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

“You can engineer trust. There's a formula. Let's talk about it. You can engineer trust. The conviction should be real because otherwise, what are you doing? Just go get a normal job. So hopefully the founder already has conviction, but there's ways to convey that and impress that upon people and to do it repeatedly with insistence over the years. So yeah, going to Mars sounds super wacky, but people who have been around Elon and have heard him say it over and over, and people who know him and trust him believe that we will go to Mars in our lifetime.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it actually is very hard to resist. And so one of the main ways to turn something from being perceived as totally impossible and insane is to have a person that you trust tell you with total confidence that it's real and it's going to happen. Now the two things in there are it has to be a person you trust and they have to say it with total confidence. If it's not a person you trust, if it's someone screaming on the street that your studio has a ghost, you're not going to take that seriously. And if I don't say it with confidence, you're not going to take that seriously. So let's say you and I trust each other and I say, Shane, I think I saw and you're like, no, that was just the thing. That was just a shadow. Oh, yeah, probably. Okay. That doesn't do anything to you either. It's someone that you trust speaking with complete conviction and doing it over and over. And those three ingredients can be engineered.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that is how people believe things. Repetition is one of the ways that people believe things and another is being told something by someone that they trust. So earlier when I thought there was a ghost in your studio if I had been like Shane, there's a ghost here. I'm telling you, I know what I saw. There's a ghost here. At first, you would be like, this is, you know, she's a little cuckoo. Maybe we scrapped this episode. But if I just kept following up with you and telling you in like, I swear to you, I saw this. I'm not lying. You'd be a little bit creeped out. Have you ever had like a kid say to you, I think I saw something? Or there's a monster under my bed and they're just so sure. And you're like, no, there's not.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think there is any. Nobody has real glory if it goes right. Nobody has humiliation and despair if it goes wrong. It just sort of is out there for the purpose of checking a box. And for some public companies, they need to literally check a box according to like SEC rules. But the press release as a means of communication, I think is obsolete by like a decade.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's very hard to prove to people that it's going to work, especially in the early days. And what I said before about human conviction and that being contagious, you need the person who leads the enterprise to say in the first person we are going to do this. It is going to work. Look me in the eyes, follow me, join me on this because we're going to do something great. I swear to you, you're not. There's nobody else who can do that in the first person. Like, imagine that recruiting speech given in the form of my boss has told me to tell you. Whatever it looks like, so going back to your question of why has it gotten so sucky? It's because we have designated a group of people who have less skin in the game to be the communicators and given them a metric of just saying stuff.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He might go off the reservation and he's kind of quirky and eccentric, a little bit weird. Let's just have somebody who's like really polished and professional and normal speak on his behalf in a way that'll never offend anybody. You would never build a cult that way. What the best communicating companies are doing is having the cult leader, having the leader of the enterprise speak directly about what their vision is. Because if you're trying to do something different that hasn't been done before, in my mind, that's the only thing kind of worth doing because otherwise just go be an employee. If you're trying to be do something originally different that has not been done, it doesn't exist.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you picture a scenario where people have a job and their job is just to communicate versus a scenario where the goal is to help people understand something important, this plays out completely differently. In the first scenario, the people whose job is communicating are just generating activity to try to show that they should hold on to their jobs and be able to get jobs in the future. Whereas in the second scenario, if the goal is to help people understand something important so that we can effect a change in the world together, that's more the paradigm that I think is the reality today. It's just not evenly distributed, but the top leaders, like the Tobikan Armstrong types, they already get it. And that is the most effective person to speak is the person who's leading the enterprise. If you were building a cult, and I would say that most successful startups are like cults in many ways, if you were building a cult, you would never be like, let's not let have the cult leaders.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is the sort of Goodwin's law where once the measure becomes the goal, it ceases to be a good measure. And what we've done is we've taken a group of people and said, your job as communications and your metric is communicating a lot, presumably”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's incredible. I mean, someone like you, your billable hours would be like in the thousands And over the course of a week of reading these communications where you're just trying to understand what's happening with government or with the private sector, if you spend an extra couple hours cumulatively, and then that adds up over the course of a lifetime, that is that much productivity added together from everyone who's doing it. And the more productive someone is in the economy, the more time they're probably spending reading this stuff, like from the news and from government announcements. And so it really adds up. I would love to see someone do a study of the financial cost of jargony gov speak and corpo speak.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think the way to break the cycle is every once in a while somebody just does something totally different and it works. And then the copying can at least glom on to copying something better. So the leaders will do something more interesting and then the copiers will try to do something similar to that. And the leader will get the A plus result and the copiers will get the C plus result. Then someone else will get an A plus result and the copiers might get a B plus result. And I think that's the way you go. So Toby, look up Shopify. He has done a number of things that are original, courageous for the first. We're both Toby Vince. And then you see other companies kind of falling in line. So it's like the number one most courageous does it first and then the number two and three do it and then eventually five years later the number 50 is doing it too. And so you do this enough times over the years hopefully things get better.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's because that's what it's seeing and that's what it's learning from. And I think that's the same effect with people. Like somebody starts their career and then goes into the company doing PR and then they look around at what does PR look like? And they're like, okay, let me just do some version of that. And it's like this experiment that I read about where they had mice in a cage and they were trained to run a certain route. And then they would put in a new mouse and take out the old mouse and they had fully replaced all of the mice like a ship of Theseus with mice and all of the new mice were doing all of the behaviors of the old mice for literally no reason at this point. The old mice were getting cheese or whatever. They just following one by one. So I actually think we're in this like very hollow meaningless corporate zeitgeist of everybody copying everybody else and there's just no there there.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The people who have done the communicating are LARPing as company executives. They are LARPing as what they think a business should speak like. So right now, you know, AI is really sublime and wonderful at many things, like really, truly astounding. When you ask AI for anything related to comms or PR, it turns into kind of a blabbering idiot. Like even the most advanced models that are creating these wonderful insights and writing poetry, you ask it to do anything related to comms or PR and it'll give you the worst thing you've seen.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Intellectual erogenous zones. What do they care about? What are they interested in? What are they thinking about? Then link it from there. So at the bottom of all of this, the way to be interesting is to find that sliver of the Benn diagram overlap of what you're trying to say and what they already care about and meet them there. And if you misfire and you end up somewhere else, then you're not doing your job as a good storyteller. Or if you misidentify the audience, I would say the number one mistake is misidentifying the audience and trying to speak to the general public and then the narrow sliver of people that super duper matter to you in that moment, whether it's people you're trying to hire, people you're trying to even befriend, whatever your goal is, that you miss them because you've just braided out into the air.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's be interesting to whom So all of these things I hear sometimes in a vacuum so it's like say the message and we've talked about this like who's saying the message and to whom and depending on who's the messenger and who's the receiver the nature of the message completely changes it's the same with be interesting so what's interesting to one person might not be interesting to another and if you're very clear on who you're speaking to then you can make it maximally interesting for them which will mean trade-offs and making it less interesting for someone that you don't care about if you're trying to be somewhat interesting to everybody now you're back to the 8 billion people problem where it's so so so minutely interesting in order to capture everybody that it's actually marginal it's like evanescent into the air so once you identify who the people you're talking about the way you're interesting is to speak to their interests if you know what are their cultural”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It could be any of the above the most common ones that I just observed online are humor curiosity or some strong emotion. It can be a wow emotion, it can be a WTF emotion, or it could be, here's a topic that I'm already thinking about and this is going to give me some new angle on the topic. Depends on who you're talking to. Like if you're talking to brain rot teens, it might be a little bit different from if you're talking to AI researchers or if you're talking to academics, you can use slightly different things, but it's humor curiosity, strong emotion, outrage, shock, surprise, or they're about to learn something about a topic that they're already following.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You get like a couple seconds. A better attention span is going down to whoever did the study that came up with the 12 seconds, I would love to see them redo it and see if that's gone down to 10 or 8 or something, as our patients have worn. And then in terms of text, because some of the ways that people get to know you is through your writing, I don't know about seconds, but it's like the first paragraph for an email, it's a subject line. For a tweet, it's the first line, first sentence, the hook. So like the opportunity, like the surface area of the opportunity we have to latch on is getting more and more fine, which means that the hook that we need to use has to get more and more sharp.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“pay closer attention to this than I do so your metrics will be like more precise but basically in the first few seconds it can drop off precipitously people are just like scrolling like when you see people looking at videos what do you picture this Actually, more the latter”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know about seconds because now a lot of the way that people interact with people that they don't know personally is through these parasocial relationships on the internet. Like there's a lot of people who watch your podcast who feel like they have a sense of who you are. Like they've created this model of you in their minds that's just kind of like weird Shane homunculus that's sort of resembling of you but not the full picture They don't necessarily do that through time spent with you they see it through your writing, your newsletter, your clips So if it's time in person, okay, maybe 12 seconds if it's time through a clip on the internet I would say like first five seconds they decide whether they're gonna keep scrolling or not like less than five when you see the metrics this is so almost crass and pragmatic to start talking about video metrics but when you see the video metrics of things posted on social media after 30 seconds like 99% of people are gone right and and you”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People because they can't get it out of their heads and they have to it's in there and it's tickling their brain and they have to share it with their families and they have to go have a conversation about it. That is the most powerful, most high lover's thing and nobody thinks about it.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's the API into their mind, or it's the gateway drug, whatever it is, it's not just the thing you want to say, it's the hook. You start with the hook, and then once the hook is in, then you can do the reeling. But some people are like, here's the fish sandwich I'm going to make for dinner before they think about what goes on the hook. And is any fish going to bite the hook? So the hook is probably the most overlooked part. I would say in order of how much it matters, it's the hook, then how you tell your story and then where you tell it. Most people get this reversed where they spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about where can I go talk, what podcast can I go on? How do I pitch Shane Parrish? How do I get on TV? Do I start a pod? Do I do a blog? And they think about the form factor in the medium and they don't think enough about how can I become so interesting that my distribution method is people telling other people.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Android type of vibe. And you want to talk to people who are really concerned about geopolitical competition and rivalry with China. So think about what are things that they specifically are thinking about right now. They're not thinking about your company. So the circle of stuff that you really want to talk about is like marketing drivel for your company. And then the circle of things that they're thinking about is if there's an invasion of Taiwan, what might that look like and how do we plan for it? But there's an overlap in the Venn diagram where part of planning for it means integrating the software that we are making and to join us and help us build this so that we can be ready. To approach it, just like picture the circles and then find the overlap”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was actually thinking of it in terms of one to many. I think it works really well with one to many. The key is many can't be infinite. The many can't be eight and a half billion people. That just doesn't work because if you're talking to that many people, if you're talking to the whole wide world, you have to water down your message so much that it becomes a drop in the ocean. It is just a nothing. The many should be the people who work at my company or the people who are really passionate about robotics or the people who are really worried about conflict with China. The many has to be like an actual circumscribed set of people. And then once you have that circumscribed set of people, then you think about what do all those people have in common that people outside of that circle don't necessarily have in common. So let's say that you are starting a new company and the company is something to do with American defense tech. It's something between palace.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The real story to tell is what's in the center that Venn diagram. So don't tell the story that's in your circle because it's hard to get other people to care. Don't tell the story that's in the other person's circle because you don't get anything out of it. It's not strategic. Tell the story that's in the Venn diagram. And then once you meet them in the Venn diagram, you can kind of walk them into the rest of your circle. You give them a gateway drug.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The wrong way is, here's what I want to say. Here it is, because the thing that you care about might not be what anybody else is caring about. I think the right way is to take two things. One is, here's what I care about. So like think of it as a circle of information. Here's what I care about and what I want to say. Then there's another circle of here's what the person I'm speaking to cares about and what they're thinking about. And it's probably a little bit different from what's on my mind. If it were identical, then what's the point of saying anything? But there's probably going to be some overlap. And so what people tend to say is the circle of things that are on their mind and then just put it out there and hope that somebody latches onto it.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Alone, they tried to cover the narrative arc of something that's happening. So when you see people right now covering hires at Meta for their new superintelligence, they're covering what is the long-term goal of this and how is it progressing over time and what is like they're thinking of it as a 12 stories that link together. And so all of this put together means when you're trying to cut through the noise, you tell it through a human with extreme conviction and you tie facts together in a chain such that it forms this bigger narrative that people feel compelled to follow.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The gravity of someone telling us these things, and if they happen to be false, then we're actually very vulnerable to it. But we had this vulnerability to human conviction and you can't convey that through any other means. There's like a unique way that people can convey conviction that makes us buy in. And then another is having it play into some kind of narrative arc. So whatever you're saying, if you just say it in a vacuum, here's like a little pile of facts that I drop in front of you. Well, there's pile of facts, piles of facts around as far as the eye can see in every direction. But if I tell you that this is part of something bigger and you need to stay tuned, then it gives you something to hang on to. So this is like the one thousand and one night's Shahzad, you know the story. She was going to be beheaded and then she told a little bit of a story and had to wait till the next day and then told a little bit. And then after 1,001 nights, he was like, you know what? Great, you can go. He made it this far. Even journalists, when they're following a beat, they try not to write one new story as a stand.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It be attached to a human, whether it's a product launch or a company launch or some piece of information, having a human mascot represent it is really important. Another is human conviction. Like there's something within us that responds to another person's conviction. Like when you see cult leaders being able to recruit or terrorist group leaders being able to recruit, their actual pitch on the merits is horrible. It's like that meme of like, you get this and I get that. And it's like you get basically nothing, poor pay, extremely poor prospects of success. Leave your family behind. And I get rights to your life and then also maybe you die. On the mares, the pitch is horrible, but there's something within us that finds it really hard to resist when someone is just looking us in the eye and telling us with absolute conviction that something is true. This is why pathological liars are so powerful and sociopaths are so powerful because we can't resist.”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“with new tools where it used to be so if you look at the world of company launches it used to be every few months there was some big announcement or some new launch now it's multiple a day every single day including weekends and evenings and holidays and so the way to stand out from that i think is a few things one is it's about human beings we've always gravitated to human beings and human stories and i think we gravitate to that even more now because it gives you something to care about that's not just generic content like content is infinite but individual human characters stand out from that it gives you a person to root for gives you something to get attached to it gives you a thing to care about and so have”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If someone is fighting you with stories you have to fight with stories under the statistics are more powerful stories. 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're not just attacking me. You're attacking all of us. 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. The three things for actually making a difference with your story are, one, two, what are the right and then lastly,”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Surface area of the opportunity we have to latch on is getting more and more fine, which means that the hook that we need to use has to get more and more sharp”
2025-09-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT