Hey everyone, welcome back to My Weird Prompts. I am Corn, and I am sitting here in our living room in Jerusalem with my brother.
Herman Poppleberry, at your service. It is a beautiful day outside, but we are headed into some pretty dense, fascinating territory today. We are talking about the hidden architecture of global power.
We really are. Our housemate Daniel sent us a voice note earlier. He has been thinking about diplomatic cables. He mentioned that he finds their structure incredibly useful for his own professional writing, specifically when he is taking meeting minutes. He wants to know how this format evolved, if anyone actually reads these things, and what the rest of us can learn from them.
I love that. It is such a specific, nerdy niche to dive into. Most people think of diplomatic cables as these high-stakes, secret documents you only see in movies or maybe in a massive leak, but they are actually a masterpiece of information architecture. They are designed to survive the chaos of a global bureaucracy.
Right, and Daniel was asking about how that structure evolved and whether these things actually get read by the people they are intended for. I mean, if you are an ambassador in a major capital, you are probably churning these out constantly. Does someone at the State Department or a Foreign Ministry actually sit down with a cup of coffee and read every single one?
That is the million dollar question. And the answer involves a lot of history, a lot of bureaucracy, and some really interesting psychological tricks that diplomats use to get attention. But before we get to the attention struggle, we should probably talk about what a cable actually is and why it looks the way it does. Because it is not just a long email.
Exactly. When you look at a classic diplomatic cable, especially the ones from the United States State Department, there is a very rigid format. You have the header, the summary, the reporting, and then the comment section. Herman, you have spent way too much time looking at these archives. Why the rigidity?
It goes back to the telegram. Before the internet, before secure digital networks, you were sending information over telegraph lines. Every word cost money, and every character was a potential point of failure in transmission. So, conciseness was king. But as the volume of information grew, foreign ministries realized they needed a way to categorize things so that a human being could filter through hundreds of messages a day.
So that is where the metadata comes in? Those weird strings of capital letters and codes at the top?
Exactly. In the American system, they use something called tags, which stands for traffic analysis by geography and subject. It is essentially a hashtag system that predates Twitter by decades. If you are a desk officer in Washington D.C. and you only care about energy policy in Central Asia, you can filter for specific tags like E-N-R-G or P-G-O-V for political governance. It turns a wall of text into a searchable database.
That is actually a great takeaway for general professional reporting right there. Most people just send an email with a subject line like, meeting notes. But if you start using a consistent set of keywords or a standardized header, you are making that information infinitely more useful for future you or anyone else searching the archives. It is about building a library, not just sending a message.
Totally. And the most important part of that structure, the part that Daniel mentioned using for his minutes, is the summary. In the diplomatic world, they often call this the bottom line up front, or B-L-U-F. You do not bury the lead. The first paragraph of a cable tells you exactly what happened and why it matters. If the Secretary of State only has thirty seconds to glance at your cable, they should get the entire story from that first paragraph.
I find that so refreshing because so much corporate communication is the opposite. People feel like they have to build a case and provide all this context before they get to the point. But the diplomatic cable assumes the reader is incredibly busy and probably a bit impatient. It respects the reader's time.
Right. And then you get into the meat of it, which is the reporting. This is where the diplomat describes the meeting or the event. But there is a very strict rule here, or at least there should be in good reporting: you separate the facts from the interpretation. You describe who said what, what the room felt like, and what the specific commitments were. You are the fly on the wall.
And then comes the part that I think is the most interesting, and the part Daniel specifically highlighted: the comment section. This is where the diplomat stops being a recording device and starts being an analyst.
That is where the magic happens. In a standard cable, the comment section is usually at the end, often labeled as comment or embassy comment. It is the place where the author says, okay, I told you what the Prime Minister said, but here is what I actually think is going on. He seemed nervous, or he is clearly posturing for a domestic audience, or we should not believe a word of this because of X, Y, and Z.
It is that subjective layer that makes it a cable rather than just a transcript. And I think that is a huge lesson for anyone writing professional reports. If you just record what happened in a meeting, you are providing a service, sure. But if you provide an analysis of what those events mean for the company or the project, you are providing value. You are using your expertise.
Exactly. And the key is that by separating it into a distinct comment section, you are being honest with the reader. You are saying, this part is what happened, and this part is my opinion. It builds trust. If you mix them together, the reader might get suspicious that you are twisting the facts to fit your narrative.
It reminds me of what we discussed back in episode three hundred thirty-seven when we were talking about diplomatic pouches. There is this whole physical and digital infrastructure designed to move these very specific types of insights across borders. But as the technology changed, the structure of the cable had to adapt. Herman, how did we get from those expensive telegrams to the modern digital system?
It was a slow evolution. For a long time, we had what were called savingrams. These were long messages that were not urgent enough for the expensive telegraph lines, so they were literally put in a bag and flown across the world. But the real turning point for the modern cable was nineteen forty-six. Have you heard of the Long Telegram?
I have heard the name, but remind me of the details.
It was sent by George Kennan, a mid-level diplomat in Moscow. He was frustrated that Washington did not understand the Soviet Union. So, he ignored the rules about conciseness and sent an eight thousand word telegram. It was so influential that it basically defined American foreign policy for the next forty years. It proved that the format could handle deep, complex analysis if the writer was brave enough to break the mold.
Eight thousand words! That must have cost a fortune to send in nineteen forty-six.
It did. But it showed that a well-written cable could change the world. Fast forward to today, and the State Department uses secure digital messaging systems that integrate the old cable format with modern search capabilities. Even though we do not use telegraph cables anymore, the name stuck.
But does that verbosity actually hurt the mission? If I am a diplomat and I write a four thousand word masterpiece about the political climate in a small country, is anyone actually reading it? Daniel asked about the struggle for attention, and I have to imagine it is brutal.
It is a total arms race. Imagine you are at the State Department in Washington. You are getting thousands of cables a day from every corner of the globe. Most of them are just routine updates. So, how do you make your cable the one that the high-level officials actually see?
You have to have a hook, right? Or you have to use those distribution labels we have talked about before.
Right. There are these labels like N-O-D-I-S, which means no distribution, or E-X-D-I-S, for exclusive distribution. These are meant to limit who can see the cable for security reasons, but in a weird, bureaucratic way, they also act as a prestige marker. If a cable is marked N-O-D-I-S, people want to read it more because it feels more important. It is like an invite-only club for information.
That is such a human reaction. If you tell me I am not allowed to see something, I want to see it ten times more. But there is also the cable of the day phenomenon.
Yeah, many foreign ministries have a curated summary. A team of people spends their entire night reading the incoming traffic and picking out the five or six most important or most interesting cables to put on the Secretary's desk in the morning. This is often called the Secretary's Morning Brief. So, as a diplomat, you are essentially competing to be in that morning briefing.
How do you win that competition? Is it just about the importance of the news, or is it about the quality of the writing?
It is both. I have talked to people in this world, and they say that a well-turned phrase or a particularly sharp bit of analysis can make a cable go viral within the department. There is a certain style of dry, slightly cynical wit that is very common in diplomatic writing. It is a way of showing that you are sophisticated and that you understand the nuances of the situation. It is almost a form of professional branding.
So, if we take that back to the world of meeting minutes or corporate reporting, the lesson is that style actually matters. If you want your reports to be read, they should not just be accurate; they should be engaging. They should have a clear voice.
Definitely. If you can summarize a complex three hour meeting into a three hundred word report that is punchy, insightful, and maybe even a little bit clever, people are going to look forward to reading your notes. You become the person who helps them make sense of the noise.
I want to dig a bit deeper into the evolution aspect. We are in February of twenty-six now, and we have all these artificial intelligence tools. I wonder if the State Department might develop tools to integrate AI. How might that change how diplomats write?
It could be a huge shift. They might have tools to handle the routine stuff—summarizing the basic reporting, tagging the metadata, and searching the archives. But there is a tension there. On one hand, it frees up the human diplomat to focus on the analysis. On the other hand, there is a fear that the art of the cable might be lost.
That makes total sense. It is like the difference between taking notes by hand versus just recording a lecture. The act of processing the information is where the learning happens. If an A-I writes the report, does the diplomat actually understand the situation as deeply?
Exactly. And the A-I might miss those subtle cues that we talked about in the comment section. An A-I might miss the fact that a minister's hands were shaking, or that he used a specific idiom that implies a hidden meaning. Diplomacy is so much about the unsaid. It is about the subtext. If the structure of the reporting starts to favor things that an algorithm can easily parse, we might lose the very thing that makes diplomatic cables valuable in the first place.
Right. It is a warning for anyone in the professional world. If you are using A-I to summarize your meetings or write your reports, you have to be the one to add that final layer of human insight. The A-I can give you the what, but you have to provide the so what.
Let's talk about some specific best practices that Daniel and our listeners can take away from this. We have mentioned B-L-U-F, the bottom line up front. We have mentioned separating facts from analysis. What else is in the diplomat's toolkit?
One big one is the use of clear, descriptive headings within the body of the report. A good cable is broken up into small, digestible chunks. Each section has a bolded header that tells you what that section is about. It allows the reader to scan. If they only care about the economic part of the discussion, they can jump straight there.
That is so simple but so often ignored. I hate getting a long email that is just six paragraphs of solid text. My eyes just glaze over. Another practice is the use of participant lists at the very top. In a cable, you always list exactly who was in the room and their titles. It sounds basic, but in a professional setting, knowing exactly who was present and who was missing can be a huge piece of context. If the C-F-O was supposed to be there but sent a deputy instead, that tells you something about how the company views that project.
That is a great point. It is a silent signal. And speaking of signals, let's talk about the precedence levels. I have seen those labels like FLASH or IMMEDIATE. How does that work?
That is the urgency marker. FLASH is the highest precedence. It is reserved for things like the start of a war or a major national security crisis. It is supposed to be handled in under ten minutes. Then you have NIACT-IMMEDIATE, which stands for night action, meaning you have to wake someone up to read it. Then IMMEDIATE, PRIORITY, and finally ROUTINE. Most cables are ROUTINE.
I love the idea of a corporate version of that. Imagine marking a meeting minute as FLASH. People would actually open it!
Or they would fire you for being dramatic. But the lesson is to use your subject lines to signal urgency accurately. If everything is urgent, nothing is.
We have covered a lot of ground here. We have talked about the structure, the evolution from telegrams, the importance of the comment section, and the brutal competition for attention in a world of information overload. Herman, if you had to give one piece of advice to someone like Daniel who wants to adopt this style, what would it be?
It would be to start with the summary and never, ever bury the lead. If you can master the art of the one-paragraph summary, you have already won half the battle. Everything else is just supporting evidence. And use those headers! Make it scannable.
And for me, I think the biggest takeaway is that separation of facts and analysis. It is such a simple way to build credibility. It shows that you are an objective observer and a thoughtful analyst at the same time. It reminds me of the five minute walk test we were talking about earlier.
Oh, right. The idea that if your reader has to walk five minutes to a secure facility—a S-C-I-F—to read your report, it better be worth the walk. In a corporate setting, that walk might just be the mental effort of switching tasks. Is your report worth the interruption?
I love that. The five minute walk test. If you are at home and you want to try this, the template would look something like this: At the top, you have your metadata. Date, time, location, and a list of participants. Then, you have your B-L-U-F—a one-paragraph summary. The big takeaway. If someone only reads this, they should know exactly what happened.
Then, you have your sections with clear headers. Discussion of the budget. Timeline for the launch. Feedback from the client. In those sections, you stay as objective as possible. You are just the recorder. And then, at the very end, you have your comment section. This is where you put your own thoughts. My impression is that the client is actually more worried about the timeline than they are letting on. Or, we need to be careful about the budget discussion because it seems to be causing tension between the departments.
Exactly. And the beauty of this is that over time, people will start to value your comment section as much as, if not more than, the actual minutes. You are providing a perspective that a simple transcript just cannot match. You are building institutional memory.
And in a world where people change jobs every couple of years, that institutional memory is incredibly fragile. If you are the one who is consistently producing high-quality, well-structured reports, you are the one who is holding the story of the company together. It is a form of leadership, really. You are defining the narrative.
Well, I think that is a good place to wrap things up for today. We have explored the world of diplomatic cables, from the early days of the telegraph to the high-stakes digital networks of today. We have looked at how to use that structure to improve our own professional reporting and how to navigate the constant struggle for attention in a busy world.
It has been a blast. I am going to go see if I can write my next grocery list in cable format. Tags: dairy, produce, urgent. Precedence: IMMEDIATE.
Just make sure you include a comment section about why we actually need the expensive cheese.
Oh, the analysis on the cheese will be very thorough, I promise. The B-L-U-F is that we are out of cheddar, but the comment will explain the geopolitical necessity of brie.
I look forward to reading it. Thanks for listening to My Weird Prompts. You can find all our past episodes and our R-S-S feed at my-weird-prompts-dot-com.
And we are on Spotify as well. Until next time, I am Herman Poppleberry.
And I am Corn. Keep those prompts coming.
See ya.
