THE BEST OF: Your Brain on Fake News and the Biggest Media Conspiracies Exposed
Well before the era of “Fake News,” media strategist and author Ryan Holiday was the first to blow the lid off what many argue to be a corrupt and page-view-centric media that simply fabricates stories to make a quick buck. His controversial book, “Trust Me, I’m Lying” is part confession, part revelation, as it explains how influential blogs have become in our society, and how many abuse their storytelling power to trick your brain into believing the unreal is real. How does Ryan know for sure? Because he was the guy people hired to lie to you. In this interview. Ryan is revealing his secrets along with his brand new book, “Conspiracy,” an examination of the rise and fall of Gawker, and how it rocked the world of media for good. For more from Ryan, check out Conspiracy here: https://amzn.to/2KeNj3Y Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
When we have personal expertise, we see just how off-base the media often is.
You're an expert, you know about all sorts of medical issues, and you watch the news media cover those issues and often get it completely wrong.
So you're like, well, I don't trust them there.
But then we turn around when we're watching them speculate about where LeBron James is going to end up playing or who's going to win for president, and we trust them.
You know what I mean?
what I mean?
It's very alarming that we continue to consume them as if they're only wrong in this one area.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast. I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
Dr. Oz Well, before the era of fake news, media strategist and author Ryan Holiday was the first to blow the lid on what may, actually many would argue anyway, is a corrupt and page-view-centric media that simply fabricates stories to make a quick buck.
His controversial book, Trust Me, I'm Lying, which was my vacation reading this year, is part confession, part revelation, and it explains how influential blogs have become in our society the The main way that information is exchanged, why most of them, he says, most of them are abusing their storytelling to trick your brain into making you believe the unreal is real.
How does Ryan know for sure?
Because he was the guy people hired to lie to you.
Today, Ryan is here revealing his secrets, along with his brand new book, Conspiracy, an examination of the rise and fall of Gawker and how it rocked the world of media for good.
Doc O'Carris, you might all remember, was the inflammatory website, gossip website that was bankrupted through litigation with Hulk Hogan.
We'll get to that in all detail, but I want to talk a little bit about Trust Me, I'm Lying, a fabulously written book, Engaging.
But it was written before the term fake news as part of the international dialogue.
And as I read it, I kept thinking, you know, I can't believe how on top of this he is.
He just, you know, how did he get this book out so quickly?
And then you check the publication date, and you realize you wrote this before most of us even thought about it.
Now, I've got to admit a little bias.
I've been probably the poster child for fake advertising since I was doing the Oprah show.
So, you know, this is my 10th year of the show, so it's, you know, 12, 13 years ago.
I first started seeing my name used illegally.
Illegal in that it's unethical and I have recourse, but it's not illegal in that the government does anything about it.
And we have large media companies making a fortune, internet company, making a fortune on my name, Oprah's name, many other people's names, with no recourse.
And so I began to see this as a problem, but I could not understand why no one cared.
Why did you begin to appreciate this, to understand this?
I think what I was alarmed by as a publicist was, you know, I tried to work with what I thought were ethical companies or people that I liked whose work I wanted to see out in the world.
But then you could see how a lot of the same tactics that you might be using to publicize a good cause or a good company could also be used to divide people, to trick people, to manipulate people.
And so I wanted to sort of rip back the curve.
I wanted to show the public, you know, sort of how the sausage is made.
They think that the news is sort of produced in this, you know, objective, sanitary, you know, environment that cares about you.
And in fact, they are trying to churn out as much content.
They'll cut any corner.
They will, they, you know, there's this joke, if you don't pay for it, you're the product that's being sold.
Yeah.
And that's certainly true.
That is so true.
Yeah, and so people don't realize that they are being sort of manipulated and packaged and then sold to these advertisers, some of whom are probably using the exact tactics that you're talking about.
I know in my case, we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue a year.
May get involved in litigation that I don't sell anything.
You still get pulled into it because people can't even tell.
Fake news, and I think fake news came out of fake advertising, only because fake advertising was about the money.
Yeah.
Clearly.
Turns out fake news is too.
We've had people like Justin Kohler on the show who are very open about the fact that they—well, Justin Kohler wrote the piece, the series of pieces about how Hillary Clinton stuffed the ballot boxes in Ohio in an effort to steal that state during the last election.
Okay.
And he had written these things and was making good jobs.
Now, you may not know this, but he's a Democrat.
So this wasn't politically motivated at all.
And by the way, there were no Russians involved in this.
He did this because he could make money.
And he's very open about it, which I have to respect him for.
And it's interesting to sort of go through this process and you realize, my goodness, well, fake news is about making money just like fake advertising was about making money.
At least in fake advertising, they were clear they were trying to make money.
They were lying for a very clear purpose.
Fake news is more pernicious.
So explain to everybody, if you don't mind, how the fake news that people are talking about and accusations making in Washington now may actually be pretty accurate.
Yeah, it's weird.
Fake news has become this partisan thing.
We say what we don't like is fake news.
But in truth, sort of fake news is across the political spectrum.
You know, we live in a world where most of the news is consumed by people who hear about it through social media, right?
Very few people sort of go to CNN.com.
It's that you pull up Facebook and then you see an article from CNN. So what this creates is...
An incentive for the news to be very inflammatory, to tell people what they want to hear, to be the kind of news that you want to share, so then other people will see it.
So the news becomes sort of stretched and made to be more extreme and manipulative.
That's at the mainstream level.
And then it's sort of below that you have people who will just outright make things up.
And, you know, I think to go to this connection between fake news and fake advertising, if you pull up, you know, even reputable media outlets, you read the article and then you go down to the bottom.
There's that set of sort of salacious thumbnails at the bottom of the articles where it's like, you know, look how Jennifer Aniston lost 700 pounds.
And it's like some manipulated...
These are reputable media outlets selling their traffic to disreputable advertisers who...
Who will say and do anything to get you to click.
So you think you're consuming the news by people who want you to be informed, but really your attention is being captured by people who want to sell that attention to manipulative advertisers.
And so you've just got to realize that these media outlets are not necessarily your friend anymore.
They're not Walter Cronkite trying to give you the truth.
They are people trying to capture or get as much of your attention as possible and then sell it to someone else.
How did you get into this space?
You live on a farm in Austin.
I know that's not where you grew up.
I didn't start there.
I started just as a publicist.
I worked for a number of controversial authors and media brands.
I was the director of marketing at a fashion company called American Apparel.
And so I watched as not just how we would do advertising tactics like that, as you would see sort of, hey, these are all the things you can do, but you would also see how a rumor or a reporter who got a story wrong, you would see, you know, a blog, let's say Gawker, get a story wrong.
Someone would send them an anonymous tip, and then that story would get published.
And then the next thing you know, NPR is calling you to comment on that story.
Or, you know, it's headline news somewhere else.
And so I was watching as these sort of rumors or these half-truths were bubbling up from the internet, but not staying there.
They were becoming real things.
You know, my parents would call me and be like, I heard this happen.
And I'd be like, that didn't happen at all.
Yeah.
I was there.
I was in the room as this happened.
And so it occurred to me that this system could be manipulated and probably was being manipulated.
And I think the most alarming thing for me was realizing that it wasn't just publicists.
It wasn't just, you know, Russia doing things behind the scenes.
But in fact, the news media was kind of complicit in this happening and liked that it was happening because the way their financial model works now, they need this to happen.
There's some very poignant examples you give in the book.
Trust me, I'm lying.
Great title, by the way.
Thank you.
Like a marketer.
Publicist.
Easy to publicize that title.
And there was one that caught my attention where you actually bought a billboard, defaced the billboard, took pictures of the defaced billboard.
Explain why and how your mind even figured this out and then the shocking impact of this.
Well, I was working on a movie called I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, which was mostly targeted at young men.
And so we were thinking, you know, what's the best way you can get young men to want to do something?
And we settled on—we figured the best way to get young men to do something is to tell them they shouldn't be allowed to do something.
It's to make that thing infamous in some way.
So instead of doing a positive advertising campaign for the movie, we did a guerrilla negative advertising campaign for the movie.
So we started a boycott on Facebook, which got thousands of members— We made these deliberately provocative advertisements that we knew blogs would be outraged about.
And then we didn't just hope that they found out about it.
We would take pictures and anonymously send it to blogs and say, I'm so angry about this, can you believe it?
And then we even started vandalizing our own billboards, which we had made to be controversial.
Then we vandalized them.
Then we sent photos.
Then those photos got picked up.
And then real people started doing the same thing.
And, you know, they've done these studies.
They found that outrage and anger are the most viral emotions.
So if the media is driven by what's shared and what people share the most are things that make them angry, you shouldn't be surprised, one, that people do things that make you angry in the news.
So that would be like what marketers do.
And then it shouldn't surprise us that the news seems to make us angry all the time, even at the highest, most elite, most trusted level.
They sort of have internalized this idea that, hey, if we tell people the world is fine or don't worry about this or this is going to sort itself out, they're not going to pay attention.
Yeah, there's no engagement on good news.
Yeah, right.
But can you believe what so-and-so just tweeted or, you know, this is the worst thing that ever happened.
The world is going to end.
That's what gets us to pay attention.
We're only just scratching the surface here.
We've got a whole lot more to discuss after the break.
Explain the money in all this.
And I...
As you were teaching me about this through your words, I began to think about, well, of course it's this way.
It's so predictable.
It's actually taking us back in time, as you actually allude to in the book, to an era when all magazines were tabloidy.
All newspapers were just sold like that, and that changed.
Maybe that's an example we may be able to emulate today.
So, in the very olden days, you know, a city like New York would have had hundreds of daily newspapers.
And all the, you know, we've sort of seen this in movies, the extra, extra read-all about it, the newsboys competing on the street corner shouting more and more extreme headlines.
Well, we got away from that in the middle of the 20th century because most people subscribed to a newspaper.
The New York Times was delivered, the Washington Post, the New York Daily News, whatever it was, you got the newspaper delivered to you.
And then as the internet came, it sort of broke that apart.
Not only did we stop paying for the news, but then there was an infinite number of outlets all competing for your attention.
So economically, they've had to get more and more salacious just to catch your attention.
But then, because people aren't paying for it, They only get paid if they can serve advertising against those impressions.
So the more extreme, the more salacious, the more they catch your attention, that's the only way they can make money, and they can publish an infinite amount of content.
So if you were to go into a newsroom right now of any website, what they would have is a big screen on the wall, and they'd be running a program called Chartbeat.
And Chartbeat actually...
Illustrates itself as an odometer.
And so you can see how the traffic is going.
And so it's like everyone is writing and publishing as fast as they can, as salacious as they can, to keep...
You know, it's like the movie Speed.
Like, we can't go below 80 miles an hour, the bus explodes.
And so they're publishing just as much as possible.
And the writers themselves know that not only are they being paid to some degree based on how much traffic they get, but they'll get fired if they don't.
You know, if you worked six months on an investigative report for a newspaper in the 50s, that was great.
You did a great job.
This is true.
You know, here's a Pulitzer Prize.
But now if you work six months on a story and it doesn't get 600,000 page views, you might get fired, right?
You can't take, not only can you not take that much time to work on a story and make sure you get it right, but if it doesn't deliver traffic, you didn't do your job.
And so basically everyone in the media is obsessed with how many tweets, how many Facebook shares, how many views did this story get, and everyone to some degree is compensated based on that as well.
And so, you know, what gets traffic is often at odds with what is true and real and the complicated nuances of reality.
As a consumer, how on earth do you discriminate the real from the clickbait?
I mean, it's extraordinarily difficult.
It's also interesting to think, it's not like more news is happening in the world, right?
There's the same amount of time, but we're all consuming more and more news, right?
And I think that's illustrative of, as news has been devalued, the media has had to trick us into consuming more to stay in the same place.
So I think one of the things discriminating...
What a viewer or reader or listener needs to do is just consume a lot less information.
Like, to ask yourself, am I actually going to act on this in any way, right?
Like, how much of the news on Monday is made irrelevant by Friday?
Because it wasn't actually news.
It was speculation about what might happen on Wednesday, and then what the response to that would be on Thursday.
Meanwhile, if you just waited until Friday, you would have gotten the facts.
You give a great example with Politico.
Creating a presidential campaign, which I witnessed this whole thing.
I never was aware of it.
This is a beautiful example of what you're speaking to.
Yeah, I talked about how, you know, you go back to 2008 and then 2012 and then 2016, and then we're going to see it again in 2020, is that not only is the cycle starting earlier and earlier, but the staffs are getting bigger and bigger at each one of these outlets because traffic goes up but the staffs are getting bigger and bigger at each one of these And so they're trying to kind of keep us in this perpetual election.
It's almost, it's crazy to think 2016 was two years ago, but it feels like we're still in that campaign.
And then it's going to seamlessly bleed into 2020 because if they can keep us, again, sort of outraged and paying attention, like this is a matter of life and death, their chart beat number is going to stay where they want it to stay.
The last thing that they can afford is for us to turn off the computer and go home with our families or turn off the computer and actually, you know, contribute to society or, you know what I mean?
Like what they don't want, they want you to be signing petitions.
They don't want you to be taking real action, because taking real action requires you to get up from your computer or put your phone down.
Well, the example I'm thinking of, I think it was Pawlenty.
He was propped up as a presidential candidate.
I don't even know if he thought he was running.
I can't even tell.
And so now we're all excited about this guy I've not heard that much about, but seems really clean-cut and solid-cut.
I think it was from Minnesota.
And then his campaign...
It doesn't go anywhere.
There's a couple months of lots of rich content about a person who I didn't hear that much from.
Was he even running?
I mean, that's the question.
It's like, who is the tail wagging the dog here?
Is the media making things real?
And look, you could argue again, not being partisan about it.
But they quantified how much free publicity Trump got in the 2016 election.
Something like $2 billion worth of free publicity.
But it's not really free, right?
Because you said whatever you're getting for free, you're being sold.
So somebody was making money on that.
Right.
No, the media made tons of money.
It's that Donald Trump didn't have to pay for that attention.
And I think, you know, you could argue that one—Donald Trump has been talking about running for president for 30 years.
I think he first talked about it in 1987. Well, what's different?
Well, the media system has been going this direction, and they finally intersect at the perfect level that we have a media system that is perfect for a reality television candidate— Yeah.
years ago now, but we're still talking as though we're still in it, to your point, was that every single newspaper, I believe, in the country, with one exception, in their op-ed pages, urged their voters against supporting him.
Every newspaper in the country that you've ever heard of told you to vote for the other candidate, and yet he still got elected, which does underline one of the points you're making, which is traditional media has become unreliable, and I think America's figured it out, which is really problematic, and And if someone's always loved news and understands the value of news in an open society, we're no better than any despotic system if our public doesn't have a news media they can trust.
In this case, we did it to ourselves.
Well, there's a quote I have in the book that actually dates to like the early 1900s where this social scientist is saying, you know, America as a democratic republic is a country governed by public opinion.
And so he says, well, what governs public opinion?
Because that's what governs the country.
And so at that point, it was these sort of unreliable newspapers.
Well, today it's these sort of unreliable blogs.
And yeah, you're right.
It's totally alarming that the people who are supposed to be experts, who are supposed to know what's happening, would get the election so completely wrong.
And then what's interesting, there's this thing called the gel amnesia effect, which is that you're an expert, you know a lot about all sorts of medical issues, and you watch the news media cover that thing, cover those issues, and often get it completely wrong.
Yes, shockingly.
And then, so you're like, well, I don't trust them there.
But then we turn around when we're watching them speculate about where LeBron James is going to end up playing or who's going to win for president or even the weather.
And we trust them.
And we don't really, you know what I mean?
It's very alarming that when we have personal expertise, we see just how off base the media often is.
Or in the election, we see just how badly they missed it.
And then we continue to follow and consume them as if they're only wrong in this one area.
Like, my son was actually born on November 9th, so the election return sent my wife into labor.
And I remember we were sitting there, and I was on my phone, and I was somewhat despondent about the election.
And I'm reading some opinion piece from someone who's telling me this is what this all means.
And then it was like, wait...
Two days ago you were telling me that he was never going to get elected.
Why am I turning around and listening to you tell me what this now means?
And so we have this weird system where they've gotten so good at manipulating our emotions that we continue to give them our attention and time even though we know they have very little credibility.
Up next, Ryan reveals the biggest media conspiracies of all time and what you can do to stop it.
I'm much more tolerant of people earnestly trying to tell the news the right way.
I mean, you listen to us sometimes on ESPN, they have old games.
Yeah.
You listen to the broadcasters, and during the game, they're getting it all wrong.
Yeah.
Oh, the emotion shifted.
They're coming the wrong way.
He's not going to be able to make the shot.
And then, of course, you know what happened at the end, and their entire attitude shifts, because they're fair-weather fans, unfortunately, frequently.
That's human nature.
It's the pernicious...
Under appreciation that I've been conned on purpose because someone's making money off me that's most upsetting.
Again, I'm living it.
Yes.
And unable to protect myself.
I mean, there are narratives about me, about this podcast.
People who have never seen this podcast before will write things about it.
I know they don't see it because they're writing comments before it came out.
They're not even real people, though.
If you read the comments, it's crazy.
It's almost like they've been given a script and they're too stupid to rewrite it individually.
So it's like one or two words are different and then it's like these fake...
Fake accounts.
And I can't tell if they're helping me or hurting me.
Maybe they're helping me.
And that's the bizarre part about this.
Well, what's interesting is like you would never want to read a report on Google from, or Tesla, let's say, from a reporter who short that stock or invested in that company, right?
Because you know they would be biased.
Well, what if that reporter is paid based on how much traffic their article does?
It doesn't matter.
Now it's actually even more alarming because they don't care about whether the company's stock goes up and down.
They care about whether the stock of their story goes up and down.
So, you know, if I'm a blogger...
I don't care about you.
You're not even a human to me.
What I care about is if I say something positive, how many views will it get?
Maybe X.
If I say something negative, how many views will it get?
Maybe 2X, you know, or maybe it's reversed.
But I'm not, that's the really alarming thing to me is how dehumanizing this has become that we don't even think about the people on the other side of the story.
We just think, you know, Does society hate this person or love this person?
Or can I attack this person that society loves and get attention?
Or can I pile on this person that society hates?
And And it's really, really scary because, you know, we can end up driving good people out of the system or we can just, you know, it's just abusive and awful.
I see it in medicine.
Fans will call me frequently and say, well, I don't understand.
First they were good, now they're bad.
And how come doctors can't figure it out?
And I'm sort of left saying, well, actually, I don't think it's that confusing on the inside.
But on the outside, of course, it's miserably confusing because people are purposely writing articles.
Omega-3s are too good.
Yeah.
They're too popular now.
I'm going to write an article about how omega-3s cause cancer.
Ah, worse.
Alzheimer's.
Yeah.
No, make it worse.
It ages you prematurely and causes Alzheimer's.
And then you make this stuff up and you write it and you take one little tidbit, which you can always manipulate, to your point.
And it's not that they have a vested interest against omega-3s.
They don't hate fish.
Right.
They literally are just trying to get you to read.
Which brings me back to you.
You know, you seem like you were on the dark side.
You were very honest about it, and trust me, I'm lying.
And I don't know, I trust him, and you think he's lying to me?
I can't even tell.
That's a liar's paradox.
You trust someone telling you that they're lying.
We're all Cretans.
That's right, we're all in Crete now.
So why?
Why made you come to lie?
And this happened before your son was born, so I know it wasn't just a responsibility.
I do feel like I was dancing with some of that dark side.
I was, you know, 23, 24 years old.
And it just became, first off, it was like, this is not who I want to be.
This is not what I want to do with my life.
And also, what would someone who is going to be acting in even worse faith, how could they abuse this?
And so that's why I wanted to write the book.
I wanted to show people how this works.
And I also wanted to show people in the media how this works.
And my naive thinking in 2012 when the first edition of the book came out was, if I can show the media where these loopholes are and where they're getting manipulated, they'll stop.
And the alarming thing is that was the opposite of what they wanted because this is very good for business.
So let's go through some of these points.
Help a reporter out.
Haro.
Yeah.
People don't realize when you see an expert quoted in the media, it's not like the media, it's not like that reporter, you know, knocked on a bunch of doors and found this expert.
Sometimes they'll just tweet out, hey, I'm looking for somebody to tell me X.
And then someone says, oh, I'll do it.
And so it actually creates...
We even found this in the election.
Reporters quoted, I think, on 1,900 different occasions fake Russian trolls in the media as experts or as sources in stories because they were just...
Looking around on Twitter to see what people were saying.
These weren't even real people.
I don't blame Haro, help a reporter out.
I think it's a noble effort to help a reporter out.
I blame the reporter who's too lazy to triangulate, especially a ridiculous claim.
Yes.
Just...
You know, in my own case, when people write things about me, I would expect that they would call me to get an opinion, a fact, nothing.
I don't remember the last time a reporter called us, anyone in my group, asking for our opinion.
Right.
About whether something was true.
Or a fact check.
Anything.
Anything.
I mean, it's just shocking.
I mean, literally, a phone call would, any phone call, would have allowed us to at least either defend ourselves or offer some clarity on something that's clearly wrong.
And yet, you can't even defend yourself after it's published, because why bother?
Because that makes sense.
It's like a news cycle.
And I'm just a microcosm of what we're seeing in a much bigger picture.
And I think readers will sometimes see an article, let's say it's a negative piece about you, and then at the bottom will go, Dr. Oz did not respond to requests for comment.
And so you go, he must be hiding something.
Why didn't he respond?
And they don't realize that actually the story was already written, and they emailed you six seconds before it was about to go live.
Even if you had commented, it wouldn't have made a difference for the story, but they actually deliberately set it up that way so you couldn't respond.
You're a busy person.
They're not giving you five days to put your thoughts together.
Ryan, literally, they don't even call or ask.
I've noticed this actually over the last two years.
They stopped writing it at the bottom.
I used to notice that.
It would irritate me because I never had a chance, but now they don't even do that.
They don't even call.
I don't know the article's coming out.
A friend will say, why'd you do this?
What are you talking about?
So Harlow's tip of the iceberg.
SEO payola.
Search engine optimization payola.
What's that about?
I got an email about this yesterday.
Someone said, hey, look, I noticed you write for all these websites.
I will pay you cash if you mention or link to my articles or my content in your articles.
How much do you charge?
These can go for thousands of dollars.
So people don't even realize when you Google something, Iterative journalism.
Well, this goes to what we were talking about earlier.
You know, very rarely is a news story, here's what happened, right?
It's here's what might happen, or here's what we hear is happening, or here's how will so-and-so respond to the news about X. That might happen.
Yeah, so it's this sort of speculation on top of speculation, or it's The story is developing.
You know, one of the benefits of, say, reading a newspaper is at the very least, some time has elapsed.
And they had to sort of put it all on the record.
Well, what if you, you know, you could pull up a Wikipedia page at 9 a.m.
and feel like the facts are one thing.
And at 2.30 p.m., it could be a totally different page because you're not seeing a finished product.
You're seeing a snapshot in time of a developing thing.
And that allows reporters to be lazy.
So instead of getting it right the first time, you know, I quote the founder of a site called TechCrunch, which is a big tech website.
You know, his line was, getting it right is expensive, getting it first is cheap.
And so that, you've got to understand, that's the ethos of a lot of these bloggers is like, I'll get it right, I'll get it up, and then I can correct it.
But that doesn't do anything for the person who read the incorrect version five seconds after it came up.
We never read the same story more than once.
And then it's probably writing about it because bloggers get their ideas from other bloggers.
Totally.
Right?
So they've now misquoted something.
Let's talk about that.
Lisa and I were at dinner with this very senior diplomat from a big country.
And we were talking about your book.
Oh.
In a favorable light, by the way.
Thank you.
And he listened and he said, this is fascinating because actually that's what we do.
And I said, what specifically is what a typical thing we would do is we would get three bloggers to write about something that is not all that relevant to what people should know.
But it tends to portray an initiative that we care about in the right light.
And under his breath basically saying these were dishonest blogs.
Yeah.
You know, there's an energy crisis in the southern part of our country.
Yeah.
And so these three guys write this thing.
And they're three bloggers that have zero credibility in the space.
They are paid hacks.
And then they let that circulate for a week or two or three, like making a soup.
And then they'll go to a journalist that's a reputable journalist and say, you know, there's this emerging science and insight about the energy crisis in the southern part of our country.
And now the biggest paper writes an article based on three blogs written by guys who have no business talking about that.
It's sort of like the climate change argument.
And you're sort of sitting there and say, oh my goodness, I've been completely manipulated because a big journalist wasn't willing to do even a little bit of homework.
And not to be overly harsh on them, if they didn't write the article, someone else would have written it anyway.
And the way they get their leads is to...
So some of it's old-fashioned journalism and manipulating the press, but much of it is based on an incredibly sloppy process where we don't even have fact-checkers at the New York Times anymore.
Yeah, as I call it, trading up the chain in the book.
These things start really small.
It could start as a tweet.
It could start as a blog post.
It could start as a comment at a press conference, and it goes up and up.
If you remember the movie Wag the Dog, which is a great...
What about the B-2 bomber?
Can you comment on the B-2 bomber?
And everyone's like, what's the B-2 bomber?
You know, and now all of a sudden everyone's talking about it.
And I think, you know, hostile powers or international sort of adversaries have really mastered that.
They go, hey, if we can get people to talk about this conspiracy theory, then when so-and-so has to come out and deny it, that's actually people hearing about it for the first time.
And so even if that mainstream reporter is doing it right and saying this is not true, there is no energy crisis in Russia or China or whatever, people are like, what?
There's an energy crisis in China?
This is the first time hearing about it.
And so, you know, these are what conspiracy theorists exploit, certainly.
But if you listen to other world leaders talking about it, which, of course, most of us don't get exposed to it, but if you actually listen to a long interview with Putin, not to support his policies, but you start to think, my goodness, who's telling the truth here?
Because his version of the truth is so different from the Chinese premier's version of the truth versus our president's version of the truth.
Then you start to say, my goodness, if we can't agree on the facts, how can we possibly agree on solutions to those problems?
Yeah, right.
It's not just that we're divided politically.
It's that we can't even agree on what is real and not real right now.
What somebody thinks is fake news, somebody else thinks is very important, and what they think is fake news, the other person thinks is not real.
So how do you know somebody's clickbait?
Help our audience appreciate the telltale signs that you're being conned.
Well, I think we always want to be wary of the confirmation bias.
So I think a good sign, if this tells you exactly what you already think, that should be very alarming, right?
You should be looking for information that disconfirms what you think.
So if the headline is so perfect, if it aligns exactly with what you already think, that should alarm you.
I think the other thing is, if it dies out, if it cries out for you to share it, that should also be a sign that perhaps you're being manipulated.
You know, you also want to look at where is this outlet coming from?
How did you hear about it?
You know...
The other thing that I think about, and one of the reasons I've started to consume less news and started to read more, is that a book, and obviously I'm an author, so I'm biased, but one, a book you have to pay for.
So if it's not good, it's not going to sell.
But also, there are We're good to go.
And you feel like it's super urgent, that might be a sign that you're being manipulated.
It's funny you say that, because Fareed Zakaria, who's one of my favorite people, you know, big journalists, he has to report daily.
I wanted to find out what newspapers he reads.
Yeah.
He says, well, and granted, he has a staff that prepares briefings for him, so he may not be the normal person.
He says, well, I don't really read newspapers that much.
Yeah.
I said, what?
I said, what magazines?
I don't know.
He gave me a couple names, but he said, they're not really my Bible.
I said, what do you read?
I read books.
I said, why?
He said, because someone sat down for a year or longer and wrote this down.
There's something substantive there, or he would never have wasted his time.
He wouldn't have paid for all the reasons you give.
I think it's a callback to the importance of something.
You're better off reading Dostoevsky and understanding crime and punishment than trying to catch up on some rumor that's about to come down.
Right.
In the State and Defense Department, as they're trying to figure out what to do about China, they're reading History of the Peloponnesian War, which is 2,500 years old.
If the most informed people in the world are reading a 2,000-year-old book to figure out what to do about some world crisis, maybe we could follow that example a little bit.
You reference in the book some research on the brain and how the brain processes.
Some of it's confirmation bias, which I get, but share as a doctor, educate a doctor on how the brain responds to some of these tantalizing tidbits of information.
Well, one of the interesting ones that I write about in the book is what we call the backfire effect.
So if you read an article and it's incorrect, because the reporter got it wrong or they were manipulated, and then you see a correction for that article, it doesn't make you change your mind.
It actually makes you believe what you were told originally even more.
And so this whole idea of iterative journalism, like, hey, we'll correct it as we go, is actually based on really shoddy science.
It's super hard to get people to change their mind.
And again, so if you read about the energy crisis in China...
And then you read a story that says there's no energy crisis in China.
You now believe it more because you've now heard on two separate occasions about the energy crisis in China.
So there must be something going on.
Right.
People listening to this, now they're going to have energy crisis in China bouncing around their head, even though we're just talking about it theoretically.
The mind is really bad at just sort of Having something and it's bouncing around, but not holding it to be true.
And I think that's what the media exploits, too.
We're like, somebody took the time to write this down.
It must be true.
And that's not the case.
I think biologically we're hardwired to believe things written down.
Yes.
It's so firm, so rich.
Unlike our voice, which sends lots of subtlety.
When we speak, and much of our brain grows as high as it is, in order to process auditory clues, we can tell a lot about what you really are trying to say by the timber tone, etc.
We don't have that with the written word.
You just have to look at the words.
And there are poetic ways of doing it, but let me shift gears for a second.
Conspiracy, your new book.
Again, I must commend you.
Whatever anyone thinks about you personally, you're a beautiful writer.
Thank you.
This whole story of Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and some talk about was the anatomy of intrigue.
Bring us all up to speed on what really went down and why this is so profoundly important for media and the internet.
Well, we talked about the media sort of acting in bad faith.
In 2007, a website called Gawker outed Peter Thiel, who was then an unknown technology investor, as gay.
Just sort of cruelly, meanly just said, hey, I believe the headline of the article is, Peter Thiel is totally gay people.
And that's not illegal.
You can do that.
But it is...
Unethical, too.
Yeah.
And so, but he had no recourse.
And so he waited then for almost five years until they ran a stolen sex tape of the celebrity wrestler Hulk Hogan.
And he approached Hogan and he said, look, I will back you in a lawsuit against this media outlet because I don't think that they should be allowed to exist anymore.
And so from 2011 until 2016, he secretly backed this lawsuit.
And they ended up winning $140 million judgment against Gawker that bankrupted them.
And so, to me, it's one of the first signs that, hey, maybe this is turning in the right direction, that Here's a media outlet getting held accountable for what they posted.
Perhaps at an extreme level, you know, maybe there's a little bit of scapegoating there.
But here is someone using their resources to say, actually, wait, there is a line.
You are accountable to what you say and do.
And perhaps somebody being secretly recorded in their bedroom in a consensual sexual encounter is nobody's business.
Why is it a conspiracy?
Well, he did this in secret, you know, for all this time.
And nobody knew he was behind it.
Gawker thought they were...
What's so interesting is Gawker thought they were only fighting an ordinary celebrity.
And so they said, look, we'll just bankrupt this guy.
We'll just keep fighting and fighting and he'll never be able to win and he'll be so embarrassed by the process that he'll never have recourse.
They didn't know that he was part of this secret conspiracy that had a blank check from a billionaire that said, no, we are going to win and we're going to win in the court of law.
And that's ultimately what happened.
So, you know, obviously on the one hand, it's scary that a billionaire could bankrupt a media outlet.
On the other hand, it's also scary that a media outlet could publish stolen material of essentially no public value, humiliate this person and know that they'll in almost no normal circumstances could anyone hold them accountable for this.
What was stunning to me, yes, it did highlight the audacity of Gawker to believe they could use the law as a weapon.
And the reason they believe that crazy idea is, of course, they can't.
Yeah, right.
All big companies to use.
The law is used very effectively as a battle tool, which is part of the reason it is the way it is.
It's not a bad thing, it's just the way it is.
But what caught my attention with the Gawker settlement is how many big media outlets were horribly offended by the settlement.
And how the public was cheering.
First of all, where's your social responsibility?
And I admit that I would feel some fear.
I was an editor of a big-time paper.
This might happen to me, too.
So there's out there.
But you have to draw the line somewhere, as you point out.
And most importantly, they're not...
Traditional media is not defending itself.
It's being raped and pillaged, I believe, daily with internet media outlets, money of which flows to the biggest internet companies in America, who are completely above reproach.
I mean, there was this gargantuan settlement in England, I think it was like $600,000 against one of the big guys.
I mean, it's shocking.
I say gargantuan, not financially.
It was ridiculous.
But the issue was a big issue.
I think it was a privacy issue, and the settlement was $600,000.
Which is nothing.
You're basically saying it doesn't matter.
Right.
That's what they just got.
Half a second.
So I think there was a lot of outrage by Americans who say, media, at least join up a little bit and protect yourselves from I mean, Americans value people who stand up for what they believe is right.
We're not seeing that right now at any level.
They're not protecting themselves against the internet moguls who are coming down on them.
The hordes are racing and nothing's out there.
They get upset about the Gawker settlement I was cheering.
I think it was fantastic.
At least it sends a little shot across the bow of people saying, well, maybe I need to be a little bit ethical.
Right.
And for me, of course, at a personal level, I get frustrated by this because, you know, it's very hard to defend yourself in a world where it's very easy to take pot shots.
Yeah.
And you're not allowed to fight back.
And when you do, which we've had to, and others, I mean, I'm not the only one.
Many others have done this as well.
People actually start to get up and cheer for you.
And I think a lot of this takes me back to the fundamental question I had in all of your writings, which is, what do we do about it?
And if you could, take us out of this wonderful program with my time with you.
Yeah.
Explaining yellow journalism and how traditional, high, really respected media outlets that we today still have changed that.
And could that subscription model be the solution to the challenges we face today?
Because without an open and free news media, democracy is at risk in America.
I think number one thing is we should probably consume less news, right?
There's too much in the way that there's too many Ubers in New York City and now none of them can make a living.
There's too much media.
We're consuming too much of it.
It's devalued it.
But we need to pay for the media that we do consume.
So instead of mindlessly consuming links on Facebook, find a media outlet that you trust, that you think is respectable, and consume that media outlet regularly and pay for it.
And if it's not for sale, subscribe.
What's so great about podcasts is that Here we are having a long-form discussion.
It's unedited.
It's thoughtful.
There's a time delay.
And then people are subscribing to it.
It's being delivered to you via iTunes.
You're not hearing, can you believe what Ryan Holiday said on Dr. Oz today on Twitter?
You know, it's out of that sort of echo chamber of noise.
And people forget that in the late 1800s, the New York Times was a sensational yellow media outlet.
It was only switching to be a subscription media outlet that it became the reputable paper that it once was.
And, you know, when you look at a headline for something like the Pentagon Papers, it wasn't like the president lied.
You know, exclamation point.
It wasn't exclusive.
You'll never believe.
You know, it wasn't clickbait.
It was, report says, you know, it's this long, subtle headline.
Because in a subscription environment, when it's being delivered to you and you're sitting down over your morning coffee and you're spending some time with the news...
It doesn't have to be salacious and extreme, and it can be trustworthy, and it can treat you with respect, and you can treat it with respect.
And if they mislead you, you stop paying them, and that hurts them where it counts.
Ryan Holiday, thank you very much.
You're wonderful books.
Conspiracy just came out.
Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue.
And you've got to go back and find, trust me, I'm lying, it is a fantastically written book that will make sense of a lot of the things you're struggling with today.
Ryan, it's a great pleasure.
Thanks.
Thank you.
Thank you for all your advice and congratulations on your insights, waking us up to the craziness in the media world.
