Final Thoughts on Human Connection

Hi everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is on with Caras Wisher and I'm Caraswisher. We're bringing you an episode of the new podcast from the Vox Media podcast network called Create or Destroy Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins . In this episode, host and marketer Seth Matlin speaks with political strategist David Axelrad, who is President Obama's chief strategist and senior advisor. David is currently a senior political commentator for CNN and the co host of Vox's hacks on Tap podcast. Seth and David talk about how to fix the American brand, which David sees as having been devalued, but not beyond repair . So stick around. What is the story that holds us together? What is the story that most of us share that allows us to have a sense of community rather than a sense of , you know, adjacent parts . I'm Seth Matlins and welcome to C reator Destroy Reimagining Marketing. It's my new show exploring how every decision a company makes, not just the marketing ones, but everyone either contributes to value creation or destruction. And it's about how the only value that ultimately matters is how valuable your customers think you are, all of which is why marketing has to be reimagined as an organizational mindset, not just a function. Each week I sit down with CMOs, CEO s, founders, cultural thinkers, the people who are building breaking and reimagining how businesses grow or don't, for conversations about what creates value and what destroys it. It's a business show, it's a marketing show, creator destroys the show that argues they've always been the same thing. This week I'm thinking about the business of politics because the parallels between political campaign strategy and business value creation aren't metaphorical, they're structural and abundant. At a fundamental level, a campaign's an enterprise where every decision, what you say and don't, who you hire, where, how, and when you show up or don't, what you refuse to say , the baby or the donor you kiss or don't either builds value with voters or destroys it. And voters, they're customers who all only get to buy what you're selling on just one day, and you need fifty one percent of them. To unpack these parallels, I'm sitting with the legendary political strategist and consultant David Axelrad. He was chief strategist and senior advisor to President Barack Obama, the founding director of the University of Chicago 's Institute of Politics and he's currently a distinguished fellow at the University of Chicago, a senior political commentator for CNN and the co host of the Hacks on Tap podcast. Across forty years and over one hundred and fifty campaigns, David may have thought more deeply about how you move people to take action at scale than almost anyone alive. Support for this show comes from Fetch Pet Insurance. Do you have a pet ? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U. S. gets hit with a vet bill of over a thousand dollars , and it's almost always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch Pet Insurance comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance. Get paid back up to ninety percent of vet bills. You can use any vet in the US and Canada. All vets are in network. Go to fetchpet. com slash save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet. com slash save . Support for this show comes from cohere as AI advances one thing, matters more than ever, staying in control. Most AI comes with strings attached like sharing your data and infrastructure or compromising your independence. With Cohere, you don't have to give up control to gain capability. You can have both. From frontier models to out of the box tools, Cohere gives you everything you need to build and deploy secure, scalable AI that drives growth and delivers results. Your data decisions and competitive edge stay yours. You control your AI on your term s. See how AI can empower your organization without compromising what matters most cohere dot com slash box for this show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard enough , so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odu. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all in one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e commerce, and more. And the best part, Odu replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch . So why not you? Try Odoo for free at Odoo. com That's ODO . com So David, I want to start by asking you a couple of questions about brands . It's going to come at you in two parts. And specifically about what you've learned about their role in value creation and getting people to turn out and buy in that moment, right? That is a GOTV effort. First part of the question is, I want to talk and get your take about the candidate as brand, right? And how as a political strategist, you think about this and what are the steps that you take to take a candidate that maybe we don't know particularly well and turn them something of a brand or to use George Laykoff's context, you know, frame them as something of a brand and turn the product that's the candidate into something more sellable than perhaps they'd be without it. Well, this won't make me unique, but I once was screamed at by Steve Jobs because at the beginning of the Obama campaign, he after telling me that my industry was crap and so on , he asked me what our communications plan was, and I started talking to him about it And he interrupted and so on . And I said to him, Steve, you know, selling presidents may be just a little different than selling computers and he hung up on me . So you know, I'm always reluctant to speak of candidates as brands, but there's no doubt that they are . And you know, the process that I went through with candidates is trying to understand what their comparative advantages were with the folks who were going to decide the election, in other words, I would focus on not the people who I knew were always going to be for us or the people who were always going to be against us, but those people who were persuadable . Because you can say a hundred things about someone that are all real and authentic, but what are the two or three that are the most meaningful? And how do they cohere in a message that people can grasp . And that's the process that I always applied in campaigns . And certainly that was the case in the Obama campaign This Obama you speak of? Well, you know, that's what everybody was asking us. At the time, yeah, at the day . But you know , when Obama , he really you have to look at his rise from two thousand four through two thousand eight began with his Senate race. And it came in a time when the country was deeply, deeply fractured by the Iraq War . And by a sense that Washington was , you know , just at each other's throats . The parties were at others' throats, they were gridlocked. They were very self interested . And here comes this guy from the outside who challenges the whole gestalt of Washington, the whole , you know, red versus blue, who's up and who's down kind of theory of Washington and the idea that we, you know , that we can never deal with any big problems because of it . And so the first ad set that I ever did for Barack Obama was in his campaign for the US Senate . And it was a biographical ad and a lot of it was about things that he had done in his life , you know, first African American president of the Harvard Law Review, things he had done in public life where he took on an issue that people thought was unachievable helped achieve it , all building up to him saying and now they say we can't change Washington. Well, I'm Barack Obama. And I approve this message to say, Yes, we can . And yes, we can became the sort of tagline for much of what we did moving forward. In fact, it's one of the words that's embedded in the side of the Obama center that's opening in June . And what we were playing against was not just opponents, but against a whole political climate at the time where people were deeply jaundiced about the system, about the ability to get things done , and where politicians were not trading high and were seen as sort of self interested. Parties were seen as self interested . Almost seems nostalgic today . So yes, we can , yes, we can it was both optimistic and it also was about them and not just us . And what we wanted people to sorry to interrupt but when you 're the vote yes In two thousand , it always I'm always reminded Hillary's slogan was I'm with her. That was a tagline they used a lot and his was, yes, we can . And it was not about him. It was about them. It was about what we could do together . And there was just a yearning for someone who could who could lead such a movement . So I always think back to that race in two thousand eight. And you know, we were the insurgents. We were the grassroots candidate. We were challenging what essentially was the big brand in Democratic politics , Hillary Clinton, the Clintons , but they made a series of strategic decisions, one of which was , you know, there were posters everywhere saying, I'm with her to try and tie into the fact that she would be the first woman. We didn't ever reference the fact that he would be the first African American president. We feared if people were motivated by that, they would know . It was n't we didn't need to remind them . But the tagline of yes, we can made it about everyone, not about him . Yeah . And it was very positive at a time when people were very , very down jaundiced about what politics was and what it could produce . And so you know, that kind of it was built on the essence of who he was and the story we told about him from the beginning. And so we had a solid foundation for the theme. I want to come back to Hillary's campaign in OA in a minute, but I want to ask you about something you said earlier, which is in building the brand and refining the message and we're going to talk about you as a storyteller as well . You talked about trying to figure out what resonates with whom. Now, about two or three years ago when I was still at Forbes, I set out to write a piece that I never did about why the Democrats by and large socket marketing at least when compared to the other party. And they just do. One of the things that my research led me to from a bunch of people who are far more informed about it than I was is they all agreed with the premise and what they said is it's because the democratic tent is so big. There's so many constituent groups that you have to appeal to that figuring out what to say to every that pulls everybody in as opposed to what you have to say to pull in this group and this group and this group and this group all based on identity is a real challenge, right? The Republicans tend to have in America, obviously, a more cohesive base . And so the COMS challenge is a little simpler. And I'm wondering, A, if you think that's right, but B iven to the extent you do think it's right, given how many identity groups there are, how many different types of people make up the Democratic Coalition, how do you figure out what's going to resonate with I mean, it's a question of whether you think that the you know, whether you can assemble piece by piece your base or whether you emphasize those things that talk that speak to the largest number of people . And our theory was that we would do that. I mean, you know, we would have conversations with different constituencies, but as I said, we never we never emphasized the fact that he was a black candidate that was obvious to everyone. And we really kind of stayed away from a lot of sort of divisive social issues or niche issues because there were some big issues that everyone shared, concerns that everyone shared. And what we were pitching and what we believed that we should speak to the common experiences of large numbers of people who were struggling in the economy, who were opposed to the war, who were fed up with politics as usual rather than this sort of micro targeting that I think is a flawed way to approach campaign campaigns . And do you think it's that way both at a national campaign and a local campaign and why? I mean, look primary elections are different than general elections and you know, they're there are different circumstances . And I'm not saying that you should not you should not , you know, try and appeal to groups of voters who are important in a party or in , you know , or generally, but you should not do that to the exclusion of a larger story . What is the story that holds us together? What is the story that most of us share that allows us to have a sense of community rather than a sense of , you know, adjacent parts you think Do you do think that that approach es will that approach work at a national level moving forward in a country that, you know, as I said before, like nostalgic for zero eight when people were divided? Like that, seems like, you know, the Halcian days of division. Yes, yeah , as opposed to today I mean, one thing we're fighting, Seth is we are we live in an age of social media. We live in an age of big data and algorithms that thrive on separating us and shoving us into silos . I actually think we're reaching a point where it's possible that a candidate in twenty twenty eight, for example , could actually run against all of that . And because I do think there's a I think that people we are sort of oftentimes against our wishes, even our awareness. We are being shoved into silos, but I also think there's a weariness with the kind of siege mentality of our politics today, the sort of constant battling that we have. And I do I think now it could just be I am a , you know , un apologetic idealist about what democracy can be, but I think people also hunger for community and we've lost community. We have faux community , but we don't have real community. And I think people are hungry and you know, the president is sort of a human algorithm. He finds those things that divide us. And in human algorithms sorry. This is showing. Well, yeah, it's not very subtle . But his view of leadership is exactly that you find your community and you animate them creating straw men and draw everybody outside the circle who's opposed to you in ways that galvanize people . I think that there is every election, I can tell you, I mean, this is my very, very strong feeling based on my experience . Every presidential election , interest ingly, often times mayor elections too, but every presidential election , especially when the incumbent is leaving is the incumbent who's leaving . And it's never that people want to replicate what they have. They always want the remedy to whatever they see or the deficiencies in the person they have. But one of the deficiencies that Donald Trump has that is deeply felt is he is a very, very divisive person . And I think that a candidate who tries to draw , you know, our draws together is going to have is going to is going to develop a following. So I think the answer to your question is yes. I think it' s possible that especially by making I mean by making the algorithms, the social the algorithms, the social media platforms a target for criticism and I think that there are a lot of people who may feel that it's time that we rein some of that in and that we find our common humanity Support for this show comes from Odu . 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Support for this show comes from Odo . Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odu . It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all in one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting , inventory, e commerce, and more. And the best part, Odu replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch , so why not you? Try Odoo for free at Odoo. com That's ODO . com I hope you're right. But implicit in what you're talking about is something that a lot of the marketers in my audience will be familiar with, which is , you know, the binary of should we be for something or against something, right? So back in zero eight, Obama was for, right? He was for change. He was for the change that the collective in the community could bring and what could happen and be done from that. Yes, we can. To your point about the current administration and really the way he's operated for at least the last ten years. Yes, he's against, right? He's against whatever's not for him . And I'm wondering , do you go and you know, you referred to yourself as an I think as an eternal optimist . I'm not sure you said it termsal as an ide ideist al but idealist yeah as an idealist do you do you consider the yeah, we can be against something too no you've talked about against against the algorithm Yeah no, no, look, I think, I don't I think that there is plenty to be against that doesn't pit you against your neighbor. Right, right . You know, so I mean there are forces that should be challenged . You know, we are awash in money that translates into power . That should be challenged . You know, the algorith should be challenged. The fact that we have AI rolling out as quickly as it is without any serious policy about how we're going to create some guardrails in a mechanism that is taught to think like people but has no moral or ethical construct. I mean there are all kinds of things that we should be against in the service of reform that is really important if we're going to advance as a country , but pitting ourselves against each other , neighbor against neighbor , you know , you disagree with me . I think you're going to destroy America . I think you're evil You know, I don't recognize your common humanity. I think people are tired of that. And I can't make an empirical case at this moment. But I see a lot of focus groups and I hear a lot of discussion and I feel there is a weariness of it . I think actually decency is going to have its day. I think people are so tired of who Trump is and how he operates that humility , empathy , integrity, honesty , the ability to unite rather than divide . I think those are going to be at a premium in twenty twenty eight and the person who emerges is going to reflect those qualities. Well, I certainly hope you're right, but it's a great segue to actually the second part of my first question, which is, you know, about brands, which is yes . I used to say back in the day that I had two favor ite brands, Santa Claus in America, Santa Claus because where else could you see parents lining up for hours to put their children in the lap of a strange man just because he was wearing an outfit, a red outfit with a beard , like that's the power of a brand . But also America because even back in the day, we still stood for something despite the contradictions in some of our attitudes, our behaviors , rather . Again, coming at this with a very biased, progressive perspective , to me, it seems the last eighteen months have done more to tarnish the American brand than at any time in my not so short life. And I'm wondering what you think the value of the brand of America has represented, the actual value in terms of, you know, policy and politics and getting shit done around the world and if you see a way back from it ? Well, look, I think the American brand has been flawed as we are because we're human and we haven't, you know , we haven't always lived up to our best ideals . But we've done awfully well compared to the, you know, other societies in the long march of history . And and it's reflected honestly in success that, you know, the one of the tragedies of the last few years is the degree to which immigrants have been demonized. There's always been a sense that America is a place where you can make it and will have the freedom to make it . And now we are basically instead of that great inscription at the base of the Statue of Liberty , you feel like she, instead of a torch, she be holding out her hand and telling people not to come. That is a very destructive impulse and it certainly undermines it undermines our brand. And there are many other ways in which that is true. I speak, by the way, as the son of a refugee from Eastern Europe who came here with nothing when he was a child. And one generation later, I was the senior advisor to the president of the United States who happened to be an African American man. So that is part of the American mystique. In fact, I will tell you that when we were talking about Obama running for president, Michelle Obama said, What do you think you can bring that no one else can bring? And he said, well, I don't know, but there are a lot of ways to answer that. But he said, There's one thing I know. He said, When I take that oath of office millions of young people look at themselves differently and their prospects differently . And the world will look at us a little differently. His election was an affirmation of America at its best , the ability to progress , to self correct, the idea that really anybody can succeed . All those things have been tarnished . You know, there are practical things about us being a world leader in terms of research and development and technology and all of that. That's all at risk. I mean, there's a lot , but at the core of it were the values that we're celebrating in the two hundred fif tieth year that cherishes freedom , freedom to worship as you would, would freedom to pursue your dreams And we need to use the occasion rather than celebrate the mad king we have today to celebrate the values that animated those founders two hundred and fifty years ago . And I, you know, but I'm not going to, you know, I said I'm an idealist. I'm not a nut. I understand that we have greatly devalued the American brand. I keep telling people that the blast radius from this administration is going to be felt for generations to come, and it's going to be the work of all of us in the future to rebuild that the destruction of USAID and foreign aid. And I know foreign aid is politically a very, very freighted subject because people have this notion that we're giving tons of money away to philanthropy. Yeah, yeah. But and it is in a way philanthropy . We've saved millions and millions of people all over the world from starvation and disease . We've also in doing it won the good will of those people, we've also in doing it prevented conflict that and disease that would ultimately wash up on our shores . Yes. I think of it less as philanthropy. I mean, obviously there is some philanthropy in it, no doubt as there should be, but I tend to think of it more as cause marketing, which is you're doing well by doing good, right? There is a benefit to us by doing what we do for others. And I think that the you know this better than I exponentially, but we've reduced things not to their least common denominator, but to their actually, you know, their absolutely fucking stupidest denominator. And foreign aid is seen as , you know, we're not getting anything back. Well, it was done. It was done in like overnight by a bunch of, you know , gamers and Elon Musk who knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing . And I think it will be it will go down as one of the stupidest decisions, foreign policy decisions in the history of the country. But here's the fundamental issue is that Donald Trum p has a philosophy and that philosophy is the world is a jungle and the strong take what they want and the weak fall away and rules and laws and norms and institutions are for succors and and that is a very dangerous philosophy. That is the philosophy of Vladimir Putin . And you know, to the degree that he has bent the U. S. government to his philosophy and operated that way , it's been a blow to American democracy, but also to America's brand in the world because people, you know, why are we the default currency? And why are we , you know, we were viewed as the reliable country , the country a country that people could count on even if we had disagreed they had disagreements with us to operate a certain way. Right . And that has been , you know, there's been great doubt caused by so that is something that we're going to work to repair because as we're learning in Iran , having the biggest army is not the end of the story in a very interconnected world. I want to go back to something you mentioned earlier kind of in passing . You see a lot of data. You've seen a lot of data for, you know, the extent the breadth of your career. Yeah . I'm wondering two things how do you use data to figure out what people actually value as opposed to what maybe they think they should value something, right? Because you know, what's the famous quote, which is the moment you ask the question, you change the answer. And what I'm really interested in is like, are there moments when you've absolutely ignored the data and found a lot of value accretion because you did? Well, I'll tell you something . My mother was a newspaper reporter who ultimately went her newspaper fold ed became one of the pioneers in qualitative research. Is that right? And she was the qualitative director for Young and Rubicam. Really? And but so I grew up like in this focus group culture. And when I became involved in politics, I was a real devote to qualitative because ultimately and part of this is, you know, I'm a journalist by training too. I want to hear in people's own words, what's going on in their lives , what's important to them , you know, what are the challenges they face ? We during the presidential races and the second one in particular , you know, a Joe Beninson, who was our poster, also ran this ongoing ethnographic kind of project where people were just journaling . And we learned so much from all of that that helped shape the qualitative , but the qual itative wouldn't have been I mean the quantitative I should say the polling, but it wouldn't it wouldn't have been nearly as rich . Campaigns and messaging and campaigns is an art as well as a science . And you need to you need to have a feel what people are telling you . And I you know, I worry a little bit that we 've become so empirical that we know we test everything and if something does a tenth of a percentage point better than the other thing, then we're going to go with that and so on . You know, and I think that we are we are burying ourselves in analytics in a way that that destroys the art of of marketing. I'm wondering agreeing with you completely and there's a great quote from a great I think it was must have been an admin, British admin, David Abbott that I'll paraphrase which is if you AB test two things that suck, one still's gonna win. And right. And I'm wondering , and I didn't know that about your mother. And I imagine dinner table conversations were pretty rich and interesting. Do you think of yourself as a marketer? No, I think of myself as a storyteller. Yes, I mean I was in the marketing business for sure . And you know , I only resist terms like marketing and brands because out of reverence for the mission of what politics should be. And I never wanted to, you know, there was a great book in nineteen sixty eight called The Selling of the President by Joe McGuinnis about how they marketed Richard Nixon and so on . You know, that and it was a really interesting book and they did they kind of they sanded down the rough edges on Nixon, they put him on laughin, they did some things to make him rested and ready? Human , yes, more human for his for voters. At the end of the day, they they won the race through not so subtle racial appeals , but which was very much consistent with who Nixon . But so I resist those terms, but obviously, when you we are trying to make a sale , I mean , and it's very intensive because you can have a product that lives for decades. In an election, you've got a matter of months , you know, maybe in a presidential race years , but in a generally a matter of months and people are going to have a choice and they are going to decide and it's binary and it's binary. And so you really need to think about that. And so I always used to work back from what do I want people to be thinking when they walk in that polling place ? What do I want them to think about not just my candidate and the other candidate, but what is the choice about ? And I try to drive those conversations that way , you know , which I think at least from my seat makes you a marketer and of course you're a marketer Yeah. And I'm wondering self loathing market . Yeah, aren't we all? A safer Ontario means more police and prosecutors making sure my car doesn't get stolen . It means building new jails to keep criminals behind bars . And it means there's no need to worry when I play at the park. You're making every corner of Ontario safer to make all of Ontario safer. That's how we protect Ontario. For all of us . Learn how at Ontario dot ca slash safer Ontario paid for by the government of Ontario . The U. S. and Iran say they've agreed on terms to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. You already see oil prices from a high of one hundred and twenty six dollars a barrel down to about eighty dollars a barrel today. That's a lot of progress. The war, of course, drove up the price of gas and other essentials and has led to some ugly polling for President Trump. sixty one percent of adults polled by NPRPBS and Marist disapprove of his handling of the economy. His handling in a certain light makes sense. His priority was preventing Iran from getting nukes, but Trump's messaging was un usual, unusual for a president. Last month, the reporter asked Trump, to what extent was he thinking about American's finances when he negotiated with Iran? I don't think about American financial situations. I don't think about anybody I think about one . What's he doing? Coming up on today Explained from Vox Hassam Piger has blown up in recent years. After the twenty twenty four election, the popular leftist Twitch streamer became a go to voice for the Democratic Party's butt. Piker's glow up has angered a section of Democrats who are growing louder and voice. Hasan Piker is anti American , he is bigoted, he's anti Semitic, and he is deeply misogynistic. So in March, a Democratic group called Third Way published an op ed in the Wall Street Journal's opinion section, saying quote, Democrats are too cozy with Hassan Piker. He is such an extremist that it will only do damage to Democrats and hurt their chances of beating right wing populism. Now Pi,ker is controversial, no doubt, but is he toxic? I don't think this helps Republicans at all. I think as a matter of fact, third ways brand of politics has helped Republicans . Their attitude has been to constantly concede on cult ure or issues of the Republican Party and never focus on economic populism. I'm Esten Herrington and this is America Actually . Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. I'm wondering what parallels do you see two or three, maybe between selling of a candidate and the selling of toothpaste, right? Which is where do you see the parallels ? Or where do you see the disconnects? Well, I mean the parallels are what I just referenced, which is people are going to make a choice. There are a lot of brands of toothpaste . So what is it? What are the qualities about your toothpaste that appeal that would appeal incrementally to yeah, it's different because you don't have to you don't have to get fifty one percent of the market when you're selling toothpaste . So it's a little a little different in that way . But you do need the whole thing boils down to comparative advantages on things that people most value about toothpaste . And so what is it about your toothpaste that matches up with their essential needs and desires relative toothpaste. What I think is interesting about the reference is, you know, if you compare a lot of the marketing that a lot of toothpaste just to stick with it do, do they're all kind of market ing the same thing, which is, you know, a better smile , fresher breath and wider teeth . And I think the product and service, the inhumane, not inhumane, the non human and service marketers too often, they're just saying the same f and thing over and over again not finding that source of competitive differentiation or kind of that strategic way in, which is actually where I want to go next, which is in the description of your podcast hacks on tap, which for our listeners is available everywhere. You listen and on YouTube, if you choose to watch , in the description brought to you by Vox Media and brought you by our shared partners at Vox Media . You invite the listener to know, quote, what's going on behind the scenes and where strategic decisions are being made? You say, pull up a stool . Where are strategic decisions being made ? Well in a good campaign, there's usually a strategic hub . There is , you know, I'll use the Obama campaign as a as an example , but, you know , my business partner, David Pluff was the manager and managed , you know, a lot of the operations of the campaign. I was the, you know, the kind of message strategist and I managed that part of the campaign , but there was a core group in my group that involved upstairs.er I did an interesting thing , I think. It was it was interesting to me anyway, but normally you'd hire a pulseer and that pulster would do both the qualitative and quantitative . I hired a pulser, Joel Beninson and a qualitative guy David Binder who was a brilliant, brilliant, qualitative researcher. He does polling as well, but I hired him only for purposes of doing qualitative and he was on the road doing three focus groups a night, you know , around the country . But when we had to make key strategic decisions, Pluff would be there. I would be there , you know You know , some of the if we wanted the research guys in there, they would come . But it wasn't a large group. And oftentimes in the campaign, it boiled down to Pluff and me and the candidate . And that's the way I mean someone has to drive the train . And if you have the one sign of distress in a campaign is if twenty people are sitting around a table trying to make a strategic decision. Yeah, it doesn't work. It doesn't know. I'm wondering and let's I mean, you've run what or advised something like one hundred forty and , one hundred and fifty campaigns over the last period of your career. Yeah, you got a story and let's think at a smaller smaller than of where you made a you look back, you're like, that was the wrong strategic decision. The consequences were just not what you anticipated. I imagine I'm not a woman, but like childbirth, you remember you remember the pleasure and you try and forget the pain . You asked me for not a let me give you a presidential example because it could it travels. We had a two week period in March of two thousand eight when we were running against Hillary Clinton and Texas and Ohio were voting on the same day . If we had won either of those, she would have had to, and they said, we'll drop out if we don't win those . We spent a lot of money and time and effort trying to win in those two weeks, but we also changed what we were doing and we went after her in a very traditional kind of way. You know, we hooked her up to NAFTA and it became a very sort of familiar and dreary kind of campaign for those two weeks that was completely antithetical to our brand. Yeah, it was it was antithetical to our brand. And we lost both those and we deserve to lose both those and we learned we learned from that. But they're I'm sure I can think of anal ogous situations from smaller campaigns as well because you know , in these kind of dynamic situations you 're constantly making strategic decisions. Maybe more so than in brand advertising or brand messaging because of kind of the pace of political campaigns and the calendar of political campaigns . You don't have you one percent . And you don't often have I mean, I guess you do somewhat, but it's less it's less common to have the you know one toothpaste going negative on the other toothpaste . It happens, but you know, you are constantly under fire from the other side. And if you're not, it's because you're not doing very well . So that's something you have to respond and react to and how you do it is really important. You know, I ran a campaign for Tom Vilsak, who became the agriculture secretary later, but governor of Iowa . And it was forever an attack that Iowa, Republicans ran against Iowa, Democrats that Iowa, Democrats opp ose the death penalty . And they came at us on that, and used the example of a small child who had been molested and killed some horrible story and they said, you know, if Tom Vilsak were governor, he would not give that person . It may have been a fictitious story the death penalty . And there was a panic among Democrats there and they said, You've got to fire back. You've got to hit him back on his crime record and this and that . And my instinct no, that's not part of our brand. That's not who we are. He Villsack was very much in the same kind of , you know, category as Obama. He was, you know, a tonally in that same place . And instead we did a direct to camera where in which he said, you know, my opponent is running ads that , you know, are offensive to me as a as a husband and as a father , you know, that's his plan to win the selection. He says, but I don't, but you know what I want to talk about? And then he went on to talk about their lives and where they differed on stuff and it finished with him saying my opponents counting on eleventh hour attack ads to win the selection. I'm counting on you . And it was very, very powerful , you know , so part of it is understanding how to respond within the context of your message . So actually on that, and we just have a couple of minutes left . I've got two questions for you. Yeah. So the first is I referenced this earlier and you certainly have you've described your entire career as being at its core about storytelling. If you thought of yourself as a marketer, you said, No, a storyteller. Yes. And figuring out what the story of each candidate campaign in the moment and then telling it. Yeah. I'm wondering what advice as one of the great storytellers of the last decades you have for the CEOs, CFOs, and CMOs in my audience on how to tell stories , whether you're selling toothpaste or presidential candidates in today's world where attentions are shrinking it's not that attentions are shrinking. The competition is ever existing. Well, yes, and the habits, consumer habits in terms of information is so fractionalized now . But listen, and this may be sound like a cliche because it's used so often, but understand Understand what your authentic comparative advantages are, understand what your authentic brand is and try and develop all your messaging within that frame . Don't you know, try and tell a consistent story about why are drawn have been would be drawn to you to you . Don't try and reinvent your message again and again and again because you will not develop any kind of brand loyalty unless people really come to believe this is what it's about. This is why I'm drawn to it. And then understand the people you're talking to and their lives and how the two things fit together. When I say I'm a storyteller , the story of your candidate offers validation to the messages that you're going to deliver. Tom Vilsak was an orphan who was adopted by a very troubled family and his father ended up selling everything he owned. He found out after the fact to help him go to college . And education was a huge issue in Iowa. He told that story, but then he talked about Iowa, and he said, I'm going to do for Iowa what my dad did for me. I'm going to put education first . And that became a steady theme throughout our campaign and people believed it because they heard his story because of where it was coming from. I do think one of the lessons for brands today is to be more humane, but I'll get interviewed about that. Last question for you, sir. It's the way we end every episode , which is if you had all the power in the world , what's one thing you'd create tomorrow? Not next week, but tomorrow, and what's one thing you'd destroy? You can answer it through any lens, any aperture, anything that comes ? Well, just to follow through on what I said before. I'm kind of obsessed with with this right now . I would destroy ability of algorithms to use data, big data to try and inflame us against each other. I would try, you know, and I'm not a technologist, I don't know. And then conversely, I would try and create social media brands that appeal to the better angels of our nature and not the worse and I would market them that way . You know, and again, I have no idea if that could , you know , I mean, I'm now flying in the face of a lot of deep research that says that