Trust Me, I’m Lying, By Ryan Holiday: 11 Reasons I’m Doing This Blog

Author’s Note: This post has two parts. Part one is thoughtful and slightly depressing. Part two is less thoughtful and goofy. Read either one at your leisure.

Part One: The Main Reason

I don’t know anything. That is the main reason I am doing this blog.

My goal is to read one book per week for the next 52 weeks and write a blog about it. I think this one-year challenge is the best way to broaden the scope of my knowledge, share that knowledge with friends, and create a little friendly challenge for myself. Trust Me, I’m Lying, Ryan Holiday’s take on the twisted world of blogs, was the book that showed me I do not know as much as I think. Not knowing enough is a problem I really need to address.

In my freshman year of college, we were all required to take a course called “Western Traditions.” The class reviewed the great philosophers starting in ancient Greece moving through to the Renaissance period. The point was for us to understand early Western thought on a basic level before diving into whatever subjects we chose to study in more detail. Frankly, I remember very little about each of the so-called classics we studied, but I have always come back to one particular piece from that course, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. I am a visual learner, and I remember vividly my professor drawing out the setting of the beginning of the story on the blackboard in our classroom:

“And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened:—Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.”

Plato explains what humans see as truth is not actually “Truth with a capital T” (as our professor would always say)--it’s just someone else’s projection of truth through an unreliable medium. The real truth, the one that is important to philosophers and intellectuals, is not readily visible and can only be found through extensive exploration.

This idea, that what we humans think is true might actually be false, blew me away. At the time I was a naive 18-year-old, and it never occurred to me that things I thought of as real could be fake. The thought was unsettling to say the least.

In the years following, I continued to take things in the world around me at face value more often than not. But occasionally I would come back to that story of The Cave. When I did, I would apply it more literally to the two media that define the view of “truth” in the modern world: television and the internet. Here were two examples of where notions of truth were not just being metaphorically screened in front of us, but were being physically screened for everyone to see. These channels for thought were so powerful and so prevalent that if the ideas they were espousing were actually false, it could be extremely harmful to any viewer’s freedom of thought.

Reading Trust Me, I’m Lying has brought this train of thought full circle for me. Holiday, who has served as a marketing advisor to public figures like Dov Charney and Tucker Max, explains how the economics of blogs make bloggers easy targets for manipulation. Most blogs rely exclusively on metrics like page-views and ad clicks to determine how much revenue they get from sponsors. More views and clicks equal more ads, so for-profit blogs will almost always choose content that will get a high number of views over content that is high quality. This often leads blogs to publish stories of questionable factuality. 

Holiday describes how he would often use phony names and email accounts to send bloggers fake news stories designed to gain more publicity for his clients. Bloggers are so starved for “click bait” content, he says, that they would usually accept his “tips” as fact and publish related stories without verifying any sources. Holiday says he would take advantage of this sloppy reporting by “trading up the chain”, feeding outrageous ideas to low-level blogs knowing the stories would, for the sake of clicks, eventually get picked up by more elite news agencies. Oftentimes these stories would show his clients in a negative light, but since guys like Charney and Max thrived on being reviled, this bad press was actually good press. These tactics are one of the reasons Holiday is the marketing superstar he is today.

While the first part of TMIL is all fun and games, Book Two, called “The Monster Attacks,” is much darker. Holiday shows how the moral ambiguity of these blogs (which include The Huffington Post, Gawker, Buzzfeed, Jezebel, and Business Insider among many others) will often (surprise!) do more harm than good. By the end of the book, Holiday becomes very cynical about major blogs, and even the internet as a whole, as a means of human communication.

I do not agree with Holiday that internet communication is a total waste of space. But I have realized anything passing for “daily news” on the internet could be utterly fabricated. As Holiday points out, this is a tough pill to swallow. Holiday writes, “Suppressing one’s instinct to interpret and speculate, until the totality of evidence arrives, is a skill that detectives and doctors train for years to develop. This is not something us regular humans are good at; in fact, we’re wired to do the opposite.” When we see a report on a celebrity scandal or hot-button political issue, our instinct is not to contemplate but to react. We will not take time to analyze what is truth and what is embellishment. Instead, we will laugh, cry, or kerfuffle, and we will accept what’s written as fact.

Of course, this blind acceptance is not a major problem if, as Holiday says, “they (the bloggers) hadn’t meant anything they wrote. It had all been a game.” I realized accepting the collective thought of the blogosphere as even remotely accurate could warp my entire perception of reality. That is why I have to do this blog. I need to turn off the spigot of modern media flow into my brain and turn on the spigots of literature and thoughtful commentary. Only then can I find the Truth with a capital “T” my professor always discussed.

Part Two: 10 Other Reasons

Okay, so Part One was a little heavy. If you have gotten this far (thanks Mom), I’ll try to reward you with a little humor and lightheartedness. So, here are ten other reasons I’m doing this blog:

1. I’ve always wanted to do a blog. Aside from wanting to be a professional golfer, a professional football player, and a professional baseball player, the main career dream I have in my young adult life is to be a writer. Maybe the best way to be a writer today is to start a blog. Big problem: before now, I had nothing interesting to write about. While the one-book-per-week idea is not earth shattering, it is the best I have for right now. How’s that for a sales pitch?
2. I want to improve my writing. I found my fire for writing while I was in college, and while I lost a little of it in my first couple of years after school, my most recent job has rekindled that fire into a roaring blaze. I have brainstormed a few different ways to improve, and I figured that writing articles for the whole world to see would be the best way to get better. Hopefully this is the worst post I ever write for this blog.
3. I want to read more. When I tell myself this, I always think of Brian Regan’s standup routine, where he says, “you never hear anybody bad-mouth reading.” Also, my parents often ask me, “what are you reading right now?” in a concerned, parental tone. Now I don’t have to answer that question; I can just tell them to read my blog.
4. Routine is key. I don’t have my bowel movements timed out or anything, but lately I have become more interested in routines. I knew I wanted to read more, but I knew I would not do it unless I had a schedule. That’s how I came up with the “one book per week” idea.
5. Stakes are a good thing. Nothing motivates me like a set of stakes, and no set of stakes motivates me like the possibility of total social embarrassment. And that’s what will happen if I fail to follow through on the promise of this blog. That’s why I turned the “one book per week” idea into a blog. Also, I need stakes if I am going to prioritize this blog, which has my full-time job, sports, food, family, and friends as competition for my time.
6. What are other people reading? It’s a good question for friendly conversation, but it is something that is rarely discussed any more. I want to know what other people are reading. What did you read that rocks? What did you read that sucks? What should I read next? Send me suggestions by commenting on this post or emailing me at lyonjournal@gmail.com, and I’ll add your book to my to-do list (probably). By the way, this question is one reason I will keep these blog posts reasonably clean: I want to hear what everybody is reading. That includes my 13-year-old cousin, who reads more than anybody I know (which is like 18 people, but still).
7. Tackling tough topics. This blog is where I can write honestly on topics I care about. Is time travel possible? Is going gluten free the way to be? Does high school poison you against reading? I will discuss these hard-hitting questions, and more, in future posts.
8. Becoming a Jack of All Trades. Tim Ferriss did an awesome podcast back in July about why being a "Jack of All Trades" is way cooler than being a specialized insect. Or, in the words of James Altucher: “winners focus, losers diversify.”
9. Connecting with New People. One of my big things since moving to Sarasota has been meeting new people (and meeting girls). I am hoping this blog will be a way for me to connect with even more new people (although very few of them are likely to be girls).
10. Filter the Flow of Info. I kind of already said this one, but I needed a 10th reason. Although this is technically an 11th reason. Either way, I want to cut my flow. I already refuse to have a TV, and I am thinking about cutting out my internet service. And I live in south Florida, away from the din of large cities. If I get a bunch of cats, I can be a 25-year-old male version of a cat lady who doesn’t have TV or internet. Pretty cool right?

I hope you enjoyed this post, and I hope enjoy following me on my journey of one book per week for the next year. Thanks! Later.

Animal Collective--Merriweather Post Pavilion

The time: December 2010.  The place: Colgate University.  The situation: it's the Saturday night before finals week, and I have a 12-page paper due the next day.  In typical form, I have been slacking consistently for the past few weeks, and I've left this paper to the last minute.  Usually, my paper-writing technique is very methodical: I sit down in the library, take copious amounts of notes on my sources, and write the paper from the notes.  However, this tedious process was wholly unappealing to me on this particular Saturday night.  The last thing I wanted to do was sit in the library all night and write a paper on post-Civil War economic history.

     I resolved to write the paper straight from the sources, without prior notes, and do so at a breakneck pace.  To do this, I needed a few things.  First, I acquired an isolated seat in Cooley Science Library, which is not as crowded with socializing Greek types as the main library.  Second, despite my resolution to not drink soda, I needed some short-term energy in the form of multiple Dr. Peppers.  The isolation and frenetic caffeine buzz would allow me to write a boatload of pages in a short amount of time.

     For the most important speed-writing tool, I needed some music to put me in the proper writing mode.  Paper-writing music is a very tough thing to find.  I don't recommend writing to Katy Perry or Led Zeppelin.  Driving, hard-hitting rock and pop music draws your attention away from writing and forces you to focus all attention on listening.  I will sit for hours in the library and listen to Physical Graffiti, and I might write three sentences.  It's great music, but it's terrible paper-writing music.

     Jazz, particularly the greats like Miles and Coltrane, always provide an awesome choice for paper-writing music.  This music creates a wash of sound that soaks into the background in the wake of other activities.  While I can sit in a darkened room and hear every single note of Kind of Blue, I can write a paper to that album without ever noticing the music.  Indeed, Miles Davis and John Coltrane were two staples of my paper-writing soundtrack on that Saturday.  But I also wanted something more to listen to than the usual jazz fare.  Thus, after visiting a friend's apartment the night before, I decided to buy an album from a band that I had never heard or studied with more than a passing interest.  Three hours and seven-and-a-half pages, that album later, Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion became one of my favorite albums in modern music.

    The 'wash' effect that is so important for good 'writing music' defines Merriweather Post Pavilion.  Here, Animal Collective creates an aural landscape that runs unbroken from beginning to end.  The individual songs are almost indistinguishable from one another, but that makes the album all the more appealing.  There are no songs that stand out from the others, but there is no filler material either.  Each song contributes equally to a symphony of modern electronic music.  On MPP the whole is far greater than the sum of the parts, and the album is all the better for it.

     As a fan of traditional classic rock and blues, I find Animal Collective's music very strange.  The traditional rock instruments, sounds, and arrangements are nowhere to be found.  Instead, the band mixes limited guitar and keyboard parts with heavy synthesizers and electronics.  This process can result in a cold, industrial sound, but MPP is exactly the opposite.  The music here is warm and enveloping.  From the first swell of electronics, the listener gets sucked in to the album's sound and gets stuck there for the duration.  The vocals are distorted but soothing.  The music overwhelms, but it does overstimulate or create distress.  For the experimental and modern nature of the music, it is hard to imagine a more pleasant listening experience.

     Much of Animal Collective's success on MPP is due to their skill with modern electronic.  However, the album's warmness comes from the band's brilliant use of their musical influences.  Surf music is highly present throughout the album.  Song titles like "My Girls" and "Summertime Clothes" evoke the same emotions as the carefree surf culture of the early 1960s.  The group's sound owes much to Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound" concept that was presented most successfully in records like The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and Brian Wilson's SMiLE.  The wall of sound and uplifting attitude that defined the best of surf music provided great roots for MPP.

     Animal Collective also pays tribute to the great psychedelic groups of past and present.  The album title is the name of a concert venue in Columbia, Maryland that often hosts psychedelic rock acts, most importantly the Grateful Dead.  The title is an homage to the Dead, whose laid-back, experimental music is very influential for A.C.  After the release of MPP, Animal Collective further honored the Grateful Dead by becoming the first band to legally sample a Dead song.  The song "What Would I Want? Sky," from the band's Fall Be Kind EP, samples "Unbroken Chain," a little-known Phil Lesh tune off Grateful Dead From Mars Hotel.  The influence of the Grateful Dead and other psychedelic acts on Animal Collective cannot be underestimated.

     Many publications named Merriweather Post Pavilion one of the best albums of 2009, and I see the reasons why it is so highly praised.  It's the type of album where the listener cannot get hung up on individual notes and songs.  You simply need to dive in and experience a brilliant array of sounds and emotions.  Whether you need to write a paper, kick the depression of the winter months, or just escape from real world for a while, MPP will do the trick.  As I've written before, the best music picks you up when you're down and inspires you to move forward.  Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion does that as well as any album in today's music.

Grade: A