How To Build a Cult with Lulu Cheng Meservey

Podcast: The Knowledge Project
Host: Shane Parrish
Guest: Lulu Cheng Meservey — founder of Rostra, former CCO of Activision Blizzard, former VP of comms at Substack
Duration: ~1 hour 48 minutes
Listen: Apple Podcasts | YouTube

Lulu Cheng Meservey has been the communications chief through some of the most intense corporate crises of the last decade. Her frameworks for cutting through noise and building trust are applicable whether you are a CEO or an individual contributor.

The Attention Problem

The surface area for capturing attention is getting smaller. The hook has to get sharper. Three things make people pay attention: human stories, human conviction, and narrative arcs that connect facts into a compelling chain.

The Venn Diagram

Find the overlap between what you want to say and what your audience cares about. That overlap is your hook. Most communicators talk about what they want to say. The effective ones start with what the audience already cares about.

Leaders Should Speak

Meservey is blunt: corporations communicate poorly because they delegate to people without skin in the game. The most effective communicators are the actual leaders with authentic conviction. “If you’re building a cult, you would never keep the cult leader from speaking.”

Trust as Engineering

Trust can be built systematically through three elements: repeated exposure (stop being a stranger), shared values, and authentic conviction. Trust plus conviction is what makes people believe impossible things are possible.

Handling Attacks

Meservey introduces a physics framework: Pressure = Force / Area. When under attack, you cannot change the force coming at you, but you can spread it over a wider area by framing the attack as targeting a larger group or shared values. On offense, concentrate the pressure by narrowing your focus.

The Deterrence Model

Establish yourself as a hard target. Respond consistently to challenges. Demonstrate that crossing boundaries has consequences. She cites Palmer Luckey and Sam Altman as examples of people who have built deterrent reputations.

Tit for Two Tats

From game theory: allow one transgression. Respond firmly to the second. This balances cooperation with deterrence better than strict tit-for-tat.

On Writing and Originality

“Success for me is to open source the idea that you can control your destiny. You can create alternate realities. You can bend reality.”

Crepi il lupo! 🐺