Trust Me I'm Lying (5th Anniversary Edition)

by Ryan Holiday

  Our plan worked a little too well. We’d given ourselves a two-month window to build a buzz before getting it mainstream. It hit top-tier outlets like Fox News in under three weeks. When the traffic explosion hit, we weren’t prepared. It came so fast and at such volume, it crashed the server. The aborted plan was to utilize a plugin to compel a video view before entering, and with a crashed server the only remaining option was a URL redirect. We sent hundreds of thousands of people to a third-party site that autoplayed a graphic video titled “Meet Your Meat.”

  In the end, the results were massive: At least 200,000 people baited into getting their first glimpse inside a slaughterhouse. The Vegan Sellout List was vindicated by the results it achieved.

  I have friends working for nonprofits who travel in vans to college campuses all year asking people to watch two minutes of slaughterhouse footage. On a good day, they reach 200 people. This is important and noble work. But consider that the Vegan Sellout List may have sent over 1,000 times as many people to the same footage for three days work. Even if only 10 percent of visitors watched the video, this is an incredible return on my time investment.

  Everyone doing advocacy work owes it to their message to get acquainted with the concept of leverage, and ways to increase the impact of each unit of effort exponentially. As I asserted in my original statement on this stunt: Before this stunt, most vegans believed the temperature in Hell would have to hit 32 degrees before FoxNews. com would ever send tens (or hundreds) of thousands of their readers directly to graphic slaughterhouse footage. Regarding why these methods are justified: While the lines are increasingly blurred, I apply two different ethical equations to bloggers vs. journalists.

  Bloggers: On the internet, being vocally “offended” is the new “look at me I’m cool.” It’s like being 12 and putting a playing card in your bike spokes. I’ve met many of the bigger bloggers in the vegan space. Most of them are awesome people. A few of the more drama-centric ones are clearly acting out their own demons. Like, they couldn’t get a date in high school (or now), and it’s payback time. (To be fair, this is my take on a large swath of the internet, and is not vegan-specific.) This is exactly the type of person The Vegan Sellout List was designed to agitate for traffic. If you’ve built a career around creating—or spreading—fake drama, then you’re fair game.

  Regarding larger online media, it’s a more delicate equation. However in this instance it was simple: If they consider a list of former vegans to be “news,” they’ve forfeited all journalistic integrity and have left themselves wide, wide open. They’re for-profit businesses. I have a message. We’re both dealing in the traffic economy. In this instance, I just happen to beat them at their own game.

  What have you learned about the media and its inner-workings from your campaign?

  The unspoken conspiracy that you speak of, that exists between journalists and those seeking publicity is very real. If you have a story that provokes—real or not—they have the time. Give them the promise of traffic and a little plausible denial and you’re in. I’ve received tremendous insights from Trust Me, I’m Lying and your Creative Live course. I got to work on The Jetsetting Terrorist the day after finishing the latter. Your point that there is a harmony of interests between journalists and those who wish to hack the media is very powerful, and has proven true.

  I’ve also learned that a big part of your playbook (i.e. manufacturing controversy to generate publicity) is given a nitro boost when executed in the activist realm.

  I have to be careful here because it’s clear whose side I’m usually on, but there’s a small segment who are attracted to social movements because . . . let’s just say they have an emotional agenda. To use your term, they’re “rage profiteers,” reveling in the drama economy. And I’ve been the hidden hand instigating them for a greater good more times than I would admit. The best case study in this (which I had nothing to do with) was the recent “controversy” around a vegan cookbook titled Thug Kitchen. If you ever do a Trust Me, I’m Lying update, you have to get this in there. Thug Kitchen was an anonymous vegan blog, where vegan recipes were written in cartoonish “thug” language. It was funny, the blog became popular, and the (anonymous) authors got a book deal.

  Weeks before the book’s release, the authors revealed their identity. Surprise: They were two attractive white people from Los Angeles. Within days, several small anarchist blogs were buzzing in outrage accusing the authors of “cultural appropriation” and “digital blackface” and calling for a boycott. They announced (and eventually delivered) protests at book signings. This went up the chain like wildfire, and hit Vice just before the book’s release. That was four months ago. It’s been the best-selling vegan cookbook on Amazon ever since.

  I have no knowledge of whether this controversy was real or manufactured. But if the latter, it followed a recipe that couldn’t fail:

  • Take a target appetizing to leftist and politically radical bloggers (attractive, white, sporty vegans).

  • Assign to them some perceived misconduct that fits into one of the top three categories of internet scandal (in this instance: racism).

  • Seed excitable elements of the blogosphere with the fake scandal.

  If I were the invisible puppet master orchestrating this, I would know that only 0.02 percent of people will be genuinely offended by the Thug Kitchen authors being white. But another 60 percent will feign outrage to look cool. And just about everyone else will quietly nod their heads in agreement for fear of being labeled racists themselves.

  And what do the authors care? They get six-figures in free publicity. The anarchists get their flavor-of-the-week drama. Win-win.

  Why should we believe you? This is a question I get a lot myself—to which my answer is: Why should I lie? Lying was keeping it a secret—but I am curious to hear your thoughts. Obviously some people would say you undermine the credibility of the cause with these tactics.

  My response is: What’s in it for me? I don’t have clients (cows in slaughterhouses don’t pay), and I don’t take credit (I was outed in both instances we’re discussing. This would be a longer interview if we got into the stunts I haven’t been caught for). If anyone has a point they think defeats the message that animals are exploited (or that the TSA targets people based on their politics), then by all means lay your evidence on the table.

  But attacking a message’s delivery device and suggesting it undermines the message itself is the work of someone who lacks an argument. Credibility is everything, particularly when you’re the bearer of a message people don’t want to hear. Much different than artists, whose position I envy. When you’re an artist, there is virtually nothing that can harm your reputation.

  Most media tends to be good media. With advocacy, it’s much more delicate. You have to honor the facts at all costs. The Vegan Sellout List utilized deception of intent, not deception of facts. It was exactly what it purported to be (until the link-redirect): A directory of ex-vegans. The Jetsetting Terrorist was exactly what it claimed: A collection of true stories about a convicted terrorist being harassed by the TSA. I employ Trojan horses, not deception.

  What’s next?

  Very little I would admit to.

  Despite a compelling interview given by my female co-conspirator, it’s looking increasingly unlikely the No. 2 women’s magazine will ever run their “How a one-night stand with a radical vegan turned me into an animal rights activist” story. If it does surface, that was all us. While tasteless, a “sex confessional” is just about the only angle to get a message of substance into a publication like that. On the more frivolous front, an anonymous hip-hop project that will make License To Ill–era Beastie Boys controversy look amateur. And on the advocacy front, the stakes are too high to reveal my hand. But I will continue to provoke thought into our relationship with animals by any means necessary.

  “EXCLUSIVE : HOW THIS MAN GOT THE MEDIA TO FALL FOR SHIPYOURENEMIESGLITTER STUNT”

  MATHEW CARPENTER

/>   New York Observer, January 2015*

  LAST WEEK, THE WEB WAS BOTH OUTRAGED AND IN love with a controversial new start-up called ShipYourEnemiesGlitter. com. The premise was both inspired and insane—for $9.99 you could ship a benign glitter bomb to any friend or enemy anywhere in the world. Time.com covered it, and so did Fast Company, the Telegraph, Huffington Post, TechCrunch (note: the Observer declined to cover it because it seemed suspicious). Then after claiming six figures’ worth of orders and more than a million pageviews, the founder begged users to stop inundating him with requests and put the whole thing up for auction, where it netted $85,000.

  So what the hell was all that? Well, over the weekend, I got a rather unexpected email from Mathew Carpenter, the founder himself. It turns out that he had read my book Trust Me, I’m Lying and some of my Betabeat columns on trading up the chain and media sourcing. This partially inspired his unusual experiment to test his marketing skills, have some fun and see how the media really works. By accident, he revealed two very clear things to us all: how great the demand for weird, funny start-ups actually is and how desperate and derivative the online media is these days. In fact, he told many reporters exactly what he was doing but they chose not to print it—for fear it would ruin their story or make them look bad.

  In what is now the Observer’s second big exclusive on a media stunt that fooled nearly everyone in media, I was able to ask Mathew some questions about what happened, what he saw and what he learned and how this stunt came to be. I hope his answers provide some insight for readers on how the news works these days—but more importantly I hope it chastises increasingly lazy reporters. Oh and I hope everyone gives Mathew some credit, because this whole thing was absolutely brilliant from top to bottom.

  What made you decide to do it and why did you think you could pull this off?

  I run a lot of websites that earn recurring income with very little work. My New Year’s resolution was to work on more side projects to keep me occupied whilst improving my marketing & development skills. I read your book about 8 months ago and experimented with a few different ideas before hitting a success with this website.

  It sounds like you traded this up the chain, as I call it, going from one media outlet to the other until it became a major story. Which outlets/platform did you target first and how did it go from there? Who delivered the most punch/traffic?

  Lately I’ve found that the media (here in Australia particularly) has become extremely lazy with sourcing. 90% get their stories from aggregation websites which is what I initially targeted. I knew that if the story blew up on websites such as Reddit & Product Hunt that it would be a success. The media attributed the success to being the most upvoted Product of the Day on Product Hunt, however in terms of referral traffic Product Hunt came in 21st.

  Was there any outlet who asked you tough questions or you felt really wanted to see if there was substance to this story? Who was the worst in terms of rubber stamping and just repeating whatever they saw elsewhere?

  The publication that put in the most effort, in my opinion, was Fast Company, who wrote about the website in the most detail and asked the best questions. There were a few outlets that (a) didn’t bother asking questions and just referenced already published articles and (b) didn’t wait for me to reply to their answers and just went live anyway. I’m looking at you, News Corp.

  A couple of the reporters picked up on your SEO background. You have to tell us, what do you think being linked to and mentioned on essentially every media outlet is going to do for your rankings in search engines?

  For Ship Your Enemies Glitter it’s going to mean that no competitor is going to outrank the website for whatever keywords the new owner wants to rank for. It was tempting not to 301 the entire site to my main business website but that would have cost me the $100,000, haha. I was name-dropping my other websites hoping for some link juice to them but they were either not mentioned, not linked to, or non-followed links.

  Obviously you were pretty cynical about the media from the beginning, and had explored some of this before, but what did experiencing this make you think? What would you advise people learn from this, either for their own media habits or someone launching a product that they want to get attention for?

  I mean, it really reinforced to me how little fact checking and verification goes into a story. For example, many outlets reported I was a student at a local University which isn’t true and I have no idea how they came to that conclusion. It also showed to me the sort of manipulation that some journalists put into a story. Another example was that there was one who asked for proof of the millions of visitors the website received. I provided screenshots of Google Analytics which is about the most accurate traffic tracking software out there, however they refused to accept it and published that I couldn’t provide third party proof of the numbers.

  Finally, what’s next for you?

  The great thing about this project, no matter how messy my place has gotten from the glitter is that I’ve met a lot of really smart & creative people from it so hopefully I get to work with them on something cool moving forward.

  “EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: MEET MADDOX, OWNER OF THE INTERNET’S ‘BEST PAGE IN THE UNIVERSE’ ”

  MADDOX

  New York Observer, June 2015*

  MADDOX IS THE FIR STWRITER IR EMEMBER reading on the web. If you came of age during the first blogging boom, you probably had a similar experience. His writing and his style was influential for a generation of writers, humorists and web entrepreneurs. Since launching in 1997, he’s seen hundreds of millions of visitors, developed some of the web’s most classic memes, and sold a metric ton of t-shirts. Most of all, he’s always been ahead of the curve in terms of online business models and calling out bullshit trends in culture from “extreme” marketing to the swine flu craze.

  After a few years of sporadic content, Maddox is back in a big way. More recently, he’s built a massively popular podcast, a YouTube channel and regularly taken the media to task for offensive stories on Robin Williams’s death, BuzzFeed’s nasty habit of stealing content, and media’s propensity to pseudo-outrage.

  If you had told me as a teenager, when my friends had Maddox stickers on their cars and we all eagerly AIM-chatted each other his pieces, that I’d be interviewing him over a decade later or that he’d occasionally link to my own writing, I probably wouldn’t have believed you. But here we are. To continue our series of interviews with influential and insightful voices on the inner-workings of today’s new media, I reached out to ask Maddox his thoughts on media manipulation, some of his least favorite websites, and outrage porn.

  So you were one of the biggest and earliest critics of BuzzFeed—not just for the annoying listicles and nostalgia trolling but also for the content they steal from creators like you. A few years and millions of dollars in funding later what do you think of them now?

  They’re even worse. I was just reading the gripes of BuzzFeed employees I know personally, who were complaining that they weren’t given credit for writing, producing or directing any of their videos. Since I wrote my original piece about BuzzFeed, many of my friends have found employment at their Los Angeles offices, where they produce much of their video content. Not only does the site take credit for material from other websites, BuzzFeed doesn’t even credit their own staff for the content they legitimately created. These credits aren’t insignificant either, as many of my friends have cobbled together careers based on their credits on small web projects. When BuzzFeed publishes content, the creator is, for all intents and purposes, BuzzFeed corporation. As a friend very aptly pointed out, The Onion doesn’t credit individual writers, but they are a satirical news organization whereas BuzzFeed is not. The Onion’s entire reason for existing is satire with a strong editorial point of view, while BuzzFeed’s reason for existing is . . . to generate ad revenue and to trick you into clicking their content. One does it out of necessity to its voice, the other out of ignorance, greed or malice.


  There was the famous screenshot you took last year after Robin Williams’s death with ABC running the tasteless footage of his home. Ultimately, you targeted the CEO and they had to apologize and stop. Do you think if you hadn’t said anything, would anyone have cared? Of course, a bunch of other outlets also stole your scoop after. I’m guessing you don’t think very highly of the whole establishment?

  If I hadn’t posted that juxtaposition of real-time helicopter footage on the same page as his family’s request for peace during their grief, it’s possible that someone else may have noticed the same thing, possibly even from ABC News. However if it were the latter, there’s a tremendous amount of internal pressure not to run problems like this up the corporate ladder. Chiefly, the fact that your boss has an ego and a boss of his or her own; pointing out a mistake like this could embarrass him or her and ultimately cost you your job, or at the very least, a raise or promotion. Would you risk it? Nah, better look the other way. You have bills to pay and mouths to feed. Why rock the boat? Let that asshole Maddox do it.

  You and I talked about some of the sanctimonious coverage of the celeb nude leaks and then the Spider Man/Woman cover. Do you think these people actually care? Or do you think that pretending to be mad—that getting upset and getting other people upset—is a quick way to get traffic?

  There are three reasons at play that, when combined, create a Captain-Planet-esque superhero of shitty motives for outrage: The first reason is that the righteous indignation feels good. We live in an age of relative peace where we don’t have a “big devil” like communism or fascism to point to as the source of all our problems. They need a cause that isn’t religious since believing in things isn’t cool anymore, so finding an enemy that they feel just in hating and blaming makes them feel needed. Second, there is the money motive. It’s very lucrative to get those clicks coming to your website. Outrage is big business. And third, as cynical as I am, I can’t totally dismiss the possibility that some of these people might actually care. However, their well-intentioned idiocy is often myopic, causing more harm than good.