Hello, everybody. It’s an incredible honor to be here. It’s like the Oscars of messaging nerds. I try not to say anything deeply offensive about everyone who isn’t me. Probably not going to succeed there because I sort of trade in offense. So let’s look a little bit under the hood at the conventional wisdom that we get about messaging. So oftentimes when we’re going to have a conversation about messaging, we get told that our messages should meet people where they are. How many people have received this piece of advice? Even today perhaps? Well I would posit to you that that piece of advice is bullshit. We are not here to be a thermometer. We are not here to take the temperature. We are here to be a thermostat. We are here to change the temperature. And that my friends is Celsius. Thank you, Ann Coulter. Destruction of America. We cannot meet people where they are because where people are on the vast majority of our issues is simply unacceptable. And all of us should be out of a job if we are trying to meet people where they are. That is beneath us. The other thing is that there is no place that people are. People are capable of believing multiple, even contradictory things in almost the same instant. Do you see what’s going on here? What’s going on here? Right? Two images. Toggling back and forth. This is a visual metaphor. My background is in cognition and linguistics and I work a lot in metaphor. Nobody wanted to volunteer for vivisection, sadly. And so I had to do this visual metaphor to represent what happens in our brain. So here we are, we are seeing these two images. The full face, the profile, the full face, the profile. This represents the way that we can believe multiple, contradictory things in almost the same instant. And you can’t see both images at once. Your eye doesn’t allow for that. But neither can you hold one. It just keeps toggling away. The job of a good message is to toggle people into the most progressive version of themselves and to hold them there. And how do we do that? One of the main ways is by context. So here on this slide you see a square labeled A, a square labeled B. Do they appear to be the same color or different colors? Not a trick, what do they appear? Good job being honest. But they are the same. The only difference between these two images is the addition of the guideline. I swear to you, the colors have not been changed. I’m showing you this slide for two reasons. The first is that context matters. What’s happening here on the left is that your eye is overcompensating for the shadow from the cylinder. And that is what is giving the appearance. People do not hear our messages in some tabularasa state. They come to us with what Fox News told them last night. They come to us with the stomach ache they had for eating cake for breakfast, which they like to call a muffin. I like to call a muffin. Right? They come to us with the cultural perceptions and the stories and the ideas and the baggage. And so they’re hearing what we are saying to them in a context. The second reason I show this to you is because here on the right, that’s my evidence. That’s my proof. Those are my studies. Now let me ask you, the addition of those guidelines giving you proof, does that make the squares on the left suddenly look like they’re the same color? Do they continue to look like different colors? That is about how useful evidence is. So all of your facti facts that you all love, you all love your facts. I’ve seen your websites. And you’ve been through 800,000 of these trainings. And the one thing we all agree on is that facts are just bullshit to useless. And let me tell you something. Colleagues of Fine and Yale have actually been doing new research to show that the better educated someone is, the more adept they are at rapidly discounting facts. Because that is what higher education is. How often have you accidentally clicked to a channel you don’t believe in and they’re saying a thing, how long does it take you to be like, well I know that’s not true because what was the sample size? And that was a completely spurious conclusion based upon a pure conjecture. Right? And you use just those words to do it because you’re about as dorky as I am. So let’s think about some of the context for what we tell people. Workers, right? There is some kick-ass amazing low-wage worker organizing happening now. Some of which I’m proud to actually have done the messaging for, right? So we just saw a huge win with Walmart. We’re seeing fight for 15. We’re seeing paid sick. We’re seeing in my own city of Oakland, thanks to the incredible work that we heard about yesterday. We’re seeing minimum wage hikes, right? And we’re seeing it in Seattle, in San Francisco and other places. Why are these slides advancing on me? I apologize. You see, there’s a conspiracy. Isn’t that what we just learned? That’s what I took away from the previous speaker. That was the Bush administration. So workers, right? We need workers’ rights and workers need this and we can’t survive on 725. Think about the phrase hard work should be rewarded. Right? You walk down the street and you’re like, a paycheck! Yippee! A paycheck is not a reward. The reason that there is money to pay workers is because of work. I mean normal people. The reason there’s money to pay us is very mysterious. But for normal people, the reason there is money to pay people is because of the work that they do and so fuck you, not a reward. Also, not a raise. Confiscate less from me. Thank you very much. And yet here we are having this prolonged conversation about who loves the economy more because we are so deep in the neoliberal cave of what is possible. The context set upon us that does not benefit us. That we can’t even see the light. So what’s in a worker frame? Tasks, paychecks, coworkers, right? You know it’s not in a worker frame. Any of that other shit. You know what happens when you do a priming experiment where you make the conditions identical but in one condition you refer to people as workers and in another you refer to them as people who work? Do you know what suddenly makes sense? That maybe the widgets have babies. That maybe the widgets get sick. But maybe the widgets need shit because they’re human beings. We cannot keep playing this, we love the economy, holy shit my time is running out. I’m skipping this. We need to be in a human frame. What do you want from me? Tell them to give me more time. Tell them to give me more time. Come on. Okay, more time. Think about the phrase work, life, balance. Life is a container category into which work fits. It’s like asking to have balance between my body and my spleen. It is nonsensical and it is our fucking goal statement. That is how pathetic leave for gone we are. We need to be in a human frame. So how do we do this? It turns out the answer is math. What do I mean? Like most conversations about policy this one begins with Miracle Whip. Any idea why I would subject you to Miracle Whip at this time of day? I don’t have time so I’m not going to let you answer. Craft foods, Miracle Whip spends 90 cents of every one of its advertising dollars on the people it calls presumably without irony. It’s super heavy users. These are people who only buy Miracle Whip, always buy Miracle Whip and can be relied upon to purchase Miracle Whip in perpetuity. Why would you spend 90 cents of every one of your dollars on the people that you have? Come on, you guys are cost conscious. They’re not going anywhere? Because they’re your brand advocates. They are the people who I’m not making this up, who bake the chocolate cake with Miracle Whip, bring it to the picnic, their friends will eat it and say, this is strangely moist and delicious. What’s in it? Would you believe Miracle Whip? That’s disgusting, but I’m strangely intrigued. Because what marketers understand is that if your words do not spread, your words do not work. We have paid shit for attention to this and then we’re all crying about how it’s like herding cats and they don’t want to stay on message. It turns out if your messages are catnip, it ain’t that hard to herd cats. But instead, are you familiar with this, Fable, Asop, please all, please none? I will tell it for those who don’t know it very quickly. Man is donkey and his son, they’re going to go to market with their wares. The trip begins, son’s atop the donkey. They pass villagers, villagers say, that’s elderly abuse. Father gets on, son gets off, that’s child abuse, they both get on, that’s animal abuse. All the shit falls into the river, they carry the donkey, they don’t make it to market and the moral of the story is please all, please none. But the fact that it is a donkey is to me the most apt portion of this story because this of course is the Democratic Party mascot. And it could in fact be a summary statement of Democratic Party message. Which is please all, please none. So that is not what a good message ought to do. Here’s an example of messaging that was done in 2009. This is dial testing of a sample of just shy of 1200 people except for the orange line, who are advocates, people who do this for a living. And this is what it sounds and looks like to dial test a message in the way we normally do, which is let’s just try to find a thing that everybody likes. Let’s just try to find a thing everybody’s happy with. We need immigration reform that’s tough, fair and practical. We need to be tough on people who cross the border without permission. And businesses shouldn’t be allowed to exploit cheap labor off the books. We need to be fair to American citizens who shouldn’t have their wages and jobs undercut by cheap labor and fair to businesses that play by the rules and pay their workers a decent salary with decent benefits. And we need to be practical, restoring the rule of law while recognizing there is no way. Only because I don’t have any time. So look who likes this message. We bought and paid for this message. The pro-immigrant, pro-immigration side spent a lot of money. Do you think dial testing is cheap? Not cheap. Who likes this message? What’s that top line there? The opposition. Did the advocates wanna carry this message? They did not. We were dialing for a message that in the overall sample, if you add blue plus green plus red, looks like a good message. But is not. It is popular because it is reinforcing an idea at odds with what we want. So what do we do instead? We look for a message that does four things. It engages our base, it persuades the middle, it alienates the opposition, and it’s advocate approved. That is the job of a good message. And you know what it sounds like? It sounds like this. The same is true today as it has been throughout history. People move to make life better for themselves and their families. It’s hard to move. To pack up everything and go to a new place takes courage. But you do it in order to put food on the table, to provide for your family, or send your kids to a decent school. Immigrant Americans move here for the promise of freedom and opportunity in this country. People move in order to improve life, and we believe that moving to make a better life for your family is one of the best things, and one of the hardest things a person can do. One of the values we hold dear to our hearts is a deeply rooted belief in the freedom to be who you want to be. Say what you want to say, and go where you want to go. America is supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave. That’s a good thing, so let’s keep it that way. Engages the base, persuades the middle. The shifters who are people who moved at least 15 points over the course of the survey. I did the survey with Lake Research Partners and one of the VPs is here, my friend Jonathan, on immigration. It’s another project we did. I’m not going to play this for you because I’m over. Say, oh, this is on how to talk about poverty. You don’t care about that, right? Puff. Keep going. I love it. Yeah. But we seriously have to play it here. I’ll play it here. I’ll play it here. Okay. So let me just finish and say, it is not the job of a good message to say what is popular. It is the job of a good message to make popular what we need said. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.