Trust Me, I'm Lying
The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about
On its face, Trust Me, I’m Lying is about how the media - overworked journalists hungry for clicks - can be easily manipulated and influenced by marketers and PR operatives. This is an interesting message. But peel it back one level, and there’s a much more valuable lesson: most of us are too busy and overwhelmed, allowing others to influence us in ways we might not even anticipate.
Author Ryan Holiday ran marketing and publicity for American Apparel and other clients, where he routinely played the role of a “media manipulator.” But as I mentioned, I think the main point is much deeper than that. Let’s dive in.
Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator by Ryan Holiday (352 pages)
Rating: 4/5
Who should read it: Anyone interested in how media / PR / the news works or looking to improve their own thinking / skepticism / BS meter
Summary
The “new media” (blogs, newspapers, TV stations) is structurally set up to be manipulated
Most publications and websites optimize for clicks / eyeballs and most writers are super busy1, so they will happily accept any leads / suggested stories. In the “link economy”, anything backed up by a hyperlink is assumed to be true.
As a result, “media manipulators” like Holiday can follow a pretty simple playbook to get their client in the news, by “trading up” a story:
Create some kind of controversy or show some kind of story to a local blogger (e.g., deface your own billboard, leak your own internal document)
The local blogger or publication publishes it
Your controversy or story becomes “legitimate”, which means a larger blog will publish it if you send it to them (under a fake name)
You send that article to CNN / the New York Times and they publish it. Congrats, you’ve made it big!
Key takeaways
The most interesting generalizable takeaway is that people are really busy - too busy to do all of their jobs - and you can take advantage of that (or be taken advantage of)
Lobbyists often write bills for members of congress that get made into laws. Your member of congress isn’t doing this because they are evil, but because their staffers are all overworked and don’t have the bandwidth to research every subject and write thoughtful legislation. So if a lobbyist offers something that sounds good, why not use it as a starting point?
Professional investors might cover dozens of companies. Doing research on all of them can be overwhelming. Often, companies will prepare “investor presentations” that include information about their industry, market size, market growth, etc. While it’s easy to let the company do the work for you in terms of sizing a market or its growth, don’t you think they have their own incentives?
Most of us should more skeptical in general - if someone is telling you something, have they actually vetted it or did someone just tell them it’s the truth? All of us are running around doing 500 things at once and are often too busy to think, so we rely on others to think for us sometimes. Which can be bad. Of course, if you are trying to independently audit and every piece of information you receive, you’ll get nothing done in life, ever. (“My iPhone is telling me it’s going to be 70 degrees later - what’s in it for them?”). So at some level, you need to figure out which areas of your life you want to prioritize being skeptical / “right” and which you care less about.
Related quote from a book on how to be a good investor:
Be skeptical, very skeptical, and even more skeptical. Great analysts rarely accept anything at face value...75 percent of the information out there for consumption by financial analysts is misleading or omit an important piece of information relevant to the topic
Thoughts and reactions
I enjoyed the book - it written in an entertaining style, the main point is spot-on. Only complaint is that it feels a bit repetitive and could’ve been a bit shorter. But Holiday is able to write in a compelling way, so it went by quickly
The book was written in 2013, so it’s interesting to think about what has and what hasn’t changed since them, as well as what Holiday anticipated
What has changed:
Holiday’s bete noire is Gawker, which has since been bankrupted by Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit (backed by Peter Thiel). There doesn’t seem to be one blog that has filled its void (or I’m more out of touch)
The media industry has shifted to more subscription models, which incentivize quality writing that people will pay for
What hasn’t changed:
There’s plenty of clickbait on the internet and we’ve spent a while all talking about how “big tech” serves us content designed to elicit an emotional reaction
Fake news - which Holiday presciently discusses - is certainly a bigger thing now than in 2013
Controversy is still a powerful publicity tool - perhaps even more so than 9(!) years ago given how polarized the world has become over pretty much everything. Generating controversy might not endear you to your enemies, but will certainly fire-up your own supporters.
E.g., bloggers paid $5 / post or something like that