When facing a PR crisis, the best response is to use humor and grace — turn a hit piece into an opportunity to be likable.
The speaker analyzes Bernard Arnault's masterful PR response to an investigative exposé, where he opened with 'Thank you' and used humor to reframe the narrative. ✦ AI generated
Speaker 1 · My First Million · 2026-08-04 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 12:01
He starts with 'Thank you.' Instead of being defensive, he just starts with, 'Thank you.' ... He basically turned a diss track into a giant compliment for himself... he addresses each term one by one... and I just thought damn this guy this was like such a perfect takedown where you normally see CEOs get really flustered. They either ignore, they deny, they go start to complain and say they're biased and it's a hit piece and play the victim and instead just so smooth and I thought there's a lot that American CEOs could learn from this. Do you know what the biggest thing is? Use humor. Bring it back to Robert Cialdini. He says the rule of likability... one of the easiest ways to be more likable is to be humorous.
verbatim transcript · starts at 12:01
11:45And so it's been around since uh for the last 18 years. And at this point, they have 18,000 volunteers in Israel. It's mostly it's only in Israel. They answer something like 2,000 calls a day. And the mission statement is very simple. They say that on average, it takes something like 12 or 10 minutes for an ambulance to arrive to you. Our goal is to get there in 90 seconds in anywhere
12:07in Israel. And right now, I think they do it in like 2 minutes. And Mark was telling me, he's like, basically, right now, we are uh him and I went out to eat. He was like, "If you were a member, you would carry your bag with you at all times. And if somebody 10 floors down got uh got sick or something happened where uh they had to call an ambulance,
12:25you would be alerted uh because you were nearby and you could run down and give them some type of need until the ambulance got to them and they could actually do the real stuff, but at least you could be like a life-saving thing." And because of this, this company uh it's a nonprofit. They have saved uh potentially millions of people because they've done this since uh in the last
12:4418 years. And what's interesting is they started this before iPhones, before GPS. And when they started it, they actually just gave out these like walkie-talkies, like these radios. And now it's gotten quite sophisticated. So they the the entire foundation runs off of donations and they are spending many tens of millions of dollars a year. And what they have noticed is like for example, through 18 years of data, they know that
13:08heart attacks are more likely to happen in the morning, which means people are probably in their home versus the office. And so they know that they need to recruit volunteers who are on call and ready and they're prepared for a potential heart attack within these areas. And they have this, they actually did a YouTube video on it. They have this entire uh like AI setup that they
13:26know when to predict that something bad potentially might happen and to have their 8,000 person volunteer force to do it to be ready. And there's a few interesting things here about this one. There's this thing called like it's called good Samaritan laws. We have it in America. they have in Israel which basically just says like when you're on an airplane and the captain goes like is there a doctor on board? Can someone
13:45help me? Uh as long as that doctor acts in good faith, they can't be sued by the person, you know, it's it's called the good Samaritan law where it's like as long so but if you are on there for pay, meaning if you're a professional, like I'm paying you money, there's an exchange of goods for you to do a service, you could potentially be sued. So Mark was like this thing, it needs to
14:05strictly be a nonprofit. He said the second thing. He was like, "In Israel, what's cool about this?" He's like, "We have uh super Orthodox Jews who are doing it. We have non-seular Jews who are doing it. We have Arabs. We have Muslims. We have Christians." He was like, "I've noticed that what has brought us together is not just us sitting around talking, but I can get all groups of people to come and work