Platform Escalation: How the Liberty Movement Can Reach Millions
By Don Watkins
Photo by Amelia Bartlett on Unsplash
Good ideas beat bad ideas. Sort of.
Bad ideas have certain advantages in a debate.
One of those advantages is that bad ideas can appeal to a familiar context. If someone tweets, “Capitalism says you don’t have value unless you have money,” that strikes people as self-explanatory. But saying anything positive about capitalism requires establishing an whole context of unfamiliar, controversial ideas. That’s hard to do.
So: Good ideas, effectively communicated, beat bad ideas.
But there’s a second dynamic of debates that disadvantage good ideas: the platform advantage of those with bad ideas.
I noticed this with the recent uproar about the Ayn Rand Institute taking PPP money in response to the COVID-19 lockdowns.
I don’t want to re-litigate that debate here. But, in my view, ARI’s argument was important and compelling—and yet the vast majority of people who heard about ARI taking PPP money didn’t hear its explanation.
And why would they? ARI has a large following. But for obvious reasons it’s a following of people who are already likely to agree with Ayn Rand about many things.
ARI isn’t unique in that regard. Though there are thinkers who draw an eclectic group of fans (Tyler Cowen and Scott Alexander come to mind), most thinkers attract a like-minded audience. And when your views aren’t mainstream, that means you’ll almost always be drowned out when the mainstream attacks.
It’s time to fix that.
From pleading for platforms to plentiful platforms
The old model for reaching a new audience was to try to convince the culture’s gatekeepers to share their audience.
You write an op-ed and try to get it into the Wall Street Journal. You pitch yourself to Charlie Rose’s producer. You try to convince an agent to convince a publisher to convince Barnes and Noble to put your book in their stores.
And if you can’t convince someone to let you on their platform, you have to pay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy your way onto their platform through advertising.
But that model is dead.
The new model? Platforms—channels that allow someone build and communicate with an audience—are plentiful. And they’re owned, not by a small number of gatekeepers, but an endless number of influencers. And those influencers—Instagramers, podcasters, YouTubers, bloggers, etc., etc.—are not only speaking to audiences that rival the old gatekeepers’ in size and influence…they are often setting the trends that determine what the old gatekeepers report.
Even better, you can now advertise on these platforms at unprecedentedly low rates and with unprecedentedly high precision. Instead of paying $15,000 for a Wall Street Journal ad, you can pay orders of magnitude less to target college students in eastern Kentucky who love Firefly and listen to Kanye.
Build Platforms
One of the striking things to me is how many Ayn Rand fans discovered her because of a single line: “to the genius of Ayn Rand.” That was the dedication on Rush’s album 2112 and I would wager that thousands of people who consider themselves Objectivists and many thousands more who consider themselves pro-liberty started on their journey because of that line.
When an influencer shares their influences with their audience, the audience responds.
Let me paint a picture. ARI finds itself attacked for accepting PPP money and has a compelling answer. Only something’s different.
Hundreds of Objectivists have platforms that reach 10s or 100s of thousands of people. Some of those platforms overlap with ARI’s but many don’t.
An Objectivist nurse runs a popular nursing blog
An Objectivist photographer has a huge Instagram following
An Objectivist rapper is killing it on SoundCloud
An Objectivist accountant who loves baseball is doing hilarious baseball TikToks viewed by millions
An Objectivist drops out of college and documents her attempt to break into Hollywood on YouTube
An Objectivist start up founder has a substack newsletter half of Silicon Valley reads
An Objectivist gamer has a massive fanbase on the up-and-coming StoryFire
You get the picture. None of these platforms are geared toward promoting Objectivism or liberty. But they can be used that way on occasion. Suddenly the liberty movement's best material has the potential to reach millions of people with no pre-existing interest in Ayn Rand or pro-liberty ideas.
So many people ask me: what can I do to promote good ideas if that’s not my career?
My answer: build a personal brand around your obsessions. Then, from time to time, share your ideas with your audience.
How to Build a Platform
How do you build a personal brand? Pick a topic you’re deeply interested in, pick a format that’s suited to your strengths, and then post interesting content as often as you can—ideally multiple times a day.
Are you a great writer? Blog or write essays or insightful LinkedIn posts
Are you charismatic as hell? Start a YouTube channel
Are you artistic? Get your ass on Instagram
Are you thoughtful and camera shy? Start a podcast
Are you brash and quick-witted? Jump into the fray on Twitter
Are you 16 and eager to share your information with the Chinese government? Launch a TikTok account
Honestly, the format doesn’t matter, as long as it plays to your strengths and as long as you’re willing to put in the work by creating great content.
That said, it is far easier to grow a massive audience on an up-and-coming platform. In the early days of podcasting, you could become a top 20 podcast just by interviewing people from your basement. Now that podcasting is more established, it’s a tougher fight.
If you don’t have first mover advantage, you simply have to be better.
Stand out
I delve deep into audience building in my aptly named Grow Your Audience YouTube series. Here I’ll just hit on a few big picture points.
In the end, being “better” means: being valuable and being interesting.
Valuable ideas are ideas that solve problems people desperately want solved.
Recently a guy named James Lindsay exploded in popularity because he spent a long time learning about and criticizing Critical Race Theory. When the George Floyd protests took place and Black Lives Matter made CRT a cause célèbre, he was in the perfect position to cash in. Millions of people were troubled by the rise of books like White Fragility and James helped them understand and answer those ideas.
Now, you can’t control when or whether your issue will take off like that. But most issues have their moment. If you put in the work and have patience, you might see incremental growth for years—and then virtually overnight find yourself talking to millions of people on The Joe Rogan Experience.
It’s far easier to win on problem solving if your subject isn’t political. Most people are looking to reinforce their political ideas, not to change them. But whatever your topic, solving problems works even better if you can add the next element to your toolkit: content that’s not just helpful, but interesting.
What’s interesting? Surprising ideas and bold, surprising actions.
A word of caution here. I deliberately chose “surprising” rather than “controversial.” Controversy can be surprising, but most pro-freedom (and Objectivist) ideas are familiarly controversial. If you want to win on controversy, it can’t just be an idea people disagree with—it has to be an idea that shocks people. And then you have to have the skills to make that shocking idea appealing instead of alienating.
But there are other ways of being surprising. One principle that’s helpful here is: don’t comment on the story, be the story.
Opinions are a dime a million. But stories are in high demand. How did Greenpeace become famous? They didn’t write op-eds about environmentalism. They piloted boats in front of whaling ships.
Before his book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels became a national bestseller, the most popular things Alex Epstein did were to film himself debating the people at Occupy Wall Street, and later to publicly debate environmentalist leaders like Bill McKibben. Then he filmed himself counter-protesting the biggest climate march in history, which helped him land interviews on major media like John Stossel.
Find ways to be the story. Don’t just comment on the story.
Whatever road you go down, constantly ask yourself: how can I do something different from what everyone else is doing? Be creative. Try things out. Experiment. Take risks. Capture attention. But whatever you do, do something.
Worst case scenario, you spend a few years talking about the things you love to 100 people who share your enthusiasm. That’s awesome. You’ll learn a lot and probably have ten tons of fun doing it. But you may break through and build a significant audience.
It could literally change your life.
Share Platforms
Yesterday I read Andrew Sullivan’s resignation column from New York magazine. After talking about how he’s going to re-establish his own blog, the Weekly Dish, he says this:
What I hope to do at the Weekly Dish is to champion those younger writers who are increasingly shut out of the Establishment, to promote their blogs, articles, and podcasts, to link to them, and encourage them. I want to show them that they have a future in the American discourse. Instead of merely diagnosing the problem of illiberalism, I want to try to be part of the solution.
He is.
One of the things that astonishes me is that many of the people and organizations within the liberty movement have built meaningful platforms. What I don’t see them doing is actively working to build the platforms of other people in the liberty movement.
Successful movements pour an incredible amount of energy into nurturing the success of people within the movement. If you’re a Mormon and go into business, you have instant access to training, coaching, consulting, and funding. Established Mormons will go out of their way to help you succeed. The liberty movement does some of this, particularly at the level of education. But nowhere near enough—particularly when it comes to audience building.
This is our biggest opportunity. To spot undiscovered talent and encourage our audience to discover them.
It’s almost as if we view attention as a zero sum game. As if encouraging our audience to pay attention to up-and-comers will cause us to lose our audience. But actually it’s the other way around. If we can help our audience discover new influencers, we make ourselves more valuable to our audience.
One obvious way to do this is simply to feature up-and-comers in interviews or publish their articles. But we can do so much more. We should be studying our metrics and trying to maximize conversions as rigorously as we try to maximize our own conversions.
Here's an example. Let’s say we’re a pro-liberty organization with 500,000 YouTube subscribers. We discover Tony, a 35 year old doctor who decided that rather than practice medicine he wants to fight for freedom in medicine. He’s writing killer essays on how government regulation is hurting medicine, only no one is reading them.
Here’s what I typically see. We invite Tony on for an interview, mention his website at the end of the interview (if we remember), and then maybe have him on our show a year or two later.
That’s insanity.
Here’s what I would do. I’d start out the interview by saying, “Guys, I have an amazing guest. If you care about freedom in healthcare, I want you to follow this guy right now on Twitter. His handle is @TonyLiberty.” Then at the end of the interview, I’d praise him to the skies so he had a clip he could use as a testimonial.
Then I’d post the interview with Tony’s Twitter handle in the title.
Then I’d promote the interview 5 to 10 times on my different social media accounts, encouraging people to follow him.
Then I’d feature the interview on the front of my website, and the description would include Tony’s Twitter handle again.
Then I’d reach out to my network and get Tony on every show I could.
Then, if I saw that my audience loved the interview, I’d have Tony on again 3-5 times in the next two months.
Then I’d have him on again once a month for the rest of the year.
And I’d ask Tony: what else can I do for you? How can I help you become more successful?
At a certain point this doesn’t scale. But we’re nowhere near that point because we have nowhere near enough Tonys. But that’s the whole issue. We don’t have enough rockstars so we have to be willing to invest significant time and money in turning potential rockstars into actual rockstars.
This doesn’t just apply to organizations. If we have a platform, or useful advice, or useful technical skills, or money, we should be thinking about how we can make those available to undiscovered talent.
Anyone part of the liberty movement should be able to effortlessly plug into a network of resources to help them grow their audience. That doesn’t mean we need to drop standards or that a person is entitled to our support just because they share our ideology. The point is that if they’re good, growing awareness should involve as little friction for them as possible.
When to share, what to share
My basic thesis is that we want hundreds and eventually thousands of influencers positioned to share great ideas with audiences not already sold on those ideas.
But let me make it clear what I’m not saying. I’m not saying that you should build a platform just as a means to spreading pro-liberty ideas. What I’ve tried to stress is that there’s a real selfish value in sharing your passions with the world—and that, as a secondary consequence, you’ll be in a position to promote other ideas.
So let’s say you do it. You build an audience of 50,000 people who love your dog paintings or whatever. When and how should you share off topic ideas with them?
What you probably shouldn’t do is just repost everything your favorite thinkers release. You’ll just end up annoying your audience.
My rule of thumb would be: share when there’s a resource that’s particularly good or where an issue comes up that’s particularly important. If I was the king of dog paintings, for example, I would’ve shared pro-liberty content after 9/11. I would have shared it during the financial crisis of 2008. I would have shared it during the COVID-19 lockdowns. I would have shared it when The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels came out.
And I would have been crystal clear in my own mind: this is content that is effective at persuading non-supporters…not just at confirming what I already believe. Most content isn’t persuasive. And if I didn’t have a really strong sense, I’d probably send something around to a few of my friends who weren’t already in agreement and ask what they think.
Finally, it’s important to lay the groundwork for this sort of thing by allowing your audience to connect with you as a whole person. If your platform really is one dimensional—a fitness Instagram influencer who posts nothing but pictures of you working out on the beach—then suddenly sharing a video on fossil fuels is going to come across as weird and confusing.
But if you’ve given your audience a glimpse of yourself as a real person with diverse interests and say something like, “This book just came out by a thinker I really admire, let me know what you think”—it will seem very natural and authentic.
(A word to my fellow thought leaders and aspiring thought leaders: genuinely persuasive resources on liberty are in short supply. We need to up our game so let’s get to it!)
Stop complaining, get creative
I hear a lot of opinions about what the liberty movement should do or what this or that organization should do. And I’m the first one to say that all of us can be better.
But I also believe that each of us has a role to play in spreading good ideas. And that doesn’t just involve opening our checkbook (though if you can afford it, definitely do that!). It means making ourselves influential in whatever sphere is interesting to us.
Not tomorrow. Not today. Yesterday.
There’s this saying from Nassim Taleb, “Don't tell me what you think, tell me what you have in your portfolio.”
That needs to be our mantra as a movement. Don’t tell me what “we” should do to promote liberty. Tell me what you’re doing to build your platform.
So get started. Let me know how it goes. And let me know how I can help.
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