YouSaid · the spoken record

Lulu Cheng Meservey

lines on the record: 130
first: 2025-09-16
most recent: 2025-09-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Says for me is to open source a lot of what we're talking about here. Specifically the idea that you can control your destiny, you can create alternate realities, you can bend reality. Reality is subjective anyway, right? You can bend it to your favor if you're able to communicate to people who matter in the ways that strike them in the heart and in the mind to get them to see the world the way that you do so that you can come together and do something that doesn't make sense in the moment but does make sense longer term. And if an open sourcing this means that people understand that they can just go and do this they don't need to hire me. They don't need to hire consultants. They don't need to hire a team. They can, like anything in the world is better with friends. You can have people help you with it, but you don't need to wait for anybody else. You can just take control of your destiny by deciding here is where I'm going to go. Here's the direction I need.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At their joining because they believe in the person, and if that person is involved it'll probably work out. Like there are people now who are thinking about starting a company and people are basically offering them blank term sheets. I don't know what I'm investing in, I'm investing in you. Whatever you do. Here's some money I'm sure will work out.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hallucinogenic Lyre and nothing about that sounds real except if you know me and you know that when I say I'm gonna do something I do it even in cases in the past when it seemed crazy I said I'm gonna do I'm gonna do it now I'm gonna say I'm gonna do this other thing that's something that supersedes the immediate obvious rationality of the moment to get you believed in something bigger and sometimes the something bigger is the person There are definitely people who you see drops, like I see this right now, people leaving really comfortable jobs or offers to join something where they don't actually know what it'll be in a year.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, intent depends on trust and if you know the person, so trusting the person and knowing the person and whatever your view and the model of that person is is one of those things. Override the immediate short term logic of something. So for example, going back to recruiting for a startup in the very early days, okay, it's just me and one other guy. We're going to beat Google. Do you want to join us? Everything about that speaks.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Similar here. So if you have a one-time game, okay tiff for tat, if you have a repeated game of long-term relationships and repeated interactions, the optimal strategy is actually tit for two tits. And what that means is you can cross me once and maybe I'll let that go. But if you cross me the second time, I never will. And that is optimal balance between cooperation and deterrence.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So when people study game theory, and I think this is an Axelrod idea where it's actually written up from a series of experiments, which is people think of game theory as things like prisoners dilemma and when do you know, when do you cooperate versus defect? And there's a term called tit for tat, but in a repeated game where it's not just you meet each other once and leave prisoners tell him all these games that we talk about a lot. It's like a one-time thing with someone you don't know and then you leave. If you and I knew each other for a really long time and then we had prisoner's dilemma, that might go differently, right? Like the pure rationality in the moment gets superseded by other factors. We believe in each other. We believe in some larger cause, right? It's like what we were talking about earlier. It's the hijack of the prefrontal cortex where the thing that makes obvious sense in the moment is not the thing that people choose because you've given them something bigger to believe in.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now Shopify gets no pen trolls zero zero. And so just establishing yourself as a hard target or we talked before about Palmer and if you cross him in any meaningful way he will guaranteed hid back he will not let it stand as a matter of principle doesn't matter legal advice doesn't matter PR like he won't let it stand you need to have something about you that's a little bit spiky it'd be hard to step on and if you can establish that up front you will make the rest of your life so much easier.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It relates to deterrence, so you might not want to be the aggressor, you might not want to be out instigating and starting fights, but you want to establish that you're not a soft target. And being a hard target can look a bunch of different ways. So at Shopify, one of the things that we're really proud of, I'm on the board and we have this wonderful general counsel, Jess. One of the things that we've been really proud of at the company is that Shopify has been in the past a victim of patent trolls that just go over, they just go out to companies and attack them and then they settle and then they get money that way. And Jess and her very strong team have decided that they're going to fight it every single time. And in the short term, super expensive, huge pain. Again, you take the pain up front so that you don't have to live with chronic pain for the rest of your life. You get the certity now so that you don't have to deal with it.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a talent of recruiting the rebels. But you will never recruit them through a spokesperson, and you will never recruit them if you don't look them in the eye and tell them in the first person that you're going to keep your promises and you're going to deliver this for them or you're going to die trying, but it'll hopefully be the former.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If someone can make you believe they can circumvent the obvious logic in the moment and sign you on to something bigger. And this is how startups take off. Every great startup was two guys in a garage and then three people and then they get one person and then they get Wi-Fi at some point. And it goes from there. It's every startup sounds insane.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Takes another circuit in their brain. You know, it's like the amygdala hijack of the prefrontal cortex, but on a much bigger, long-term scale, where the thing that makes sense, once you start to see the world through this new prism that I've convinced you to look at it through, the old thing actually doesn't make sense anymore. And in the new world that you can see that I painted for you, my thing makes sense. You have to join my thing. This is when you see people at a less extreme level. This is when you see people that take a pay cut to go do something they really believed in. I took a big pay cut to go join Substack. I mean, they paid really well just that I was a company art before that and never regretted. I'm so happy I did that. There have been projects that I've done for free or for a dollar that I've been so happy to have been involved in. And sometimes you do the thing that doesn't make immediate sense because it's something you believe in. And if someone can make you believe.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, our office is my house, and it's just me and him, but it could be you. We have Wi-Fi. We have like $50,000. And some of it is from my parents. And you could join. What's your pay? We can't pay right now, but we'll pay you something and then we'll pay you more when we're able to get to it. How do you get that person to join and that person's going to leave like open AI or something and go do that? It actually sounds insane, but there's something It's irrational, but there's something like super rational, like something that's super seeds rationality that actually”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're going to succeed, and maybe you'll die, but I'm pretty sure we can do this. You should definitely come with us. That pitch is insane and it works. And so studying why it works and what it takes to do that, I think, is very instructive because for a startup, you're saying, okay, we're going to take on Google and we're going to be the next Google and we're going to be bigger than them. And our company is going to be worth trillions of dollars and our market is in the quadrillions. And if you look at Google now, they're nothing compared to what we're going to be. And it's, yeah, it's just me and one other guy.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I obviously don't support terrorist tactics or insurgent tactics or violent extremism, but I mean the idea of trying to change the status quo, change the power structure, and create a new normal. It's incredibly hard to do, and in no context is it harder to do than in a country. When the government, and usually it's not a government like ours, usually it's like an authoritarian regime that is all powerful, has a monopoly on so many things, including force, that you and a scrappy band of little bandits are going to say, we're going to go replace them. It sounds absolutely insane. And now to get your first fifty followers, you have to go around and tell people, here's the thing. We're going to replace the government with us. And we're going to be the new government. And they have the military, and we have these four guys and me, and we're going to win, and you should join us.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't have to do one big, oh, yeah, I did. Yes. Okay, I wrote a bunch of things while I was there, but the main takeaway I have from that time is that when you look at insurgent groups, you can actually learn a lot of lessons that apply to startups. Right here is something that is formed either from nothing or from something very small going up against something very big, going up against a status quo.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the Fletcher School at Tufts, it's a law and diplomacy school, a lot of diplomats go there. I studied counterinsurgency.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just use normal words too. Just use normal words, please normal words, just use words where everybody knows what they mean. Sometimes there's like a very specific word that I'm not saying never use dragon, by the way. If you're talking to other people in the industry, jargon is a word that they all know what it means. So you can use that because they all know what it means. If you're talking to six-year-olds, you obviously wouldn't use jargon. So it's not about categorically always use this, never use that. It's about use words that the other person is going to know”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It goes back to what are you trying to say? People worry way too much about the form factor and not enough about what they want to say. And so whether it's an email or a text or phone call or a presentation, know the thing that you want to say. Say that then say why they should care and if you can do that, you've won. Like the vast majority of presentations or emails that are sent are more like I need to check the box and just get this thing done so I can move on with my day to do, I guess, more of these. But there isn't a clear view of this thing that has taken up five seconds of someone's time had a goal. And did you achieve that goal or not?”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Give you that buy in, you need to convince them certain things, and you need to be intentional of how you present a story to get them to believe that. And this is something that we probably really underutilize. I mean, people whose little job is only communications don't even think that way. So I don't take it for granted that somebody who's really busy with other things should think that way. But I think everybody should, in any context in your life, you are a product that you are selling to a certain consumer.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anything you want in life, when you have a goal, there are people whose permission you need for that goal to happen, whether you're trying to date or get married or get a promotion or start a company or fundraise or sell a product. There are people whose buy-in is required for you to meet that Unless your goal is like climb a mountain or something, yeah, go drink for a mountain. But in order to get the people to”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And maybe your peers, because they're part of giving you a 360 review. You know your goal, you know your audience. What they need to believe about you, they need to believe that you can manage people. And that you have vision for what should be done, and they believe that you are going to be at this company for really long time. Okay, now how do you convey that to them? You can convey it to them through things that you write and create. You can convey it in the goals that you set for yourself. You can convey it in how you speak to your peers. You can convey it in products or projects that you kick off in the initiative that you bring to new ideas and the messengers are not only you, but your peers, your partners, anyone trying to get a promotion that kind of has a very similar template here. But with anything you want in life.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you are trying to get married, your product for a certain consumer, if you are looking for a job, you're a product for a certain consumer, and if you're trying to get a promotion, you're a product for a certain consumer. If your founder, very obvious, you're a product for a certain consumer for people to accept the job offer, for people to invest in you, for people to buy the thing that you made. So let's say that you are a mid-level designer and you're trying to get promoted to the next level up. Okay, your goal is to be promoted. You know that there's a goal. Comms is a vector, not a scalar. There's magnitude. There's also direction. You know the direction you want to go. Your goal is to get that promotion. Your audience is your manager and your skip level.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You and the VP of engineering partner on the Slimser series. Anyone can and everyone should be strategic about the image of themselves that they're presenting to the world and the product that is themselves that they're selling to any given market. So if you're dating, you are a product for a certain consumer.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If they agree with that, maybe they should consider about having UCEO. If they don't agree with that, then probably you shouldn't be CEO, right? But this is what you truly believe. You believe that the future of the company should be XYZ. And here's the role that employees will play in it. What's the form in which you convey that to them? You can write a memo. You can make this. You can start a new initiative on your team. You can roll out a campaign portraying the company that way. You can advocate for a new partnership, portraying the company that way. You can start pointing the company in that direction. You can start identifying problems or obstacles for the company being viewed in that way. And you can make sure that you're an incredibly great boss to your employees and that you're beloved and that the messengers should be not just you saying, here's my vision, but that there are other, you convince other people on the executive team to champion your vision, maybe collaborate with them. Maybe you and the BPO product work together on something.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So think about the product yourself that you are portraying. Your goal is you want to be CEO. People who will decide that are current CEO via the succession plan. The board via executive appointment and personnel decisions, and also your team and colleagues via their feedback. So that's your audience. Now, what does the audience need to believe about you in order for them to want to make that decision? Let's say they need to believe that you had executive presence. That you have a vision for the company and that employees love you and they would be stoked to work for you. Okay, so now you want them to believe these three things. How do you convey that to them Message. Medium, messenger. So the message is you believe that the future of the company should be XYZ.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, I actually, as an aside, I think that more comms people should have the path into CEO role because that'll be one of the most important things for a company to pull off is being well understood.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You would falter past like five. And this is one of the best known people. Right. If I said name forty things about Trump, you'd struggle. So at any given time, there's a very small number of things that people actually retain about us and we can either be haphazard or we can be intentional. So at a macro level, I would say just as an employee in any role, as an employee, as a friend, the intention about what you want those things to be and then present proof points and foster that. And obviously it should be tethered to reality. It should be authentic. It can't be just like totally fabricated. But it can be a conscious decision of this is the best side of me in the workplace.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Half hazardly let people see whatever they can make out from the random data points you give them, or you can be intentional and strategic about which ones you present. So let's say that there's 10 million things about you that are true. And in the work context, your boss and your colleagues are going to remember like two. And it's not because people are stupid, it's just because we don't hold that many things in our mind at the same time. Like, if I tell you Steve Jobs, okay, creative visionary Stanford speech died early. If I said name 20 things about Steve Jobs.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there's a macro and a micro, so I'll start with the macro. The same way that a founder needs to project an image of themselves and an image of their company and what they're doing, any person in any realm of their life needs to project an image of themselves. So you might project an image of yourself as a spouse or as a friend or as a business partner or as an employee, but in every scenario the forty billion data points about you as a fully rounded three-dimensional person is way overwhelming. Nobody actually brings their full selves to work. It's literally impossible. So you can either”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As well, but basically the core idea here is people do not have enough information to make all the decisions they need to make. Some of it because they can't actually understand the technology you're building or you're keeping it hidden from them, some of it just because it's simply not available, but they still need to make all these decisions in the absence of sufficient data. And so they'll start using all sorts of incomplete deduction and mental shortcuts. And you can direct these mental shortcuts.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is true of founders and companies. Like you see one founder on stage, they might be super impressive. And then if you were to see like Y Combinator had this event recently where it was just star parade. And if you were to see Gary Tan and Sam Altman and Elon Musk and Satya Nadella on the same stage, it would be kind of more than the sum of its parts in terms of spectacle and awe. This is what companies can do, like with the company that they keep. So when deal, for example, and it goes both ways, good and bad. So when deal was being accused of having this ridiculous spy episode, then the a co founder of Brex, sat down with the deal guy, and then Brex looked bad and handed up deleting it, and so it, you know, there's like anti halo effect.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My data to stuff, and this is just because of his ethos on these other things. And I probably trust his taste in pizza too. So that's another area where you could think of it as a halo effect. And then a last one is by the company you keep. Have you ever heard of the cheerleader effect? Later effect is when a group of, we'll all get cancelled after this probably, but if there's a woman of a certain attractiveness level and she stands in a group of attractive women, you'll think of all of them as really attractive. You know what I'm talking about? Like it's like Beyonc looks great, and then Beyonce with her beautiful backup dancers looks incredible and they all look incredible.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just go verify that it works. They can't verify their words. It's not like you're selling a shoe and they try it on it and yes, it's comfortable. They'll buy it. Like they actually can't verify. They can't verify what you're doing with their data. They'll never be able to investigate for themselves whether you're respecting their privacy. They just have to use as proxies other things, whether they trust or not. So they'll look at you, the human, as the mascot of the company, and use you as a proxy. Like this seems like a super libertarian guy who believes in individual freedoms and therefore he's probably more likely to respect my privacy. This is like Chris Best who runs Substack is just very skeptical of overly concentrated power and the way that that can be abused, has talked a lot about how he has a tech executive shouldn't have excessive power over people's speech. And you can conclude from that that Substack will probably be very minimalistic and disciplined in how they use my data. They're probably not going to be selling.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so there are people who say, I don't believe, I don't agree with Elon on how he campaigned for this or this or political or cultural position he has, and therefore I don't think we'll go to Mars and therefore I'm mad at Shane for including a quote in his newsletter and this stuff just spreads because the data points that we have are relatively few and we use those to actually draw outsized conclusions relative to what the data points merit. Another aspect of the Halo effect as I think of it is who are you surrounding yourself with this is super relevant for let's say AI companies and founders if you're building a technology that is so mind-blowing and advanced and esoteric and confidential You can't tell people.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why am I giving any credence to this man's taste and peace? I've never had dinner with him and be like, oh, we have the same taste in pizza. Why do I get it? And it's like because he's done a really admirable job in the media. With his company, I find it interesting.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and it also goes the other way, where if you like somebody you automatically think something is good and right, there's this thing called the halo effect and I treat it more broadly. I'll tell you how I think of the halo effect. There's a more like rigorous disciplined definition, but the way that I think of the halo effect is if you're good at If you're considered good in some arena, people will think of you as good in some other arena. I was asking myself the other day why I care what Dave Portnoi thinks about pizza.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like the form factor in the aesthetics. nails it. She does a wonderful job. She's really young. You know, she comes off is older than she is. And then part of that is you actually kind of see her grow into the role in the months that she's been behind the podium, which is kind of cool to see, but so much of communication is your body language and your bearing. You and I have talked about this. I'm like super nervous and sort of dying inside right now, but I'm trying to just like stay chill for you. For her, just showing confidence and ease and comfort and not showing anxiety or stress or anger or resentment is a big part of her persona. She comes off as a happy warrior. People love a happy warrior. She comes off as being confident in what she's saying, even though sometimes if you actually just parse the words in writing, sometimes you'd be like, I have some follow-up questions.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think she is with her. A lot of it is body language. Again, separate this from, we're separating this from the substance of do you agree with the policy? Do you like others?”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He really diffuses situations by being funny. There were times when he has said something that might be really shocking or offensive or whatever, but he's done in a hilarious way. And a lot of people sort of laugh along with him. So that, I think, is very underrated.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because he's shifting all the time. The third is that he is really funny. He is he is the funniest president. I'm sorry, Trump is the funniest president. Reagan close second. He is And then Lyndon John He is legitimately funny and being funny is an incredible communications hack. It gets people's attention. It makes them keep tuning in and keep listening. Keeping attention is harder than getting attention and he's able to do both. and also being funny makes you weirdly likable. There are people who hate everything about him forever, yes. There are also people who really don't like his positions and what he stands for and finds a lot of the things he does and says disheastful and they can't help but have some weird feeling of liking because he makes them laugh.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He behaves very predictably in someone. You know, people will say he's erratic. But he's kind of predictably erratic. Like his behavior patterns are actually quite predictable. And so if someone is a super trump or a Trump fan, they know what they're a fan of. It's not like it's unclear, you know, he's this manufactured thing that sways in the wind and he's like the John Kerry kite surfing video. He's this way one day, that way, another day. We don't know it's very clear and everybody who hates him already hates him. Sunk costs. It's baked in. It doesn't continue to hurt him like people who hate him aren't going to be more damaging to him tomorrow than they were yesterday. And the people who love him like already are on board with this. You know, there's some stuff on the margin with swing boaters, but it's very clear whether to be for or against them. He doesn't have to worry about his base shifting all the time.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One is he speaks at like a third grade vocabulary level. He doesn't use words that nobody can understand. Maybe Cofe was a long time Cofe aside, he uses words where everybody knows what the words mean strong, great, bad, good. Everybody knows what these means. I could read my seven year old a Trump speech and they could kind of grasp what's going on, or I could read to my immigrant parents, and they would know what's going on or so. So one is just he uses normal common words that have a very clear meaning. And it's so basic that so many people just don't do it. The other is he has very strong deterrence.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, that's the incentives that you're setting up. Whereas if you are the type of person to take accountability if you did something wrong and never accept responsibility if you didn't do something wrong and you stay true to your principles, there will be some pain in the beginning, but you do that a few times and it sets up a very strong deterrent. You achieve strong deterrence like that wall facer in the dark forest in the novel. I'm sorry. So it's super important to do that and CEOs would solve a lot of their PR issues by simply apologizing only when they need to and not shirking accountability if they did something wrong.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If your apology and your subsequent contrition and attempt to make amends is not correlated with whether you did anything wrong, then of course everybody should come after you all the time because it's a lottery ticket, right? Just come after you and then maybe they'll get a payout. Maybe they'll get something out of you. Everybody should try and.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think If everybody just Apologize when they did something wrong and resisted apologizing when they did nothing wrong. So many problems would be solved, so many problems would be solved. It's when people mess up and refuse to take accountability and then get accused of something where they didn't do anything wrong and apologize for that just to make it go away that everything gets muddled. And by the way, you lose all deterrent effect and you become a really soft target because whether you apologize becomes arbitrary.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, also, lawyers will say, you know, sometimes when a company screws up, a lot of times lawyers will say don't apologize because if you're apologizing, you're admitting fault and that makes it harder for us in the courtroom. In practice, I'm sorry. I know I'm not a lawyer. In practice, I've never seen someone lose a case because the CEO expressed human remorse and empathy, and that was the thing that made them lose in the courtroom. I just haven't seen it.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That won't happen. But in the moment, the lawyers have everybody quaking in fear And they are the subject matter experts because there's potential litigation and I'm the lawyer. So I don't actually even fault the lawyers. They are doing their job. What happened is the CEO was not doing their job, which was to weigh the balance of interest.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're not visible and they're not immediate. And you don't have a person who's advocating for that with all they've got, like the lawyers are advocating for the legal risk. So I've seen a situation where a company gets accused of something. It's like so painful, but this happens and probably happens a lot. But this company gets accused of something. And it's false. It's really bad, but it's false. So the lawyers say, well, we're definitely going to beat this in court. So all you have to do is keep quiet and don't say anything that could make the situation worse, and we'll beat it in court. What ended up happening was that keeping quiet and not saying anything, let that narrative take hold infester, and it ended up costing more than ten x more in reputation. If the CEO does their job,”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To a hundred million dollars. Yeah, it's not cheap. You know, you might have to go to court, you could drag on, but the loss in trust, the loss in future prospects, customers, employees who defect, that recruit that doesn't accept the job offer. It could add up to billions.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When this goes wrong what it looks like is everybody gets scared of the lawyers and the CEO follows exactly what the lawyers say and dismisses every other interest. They are not doing their job as the CEO, which is to weigh the interest against each other and find the net best outcome. They're folding to the lawyers and they're making the lawyers supreme over everybody else. And I think that is probably what happened. It's what happens a lot. The problem in the real world when this happens is by entirely considering legal risk, you're not considering trust, reputational risk, and all these other things. Trust, reputational risk, these are things that matter inherently. I don't even have to explain why they matter. Like, of course, they matter, but they also come at a cost if they're lost. So if you were to translate everything into dollar terms, legal liability might cost.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT