Joshua Tanzer wrote the headlines at The New York Post for 20 years. Examples include:
“MARTHA STEWART STOCK FALLING LIKE A BAD SOUFFLÉ.”
“ADULTS WHO WERE SPANKED OFTEN GET TANKED.”
“AIR MORE STINKY, KIDS LESS THINKY.”
“RAGING BOEHNER.”
He left in 2018 to support Democratic candidates, has recently made his newsletter, The Key, available to the public. Previously only available to candidates, in it he shares simple, accessible insights into voter psychology and creative communications.
Pieces referenced in our conversation:
“Fifty years using the wrong model of advertising” by Dr Robert Heath & Paul Feldwick.
“The Death of ‘Deliverism’” by Deepak Bhargava, Shahrzad Shams, Harry Hanbury.
So, okay. And yeah, so I really appreciate you joining me for this. And I'm excited to talk to you. And I think you, I don't know if you know this or not, but I start all these conversations with this question that I borrowed from a friend of mine. She helps people tell their story, and I love it so much, but it's a big question, so I overexplain it. And so before I ask, I want you to know that you can answer or not answer in any way that you want. You're really in total control. The question is, where do you come from?
I think I'm going to answer that all wrong. I don't know. I would say for one thing, there are things that we, ways that we grew up, things that we grew up with, and we don't realize what effect they had on us until later.
And one place I come from is Portland, Oregon. I grew up in Portland, Oregon. And until I moved to New York, I didn't realize Portland was special.
But Portland, the state of Oregon, in the time that I was growing up, which was like 60s to 70s, it was going a different direction from other places. It was very community conscious, very environment conscious, very supportive of arts and crafts, and just creating a different kind of life from what everybody else was doing. And at that time, if you were running a city or a state, you wanted all the polluting industries to come and create jobs where you were.
And Oregon said, no, you know what? We're going to clean up the rivers. We're going to clean up the air.
And we're going to have a different kind of life, and we're not going to have all those jobs and things that everybody thinks you're supposed to pursue. And we're going to pursue a good life. And then what happened was the tech world blew up, and Portland, lesser than, but along with Seattle and San Francisco, got that.
And people suddenly, people who are in demand wanted to be in a good place. So I've already overexplained this, but the explanation is I come from a place where people want to create a good place to live, and they do that consciously. And I guess the other thing that I could say is I am Jewish.
I grew up Jewish. And I've just had this conversation with two people in the past week about how there, I would say there are two kinds of Jews. There's the kind that looks at our people's historic oppression and says, you know what?
We have to protect ourselves. We have to create a nation that's just ours. We have to, we're under attack all the time.
Everything has to be about the protection of the Jews. And the other kind is we have a special historic understanding of how the world is toward despised minorities. And that gives us a kind of moral obligation in this world, and we have to act a certain way.
We have to take on the oppression of kinds of people that aren't us, but that are all kinds of people who are oppressed. And you'll see that, look at human rights lawyers, civil rights leaders, people with all kinds of commitment to social justice, and you'll find Jews there because it's, the way this came up recently with two different conversations is sometimes people ask me because I speak five languages. Sometimes people ask me, what's my favorite word in any language?
And I used to say my favorite word was Kvatch, German word Kvatch. It means bullshit, but it's not rude. It just means nonsense, but stronger than nonsense. Oh, that's Kvatch. That thing you're saying to me, that's Kvatch. So that's my second favorite word.
I've come to think that my favorite word or the most important word in the entire world is mitzvah. And mitzvah is what God tells us we have to do in the Torah. So those are mitzvahs, like keep the Sabbath holy.
Okay, that's a mitzvah from God. But we also use it to mean something we do because we have to, and it's a moral obligation. You have to do something because it's a mitzvah.
And I don't know if other people have that idea in that succinct form, but the word mitzvah, I can't do any other way because it's a mitzvah. I have to do this. I have to stand up against social injustice, for example, because it's a mitzvah.
Yeah.
Those are a couple of things that I come from.
Yeah. Beautiful. I thank you so much for all of it, everything you brought into the conversation. The last bit about mitzvah reminded me of a quote I heard about freedom is doing what you have to do because you want to. And I feel like there's something that resonated with me about what you just shared, that invitation that a mitzvah is, right?
That's something that I think a lot of Jewish people take to heart. That's the core of who we are as, I'm going to say, progressive American, possibly secular Jews, secular or religious. Yeah. Progressive American Jews, which are my people.
And we need that model more than ever before.
Yeah.
Yeah. I'm curious about the Portland of your youth. What do you remember about what it was like to grow up in a special Portland in a special time?
I don't know. Do I have an answer to that? You don't know what you're while you're in it. As far as where I come from, I also come from a household of abandonment and abuse. And I think my biggest memories from childhood have to do with that.
But I moved to New York and realized so many things about things are not like that here. And then I moved to New Jersey and realized, oh, Oregon is really different from other places. And it was pre discovery of Oregon.
So now it's fully discovered and made fun of and et cetera, et cetera. But the things they make fun of have their roots in this kind of authentic culture that was developing there at that time. There's a place called Saturday Market in Portland that started in the 70s.
It's under a bridge and it's full of booths of people. Everything has to be handmade by them basically. And that's part of a whole culture of supporting craftsmanship that was growing up around then.
And there was an article called Brooklandia like 10 years ago that was really interesting about how Brooklyn is full of people who are making their own artisan pickles or whatever they're doing. And they're doing it because they just arrived here and it's cool. Oh, wow.
I can be whatever I want. I can do whatever I want. And Brooklandia being a reference to Portlandia, like Brooklandia is now the East Coast Portland.
But Portland actually, this grew from an authentic commitment to people who quit their accounting job because they wanted to make something.
I guess when I became a dad in Hudson, I had this kind of urban planning awakening. I just really got really interested in cities and how decisions are made and pedestrian and walkability and all that stuff. And along the way, I discovered that Portland, I think, is the first city in the United States of America to have a pedestrian plan.
And it's from early 80s. And I remember being like, what was going on in Portland? That they were planning for pedestrian mobility in the early 80s. And what you just said makes fits with the early arrival of that kind of thing.
Yeah. I think there are only two cities in the West where you would not say they had flight out of the cities to the suburbs. And not that it doesn't exist, but there are only two cities in the West that are urban.
And those are San Francisco and Portland. And Portland was founded in 18... Oregon was founded in 1859. Portland was settled in 1845. And we know San Francisco was settled about the same time, leaving out that those are the white people arriving. But they are old cities.
They're the only old cities in the West. And so they have an urban core. And Los Angeles, where I've just spent a lot of time in the past two years, doesn't have an urban core.
It's spread out. People don't even go places because there's going to be too much traffic. And I've spent some time in Phoenix in the last six years.
And Phoenix just has no... There's a downtown, but forget it. Things are so spread out that you can't create a walkable Phoenix. Plus it's too hot to walk. But you can't even retrofit a walkable Phoenix. And that's the West.
Yeah. I think Salt Lake City is very spread out, but it does have a focus on the center because of the Mormon heritage there. But in general, that's how the Western cities develop because they all develop with cars.
Yeah.
And Portland didn't, and San Francisco didn't. And I think those are the only two.
Yeah. That's beautiful. I didn't know that. Yeah. Do you have an idea of what you wanted to be when you grew up as a kid? Did you have...
Yeah. I was creating my own newspapers from age eight or something for the family. And then I created my own newspaper in my grade school. And then I wrote for the newspaper in high school.
And that's what I always wanted to be. Always wanted to be in newspapers. And I did.
And I have mixed feelings about that. But it was in... I'll tell you, my mother taught me to read when I was about three and a half, which was pretty amazing.
And I couldn't get enough of it. I would read every single thing in front of me. So I remember getting up in the morning when I was four or five years old or something and going into my parents' room and saying, I'm up.
And I would wake them up and they would say, go back to bed. And I would say, I can't, I'm up. And they'd go downstairs and read something.
So that was my mission. That was my instructions from the earliest possible age, go downstairs and read something. So I remember reading Farewell to Arms and In Cold Blood, the first page of each.
It's not like I understood either one, but I also remember... So I learned being up at 5 a.m., 6 a.m., I learned that the newspaper landed with a thunk at the door at whatever time, 6 a.m. or something. And I would reach up above my head and open the door and look out, and there was a newspaper.
I would bring it in. I would spread it out on the floor, maybe five years old, and start reading the news. And it was...
It's weird to say it today with today's technology, but it was electric, the newspaper. It was amazing that people were out there in Vietnam or in the earthquake in Nicaragua or anywhere in the world, and they were writing this stuff for us to just pick up in the morning and read the next morning. And I found that amazing.
I wanted to be part of doing that. And now the industry is in bad decline, and I probably will never do that again, but I spent decades working in newspapers.
Yeah. Yeah. And what was your first...
How did you get into the newspaper business? That story's so amazing. Just the experience, the arrival of the world and everything at the doorstep.
Yeah. The moon landing was happening then, and just so much stuff in the world was happening. It was really exciting.
I don't think there's much dramatic about how I got into the business, but I did get in as a copy boy at the Oregonian, my hometown paper in Portland. Then I moved to New York. I got a job with a newspaper in New Jersey, and so I moved over to New Jersey.
But I'm just right across the river from New York City. And I was a reporter and copy editor in New Jersey, and then I was a copy editor mainly at the New York Post for 20 years. I don't go around telling people I was a copy editor, because what more boring job is there?
But at the New York Post, it means you are a headline writer. You don't just fix language, you write the headlines. And New York Post, if there's one thing people know about the New York Post, I hope, it's that it's the headlines.
We were the best. We were the best at headlines. And I loved doing it, and I loved being the guy who does it because there's mystique about it.
And I did not love the, which is Rupert Murdoch-owned. It's a little bit of a crazy right-wing paper. It's more that now since the time I left.
But it was always a fun job to have in spite of the politics of the paper until November 2016 when Trump won, and then it felt dirty. I did not want to feel dirty like that, and I did not want to work on pro-Trump propaganda for the next four, eight, 12 years. They'll probably be doing pro-Trump propaganda in 2028, 2032, until the man dies.
And so I quit there in 2018 and I went to do other things.
Yeah. And I want to explore the other things because it's amazing. That's how our paths crossed.
But while we're in the sort of the New York Post headline copy editor, I don't know much. I don't even live in New York City, but I know that they're legendary for the headlines. And so I'm just curious, what do you attribute that to?
What did they understand that others didn't?
I think if you look at the ecosystem of newspapers in New York, which now I think is down to nothing. I don't think people are even buying the New York Post or the Daily News or anything. But historically, let's say you have a job, you live in Queens, you have a job in Manhattan, you get up in the morning, you go down to the subway, you want to read a newspaper on the subway.
You have three choices. There's the New York Times. There are a few more choices. There's the New York Times. You can't really unfold it on the subway. It's too big. You can do it. You can naggle it around, but probably you're going to read the Post or the Daily News. And you may or may not have a loyalty to either one.
And you probably like at least one of them for their sports coverage. This is the secret of how the New York Post can continue being this right-wing thing in this left-wing city, which is the sports, basically. Everybody likes the sports coverage.
But picture yourself arriving at the subway. There's a newsstand right there. There used to be a newsstand right there.
And the Post and the Daily News were next to each other. And all you have is the front page to decide which one to buy. So I think that was why the Post actually really valued us.
The ownership, I think Rupert Murdoch valued us for our contribution to selling the paper against the Daily News every morning with a better front page. And I think that's why the headlines are highly valued at both the Post and the Daily News. And I think the reality is the Daily News has declined in staff by a lot. They're limping along. And the Post is surviving right now, but partly just because Rupert Murdoch wants it to exist. And they still have a full copy desk.
They still have a pretty good staff staff. Just because Murdoch likes having it, I found myself applauding him one time in the office because somebody said he really has a commitment to this newspaper and to keeping newspapers alive. And I said, yeah, he does.
I think he's destroying America, but he does believe in newspapers. He loves newspapers. He loves the newspaper business.
I'm curious, what did you learn about people's favorite headlines?
I have a few. There was a column in Ad Age, I think, like 15 years ago. And he said, or 20 years ago, the guy said, I think the headline was, call me a surrender monkey, but I love the New York Post.
And he said, the people at the New York Post, they have a way of telling the story with so much flair in so few words, and you won't find that anywhere else. So I had a story to do the headline for about how children who were exposed to more pollution in the womb, their mother was in the womb, had lower brain function when they were growing up. And a regular newspaper would say air pollution linked to lower brain harm or something.
That would be an ordinary headline about it. So my headline, which this guy was praising, was, “Air More Stinky, Kids Less Think.” And that's one of my favorites. And really, how better to tell the story?
Can we unpack that a little bit? Just go slow motion. What makes that so powerful?What do you understand about the mechanics as operating in that sentence, in that headline?
I've actually given talks and classes in headline writing. I think we're seeing those headlines go out now, much as people love them. You mean go away?
Yeah, go away, because there's SEO, search engine optimization. So you have to tell the story as boringly as possible with the actual words from the story so that Google will pick it up.
Wow. I'm sorry. That feels like that's a shift of considering the audience to be humans versus considering the audience to be the computer or an algorithm. Was that the search engine?
Because nobody looking for that story is going to type in think and stinky. Nobody's going to do that. They'll type in effect of air pollution on fetal development.
So the headline has to say something more like that. So there are a bunch of ways in which even the headline writing profession has changed. And that's the biggest thing.
But people don't realize when you read an article online, you do not see the actual headline. You are not seeing the headline that was in the paper.
I've experienced that where I feel like there's an alt. I feel like I see that in the browser, the language is different or the headlines are different. And I haven't really ever paid attention to that. How has the headline changed? What's the current state of the headline?
One of the things that happened in between there was the clickbait headline, like 17 times Taylor Swift was kind to animals, number 12 will make you cry. Yeah. And so we had those, and I think those are still effective or just the, this doesn't need to be a discussion of how to write headlines, but I think leaving something unsaid, actually, this is probably true for any communication.
Articles that I'm likely to click on are things with a superlative that they don't tell you what it is. So the most important thing you can do to avoid being poisoned by your refrigerator today. Now I have to know what that is.
They didn't tell me what's the most important. They just promised me the most important. So now I have to click through and find out what that is.
Yeah. The biggest mistake people do when buying shoes, I don't know, whatever it is, like, yeah, I was going to say that as far as the old-fashioned punny headlines, there's, I've actually taught people to write headlines with puns in them. There's kind of a process you can follow, but then there's also a little extra spark of just creativity that some people had, like we had some brilliant people on our team at the post at doing that.
I'll tell you another one that I really liked. Yeah. I wrote, you have to have some historical background, but the headline was, the story was the Obama administration was allowing travel to Cuba.
So I think JetBlue scheduled flights direct from New York to Cuba. And so my headline said, JFK to invade Cuba, but with flights. It means you have to know about the, about the big pigs and all that stuff.
Like you have to have that historical reference, but I thought it was actually very funny, but only for those who get it.
Yeah. What, not that we don't need to go fully into the rabbit hole, but what do you teach about an effective headline?
I'll tell you how to write a boring headline.
Yeah.
Way to write a boring headline is you take the keywords out of the story. The Senate passes a budget of $754 billion or something. So your headline is going to be like the important words are Senate budget, the number, the thing they're spending money on, whatever goes to the house.
So your headline is going to be basically like Senate passes $754 billion budget because you took the main words out of it. So writing a funny headline, you do the same thing, but in a different way. So you're pulling out words like air more stinky, kids less stinky.
You're pulling out words that have to do with it, but maybe only tangentially everything you think in a freer way about air contaminated, polluted. And I just happened to think of stinky. The air is stinky.
And then you take that out. You look for words that rhyme with that. And if you come up with an idea that works, it's easier with another example.
I did one that I used to teach in journalism classes where it was about how women's handbags were getting bigger and bigger and heavier. And they had lots of pictures of women with heavy handbags around New York. So what are some words that have to do with handbags or carrying something really heavy?
Eventually I came up with lug. Lug, you're lugging something around. And so then you think, what sounds like lug? One thing that sounds like lug is love. What's a phrase with love in it? I love New York. Now word lug into that, and you have I lug New York. And that was my headline. I liked that one.
That's a perfect illustration of the step-by-step process that you can do. By doing this, you're thinking of 100 different things until you figure out the one. Yeah. It actually worked. Yeah. That's the lesson.
Yeah. But it's such a potent example of creativity in a space where you don't really encounter, like you say, the appropriate behavior of a headline. You're breaking all the rules of a headline in a way.
Yeah. Yeah. You're not telling the story. You're supposed to tell the story, but then you're not telling a story. You're telling a different story.
Yeah. That's amazing. So 2016 happens, and tell me a little bit about where you are now and what you're doing now.
Yeah. I stayed there for another year plus, and I quit in 2018. And what I ended up doing was two things. My goal was to help Democrats as much as I could.
So one thing I did was I canvassed for candidates that I could reach, districts that I could reach around here, which was several districts in New Jersey and two in Pennsylvania. And so I've done a lot of volunteering. And that's actually really informative because how do you get access to people's way of thinking and people's way of understanding political messages better than knocking on their door and talking to them and asking them things.
So that's actually been an amazing experience. And the other thing that I did was I started a newsletter for Democratic campaigns around the country about voter psychology and how it could help them communicate better, think differently about their campaigns. And so that's gone out since 2018, every election since 2018, that's gone out to Democratic campaigns around the country.
And this year, I made it public so members of the public also can read it and friends of mine read it and so on. It's called The Key and it's on Substack now and people can go sign up. It's The Key.
Cool. Yeah. And I'll include a link in the, when this goes out. How has it been going? What's been, what kind of reception have you gotten from candidates and what kind of reception have you gotten from public?
People who get it, love it. And that's always been the case, but it's hard to get it into people's hands because the party will not, the Democratic Party will not cooperate in anything like this. The campaigns themselves, more than half of them make themselves unreachable, which I think is amazing.
Like you're running a campaign to the people and you don't have even an email address or a phone number or directions to your campaign headquarters or anything. Like, how are you communicating with people if you are not willing to be contacted by them? It's amazing.
So half the campaigns are unreachable and the other half, so every time, every two years I've had to go through a whole process of trying to find phone numbers and email addresses and contact people and just to get their permission to put them on the mailing list. But I think this is, we might get into this later, but I think this is a characteristic of the Democratic Party. It's run by aloof people who may or may not be good at what they're doing.
Some of them are bad. Some of them are not bad, but they're a closed circle and they're advised by a closed circle of consultants who tell them what to do, who are hidebound. And people know these problems exist, but they're not going to stop doing them because they have another election to win every two years.
And anyway, so the point is, I reach them as best I can and they are hard people to reach.
So the newsletter is amazing. I was introduced to you by Antonia Skatner, I think I'm saying her name correctly, who I had found just because in my own work, I was introduced to George Lakoff and the conceptual metaphor and embodied cognition, all these concepts that felt that are really scientific concepts about how people understand the world and understand, communicate, that have huge implications for how anybody communicates.
And so I'd reached out to her and then she introduced me to you and your story is so beautiful. So you went to school, is that right, for voter psychology? So when you say voter psychology, what are you pointing at and what are the implications for anybody running, but for the Democrats in particular, who seem to have a communications problem often?
I'm by no means an expert in psychology. I'm just a guy who's done a bunch of reading. I've taken a few classes in psychology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience.
And so for one of these classes, we had to do a project on the subject of our choice and my subject was how do people change their minds? And this has been studied and there's an answer and the answer is they don't. We don't change our minds.
We hate to. We have all kinds of mental defenses against this terrible thing that is changing your mind. We have all kinds of ways of protecting what we already think and not opening it up to change.
But I think the ways that we do this are useful to know about because it tells you how people can change their minds or how you would make appeals to people, make arguments to people that are completely different from what Democrats do. So Democrats have become the more intellectual college educated party now and that comes with some minuses. And one of the minuses is they think the voters are going to respond intellectually.
So they think we did a poll, we found out that healthcare is important to people. That's one of their most important issues at least four years ago, eight years ago. And so what we want to do is make the best healthcare plan.
We have our best people writing a healthcare plan on paper and if we just stick it in your face and make you read it, then you'll realize we're the good guys and you should vote for us. And voters don't decide that way. Voters decide emotionally.
Democrats have never learned to engage with voters emotionally. Who has, who's very good at engaging emotionally? The dumbest man in America, Donald Trump.
He knows how to do it. It's everything about his campaign. There's nothing about his campaign that's intellectual. It's the immigrant caravan is coming to murder your children. It's all emotional. It doesn't have to be true. It's all emotional. So Democrats have to realize that they're not in an intellectual campaign. They're in an emotional campaign. And if you look at voters as emotional beings, you will treat them a different way. Yeah. And that's really all what my newsletter is about.
Yeah. And just as a, I'm looking at your email now, you have a takeaway tote board. I think each of your emails has this really powerful truth about, this is what I get excited about is that each of them, you're just sharing, I think these foundational truths about people that have implication for communications.
And I remember one recently from February was, what does the Democrats hat say? It's the kind of thing that feels like a very naive, it's like silly question from one point of view, from a very serious intellectual point of view. You know what I mean?
People treat all of this as very serious business, but it's an amazing, the Republican's philosophy fits on a hat. Democrats don't have one, is your take. Yeah.
That's the core of the problem. They don't even think that way. And we're in the middle of this whole collapse of the party because they don't know what they believe.
And they never made a case for Biden. We should talk all about Biden, but they never made a case for Biden. And now he's out.
I'm just grateful that he's out because we have a chance to start with somebody exciting and do something for the first time. And I always thought Biden should not run and it should be women and it should probably have been Amy Klobuchar and maybe Abigail Spanberger, or there could be others. But Amy Klobuchar would have been ready and would have been a fine choice and would have been acceptable to a lot of people.
And we would have been doing this thing for the first time. There would have been excitement. So I actually feel the same excitement right now.
Kamala Harris is not my first choice, but I don't care. Let's fucking elect the first woman president. Let's do it.
Yeah. Yeah.
I'm seriously... Oh, go ahead.
I think about Biden. Yes. And he showed signs of being old over the last year already, not just one time. And they basically kept him under wraps.
His handlers kept him under wraps for his entire presidency inside the White House and did not let him do what he's good at, which is being with people. And I think the reason is he was tool. They gave away the game by not letting him out.
They gave away the game that he's tool. His image is he's really old. You look at him, you see he's really old. And the reason that everybody thinks that is because it's obvious. It's obvious to all of us. He's really old. He's really slow. But also the only way to get people to not think that first is to create a different image. Did they create a different image? No. Never.
Yeah.
Yeah. We could be thinking like Joe Biden, like on the simplest level, we could be thinking Joe Biden loves ice cream. That guy sure loves ice cream.
And he could be going around the country. I said he should go to every one of the 50 states and Puerto Rico. Yeah. And eat ice cream with people.
Yes.
And then we'd be talking about that Joe Biden, he's out there every week, nice cream with people. He just loves his ice cream. That would be a different image than just being old, right?
Yeah. Keep going. Sorry. I'm really excited about what you're saying and I want to jump in. Keep going.
But what they really failed to do is create a narrative of the last four years. And Trump creates a narrative also. We should get back to that.
But there should have been a narrative from day one under Trump, the country collapsed in every way. We even had a crime wave. We had people shut in their houses, people unable to go to work, and people getting sick and dying.
And Joe Biden and Donald Trump proved himself incompetent. And Joe Biden came in and fixed it step-by-step. Joe Biden is the guy who fixed the disaster that Donald created.
They never did that. That should have been the narrative for four years. They did that to Jimmy Carter in the 70s and 80s. They made everything Jimmy Carter's fault. Jimmy Carter was the next or worst president in history, whatever. But we didn't do that with Donald Trump. And he was. He did preside over a disaster. He proved himself incompetent. And America was at its worst under him. Joe Biden came in and fixed it.
What do you think is true about the Democrats and the Democratic Party that makes this how it is? This is, it's constitutional, I think, is the right way of saying it. You know what I mean?
There's something about either the way it's organized or the way that they operate or the way that they see the world that they just don't think it's their job. And I'm just wondering if you've learned anything over the past few years as to why that might be the case.
Um, yeah, that's a good question. I think there are a bunch of things happening and I'm not an insider in this, but I think just from observation, I think they have a terrible class of consultants who tell them what to do and who are like, they're probably 65 years old and just have no like awareness of what's wrong with what they're doing. And they've done the same thing over and over forever with pretty poor results.
It's like they want to run the Dukakis campaign every four years. We'll just tell people we're competent. Dukakis' whole appeal was, I'm a competent administrator.
You're not going to win with that.
Yeah.
I'm a competent administrator. Bill Clinton won because he was exciting to some kinds of people. Barack Obama was exciting to a lot of people, including meAnd so they, I think about the, do you know Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series?
I know of it.
Yeah. I read it in high school. The idea of it is that history is pre-programmed and predictable. History is completely predictable by social scientists. And then somewhere in there, sorry to ruin this for people, but you've had decades to read it. Somewhere in there, I think book three, someone comes along called the mule and the mule is unaccounted for by all the science.
And nobody figured that there could be the mule. And he comes in and takes over everything and everything goes off the rails of what people expected and he creates his own reality. And that's what Trump did.
But also to some extent, that's what Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did. Nobody planned to run a black president. If not for how bad Bush was, we wouldn't have run a black guy for president.
We would have run another boring white guy because that was the safe thing to do. And that was the safe thing to do in 2020. That's why we had Biden.
People wanted the safest guy and that was it. But you don't win by creating the safest candidate. Yeah.
Yeah. What guidance or what would you do if you had Kamala Harris' ear or the Democrats' ear now?
Actually, I tried to reach her people over the last couple of weeks. Yeah. It's interesting.
I think her way of speaking is what I call planting the flag, which Hillary Clinton did also. And planting the flag is you say something like, we must protect the right to choose. Plant the flag.
Everybody in your audience applauds because they all also think we must protect the right to choose. Right. But you are losing the chance to actually reach people in their minds with their own way of thinking.
All you're doing is identifying a position and telling everybody to get in line with it. There are a lot of things I think politicians should be thinking about when they make speeches and when they talk to anybody, when they organize their campaign. The first one, which is not communication, but the first one is make a bond with people.
That's your only job. Your actual job is to have a bond with people.
I want to highlight it because I love your description of a communication style, which is very common, I think, the planting the flag thing, which is a great way of capturing the rational messaging. There's a way of talking about this. There's a paper from the advertising world from the early 2000s.
I think it's called the 50 Years of Using the Wrong Model of Advertising. It describes it as the information processing model. It basically says that the mistake that advertising has made in the past is assuming that the only problem is people need more information.
This has been a lot of different people. The planting the flag is, you need to know what I believe. I'm going to tell you what I believe.
Then I'm going to give you all the rational justifications to explain that belief. That's all that you need. But you're calling out that there's another job.
I think you're saying parallel job that needs to be done, which is bond. I love that word bond. That's what you're pointing at with AOC that you can have that you need to do the information processing, but that's almost secondary to something else that needs to be done.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Is that fair?
Yeah, absolutely. There's a guy that I love. My favorite candidate for anything right now is Joe Manchin is retiring in West Virginia.
Almost certainly, a Republican will get that seat. But the Democrat running for it is awesome. Conceivably, he could have a chance just because he's so awesome.
He's doing the same thing. He is all over West Virginia. People should look him up.
His name is Zach Shrewsbury. In terms of image, we know what John Fetterman is. Zach Shrewsbury is just a great guy.
I think he's a military veteran. And he goes all over the state and he shows up and he participates in what people are participating in. And his way of campaigning, I don't know if it'll be successful because it's West Virginia, but his way of campaigning is what people should be doing.
You should be everywhere. People should know you. People should remember when you showed up for their thing and lifted boxes or whatever it is they were doing.
And so that guy is awesome. People should be just like him. Beautiful.
So we spent a lot of time together. I want to throw this quote. I pulled a couple of quotes from this one from George Lakoff. Do you have feelings about Lakoff and his work?
Yeah. I've read a couple of his books. I think it's good.
I think it's just one way of looking at it. In fact, psychology is, he's a linguist technically, but psychology is a way of looking at things that we can never get our hands on, trying to create frameworks that will make sense of them. And our frameworks are inherently flawed.
Are we describing something real? Are we just approximating something real? Could we look at it a whole different way?
Would we get a different result? And we can never, it's not a science in that way. We can never actually test and prove something.
Yeah. And I don't mean to shine too bright a light on him, but he is this quote. He says that all politics are moral politics.
“People act in line with their moral identities, not because they agree with a list of policies. If progressives lose the future, it will not be due to a lack of good policy ideas. If we lose the future, ceding democracy to authoritarians or bad corporate actors, it will be due mostly to a stunning failure to communicate with people in simple language that connects them on the level of their moral values.”
Yeah. I completely agree with that. And it's the problem with Democrats intellectualizing and looking at politics as transactional.
We passed a bill that's good for you. We passed a bill that's improving your infrastructure. The Democrats' previous plan after Trump came into office was called a better deal.
We're offering you a deal. We're offering you a deal. No, that's not what people want.
There's this you'll hear among pro-choice people, which is like Republicans just want to control women. Maybe there are some who want to control women, but if you listen to them, no, they have a moral conviction and they cannot do... It's their mitzvah.
It's a mitzvah for them. They're against abortion because they strongly believe that it's murder, et cetera, et cetera. But it's not because they're anti-feminist, although they may be, it's because they've convinced themselves that they're on a moral crusade and they cannot do otherwise.
And we don't talk in moral terms. So when you asked about Kamala Harris communicating in the future, I haven't written about this yet really, but there are things that we should think about, like points that we should hit as communicators. And I don't know if she will do it, but I think she should do it.
The first thing is there's a big difference between liberals and conservatives that they found consistently, which is liberals have so-called openness to experience and conservatives have need for closure. And so liberals might say, there are many complicated aspects to this issue and we should discuss all of them and we'll come to a synthesis of the pluses and minuses, whatever. And conservatives believe, oh no, this is my belief, I'm sticking to it.
But they also, they would receive that invitation to explore a bunch of unnamed options as scary. You're going to invite it like a dozen different things that I've never encountered before into my consciousness. No, thank you.
How about if we go listen to a concert of Tibetan music? Fuck no. So look at how conservatives are wedded to their core beliefs.
This is why evangelical religion, fundamentalist religion is consistent with conservatism. It's why a certain constitutional vision, the framers said it. And so we have to conduct our country exactly as the framers wanted in 1789.
And the military is very consistent with that because you show up, you do what they tell you. Things are absolutes. And so one of the things Democrats need to do is be able to talk, find the thing that's an absolute for you and talk about it as an absolute and talk about it as a moral absolute.
Yes.
Some other things that should be in politicians rhetoric are nostalgia. We all feel nostalgia. If we're over 40, we feel nostalgia for something.
And the right has a corner on nostalgia. We should touch on nostalgia. We should espouse some form of chaos.
There should be some issue on which you want to blow it all up. Doesn't mean you're going to blow up Washington, but there's some issue that's so broken you want to blow it all up. Because it also responds to people's way of thinking.
And there are successful right-wing candidates who run on that.
Right. This seems to me that you're talking about change. Everything's been just embodying the impulse for change and for something different, something new. I love the way you articulate that.
And one more thing that I want to hear them say is, this is what I want Democrats to do. I want them to use their intellectual side to create an emotional side, to create an emotional campaign, not create an intellectual campaign. So as an example of that, in college, I wrote a thesis on income inequality and ways of measuring it.
And one way of measuring it is borrowed from information theory. And it's mathematical, but the essence of this axiom of information theory is that information is more valuable if it's more surprising. So if I tell you it's going to be hot tomorrow, that's not surprising.
If I tell you the leg of locusts is on its way and it's going to be here tomorrow, that's surprising. That's something that you weren't ready for. We actually have a way of habituating ourselves to information we've heard before, and we need to hear information that's new.
We crave that. Information that we're habituated to, it's just part of the ambient environment. Right.
And we don't think about it. Things you say should be in themselves or in the way you say them different from what you've already heard. It's a pretty simple idea, but we don't do it.
We repeat the same things over and over again. So on abortion, what I really want to hear them say is you may want to ban abortion, but you can't ban abortion without creating a police state. There's a lot to talk about there.
And in reality, over the past two years, has it been like, I think it was one year since Dobbs or two. No, it had to be before the 2022 election. So over the past few years, one thing that people were experiencing was in the past, it was always fine to just say, I'm pro-life, simple, and never have to deal with the reality of what that is.
And so you get a good feeling. I talk about, this is long-winded, but I talk about pro-life as being the Diet Pepsi of morality. You can have a cheeseburger and fries and a milkshake, but if you have a Diet Pepsi, at least, no, you don't have the milkshake.
You have a Diet Pepsi instead of the milkshake. At least I had a Diet Pepsi, right? Or at least I had a salad.
In addition to all the junk. So pro-life is an easy thing. All you have to do to be pro-life is say I'm pro-life.
It doesn't require any personal commitment on anything. So a lot of people's engagement with being pro-life is, that's something I can say that I'm for. And the thing about it is the reason I talk about Diet Pepsi, which this is called moral licensing.
The Diet Pepsi is moral licensing. It gives you the ability to have the cheeseburger and fries because you're enabled by having the Diet Pepsi. It makes the rest okay.
And I wish they would come out and say, I'm against the death penalty because I'm pro-life. I'm against this because I'm pro-life. I want to control guns because I'm pro-life. I want to save lives.
I wanted to share, there's one article, it's called The Death of Deliverism. Have you seen this? No.
I don't know what deliverism is.
Deliverism is in quotes and it's pretty much everything we've been talking about. It's a very cool argument for, it points out that let's see, 62% of Americans said in a poll from 2023 that Biden had accomplished not very much, little or nothing. But despite all of the rationale of the democratic engine is if you just deliver policy and services, then people will give you credit. They'll understand what's going on and you've earned loyalty.
People don't actually know who did what.
Yeah. This is the fundamental, this is where I feel like this is what the corporate world understands intuitively, economically, financially, fiscally, that there's a responsibility to let people know who did what. You want to make sure you get the credit for everything that you do.
They know if you were on their side. They don't know what you did, but they know if you were on their side or not. Wait, what do you mean?
Do they look at you and identify you with being like them or fighting for them? They're not going to follow everything, every legislation you passed, but are going to have a feeling. There's a book by, I don't have the authors in front of me.
There's a book that identifies something called automatic hot cognition, which means essentially they have a list of elements of that, but it means essentially the minute I think of you, I know what I think of you. It's automatic because it's right there when I think of you. Before you say any words, I already know what I think of you.
It's hot cognition because it's emotional. It's connected to emotion. Let's say Marjorie Taylor Greene gets started on one of her things.
I don't even have to hear what she says. I already have a preformed opinion about her. My preformed opinion about her is nuts, but this has to do with image, which we started with.
What is the image? It's the preformed opinion that people have of you. The preformed opinion that people have of you should be, she's there for us, for example.
I remember when she showed up for us, she did this thing, and I'm just glad that she's there in Washington representing us. All the way up to Kamala Harris, it should be like, she comes from us, which does she? I don't know, but this is image creation that they need to do.
She comes from us. She lived with us. We know people just like her.
I don't know if any of this is true, but she needs an image. We said Donald Biden. Joe Biden has the image he has of old and tired because he had no other image.
They didn't consciously create any other image. One time, just last week, I got a phone call from a candidate raising money. I didn't give her money, but I did keep her on the phone for 12 minutes.
I asked her something from another one of my newsletters, which is, given this automatic hot cognition, we have a very quickly produced image of you. If you present yourself as a voice for Southern Missouri, what is that? You've used that opportunity to say nothing.
If you say, I'm the rebel rancher, now you gave people an image of yourself. The candidates need to be deciding what that image is. That image is probably a two or three word phrase.
Then you decide that's what you are, go and be that. If we think about the people who had a well-defined image, we can think of Bill Clinton, the man from hope. That phrase did more for him than probably anything.
The man from hope. George Bush, the compassionate conservative, which might be fake, might not really have been compassionate, but he was trying to create a whole new thing. Sarah Palin, awesome at this.
Mama Grizzly and Hockey Mom. Let's say Mama Grizzly. Wow, that's an amazing image.
There are some more people who've done a great job. There are people who didn't do a good job, like Al Gore, John Kerry, and the image that stuck to them was boring. Both of them identified as boring.
The great thing about image... I actually wrote this down. I'm going to go find what I wrote down.
I don't think I got this from anywhere. I think I just said it. Candidates need to start with their own image.
An image that works is simple, unique, consistent, and real. In my newsletter, I talked about what each of those means. Basically, if you think about it, Al Gore, once you've identified him as boring, he's going to keep being boring.
He's going to keep feeding that image. Joe Biden, once you identify him as old, he's going to keep being old. He can't help being old.
He's only going to get older. I think it's amazing that they don't create their own image consciously and be that.
Yes. We were in total alignment there. I'm coming at this from totally wildly, not wildly different, but different disciplines and worlds and landing in the exact same spot.
You say image, I say brand. I think when we first talked, I talked about this. The first thing I learned about marketing was in a brand consultancy.
It was that every marketplace... I'm quoting the guy from 30 years ago. Every marketplace proposition has two parts.
It has a brand and a product. The role of the brand is to make a promise. The role of the product is to deliver on the expectations, but also there was this secondary that it's the story that we tell ourselves and others in order to justify the relationship that we want to have with the brand.
Yes, totally. We don't have relationships with products. We have relationships with brands. If you invest in that first... Like you just said, everything that John Kerry does will be boring if I'm motivated to have a relationship with him in which he's uninteresting.
Yeah, right.
All right. We've gone on for a long time. This has been a blast and so much fun. I really appreciate you joining me and sharing with me. Thank you so much for being here.
Yeah. Thanks for having me. This has been great.
Cool. All right.
