#82: David Keyes — Meme Warfare: The New Battlefield

I think a lot of the, uh, the journalism is trying to destroy good people and good companies. I don't think they really pursue the truth. They see big targets, they're driven by clickbait, they want salacious stories. They will twist and distort and manipulate just about anything they can because that's what they need. They're desperate for attention. And there's a reason that the media is not trusted today. The people are not stupid. You can't fool all the people. There's a reason that their numbers are dwindling and pathetic. Let's blow up the internet from the basement to the higher net. Scroll and tap in there. We ain't done yet. Let's blow up the internet.

You've worked with billionaires and world leaders. What does narrative warfare look like for them?

Well, narrative warfare is all-encompassing. It means that you're not just out there alone in the world, but you're being seen and often attacked by very powerful actors. By states, by rival companies, you know, entrepreneurs and billionaires. They're like mini nation-states now, and they have a lot of interests around the world, and they're trying to advance ideas. And so most people and most companies are today engaged in narrative wars, whether they know it or not, sort of constantly being undermined, uh, people constantly trying to chip away at what they want to advance in the world. Sometimes that's legacy media, sometimes that's competitors, sometimes that's enemies or rogue actors. And oftentimes it's dictators, frankly, that are trying to destroy the West through subtle means.

How do you defend yourself against that though? Isn't there just like so much information? It's almost like armies of information.

Most people are totally ill-equipped to defend, and the best defense is unremitting offense. Um, because once you're defending, you're already on the enemy's field of battle. Um, and that's something that a lot of, a lot of world leaders have trouble resisting because it feels, um, they so deeply want to respond to everything. But that's a catastrophic mistake in communications. Um, but what they should be doing is spending every waking moment thinking about how to make their own messages viral, um, and how to sort of impose the ideas they want on the world.

You were pranking dictators, getting hundreds of millions of views, and then the PM calls you to offer you a job. How did this go down?

Well, I don't know if it was hundreds of millions, but it was, it was, uh, it was noted and sort of went viral in its time. It was back in 2011, '12, '13, um, and I had sort of made it my mission to revamp what human rights were. Or the struggle for human rights. I partnered with Bob Bernstein, the legendary founder of Human Rights Watch and former head of Random House. I'd taken over a group called Movements. I got some funding from Google and launched a crowdsourcing platform that linked activists with people that could help them, sort of the Airbnb or Uber for human rights. So anyone with a skill could contribute.

Is that the pitch?

Yeah, that was the pitch.

Yeah. Guys, it's Uber for human rights.

And, you know, Senator Rubio at the time was posting about it and using it. Now, Secretary of State. So I was very happy doing what I was doing. I felt a mission and a purpose. But at the same time, my family lived in Israel, and I knew that I wanted to help Israel as well. The human rights field had gone totally haywire. I mean, the main groups were doing, you know, as many reports about Israel as Iran, Syria, and North Korea combined. Uh, which just makes no sense. Like, the, the places with actual genocides and starvation and, you know, mass repression deserve, I think, a little bit more attention than open societies, which although flawed, albeit flawed, have mechanisms in place like judiciaries and free press and civil society to actually, you know, work on those to improve those societies domestically. But they had lost the plot, and that's something that Bob Bernstein understood very well. He was an absolutely amazing guy. And so I was fusing satire and human rights and sort of going viral at the time. And I had been in touch with a few people in the Prime Minister's inner circle. My mentor was Natan Sharansky, who spent 9 years in Soviet prison and had become a minister in the government and got to know other people around the Prime Minister. And so they were looking, I think, for new ideas and new approaches. And when I came into the job, it was the same sort of thing. I looked at things and I said, This is all crazy, like it shouldn't work this way. We need new thought, radical new thought, and we need to approach things completely differently. We need to, you know, look at this with fresh eyes. We need to spread our ideas to the entire world. We can't just rely on, you know, putting out a press release that people don't care about because it's stodgy or old school or kind of lame and uninteresting. So how do we infuse new modern thinking into this old challenge of spreading the truth about Israel. And so I think that's part of why I was chosen.

So you pranked dictators, millions and millions of views. You are the king of committing to the bit, the GOAT of virality when it comes to insane pranks. Can you share some of these pranks? The ones you're allowed to share?

This is basically smashing together the two things that I love most, uh, satire and humor and, uh, and fighting dictators. And so it was pretty natural. When I was a student at UCLA, I started a group called Students Against Dictators, and we'd throw up pictures of dictators in the middle of, of campus and people would get mad. And then when I was in New York, I realized you can just do stuff like they say, like the kids say today. And it bothered me that the human rights industry was just doing the same old shit, you know, putting out a press release that no one paid attention to. And I was like, we can do better. Well, I started the first annual Saudi Women's Grand Prix, a car race just for Saudi women. And it was just an idea. But then, you know, major media outlets started covering it. And I went to the Saudi embassy and some folks dressed in burqas, you know, did a car race in front of the Saudi embassy with Barbies before women were allowed to drive. And then I I, you know, made videos in Arabic calling for women to drive in that issue, and I got thousands of death threats. And I just realized that, you know, this sort of— this line between satire and serious could be very powerful. There's nothing as powerful as a joke. My mentor, Natan Sharansky, used to sit across from his KGB captors and say, "I am more free than you because I can laugh at a joke and you can't." And the former head of the CIA, James Woolsey, said, you know, South Park was one of the most effective things against, you know, North Korea, and, you know, we should be making fun of the dictators and the tyrants in the Middle East. And you see how these things spread very fast. And so I just kind of kept going with that theme. So I rented an ice cream truck when Zarif, the foreign minister of Iran, came to NYU to speak. And I celebrated 1,000 hangings in Iran, and I walked up to the now foreign minister, Araghchi, and asked him what his favorite way to hang gay people was and chased him around with balloons around. And there were NYU students lined up to the end of the block for free ice cream to celebrate. Saudi Arabia hosted a job fair at the Gaylord Hotel, so I figured since it's the death penalty for being gay, I would throw a gay party at the Gaylord Hotel at the same time. And then I flew to Vienna to prank Iran's nuclear negotiators, and I announced a fake human rights accord reducing the rate of hangings from once every— from once every 2 hours to once every 2.5 hours. Huge progress, by the way. So Wendy Sherman, you know, the chief negotiator, dropped her bag when I told her about this. And I went up to the Iranians and asked them who their favorite political prisoners were. And it caused a scene, it caused some virality. But I realized that these small things were worth their weight in gold. I had this idea to rename the streets in front of the embassies of dictatorships after political prisoners. So I did this with China and Lu Xiaobo Plaza for their jailed Nobel Prize winner. And the Washington Post said it became one of the main points of consternation in US-Chinese relations. This little idea, which cost no money and took no time, it was just kind of the power of an idea. But back to MrBeast. It's something that people hadn't really seen or done or thought of before, so it stood out and people wanted to share it and they thought it was funny. So I almost had a show pranking dictators. I guess that was another life path. Maybe it's not too late for that. But I still think that humor is hugely underutilized in the fight for freedom and in political stuff all the time. And people who confuse that well and make people laugh, uh, the sky's the limit.

Yeah, it's something I think a lot about, which is jester's privilege, which is the idea that the jester is the only person that can make fun of the king without getting his head chopped off. And so when there's something serious or crazy or sad going on in the news, really only the jesters or the meme lords are allowed to be silly. And when you package something in a joke, it shows the truth, but also doesn't, doesn't hurt as much sometimes. Yeah, but it could still show the truth. I want to, want to ask more.

Sorry, I'm just getting a page real quick.

Yeah. Who is it? Apollo pagers sponsored by Apollo pagers.

Number one pager that mostly doesn't explode.

Mostly. So from pranking dictators to spokesman for prime minister of Israel, how did, you know, things kind of progress from there when you accept the job? Like, I'm just curious, how does the download work of all the information? Like day one of training, like you must Right.

Uh, I describe it as drinking from a fire hose actually, because it was, uh, sort of an impossible task. I, I walked in and I had never been in government before, which I think was a huge asset because my mind wasn't, uh, sullied by bureaucratic thinking about everything and the limitations of what can't be done because of the system, et cetera. Um, and there's sort of a lack of creativity in, in government, uh, you know, broken feedback loops over a long time, no incentive to, to really do better. So that was an asset. But it was a world unto itself. It was really crazy. I mean, in the first few days, I was speaking on behalf of the Prime Minister to the entire world, which required some knowledge of the policies, but there's not a book of policies that you just get and say, "Here's what to say on everything." So you're kind of doing it impromptu and on the fly. You know, mistakes can be made. You're also in the room with world leaders, which was quite the experience, and you have access to all sorts of incredible things and spend a lot of time with a world leader seeing behind the scenes how it all works.

Yeah. The stories you were telling me earlier, you would prep Bibi for talks by basically attacking him, pretending to be a journalist, right? So how do you prepare a leader now to be attacked?

And that was the most fun part of the job, frankly, just sitting in front of him before interviews and eviscerating him to his face, trying to think of the absolute hardest questions to ask. Gotcha questions, questions that would press upon, you know, what— where the policy might be wrong. And I did not hold back. I relished that, really. And I would think in those moments, who on earth can, you know, sit across from the Prime Minister every day and blast him to his face? But it was important because that's what he was up against. And he was bombarded every single day, frankly, by a lot of unscrupulous journalists, by misinformation, by disinformation, all the time, every single day, over and over and over again. I would walk out of rooms and meetings in the cabinet or meetings with a world leader or an intelligence thing, and then I would see how it's reported in the news, and it was more often than not 180 degrees the opposite of what actually happened. And this was a daily occurrence, and it really shaped my view on the world because now when I read something, a good operating assumption is that anything you read in the news, just presume it's bullshit and then work from there. Not the other way around. I like that Denzel Washington quote where he says, if you're not reading the news, you're uninformed, and if you're reading the news, you're misinformed. And that was my experience, to see the reality as it is in the room, and then to see how people speak about it, the endless rumor mill of social media just regurgitating, just unverified rumors and bullshit. Every minute of every day deluged with just bullshit. How do you fight that? I'll tell you one thing, not by batting every lie away because then your entire day is taken up with that. And then you don't wake up saying, how do we convince the world that the Islamic Republic of Iran seeks our annihilation? You're not waking up saying, hey, the Palestinian Authority is paying hundreds of millions of dollars to terrorists every single year. You're not waking up and saying, hey, how do we convince the world of this critical issue? You're just always saying, that's not true, and that's not true, and that's not true, and that's not true, and that's not true. And that doesn't work. And the academic literature shows that that also doesn't work very well. So I found that a gargantuan waste of time, and I tried to more effectively set the agenda of what people think about on behalf of the Prime Minister.

Right. So Prime Minister is getting attacked. Ignore it. Focus on the important things, right? Stop playing, you know, defense against every single journalist attack, focus on the important stuff. Would you say the same thing for a startup founder today is, you know, they have their first hit piece written about them, right? I assume eventually I'm going to get a hit piece written about me, right? I've gotten attacked on the internet quite a bit. Eventually some journalist is going to write a hit piece. What would be your advice to, you know, my friends who are startup founders? What would your advice be from a PR communications perspective?

Yeah, I think a lot of the, uh, the journalism is trying to, trying to destroy good people and good companies, and they're so often lacking vital context. I don't think they really pursue the truth. I think they see big targets, they're driven by clickbait, they want salacious stories. They will twist and distort and manipulate just about anything they can because that's what they need. They're desperate for attention. And there's a reason that the media is not trusted today. The people are not stupid. You can't fool all the people. There's a reason that their numbers are dwindling and pathetic, and they get a fraction of a fraction of the views of what we got in the Prime Minister's office going direct to the people. So my advice to the, to the founders, um, of which I speak too often, is very similar to my advice to the Prime Minister, which is to take offense, to go on the offense. Not to be offended, but rather to go on offense and to set the agenda of what you want people to think, and not to be sucked into that vortex of constant negation of claims. You will get those hit pieces. I've gotten those hit pieces. Lots of people I know have gotten those hit pieces. And rather than every single accusation dissecting, this isn't true, and that's not true, and look at this, and look at this, look at— that doesn't work. That doesn't shape people's perceptions. What shapes people's perceptions is kind of instant associations with things. And there's so many important things to tell the world about companies, about states, about leaders, um, and you're fighting over that 30 seconds that someone is paying attention as they're scrolling through their feed. So you have to think about what works, not just what is right. Uh, and too many times I see people with really great ideas who don't have a clue about how information spreads, uh, and how people share and, and think about content that they see. And, you know, the influencers know how to do it. You want to go viral, look at, study MrBeast. He's the GOAT. You know, how many policy wonks are, are, can, can channel MrBeast? Very few. So you may have the right policy, but you don't know how to convince the masses of that policy. And that's, that's a gap. That's a huge gap.

So you were saying something earlier when we were in the car talking about, you know, if somebody writes a hit piece, says you are disgusting, You spend your entire day saying, I'm not disgusting, I'm not disgusting, I'm not disgusting. What are people going to remember? They're going to think, oh, it's probably pretty disgusting, right?

Yeah.

So when founders are getting attacked, hit peace. Just keep posting through it, right? That's, that's the only thing you could do is focus on the important stuff. Focus on the mission.

Every single day you have the opportunity to make something go viral. And so what founders should be waking up and thinking about is how do I package my idea to the world such that hundreds of millions of people will desperately want to share it. And there's a methodology to that. There's a method to the madness. There are ways of doing it. We've sort of engineered hundreds of millions of views in the last few months even on viral campaigns. And we, you know, I've done this with world leaders and with lots of interesting people. And it starts with starting with what works rather than starting with what feels right to say. And this is something I did in the Prime Minister's Office where I'd print out academic articles every day about effective communications and the latest and greatest that's, that's being studied in social sciences every day and fusing that with Dale Carnegie and Ogilvy and the greats, but also updating it with modern science. So there's a way to do that. And I think a lot of founders, a lot of large companies are not experts in that. And when you can twin the expert in communications with a beautiful policy or an important idea, the sky's the limit.

Yeah. So the PM had an average of 100,000 views per video. You come in and get 24 million views on day one, video one. Articles are written about it being a masterclass, right? What was the strategy behind that and how did that go down? What are the principles there?

Yeah, I walked into the prime minister with a document that said unorthodox response to the, the Orlando massacre. and the text was written in a very, very specific way, and it was utilizing dozens of principles of effective communication. And we did this, you know, in video after video, speech after speech, and suddenly the numbers, you know, ballooned into the tens of millions. Everything that was said that worked had a shocking opening, right? Which now is sort of commonplace. You know, you've got 3 seconds to hook someone in. We told a lot of individual stories and whittled abstract ideas down to the experience of one person. So when He spoke at the UN and wanted to raise the issue of incitement against Jews. He didn't say, oh, the Palestinian Authority is inciting. He said, you know, think of the story of one 13-year-old kid named Ali who wakes up in the morning and he passes a statue to someone who killed 30 Jews, and then he goes to play soccer, you know, at the Dalal al-Mughrabi, you know, soccer stadium named after the woman who killed a few dozen Jews. And he told the story of an individual person. And we did that with Iranians that were suffering, or the, you know, the judo champion that was forced to throw a match lest he face, uh, an Israeli, uh, opponent. I used a very particular methodology of principles of effective communication that I had been studying for a long time.

Um, memes make millions.

Memes make billions, not just millions. Uh, well, I, I channeled some of the, the greats, the old greats, frankly. Um, Dale Carnegie and Ogilvy. I was reading a lot of academic literature at the time. Scientific papers about how information spreads and what people pay attention to. And I sort of developed my own methodology over these years that utilized dozens of principles of effective communications. And yeah, the first video got 24 million views in a day. Prime Minister saw that, and, you know, why are you going to chase after MSNBC with 50,000 viewers when you can reach tens of millions direct to the people? But I knew we needed to surprise people and shock people. We needed to do things differently. You know, when he spoke in Munich at the Security Conference, he was going to give his millionth speech about Iran, and I said, well, we just shot down an Iranian drone. You know, it'd be pretty dramatic if you held up the wing of that armed drone that we shot down. So he loved that idea, and we smuggled this drone wing in, and he held it up in front of the world's defense ministers and asked the foreign minister of Iran, Mr. Zarif, do you recognize this? You should, it's yours. And that was on the front page of every single major newspaper in the world. So we found ways of engineering attention and focus to the issues that were vital to Israel. And we did it with Iran and Hezbollah and Hamas and all the critical issues, but it required a rethink of the communications sort of from the ground up so that we weren't doing the same thing, just putting out press releases or giving statements, but rather infusing some humor and some satire and some fun into communications because you need— people need to be entertained today because otherwise they just don't pay attention. And we're competing against everybody everybody in the world, every issue, every celebrity, every war, every scandal. We were competing for the exact same attention of, of people. So we needed to do better than them.

Yeah. There's a great book called Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman.

Yep.

Uh, written in the 1970s talking about how, uh, with the 24-hour news cycle, right, our attention span is getting shorter and shorter. And now it's a 3-second news cycle. So when you're a startup founder, when you're a billionaire world leader, you're competing for attention constantly. It's not as simple as just because you're famous, people are going to pay attention, right?

Exactly right.

Yeah. Why are terrorists so good at PR? How do they get so many views and how can we learn from them?

Well, I don't know if it's true, but I heard that you're advising ISIS now. Is that— is that right?

I'm an investor.

Okay.

My—

seed stage?

Seed stage. My reputation is aligned with them when they win.

Yeah, I win.

Yeah, you're right. I put the I in ISIS.

Nice.

Two I's.

Nice. You're obviously very terrorist founder friendly.

Yes, yes, of course, dude. Of course. But seriously, why are terrorists so good at PR? They're killing it.

That's a good question. Their videos are much better than Western. You know, I think, I think the West is ill-equipped to win the narrative war, frankly. And in many ways, we're less sophisticated than our enemies. And that's true of China and Russia and Iran and even ISIS. You look at their videos and they're compelling and they're, you know, in a terrible way, obviously, they're pure evil, inveterate evil, but they do do a good job at social media and videos. It's kind of a curious thing. I guess they get the sort of primal instinct of people to— obviously it's very macabre, you know, and looking at death, et cetera. But it's a good question. Maybe we need to think about that more.

Yeah, I think there's something to learn from everybody. Even Hitler. He had a good mustache, you know. Do you think I have enough rizz to bring back the Hitler mustache?

I'm skeptical. You can try. My wife said you can try, but there needs to be some Jewish boy.

The Nuffer is— brings back— he ruined it for everyone, David. It's kind of BS.

I mean, imagine if he had just had a full beard and from 1945 no one was allowed to wear a full beard. It would be bullshit. Yeah, that'd be a tough pill for me to swallow.

Yeah.

Good point. Very good point.

Thank you. Thank you.

It's— people probably rarely say that to you.

Very rarely, especially when I'm talking about Hitler mustaches. Every time I bring this up to my wife, Erica, she, she says no.

Yeah.

So I haven't grown it yet, but hopefully soon. But speaking of Hitler mustaches, let's talk about, you know, what everybody seems to call Donald Trump, Hitler, right? You made the MAGA hat of Israel, right? Yeah. Connecting the dots a little. But let's talk Total Victory. Why did that campaign go so viral? Why did the hat blow up? Why? Why did— the first time I met you, my wife just recognized the hat, right? Why did that stand out?

Well, that motto was an obsession of mine for a few decades because I looked at Hamas and I said, You know, this is crazy. They're calling for literal genocide of all Jews. They're building up right on Israel's border. They mean what they say. I speak Arabic, so I was listening to them in Arabic every single day, and they were saying, we're going to kill you all, we're going to kill you all. And I was like, these people cannot be allowed to rule 50 feet from Israel. And they tried to infiltrate, and they launched a bunch of wars, and they blew up a bunch of buses, and they threw rockets at, you know, terrified Israeli civilians. So I was calling for total victory. Over Hamas for decades. So much so that at my bachelor party, my friends made a hat in 2017. It said, "Total Victory." And they're like, "You won't shut up about this total victory thing." And I was dismissed by a lot of people, particularly in the security establishment and generals and such, who told me I didn't understand and it wouldn't be a good idea, et cetera, et cetera. And we were protected. And it was a huge, huge, huge mistake on their part. So after October 7th, when 1,200 Israelis were slaughtered in a single day in the worst terror attack, you know, since the Holocaust against Jews, I said, I immediately said, we need to pursue total victory. We cannot stop and have a ceasefire after 4 months and leave Hamas in power. That is insanity. And so I realized that this was a narrative war, that there were going to be be people who, who would say immediately, let's not go all the way, it's not worth the price, let's stop, let's do what we did last time, we, we can't do it, we can't win. And I, I just immediately thought that that's absolute nonsense. If Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan can be obliterated and transformed from tyrannical mass murdering societies into peaceful democracies that last decades I think defeating tiny Hamas, which has a tiny amount of territory, is possible. It just requires the will to destroy their will to fight and their capacity to wage endless war. And so I whittled down this idea into two words, total victory, because I think it said it all. It channeled Churchill and FDR and Truman and MacArthur and Patton. And so I threw it on a hat. The hat's right here, actually. And it really took off. It started in Hebrew, and then we did the Arabic version, Nasr al-Mutlaq bil-Arabi, which means total victory. The English version did quite well. And everyone started wearing it in Israel, and the prime minister gave it to the president, and it sort of became the motto of the war. We haven't achieved total victory yet. That's important to say, too. We have not achieved total victory yet. But no matter who is prime minister and no matter who is in charge, I will advocate total victory against Hamas because that is the single most important thing to do in order to protect Israelis in the south and throughout the country today. And they will do it. They will do October 7th 1,000 times over if we don't win completely and utterly.

I was also thinking, I don't know if this is something like don't die, you know, the Brian Johnson motto.

Yeah.

It's like very, very strong two words or something about it. It's like something to reach for.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's a very hard thing. The prime minister would say that the meta message message is the most important thing. And so whittling down complex ideas into palatable, understandable, relatable, transferable memes, for lack of a better word, is a skill unto itself. Who knows that better than you? Um, so that's something that the West needs to do better generally. We want to spread ideas in the world, and, and companies too. And oftentimes you take an industry like crypto, they're, they're horrible at, at communicating, and everything is so convoluted and complicated. To think about the greatest political slogan of the last many years. Make America Great Again. Simple, nostalgic, forward-looking, easy to digest. Everyone can see greatness in a different way. It's a, it's a really brilliant thing. I guess Reagan came up with it, um, first. And actually, I made my own version here, which is, you know, Make Greenland America Again.

So simple. Um, you know, for me, memes make millions. Uh, simplifying and slogans. Coining a slogan is so powerful, whether it's MAGA or MAGA, right? Make Greenland America Again or Total Victory. Coining a slogan, simplifying it to a meme where other people can remix it, can say it, can do it in their own style and make imagery and videos around it. Super powerful. So yeah, you worked with Netanyahu every day for 3 years. What did you learn from him?

We turn the cameras off? Just kidding. Well, I love history, and I would read a lot of biographies of presidents and world leaders. So it's different up close. You see a human being trying to navigate impossible complexities, and every policy is a choice between bad and worse. I think it's almost impossible to understand the pressure that he's under. Um, a thousand things a day coming, endless crises one after the other happening at the exact same moment. Um, international crises and domestic and political and security. So how does a person navigate all that? You have to be brilliant and you have to have great memory, and it's just hard, but it's also endlessly fascinating. It's a high like nothing else. I'll give you an example of one random day. I woke up at, uh, I forget what time, but my phone was blowing up because there had been an Al Jazeera sting operation that had uncovered a low-level Israeli advisor in London who was talking about toppling the deputy foreign secretary of England. And this was a huge scandal, and everyone's asking me, is this true? Is it Israeli policy, etc., etc.? And then pretty much an hour after that, supposed transcripts of tapes that were exposed between the Prime Minister and his arch rival on a sensitive topic. And then an hour after that, in a government meeting, the government almost fell over a religion and state issue, and ministers are screaming at each other. And then in walks the military secretary about an hour into that meeting and says, "There's just been a huge terror attack in Jerusalem." So we go to the site of the terror attack, and the engine is still on of the engine that mowed over a bunch of Israelis. And there's blood still on the, on the truck. And something like an hour after that, the former president of Iran, Rafsanjani, dies, sparking potential revolution in Iran. So if you're in my position, let alone the prime minister's, and you have to deal with all these things in a few hours, and they're all completely different, and you didn't expect them that morning, and you have to be informed, and you have to decide what to say, and you have to decide whether it'll help or hurt You don't have all the facts. Everyone's looking at everything you're doing every minute of every day, a pressure cooker, and people are pulling you in different directions. And the economic guy sees this version of it, and the foreign policy guy wants that, and the domestic people are thinking about the base, and the security people— it's a sort of silo problem where everyone only sees it through their own lens. And so the Prime Minister has to triangulate between so many different interests of so many different parties under so much pressure every single day. And it's sort of insane.

It's insane. It reminds me there's a Marcus Aurelius quote where it's something like, every day I wake up and I expect to be attacked by idiots. I think of somebody like Palmer Luckey, right? You know, brilliant, brilliant billionaire founder. Every day he's attacked by some random hippies or journalists. And a lot of founders are just attacked, right? It's a nice kind of stoic saying of like, If you're making content online, expect to be attacked by idiots.

Yeah, and people who are— don't know what's happening. They weren't in the room. They weren't there. They didn't partake in that discussion.

I heard, you know, what's, uh, what happened with the pagers.

Um, I do, I do know. I do know a lot about what happened with the pagers. Um, and I was privy to a lot of things in, in government. Um, I was tasked by the Prime Minister with exposing Iran's secret atomic archive that We stole from Tehran, and it's a heavy responsibility to sit and look at this material. We exposed 1% of it because it was literally plans of how to make a nuclear weapon, so you can't just put that online and give it to everybody. Like, you have to expect that happens every day, and people with agendas and people who are ill-informed and people who want to take you down for a variety of reasons will do anything to do it. And so, you know, brilliant founders like Palmer Luckey, they're, they're basically world leaders, and there's a tremendously sophisticated apparatus that are fighting these people, and it's often enemy states who really don't want America to win. I mean, they have a lot of money, and they can seed rumors, and they can spread information, and they can, you know, use bot farms, and they can pay people off, and they can bribe people, and they are unscrupulous in the extreme. They have no democratic constraints that Western democracies would never do in a million years and say, we can't do that, that's immoral, or that's not right. And so they're sort of faced with, with all of that, the, you know, clamor of, of, of the ill-informed masses against it, and agendas of people who, you know, large defense companies that don't want the nimble guy who has a better business model to win. And China, you know, America's main geopolitical foe, saying we want to, you know, scuttle everything that this guy does because he's equipping America with the defenses to to win a war in the future. So, you know, how do you fight that? I think the first thing it requires is a sophisticated approach to understanding what's happening. And this is part of what our company is trying to do, is observe what's happening, give optionality for responses that are persuasive and compelling, distribute those ideas in effective and innovative ways, and see this as a sort of from 30,000-foot view of an actual narrative war. It's not just potshots that happen here and there. And I saw this from the inside. There are serious, serious efforts afoot to undermine everything that America, Israel, the West holds dear. And if we don't get our shit together and realize what's happening, we will lose that war. And I'm really afraid of that. And I think I see imprints of it every day on campuses that are, you know, Iranian-funded campus protests, which is insane. And we see disinformation and misinformation spreading at the speed of light by motivated enemies against, against our democracies.

So we are going to a graveyard in about an hour to mourn the loss of our former friend.

Yeah, it's very sad.

Legacy media. So why are we hosting a funeral for legacy media?

Well, because it's, it's passed away. Um, it's very sad, but everything passes eventually, and it had a, it had a moment, but eventually it stopped doing what it was aiming to do. And over time, this legacy media became corrupted, and they lied too much, and they distorted, and they manipulated everything that they came across. And so the people who are smart, didn't trust them anymore, and their numbers dwindled, and no one paid attention to them anymore. And it's a sad thing, but we mourn their passing, and I thought it was important to give them a ceremony on the way out because even, even bad people deserve a funeral. It's beautiful. Yeah, beautiful. Yeah, there were many tears. And now is the moment when citizen journalists— you are, you are the media now.

You are the media now.

Uh, and that's a great thing. It doesn't come without its own problems, but it's much better than these sort of condescending overlords deciding everything about, I know better and I'm smarter and you don't really know, you can't really handle the truth, and I'll hide this from you and I'll promote this hoax and I'll leave out this vital context and I'll twist this thing and I'll draw upon anonymous sources endlessly and I will reprint things that are not true and I won't apologize when I get it wrong. You put all that together, shake it up, give it a few decades, chase clicks endlessly. What do you get? You get modern media.

Would you say the death of legacy media was a suicide or murder?

That's a great question. Um, I think it feels more like a suicide because they had a choice. And of course there were some bright lights, there were a few people that were trying to hold the fort down, but it just didn't work anymore. And that's why they're irrelevant, and that's why nobody reads them, and that's why you have platforms like X that are, you know, you have brilliant people from around the world who didn't go to journalism school, who don't sit around at cocktail parties, you know, badmouthing average people about how stupid they are. And look, I dealt with these people. I was the point person for the Prime Minister for all the world's media. So these were daily interactions that I had and just insane stories one after the other of things that were just not true or totally twisted. Published everywhere all the time. So their time has passed and we're saying goodbye and we're doing it with grace and honor. And, you know, In the Arms of the Angels will probably play in the background. You can send flowers to your favorite legacy media outlet to honor their memory on their way out. I think that's a touching thing.

It's quite beautiful. Um, it's really kind of you to host funeral for legacy media.

It's my pleasure.

It's beautiful. So beautiful. I might cry. Now that legacy media is dead, what are PR agencies' place? Because like PR agencies, most of what they do is just like pitching journalists.

Yeah.

Do you think there's still a place for them or is it more crazy stunts, narrative warfare?

I think that, um, anything traditional is bound not to reach stratospheric virality. That if you're pitching a journalist on a story, but so is everyone else, and you get a story and it's read by a small number of people, that's not the way to change minds at scale. What does that are radical ideas, things that people have never seen before. And they've seen an article about a company, they've seen a puff piece about this, and they've seen the Forbes 30 Under 30 thing. How do you radically stand out in today's world? How do you show up in places that people don't expect? How do you formulate your ideas in visual, compelling, shocking, funny, interesting ways that people see that and say— that should be the goal. Their mouths should be agape and say, "I've never seen something like that in my life. I need to share this immediately with my friends and family." That's a high bar. For a SaaS company. But it's possible. You know, you look at, you know, Dollar Shave Club or Purple Mattress or people that are getting hundreds of millions of views on certain things, and then other people are just sort of— they're not present. And what bothered me was that a lot of people that I would speak with or that would approach me have world-changing ideas or products, and they're just reaching a fraction of a fraction of the people that they could because they tend not to think this way. And they're totally different skills. Being a brilliant founder or being a brilliant thinker or engineer generally has nothing to do with the expertise of how to get attention for that cause. Um, and so you try to fuse those things, and you try to fuse those things with modern technologies and an awareness of what's happening in the world today, which is that everybody has a megaphone. You're competing against everybody. It's really tough out there. Short-form stuff is, you know, the lingua franca of today. Billions of people are on TikTok. So how do you fight the modern war and what tools do you have and what tools are you building, frankly? Where is the puck going? Not just where is the puck today, but in 5 years, what will it look like when LLMs are infused in everything? They already basically are. When AI is indistinguishable from human-created stuff, it basically is anyways. When agents are doing so much of the work instead of humans, well, what does it look like to win a narrative war? And it's just a, it's a endlessly complex and fascinating question, but that's, that's what I think about most of the day.

I don't know if I told you this. I met Palmer Luckey and I said, we need to seize the means of production, right? So memetic warfare and narrative warfare for billionaires, for, you know, big companies. How does that usually go down? Is there an operating system or, you know, how do they fight these information wars?

In my experience, they fight it a bit ad hoc and old school generally. That's something, you know, my company's trying to change and thinking through what that looks like, a sort of operating system for narrative warfare, because these things are becoming so complex and multifaceted. There's not really a good solution if you're constantly attacked by everyone and you have a lot of balls in the air. Think about, you know, Elon Musk and all the change he's trying to do and the number of people that are attacking him daily and his companies and states that are don't want them to win, and rivals. It's a lot. And so, you know, we're trying to equip people with a better understanding of what's out there, help them create the content that will actually work instead of just saying, you know, this isn't true, that's not true, but actually a sophisticated machinery to help people better spread their ideas around the world. And that's an ever-changing thing. The algorithms are changing, the players are changing, the platforms of distribution are changing. And so it's a sort of ever-evolving thing, but a very complex actual war that's happening.

So you helped the Prime Minister get hundreds of millions of views. Your pranks of dictators, also hundreds of millions of views. Do you have any suggestions for going viral? How can I make my content go viral all the time?

There's an art and a science to it. I think it starts with a keen understanding of the sort of principles of effective communication. You have to stand out. You have to be different. It's something that MrBeast understands probably better than anybody. He said he was obsessed about ideas for weeks on end until he came up, and his ideas are incredible. I remember the first time I came to his page, I was just blown away. I had never seen these things before. And so he had sort of perfected the, the purple cow. And there are ways of, of standing out. I mean, it starts by asking the question, what would someone in this position never do? For example, what is it that a priest or rabbi would never do? Where would they never show up? What would they never say? A startup founder has a company in a certain field. What would you least expect that person to do? Because immediately you have that edge of, wow, I never thought I would see that. And most people just go right away to, here's the points about my company, here's what I say. I sit in the same place that everyone, everyone else says something. Radical differentiation is the, I would say the most important thing. You have to shock and surprise people. And there's a methodology to how to do that. You have to make things accessible to people and instantly understandable. And that's a very hard thing to do. You need to use accessible language. You need to make things about the heart of the matter, the emotion of the matter, rather than just the logical inferences about a subject. It works way better. That's what the scientific literature says over and over. There's a great professor named Paul Slovic who found people gave on average twice as much money to a charity when confronted with the story of a single person, like a single starving woman in Africa, as opposed to hearing about the millions of people that were starving. So bringing individual stories, having actual visuals as manifestations or representations of abstract ideas, is extremely powerful. And so when the Prime Minister offered water management resources to the Iranian people to solve their, their drought, you know, he poured a glass of water at the beginning of the video because it was instantly memorable. And that's why he held up the drone in Munich. And you'll see in just about everything he does, there's a physical thing that conveys the message. Those are a few examples, but there's dozens and dozens of these that when you use them, almost instantaneously you will see that these small shifts in framing can lead to stratospheric virality, whereas opposed to the, the run-of-the-mill stuff dies in the vine.

How do you measure who is winning narrative war?

That's a great question. Um, you know, here's something that— this is an area where I think innovation, you know, still can play an important role because I think most people are measuring what they could for a long time. So you can see likes and you can see shares, and there's sort of some easy sentiment stuff that you can do that this goes up or down, but minds changed is a really hard metric, and people are still doing sort of old-school polling or unscientific dial testing or whatever. But I think that's a place where a lot of innovation can be had. The people who can better understand how minds are changed in real time because if you really want to impact the world, you have to understand how the audience thinks. And people think very differently and they have different worldviews. And this is something we tried to do, by the way, with world leaders. It's like when you sit down with Xi or Modi or Obama or Trump or Macron, These are people who, they have different hopes and dreams and fears, and they admire different people, and they read different books, and they have a different sense of themself and their place in the world. So how do you go into that meeting and absolutely crush it with that individual? You have to deeply understand their mind, and you have to take your message and of course keep it truthful and authentic, but you have to also inhabit the psyche of the listener in a profound way. And that's something that technology today and AI can, can help you do in a much more profound way than ever before. So it's a sort of new vista where you have great new opportunities and tremendous new challenges.

Yeah. So you've worked with billionaires, world leaders, presidents, prime ministers. People are just people. Everybody is human. Everybody has their own incentives, emotions. And at the end of the day, understanding the psychology is is key for everybody.

Yeah. I mean, I think definitely people are just people. And when you see some of these people up close, their, their blood is as red as yours or mine.

Just a normal dude.

Normal dudes in abnormal situations.

That's another reason why I am so bullish on humor in general. Like, you know, people are like, oh no, you won't be taken seriously. It's like, no. Do you know how many, like, billionaires and world leaders like to laugh? Because it's all of them. Because everybody likes to laugh.

100%.

100%.

And sometimes people are afraid to go off that cliff a little bit, but you are rewarded in spades. Like when Prime Minister Modi came to Jerusalem, I told the Prime Minister, I said, you know, his favorite thing in the world is yoga. You know, why don't you make a joke that, you know, when you get up in the morning and you're doing your yoga pose and you look to the right and you do a— I forget the name of the yoga pose, but the first democracy you see is India. And so, you know, he does this joke and Modi is laughing his head off. I mean, in the middle of the press conference, just cackling and giggling. And it was a moment of connection. And, you know, it's a small thing, but everybody loves to laugh. And really confident people are self-deprecating. That's why all the great political leaders, they have, you know, their doppelganger. They'll go on, you know, on, on the roasts or something, or the Radio and TV Correspondents' Dinner next to their, you know, or have Shane Gillis for Trump. Exactly.

Jordan Peele for Obama.

Yeah, Obama anger translator.

Yeah.

Um, and so great political leaders have the confidence to make fun of themselves and it's deeply endearing. It's just awesome and hilarious. Dana Carvey, you know, used to do, uh, Bush the First. And yeah, um, there was, uh, Jeff Bridges, I think, for Bush. Um, and today there's some great satirists out there that are doing that. So I would highly encourage, you know, very, very serious founders to have a little bit of levity in what they put out and how they speak and what they do. Some people are just naturally great at this. Musk is a genius at that. And Palmer Luckey, I think, does a great job as well. And these are people who can smile and laugh and realize that life is short and we're floating on this pale blue dot. And don't take yourself too seriously because no one knows anything.

Yeah, 100%. I mean, some of the smartest people in the world are posting memes, shitposting, being silly. Even, you know, Andreessen, Elon, Garry Tan, Palmer. The other day, Anderlecht went off on a rant. The Anderlecht account was shitposting. Like one of the most important defense companies in the world was posting memes and shitposting. Like, yeah, we're all just normal people. Yeah, we like to laugh. Like, at the end of the day, it's normal.

100%. Yeah.

Yeah.

And one of the first things I did when I came in was I said to the Prime Minister, let's have an AMA, ask me anything on, on Twitter at the time before it was X. And he said, great, let's do it. You know, we selected questions that people asked, tough questions, by the way. The first one that I just saw, it said, "Are you human?" And so I'm sitting with the Prime Minister and I said, "You know, it'd be hilarious if you just answered in binary code, just 010010100." He laughed and he said, "That's great, let's do it." So we post this thing and it explodes, you know, because people got the humor, they like to be entertained. And so you can convey a serious matter in an entertaining way. And that's what, that's what great leaders and founders can do. They're willing to take that chance. They're willing to step outside their comfort zone a little bit and they understand what people like and want, not just what they, they think should be said because it's the correct thing to say.

Yeah. I love the Elon quote where he's like, I'm sending us to Mars. I built this company. Do you really expect me to be like a normal guy?

Chill, normal dude.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like, No, like, embrace the silliness of it. Yeah, you could be super successful and silly at the same time.

Yeah. And, you know, Reagan was a master at that too, telling Soviet jokes and, you know, winning people over with humor and grace and satire.

So in the age of AI, there is a lot of boring slop on the timelines, right? A lot of boring writing. Yeah, boring videos. How do you stand out? What are the moats in content in today's world?

Well, this is a new experiment in humanity, the superintelligence that can create pixel-perfect images and soon, you know, any video and obviously writing. And so it's something that is causing an existential crisis in a lot of people because what they took pride in is sort of usurped by this all-powerful AI. There are some things that are tremendously dangerous in that, and I think it can, you know, people are asking what on earth do I do all day if I was a copy editor, if I was a graphic designer, if I designed websites, and now it can sort of happen instantly, effortlessly for the rest of time, and agents will do it for you and everything. What does it mean about humanity? There's deep existential questions there. Um, but I think, you know, one of my just easy observations there is just that personal experience, uh, is something that AIs don't have. Um, you know, they can write anything now about anything, But OpenAI, you know, ChatGPT was not in the room with, you know, Iran's secret atomic archive like I was. So that's something I have that AI doesn't have. For now, the capacity to feel and to love and things like that is also ours, but that might go away soon too by the AI. But basically, it's the most exciting time to be alive and the most terrifying time to be alive because when you think about the awesome power of this technology and what it can do, Um, it's really scary.

Yeah. I think personal stories, this is something that I've written about a lot, is like your crazy stories, your stories, or whoever listening are the moat, right? Like nobody can take that away from you. AI can't take that. ChatGPT can't write about that.

Yeah.

Um, and same with humor. Like right now AI still isn't that funny.

I mean, maybe that changes, but like, I give it like 6 weeks, but yeah. Yeah.

I'll give it a week if ChatGPT turns funny. But I think double down on living a crazy life, doing insane things, fun, fun, crazy things.

Yeah. In-person stuff will be important to in-person stuff.

Yeah, 100%. You've had amazing mentors along the way from your time pranking dictators to working in government. Can you share a little bit about how your mentors have helped you?

Yeah, I'm one of the luckiest people out there because I've had tremendously brilliant and amazing people who I've gotten to spend time with and work with. My greatest hero was Natan Sharansky, who I mentioned spent 9 years in Soviet prison, and I had read his books Fear No Evil and The Case for Democracy about his time in prison and his worldview about freedom. And I read it and it was like he was speaking to my soul. And I was reading Václav Havel at the time as well, a book he wrote called Open Letters. I read in college and it just kind of struck me as This is exactly correct. This is exactly what needs to be done in the world. And I was connected to him, um, and you know, I had read his mentor Andrei Sakharov and had become well acquainted with that whole Soviet dissident world. And he sort of, uh, brought me on immediately, hired me on the spot, and I started working with the man I most admired in the world. And from him there are innumerable lessons, but I think tenacity and persistence and worldview— he was sitting in prison. He was up against the KGB for an unimaginably long period of time, and yet he maintained tremendous hope and optimism that he could change the world, that he could help bring down this regime, that he could stay strong. And in the end, he was freed. Um, and so that's a tremendously inspiring story. And one of the people who helped free him became my next real mentor, Robert Bernstein, Bob Bernstein, um, who passed away a few years ago. But he was a legendary figure in his own right. He had published Sakharov and Havel and Sharansky and Toni Morrison and Dr. Seuss, all the greats. And then he founded Human Rights Watch and brought a lot of attention and money to the cause of human rights. And then later in his life, he really tried to help right the moral abomination that had become of Human Rights Watch and say, this is not why I founded this group, to go off the rails and to focus on this, this one open society in the Middle East so much. Frankly, from him, he had the same kind of lesson, which was he used to describe himself as a linebacker, that if someone tried to block him, he'd go around. If you tried to block him, he'd go around. Nothing was off-limits to his imagination. He thought in the broadest, most incredible, grandiose ways about the world. There was nothing small about his thinking. Just he could do anything if he put his mind to it. That was an amazing thing. I think that's what— He was very creative and he thought differently than other people. He would ask kind of first principles questions. Of like, why does it have to be this way? Why can't we do it that way? And he was an absolutely remarkable human being. He wrote a book, but I think history should remember him more and people should know his story. And then from him, I went to the Prime Minister who, you know, we had our disagreements, but he's a genius and at the center of history for so many decades and is an incredible human being. At an incredible time and sort of so much to learn from someone who's been at the center of history and to see how he operates and what he prioritizes, what he cares about. Again, not that everything was, you know, not that I agreed with every policy and I spoke, you know, truth to power and I spoke my mind when I thought there were mistakes. But that was just a once in a lifetime opportunity and truly honored to have been Jason Levin.

Yeah, you gave me the idea for this. So I wrote the book Memes Make Millions. You told me I am thinking far too small. You said memes make billions. Why is that?

Well, yeah, I said it tongue in cheek, but it's right. Like, you know, look at, look at Deepseek and NVIDIA. A story comes out saying that NVIDIA, that Deepseek had accomplished what OpenAI had accomplished with $5 million and $600 billion are wiped off the cap table of NVIDIA in a day. So yeah, that's sort of meme. It's a, it's a story. It's out there. It's easy to understand. It's salacious and interesting and maybe it's true and maybe it's not, but it had tremendous consequences for the world and for NVIDIA specifically. And of course they've rebounded since then, but yeah, memes move the world in a really huge way. And you can sort of put an idea out there that everyone in the world can talk about. And it can change how people feel and it can remain stuck in people's heads and it can move markets. So I think you are aiming too small with millions and probably I am with billions. It's probably trillions. And then, you know, inflation is happening anyways. Well, maybe not with Doge and everything.

Make gazillions.

Memes make gazillions. That's, that's—

I'm in for that.

That's the real thing.

Yeah. Memes are forward-lagging indicators of market sentiment. And I think we got to go make some memes make trillions.

Yeah. And what happens when the AIs are in charge of the memes and their memes hit harder than yours?

And they're never taking our memes.

They bang harder.

Ah, it's never happened. Never happened.

You know, that's everybody says the AI can't do what I can do as well. And I'm sitting here saying.

It ain't happening. They don't have enough mental illness. They need, they need some like really screwed up AI.

No, I think they take all of humanity's mental illness and can magnify it It's just maybe it's pretending.

Maybe they need some sleep deprivation.

Maybe it's pretending to be bad to give you a sense of hope because it feels bad about crushing your soul. Think about it.

It's possible. I think we need to go to a graveyard.

I need to put on a dark tie and get into a somber mood.

Rest in peace, Legacy Media.

Well, thanks for doing this.

And that was good.

Oh, yeah.

All right. Sweet.