You're Being Lied To
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I'm Barry Weiss, and this is Honestly. About a year ago today, I left a job that anyone in their right mind would have probably clung to for dear life. It was stable. It was pretty well paid. It was a job in the media in a time where the media is collapsing. It was at a print newspaper, which feels like a thing that won't exist a few years from now. And it wasn't just any newspaper. It was the New York Times. Why did I leave?

It's a question that my grandma, a lifetime Time subscriber, has been asking me pretty much every day since. And the best answer that I can give her is to read my resignation letter. I wrote this. The lessons that ought to have followed the 2016 election, lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, about the necessity of resisting tribalism, about the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society, those lessons have not been learned.

Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper, that truth isn't a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everybody else. I became a journalist to pursue my curiosity. I certainly didn't become a journalist to get rich. And all of a sudden, it felt to me that that curiosity was a liability and not an advantage.

As I wrote in my letter, why edit something challenging to our readers or write something bold only to go through the numbing process of making it ideologically kosher when we can assure ourselves of job security and clicks by publishing the 4,000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world? And so self-censorship has become the norm. Now, of course, this story isn't a story that's unique to the times. This is a story about the entire corporate legacy institutional press.

And nearing the anniversary of my own Jerry Maguire moment, I've been thinking a lot about the state of America's press, about when and why papers like The Times abandon the idea of all the news that's fit to print and embrace something more like all the news that fits the narrative or all the news that pushes our politics.

So it was with all this on my mind that I sat down with the writer, the author, the bookstore owner, the Daily Stoic podcast hosts, and just generally brilliant guy, Ryan Holiday. We spent the first half of our conversation walking through the kind of unbelievable story of Gawker's rise and its fall. Gawker being an early online media company whose ethos and tactics really recast what journalism in this country was all about.

And we talked about how Gawker played a role in creating a lot of the problems that I think we're facing today. In the second half of the conversation, we expand out and we try and do our best to diagnose what exactly is at the heart of our media problem, why no one trusts what they read, including the two of us, and whether there's a way we can help change that. Because I think we both agree that changing that is essential if we want to protect our liberal democracy.

And then Ryan does his best to stage an intervention on behalf of my completely undisciplined daily routines. He's a stoic. And for some reason, that means that he is also like very disciplined for reasons that he will explain. It was a really fascinating and fun conversation. He's incredibly smart and thoughtful. And I'm grateful to Ryan for giving me so much of his time. So please stay with us and we'll be back right after this.

This podcast is supported by FX's English Teacher, a new comedy from executive producers of What We Do in the Shadows and Baskets. English Teacher follows Evan, a teacher in Austin, Texas, who learns if it's really possible to be your full self at your job, while often finding himself at the intersection of the personal, professional, and political aspects of working at a high school. FX's English Teacher premieres September 2nd on FX. Stream on Hulu.

Ryan Holiday, thank you so much for speaking with me today. Yeah, I'm very excited. I'm a big fan. I'm a big fan of yours too. So you're a person with a really extensive biography, considering that you're a few years younger than me, so I already sort of hate you for that. I think for a lot of people who encounter you, you are the stoic guy. You're the guy that sort of popularized this philosophical movement. You've written a lot of books.

many bestselling books, but most recently books based on these stoic ideals. You have a podcast, you have a newsletter, you have a bookstore, you live on a ranch in Texas. Somehow you exercise every day and you also have two children and what looks like a really happy marriage. So you kind of have this amazing life, which we're going to get to. But the way that I came to know your name was because of a book that you wrote called Conspiracy. Yeah.

And I read it actually on the verge of leaving the New York Times. So I read it about a year ago. And I read it during a time when conspiracies were all over the place in the culture and continue to be all over the place. But this was a book about a real conspiracy, a conspiracy led by a

mysterious Silicon Valley billionaire named Peter Thiel, a conspiracy that involved Hulk Hogan and warring Florida DJs and a sex tape. And the conspiracy essentially crushed the

What in my mind was kind of the pinnacle of the New York Brooklyn elite media scene, which was a media company called Gawker. So I wanted to start with that story. What was Gawker? Why was Peter Thiel obsessed with it? And start to tell us the story about how it ended up getting taken down through this pretty long, I think more than five year conspiracy. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, the word blog is now such a part of our culture that it's difficult for people to remember that that's a relatively recent invention. Like Gawker is one of the first blogs, the first time people just started posting sort of news stories on the internet outside the media system with a sort of a different set of ethics and standards and practices. And

Lo and behold, it was wildly, wildly popular. Gawker starts as this blog in a guy named Nick Denton's Manhattan living room and grows into...

you know, a company that by the mid to late 2000s was doing hundreds of millions of page views and then later billions of page views a year. And basically the ethos of Gawker was Nick Denton said, I want to publish the stories that journalists talk about in a bar, but would never actually publish, which is fascinating. And it,

exciting in one sense. And there are these kind of open secrets in every industry. And then the other side of that is that there are many things that people talk about, gossip, rumors, you know, lies, and there's a reason they never get published. So Gawker sort of makes a name for itself publishing, uh,

Some stories that other people wouldn't touch and then other stories that people wouldn't touch because they were horrible and wrong and awful. And so it becomes this powerhouse in media that sort of everyone talked about.

everyone read, even if they didn't admit that they read it. I mean, there was a time in my life that I was checking it 10 times a day. Oh, me too. Yeah. For sure. For sure. And for people who haven't heard of it, you have definitely heard of stories that Gawker broke because of its unique role in the media ecosystem, which is because people like you and I were reading it 10 times a day. And because it's so often focused on sort of pet issues or personalities in that media scene.

stories that would break on Gawker, regardless of their veracity, regardless of the sourcing, regardless of the tone or style would often get filtered out into the rest of the media. So Gawker would break a story or put up a, an unsourced rumor, uh,

or someone in the comments section on Gawker would do this. And then that might be a lead story on CNN or the New York Times like a day or two later. So it had this enormous influential role. Yeah, it's almost like if we think about the role that Twitter plays today in terms of starting, you know, a story will sort of bubble up there, you know, and

And then two days later or maybe a week later, it's being covered by CNN and The New York Times. Before Twitter was that thing, Gawker was that. That's right. That's totally right. And, you know, it's important to note that this evolves over like 10 plus years. So, you know, Gawker goes through different iterations, but it sort of starts as this very bloggy website that's, you know, run out of this guy's living room.

But then it grows to be this behemoth, but it still maintains this sort of living room ethos. So there, you know, when it was this tiny Manhattan gossip blog, it would, you know, surface, you know, an anonymous tip or a stolen photo or, you know, attacks. So it kind of had this reputation of punching up. But as it got bigger and bigger and bigger, even though it still saw itself as the underdog, it was reaching literally billions of

of people. And so it was kind of this wild, out-of-control dumpster fire that was just about to explode. So for people like me and you, ink-stained wretches, let's say, it's obvious why a publication like Gawker would be supremely interesting to us. Why does it then become interesting to Peter Thiel?

Well, in 2006, one of Gawker's websites, Gawker was actually a collection of websites. So when we talk about Gawker, we're really talking about Gawker media as a whole. But one of Gawker's websites, Valleywag, which is sort of a gossip website about Silicon Valley, which again, credit to Gawker, is itself an interesting innovation. Like it's this New York-focused media company that's

that goes, hey, what's happening over on the West Coast? These are the new business celebrities. Like these are the new pop culture figures. We're gonna cover them as if they're the same as Matt Lauer or any sort of big New York media personality. And so this small blog in Silicon Valley writes an article about Peter Thiel, who then was known as one of the early co-founders of PayPal and the first outside investor in Facebook.

And it writes a piece titled Peter Thiel is seriously gay people. And this was a fact that Peter Thiel was not public about for a variety of reasons.

And in his reading, the website outs him and does so. I think what really weighs on him is not so much the public versus not public, but that he was somehow twisted or strange or conflicted. And that's why he was not out.

The first time I remember learning about Peter Thiel was when I saw the movie The Social Network. That's who Mark Zuckerberg goes into the meeting with. Jesse Eisenberg's playing Mark Zuckerberg, and he's wearing the pajama pants, I think, and the flip-flops, and he gets this check from Peter Thiel.

And so Gawker outs him, Ballywag outs him. And what does he then do? What does this outing sort of spark in him other than, of course, rage? Well, what he does is nothing because there was really nothing you could do about it. So and this is true for all public figures. You know, you sort of get told like, look, people are going to gossip. They're going to say things about you. They're going to attack you. You have to have a thick skin about it. You have to just get used to it.

And I don't think he liked that. The idea that you just don't do something about it did not sit well with him. There is sort of a naivete to Peter at this time. I was talking to someone who was at Gawker around the time this happened, and Peter had met with him. And Peter's question was something like,

why would someone write this about someone? How can they do this? Sort of not understanding both that it was allowed and that someone would, that people would find this interesting and that people would do it and that this was a whole sort of cottage industry. Yeah, that this was totally common. Yes. He's like being rudely introduced

to a world that as a entrepreneurial focused, like hyper geek, it just is not

his universe and he finds that he doesn't like it. But I think what rubs him wrong the most is the powerlessness about it. You know, if let's say you suddenly found yourself a billionaire, I have to imagine that things that you or I as sort of mere ordinary people just readily resign ourselves to, you suddenly go, why am I putting up with this? What good is this fortune?

if somebody else gets to decide how I'm seen by the public. I think Peter wrestled with that. And then I do feel like he also did feel quite violated by this, that he found it to be morally repugnant that Peter

one person could decide on their own that another person's sexuality is the world's business. And I think Peter was wrestling at this time, like, am I just a behind the scenes venture capitalist? Because again, going back to 2006, you know, Facebook is a fast growing company, but it's not worth a trillion dollars, right? But there was this kind of wrestling with the like, who am I? What kind of power do I have? What am I going to put up with?

And how can I affect change in the world if I don't like something? So what does he decide to do? Well, again, he does nothing for a pretty extended period of time. You know, I think he explores some different legal options, but it's basically told again, there's nothing you can do about it. Like you can't sue them for libel, you're going to lose, etc. It's not illegal what they did to you. Right. You know, I think that's what he's hearing over and over again. And even if it was,

You know, there's that old expression, you don't go to war with people who buy ink by the barrel. I have indeed heard that expression. Yeah, I think people, because the press often is, you know, victims of sort of real authoritarian attempts to shut it down.

the press always presents itself as the underdog, but anyone who's ever either been a public figure or known a public figure knows that also the media has a large moat around it that protects it from the consequences of its actions because, first off, it's very expensive to sue anyone for any of these things. There's a whole bunch of precedent on their side and,

Let's say a media outlet writes something horribly untrue about you. To fight that, you have to repeat things.

the allegation over and over again, right? Like, I am not a rapist. Like, I am not this. So it's this sort of, there's nothing you can do about your specific situation kind of a thing. And then it's not until a chance encounter with a young kid who sort of sees what this is worth to Peter and presents him with...

idea of doing something about it. And this is when the conspiracy of the title of the book and really the story begins, because until then we have, you know, a seething, angry guy who, you know, is pissed, but can't find any way to seek his revenge. And then all of a sudden you have, you know, this in the book, he's anonymous, essentially this fixer.

who decides, I'm going to help you do something about it. Yeah, not unlike the many young fixers or ambitious people that Peter has met and invested in over the years, right? Normally, that's a Mark Zuckerberg, or it's one of the co-founders of Palantir, or the people he recruits at PayPal, or any of the startups that, you know, he's invested in over the years. He has a knack for identifying talent,

and identifying initiative and identifying people who can get stuff done. And so at a, you know, a restaurant in Berlin, the two of them meet. And, you know, Peter does seem to always kind of be on the lookout for interesting people. I met a number of them over the years. But they're having this sort of general meeting, general dinner about stuff, and Gawker comes up and the kid says, you know, what are you going to do about it? And Peter repeating what,

He had been told so many times that there's nothing you could do about it is met with a response from this kid. Again, a pretty ballsy move. But he says, Peter, if everyone thought that way, if everyone thought that there was nothing you could do about things, what would the world look like?

And I think this is just sort of music to Peter's ears. It perfectly strikes both where he is ideologically as well as egotistically. And he decides like, okay, let's do something about it. He kind of calls this kid's bluff and ends up earmarking close to $10 million to this kid to try to get what some would call revenge and others would call justice, which

But, you know, you could put both of those judgments aside and say what he wanted to do was something about the situation. So how does Hulk Hogan come into the picture? Well, this is Teal's real genius and the genius of the conspiracy. So this begins because Teal...

Teal believes he's outed. And I talked to Owen Thomas, the writer of the piece. In Gawker. Yeah. Who, you know, says in his view that he didn't out him, that this is sort of public information and he's well within his rights to do this and that there was no ill intent. So I think it's worth putting that out on the record. But

In Peter's view, he was, you know, sort of cruelly outed and exposed and then mocked for his sexuality by this website. So that's the sort of originating crime.

But when they decide to do something about Gawker, they realize like, we're not going to get them on that, right? It's like the decision to go after Al Capone for tax evasion. Exactly. You know, a website that would out, you know, a not particularly well-known venture capitalist also took all sorts of other risks and published all sorts of other stories that they were less within their rights to do so. And so where the conspiracy really begins is with this idea of,

what other things have they done wrong that we could be able to go after them for? Like, actually, I spoke to Sean Parker, one of the other founders of Facebook, founder of Napster. Originally, and by the way, again, I think this makes the point that lots of people were thinking about what you could do, but no one thought you could do anything. But they initially wondered, like,

In the early days of blogging, like people just posted photos like, you know, no one, no one, no company had their own photographers. There was no real legal department. They thought maybe we could just get them for copyright violations that they had just, you know, stolen enough photos that multiplied by enough fines that would bankrupt the company.

So they kind of were exploring all these indirect means of going after Gawker. You know, do we hire private investigators? Do we try to buy the company secretly and shut it down? But ultimately what they decided on was legal cases. They sort of started to go through Gawker's back catalog and find unscrupulous or unethical or potentially illegal stories that the site had published.

wanted to approach the subjects of those stories as potential plaintiffs in lawsuits. And then suddenly, in 2012, Gawker runs a stolen sex tape of the professional wrestler Hulk Hogan having sex with his best friend's wife, not knowing that his best friend, whose name is legally Bubba the Love Sponge—

is secretly recording the sexual encounter and keeping copies of it in his desk at the radio station.

And does Bubba the Love Sponge, legal name, decide to leak this to Gawker? Why does this tape get leaked? So it's too preposterous to even have included in the book. But in short, because it's not been totally proven, but basically there's a whole other second lawsuit that happens. But basically the going theory is that a rival Florida DJ, having either seen the tape or heard of the tape, because this is what Bubba gets off on,

steals it from Bubba's desk and leaks it to Gawker as part of an attempt to either extort money from Hulk Hogan or get Bubba the Love Sponge more prime spot on the radio.

So the whole thing is put in motion by like so many absurd twists of fate that you could never script out, but happen to all be like certifiably true. It's really remarkable. So basically, though, the public sees this as a suit being brought by Hulk Hogan. They have no idea that Peter Thiel is behind this lawsuit and bankrolling it.

it. One of the most incredible parts about the whole story is that like the Gawker Hulk Hogan lawsuit is one of the biggest media stories of for like five years. Like it's a huge media story. It's covered by every major media outlet. Reporters write dozens of stories about it. And it goes all the way from, you know, the inception to the verdict. And then even after the verdict, it's

And not a single person suspects, asks, or learns that Peter Thiel is behind it the whole time. So there's this, I think, just a side sort of like wow thing is just like the media could not have gotten the entire story more incorrect from the beginning. Like one of the most covered stories of its time was not at all what it seemed.

And what is the verdict? Like, take us to the conclusion here, because it's a pretty astonishing verdict. And from what I remember, the case is tried not on the turf that you would imagine Gawker would want, which is Brooklyn or Manhattan. It's tried in Florida. The judge in the case is the judge from the Terry Schiavo case. And...

We can imagine how a jury in Florida might see these guys from Gawker versus how they see Hulk Hogan. Yes. So there's a million sort of strategic and tactical breakthroughs that contribute to all this. But in short, the first decision is they're going to bring cases on other people's behalf. Peter's not going to be associated with it, but he's going to fund it all. That's sort of breakthrough number one. Breakthrough number two with the Hogan case is the

the vast majority of cases settle. So what if we took a case all the way to trial? Have you ever been deposed in a lawsuit? Me? No. I've been on a jury, but never deposed in a lawsuit. So the first question that you are asked when you are deposed in a lawsuit is, have you ever been deposed? Yes. And so Gawker is this massively controversial website that's been the target of many, many lawsuits. There's a moment early on in the Hogan case where Nick Denton, the owner of Gawker, is deposed.

And he's asked, have you ever been deposed in a lawsuit before? And so is a bunch of the other people at Gawker. And they all say no. And this is a huge breakthrough for Peter because he realizes after like hundreds, if not thousands of cases that have been brought against Gawker at this point, no one has ever actually taken it very far, right? And so one of the big breakthroughs they have is like, we're going to push this all the way through. We're going to actually try to get a case in front of a judge and a jury immediately.

and see what happens. We're not going to settle because the vast majority of lawsuits settle, right? It's just a negotiation technique. Peter's actually trying to destroy the person on the other side of it, which is a different thing.

And then they originally filed two lawsuits, one in Florida and one in federal court. And the federal court one is tossed out, which sort of accidentally leaves them in Florida, but is vastly preferable. So suddenly this New York Brooklyn media company with all of the context and

culture that comes with that is being forced to answer to not just, you know, the judge in the Terry Shivo case in a, you know, a circuit court in Florida, but like six or seven random Floridians sitting on the jury, right? It's just fundamentally different context.

And so they sort of accidentally, but also brilliantly find themselves having pushed this case into Hulk Hogan's home turf. This is where Hulk Hogan is from. And...

Just a four-year legal case, you know, the reason most people settle is because lawsuits are very, very expensive. I think Thiel estimated to me that he believes Gawker spent something like $20 million litigating the case. He spent like 10 or perhaps more. And so the case never going away is incredibly unusual. And so it's just sort of drifting slowly towards this outcome that Thiel wants to

but that Gawker has never actually experienced or prepared for, doesn't believe it's going to happen. You know, they're under the impression that they're fighting Hulk Hogan. And this is something only Teal could say with a straight face. But, you know, he says, you think Hulk Hogan is very rich because he's a famous wrestler and he had a reality show. He's like, but in fact, after his divorce, he says, Hogan was only a single digit millionaire. Right.

Which, you know, is preposterous, but also, you know, a single-digit millionaire cannot spend $10 million litigating a lawsuit that they might not win. So Gawker is under this impression that they're fighting against...

You know, a B or a C list celebrity from Florida having sex with his best friend's wife. They're not aware that they're fighting the unlimited checkbook of one of the richest people in the world who is seeking their abject destruction.

You know, the Hemingway thing about how you go bankrupt suddenly and then all at once? Totally. It's like all at once, they're in a courtroom in Pinellas County, Florida, having to answer for years and years of these ridiculous stories that these Fox News watching, you know, Florida people find horrifying and are now in a position to hold them accountable for.

So ultimately, they have to pay something like $150 million, correct? Yes. And that bankrupts Gawker. Yes. And also funny to point out, at the time, almost everyone in the media celebrates and thinks is a good thing. I remember the New York Times did a panel of like three or four experts. I think it was three experts looking at the verdict and

And they all say this has a very limited scope. This is a good thing that happened. Basically, they were like the precedent set here is like you can't run stolen sex tapes filmed without people's consent. Right. But that's before they know that Peter Thiel is connected to the story.

Exactly. So looking at it in the singular context of should this have been allowed to happen, yes or no, people are almost universally on Hulk Hogan's side, even though Hulk Hogan, through the course of the trial, takes a number of terrible blows, including the reveal of another tape where he repeatedly uses the N-word to describe his daughter's boyfriend.

But ultimately, Hogan emerges victorious and is seen as like the underdog triumphing over the big mean media outlet. Right. Until a month later, Teal's involvement is suddenly revealed and the whole thing shifts.

And this is where I become extremely interested in the story, beyond just the outlandishness of all of the details that you've just gone through. And really, people should read the book because it's wild, is the way that this verdict is

serves as a kind of litmus test. So I remember when my wife and I sort of started dating and we're on the same page now about lots of things politically, but this is one of the holdout issues where we really do not see eye to eye. Like she thinks the takedown of Gawker was awful, that it kind of had this chilling effect on the media. She really sees it as a free speech issue. And

And I didn't. I saw, I was sort of thrilled to see Gawker's demise. And I've wanted to ask you ever since I read the book,

Which side of that litmus test you fall on? Where you stand? Writing the book, I went back and forth like a billion times. But I'll tell you, I have a bit of a bias here because when I was 21 years old, I was the director of marketing at a company called American Apparel. And the company was in the middle of a lawsuit. And...

The company's contention was that the person that manufactured these claims was trying to use the media to shake down the company. I don't know. This all happened before I was there. But I was working as a spokesperson and a publicist for the company, so I was having to deal with a lot of the issues of the public response, among other things.

And as part of this lawsuit, my email was broken into by the person involved in the lawsuit. I believe they're a lawyer and an IT person at the company. They broke into my American Apparel email and leaked all...

all my emails to Gawker, to a bunch of websites, basically to embarrass the company. It happened on Christmas Eve. I was at my now wife's house. We were celebrating with her family. And I get an email from a CNBC reporter that says like, do you care to comment about this email? And I was like, what email? That's like in my inbox. This is a private conversation between me and the CFO of the company. And it was about, he had said something like, we almost went bankrupt last week. He was being hyperbolic.

But the point is, all of a sudden, like this is my first job. And now all of a sudden my emails are public and they're public on Gawker. No one emailed me for a comment. Nobody questioned the ethics of do you run stolen material? Do you run stolen material that's clearly being used as leverage in a lawsuit? What is the newsworthiness of this? And I just remember thinking in that moment, like my life is over. Like I'll be embarrassed by this forever.

I'm obviously going to lose my job. The company may, you know, experience immense consequences. I remember being just completely devastated by it.

And so I have a certain empathy and understanding of what it was like to be on the other side of these Gawker stories. And there are a lot worse examples than the Hulk Hogan one and the one I just talked about. I mean, there's famously a video of a woman sort of passed out on the floor of a bathroom.

I remember this one. With a man having sex with her. You know, she contends that this was rape, you know, and Gawker contended it was a funny, gross story, right? And there's like an email exchange between the girl's father and the reporter and the editor about like, how could you do this to a person? And Gawker's saying like, basically, again, like shut up and take it. So as someone who read Gawker and...

enjoyed it, I also understood the darkness of it, and I experienced the darkness of it. And I sort of came to believe that it was a site with a toxic culture, and it was inevitable that it would do something like it did. And in the midst of the Gawker trial, they run another story where they out-

the CFO of Condé Nast, who had a wife and kids, but also was gay and had apparently been having an affair with someone who was then shaking him down. So I guess if you ask me, is Gawker more a force for good or bad in the world, I would have said not a force for good. If you were asking me, do I think they should have been able to run the Hulk Hogan sex tape?

you know, and is it a dangerous precedent to be sued for that? I would say, no, I think that's perfectly fine. Do I also have some mixed feelings about, you know, a billionaire being able to bankrupt a company because he doesn't like them? Yes, I do. At the same time, I also haven't gone through the law. It's like, Cocker committed suicide as much as it was destroyed. But I think what you just spoke to is really at the heart of it, which is,

Is Gawker punching up or really the media more broadly punching up or punching down? Like who's the real bully in the story? Yes. And if you think about it, you know, as a caricature, right, you have kind of like a misfit crew of mostly 20 somethings making, you know, a pittance compared to what Peter Thiel can make in a week of his life up against this pretty, you know, mysterious figure. Yeah.

In Silicon Valley, you know, or, you know, I know he's multiple homes in many places. Like, it kind of looks like that guy's the villain, you know? And I think that's one of the reasons that this story was so interesting and so complicated is that I genuinely think that the Gawker folks probably saw themselves as the underdogs.

And maybe when they began, they were. But as they accrued power, that position shifted. And that's something that I think we see like that story playing out over and over and over again. That's not just a Gawker story. That's a story about like how power actually works on the Internet. With all forms of power comes responsibility. And Gawker seems...

Seems to have at the time and now, and it's sort of weird, you know, lost cause mythology have embraced all of the protections of journalism and all of the, I don't want to say glamor, but all of the underdog sort of imagery and sense and purpose and place in the world and rejected any of the things that you're supposed to do to, to,

qualify for those protections, right? Like the reason that libel and slander are different is that, you know, a newspaper is ostensibly obligating with some sort of public purpose. They have a mission, they do make mistakes, and you don't want to bankrupt them over a mistake. And I think what was so different about this case is that it not only wasn't a mistake, it was part of a deliberate policy, but it was also one case among many.

One of the reasons that the Gawker story interests me is because of the law of unintended consequences. Yes. It seems to me that Peter Thiel believed that in crushing Gawker, he was going to crush the media scene and therefore the country writ large from this kind of nefarious actor. But in fact...

What I think we have seen, and I'm curious if you agree with this, is that in crushing Gawker, the guts of Gawker, the ethos of Gawker just spread out into everything else. And so now it's not just, okay, yes, the world is rid of this particular blog, but the mores and the ethics and the sort of code of that blog is now –

present at places like the New York Times. I would agree. I would say it's even more complicated than that, because what Peter told me is that we really objected to with Gawker was this sort of denialism, like the sense that everyone sucked, everyone was a hypocrite, nobody did anything worthwhile, we should make fun of people who were weird or different, that it was sort of creating this sort of cultural homogeny, and that he was worried about

what that would do. Like, if you took the New York scene and applied it to Silicon Valley, would you get Silicon Valley anymore? And so I believe he was sincere about this. And yet...

You know, immediately coming out of this lawsuit, and I remember talking to him about it at the time, what he tells me he learns in this Florida courtroom is that, like, Trump can win, right? That seeing this sort of reaction against the media culture, that Trump has a chance. But it's hard to argue against the meanness and the bullying and the nihilism and the sort of burn-it-all-down-ness of Gawker.

And then embrace the sort of MAGA mentality, which I would argue is, you know, per the horseshoe theory, like kind of a similar point of view. And so it's like, is the world better today from a media perspective across the board than it was in 2016? I don't think anyone would say yes. So it's hard to argue that Thiel was successful.

successful in that sense. And I think the other part about it, and this was kind of a thing at the time, but it's become more pronounced now, um,

you know, Teal had donated some money before the Gawker thing to pay some of James O'Keefe's legal bills, like of the Project Veritas thing. And Project Veritas and James O'Keefe is like this outfit that sort of relies on hidden camera tactics and lying about who you are. I mean, I would say he's a nihilistic grifter who exploits sort of suspicion of the

liberal establishment to make up stories and attack people and sort of get people divided and riled up. So that would be one way to say it. I'm trying to give people a simple explanation for what they are. If you've seen those Planned Parenthood videos, undercover videos, if you've seen leaked videos of people from places like NPR talking off the record in a bar to an unsuspecting interlocutor, that's probably from Project Veritas.

Sorry, Ryan, go ahead. Yeah, I would just argue that he does the exact same thing that Cocker would do, which is like he would, he'll interview the janitor at CNN and find that he's not a Trump supporter and then blow it up into being this thing that CNN is anti-Trump or something, right? But my point is,

You can't say that this sort of extremism and radicalization and nihilism is bad when Gawker does it because it attacks you and then enable the Milo Yiannopoulos of the world or the Mike Cernovichs of the world or these sort of extreme alt-right figures who –

actually, and I know they read my first two books about this, including Conspiracy, who are actually kind of using the Gawker playbook to build their own media platforms and enact their own agenda. So it's kind of this, the unintended consequences of it, I agree, are that it's the most interesting part of the whole discussion. Well, I'm glad you brought up your first book, Trust Me, I'm Lying, and the way that it's used as a playbook, because

I just read your first book this week. It was great. But it was really enlightening because I feel like all of these years I was blaming places like Gawker for pioneering these slimy tactics. But in your book, you take credit for pioneering this exact bullshit. It's like you were in a way proto-Gawker yourself. Yeah.

Well, I think Gawker predates me. So I think a lot of the things I'm talking about in that book are just things that anyone who is trying to get coverage on a site like Gawker sort of figures out, which is like, okay, if no one's really vetting things, if what gets talked about is what's being talked about, right, it becomes really easy for people who want to steer the conversation or stir things up.

to kind of create something from nothing. And what I was trying to do in that book is really sort of show how the sausage gets made, you know, sort of sparing no indictment of myself. And it was funny, you know, that book came out in 2012. And most people in the media, including the New York Times, I remember I placed this, I got quoted as this fake expert in the New York Times, and I sort of revealed it. And it was this big

thing. And I'm pretty sure that's why my first several books didn't appear on the New York Times seller list. And it was this whole big thing. Do you think that was intentional?

I do, yeah. It was very conspicuous. I think the first time one of my books hit the bestseller list, it was like seven years after my first book and it debuted at number one, which is like very unusual. So I think there was sort of a finger on the scale that was lifted. My point was, I wrote this book sort of exposing like, this is how stuff is working and this is how the system can be exploited and taken advantage of. And people got really mad at me

and told me I was wrong and that I was the problem. And then lo and behold, over the last several years, extremists on both ends of the political spectrum, including sort of malicious foreign actors have

done the exact same thing. I mean, I remember there was a study after the election, the 2016 election that like 1800 fake Twitter accounts were quoted in major media outlets during the election. And again, in 2012, I did an enormous thing about this and got all the way into the New York Times. And the result was like shooting the messenger instead of, you know, like closing those loopholes.

So let's get into the sausage making that you sort of expose in the book for people who haven't read it. Essentially, if the old idea, right, was like that quality rises and like cream rises to the top, what the book really shows is that that's not true at all. Shit rises. And, you know, you sort of use yourself and your own media manipulation tactics as exhibit A.

Can you give us an example or two of what you mean by that when you talk about yourself as a media manipulator? What were the kind of stories you were manipulating on behalf of yourself, on behalf of other people?

To go back to Gawker, one of the big innovations that Denton has in the early 2000s is the idea that writers should be bonused or, in fact, compensated entirely on how much traffic their articles get. That's commonplace now, but he invents that. And he even puts a big screen up in Gawker's offices. The leaderboard. The leaderboard. Who's doing the best, right? And so it turns media into this game, right, which its younger employees are very familiar with and quite good at.

So, you know, in let's call old journalism, establishment journalism with all its problems and biases, we would we would never accept a reporter having a financial interest in the company that they're writing about. Right. Like we would never let you report on Google if you owned a large amount of Google shares. If you owned any Google shares. I mean, the rule at The New York Times, right, is like you have to sell every stock before you get it. Take a job there.

Yeah, I mean, some reporters don't even vote, right? Because they want to be apolitical in that sense. So contrast this with, okay, I don't own stock in Peter Thiel or American Apparel or random person I'm reporting about. But how this story does directly determines what my paycheck will be at the end of the month. So now my incentive is always to go towards what will...

you know, drive the most shares, what will drive the most views. And that's outrage and exaggeration, right? Yeah. Yeah. But I'm even not incentivized to get the story correct. Because let's say I write about something, then I'm wrong. Then I have to write a second story correcting how I was wrong the first time. And now I got two stories when I should have had zero stories. Right. Right.

So it's just, it completely screwed up the incentives of media. And so what I was talking about is, okay, if you understand that this reporter is not only incentivized by how the story does, but that they have to publish. I remember a few years ago, I used to do this in some of the talks that I would give, but the Washington Post had posted an ad for a fashion reporter that would post in their style section. And they were requested to do eight to 10 stories a day.

That's insane. It's completely insane. I mean, there's not eight to 10 interesting things happening in a day on that beat, right? So think about what a person who's looking to post eight to 10 quick stories per day. And if you're a publicist, you're like, oh, okay, we can work together. You know what I mean? Like our incentives are aligned here. And so a lot of the book is just how understanding the...

toxic incentives of the system allow you to insert yourself into it or insert a narrative into it that would be beneficial for you, but probably at the expense of, say, someone else or the expense of just the truth generally. But you were doing things that were well beyond, you know, the sort of synergistic relationship between a lazy PR hack and a blogger. You know, the example that stuck out to me that I was...

kind of amazed by, I thought it was so creative, was the publicity campaign that you mounted for Tucker Max. Can you explain what you did there? Yeah, his book had become... And who Tucker Max is for people who don't know. Yeah, it's funny. It's like the second time I'm talking about him in like two days. He was one of the sort of

early blogger, influencer types. He would write stories about drinking and hooking up. And he wrote a book that sold millions of copies based largely on kind of how controversial he was. The media loves to talk about controversial people. And we encouraged that controversy, right? We would seek it out on places like Gawker. But when the book was adapted into a movie, we had a very small budget and we focused on

couple of things that might sound familiar to people these days. So one, we set up a series of protests and boycotts on college campuses, right? What do you mean you set up protests? How does one set up a protest? We would email like a women's rights group on campus and say like, this movie is being screened in College Station. Isn't that awful? Like, how could your university allow this person to come speak on campus? Right?

Right. So instead of trying to to slip under the radar, we were trying to encourage people to come out and protest. You were triggering people intentionally. And then when those people got triggered, then we would take examples of them being triggered and send it to the local news who would then come cover it. And then when they would cover it, we would send the local news coverage to the next city we were going to. Right. So we it sort of became this ruse.

roiling, rolling backlash against this movie that culminated in an advertising campaign that we set up to be very deliberately banned. We put up these really offensive billboards. I even vandalized some of them. But the idea was like we wanted the ads to get banned. Like the ads went up in Chicago. They were banned. Everyone reported about it. And then we got our money back.

So it was like... So you were like, you know, before cancel culture was a term of interest, you were sort of engineering cancellations for this movie and this personality as a way of generating interest in money. Because for certain things or certain ideas or for certain markets, like...

something that has been, like my contention was if you want young men to go see a movie, one of the best ways to get them to do that is to have other people tell them that they should not be allowed to go see that movie. Now, all this being said, the movie did not do particularly well, but there was lots and lots of attention. And it's funny to me now watching, like I remember just the names of the different reporters and it's funny to see where people who wrote some of those initial stories ended up.

Right. And to your point about sort of a diaspora of Gawker type people spreading throughout the media system, like they're all leading reporters and writers at like, you know, different outlets now. Of course they are. And so now all media culture is that way. Right. And so in a way, like.

The idea of blaming, you know, Nick Denton or the folks that ran Gawker for incentivizing people to go viral or for rewarding people based on clicks, like that seems to me inevitable in a way. Like that's the nature of the Internet and of big social. Am I wrong?

No, I think that's totally right. And I think that perhaps that was a bit naive on Peter's part, which was thinking that, you know, you could eliminate this thing and that would solve the problem in

In fact, the rot was much more systemic and pervasive than maybe he wanted to admit or believe. And I think there's like almost a deeper level of irony there. The reason the rot is so pervasive is precisely because of the kind of companies that he...

and, you know, sits on the board of. And I'm not saying Facebook good or bad, but it's like this is just like the nature of the internet. No, I mean, it largely all traces back to the algorithmic Facebook news feed, which for the vast majority of Americans is their news source. Yes. It's not that they get their news from Facebook, but Facebook is how they discover the news that they read. And it's wildly unrepresentative of...

of reality, but then also sort of hyper incentivizes sort of polarization and divisiveness. And Twitter is just as guilty. I mean, I have this theory that what,

What Twitter really did was break the brains of an entire generation of journalists who used to be incentivized or who were trained to think long form, to think over a long period of time, to work on a story, you know, as it develops, to think about it into like, how can I reorientate?

reduce this thing into 280 characters in as short a time as possible. So yes, so much of it traces back to the underlying technological infrastructure and the idea that getting rid of Gawker, it's like if we kill Osama bin Laden, Islamic fundamentalism will go away. That's not how it goes at all. The other thing that to me just seems so quaint is the idea that, you know,

a guy could be so outraged that his privacy was exploited seems to me like incredibly quaint right now because like no one has privacy. Everyone's everything forever is exploited on Twitter. Like Gawker is now social media. We're all on social media. We're all public figures. Anything that like a 15 year old did in a TikTok video is now going to follow her around forever.

You could also add on top of this that he is the founder and lead investor in a company called Palantir, which is a massive, you know, sort of private surveillance and big data company, in part initially funded by the CIA. So there's some extra irony there, too. I guess the one thing I come back to with Peter, and I hope comes through in the book, is that even if it totally blew up in his face, even if it's made things worse—

I have this more than begrudging respect for the sheer amount

competence of it, you know, like, like that he set out to do a really hard thing. And he did it. And he did it. And he did it with nobody noticing. And he did it against people who were so smug and so convinced of their own righteousness and invincibility that they didn't even see that it was happening until it was too late. So I actually, you were talking about your wife and her very different view on it. I think it's in,

some respects what I was trying to say in the book is like, whatever, if you think it was good or bad, let's just focus on like how it happened. Because that to me is actually the rare thing. Are there other conspiracies happening? Yes, but they seem to be defined primarily by like bumbling incompetence. I was just impressed at

the foresight and the patience and the creativity and the pragmatism and kind of by the ruthlessness of it too. There's a Machiavellian genius to it that I think is at least worth studying. And I would argue that if you hate it, you probably have the greatest obligation to study it because you should understand how these things happen.

Having read Trust Me, I'm Lying and read about your own competence at manipulating the media and knowing that you also had a chip on your shoulder vis-a-vis Gawker, given what they did to you when you were 24 years old and working at American Apparel. I cannot help but wonder if you are the unnamed fixer, the unnamed co-conspirator in the book.

So that did not occur to me that anyone would have thought that until the legal review of the book and the lawyer for Penguin Random House said, like, I need you to like demonstrate to me in some way that you're not this person. I'm definitely not. I feel like if I was that person, part of the playbook would be not to write the book about it. But no, I'm definitely not that person. And although I have continued not to name the person, there is a lot of

speculation and a number of outlets have tried to claim that they know who the person is. I don't think anyone has seriously claimed that it's me. Okay. Well, knowing what you know about the way the press functions, do you believe anything that you read in places like the New York Times and the Washington Post?

I just, I'm just always cognizant of the bias. Like when people talk about liberal or conservative bias, they're almost always missing the point. That's like the fifth least important bias. I do try to limit my news consumption entirely. Like, you know, when people hear like, I don't watch a lot of news or for, they go, but isn't it important to be like an informed citizen and a democracy? And I think that's a really important point.

And I said, yeah, I think it is. It's just like... You're not getting information there. Yeah, watching the news is like the worst way to possibly do that. So I tend to try to get my information from older sources. What do you mean by that? Like books. I mean, I like the incentives of books. I mean, again, I'm biased as I write books, but like...

First off, a book is information that's designed to have a long shelf life, like pun intended. Books are Lindy. Yes, books are Lindy. And then also the relationship between the creator and the consumer is aligned, right? Like I paid for this. So if it sucks, like that person isn't going to be able to sell books to me anymore. Whereas like, let's say you read a terribly...

frustrating story in the Washington Post. Like, you're still gonna keep reading posts 'cause it's free to you. You know, you only saw this like across your Facebook feed or across Twitter, somebody emailed it to you in the first place, right? Like you're not actually the customer of these websites in most cases.

Since I wrote the book, obviously, the Times and the Post have pivoted slightly more towards subscriber revenue. But the point is, the vast majority of news is consumed for free, and it's worth what you pay for it. Let's go a little deeper, because I think a lot of people will hear you say, whether the bias is left or right, that's really not the thing that matters. Say more about what the real bias is that we should be more concerned about.

Well, I think the bias is like, first off, I think the number one predictor of virality is how angry something makes someone. So it shouldn't surprise us that most of the news, left or right, is really aggravating. So we are repeatedly told that the world is awful and falling apart and that people are doing horrible things because that's what we react to.

Also, when you really meet some of these people, you realize like they just have no idea what the fuck they're talking about. Like they're not remotely qualified. They've never started a business. They've never, you know, met any of the people that they're talking about. They just they don't actually know enough to be speaking authoritatively on this topic.

And so I think that's the other bias is this sort of the certainty and the judgment is it's not that it's politically biased. It's that it's like sort of outsider insider biased, right? Like it's the perspective of a person who's, you know, Plato's caves are looking at shadows. They don't actually know what's happening. And so you're getting this

totally unhelpful reflection of the world. I think that's one of them. But people will hear you say that and they'll say, well, hold on, Ryan. Like, you know, if that's true, like why is the New York Times have more subscribers than ever? Why is the stock price so high?

Yeah. I mean, look, I think it's great that the New York Times has subscribers. I mean, the economics of a subscriber business are far superior and far less vicious than, you know, an ad-driven sort of page view model. So I like that. I'm not saying that it's 100% wrong, and there are plenty of great reporters. I'm just saying that a lot of what you read

Actually, there's a great example. There's something called the Gale Amnesia Effect, which basically says that when you read the news about something that you're an expert about, you realize how wildly inaccurate most of the assumptions like in an article are. Yes, yes, yes. For me, that was always the subject of interest.

Israel and more broadly, the Middle East, where I was like, okay, I do know a lot about this particular subject. I might not know a lot about hedge funds or, you know, China or a number of other things that hopefully I know more about now than I did, you know, 15 years ago when I got into journalism.

But the one subject that I did know a lot about, I was like, wait, holy shit. If they're getting it wrong about this, what else are they getting it wrong about? I did not know that that phenomenon had a name. Yeah. And most of the reasons called the amnesia effect there is because you conveniently forget it when you then read a piece about your favorite celebrity or you read a piece about, you know, a hedge fund company.

You were like, you were just shouting obscenities at them for being, you know, terribly off. And then you, you assume that they're reporting about this, that, or the other is somehow subject to a second set of standards. And that was kind of my experience with Gawker too, where people now in retrospect go like, you know, Gawker, they were right about Harvey Weinstein. They were early on Bill Cosby. You know, they, they, they wrote about Louis CK and all these other things. And it's like, true, but,

But the reason those stories didn't have the resonance that they did later when, let's say, the Times did report on them...

is because they had such a terrible reputation for their reporting methodologies and their standards that people didn't take it seriously. They knew it was just a random rumor. So the fact that a broken clock is sometimes correct is a problem. So I think, yeah, you just get the sense that you are relying very heavily on judgment from a person who is not actually particularly informed about the world or even the beat that they're reporting on.

I've been thinking a lot about journalism and the Times lately, much more so than usual, because I think it's like about a year ago that I left the paper. And there are at least three things that I've been

thinking about that I witnessed there and that I feel like I've continued to witness now as a reader and that I think are kind of at the heart of what's wrong with journalism and making it impossible for us to live in a shared reality. And I wanted to kind of run those by you and see if I'm leaving something out, if you agree with them, or if I just sound like someone who's been, you know, scorned by a place that I wanted to work. So the first is, you know,

just forcible closure of the Overton window, the forcible closure of, you know, the spectrum of what it's acceptable to talk about or ask or be curious about in public. And,

The obvious example this year was the idea of the lab leak, the idea that COVID came from this lab in Wuhan and that anyone who raised that question was accused of being, you know, not just misinformed, but actively racist. The second thing is that the press, I feel, actively hides the ball or overlooks major stories that

for the sake of pursuing what they believe to be social justice and progress in their political project. And here I'm thinking about the violent riots that happened this past summer mixed in with peaceful protests that we weren't allowed to acknowledge were violent. And then this year, just the increasing rates of homicide in cities across the country. And it's like these stories just do not get covered. And

It's almost like asking readers not to trust what they see with their own eyes. And I remember really clearly I had this good friend that worked at the Times and

And he was working on a story about the Antifa protests in Portland. And I remember when it came to editing the story, the reporter that he was, it was like a collaboration, the reporter that he was working with kept saying, you know, there's no reason that we should use the word violence to describe the protesters, even though the story they were working on involved protesters attempting to burn down a federal building with Molotov cocktails. Like, we shouldn't use the word violence to describe that, even though it's about burning down a federal building. Right.

And then the third thing I think about is the way that the reporter's own identity or the columnist's own identity has just overtaken absolutely everything. Like it just informs what you can pursue, what you can't pursue, what subjects you can touch, what subjects you have to avoid. And that if you're the wrong identity, you know, essentially you're kept in this tiny, tiny, tiny little box. But if you're the right one, almost anything is possible, including mistakes you might make that are overlooked.

Do you see all of that? Yeah, I think there's a couple things at play. And it's first off that reality is really complicated, right? And that like there's good people who do bad things and bad people who do occasionally good things, very stupid people who are occasionally right, you know, people who are right about something, but using it for, you know, malicious ends. There's this like sort of

Reality is really, really complicated. And I think social media, but then also the idea that like...

It's interesting. I always urge people to go back and look at the headline for the Pentagon Papers. The New York Times headline for the Pentagon Papers is the most boring headline you could possibly imagine. It's not like, stolen papers reveal presidents lie about war. It's not that, right? It's like, study finds, it's incredibly boring. And that's because the Times at that time was not subject to

any viral pressure, right? It's like you subscribed to the New York Times and it came to your doorstep and you read the whole thing from cover to cover. Now, everything exists as a one-off, right? So the story has to go...

find an audience, has to be spread from person to person, which creates an incentive for certainty and clear cut sort of good and bad. And all of that weighs very heavily, I think, on a reporter who's trying to be successful at what they're doing, as opposed to a reporter who's obligated to present messy or unpleasant or complicated truth.

So I think that's a big part of it. But I would also, I would say like with the Overton window, the lab leak theory and some of the other stuff, I think one of the tricky parts, and certainly my book, my first book didn't make this easier for anyone, but

How do you sift through what should be in the Overton window? What should be considered? What should be discussed when a good chunk of people and let's say foreign actors also use what's discussed in the media actively acting in bad faith? Right.

Right. So like, I think the reason, for instance, the lab leak theory gets incorrectly shut down at first is that it's primarily being put forth by people who don't actually care about where the COVID came from and aren't taking COVID seriously, but in fact are trying to engage either in outright distraction or like whataboutism. Right. So the hard part is like, if you care about racism and you see racist people raising an idea that

to distract from a pandemic that is raging through the country, you can very quickly and accidentally throw the baby out with the bathwater, which is what I think happened with the lab leak theory. And then it compounds with the identity issues you're talking about, the certainty issues you're talking about, all of those things. And then I think right now we're in the middle of an overreaction, whereas to go back to the lab leak theory,

We still really have no clear idea one way or another where it came from. It could have come from a lab. You could also make a very persuasive case that it came, you know, sort of naturally, or maybe it's a combination of both. But now because the media got it wrong, now we're overreacting in the other way. And the truth is, which isn't viral, which is hard to discuss, is like,

The biggest thing that's happened in like 50 years, we still like are completely in the dark about and have no real understanding of. And it's very hard to sell that to the public. Like you can't publish a story that says,

We still don't know where COVID came from. You can be like, we can publish, it came naturally. And then we can say, these people who are questioning that are racist. And then we can say, oh, actually, maybe we got it wrong. And we can ping pong back and forth, but we can't sit

with uncertainty or confusion or contradiction. I think Keats said that the mark of brilliance is negative capability, the ability to have conflicting things in your head at the same time. We're very bad at that. And the media particularly is bad at that, that like we have conflicting reports and we don't know. And that's a problem. I also think that if there's not a clear villain on the opposite side of the political spectrum, the story just doesn't

rate. Like I'm thinking a lot, you know, in the past few weeks, this building collapses in Miami surfside with, you know, more than 150 innocent, you know, poor people in it. And no one cares. I mean, no one cares. No one is talking about it. And I think the reason is just like, okay, because it's not interesting because we can't blame either like, you know, MAGA people or woke people.

And so the story just doesn't rate. I also think it's like when we talk about media manipulation, there's always somebody incentivized. So Joseph Epstein, who wrote a bunch of great books, but he wrote this book called Between Fact and Fiction, which is sort of a critique of journalism. I think he wrote it in the seventies.

But he says that the fundamental problem of journalism is that journalists are always dependent on sources and sources are always self-interested. Right. So you're always getting an agenda from someone. And it's always interesting to me the way that a story develops can tweak the direction that it ends up going. And I was struck by the Florida story as like.

Okay, so obviously from the get-go, it involved the deaths of dozens of people, right? But the way it was presented to the media initially is that like four people were confirmed dead and like hundreds were missing, right? And so I think that story, and I imagine that probably came from somebody on the ground reporting it that way. You could, I might be getting a little conspiratorial here, but like,

You could see like a local official presenting it the optimistic way versus the incredibly depressing and tragic way, which is that like this is a major disaster and potentially, you know, an upwards of 50 people have died. Instead, it was presented kind of initially as like a rescue operation, right, as opposed to like a foregone conclusion. Right.

So again, let's say I'm making no claims to the veracity of what I'm saying, just using it as a hypothetical example. You can see how the story develops based on the information from a source on the ground, and then everything descends from that or uses that as the basis point. So

At the beginning, a story with four people dead in a building collapse, 150 missing, is of a totally different sort of caliber slash tragedy scale as opposed to more than 100 people presumed dead in building crash, right? And depending on who you might be trying to pin it on or what country it's happening in or what else is happening in the world, the way a story develops is

can determine the sort of natural evolution that it goes on. And I do feel like it is tragic that that story sort of underplayed and didn't bring us together in the way that sometimes only tragedies can, because it didn't pierce through, because it didn't seem like as big a deal as it obviously is. Does that make sense? Yeah.

Yes, I think it was that it wasn't a... I think that's part of it. And I also think that part of it was that there wasn't a clear villain. Sometimes bad stuff happens. And if you can't pin that on someone, again, nobody wants to pass a bummer on to somebody else. I think the founder of BuzzFeed said that famously when people asked why so much of BuzzFeed news is like cats and stuff. He says, people don't want to pass negative news on. They'll pass angry news on, but they don't want to pass...

like bummers on. And I think, I think the Florida story is just like, oh, that really sucks. And it also kind of causes existential terror, right? You're like, shit, I live in a building like that. I could die because it doesn't, there's not clearly blame one place or another. It's not clearly part of a trend. Can't be associated with

climate change. It can't be associated with the Republicans in Florida. You know, there wasn't, it doesn't have anything to do with guns or any of these other issues. It's just sad and tragic. Right. Like,

How does Ron DeSantis banning critical race theory relate to this? Okay, if not, we're moving on. Yeah, which is awful. It's just amazing to me that I know more oftentimes about like, you know, what a Tennessee cheerleader, you know, how she sang along to a song with an N-word in a video when she was 15. And like, I know all of the details of that more than I often know about like, I don't know, all the people starving right now in East Africa. Yeah.

And I felt that myself, you know, as a journalist. So, you know, just as a tiny example, we did an episode of the podcast the other day about the absolute transformation of Hong Kong from a free society into a fear society. Right. And the specific example of the closure of this really sort of intrepid pro-democracy tabloid called Apple Daily. And I was like, I'm so proud of this episode. I think it's amazing. I think this is such an important story. Yeah.

but it's the bummer story. That just gets so many fewer listeners than Mark Cuban talking about NFTs. Or to go to the point about how much news do you consume? Why do I know the names of several of the candidates for New York City mayor? I don't live in New York. I don't care. It's not even the actual election. It's the primary. And yet that's

something that I have spent, you know, far too much time being told about and willingly reading about. And I think, yes, we focus, for instance, far too much on national politics, not enough on local politics. We focus far too much on like

piddly things that don't matter. I was talking to my wife about this the other day. It's interesting, you know, all this talk about sort of white supremacy and systemic racism, but particularly, you know, I would come to sort of describe things as white supremacists or, you know, white rage, et cetera. And I was like, I haven't heard anyone talk about the Aryan Brotherhood recently. And that is like a real white supremacist organization that controls

like the federal prison system, you know? And so it's interesting that we will have lots of conversations. I don't want to call it about benign instances of certain phenomenon because that sort of underplays their significance. But the part where there isn't someone to blame or where it's just sort of totally demoralizing to think about and you're powerless to do anything about,

that stuff gets left off because there's no engagement to be driven from that. I think one of the outcomes of this is that

A, people think that the world is so much scarier and more miserable than it actually is. It's like we point the finger at those freaky QAnon followers all over there that believe in Pizzagate and whatever else. But we're all in a strange way becoming a version of that. Like that we think, you know, I know people that really believe that like white supremacists are around every corner in places like New York City and Los Angeles. Right.

And you don't actually, I think the weirdest part is like, you don't actually believe that, right? Tyler Cowen did a great piece several years. I think this is like 2016, right after the election. He's like, he's so great. If you really think the things that you're thinking about Donald Trump right now, why haven't you liquidated your retirement portfolio? Like, why, why are you, you know, like, so you don't either, either it's like a fight or flight thing and you've just decided to freeze.

Or you're not, you know that you're overstating the severity of the thing you're talking about and your actions belie like what you actually think about it. So why are people saying it?

Because you have to say, it has to be extreme to break through the valence. So I talked about virality and anger. It's not just anger. Actually, Jonah Berger did a study on this on New York Times headlines. This is several years ago. But he found that, first off, anger is a great predictor of virality. But it's really the valence of the emotion itself.

period that generates the virality. So something that makes you really, really happy will be more viral than something that makes someone mildly upset. But the point is the extremeness is what you need to break through. So the idea of saying like, hey, that was in poor taste. I didn't like that.

that's not going to get you media attention. You have to get media attention by saying, you did violence to me by saying that. Or, you know, the valence of your claim has to be ratcheted up several degrees. Yes. Or no one will take it seriously. And so it becomes, there's like inflation with all the terms and things that we use. But then that very inflation like strips the core claim away.

Yes.

Oh, no, of course. I think this is a huge problem. It's akin to, I've actually used this talking about Donald Trump before, but when you prescribe antibiotics for everything, what you create is superbugs, right? So when you create a culture that just like can laugh off anything that it doesn't like or accuse it of this, that, or the other, that just uses shame as a way of like sort of pushing out things or ideas it doesn't want to engage with, you create things that are resistant to shame, right?

Right. And so for instance, like Me Too, obviously a very important movement. Clearly there was a massive existence of problematic people that were able to escape the consequences of their problematic, if not illegal behavior. But if you attack all

all examples of this behavior with equal vigor and you make no distinctions between the two, then you create this sort of superbug environment that I'm talking about where somebody realizes, oh, I'm just going to get accused of horrible things regardless. So I'm just not going to take any of the allegations seriously. I'm just not like, you're not going to shame me into quitting. And then we're like, fuck, now what do we do about this person? Like now the public relations response, if you're accused of something is,

is not to apologize or admit wrongdoing. It's to go on the sort of Trumpian offense. And Cuomo is doing the exact same thing as other people have done, which is you're just, I'm not gonna, you're not gonna bully me out of office with this. So it becomes, if you overuse a certain tactic, it stops working.

100 percent. And and I've thought about this so much when it comes to, you know, the issue of public apologies, which is like basically there's no world in which apologizing is a smart tactic. And that makes me so depressed because apologies shouldn't ever be tactics. They should be sincere. But now they've become like they become weaponized. Right.

That's right. And oftentimes the people that are demanding public apologies from people that have annoyed them do not actually seek an apology. What they seek is a confession, and the apology serves as a confession. Or they're, to go back to Cochran and Peter, what they're seeking is the destruction of that person. Yes. And they've seized upon this as a means. So they don't actually care about it. No.

They are using it. And I think people who are fans of that person that's being attacked see that. And then they themselves see,

become immune to caring about the thing because they now don't see what happened as being wrong. They see it as being, you know, weaponized against a person. And yeah, you create this sort of complete devaluation of certain things that should be, you know, deal breakers, right? And we're kind of in a feedback loop with these things. I don't know how you get out of them.

There's a line that you have in your book, trust me, I'm lying, from Upton St. Clair, where you quote him saying, it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it, which I loved. And I guess big picture here, you know,

You wrote this book in 2012. Things have gotten markedly worse in the decades since. Is there any way to turn this around other than simply unplugging the internet or deciding not to read it and going back to reading the ancients and other things that have stood the test of time? Is there any chance of the media turning it around? It's pretty funny. In 1912, Upton Sinclair wrote a book called The Brass Check.

which was after The Jungle. He wrote an expose of...

that era's media system, which was as bad as the slaughterhouses were. Isn't that also the name of your consulting company? It is, yes. And what the brass check refers to, which I got from the book, it refers to when you used to go into a brothel, you would pay at the front desk and get a brass check, like a token that you could then redeem with a

of your choice. And his implication was that these journalists were the tools of the capitalists of his time. This is a little inside baseball for you. But yeah, I think it's really, really bad. And I see a couple green sprouts, I guess. One, I do think people are consuming, smart people are consuming less news. So,

So first, addressing how much media we consume. Two, I do think generally subscription-based products are far superior, whether we're talking the New York Times or we're talking Substack and paid newsletters. I think any time that the writer is directly being compensated by the person who's consuming it, you create a stronger, more trustworthy relationship, and it's less likely to be filtered through certain other systemic biases. So I like that.

I also think podcasts are great. I mean, you and I, we've been talking for over an hour and a half now. Like that is long form upon long form upon long form of content. I did a cable news hit a couple of weeks ago for something and it was like, I had to drive all the way across town. Totally. And I was on TV for 97 seconds. Three minutes. Yeah. Yeah.

Totally. And we talked about nothing. So I think the long form stuff is better. The conversations are better. I like that podcasts don't really go viral. You have to listen to the whole thing. So I think that's great. But I do think we are in a tricky spot. America, our system of government, and this is an observation that goes back to the early 1900s. Our system of government is dependent on public opinion.

which means that the forces that create and form and influence public opinion are in fact running the country. So we are at the mercy of these platforms, these ideas, these trends in journalism and media

in really important ways. It's not just like, oh, TV makes you stupid. It's that TV, Neil Postman talked about this, TV creates a stupid country. I mean, you have a line in the book where you say the dominant cultural medium determines the culture itself. Yes. So even if you're not on Twitter...

or not on Facebook, and you've somehow miraculously unplugged your brain from your smartphone addiction, which I absolutely have not, you're still living in a world that those mediums are creating. Exactly. People go, oh, I find it so hard to read these days. It's because you've been trained not to sit down and read a book. And so, yeah, I think it's really hard to pull out of that, and I don't exactly know the solution.

I kind of want to point the finger at myself and maybe you too, because we're both somewhat involved in, let's just say, like new media, newsletters, and developing a really intimate relationship with subscribers. On the one hand, I think it's amazing that people are able to strike out on their own, myself included, and create that kind of intimate relationship and that you don't need massive numbers of people to make a really good living doing it.

The problem is, is that I at least, and I'm really curious if you found this too, the problem of audience capture and playing to the sensibilities of your readers or your listeners, that doesn't go away just because the audience is more niche or smaller. Right.

I know that if I put out, you know, a story about some crazy excesses of an Ivy League school or, you know, wokeness at, you know, some major Fortune 500 company and so on and so forth, we all know what those stories are, that that will, like, scratch the pleasure center of my reader's brain more than anything else. And I find it, you know, the challenge then, you know, is it's not some faceless story

company that has to resist that temptation. It's you, or in this case, it's me. I'm wondering if you've run up against that and how you guard against it. I completely have. And I think we've both seen people that we know get slowly radicalized by their own success. You start talking about something and then

I think as a Scott Adams is a great example of someone who appears to have just spun off the planet to me, a guy that started making, you know, cartoons about workplace culture is now like, you know, I don't know, was not not tethered to the reality that I live in, certainly, because you find that the kinds of things you say that get engagement are.

tend to be the things that you think about and say, right? Like humans are really good at figuring out the logic or the language of something and then sort of adapting it as part of who we are. You know, I've been writing a daily newsletter now for five years, I think, and then writing online for a lot longer than that. I had to make a decision pretty early on that like,

That email goes to an email that I have never seen. I can't hear what people say every day or I won't wake up and say what I think.

Right. Wait, sorry. What do you mean? It goes to an email you've never seen. I send the email and then people can reply, right? Like, oh, I love this. I hate this. You're a piece of shit. Right. I want to say what I have to say. You mean you don't read the replies or the comments? Yes. I didn't build this platform to not say what I think. Right. Like the purpose of the platform is for me to communicate what I think, not to communicate what you want to hear.

Right. And so you have to create some buffers between you and the audience. Actually, I have a quote on my wall that from one of Johnny Cash's managers or producers or something. They said this to him. I wrote it. He says, you need to build a big mausoleum in your head with big iron doors that

that nobody can get in there except you. You don't let me in there. You don't let June, his wife in there. You don't let your manager in there. You don't let the record company people in there. You have to decide for yourself what you want to do with your music and not let anyone else tell you. So that's kind of how I think about it. It's like, here's what I think is true. Here's what I believe. Here's what my research and work shows me. Like consequences be damned. There's a lot of things that I want to say to that. Like,

Do you ever say things knowing that it's going to piss off the majority even of your audience in order to A, keep them on their toes or B, make sure that you're not getting captured by the prevailing view of your audience?

I think about it less like that and more about like, what do I think these people need to hear? I feel like having a platform or an audience is as much a privilege as it is an obligation. And so the Stoics talk a lot about like what's in your control, what's not in your control, but then how do you use what is in your control to make the world a better place? And so like, look, if I mentioned vaccines,

unfortunately, an alarming percent of the audience gets very upset by that. Your audience. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Or I would probably argue any audience at this point. But, um,

At the same time, I have the ability through that, if I can convince one person to do it, that has an actual impact in the real world. So I think about also what my responsibility is, not so much to the audience, but to the world in general. And I try to say what I think is important and talk about what I think makes a difference as opposed to sort of just repeating the greatest hits, which

to your point, you sort of know intuitively like, oh, this will do really well. Is it a balance? Sure, because if you only say things people don't like, nobody comes back and then you don't have the audience anymore and you certainly aren't growing the audience. But at the end of the day, I would rather be able to look myself in the mirror than have like large stats to brag about.

This was something that I saw a lot at the Times because everyone knew that our subscribers are like 90 to 95 percent identify as Democrats and liberals. And so like no one – like the publisher didn't need to come down from his office and say deliver things that will engage that audience. You just –

felt it. You saw it. You knew that if you ran a certain kind of piece with a certain kind of perspective, typically on a particular president, like that would get unbelievable engagement. And it

It's just like at the times, at least you have some level of insulation from that. But then when you're running your own thing, there's no insulation at all. It's just you in the audience. And it's really hard, I find, not to resist playing to them. So well, I think about that because, you know, you'll talk to people, both political parties. Why doesn't so-and-so take this stand or, you know, yeah, sure, they'd lose their job, but why don't they do this? And it's like, when was the last time you put your ass on the line or put even, you know, like.

1% of your salary on the line to do or say something that would be unpopular, but you thought was important. Right. So I think we spend a lot of time in our culture, like demanding or expecting sort of selflessness and perfection and virtue from our politicians and our athletes and our artists.

And then we demand very little of ourselves because we go like, oh, I'm small. I don't matter. Like I found that when I go to Washington, my books are sort of made their way through, you know, a bunch of different interesting people from different parties. And like, you'll be talking to someone and I'll be like, so why don't you do something about this? And they're like,

you know, well, I can't. And it's like, you're a senator. Like, but you see, they see themselves compared to other people in the hierarchy as relatively powerless. Right.

But compared to a citizen, I mean, you're like one of 100 people that can do something about this. But you've decided you're identifying with like the unaccountable crowd as opposed to like one of the people at the top. And so you have to go like, maybe it's a little aggrandizing, but you have to go like, if you believe in the great man of history theory that an individual can make a difference-

then you should believe that you can make a difference. And I find that that is not a belief that a lot of people have. Well, Great Men of History is a wonderful transition to talking about you and your life a little bit more specifically. You know,

On the one hand, I don't think in this conversation or if we went on for another 10 hours, we could come up with a solution to changing the way that incentives work on the Internet when it comes to the press. Probably not. But I'm struck by the fact that, you know, your life feels quite removed from that.

You know, you live on a ranch in Texas. You have a very regimented routine where you really limit your time on the Internet. You're living by the teachings of the Stoics. When we met in Austin a few weeks ago, I was struck by the fact that you had titles of your book, but they're also teaching of major Stoic teachings tattooed on your arm. So you're very committed to that.

You opened a bookstore during COVID, which is like opening a bookstore in a normal time seems crazy, but opening it during COVID seems doubly crazy. So I wondered if I could ask you about the personal choices that you've made in your own life and how you think that the rest of us might learn from those choices.

Well, I don't know about you, but when I did spend some time in New York, I went there after my first book sold. I thought like, oh, this is where writers should go or whatever. And I was struck by one, how incredibly unhappy everyone was and how incredibly like small their lives were. It's like, you know, this is someone who's like a top person at, you know, this outlet or that outlet. And they have like

a two bedroom apartment. They have two kids. They spend tens of thousands of dollars a year to send them to this private school. And it just feels like they're grinding out a very miserable existence. And I just felt like I didn't want that at all. And I didn't think that it led to particularly good creative work. And so, yeah,

Yeah, my wife and I moved to Texas. And then we just said, hey, if we're going to live in Texas, we should really live in Texas. So we moved out more towards the country. But I've always just been a proponent of doing like what you want to do. It's funny, like living in the ranch or the bookstore, people always go, oh, I've always wanted to do that. It's not like, you know, it's not like I had to win the lottery to be able to do those things. I mean,

I know for a fact that the farm that I live on cost more than the one-bedroom apartment I was renting in Manhattan, right? Oh, just about the price of the ranch in Texas. Do you mean that it costs more than your one-bedroom in New York or less? No, no, it's the same. It was like what I was renting a one-bedroom apartment for, monthly, I purchased a ranch in Texas. Right. Right.

I think things that people think are impossible are often much more possible than they think. But I just wanted a life that I actually enjoyed living as opposed to a miserable one that I then, you know, projected onto the people I was writing about, which I feel is what a lot of reporters do. Don't you think, though, that, you know, you say it like it's easy to know what one really wants or what will make a person really happy. I think it's really hard for a lot of people to be able to kind of tune into that.

their personal desires when everyone around them is doing a particular thing. Yes. Well, Teal talks a lot about mimetic desire. You sort of just do what everyone else is doing because you don't know what you actually want to do. And I think that's very true and real. And

I don't know if it's hard to do it so much as people don't have time or space to do it. And a big part of stoicism is like having space and room to reflect and to think and to question yourself and what you're doing and why you're doing it. And so it wasn't like I just knew for certain this is what I wanted, but I didn't.

thought about it and then made a small step and explored it a little more, you know, so it's, it's a process, but I think a lot of people, there's, there's actually a quote from Seneca where he says, many people are afraid to live as they wish and instead live simply as they have begun. And I think we sort of get on tracks. I think this is what's interesting about your story. It's like very few people climb to the top of a certain mountain and then they

have the courage or the fortitude to be like, I'm going to, I'm going to get off. I'm going to blow all of that up and try something else. And, and in doing so, you know, admitting the possibility that you could be committing career suicide that you then regret, right?

Totally. Totally. I mean, I guess I wonder if the reason that you've sort of been able to construct this pretty, at least from the outside, this pretty amazing and unique life for yourself, if it's directly tied to the fact that in your work on stoicism and other things, you're in the regular practice of articulating the virtues and the values that you want to live your life by. Yeah.

Yes. I mean, like, so sometimes I try to remind people I have an unfair advantage when it comes to stoicism because I've been talking about, like, in the course of writing this daily email for five years, I'm having a conversation with the audience, sure, but I'm also having a conversation with the audience.

the texts and with myself on an ongoing basis. That journey, if simply done privately, might have taken five times as long or something. So yeah, the active exploration of these ideas is possible when you rip yourself out of the muck of whatever the breaking news story of the day is. And I feel like a lot of people are trapped

How do they untrap themselves? Because I agree with that. Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I have a couple rules. One, I don't check my phone for the first one hour that I'm awake and I don't sleep with it in the room that I'm in. So a minimum of every day, it's like eight or nine hours without the phone.

And then I take a long walk in the morning or a long run in the morning with my kids. So instead of using the phone, I'm also like with children who are not jaded and don't give a shit about any of this stuff and, you know, want to look at the deer or the ants that are crawling across the road or, you know, want to make up a ridiculous story about something. So I start the day from a place like that. And then my other thing is I go right into...

like the important thing for the day. So like I'm writing right now. So I like, and I did my writing. So like, you know, whatever happens the rest of the day is kind of like extra for me. I already like did what I needed to do. But again, I feel like a lot of people procrastinate. A lot of people overcommit to stuff. Part, one of the benefits of being out here is like, I don't, I don't get asked to do half the stuff that I got asked to do when I lived in Los Angeles or New York.

Yeah, I mean, that I think is an enormous part of it. Yes. And look, it's not sustainable for everyone. And if, you know...

There might be periods where I'm not like that, putting out a book or something. But actually, every time I put out a book, it confirms to me, like, I was like, oh, I used to do this all the time. This is horrible. Why am I doing this? You know, Tim Ferriss came up with this phrase of lifestyle design, which I think is a really beautiful expression that not a lot of people are familiar with. Not enough people are familiar with. I mean, as someone who is very poor at designing my lifestyle, like, I mean...

As I told you before we started, I was watching a bunch of your videos about like seven routines for living a happy day and week and all this stuff. And I'm like watching them from my bed where my computer is shriveling up my ovaries. And I'm probably getting bed sores because I've been typing for three days in a row without getting up to exercise. And I'm looking at you and I'm like –

how is this guy like published 10 bestselling books and has two children and has a ranch and has the bookstore and he's three years younger than me. Like I want to kill him. But rather than killing you, I want to ask like if you're doing an intervention on my lifestyle design other than the fact of, you know, as you and Ariana Huffington say, don't sleep with your phone next to you. What are like the two or three other things that I should do starting today? What time do you wake up in the morning?

Seven, 7.30. Oh, so you're already waking up early, which is great. But what do you do when you wake up? What are the first things you do when you wake up? I look at Signal, I look at Twitter, and I look at my email. So you're starting the day at the mercy of things that you don't control, right? Correct. The best expression I heard is that your inbox is a to-do list put together by other people.

I love that. Yes. You're not starting the day thinking about what you want to think about, reading what you want to read about, doing what you want to do, writing about what you want to write about. You're starting your day based on whatever has happened while you were sleeping. So you're inherently starting the day on your back foot, which is like a really bad place. So if I was, all I was making was like a small tweak. It would just be about like, how are you going to start the day intentionally and productively

um productively as opposed to reactively okay that's one thing what's two i would put an exercise practice in it doesn't have to be crazy but i you know like a walk or a run or a swim or a class of some kind i like to have something that i win every day that aside from the work like something that's like if i did it then it was successful right so something like that is really great um

And then honestly, I found kids have been like the greatest thing that I've ever done. The most centering thing that I've ever done and helped me like say no to like crap that I don't want to do and shouldn't have to do because I realized that, oh, I'm stealing this time from them.

Yes. I mean, we're on the path to trying to make that happen, let's say. No, I read that. That's why I said this. But it was a total game changer. There was something that I saw in one of your videos that you showed a picture of

of maybe a designer or a writer who had a sign next to his desk that just said the word no. Who was that? Oh, yes. Oliver Sacks. Yes. So there's actually this great performance coach. His name is Dr. Jonathan Fader. And he was like the performance coach for the Mets and the Giants and a bunch of other probably writers you know, too, and musicians. But he gave me this thing. And it's Oliver Sacks had behind him a giant sign that said no. And

And to remind himself to say no. And honestly, there's like 10 emails in my inbox that like when I immediately saw, I knew my reaction was no, but like I couldn't bring myself to say no. And at some point today, I'll pull it up and I'll like, I'll bust out like five declines. And so every time you say yes to something, you're saying no to something else. Mm.

And every time you say no to something, it is the opportunity to say yes to something else. And so I think about that a lot. And unfortunately, a lot of times when people are saying yes to things, particularly Twitter, like actually Clubhouse is a great example. The amount of people that I know that have kids that spend time on Clubhouse is like completely baffling to me. It's like, what the fuck are you doing? That you are spending time in the evenings in an imaginary place.

Like conferences already suck. And here you are attending imaginary conferences that you're not being paid to attend. This is completely baffling to me. But the point is realizing that when you're accepting these things, that it's coming at a cost either to your work or to people that you've already promised yourself to. Ryan? Ryan?

We've been going for two hours. I feel like I could talk to you for another many, but I'm also aware- Let's talk when you come on my podcast. We'll talk more about the Stoics. I can't wait to do that. I need a Stoic intervention in my life and I am willing, ready, and able. I think that maybe I can make a commitment right now to not checking my phone for the first hour of every day and getting- Here's what I would do. I would start with 10 minutes. I would do one-

go like, I'm going to do one thing before I check my phone. Like I'm going to take a shower or I'm going to brush my teeth or I'm going to let the dog out. Like I'm going to do one thing before I touch the phone. Then you can build on that. I can do that. And I think that that would make everyone in my life a lot happier. But next up for me on my list is reading your books about stoicism. And

You're also working on, from what I recall, four books about the cardinal virtues, wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. Do I have that right? Yes. Yes. Those are the four virtues of Christianity and Stoicism. So the Courage book will be out in the fall, and then I'm just starting the Self-Discipline book now.

Okay, we're going to need to have a conversation about that because- I would love that. The issue of courage and why it's so rare a quality and how we can cultivate it, if that's even possible, or if it's something that's sort of inborn is something that I'm sort of obsessed with. So I'd love to talk to you about that. Well, I just got it back. So I will send it to you today. Fabulous. I would love it. Thank you so much, Ryan. It was a total honor. I'm a huge fan and this was really fun for me. Thank you. Thank you.

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