Holiday - Trust me, Im lying: confessions of a media manipulator

PRAISE FOR RYAN HOLIDAY AND TRUST ME, IM LYING

Holiday effectively maps the news media landscape.... Media students and bloggers would do well to heed Holidays informative, timely, and provocative advice.

Publishers Weekly

This book will make online media giants very, very uncomfortable.

Drew Curtis, founder, Fark.com

Ryan Holidays brilliant expos 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 internets 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, Im Lying provides valuable food for thought regarding how we receiveand perceiveinformation.

New York Post

TRUST ME, IM 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. Hes 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

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 whats really going on and they operate for the benefit of a few and at the expense of basically everyone else. I read this description after I wrote and published Trust Me, Im 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 realitypretending 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 its 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 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 theres your question: I might be the one confessing, but who is the real media manipulator here?

When I started talking to publishers about this book in late 2011, I told them that I didnt want to put out a book of media criticism. No matter how smart or insightful those books can be, theyre 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 webs marketing and publishing practices because Id 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 wouldnt just rip back the curtainI wouldnt let anyone look away from what they saw.

This decision sent me and the book youre 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 tooand more than five years after this books 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, Im Lying that I thought it was interesting that Michael Lewiss Liars 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 writinga memoir of my time in the world of media manipulation and an expos of the media systemmight 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 didnt think Id 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: