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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Here is a big difference between the CEO and anybody else. Most other people, their job is to optimize for one specific thing. So lawyers, they're doing their job their job is to minimize legal risk and to minimize the surface area of legal liability approaching zero. The CEO's job, and this is like a Hegelian political philosophy point of view of weighing and considering different factions and different interests, the CEO's job uniquely is to consider different interests and weigh them against each other to reach the net optimal outcome for the company.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think lawyers wrote it. I think probably a committee. I think the. Collective noun is maybe a bar, a bar of attorneys wrote it for him. And it doesn't sound human because it's not human. A committee is not a human being.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it wasn't insane time for Coinbase and the thing that held true was Brian is willing to put his face to his words and his words to his principles, and he was willing to say it for himself he could have gone through spokespeople, and then not had to take any of the comments and just kind of hid behind. He could have used his people as a human shield, and he didn't. So that made a big difference that you can see in the reactions of just what that did with people's confidence in him and of the company. And obviously it's not a great situation, but he turned it into something that gave the company a really costly way to prove what its values were.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Brian is very special in the sense that he has such a deep sense of right and wrong in what he believes in that he has such high conviction that the thing he believes is right and true and good. I happen to agree with him, but not everybody does. And when people don't, it doesn't bother him as much as it would bother an average person because his conviction is so deep that the opinion of a random person actually doesn't matter that much. He's also been forged by fire the same way that Palmer and some others have where they've gone through this experience and felt the pain and now they know that the normal slings and arrows of the quotidian haters don't amount to that much. And so I give you this preamble because the spinal fortitude of the person matters a lot. I don't know the crowd strike to see you and I don't want to criticize because that was an insane time and it feels very overwhelming.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're probably reading like the Simon Williamson newsletter. They're probably reading this V sub stack. They're reading the less wrong comments. Like this is a totally different ecosystem that you actually haven't penetrated whatsoever. And so just putting it. So a lot of the time we speak through Press releases or spokespeople or hired gun PR agencies when actually the founder just needs to go on video and talk as a three-dimensional human being and nobody's going to like if you're the wizard of Oz behind the curtain it's very hard to trust you because people don't even know who you are but if you just come out with your face and say it that's more effective than an army of hired guns trying to say it for you”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's try to go there. Who has the biggest distribution? Who cares about what's the biggest distribution? It's a vector. It's not about just magnitude. Magnitude means nothing without direction. In what direction is that distribution? Who are the distributing to? So in AI, for example, I work with a lot of AI founders and companies. And I've heard companies and founders try to, they're like doing comms activities. And then I ask them, what's the goal? Well, the goal is actually recruiting researchers. Okay, well, if you're trying to recruit researchers, why are you spending all this time on NPR? Do you think the researchers are listening to NPR? Do you think the researchers are like reading this whatever, I don't want to dunk on anyone too bad, but like NPR actually is a good example?”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“stuff. The three things for actually making a difference with your story are one, what is the message? Don't just start saying stuff like what is the core truth that you're going to convince people of? And that's the overlap in the Venn diagram that we talked about. It's true. It's relevant to you, but it's also something that those people actually care about. You better get that out there. So identifying the message people kind of just skip this part, like just get the CEO on podcasts and he'll open his mouth and stuff will come out to what are the right mediums. So there are people who maybe should be on this podcast, maybe should be on Sean Ryan, maybe they should be on Theova Van Maybe they should be on the New York Times. Like it depends on who they're talking to and what they're trying to get accomplished. But people don't often think that way. They think about just what are the hot podcasts right now. They'll look at the Apple Leaderboard and then, okay, the top ones on the Apple leader.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You don't want your comms to look like that where you're just like doing things in a bunch of different directions. You actually want your comms to look kind of like a line that builds towards a destination. And if you don't have the direction in mind, then it's just a bunch of frantic activity and wasted motions, some of which cancels each other out. So again, it goes back to don't worry so much about where you're going to say it. Worry about what are you going to say. In none of these plans and strategies that lay out three town halls and four op-eds and whatever, I almost never see here's the idea that we want to spread. Here is the idea that we're going to spread and everything needs to go in this direction and what makes this idea interesting and worthwhile. It's just get the CE out there. Get the CEO out there. Get him interviews. Get them onto the Shane Parish podcast. What's he going to say? Nobody knows. Just put him in the chair.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I talk about velocity a lot because velocity is a vector. It has a magnitude and a direction. People talk a lot about magnitude. They don't talk about direction. So this is what you were saying earlier with like people just saying a lot of words but it doesn't mean anything. And so sometimes it feels like the metric is just quantity of yapping and we're going to go on all these podcasts and we're going to deliver blog posts like I've seen inside a lot of comms teams or agencies where their metrics and their KPIs for the quarter are Two opeds three podcasts four town halls and it's all about quantity. Without talking about where we try to move the needle to. So it's kind of like, you know, the Claude logo that's You know, like the star rest in all these different directions.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there has to be something to attach these motions onto. And if it's just sort of this Diaphanus idea in the Ether it's very hard for people to even congregate around something.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But there's one specific thing to picture. If he had said the problem is red tape, that's nothing. If the problem is bad regulations The problem is being slow and not moving fast enough as a country in general. Like there's just nothing there.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Blake Scholl runs it. It's the first civilian privately created supersonic plane. They've been lobbying and fighting and struggling against this one specific bad piece of legislation, those outdated from 50 years ago. That's basically a speed limit in the sky because at the time planes made this big boom when they went fast and people didn't like the big boom because it's disruptive. So they said, you're not allowed to go fast. The real thing should have been, you're not allowed to be noisy, but they just made it, you're not allowed to go fast. Now that we're able to go fast without being noisy, you're still not allowed to go fast. So he was able to actually help influence getting this legislation overturned. And that was a big win. But he wasn't attacking anybody. He wasn't being mean to anybody. He just said, like pinpointing, this is the thing that's holding me back speed in America, not just for me, but for industry and for a lot of things broadly beyond just my company.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, sometimes a good way to succeed as an underdog is to pick a fight. Now I don't suggest picking a fight just to be mean and you never want to be punching down or you be the bully. That's not good. But if you are starting from basically nothing and you need to gather steam and gather people to join a movement, make yourself relevant, then it's good to have something to fight for. You need to have a cause. And often with a cause, you need to have a foil. So yes, there's something you want to see in the world, but there's something that you want to change. There's something that you are against. And so I think that it's very worth choosing. a foil. And maybe the foil is the stranglehold of the existing financial system. Maybe the foil is this one specific regulation. So, boom, supersonic.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“reporter has had a vendetta against my company because their cousin runs a competitor or whatever. That is actually a lot more effective and more effective.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A substacker for a specific post. You're attacking all independent writers who are trying to assert their freedom of expression. That's a way to diffuse the pressure on you and rally people to you in a very powerful way. And then if you're ever on offense, not that you want to be the antagonist and go after someone and attack someone, but sometimes you need to go on offense just to defend yourself. If you're going on offense, then you actually want to maximize the pressure and you decrease the surface area. So for example, if the media is attacking you in a very unfair way, the worst thing you can do is just complain about the media. If the surface area of what you're complaining about is too big, then you sound like a tinfoil hat, like the media's after me and the government's after me and also the CIA's after me and also the weather is not good. It's too much, whereas if you narrow it to say this specific.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I sometimes refer to an equation in physics, which is p equals f over a, the pressure equals the force divided by the surface area. And it's very intuitive, right? Like the same amount of force, if you spread it over a wide surface area, doesn't exert a lot of pressure. So think of like a big sheet of paper that's pushing down versus if the surface area contracts, then the same amount of force creates a lot of pressure. So like a needle can puncture through. So like base sheet of paper, really hard to puncture through, needle can puncture through, or it's the same when you're trying to rip fabric if you're just tearing fabric. It's really hard. But if there's a tiny nickel already, the whole thing just comes open. And so the way to think about this is if you're trying to relieve pressure, you don't get to change how much force is coming at you, but you can change the surface area. You can spread it out over more surface area. You're not just attacking me. You're attacking all of us. You're not just attacking, let's say, substack.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You. So I think that a hit piece is not the worst thing that can happen. There's a kind of horseshoe where a great piece, fine, a hit piece, fine, kind of fine. You can use it. Doesn't feel good, but you can use it. What you don't want is the uncanny valley where it's not a hit piece, but it has information about you that while it doesn't sound aggressive or hostile, makes you look horrible. Like that's the worst way of looking bad is not even being attacked and looking bad. It's not the mainstream media is coming after me and they have an agenda and they hate what I stand for. It's just, oh, they reported this fact and it makes me look horrible. That's like the uncanny value where you don't want that or it's like mixed, but a straight up hit piece I think is okay.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think God smiles on underdogs, and I think that if you are blessed to be in an underdog position, you should try to take advantage of it. It's not going to feel like a blessing in the moment. It'll feel really horrible. But there is something to being so clearly punched down on that gives you more power and liberty in that moment where people will naturally sympathize with the underdog. People are naturally very skeptical of big mainstream corporate media right now. People are very skeptical of bullies. And so if you're in the receiving position of that, I think you can actually use that. Because if you realize that you're not trying to win over every single person in the world, but that there's a certain set of people you need to win over who are aligned with you, then actually all you need to do is help them understand that you and they are on the same page and an attack on you is an attack on them and use that to rally them to.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't want to insulate. Yeah, I don't want to insulate myself from that. I want to see it. Maybe I want to engage with it. Maybe I want to have some of that back and forth, especially when I was working in video games. You know, gamers are so passionate and have no tolerance for nonsense. And I really respect them for that. Even the ones who hated me or hated my company. And I really valued the opportunity to go back and forth and people. Gamers are really funny too. Like their love language is memes. They would make memes of me, sometimes nice, sometimes really cool. Like I cringe to think of them. And yeah, that's part of the course where I would make memes back and we would interact. But if it's like just rude and nasty, then I don't need to subject myself to that. I'm going to lead the proverbial room. So that's a mute.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm a big muter where it's like, okay, if I've said something and you think it sucks, then feel free to dunk on it. I've decided to say it. I'm not going to say it only to people who agree with me. I think if someone is like abusive or threatening, maybe that's a block situation. Okay. But I'm a big muter where it's like I just don't want to pollute my feed with your nonsense. And it's different from disagreeing. It's more like if you are just negative and rude and toxic in other ways. So the way that I do it is if someone just disagrees, I actually want to see that.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it's about who you surround yourself with and getting people who will tell you. In the safety of your inner sanctum, when you're wrong so that you can start spreading. You can start with just people that you trust and it's not going to do any damage, but if you don't even allow people close to you to disagree and star with you, and if you penalize people who speak up against you, then what you're doing is you're making yourself incredibly intellectually brittle so that when you go out into the world and get faced with who knows what, you're completely unprepared. And that unpreparedness shows either in live interviews. Sometimes you see people in live interviews just like lock up and they freeze. No one on their team has told them that they sound bullshitty. And so suddenly the reporter is telling them they don't know what to do. Or they just freeze and hide and go away and they don't engage. And now it's just like you're lying on the ground while people punch you. So I think it's just who you surround yourself with. It's kind of like you want your friends and family to tell you if you have broccoli in your teeth so that you don't have to go out into the street. But if you yell at them for doing that and they stop telling you.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The most handsome and smart person everywhere they go. If someone disagrees with them online or they're getting dunked on, they actually don't really know what to do. And so they outsource it to the comms team and it just sort of unravels from there.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would say, Well, of course, you would think that you Zionists would have to defend it, like everything they've had to defend repeatedly. And as a result, they're very sharp. You can say that you disagree and you think their opinions are bad and wrong. It's very hard to say that they're not sharper and they're not smart and they're not great on the stump because they objectively are, even the people who hate them and hate their positions can't say that they're dumb. And that's the same for CEOs like Palmer or like Toby where they don't surround themselves with yes men. They put themselves into situations that might be mixed, hostile, skeptical. They welcome the skepticism they engage and as a result they are incredibly sharp and they don't freeze when they're confronted with skepticism. Whereas when you see sometimes CEOs that have been more coddled where they've been like the god king of their company and everything they say is right and true and brilliant.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On that a lot of power in just sparring. Like when you listen to whether they're CEOs or founders of political figures, the people who spend a lot of time sparring are sharper than the people who haven't had to spar. They are just sharper and better. So like Charlie Kirk, he's a right-wing activist. He goes around to campuses. He literally just parks himself at a campus. And then all these college students who hate him line up and fight with him verbally. They argue with him. And he just like chops them down systematically or he engages with them. It's not disrespectful. He engages with their ideas and then he has these debates. He just does this basically as a full-time job. And he is now incredibly sharp. Ben Shapiro is the same. These are people who have had to defend every single thing. If you're Ben Shapiro, you walk outside and say the sky is blue.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, that's cool. Yeah, talk to a UFC fighter who's actually a UFC Hall of Fame. And he says that whenever he goes to a bar, he doesn't want people to know that he's a professional fighter because all the guys try to fight him.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes And everybody should do this. I actually think there should be just a clip. I want to find a clip of the final rap battle and just make it mandatory viewing for anyone who's in the public eye and has haters and people attacking them. Because what he says, hopefully everyone's already seen this cinematic masterpiece. But what he does is in this rap battle, M&M's character, he goes first and everything that the guy would have used against him, he uses against himself and addresses all of it and he either owns it or diffuses it and then by the end the other guy actually has nothing left to say. So just being first means that you have the opportunity to do that. If that, if the order had been reversed, the whole thing wouldn't have worked.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whoever comes up first has an advantage. This is Winston Churchill says the lie makes its way around the world before the truth can get its pants on. Half the quotes attributed to Churchill are apocryphal, but they're all of them are excellent, whether he actually said it or not. He spiritually said it. Online you see this constantly where somebody will post something and then sometimes there's a great rebuttal and the rebuttal will get like one tenth as much engagement as the original thing. And so there's a lot of value in simply saying the thing first. And if you think someone is going to attack you for something, then you can get ahead of it and do the pre rebuttal, the pre-buttal. I think the pre-buttal should be a thing. If you know what people are going to attack you for, do the pre-buttal. So have you seen the M&M rap battle in 8 mile?”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And our revenue is this, but you claim you're like, all of that fades into the noise and people are just picturing like the spy hiding into the bathroom trying to flash a phone. So if someone is actually lying and attacking you, maybe there's a story to be told about that.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have to fight story with story. There's no like any The most powerful statistic is probably not as powerful as the median story. Like the most powerful statistic is not as powerful. It probably is the average story. If someone is fighting you with stories, you have to fight with stories. Out of the statistics will be better stories. Under the statistics are more powerful stories. So the facts are on your side, better stories can be found. And if your opponent is actually lying in their skull duggery, maybe there's a story about that. Like in the tech world, we're seeing a very interesting story play out between rippling and deal, which are these two payroll processors and deal planting a spy. And the spy, like running into the bathroom and then try to flush a phone. I mean, it's very vivid. And so all this back and forth about you spite on us and we spite on you and you told people this.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The great presidential campaigns are very good at telling specific stories about here's the way something should have been, here's where it all went wrong, and here's what needs to do to bring about a happy ending. And we're almost there and help me take us to the happy ending. Like that's every story, right? The shire is green and beautiful and then Sauron starts to wage war. And in order to make things right again, the ring needs to go into the volcano. Every great story is some version of here's how things should be and here's something wrong and here's what it takes to fix it and the great politicians make themselves the thing that it takes to fix it and you can help them get there and along the way they're telling stories about this one single mother sitting at the breakfast table over this bill for this specific type of cancer that her husband, whose name is Joe, like that is the message that gets people”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When charities try to get you to give money, they're like, this specific child. So on the poster, on the recruiting thing, it's never like 50,000 children or at least if they're doing a good job, it's not. If they're doing a good job, it's like this is one little girl staring into the camera. She has this sickness. She needs $10. Can you just do that? Or even if it saved the pandas, it's like this panda. So, this band has a name. And so we always want it. We want to influence a story and help a person. For us, the reward of getting Cataract surgery for one person is much more powerful than changing a percentage from two point one to two point one oh five.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know the probably apocryphal Lenin quote about one death is a tragedy, a thousand deaths is a statistic is so true. And I think a good example of this is probably during the NAFTA debates where it was about should we have free trade or not free trade and the people who are pro-NAFTA pro-trade would say it'll lift our GDP by this much, it'll help facilitate this much of trade and do these things like very nebulous because what is 2% versus 1% versus 8% like the average person doesn't mean anything to them Whereas if you're anti-trade and you could say like this is Shane he's got 12 children He just lost his job people will do anything to help Shane with twelve children who just lost his job versus the two percent of potential growth just doesn't mean anything it's why”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and then let it heal hopefully once and for all, or you can kind of wait for it to go away and then decide that you're not happy with it and it bugs you and then you have to fix it and then five years later you're stuck breaking your nose from scratch. This is the way that I think about a reputational blow is if there has been material reputational damage you can either handle it in that moment and break the nose back and just fix it then and there while things are already bad or kind of let it fester and then eventually you'll realize like you don't want to live with this and you have to address it and now you're stuck with do I have a crooked nose forever or do I have to break it from scratch?”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would be worth addressing. So, who are the people involved? Do they matter to you? And then what is the actual accusation? Does that matter to you? If both are yes, then you got to respond immediately and aggressively right away. You can't kind of, oh, I don't know, it feels so bad. Maybe it'll go away. That the instinct is, let me just maybe it'll just go away by itself. It doesn't go away by itself. So this is like, so I broke my nose multiple times in college. You could sort of see it's like curb. And what I learned about broken nose is if you break your nose, you got to break it back right away so that it can heal. If you don't do that, you either have a crooked nose forever and learn to live with it, or if you want to get it fixed five years later, you got to break it back five years later. So you can either break it back now while it's already broken.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Great congratulations. That's good for you. You don't have to do anything there. That's actually like a wonderful compliment. You might turn it into an ad, like lean into it. So the first is just like, who is it and who are they reaching? And is that going to do damage? And then the second is, is it something material? So if it's, I write a blog post and I'm like, I went to Shane Parrish's studio and his snacks weren't that good. But if it's like, I went to his studio and he lied to me about what we were going to cover. He tricked me into coming on with promises of an interview and it went in a totally different direction. And after he lied, he used that to, you know, he put my face on an ad without getting my permission. He used it to like shill his new supplements company or something. That would be pretty material to you in trying to get future guests and in the image that you have with people that you respect.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First thing is does it actually matter? Because, like, don't waste your one wild and precious life responding to every single thing if it doesn't matter? Not because it'll necessarily hurt you, but just you have better things to do with your time. Go for a walk. So the first is deciding whether it matters. And there's a couple things to decide whether it matters. Number one is it reaching people that matter? Because if it's some dark corner of the internet with some crank and your actual audience is not there and don't care, that's really fine. Or let's say that you are a Republican politician and your audience is like right-wing Americans and AOC attacks you.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Effect being someone that they're really not. And then once you see through that, not only do you not have the original intended effect, but then you also lose all your other credibility too. Who else is like, I think Sam Watman has a fairly strong deterrent, but the way that you respond to attacks establishes how strong or weak of a deterrent that you have. And it's painful up front. But then it gets a lot easier later because people stop coming after you.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When he was doing it on his own, and not every bit like I wouldn't have done that. A lot of people either wouldn't or couldn't get away with it. But this is authentically him. This is not like his PR team wrote a script for him and they're like, hey, read this and get really mad. Like, this is him. I think he had it on his Apple notes and just like did himself like, hey, I'm going to do this. And then did the way this goes wrong is if people try to”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She just like feels bad. She's got other stuff going on and the aliens call her bluff. They realize that she has weak deterrence and they are not deterred and then things go very badly from there. All of this is to say that some people have strong deterrence or weak deterrence. And you can signal that through your behavior. Someone like Palmer, whom I love and I really like this about him, has basically perfect deterrence, which is that if you come after him in some material way, he will come after you basically guaranteed one hundred percent of the time his comms team isn't holding him back, his co-founders aren't holding him back, investors, nothing, nothing is holding him back from coming after you and probably continuing to come after you for maybe the rest of his life, like extremely strong deterrence, which doesn't mean that there are not like internet goons who sometimes still take a shock. But I actually haven't seen it for a very long time. I can't remember the last time”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the second book, they have the power to do the equivalent of pulling a trigger. And the aliens have to determine who's really going to do this. So the aliens decide which people have strong deterrence and weak deterrence. And there's one guy who has, I think they call it perfect deterrence, which is he will 100% pull the trigger if needed. He doesn't care about dying. He doesn't care. He's not worried about protecting his family. He's not worried about literally anything. He's just like a perfect algorithm where if this then trigger, he has perfect deterrence. And during the time that he's around, the aliens do nothing. They're completely deterred. When he's gone, that power passes to this woman who has actually very weak deterrence.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably want to come to Earth and take all of our resources and we would be destroyed. And it turns into a game of deterrence. It turns into game theory of how do we prevent them from doing that when they're so much more technologically sophisticated than us. And I won't spoil it, but a large part of the book centers on how do we deter them. And again, they are technologically dominant over us. They've actually sent sensors and spies to come here and can see everything that's happening. And so Earth has designated certain people to be what they call wall facers, as in they are metaphorically facing a wall and not interacting with the outside world in a normal way. They're making secret plans and their job is to be deceptive so that anyone watching whether you're a human or you're a trisolar in alien civilization, you can't tell what they're really up to. And among some of the people.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's a big deterrent effect with some founders. So like Palmer Lucky has extremely strong deterrent. Have you ever read the three body problem? You'd love it. You'd love this trilogy. The three body problem, it's actually three books, and there's an alien civilization. And they”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Completely different way. And so one of the things I tell founders to do is just to show up and defend yourself. Defend your people, defend your companies. Sam Altman is really good at this. He defends his employees. And it's very hard, even as much as with any public figure, people like to dunk and hate and insult. And when he shows up, a lot of the time you see the person immediately fold because they're just like flattered or they don't want to fight with him directly or something. It's one of the most powerful things is just to put a human in their way.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's interesting. I'm a teetotaler, so I'm the person that, if I sniff a wine, I'm like, I think it's wine. But what I have noticed, which is related to this, is do you ever see online when people are insulting someone or dunking on someone, but then that person shows up and says, thanks for your feedback. The original person who was insulting them or dunking on them almost immediately folds like a cheap suit. Have you seen this? Yeah. Almost immediately they fold. Hey man, thank you. No, totally understand. I would be doing the same thing. I got you. Like, what just happened? And it's because once you're actually confronted by a person instead of just like a concept or some kind of nebulous idea of a person or some representation of a person, like what's the person is there talking to you, even if it's online, we behave in a way.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've established that it's even possible for you and me to see things the same way as opposed to your knee-jerk assumption that it wouldn't be possible.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if you share them, then listen to what I have to say next. If you don't share them, that's okay, right? Not everybody has to share them. So they have to get a sense of who you are and you're not a stranger. And they have to get a sense of how you think and how you view things such that when you say the things, they already have ingrained in their mind that they think like you think and therefore if you believe this thing, they're more likely to believe that thing too. This is how to resolve a debate or an argument, by the way, the better way to argue and you see really smooth people like Gavin Newsom does this on his podcast, maybe a little bit too slick, but he's clearly very good at it, is he'll have somebody who totally disagrees with him on a bunch of things and he'll always make sure to start with agreeing with them on something. Even if it's trivial, I agree with you that that thing was totally insane. And now we can have a productive conversation because”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One is repeated exposure, so in order to trust somebody, first you have to have a sense of who they are. You wouldn't trust a stranger, you wouldn't trust a mystery man. So one is you have to know who are they? They have to show up enough for you to get a sense of you actually know them and they're not a total stranger to you. It's hard to trust a stranger. But it's easy to trust even a stranger that you have a parasocial relationship with because they're not a stranger. There are people that you've never met in your life who would trust you because to them you're not a stranger. So first is just become not a stranger. Second is establish a set of shared values. I wouldn't necessarily trust your opinion on a restaurant unless I knew that you and I like the same type of food. So if you are like a vegan that hates spicy”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have different decision making heuristics. We have mental shortcuts because we don't have all the time in the world. This is like an evolutionary thing that everybody has this. We don't train it. It just comes with us out of the box. We don't have all the time in the world to take in every single piece of information and make a decision all the time. Sometimes it's like if you see smoke, you just got to go. Right. And so we make. We take mental shortcuts all the time, and one of the big mental shortcuts is if we like something and feel comfortable with something, it's more likely to be real, someone we like is more likely to be competent, someone we like is more likely to be smart, all these things just kind of go together. And so liking is at the center of that.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“were more convinced by people we like and we like people that we trust so they are related it is it is possible to believe someone you don't like it is like picture someone that you really dislike and they say they're going to do something but you immediately believe that they're going to do it so let's say that there's some foreign adversary who makes a threat and you believe that they'll follow through under threat because they usually do even if you don't like them that is possible but there definitely is a link between if you like someone you're more likely to believe them and if you if you believe someone you're more likely to like them and i think that liking is actually really underrated so have you heard of the affect heuristic”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. Maybe the tenth time. Maybe the hundredth But by the ten thousandth time you're sort of like maybe he sees something that we don't see. And if you look at people who do not like or trust Elon, they don't believe it as much. They think he's a charlatan, they think he's a liar, they think he's a bad guy, and so anything he says, they don't take seriously. But if you take him seriously and you trust him and you believe him, then that carries a lot of weight, especially when he says it over and over and over.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT