by Ryan Holiday
PRAISE FOR RYAN HOLIDAY AND TRUST ME, I’M LYING
“Holiday effectively maps the news media landscape. . . . Media students and bloggers would do well to heed Holiday’s informative, timely, and provocative advice.”
—Publishers Weekly
“This book will make online media giants very, very uncomfortable.”
—Drew Curtis, founder, Fark.com
“Ryan Holiday’s brilliant exposé of the unreality of the Internet should be required reading for every thinker in America.”
—Edward Jay Epstein, author of How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft
“Ryan Holiday is the Machiavelli of the Internet age. Dismiss his message at your own peril: He speaks truths about the dark side of internet media which no one else dares mention.”
—Michael Ellsberg, author of The Education of Millionaires
“[Like] Upton Sinclair on the blogosphere.”
—Tyler Cowen, MarginalRevolution.com, author of Average Is Over
“Ryan Holiday is the internet’s sociopathic id.”
—Dan Mitchell, SF Weekly
“Ryan Holiday is a media genius who promotes, inflates, and hacks some of the biggest names and brands in the world.”
—Chase Jarvis, founder and CEO, CreativeLive
“Ryan has a truly unique perspective on the seedy underbelly of digital culture.”
—Matt Mason, former director of marketing, BitTorrent
“While the observation that the internet favors speed over accuracy is hardly new, Holiday lays out how easily it is to twist it toward any end. . . . Trust Me, I’m Lying provides valuable food for thought regarding how we receive—and perceive—information.”
—New York Post
TRUST ME, I’M LYING
Ryan Holiday is a bestselling author and a leading media strategist. After dropping out of college at nineteen to apprentice under Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power, he went on to advise many bestselling authors, multiplatinum musicians, and notorious clients. He’s served as the director of marketing at American Apparel, where his work was internationally known and used as case studies by Twitter, YouTube, and Google. His books have been translated into twenty languages and his writing has appeared everywhere from the Columbia Journalism Review to Entrepreneur and Fast Company. His company, Brass Check, has advised companies like Google, Taser, and Complex, and some of the biggest authors in the world. He currently lives on a small ranch in Austin, Texas, and writes at RyanHoliday.net.
First published in Great Britain in 2018 by
Profile Books Ltd
3 Holford Yard
Bevin Way
London
WC1X 9HD
www.profilebooks.com
First published in the United States of America in 2012 by Portfolio / Penguin
Edition with a new preface and two new appendices published 2013. This revised and expanded edition published by Portfolio / Penguin, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2017
Copyright © Ryan Holiday, 2012, 2013, 2017
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
eISBN 978 1 78283 423 6
The very blood and semen of journalism, on the contrary, is a broad and successful form of lying. Remove that form of lying and you no longer have journalism.
—JAMES AGEE, LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN
CONTENTS
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
BOOK ONE
FEEDING THE MONSTER
HOW BLOGS WORK
I BLOGS MAKE THE NEWS
II TRADING UP THE CHAIN: HOW TO TURN NOTHING INTO SOMETHING IN THREE WAY-TOO-EASY STEPS
III THE BLOG CON: HOW PUBLISHERS MAKE MONEY ONLINE
IV TACTIC #1: THE ART OF THE BRIBE
V TACTIC #2: TELL THEM WHAT THEY WANT TO HEAR
VI TACTIC #3: GIVE ’EM WHAT SPREADS
VII TACTIC #4: HELP THEM TRICK THEIR READERS
VIII TACTIC #5: SELL THEM SOMETHING THEY CAN SELL (TO BE IN THE NEWS, MAKE NEWS)
IX TACTIC # 6: MAKE IT ALL ABOUT THE HEADLINE
X TACTIC #7: KILL ’EM WITH PAGEVIEW KINDNESS
XI TACTIC #8: USE THE TECHNOLOGY AGAINST ITSELF
XII TACTIC #9: JUST MAKE STUFF UP (EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING IT)
BOOK TWO
THE MONSTER ATTACKS
WHAT BLOGS MEAN
XIII IRIN CARMON, THE DAILY SHOW, AND ME: THE PERFECT STORM OF HOW TOXIC BLOGGING CAN BE
XIV THERE ARE OTHERS: THE MANIPULATOR HALL OF FAME
XV SLACKTIVISM IS NOT ACTIVISM: RESISTING THE TIME AND MIND SUCK OF ONLINE MEDIA
XVI JUST PASSING THIS ALONG: WHEN NO ONE OWNS WHAT THEY SAY
XVII CYBERWARFARE: BATTLING IT OUT ONLINE
XVIII THE MYTH OF CORRECTIONS
XIX THE TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY DEGRADATION CEREMONY: BLOGS AS MACHINES OF MOCKERY, SHAME, AND PUNISHMENT
XX WELCOME TO UNREALITY
XXI HOW TO READ A BLOG: AN UPDATE ON ACCOUNT OF ALL THE LIES
CONCLUSION: SO . . . WHERE TO FROM HERE?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
APPENDIX
NOTES
WORKS CITED
FURTHER READING
INDEX
PREFACE
A MAN MUCH SMARTER THAN I AM ONCE DESCRIBED a “racket” as something that “is not what it seems to the majority of the people,” where only a small group of insiders know what’s really going on and they operate for the benefit of a few and at the expense of basically everyone else.1 I read this description after I wrote and published Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator. I had used the word casually only once or twice in the book, but I understand now, based on the reaction the book generated, the extent of the racket I was exposing.
There is no other definition for the modern media system. Its very business model rests on exploiting the difference between perception and reality—pretending that it produces the “quality” news we once classified as journalism without adhering to any of the standards or practices that define it. Online, outlets have to publish so much so quickly and at such razor-thin margins that no media outlet can afford to do good work. But of course, no one can admit any of this without the whole system collapsing.
Starting to sound like a racket, no?
In recent years, the evidence has piled up. The president of CBS said on the record that the election of Donald Trump “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” White supremacist Richard Spencer has talked openly to reporters about how he “memed his movement into existence” (and they kept covering him after he admitted it). It was revealed that many of the “fake news” sites that dominate Facebook with preposterous left-wing and right-wing propaganda are owned by the same parent company. An editor at Gawker tweeted that if they resisted publishing those too-good-to-be-true viral stories, “traffic would crater.” For me the kicker was having another Gawker editor tell me after an inaccurate story that the whole game was “professional wrestling.”* These kinds of incidents make you realize it really is a brazen and corrupt system operated by a few at the expense of the rest of us. So there’s your question: I might be the one “confessing,” but who is the real m
edia manipulator here?
When I started talking to publishers about this book in late 2011, I told them that I didn’t want to put out a book of media criticism. No matter how smart or insightful those books can be, they’re usually written by academics or outsiders and can only scratch the surface of the problem. I believed I had a chance to do something different. I could be the first defector, in a position to expose the worst of the web’s marketing and publishing practices because I’d created and perfected many of them.
I decided to administer a major shock to both the media system and the public with the same book. I wouldn’t just rip back the curtain—I wouldn’t let anyone look away from what they saw.
This decision sent me and the book you’re about to read down a path that surprised and appalled me, a person I thought was plenty jaded. I was cynical and pessimistic in my predictions too—and more than five years after this book’s publication, things are so much worse than I ever could have thought they would be.
I remember telling my publisher in an early meeting about Trust Me, I’m Lying that I thought it was interesting that Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker (a first-person memoir critical of the culture of Wall Street in the eighties) is regularly named as the book that encouraged people to want to get jobs on Wall Street. I always knew the book I would be writing—a memoir of my time in the world of media manipulation and an exposé of the media system—might have a similar arc. But I never expected to hear from people who used the book to trick the most prestigious media outlets in the world into covering their companies. I didn’t think I’d hear from start-ups and journalism professors and media outlets who assigned the book to students and new hires. I never dreamed that my book would be cited as an influence by the people who helped get an unhinged lunatic and former reality television star elected to the presidency.
I have repeatedly been asked what it feels like to have been so right with this book. I can only reply with this quote from the brilliant cultural critic George W. S. Trow, who was an early influence of this book:
There’s nothing fun about being right if what you’re right about is the triumph, or the temporary triumph, of the inevitably bad.
Let me give you an example. As part of the launch of this book, in an attempt to prove just how bad things really were, I did a stunt using the service Help a Reporter Out (helpareporter.com), which purports to match reporters and “expert” sources. I wanted to prove just how absurd and prone to abuse a service like this could be. I replied to every HARO query I could, including the “urgent” queries that HARO put out on Twitter, figuring that pressing deadlines would make it even easier to get quoted. I ended up being quoted as an expert on topics I knew nothing about in stories in CBS, MSNBC, Reuters, and ABC News. I eventually asked my assistant to start supplying quotes to reporters for me, which he did, scoring a feature in the New York Times about vinyl records (another topic I knew literally nothing about). I then revealed how all this had happened, to the intense rage and consternation of nearly every major media outlet. And yet the New York Times, embarrassed and exposed by what had happened, could have banned their journalists from using the service going forward but didn’t.
They probably should have listened to my criticism. Because over the next five years, the Times would feature quotes from a “millennial” comedian named Dan Nainan six times. So too would Forbes, the Chicago Tribune, Business Insider, the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, CNN, and other outlets in trend stories about his millennial experience. The only problem? Dan is not a millennial, just a liar. In truth, he is fifty-five years old. He fooled nearly every media outlet in the country. His tool of choice? Help a Reporter Out.
I wish it gave me some joy to throw these events back in the face of HARO’s founder, who accused me on video of being a lone bad actor and grew so angry in his denunciations that I thought he might have an aneurism. But in this case, being right just makes me sad—and scared.
Members of the media like to talk about the essential role it plays in society and in democracy. They’re right. And they haven’t been doing their jobs. In fact, they are just as much a part of the problem as manipulators and marketers are—perhaps even more so.
By the time you are reading this, the launch of the book will seem far away. But when it came out, the book was controversial, on purpose. I knew that to cut through the noise, everything about it had to be different and prove the ideas in the book. I won’t say I was an angel about it—but I definitely made my point. I leaked that the book was a celebrity tell-all, which blogs picked up without verifying. I doubled the size of my advance in the announcement and nobody fact-checked it. I got popular media folks to denounce the book and used their outrage to sell more copies.
I applied all the tactics of media manipulation described in the book in order to propagate my warnings about the dangers and prevalence of media manipulation. I also “traded up the chain” to reach as many people as possible. Coverage about the book started online with small blogs and ultimately reverberated across the globe, from radio shows in Malaysia to the pages of Le Monde. From NPR to the “Editor’s Notes” section of the New York Times (which retracted a quote from me after I exposed a problem in its sourcing methods)2 to a Forbes.com megastory (which did 165,000 views), TMIL was everywhere.
The point of all this wasn’t simply self-promotion. I wanted to prove I was as good as I said I was—and I wanted to prove that the system is so vulnerable that even a transparent media manipulator could make it do what he wanted.
Of course, other things happened that I did not plan. I was feeding the monster with my marketing, and just when you start to think you’re in control, you catch a swift kick to the stomach. Something doesn’t quite go your way, something unexpected happens, and the next thing you know you’re on the front page of Yahoo.com when you’d rather not be.
It spins out of control very quickly. There were a lot of names thrown at me and my book, from “douchebag” to “lying jerk” to “out and out phony” to “troll.” One blog accused me of “throwing shit” and another influential PR writer claimed I was “hurting an entire industry.” Scott Monty, then the head of social media at Ford, posted a picture of my book in his trash can. I remember doing an interview at some point and the reporter saying, “You know, this stunt about being a fake expert is going to be in your obituary.” I had not thought that far ahead. I was twenty-five.
It was these unexpected things over the last few years—some of which were fun and some of which weren’t—that proved my point too:
• I skipped the credit check on a new apartment by sending my landlord a link to an article about the (fake) size of my book advance.
• Well before the launch of the book, someone leaked my book proposal to the New York Observer to try to wreck my meta-marketing plan before I could get it started.
• Many bloggers made embarrassing mistakes about the book and refused to correct them. Others denounced it and criticized it without reading it.
• The settlement in a lawsuit involving one of my clients was held up because they worried about what I was supposedly revealing in my “tell-all.”
• Business Insider, who I heavily criticize in the book, called me a liar instead of defending themselves . . . in an eleven-page slideshow.
• Even though each one of my books has sold enough copies to hit the New York Times bestseller lists, I never have—retaliation, I suspect, for embarrassing them with one of my experiments in the book.
• I began to get e-mails from some of the most notorious media trolls in the world—including members of the so-called “alt-right”—about how the book was their bible and how they used it to get attention (Liar’s Poker all over again).
• I thought the book would get me out of the marketing game, but instead it led to more consulting and advising than I could possibly know what to do with.• Finally, I got older and saw more of the world (and of power, people, and institutions). This changed how I saw some of the things I
’d written about in the book, and it changed how I saw my own writing. I won’t apologize for anything I did or said—even the cringeworthy moments—but I am certainly not proud of all of it. How could I not see things differently at thirty than I did in my early twenties? As a result, I’ve revised the book to adjust for that experience.
There is one obvious mistake in my approach that I will admit right now: For all my cynicism, I was far too bullish about the system’s capacity or desire to actually hear my message. Many media outlets were glad to report on the book initially and gobble up the pageviews I could create for them, but actually doing something about the charges turned out to be far more challenging. “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something,” Upton Sinclair once said, “when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
I wasn’t thinking about it that way or I would have been much less surprised. It might seem naive, but I felt that if I could just get everyone’s attention and expose the problems in the right way, it could make a difference. I knew that my methods were untraditional and uncomfortable—like I said, they had to be—but I hoped the implications of my revelations would matter most.
Even though everything I wrote in Trust Me, I’m Lying was based on my personal experience, somewhere in the back of my head I always worried that my colleagues might say, “Ryan, c’mon, it’s not that bad.” Maybe they would say I was cherry-picking or being cynical. In fact, no one said that. The overwhelming reaction from people in the business was “Ryan, it’s even worse than what you say.”
Except for one thing. They would only say this in private. They would e-mail it to me or pull me aside at parties to tell me, but in public many of these same people criticized the book. Or called me names. Or, as I had feared most of all, ignored the book altogether—depriving it of the oxygen it needed to spread.
Regardless of the reaction or impact this book has had, I’m excited for you to read it. Besides the desire to get a huge weight off my chest, I also set out to write a book that could serve as the handbook for the rising sector of social-media jobs (I felt like there was no “bible” for this job yet). From what I hear, many firms now require employees to read Trust Me, I’m Lying. And more encouragingly, many blogs as well as journalism schools now require their writers and students to read the book—so they know how to spot manipulation and prevent it.