Don't Start a Blog, Start a Cult - Mr. Money Mustache

The first question I had for you, not on the paper, is if I want to start a cult-like Mustache Ian's. What are your pro tips?

That's a good question, and if I had prepared, I would have brought my little talk that I gave a few years ago at a blogger conference that was called "Don't start a blog, start a cult." But anyway, I think the pro tips are you need to have an identifiable philosophy that's maybe a bit different than what the normal world is into.

Your people, your cult members, are gonna organize around this cult. So you maybe want just a little bit of a feeling of us versus them, and like, "Oh, we are, you know, we got these values and they're noble, but the other outside world doesn't quite support us. We're a little bit oppressed." So then you have the sense of identity.

This is all stuff I stumbled on accidentally because really I was just saying, "Here's a good idea for a living." And then other people like, "Yeah, I like that idea too, but nobody agrees with me." So that's why I accidentally had the slightly cult thing going on.

Other things that are useful, you know, a couple more pro tips would include the use of terminology and silly words, and that's true whether you're the cult of Star Trek or iPhone or the various religions. They all have these sort of special terminology, and it helps to have an identifiable leader too.

So I've called it—and which I am better or worse—she came, yeah. But you got Steve Jobs or Captain Kirk, or the leaders of the religions, or the gods. All this stuff is handy for creating cult. People think of a cult as a bad thing because they're thinking of Waco, Texas and Kool-Aid, but really it's just a social organization structure, which is a basic built-in thing to human beings.

It's what allows us to live together and cooperate. So if you can make your brand, or your company, or your blog have these cult-like properties, then that's probably a good thing for making it last and having a real audience.

How do you feel about the cult of Elon Musk?

Well, I'm part of it, okay? I think that's—I'm gonna have a biased answer—but it certainly fits the description that we were saying, that I was just saying now about what a cult is. He’s definitely an identifiable leader, he's definitely got unusual ideas, but the reason I—and so much in this cult—is everything that guy says or writes, I just agree with it almost fully.

I really like the way he explains stuff. It's like that finally someone is running a company and instead of just spewing like this corporate [ __ ] like "We are considering the needs of our customers. We will get back," you know, he's always like, "No, I think it was a bug in like the 3.0 software. We'll get a release out, yeah, next week."

You know, like it's proper. He speaks like a combination of an engineer but with a much bigger perspective on everything, and he has these clear goals. So that's why I'm so favored, you know? And so far, he's done very little like evil.

Yeah, you know, like maybe he has personal issues in the sense that he's so driven that it's hard to relate to deal on Musk if you work directly for him, but his overall goals seem to be absolutely spot-on for, you know, a good person. That's a kind of cult I want to be on.

Well, I was curious if the cult leader, you know, needs to be like somewhat maniacal in their pursuit? Like they have to be polarizing to a certain extent, probably a little bit, or they at least have to be so convinced that their way is the way, or a viable way, that they're going to get some disagreement from some people.

You know, in my personal views, for example, have become more hardcore over the last year that cars are just like the biggest stupid inefficiency that we have in the United States and we need to just cut that whole [ __ ] down by at least 90 percent.

Because 99 percent of people are completely car dependent, that makes me a polarizing figure. This bicycle sandals man trying to tell me to do—like it's just so different from anything I can imagine. So in that way, that might be actually enhancing my status as an imaginary cult.