Speaker 1: This is Masters in Business with Barry Ridholtz on Boomberg Radio.
Speaker 1: This week on the podcast, I have a special guest.
Speaker 1: His name is Rex sore Gats, and I have to
Speaker 1: just share a little background. I began my blog in
Speaker 1: the late nineties on Yahoo GeoCities, a now defunct property
Speaker 1: of Yahoo, which in and of itself is who knows
Speaker 1: what the hell is happening with that? And early in
Speaker 1: my blogging career, I came across a a blog called
Speaker 1: fim Oculus, and I always found it filled with unique
Speaker 1: and interesting tidbits. There were a run of things I
Speaker 1: was looking at back then, uh Copkey fam oculus, Um,
Speaker 1: just a handful of colossal uh that Boing boying. There
Speaker 1: was just a run of of differences that we're just
Speaker 1: collecting interesting, eclectic, unusual things back when the Internet was
Speaker 1: small enough that one person or a small group of
Speaker 1: people could do that and find some really really fascinating things. Um.
Speaker 1: As it turns out, Rex Uh not only was a blogger,
Speaker 1: but he was a television producer, digital media consultants UM,
Speaker 1: and a writer. And I've followed his career over the
Speaker 1: years and have always enjoyed his work. We talked about
Speaker 1: the genesis of the book The Encyclopedia of Misinformation, which
Speaker 1: is really quite fascinating. And if you are at all
Speaker 1: interested in web history, in in how and why memes
Speaker 1: catch on on the Internet, whether they're true or false,
Speaker 1: how they spread, I think you will find this to
Speaker 1: be a fascinating conversation. So, with no further ado, my
Speaker 1: interview of Rex Sorgats. My special guest today is Rex Sorgats.
Speaker 1: He is somebody I have been reading for several centuries now.
Speaker 1: He is the author of the Encyclopedia of Misinformation. See
Speaker 1: what I did there, slipped a little misinformation and he
Speaker 1: has quite uh quite a bio. In addition to being
Speaker 1: a product designer a creative technologist, he is the founder
Speaker 1: of the New York media consultancy kind of sort of media,
Speaker 1: and he is the author of a book which may
Speaker 1: have the longest subtitle I've ever seen. The book is
Speaker 1: The Encyclopedia of Misinformation, A compendion of imitation, spoof's, delusion, simulations, counterfeits, impostors, illusions, confabulations, skullduggery, fraud, pseudoscience, propaganda, hoaxes,
Speaker 1: flim flam pranks, hornswoggle, conspiracy, and miscellaneous fakery. Rex or Ghats,
Speaker 1: welcome to Bloomberg. It is wonderful to be here. So
Speaker 1: I have to start with your bio, which begins Rex
Speaker 1: sor Ghats is a professional orson Wales impersonator and a
Speaker 1: third generation like in Thrope, who is responsible refore rebranding
Speaker 1: contrails as chem trails. Obviously none of that is true.
Speaker 1: Tell us about your your background. I wrote that bio
Speaker 1: for my It's on my Amazon page because I started,
Speaker 1: I started writing a traditional bio, and then I was like, well,
Speaker 1: this is a book about misinformation, I should really just
Speaker 1: make a spoof of the whole idea. And I have
Speaker 1: to point out that, having read you over the years,
Speaker 1: first that fimaculus, then it wired. You're very much into
Speaker 1: um recursive fractals and regressions where there is an element
Speaker 1: of a meta reflection on the underlying subject. For example,
Speaker 1: you many people do your year end lists. That doesn't
Speaker 1: work for you. You You do a list of lists, and
Speaker 1: we'll talk about that later. But the your self description
Speaker 1: as a hoax is perfectly consistent with not just the book,
Speaker 1: but your own brand of recursive um writing. Fair fair statement. Yeah,
Speaker 1: for sure, Um there's a There's even an element in
Speaker 1: the book where I do I return to this trope
Speaker 1: a lot where I stayed a fact and then throw
Speaker 1: a footnote in there and then and then undermine the
Speaker 1: fact itself. Like I have this tendency to kind of
Speaker 1: not my writing. I don't I don't trust writing that
Speaker 1: asserts itself in some sort of like overly um unbiased
Speaker 1: intellectual way that just so firm and has no sense
Speaker 1: of doubt about itself. So I think that I'm always
Speaker 1: I think everything I write is expressing um, is making
Speaker 1: a point, but it is like willing to say I'm
Speaker 1: not really sure about this. And I think that that's
Speaker 1: that we live in a media climate where that's I
Speaker 1: think an especially important trait, the certitude amongst people who
Speaker 1: have no basis for certitude seems to be the model.
Speaker 1: Are on the twenty four hour news channels, regardless of
Speaker 1: political leaning. Yeah, I mean, I I don't know if
Speaker 1: I the last time I saw somebody on cable news
Speaker 1: and will include all networks there say get asked a
Speaker 1: question and say I don't know. You know, that just
Speaker 1: never happens, and I I always start with I don't
Speaker 1: know or I am not sure. Let me try to
Speaker 1: work this problem out. I've got a few ideas. Here
Speaker 1: are different opposing ways to think about it, and I
Speaker 1: think that that that whole notion has really disappeared from
Speaker 1: media climate. To be honest, it gets said very rarely,
Speaker 1: and it's really hilarious to watch the anchor just suddenly.
Speaker 1: It looks like a fast driving car that suddenly hits
Speaker 1: a patch of oil. It's been all over the place,
Speaker 1: It's all over the ice. Date don't know how to
Speaker 1: deal with someone who says, oh, that's outside of my expertise.
Speaker 1: I can I really have nothing to add on that.
Speaker 1: Their heads explode, yes, and writing a book about misinformation,
Speaker 1: which is not exactly a topic that, like, I had
Speaker 1: known a ton about the at least the social science
Speaker 1: part of it. I know the cultural part about it,
Speaker 1: like the part the kind of P. T. Barnumsesque qualities
Speaker 1: of our society and culture. But I had to do
Speaker 1: an immense amount of research into um. All of the
Speaker 1: research is going on right now around oh, fake news
Speaker 1: and what trusting the media and all of that stuff.
Speaker 1: So that's that was all brand new to me. Well,
Speaker 1: we'll talk a little bit about fake news, and we'll
Speaker 1: talk about how the media has kind of painted itself
Speaker 1: into this corner. Let's let's stay with your background a
Speaker 1: little bit. You you do a lot of different things.
Speaker 1: You're a designer, and you were part of a team
Speaker 1: that won the Pulitzer Prize. Assuming that that's not misinformation,
Speaker 1: tell us tell us about that. Uh, this is a
Speaker 1: story from a long time ago. Um, he's twenty one
Speaker 1: years ago, I think now. Yeah, So in nineteen ninety seven,
Speaker 1: I was living in North Dakota, Grand Folks, North Dakota,
Speaker 1: and this little town of fifty thousand people suffered the
Speaker 1: greatest um disaster of the twentieth century for real American city. Well,
Speaker 1: and if you quantified in the sense of people evacuated,
Speaker 1: the entire town had to be a back of the
Speaker 1: town out and it was a flood, and Um Clinton
Speaker 1: was still president and he actually came to town and
Speaker 1: cried on national television. It was like it was kind
Speaker 1: of the Katrina before its time. Not as severe a Katrina, obviously,
Speaker 1: but it was so all fifty thousand people are out.
Speaker 1: Were there any fatalities or there's interestingly zero zero fatalities.
Speaker 1: But the reason it became in such a strange national
Speaker 1: story is that in the middle of this flood, in
Speaker 1: which like six ft of water in downtown, it's like underwater.
Speaker 1: In the middle of this flood, a fire starts and
Speaker 1: it seems like the ultimate sort of reckoning of hell. Yes,
Speaker 1: and it creates this paradox where there's all of this water,
Speaker 1: but there's a fire, and the fire can't be put
Speaker 1: out because the fire hydrants are on the water. And
Speaker 1: so there there are pictures out there a fireman kind
Speaker 1: of diving into the water to try to connect their
Speaker 1: hoses to the fire hydrants and then they finally get
Speaker 1: them connected. In there, there's no water pressure and so
Speaker 1: none of it works. And uh. And I the reason
Speaker 1: I UM kind of became a notable person around the
Speaker 1: event was I was a person who decided not to
Speaker 1: leave and I was staying in my apartment because I
Speaker 1: lived next door to the Grand Forks Herald, the newspaper
Speaker 1: in Grand Forks, which back then was owned by night Ridder.
Speaker 1: There's a company that is no longer around UM, and
Speaker 1: it was working on the newspaper and trying to still
Speaker 1: get it out. We managed to eventually that newspaper burned down.
Speaker 1: UM and I had to be rescued from my apartment
Speaker 1: in the middle all this flood fire and we want
Speaker 1: to pulletzerprise that. I hope you took lots of photographs
Speaker 1: from the vantage point that was pre iPhone or any
Speaker 1: kind of thing like that, and so none. I have
Speaker 1: zero photos. I've actually I just went back last summer
Speaker 1: or this this a few weeks ago, and uh, the
Speaker 1: town has recovered. There's there are no walls all over
Speaker 1: protecting it from the river coming though. Uh. And there's
Speaker 1: pictures all over town, um, commemorating the event. Uh. And
Speaker 1: it was. It was a fascinating thing, and it was
Speaker 1: kind of in a weird This is weird to say,
Speaker 1: but I lost everything I ever owned. But it was
Speaker 1: sort of lucky because, um, you know, we won the pulletzer.
Speaker 1: I became known for it. Um, I was the internet
Speaker 1: guy in an arrow, which there, Yeah it was. I
Speaker 1: was the web master, which was a very valuable title
Speaker 1: back then. And uh, it allowed me to get out.
Speaker 1: Really I didn't really have many other It was hard
Speaker 1: to foresee how I was going to get out of
Speaker 1: North Dakota. And this was like a quick Oh I
Speaker 1: got I got talent, now d git to exodus. I
Speaker 1: get it. Let's talk about this book, because I find
Speaker 1: it to be fascinating. That's why I wanted to have
Speaker 1: you on the show to go over this. Hey, we're
Speaker 1: in an era of alternative facts, so given that, why
Speaker 1: do we need an encyclopedia of misinformation? Yeah? I thought
Speaker 1: I thought it was a good idea to try to
Speaker 1: compile all of the stuff out there that is not
Speaker 1: just misleading information, but it's about the theories behind it
Speaker 1: and how it evolves and where it comes from. And
Speaker 1: that's really what the book is. Like, I think sometimes
Speaker 1: people see the title, I think, oh, this is gonna
Speaker 1: be a list of hoaxes, or you know, it's gonna
Speaker 1: be like, here's a bunch of conspiracies, and there's a
Speaker 1: little bit of that, But really it's about the theory. Um,
Speaker 1: here's a big scary word, the epistemology of of conspiracies,
Speaker 1: hoaxes and these and media And ultimately, I think I
Speaker 1: think of it as a book about trust, like who
Speaker 1: what's sources? Who what sources of do you trust today?
Speaker 1: And um, I don't say this out right, but I
Speaker 1: think it becomes implicitly clear that that's eroting, like our
Speaker 1: institutions are eroting and our faith in in UH knowledge
Speaker 1: bases is going and and I try to deal with
Speaker 1: out in a playful way. I would point out that
Speaker 1: the erosion of trust in institutions is a feature and
Speaker 1: not a bug, because if the population doesn't trust the institutions,
Speaker 1: they're more likely to trust the grifters and con men
Speaker 1: who were trying to get over fair fair statement. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's fascinating. I think that one of the I didn't
Speaker 1: talk about this in the book, but it's I'm going
Speaker 1: to write about this at some point. I'm fascinated by
Speaker 1: the evolution of media literacy because I feel like I
Speaker 1: grew up in a time when people were told always
Speaker 1: distrust what you're the information you're given in and root
Speaker 1: out its source, and um, look look where it came from.
Speaker 1: And you it was like this idea that information should
Speaker 1: be immediately distrusted. And I think that sort of made
Speaker 1: sense in an era of kind of monolithic information and
Speaker 1: and kind of a state where we we built UH
Speaker 1: knowledge bases that no one wanted to contradict. And now
Speaker 1: I believe that idea of constantly questioning has become so
Speaker 1: rampant and spread wildly on the Internet, particularly through places
Speaker 1: like Reddit that now we're left in this place where
Speaker 1: we don't trust anything, and like like there are people
Speaker 1: out there who don't believe that Charlemagne existed, you know,
Speaker 1: like all the parts of history are lies these days.
Speaker 1: The flat earth thing is probably the best example. Like
Speaker 1: I didn't know how to write about that. That's a
Speaker 1: good example something I don't know how to write about
Speaker 1: in the book because what am I gonna do. Am
Speaker 1: I gonna like debunk the flat earthers? That just sounds boring.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna or I'm gonna make fun of them, or
Speaker 1: what what am I gonna do with it? And so
Speaker 1: what I chose to do with that entry is I thought, well, uh,
Speaker 1: what's interesting about this is that it's emerging right now.
Speaker 1: But really it's emerging because people have there's this idea
Speaker 1: out there that historically they are all these times in
Speaker 1: history where people thought the Earth was flat. And I
Speaker 1: went back and looked at this turns out not to
Speaker 1: be the kid turns out not to be true at all.
Speaker 1: Like you have to go back way back, like to
Speaker 1: Homer to find out people who actually leave their earth
Speaker 1: was flat. There was no one during Columbus's time that
Speaker 1: was flat. Even the Greeks understood the earth was the
Speaker 1: Aristotle play dont knew it was around, Like, uh, I
Speaker 1: mean even church figures. I mean the people who persecuted
Speaker 1: Galileo believe the Earth is round. They just didn't believe
Speaker 1: that the Earth was not the center of the universe.
Speaker 1: Like and Dante thought the Earth was round because if
Speaker 1: you drill the hole into the earth and you got
Speaker 1: to the inferno, you could come out the other side,
Speaker 1: you know. And so this idea was like a it
Speaker 1: evolved because in the nineteenth century someone came up with
Speaker 1: the idea that I can use this as a cudgel too,
Speaker 1: like describe a certain kind of part of society that
Speaker 1: thinks that there's they're so stupid they think the Earth
Speaker 1: is flat. And it was kind of an accident of
Speaker 1: intellectualism that this evolved. And um, sorry, like that that
Speaker 1: was the difficulty of this book is like, how do
Speaker 1: I write about these things that are kind of interesting,
Speaker 1: But I don't really want to be a book of
Speaker 1: debunking because that's so that raises the next question, how
Speaker 1: new is fake news? Yeah, when you when you write
Speaker 1: a book like this, you end up becoming a little
Speaker 1: bit weary with history, especially like there's a lot of
Speaker 1: nineteenth century stuff in here. Um, and that was just
Speaker 1: an era of peer chicanery and uh and manipulation, Um,
Speaker 1: the gold in age of grifters. Yeah, it truly was.
Speaker 1: And Uh, if you look at someone like P. T.
Speaker 1: Barnum um, or just like all of the people spreading
Speaker 1: medical hoaxes at the time, you really kind of go,
Speaker 1: maybe today isn't that bad, Maybe the Internet isn't that bad.
Speaker 1: And so I can't I can't draw exact distinctions. I
Speaker 1: would say that, um, something is coming up right now
Speaker 1: on the Internet that feels like the the change that
Speaker 1: started to happen in the early nineteenth century where um
Speaker 1: people found ways to game the system. And so I
Speaker 1: feel like we're kind of returning to an era right now.
Speaker 1: So so let's talk about the shifting Overton window. Explain
Speaker 1: for listeners exactly what that is. Uh. The Overton window
Speaker 1: is a fascinating little idea UM developed by a researcher
Speaker 1: who he just kind of came up with the term.
Speaker 1: And it's for essentially, it's what are the topics that
Speaker 1: we allow into public discourse, what is safe for us
Speaker 1: to discuss and like in public discourse, I mean kind
Speaker 1: of the media, I guess, i'd say, but but general
Speaker 1: debate within a society, Yes, that's acceptable. Yeah, that that
Speaker 1: if you brought it up at a party, no one
Speaker 1: would like, I think you're crazy or whatever. And it
Speaker 1: is a fascinating thing to watch, right, Like, things definitely
Speaker 1: move in and out of the over overtoned window. Um.
Speaker 1: And just for a little context, the the term comes
Speaker 1: from watching. I believe the phrase the description used was
Speaker 1: watching a parade through window and if you shift your position,
Speaker 1: you're seeing a different part of the parade from a
Speaker 1: different angle. Is that yes, So so the overtoned window
Speaker 1: refers to how, at different times and different angles we
Speaker 1: are tolerating or discussing different topics. Is that Is that
Speaker 1: the metaphor? Yeah? And you could just like name something like, um,
Speaker 1: legalized marijuana, Like that's not something that was like readily
Speaker 1: discussed maybe ten years ago for sure, not twenty five
Speaker 1: years ago. So there was a contingent of the population
Speaker 1: who believed in it, but it wasn't a mainstream idea
Speaker 1: or even just gave marriage like was not a real
Speaker 1: mainstream I d until accelerated very quickly. Um. In recent years,
Speaker 1: but the term more now is used to apply to
Speaker 1: UH mostly about how the right, the far right, the right,
Speaker 1: whatever we want to call that group UM has entered,
Speaker 1: has has pushed into um public consciousness ideas that otherwise
Speaker 1: recently would have been considered outsider um extreme views on immigration,
Speaker 1: for instance, UM. I mean, just open up Reddit now,
Speaker 1: go to the Donald un reddit and you'll just see
Speaker 1: like this rampant conversation about things that we obviously just
Speaker 1: sort of thought we're outside of discourse and now are
Speaker 1: allowed in and we have to take seriously. And so
Speaker 1: there's a kind of a good quality to it, right,
Speaker 1: because like our mind should always be open minded to
Speaker 1: any kind of new ideas. At the same time, it's
Speaker 1: like we get we're we're starting to take things seriously
Speaker 1: that otherwise we're like, oh, that's for the freaks and
Speaker 1: the outsiders, and now we have to deal with debunking.
Speaker 1: Like flat earth is a good example, Like you know,
Speaker 1: we like now we have to we have to spend
Speaker 1: time on that topic. You mentioned read it twice, But
Speaker 1: you're not referring to things like Twitter or Facebook. Are
Speaker 1: they quantitatively or qualitatively different than the various subreddits that
Speaker 1: really go so far into the weeds. I mean I
Speaker 1: sometimes get asked like which is the most dangerous one
Speaker 1: really kind of juggle around which social network and my
Speaker 1: most most troubled by UM read it is where the
Speaker 1: audience is smaller, still substantial, but smaller. But it's really
Speaker 1: where ideas get root. And you might consider it the
Speaker 1: base of the of fringe ideas. People who used to
Speaker 1: be lone wolves in their town find life minded individuals
Speaker 1: who are similarly insane and basically allows them to reinforce
Speaker 1: their not whatever the mania of the moment happens to be,
Speaker 1: They find similar people and then they build propaganda around it.
Speaker 1: They start memes, they make pictures, They kind of they
Speaker 1: become self edified by having on the people to talk
Speaker 1: through the ideas of the thing to go back to
Speaker 1: flat earth, like read it on flat Earth is fastening
Speaker 1: because people will come in and kind of contradict things
Speaker 1: and they'll have to like go, oh, I know how
Speaker 1: to evolve this theory further. So it's like a breeding
Speaker 1: ground for like furthering these these thoughts UM and then
Speaker 1: eventually what happens is that stuff bubbles up to Facebook,
Speaker 1: and that's when it goes mainstream and then all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, your Grandma's like being presented with images of
Speaker 1: Peppie the Frog, And I think within that group, it's
Speaker 1: sort of self legitimizes what should really be a fringe
Speaker 1: set of ideas. Yeah, I don't it really should be
Speaker 1: and it's depth. The Internet is definitely causing this weird
Speaker 1: fracturing thing right now where I I don't I feel
Speaker 1: like are not We used to have like a set
Speaker 1: of facts that we based everybody's understanding. Yeah, and now
Speaker 1: that thing is fracturing all over the place, and um,
Speaker 1: I'm not optimistic about how that turns out. So I'm
Speaker 1: gonna be a little selfish year and I'm gonna say optimistically,
Speaker 1: if you're a high functioning idiot, if you believe things
Speaker 1: that are patently demonstrable untrue, we're just seeing the impact
Speaker 1: of that in things like elections, what have you. But
Speaker 1: over the course of our lifetime, when you believe in
Speaker 1: things that are apartently untrue and then you go out
Speaker 1: into the world, there will eventually be negative consequences, whether
Speaker 1: that's um personally, politically, professionally, economically. But if you believe
Speaker 1: the world is flat, or if you believe you can
Speaker 1: walk through that wall, we'll act on it, and bad
Speaker 1: stuff is going to happen. So I'm hoping that eventually
Speaker 1: Darwin's Revenge sort of filters this out. You're trusting, like
Speaker 1: the socialization process to to adjust these people, or or mortality,
Speaker 1: one of the those are Those are the two I'm
Speaker 1: I'm rooting for. And I think that there's a case
Speaker 1: to be made that socialization eventually wins that if these people,
Speaker 1: like a call it a different group, that kind of
Speaker 1: men's rights activists on on Reddit, if eventually those nineteen
Speaker 1: year old dudes gotta go find jobs, and is that
Speaker 1: all they are? Nineteen year old dudes, well, their sound spacemen.
Speaker 1: There's unfortunately some forty five year old dudes out there too,
Speaker 1: but it's a lot of it's a lot of young
Speaker 1: men disenchanted with their either cultural or economic situation, and
Speaker 1: eventually they're going to come to the conclusion that, um, actually,
Speaker 1: maybe it's better for me economically not to have these
Speaker 1: really like horrible views about half of the globe, and
Speaker 1: that I need to adapt just to to like survive
Speaker 1: in the society because my views are going to be
Speaker 1: considered out true. If I don't. I hope that's true.
Speaker 1: The problem is, at some point, do these people like
Speaker 1: find like minded people at work, you know, Well, they
Speaker 1: certainly have found them on the internet. And what we
Speaker 1: noticed with with some of the neo Nazi marches and
Speaker 1: other stuff, people have been identifying those folks and they've
Speaker 1: been getting fired. It turns out that being a Nazi
Speaker 1: and then being public about it is not a great
Speaker 1: career move. Yeah, and I think that there is a
Speaker 1: corrective quality out there when those things happen. It does
Speaker 1: make me go, oh wait, maybe maybe I shouldn't be
Speaker 1: in such a panic about this. Maybe we actually are
Speaker 1: more we have we have stronger belief systems that are
Speaker 1: that are being more corrective to these these kind of ideas,
Speaker 1: and that it's just like a weird spurt in time,
Speaker 1: and that this always happens every once in a while
Speaker 1: and it's a messy transition until we sort of get
Speaker 1: to whatever's on the other side. Yeah. And I mean,
Speaker 1: like this goes back to the very first thing I said,
Speaker 1: is like people seldom say I don't know, Um, there's
Speaker 1: a case where I don't know, really, I really don't
Speaker 1: know if I should be panicking about this moment time
Speaker 1: in history, or if it's kind of a rhyming thing
Speaker 1: that happens every once in a while and on any
Speaker 1: given day, I could change my view in this that
Speaker 1: some days I just feel like, oh, we've lost it.
Speaker 1: We like no one, There is no truth, Every world
Speaker 1: is asunder, no one trusts anyone. If only there was
Speaker 1: an encyclopedia of misinformation that could help us through these
Speaker 1: challenging times. That's that's a good selling point for the book.
Speaker 1: Thank you. Let's talk a little bit about your early
Speaker 1: days as what you've described as a proto blogger, and
Speaker 1: I first came to know you a long time ago
Speaker 1: as the author of Vermaculous, A Thing that eats itself.
Speaker 1: Explain Explain what Faaculus is and was, and why you
Speaker 1: decided to launch it. Uh, it's really easy to say
Speaker 1: that it was a blog before blogs. There was a
Speaker 1: right right before I guess the year two thousand. They're
Speaker 1: a handful of people who were making personal weblogs, which
Speaker 1: was the term at the time. Um, there's probably about
Speaker 1: a hundred people who were either writing um short entry
Speaker 1: about things that had happened in their life, a little
Speaker 1: more like a diary, or there were blogs that were
Speaker 1: just linking to stuff, and I was in the ladder category.
Speaker 1: I was fascinated by this emerging culture online that it
Speaker 1: was coming about. Um, you know, this is long before
Speaker 1: long long before Facebook, but even before read It and
Speaker 1: and things like that. So but we there was a
Speaker 1: community of a hundred a couple of hundred people who were, um,
Speaker 1: just find on the internet all day and finding stuff
Speaker 1: and wanting to share it with other people and then
Speaker 1: had comments below. And who knew that that would actually
Speaker 1: become what the Internet is today, which is effectively, here's
Speaker 1: a link and here's a bunch of comments below. But
Speaker 1: I think that's what blogging started off as, is like
Speaker 1: there's something that's interesting and it could be an article,
Speaker 1: it could be a painting, it could be whatever, and
Speaker 1: people would talk below it. And that was there was
Speaker 1: a discussion that happened. So let's talk about the list
Speaker 1: of lists. So and again I I referenced earlier, you
Speaker 1: have this sort of recursive meta, which makes sense for
Speaker 1: something that eats itself, something that consumes itself as a
Speaker 1: a source of sustenance. So everybody does these end of
Speaker 1: year lists. These are the best books, these are the
Speaker 1: best movies, here's the best whatever, and you were so
Speaker 1: tickled by it you started a thing. And I want
Speaker 1: to say it really began right after Thanksgiving each year
Speaker 1: more or less the list of lists when one list
Speaker 1: ruled them all. Yes, it was. When I started, it
Speaker 1: was relatively easily. Basically I had a Google search alert
Speaker 1: for best of year or best of two thousand six
Speaker 1: or whatever, and uh. And there was also a submission
Speaker 1: from the sites of people could send me stuff or
Speaker 1: just I looked around a lot and all it is
Speaker 1: accumulate them, list them. And I didn't even annotate them.
Speaker 1: I just said, here's the list, put in the category
Speaker 1: and uh. And then I dousic, film, books, sport, whatever
Speaker 1: it was. And then it somehow took off. But and
Speaker 1: I started it, there was probably it was easy to do.
Speaker 1: When I started it, it was probably two hundred lists.
Speaker 1: Like uh, it's funny now like now there's easily two
Speaker 1: hundred lists that are best cars over the year, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean? Now would be thousands of lists. Well,
Speaker 1: there's also there's all these I don't want to say
Speaker 1: scam because they're not just outright scams, but through all
Speaker 1: these affiliate marketing sites where it's like dishwasher reviews dot
Speaker 1: com or I'm just making that up, but it's these
Speaker 1: really narrow niche things, and all they want to do
Speaker 1: is send you to Amazon and earn an affiliate fee
Speaker 1: or wherever else they're earning an affiliate fee. And so
Speaker 1: when you go search for best anything, these things just
Speaker 1: populate Google on a pretty and I've played with with
Speaker 1: what does it, duck, dot Go and bing and some
Speaker 1: of the other search engines, and you still end up
Speaker 1: seeing these things. There's no avoiding them. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: the list itself is fast. How it became an industry.
Speaker 1: I think the first place you started to see it
Speaker 1: become really popular was BuzzFeed, right there was They were
Speaker 1: ridiculed early on for making listical very popular though, but people,
Speaker 1: but the media community didn't like them, but they were
Speaker 1: wildly popular because it's not pros. It's just oh, you're
Speaker 1: interested in X, here's eighty x is and have fun
Speaker 1: with you. And there was some something there was a
Speaker 1: perception that there was an inelegance to it and when
Speaker 1: in fact it's like that's actually just what people wanted,
Speaker 1: right um. And then the next evolution of that are
Speaker 1: are the the creation of sites like Wirecutter and those
Speaker 1: sites that are like, here are the best refrigerators, here
Speaker 1: are the best whatever, and they're using affiliate links on
Speaker 1: top of it. And that was back in the day.
Speaker 1: That was things like, um seen that and I'm trying
Speaker 1: to remember. The other Ziff Davis property name is Escape,
Speaker 1: but it was a run of tech focus sites and
Speaker 1: it was the best computers, the best laptops, the best monitors.
Speaker 1: But there was some journalistic credibility behind that. I don't
Speaker 1: know if you get that anymore. Yeah, um, I think
Speaker 1: there's a there's a handful of honest attempts at it. Um,
Speaker 1: Like the Wirecutter is owned by the New York Times.
Speaker 1: That's and that's an honest application if you're, uh, there's
Speaker 1: something weird about the wirecutter. Though, if you're like I
Speaker 1: want the best um drip coffee maker, it you type
Speaker 1: that best drip coffee maker into Google, you're gonna get
Speaker 1: work almost everything. Now you're gonna get work. And now
Speaker 1: it's like, do I trust this thing? That's like always
Speaker 1: the answer? Now, like it's it's inevitably always a going
Speaker 1: to be uh this one site and uh, there's like
Speaker 1: no competition and so so I'm using bing instead of
Speaker 1: Google just for test purposes. The first thing that comes
Speaker 1: up is coffee maker picks dot com and they give
Speaker 1: you and then coffee Maker Picks is the next one.
Speaker 1: So these are these best digs dot Com. These are
Speaker 1: the sort of Finally halfway down the page is consumer
Speaker 1: Reports Epicurious Comparable Amazon Pets, which is kind of interesting.
Speaker 1: One of the things that Google. By the way, I
Speaker 1: could tell you what the best rip coffeemaker is without this.
Speaker 1: But one of the things that Google does is it's
Speaker 1: sort of personalizes your search based on sites you've gone
Speaker 1: to before and things you like, and so every now
Speaker 1: and then it helps to open up I don't know
Speaker 1: what your browser of choices, but if you open up
Speaker 1: so I use Chrome, but if I'll open up Safari
Speaker 1: or Firefox where I'm not logged in and I don't
Speaker 1: normally Google over there, and I'll get a very different
Speaker 1: run of things than what I get on Chrome where
Speaker 1: I live, which is which is kind of fascinating that
Speaker 1: even search has become biased and skewed in some ways. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I mean they entry in the book that covers
Speaker 1: that topic is the filter bubble um, which is like
Speaker 1: you're You've posed an interesting scenario where you could type
Speaker 1: for best coffee maker and I could I could search
Speaker 1: for it, and we maybe have different results based upon
Speaker 1: the based upon Google having knowledge about us and presenting
Speaker 1: what we it thinks would be better. Um. Sort of
Speaker 1: a fascinating little conundrum. Right, Maybe maybe that is true.
Speaker 1: Maybe there is a There is no best coffee maker.
Speaker 1: There is there's only a best for you. Well, that's
Speaker 1: sort of true about everything in life. The best for
Speaker 1: me is the brevel grind and brew it's beans over here,
Speaker 1: a thermis down here with a timer so you could
Speaker 1: set it to go off at four thirty. No radio
Speaker 1: has no affiliate fees. You're not getting anything. Back in
Speaker 1: the day, when my blog was on type Pad, before
Speaker 1: even knew what affiliate fees were, I did a post
Speaker 1: called your coffee Sucks and basically explain why everybody's coffee
Speaker 1: is bad. First of all, you're buying ground beans and
Speaker 1: then sticking them in the shelf in the cabinet for
Speaker 1: six months so they stink. You give me your rotten, crappy,
Speaker 1: mineral infested water, and using a really mediocre coffee maker
Speaker 1: that doesn't brew for long enough, and then burns the
Speaker 1: coffee on the So some of us are very particular
Speaker 1: about our drugs. So was that did your post? Uh
Speaker 1: do well? And search? Oh my god, it went crazy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I have this thing still. I've you mentioned fam ocular
Speaker 1: smiled blog. I haven't updated it in eight nine years, probably,
Speaker 1: but I still get emails from people because it still
Speaker 1: does pretty well in search. And I'll get emails from Uh, wait,
Speaker 1: you haven't posted on that in eight years other than
Speaker 1: too like other than to say, I wrote a book,
Speaker 1: here is a link to it. I haven't I haven't been,
Speaker 1: and you're not updating the list of lists. I'm trying
Speaker 1: to remember. I've stopped doing that about five years ago too. Um,
Speaker 1: I guess got too much. As I told someone on Twitter,
Speaker 1: I chose life. I would have had. That's a fair answer.
Speaker 1: I would have had to hire someone. It got so
Speaker 1: all consuming. Uh And even even though it was even
Speaker 1: back in two thousand five, it was still like a
Speaker 1: pretty hard thing to do. Um, and now it's impossible
Speaker 1: for one person to do it. It sounds like the
Speaker 1: internet was like somebody needed to index the Internet back then,
Speaker 1: like there was like kind of like a Yahoo Ask
Speaker 1: kind of quality of the internet back then, that somebody
Speaker 1: could compile everything into a place, and that you could
Speaker 1: you could consume all of you could. You could look
Speaker 1: at everyone's you could look at every list of the
Speaker 1: best albums of two thousand and six. At one point
Speaker 1: that was an actual thing one could do. Then you
Speaker 1: can hunt down two of them. Now it's millions. That's right.
Speaker 1: You could just simply couldn't do it now. Um, that's
Speaker 1: why we have Google. You don't have to do it anymore. Google,
Speaker 1: it will just tell you all. Heil are overlords, surgeon
Speaker 1: Larry I for one record, uh, welcome our new technology, overlords.
Speaker 1: I'm looking forward to living in the future, whenever it
Speaker 1: chooses to arrive. I want to talk about your writing
Speaker 1: and your focus on technology and culture and media, because
Speaker 1: you've written some stuff that I found really really amusing,
Speaker 1: including some things that have mocked what I've done, either
Speaker 1: unwillingly or unwittingly. Um, but I'm always amused by that.
Speaker 1: And one and this goes back to the recursive nature
Speaker 1: of your work, where you're always looking for these meta
Speaker 1: themes that show up in media, and you start to
Speaker 1: see the same ideas over and over again, and what
Speaker 1: what at one point in time might have sounded like
Speaker 1: a clever idea. When you see a hundred of them,
Speaker 1: it's like, oh, this is just a nonsense formula. So
Speaker 1: the one that struck me the other day because I'm
Speaker 1: guilty of it, X should buy Y. I got. I
Speaker 1: thought you were going to point that one out well first,
Speaker 1: because years ago I wrote a terrible column for The
Speaker 1: Washington Post that Apple should buy Twitter. In hindsight, what
Speaker 1: an awful idea. But last year I wrote a column
Speaker 1: Apple should buy Netflix, and it turned out to be
Speaker 1: a great idea because at that time Netflix was like
Speaker 1: sixty or seventy million billion dollar market cap. It's now
Speaker 1: coming up on one eighty or something insane um. And
Speaker 1: then I did a follow up, which is, all right,
Speaker 1: you missed Apple, you miss Twitter, Now go buy Disney.
Speaker 1: I usually don't like those sort of columns, but every
Speaker 1: now and then something happens. It's like, you know, the
Speaker 1: Apple Video store is not great, and the Twitter the
Speaker 1: Netflix version is, so it would make my life easy.
Speaker 1: By the way, everything I write, I don't know if
Speaker 1: you have this experience. Everything I write is for me.
Speaker 1: And when I say Apple should buy Netflix, it's not
Speaker 1: because I have a grand vision of the future of
Speaker 1: technology that would simply make my life more convenient. So
Speaker 1: I don't I don't know how many how many people
Speaker 1: write like that or right for themselves, but so that
Speaker 1: cracked me up. What motivated extra by Why? So, uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was merely noticing a trope out there, which is
Speaker 1: a lot of technology business writers. I sometimes feel like
Speaker 1: they've run out of like tricks they got to they
Speaker 1: have some they have to get three columns in this week,
Speaker 1: and they have to come up with one, and so
Speaker 1: they go Apple stop by Netflix, and they write that thing.
Speaker 1: And so I called it extra by Why, and I
Speaker 1: just listed a whole bunch dozen dozen And you realize
Speaker 1: quickly that this is like, uh, it's a you know,
Speaker 1: it's a trope or you know, if you want to
Speaker 1: be more negative, gimmick, it's a gimmick. So when I
Speaker 1: read media criticism, I often say, this person doesn't understand
Speaker 1: the nuance. They don't get this, they don't get When
Speaker 1: I read that, I immediately said guilty, Yeah, I just
Speaker 1: like I'm nailed. Yeah. And the thing about it is
Speaker 1: like I could have been very um negative towards the
Speaker 1: trope at that, but I ended with by saying I've
Speaker 1: I do this on Twitter all the time. And the
Speaker 1: reason that even though I think it is a bit
Speaker 1: a little bit of a lazy thing, there is something
Speaker 1: fascinating by the extration by y Trope that that kind
Speaker 1: of article is that I think in the article, I
Speaker 1: call it business fan fick because what allows you to
Speaker 1: do is kind of project a future in your head.
Speaker 1: What would it look like if the Wall Street Journal
Speaker 1: bought Flipboard? Like that's one of those examples that like
Speaker 1: people would say five years ago, you there was like
Speaker 1: a big idea that that somebody should buy flipboard, And
Speaker 1: it's like that no one regrets not having bought flipboard today, right,
Speaker 1: Um or whatever? Startup? Like there's a lot of the
Speaker 1: small startups that you hear this said about Twitter should
Speaker 1: buy Nuzzle or Microsoft should buy geth Hub. Yeah exactly,
Speaker 1: And that'll of a and uh And I think that
Speaker 1: there's like there's kind of a weird value in it
Speaker 1: because it allows you your mind to kind of wander
Speaker 1: and kind of speculate about that future and sort of
Speaker 1: say with yourself, what would it look like if that happened? Um,
Speaker 1: Microsoft buying GitHub is like a fascinating one because if
Speaker 1: you had written it a few years ago to sound
Speaker 1: it had sounded preposterous um just because of microsoft stance
Speaker 1: towards the open source community, um, but also like uh it.
Speaker 1: No one would have foreseen the change in how Microsoft
Speaker 1: has been received over the past five ten years, and
Speaker 1: the CEO did a lot to change the reputation. And
Speaker 1: then some of the other companies like Facebook and Google
Speaker 1: let's don't be evil, became a little bit evil, and
Speaker 1: I think everybody looked at Microsoft with a little I've
Speaker 1: always been a negative viewer of Microsoft, and I'm kind
Speaker 1: of saying, oh, they're all bad guys. Yeah, well, my guest,
Speaker 1: I was taking an interesting thing lately where they're picking
Speaker 1: companies that are have good reputations, and so I always
Speaker 1: kind of thought they would buy Twitter, and that was
Speaker 1: just gonna be the worst outcome because it's the wrong
Speaker 1: company doing it, and it's it's mashing up to things
Speaker 1: that have negative emotions around them. And I'm really glad
Speaker 1: for Microsoft that they did. And I mean, I think
Speaker 1: Twitter is valuable when and whatever, I just think it
Speaker 1: in a horrible matching of those two things. Somebody is
Speaker 1: going to start a new social network and uh, it
Speaker 1: could be one of the big platforms. Um. There will
Speaker 1: be competition in the next year for Facebook, and whether
Speaker 1: it's somebody trying to buy something or or starting from
Speaker 1: scratch or just something that emerges from nowhere, I think
Speaker 1: it'd be a good time for Google to take a
Speaker 1: shot at doing a new social network that promises privacy.
Speaker 1: Um It. It'll be a hefty marketing effort to convince
Speaker 1: people that Google will make a social network the promises privacy. Um.
Speaker 1: But I think that would be amazing if they took
Speaker 1: a shot at the most interesting aspect of that is
Speaker 1: if there was a way too. If you if you
Speaker 1: look at um how unsuccessful they've been at policing YouTube
Speaker 1: and coming up with um sifting out inappropriate things for
Speaker 1: kids and whatever. So I don't know if if I'm
Speaker 1: confident that they have an ability to do what Facebook
Speaker 1: clearly has not shown ability to do, which is separate
Speaker 1: real from fake, identify what is valuable and what's not
Speaker 1: and not. None of the social networks do that any well,
Speaker 1: the exception being linked in because people's professional career, there
Speaker 1: are a whole lot of hoaxeres on LinkedIn posting fake
Speaker 1: job like that stuff gets found out way too quickly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and Zuckerberg is not being reassuring, and he says it
Speaker 1: should take us three years before we have solved this problem.
Speaker 1: And it's like three years. What I have to deal with?
Speaker 1: This must mentioned information for three years? Well you don't.
Speaker 1: You don't have to. I mean, you and I are
Speaker 1: of not that far apart generationally. How often are you
Speaker 1: on Facebook? I look at it once today. Really, I
Speaker 1: feel like I'm once a week, and I think that's
Speaker 1: healthier if I could, if I could reduce that. Uh.
Speaker 1: I was never a daily user. And when I set
Speaker 1: up Facebook, I was always astonished at everything they asked.
Speaker 1: They don't have anything that's accurate about me except where
Speaker 1: I work and where I went to college and grad
Speaker 1: school everything else. No, you're not getting my breath day. No,
Speaker 1: you're not getting No, you're none of that stuff. Why? Why?
Speaker 1: And yet everybody voluntarily gives that stuff. Who's your favorite bands?
Speaker 1: I don't know if you and my wife you would
Speaker 1: know that. But you're a for profit tech company. I
Speaker 1: have no interest in share. I don't want you to
Speaker 1: serve me ads on that I'm ignoring them anyway, but
Speaker 1: that I'm that's that's me. Let's let's talk about um.
Speaker 1: Some of your other columns that I found fascinating, especially
Speaker 1: in light of the Encyclopedia of Misinformation. Tell us about
Speaker 1: Steve wins Vermier. Oh headline, this is not a Vermier.
Speaker 1: Thank you. I was gonna ask what was the headline
Speaker 1: of that story. So one of the things I'm fascinating
Speaker 1: with is art forgeries. And I wrote a five part
Speaker 1: series about all the different times we've been been manipulated,
Speaker 1: all the different ways we are manipulated with art, and
Speaker 1: one of them is really easy to point toward, which
Speaker 1: is um forgeries. And uh, that specific column goes through
Speaker 1: my desire to have a Vermier, and because who wouldn't
Speaker 1: want one? There are only depending on who's counting vermer
Speaker 1: existence that we know of and theoretically and some that's
Speaker 1: the thing. Every once in a while that will be
Speaker 1: a new one added to the cannon. And it's not
Speaker 1: that somebody has discovered a painting. Usually it's something it's
Speaker 1: that somebody has decided, Oh, this thing that's that we've
Speaker 1: been debating for the past twenty fifty years finally gets
Speaker 1: led into the canon of allowed official Vermeer's formers um.
Speaker 1: Steve Wynn bought one, uh, and I think his is
Speaker 1: fascinating because it was something that was not perceived to
Speaker 1: be part of official vermier Dam until he bought it,
Speaker 1: and then it became so. And what It's an interesting
Speaker 1: case because it it's like saying the verifying fact of
Speaker 1: art is not it's historical voracity or any kind of
Speaker 1: analysis on it, or yeah, it has something to do
Speaker 1: with that. It really has to do is did somebody
Speaker 1: pay the money to make it worth it? So someone
Speaker 1: spent what do you spent thirty million dollars on a
Speaker 1: Vermeer of questionable uh provenance? Is that's their description? That's right?
Speaker 1: And is it now considered a real Vermeer? It is
Speaker 1: it's because somebody spent so much money on it that
Speaker 1: he was. There was no new historical analysis done on it,
Speaker 1: There was no no new scientific work done on it.
Speaker 1: It was that somebody paid that amount and now it
Speaker 1: has to be And uh, did you track the recent
Speaker 1: da Vinci with the what was it the museum in
Speaker 1: somewhere Abu Dhabi or so, So essentially they figured out
Speaker 1: something that was of previously uncertain provenance and came to
Speaker 1: the conclusion it's legit and then paid an ungodly amount
Speaker 1: of money for And that's in a fascinating case because
Speaker 1: I think that that christ painting that was most da
Speaker 1: Vinci people did not think was real. I bet in
Speaker 1: fifty years that will be the Mona Lisa. I really
Speaker 1: believe that history is going to reevaluate it and it's
Speaker 1: gonna and because it's become the most valuable painting about them,
Speaker 1: that must mean that it's not not only a da Vinci,
Speaker 1: but it's important and that it is deserving of of investigation,
Speaker 1: and it's it's even suddenly more mysterious, it's more artful.
Speaker 1: It's like it's full of all kinds of new value
Speaker 1: just because somebody wrote a big check for it. Um.
Speaker 1: And I think that's a fascinating thing with the art world.
Speaker 1: UM and that that specific story. What I did was
Speaker 1: I decided that I wanted my own Vermeer. And there's
Speaker 1: this thing in China whereas many many of these in China,
Speaker 1: hundreds of these companies where you can order whatever painting
Speaker 1: you want off the internet, and it's it's literally a
Speaker 1: painted forgery, stroke for stroke on the original one exactly right,
Speaker 1: and by sub estimates, there's like twenty people that are
Speaker 1: employed doing this all day long in two specific regions
Speaker 1: of China. And uh, it's a lot of Westerners saying
Speaker 1: I have a favorite painting, please make it for a
Speaker 1: hundred bucks and send it to me, and really, and
Speaker 1: it shows up and so there's a roth go I'm
Speaker 1: very interested in. I would pay a hundred bucks for
Speaker 1: a roth cup and you could put it up and uh,
Speaker 1: only a handful of your friends might be able to
Speaker 1: notice that it's not real, and maybe not even them.
Speaker 1: Do you remember the story about the Jackson Pollock um
Speaker 1: that supposedly was given to his girlfriend and it's provenance
Speaker 1: has been questioned and and it was up for sale
Speaker 1: some time ago, and I think it was there was
Speaker 1: a silly number like fifty thousand dollars. Is it worth
Speaker 1: it to roll the bet the dicellars for what could
Speaker 1: ultimately be worth fifty million dollars? Yeah? That that sounds
Speaker 1: like a good bet. Right. How did it turn out?
Speaker 1: I don't I don't think it's ever been resolved. And
Speaker 1: there was an issue, uh with I think it was
Speaker 1: her estate as to what to do with this um
Speaker 1: in the new York Times sometime ago. Can you stick
Speaker 1: around a bit? I have so many more questions for you. Sure,
Speaker 1: we have been speaking with Rex Storgats, author of the
Speaker 1: Encyclopedia of Misinformation. If you enjoy this conversation, we'll be
Speaker 1: sure and stick around and check out our podcast extras.
Speaker 1: Will we keep the tape running and continue to discuss
Speaker 1: all things misinformation like? We love your comments, feedback and
Speaker 1: suggestions right to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg
Speaker 1: dot net. Follow me on Twitter at rit Halts. You
Speaker 1: can check out my daily column at Bloomberg dot com.
Speaker 1: I'm Barry Ridhults. You're listening to Masters in Business on
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Radio. Welcome to the podcast, Rex, Thanks so much
Speaker 1: for doing this. During the break, we were talking about
Speaker 1: some of the ideas in the book and how you
Speaker 1: wanna get them out into the firmament, and we were
Speaker 1: talking about podcasts and radio. Tell us what you're thinking
Speaker 1: in terms of setting doing the podcast, because you've done
Speaker 1: pretty much everything else in media. Yeah, you know what
Speaker 1: I didn't say during the broadcast. You were a producer
Speaker 1: at was a MSM dot com. How how did that
Speaker 1: work out? Um? It was alright, I was I was
Speaker 1: there for a couple of years. This is back when
Speaker 1: MSNBC dot com was in Seattle. People for people forget
Speaker 1: that the MS and MS was originally Microsoft. Is this
Speaker 1: a Michael Kinsley joint? Originally it was originally Yes, I
Speaker 1: came in after he had been had left, but as
Speaker 1: was Slate. Slate was a Kinsley Microsoft fanchow and uh
Speaker 1: they yeah, eventually they packed up. Eventually NBC bought back there,
Speaker 1: the Microsoft part. And there is no such thing as
Speaker 1: a UM division of MSNBC inside of Seattle, inside of
Speaker 1: Redmond anymore as it once was. And that's where I
Speaker 1: worked out of Seattle, which is a real interesting town.
Speaker 1: I've been to that Microsoft campus. It's astonishing, giant college campus. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's Uh. I think I was too young to enjoy Seattle.
Speaker 1: I think I'd love it now. Um, But it was
Speaker 1: like Seattle was felt to me like a town of
Speaker 1: UM middle managers. Like there was a lot of project
Speaker 1: managers at Amazon, and project managers at Starbucks, and project
Speaker 1: managers at Mobile and Boeing, and there was all of
Speaker 1: these companies, very successful companies, interesting places to work, but
Speaker 1: it was like a town where everyone was a project
Speaker 1: manager who wanted to be a vice president. That was
Speaker 1: my attitude about the place at the time that it was.
Speaker 1: I didn't feel like there was a lot of innovation
Speaker 1: there it, which is strange to say for a town
Speaker 1: that's considered a technical hub. Right. Um, and I look
Speaker 1: back on that, I think that's that's actually just mostly
Speaker 1: my youthful arrogance. Like it was a fine It was
Speaker 1: actually a fine town, and I was I was just
Speaker 1: not like I was. I was too youthful and party
Speaker 1: ish at that time to really enjoy it. Now I
Speaker 1: go back and all of the people who I thought
Speaker 1: of as like, uh, you know, middle management are are
Speaker 1: actually those vps or e vps now of those places,
Speaker 1: and they're fascinating. I don't know what my problem was. So,
Speaker 1: you know, Seattle and Portland's for that matter, are places
Speaker 1: where I visit fairly regularly, and wherever I go, I
Speaker 1: always say to myself, could I live in this part
Speaker 1: of the country, you know, permanently, not just for a
Speaker 1: couple of years. Um. Seattle is really uh, it's on fire.
Speaker 1: It's it's happening, as is Portland's. I mean, you can
Speaker 1: pretty much work you way down the coast and just
Speaker 1: about every city is booming. But Portland's another one of
Speaker 1: those cities where gee, who who who knew that this
Speaker 1: own is just exploding? And I find that fascinating. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I bought when I went to Seattle in two thousand five,
Speaker 1: I bought a condo and by two thousand seven I
Speaker 1: was leaving, and by that time, the real estate market
Speaker 1: was falling apart. So I kept it because it was
Speaker 1: like everything was crumbling, and I thought, this is going
Speaker 1: to be the worst investment I've ever made. So did
Speaker 1: you double your money or triple your money? More than triple?
Speaker 1: Now I still have it, And of course now it's
Speaker 1: Amazon has move since moved downtown. I bought a place
Speaker 1: downtown and Amazon has since moved their headquarters in New HQ.
Speaker 1: Is amazing. Yeah, And now it's like, oh, this real
Speaker 1: accident thing that I bought is actually going to turn
Speaker 1: out to be one of the wisest investments I've ever
Speaker 1: had to had. Right, So never confuse brains with the
Speaker 1: bull market, stocks or real estate, is absolutely true. So
Speaker 1: are you out there often? Do you visit your place?
Speaker 1: Are you renting it? I rented out Um to continue
Speaker 1: will parade of Amazon employees who want to want to
Speaker 1: live nearby their new headquarters. Uh. And so you're gonna
Speaker 1: hold onto this for a while. That that's uh, that's
Speaker 1: pretty funny. Um. So what else did we get to
Speaker 1: that I wanted to talk about some some of your columns. Um.
Speaker 1: We discussed the Jackson Pollock I mentioned. Uh. After I
Speaker 1: read that story, I showed it to my wife, who
Speaker 1: teaches fashion illustration and design, and she goes, oh, there,
Speaker 1: you can take a class and painting like Jackson Pollock.
Speaker 1: Like what, Yeah, they offer it. What go go sign
Speaker 1: up for that. If you really wanted Jackson Pollock, you
Speaker 1: don't have to spend fifty grand. It's Pollock. You could
Speaker 1: do it yourself. Okay, So we signed up for this class.
Speaker 1: It gets canceled last minute and we never redid it.
Speaker 1: But I would like to hang a big Jackson Pollock. Um.
Speaker 1: The hard part is his signature. The rest of it
Speaker 1: isn't Isn't that difficult? So there's a famous instance of
Speaker 1: forgery out there of a Pollock that was revealed to
Speaker 1: have have benefittory because the misspelled Jackson Pollock. That's always
Speaker 1: a clue when you get the artist name wrong that
Speaker 1: that's never a never a good sign so I wanted
Speaker 1: to talk more about the book a little bit. What
Speaker 1: surprised you most when you were doing the research about this,
Speaker 1: because there are some kind of interesting entries in here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess, um, I think it isn't even actually what
Speaker 1: surprised me that there's all kinds of interesting ideas in it.
Speaker 1: The biggest surprise is actually what happened outside of the book.
Speaker 1: I was halfway done with the book, writing the book
Speaker 1: when um, wait an election and Trump got elected. So
Speaker 1: this was you started this book. So my assumption in
Speaker 1: a book where Trump really is not mentioned by name,
Speaker 1: I think you said he's in one that maya was
Speaker 1: that this was pushed back to his presidency, not that
Speaker 1: you specifically reference him in any way, shape or form,
Speaker 1: but it's just sort of like, this is what grifters
Speaker 1: have done since the beginning of time, and here's a
Speaker 1: million examples of it. Yeah. So the quick story is
Speaker 1: that it was originally titled it was sold to the
Speaker 1: publisher as the Encyclopedia of Fakeery, and that's a little
Speaker 1: bit more playful title. Uh, And the the subject matter
Speaker 1: was a little bit more i'd say, aesthetics, culture, society,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't so it wasn't a very serious book,
Speaker 1: and I wouldn't say that the book you're holding now
Speaker 1: is not also not a super serious book, but it
Speaker 1: it took on a graver tone when halfway through writing it, UM,
Speaker 1: we had a ran new presidents, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: it was like the entire idea that knowledge is uh
Speaker 1: socially constructed, or that it's that what we know is
Speaker 1: up for grabs, that kind of like that, which is
Speaker 1: a kind of a glib reaction to living in this society,
Speaker 1: that's like over over mediated, what do we know? We
Speaker 1: don't know anything. That kind of attitude suddenly became grave
Speaker 1: and I realized, like, oh, I have to make this
Speaker 1: thing more serious. And so that was the biggest changes
Speaker 1: that all of a sudden, I had to introduce a
Speaker 1: lot more social science into it. UM. So there's things like, um,
Speaker 1: the backfire effect and filter bubble and these these topics
Speaker 1: that are much more from psychology and sociology UH that
Speaker 1: try try more to get to the underlying concepts of misinformation.
Speaker 1: My favorite word of the past decade has to be agnetology,
Speaker 1: which is culturally constructed ignorance. To go back to people, UM,
Speaker 1: the tobacco executives, more recently climate change deniers. UH, anybody
Speaker 1: who has an interest in truth not getting out there. Uh.
Speaker 1: If you have enough resources, you have enough time, energy, money.
Speaker 1: We learned recently in the book Bid Blood and Theoropness
Speaker 1: they were they were kind of trying to do the
Speaker 1: same thing. Um, if you have enough money and enough
Speaker 1: willingness to gaslight a nation, you could create an alternative
Speaker 1: set of facts. And there are people who will unfortunately
Speaker 1: believe things that aren't true to someone else's advantage. It's
Speaker 1: it's astonishing. The I like the my definition for agnetology
Speaker 1: in the book, it's uh, the science of creating stupidity.
Speaker 1: And what's interesting about it is that it's not when
Speaker 1: you think of propaganda, you tend to think that it's
Speaker 1: like uh, an attempt to convince someone of an argument, right,
Speaker 1: And it's through various means that you're trying to argue
Speaker 1: a point of view and eventually they'll adopt it. And
Speaker 1: what's interesting about the anatology stuff that is especially around
Speaker 1: the tobacco companies, UM, some big oil. Especially what we
Speaker 1: learned around tobacco was that it wasn't that UM, the
Speaker 1: tobacco companies made an attempt to fill the information space
Speaker 1: with like corrective analysis. Like it wasn't trying. There was
Speaker 1: no like scientific studies done. It was actually just like
Speaker 1: continually bombarding it over and over and over and over
Speaker 1: again with more and more and more and more information.
Speaker 1: And so it became like this endless thing where anything
Speaker 1: that you believed, you could find a resource for that.
Speaker 1: What's saying that thing. And there's a lesson there that
Speaker 1: we're going through right now, which is, UM, any belief
Speaker 1: that you have, you can google it and you will
Speaker 1: find someone on the internet who has the similar belief,
Speaker 1: and uh, if you don't want to find contradictory evidence
Speaker 1: for it, you don't have to. UM that's a big
Speaker 1: problem we're going through right now. And I think that
Speaker 1: in some ways that tobacco, those tobacco lawsuits, they the
Speaker 1: science of creating stupidity that that those researchers developed, some
Speaker 1: of which are real powerful, well known psycho sociologists of
Speaker 1: the day, is coming back to haunt us. The the
Speaker 1: my favorite line and I'm trying to remember where I
Speaker 1: pulled this from. UM, tobacco companies sell two things, cigarettes
Speaker 1: and doubt. And that's really quite fascinating. Let me jump
Speaker 1: to my favorite questions. This is what we ask all
Speaker 1: of our guests. Tell us the most important thing people
Speaker 1: don't know about your background. I was having dinner with
Speaker 1: my wife last night and I casually mentioned that I
Speaker 1: was once a flash developer, and flash the software, flash
Speaker 1: the softwarees and those like flash games, little interactives, and
Speaker 1: eventually video is what it became known for, and which
Speaker 1: is hard to it's almost gone from the innergry now
Speaker 1: it's being expunged. Once Apple killed support for it. That
Speaker 1: was the beginning of the end. So uh, and it
Speaker 1: was It's funny that my my own wife, even ary
Speaker 1: two for two years, did not know this about me. UM.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's important. I think it's funny
Speaker 1: that for years I did this job that is now
Speaker 1: completely defunk going away. Might as well be a steam
Speaker 1: engine fitter. UM. Tell us about your early mentors who
Speaker 1: helped you along with your career. UM, I think you know.
Speaker 1: I grew up in very rural North Dakota, and there
Speaker 1: when I was growing up, I didn't know anyone who
Speaker 1: I didn't know anyone who went to college. I that's
Speaker 1: weird to say. What what is the prime economy and
Speaker 1: north I assumed some farm farming. Yeah, my graduating class
Speaker 1: was twenty seven people, twenty five of whom were farmers
Speaker 1: um and maybe twenty three of whom still are farmers. UM.
Speaker 1: And so I growing up, I didn't I didn't have
Speaker 1: role models really. I mean there are people that I admired. H.
Speaker 1: I had a really great English teacher, Mr Olig. I
Speaker 1: guess that's who I would say is my my mentor
Speaker 1: in some ways, um, just because you know, he really
Speaker 1: encouraged me. But I grew up in a place where
Speaker 1: I didn't have like a uh like access to a
Speaker 1: lot about outside information. And when I said like I
Speaker 1: didn't know anyone who went to college, I really like,
Speaker 1: I I didn't know anyone who went to like the
Speaker 1: University of Minnesota, which would have been like the big school.
Speaker 1: Still it's still eight hours away, but it would have
Speaker 1: been a probably the big state school to go to
Speaker 1: more much less did I know anyone went to Harvard?
Speaker 1: You know, I wouldn't would have like blown my mind.
Speaker 1: So when I started to go to decide to go
Speaker 1: to college, I it just never would have occurred to
Speaker 1: me that I would go to like any of those
Speaker 1: places ever in my life. So you applied to the
Speaker 1: University of Minnesota. I didn't because that that seemed like impossible.
Speaker 1: I applied to the University of North Dakota, which was actually,
Speaker 1: uh five hours away. And it's the furthest that my
Speaker 1: mind could imagine going, and it's the furthest that anyone
Speaker 1: that I ever knew went, and it it's still in state,
Speaker 1: but it was five hours away, and it seemed like
Speaker 1: it seemed like I was pushing boundaries by doing that. Really,
Speaker 1: that's that's fascinating. So, as a Jewish kid grown up
Speaker 1: in Long Island, forget college. It was a given I
Speaker 1: was going to law school. I was five, and I
Speaker 1: was pretty much told, yeah, you'll be going to law
Speaker 1: school or medical school that way. There was never any
Speaker 1: sort of, well, if you want to go to college,
Speaker 1: you can. If not here, here your other career options.
Speaker 1: It was pretty much, hey, we'll see how smart you are,
Speaker 1: maybe you'll get into medical school, and if you can,
Speaker 1: well we can always use another lawyer. It was never
Speaker 1: that that's fascinating that And yet you you go to
Speaker 1: North Dakota, what was your experience like there? Uh? Und
Speaker 1: the univers Earth Dakota is it's pretty typical big state school.
Speaker 1: You know, twelve students. It's probably it's probably bigger when
Speaker 1: than what you when you hear the name that it
Speaker 1: probably is it. I don't think it was any different
Speaker 1: from going to like, you know, University of Michigan or
Speaker 1: an Arbor or or any of the big football powerhouse. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's It was a pretty typical big state school,
Speaker 1: and it was it was a transformative thing for me
Speaker 1: because suddenly, um, just wildly more diversity, but the basic
Speaker 1: North Dakotan's or was it a little more national reach.
Speaker 1: It's probably about North Dakotans ten percent Minnesota something like that,
Speaker 1: and then UM. But the big thing was that, you know,
Speaker 1: when I was in high school, there was no outside media,
Speaker 1: and so I my high school library was the only thing.
Speaker 1: There's no in library and town. There's the high school
Speaker 1: library is the only accessed external information. This is obviously
Speaker 1: pre Internet. And the library had three magazines, UM Sports Illustrated,
Speaker 1: H Time, Newsweek, and one daily newspaper, UM the Bismarck Tribune,
Speaker 1: which had just it was basically a couple of local
Speaker 1: stories and some a pr to cales. Other than that,
Speaker 1: I didn't know what was going on in the world.
Speaker 1: I wed the three networks, but no cable um and
Speaker 1: so I didn't know any popular music. And when I
Speaker 1: went to college, I suddenly discovered the Cars and the
Speaker 1: Pixies and the key here and every band that means
Speaker 1: with the that I had never Not only had had
Speaker 1: I never heard before, I never could have heard before
Speaker 1: because it was not on the radio and I didn't
Speaker 1: I didn't go to record stores. I don't even I
Speaker 1: would have to travel forever to go to a record store.
Speaker 1: No local tower records where you grew up. So college
Speaker 1: Walthly was like uh an I opening thing to me,
Speaker 1: and I loved it, and I end up staying there
Speaker 1: for probably too long because I was like, this is great.
Speaker 1: I just sit around and learned stuff. So how long
Speaker 1: were you in college? For like six and a half years.
Speaker 1: That's why I was five years, So you're you're worse
Speaker 1: than me. I got. I got a few degrees. I started,
Speaker 1: I started premed um, you know, I studied everything like
Speaker 1: Latin and first all the sciences, and then I got
Speaker 1: really interested in philosophy and literature. And by the time
Speaker 1: I was done, I remember ah going to my advisor
Speaker 1: and him saying, I think that you probably have taken
Speaker 1: more classes than anyone ever here, and I would like
Speaker 1: to actually go back and look, I bet that's probably true. Um,
Speaker 1: I got three majors and two minors, and I would
Speaker 1: have stayed forever if I could. If you knew me
Speaker 1: at like twenty three, you would have guessed that it's
Speaker 1: impossible this person is not going to be a college professor,
Speaker 1: because like, that's just like what I loved. And whenever
Speaker 1: I'm run into someone who says they don't they didn't
Speaker 1: like college, I just go why, it's the best ticking
Speaker 1: in the world. You just around read books and talk
Speaker 1: about him. I why how could you not like that? Like,
Speaker 1: speaking of books, tell us about some of your favorite books. Um,
Speaker 1: I think I'm gonna name a weird book that influenced
Speaker 1: my book. Um, do you remember this book early eighties
Speaker 1: called girdle escher Box. I swear to God, I knew
Speaker 1: you're gonna say that. I swear to God that that
Speaker 1: was on the tip of my tongue. That book is
Speaker 1: sitting on the top shelf of my bookshelf in my
Speaker 1: office at home, and I am due to reread it
Speaker 1: because it's all about the recursive nature of of music,
Speaker 1: of mathematics, um and and of art and those three.
Speaker 1: I I'm just I almost was going to volunteer that,
Speaker 1: but I'm just um Douglas Hofstad so he. I think
Speaker 1: that book is fascinating because, uh, for a lot of reasons. One,
Speaker 1: it has no single point. Like today, if you're going
Speaker 1: to write a book, you have to make a pitch
Speaker 1: that you can come up with in two sentences, probably
Speaker 1: too long, but you have to say precisely what this
Speaker 1: thing the elevator, Yes, And it has to be it
Speaker 1: has to be tight. And especially I think in the
Speaker 1: idea in the space of like idea books, whether they're
Speaker 1: marketing or business or whatever, it has to be so
Speaker 1: kind of like you're gonna drill this point home and
Speaker 1: over and over and again. Um good. A lesser Bach
Speaker 1: was this, I guess the book of philosophy but also psychology,
Speaker 1: but also like it had plays and it had all
Speaker 1: of this like random assemblage of stuff and it never
Speaker 1: really tried to talk you into anything, and there's not
Speaker 1: enough books like that. I think of my book in
Speaker 1: the same way is that I'm more interested in like
Speaker 1: playing around with ideas and experimenting and like and and
Speaker 1: not trying to talk you into any specific point of view,
Speaker 1: but just to like give you a space to kind
Speaker 1: of like let your mind wander. And it's little more atmospheric,
Speaker 1: I guess, um, And so I love That's why I
Speaker 1: love that book is that it doesn't ever browbeat you.
Speaker 1: And it's also just like it's so many random things,
Speaker 1: Like it's like, here's an essay about mc yester's paintings,
Speaker 1: and then here's like a dialogue between tortoise, a tortoise
Speaker 1: and Achilles on a hill, and it's just it's like
Speaker 1: a weird collection. I had that assigned in college. And
Speaker 1: the thing that makes it a coherent whole is that
Speaker 1: theme that runs through everything of the self replicating, self
Speaker 1: repeating nature of mathematics and art, music and theoretically everything else.
Speaker 1: It's a fascinating book. He had another book out after that,
Speaker 1: The Mind's Eye, Yes, which is another really interesting, more
Speaker 1: philosophical book. Um and not quite as um esoteric? Is
Speaker 1: that is that the right word? But he's a fascinating writer.
Speaker 1: Give us more what other books? Not that you really
Speaker 1: that one book is enough to keep most people occupied
Speaker 1: for a long time. I'll give an off subject one
Speaker 1: something has nothing to do with my book, but it's
Speaker 1: always been something I've loved. Um, it's a probably more obscure. Um.
Speaker 1: Do you remember I shouldn't use past tense. This person
Speaker 1: is living, do you know? Uh, the architect rem Coolhouse.
Speaker 1: The name is certainly familiars a if it's in that
Speaker 1: category of stark atitect, like when there was that emergence
Speaker 1: of people in the nineties that was like they became
Speaker 1: the star architects. We're in the Bloomberg building right now.
Speaker 1: And I would not be surprised if he had some
Speaker 1: influence on this kind of thing. Um. Well, he wrote
Speaker 1: a book in oh maybe like called Delirious New York
Speaker 1: and it's a history of New York City. But it's
Speaker 1: written in a specific time when you could write a
Speaker 1: book that allowed you to use really poetic language. And
Speaker 1: I say, we're poetic with some hesitation, because that makes
Speaker 1: it sound like, you know, Flighty or something. But it
Speaker 1: was a book about a theory that posited New York
Speaker 1: exists this way because of this set of systems, and
Speaker 1: the specific system he was interested in was the grid.
Speaker 1: And and once you start to see the city through
Speaker 1: the lens of how he sets it up, which is, um,
Speaker 1: the innovation of New York is the grid and it's
Speaker 1: the innovation of America. You kind of go, oh wow,
Speaker 1: this is really interesting, and he writes it into very
Speaker 1: um all against used the same adjective poetic way that
Speaker 1: is like, it's not um, it's not making a grand argument.
Speaker 1: It's simply like letting you understand a way to think
Speaker 1: about New York City, delirious new York, a retroactive manifesto
Speaker 1: from Manhattan, anything else. So we're gonna leave it with
Speaker 1: those two, both of which I think can keep people
Speaker 1: busy for quite some time. UM. I read a lot
Speaker 1: of Jonathan Swift writing this book, just because he was
Speaker 1: the the satirist of of lore that is so important
Speaker 1: to our times. I have an entry about a modest proposal,
Speaker 1: and I went back and read the modest proposed it
Speaker 1: again for the first time. Brilliant stuff. Um. But he
Speaker 1: also did a series of essays on politics that are
Speaker 1: highly relevant to our time UM called the Art of
Speaker 1: Political Lying. Uh really recommend them Art of Political Lying.
Speaker 1: All right, well we'll make a note of that. So,
Speaker 1: since you started your blog way back when, what do
Speaker 1: you think is the most significant thing that changed, uh
Speaker 1: for better or worse in in terms of blogging and
Speaker 1: and media? Oh uh, you know. I a researcher called
Speaker 1: me yesterday and asked me a bunch of questions about
Speaker 1: internet and media technologies, and the final question was what
Speaker 1: are you excited about? Question? Well, emerge these two together,
Speaker 1: and it was what are you excited about? And I
Speaker 1: sat there and thought, I don't have an answer. If
Speaker 1: it had been on radio, they would have been dead
Speaker 1: air I had. I was like in my head, to
Speaker 1: do I want to say bitcoin? Do I want to
Speaker 1: say virtual reality? Do I? And I was like, I
Speaker 1: don't have an answer. And I think that it's because
Speaker 1: I grew up in an era where we were making
Speaker 1: um uh consumer facing products and more and more the
Speaker 1: startup world and the media world looks uh b two
Speaker 1: b um marketplaces and all of things that have value,
Speaker 1: but they're just way less interesting to me. And so
Speaker 1: I have a really hard time getting excited about consumer
Speaker 1: technology at all. Right now, Uh, that's interesting. The things
Speaker 1: that I do, the things that I get excited about
Speaker 1: are strangely have gone to the completely other side. And
Speaker 1: it's content. Right. Netflix got really effing good, right like
Speaker 1: TV got good, UM, podcasts got good. I don't know
Speaker 1: where it came from, but all of a sudden, like
Speaker 1: I wished I had made a choice so a few
Speaker 1: years ago and moved to l A and entered into
Speaker 1: the entertainment space. Decaisn't I never would have made five
Speaker 1: years ago, but I kind of wish I had because
Speaker 1: it's exciting right now to be in that world. But
Speaker 1: you don't have to be in l A. That's the
Speaker 1: beauty of the technology. You could do a podcast from anywhere.
Speaker 1: We happen to be in a radio studio in a
Speaker 1: media building. But I have one of the guys in
Speaker 1: my office does a podcast. They skype. It's him and
Speaker 1: somebody who's in Michigan and Animal Spirits, Michael Batnick. They
Speaker 1: basically do this using really inexpensive technology. It's a it's
Speaker 1: a it's a radio. He ended up getting a fixed
Speaker 1: mic because it sounded better, and they use um either
Speaker 1: Skype or a direct line, so the quality of both
Speaker 1: sides audio is really good, and you end up with
Speaker 1: It's amazing what you could do even with very very
Speaker 1: inexpensive technology. So you wouldn't have had it. Moved to
Speaker 1: an Yeah, for podcasting, I wouldn't have had to move,
Speaker 1: but to Besion TV, I would have had. Sure. Um,
Speaker 1: podcasting isn't just because it is. I mean New York
Speaker 1: is sort of the hub, but it's way more dispersed.
Speaker 1: It's all around the country that things are going on. Uh.
Speaker 1: What do you do for fun? Uh? If if I could,
Speaker 1: if I could do anything in the world, it would
Speaker 1: be to like disappear into a cabin somewhere with a
Speaker 1: guitar and write songs that and put them on a
Speaker 1: four track and have no one ever hear them. That
Speaker 1: sounds like fun. That's what I That's what I do
Speaker 1: for fun, is I record some songs at home. Um
Speaker 1: that I have no It sounds like I'm an aspiring
Speaker 1: an aspiring performer. I have no desire to perform or
Speaker 1: have people hear it. I do it only for myself,
Speaker 1: and so that's fun. That that does sound like fun.
Speaker 1: Tell us about a time you failed and what you
Speaker 1: learned from the experience. Um, we always in startups for
Speaker 1: a long time, so those are nothing but failures over
Speaker 1: and over again. Uh, so I could tell lots of
Speaker 1: stories there. So you don't have any Early Facebook stock
Speaker 1: is that what you're saying, I don't. I mean, I
Speaker 1: had I had some successes and so i'm things. I'm
Speaker 1: proud of um and products we made. But uh, but
Speaker 1: but everyone who's done startups has like more, even the
Speaker 1: successful people have nine stories of failure. Um. I think
Speaker 1: I think the straw tell though, is that, Um, do
Speaker 1: you know I got sued by Garrison Keeler No so
Speaker 1: formally of Lake Woebegone NPR. And I think he kind
Speaker 1: of ran into a little trouble. He has, he has
Speaker 1: been in trouble recently. He's on a list of men
Speaker 1: that seemed to be involved in nefarious activities. Um, so
Speaker 1: why did why did he sue you? This is a
Speaker 1: while ago, over ten years ago, back in the blogging era.
Speaker 1: I started, Uh. I used to be in Minneapolis, and
Speaker 1: I started a website called min Speak, which is basically
Speaker 1: a It was a kind of a local reddit, I
Speaker 1: guess like it was like you posted links and you
Speaker 1: talked about them, and it was a community site. It
Speaker 1: was a community news site and it was pretty popular.
Speaker 1: And I did a marketing campaign for the site that
Speaker 1: was a bunch of T shirts. Um, and we made
Speaker 1: T shirts that said things like it was like an
Speaker 1: outline of Minnesota and it said land of ten thousand
Speaker 1: fakes rather than lakes. It was like little pond t shirts,
Speaker 1: and one of the T shirts was um Prairie Ho Companion.
Speaker 1: That's hilarious. I thought it was funny too. I had
Speaker 1: a hundred fifty even printed up. Um. They sold out
Speaker 1: within six months, And about a year and a half
Speaker 1: after that, I got a letter from Keeler's lawyer with
Speaker 1: a season desist down that's saying please stop selling these.
Speaker 1: Uh No, I actually didn't say please. Now, isn't parody
Speaker 1: fair use for something like that is clearly parody. It
Speaker 1: seems really strange that one of America's leading satirists would
Speaker 1: be out trying to sue someone for poking fun at him.
Speaker 1: It seemed absurd, right, So here's the thing I wanted
Speaker 1: to give the guy at the benefit of the doubt.
Speaker 1: So I called the lawyer of this name that was
Speaker 1: listed at the bottom, and I said, listen, your client
Speaker 1: is making a mistake if you pursue this thing. Here's
Speaker 1: all I'm gonna do. I'm gonna scan in this two
Speaker 1: page cease and desist. I'm gonna I'm gonna put it
Speaker 1: on the Internet, and I'm gonna write on there about
Speaker 1: like this conversation I'm having, and I'm gonna tell everybody
Speaker 1: how absurd it is that this is happening that and
Speaker 1: I'm going to ask for help for like first offendin
Speaker 1: defense because I'm not going to defend it myself. And
Speaker 1: I'm gonna get it and I'm and I'm gonna make
Speaker 1: your client look like a fool. And the lawyer was like,
Speaker 1: are you threatening me, Mr Sargatts, And I was like, no,
Speaker 1: I'm not threatening. I'm just telling you. Here are my
Speaker 1: cards on the table. I'm sharing strategy. I'm saying, don't
Speaker 1: pursue this. No one's gonna know. I'm not I don't
Speaker 1: have T shirts left, I don't know why you're doing this.
Speaker 1: I'm not selling this T shirt anymore. Just I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't want to make a big deal out of it.
Speaker 1: And he's like, well, I'll talk to my client. And
Speaker 1: ten days ten days later, he called back and he said,
Speaker 1: my client wishes to pursue this lawsuit. And I was like, oh, man,
Speaker 1: you're asking for it. And so I did exactly that.
Speaker 1: I basically put the conversation that I had with him
Speaker 1: on on and I scanned the two pages and it
Speaker 1: was the biggest thing on the Internet that day. It
Speaker 1: went viral like crazy because both people from the left
Speaker 1: and the right liked it. It was the top link
Speaker 1: on Drudge Andrew Sullivan wrote a column about it. All
Speaker 1: of like the bloggers of that day were like it
Speaker 1: was a big deal for them, like people like Matthew Iglesias,
Speaker 1: like the kind of first generation of of Internet. People
Speaker 1: were all about it and up in an uproar, and uh,
Speaker 1: I got six d comments and the A C. L.
Speaker 1: You called, the Standford Law School called and said they
Speaker 1: wished to defend me in this exactly what you predicted exactly.
Speaker 1: And uh when I take called back and say, all right,
Speaker 1: well we will going to let this go. Well that's
Speaker 1: what I thought was gonna be was gonna happen. I
Speaker 1: just let to sit there and let it sit there.
Speaker 1: And I thought to myself, I could pursue this, I
Speaker 1: really could. And I have the right to write this
Speaker 1: is a first clear, first Amendment and I'm gonna win
Speaker 1: like whatever, and there's a principle here. But you should
Speaker 1: reissue that shirt. I could, I should. This would be
Speaker 1: a right time to do because he's not suing anyone now, Um,
Speaker 1: and I didn't. I didn't pursue it, and I look
Speaker 1: back on it. I think I made the right choice,
Speaker 1: but I'm not sure. But here's why. I thought, do
Speaker 1: I really want to have this thing that I become
Speaker 1: a person who's who's litigated for even if I'm right
Speaker 1: that I'm litigated for using the word hope? And I
Speaker 1: was like, is that really something I want to defend?
Speaker 1: Um on a on a instant constitutional basis, I for
Speaker 1: sure do, But on a like personal level, is that
Speaker 1: something that I really was a very mature decision. So
Speaker 1: I decided not to do it, even though I know
Speaker 1: him in the right. That's hilarious. That worked out well. Um,
Speaker 1: what sort of advice would you give a millennial, a
Speaker 1: recent graduate who was thinking about going into filling the
Speaker 1: blink content production, web design, media writing. What what advice
Speaker 1: would you give someone right out of college? Um? I
Speaker 1: have to give advice that's kind of based on my
Speaker 1: experience again and that that is again kind of growing
Speaker 1: up in the middle of nowhere. And if I went
Speaker 1: back and gave like a graduation speech to kids and
Speaker 1: where I grew up, I would try as hard as
Speaker 1: I possibly could to convey to them this really simple
Speaker 1: notion that I think most millennials feel but probably don't
Speaker 1: feel where I grew up, and that is you really
Speaker 1: can do anything. It sounds so simple and kind of
Speaker 1: almost tried to say you can do anything, right, But
Speaker 1: it's not a thing I believed, no one. There's no
Speaker 1: way I thought I could do anything, and it wasn't.
Speaker 1: It wasn't until deep into college that I thought I
Speaker 1: could do anything. And there's all stain. That's my first
Speaker 1: thing I would say is like you really, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: You can do anything. And the second thing is whatever
Speaker 1: your interest is, you will find a job or a
Speaker 1: career or perhaps fortune around the thing. Like I'll give
Speaker 1: a quick example. One of my my favorite areas of
Speaker 1: interest in college was linguistics, and because it's a mix
Speaker 1: of science and art and it was like kind of
Speaker 1: like the perfect thing for me, and I didn't pursue
Speaker 1: it professionally because of that. No one really has careers
Speaker 1: in linguists. We're gonna be speech pathologist where you're gonna
Speaker 1: be today? Yeah, Google is so deeply in need of
Speaker 1: this linguists. Every tech company is, and I think that
Speaker 1: you wouldn't have foreseen that then. And uh, and I
Speaker 1: think that you can name almost anything. I think that
Speaker 1: you'll find that eventually there will be an emerging you
Speaker 1: can own that category. And um, that's like a that
Speaker 1: sounds like a idealistic early Internet person like, because there
Speaker 1: was a lot of rhetoric around the early Internet that
Speaker 1: if you if you you care about ti vos, you
Speaker 1: can write a blog about tvOS and it will be successful. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it was like for years it was, um, you
Speaker 1: could whatever your passion is, you will find an audience
Speaker 1: for it. I think it's still true though. It's like
Speaker 1: one of the pieces of the um utopian Internet that
Speaker 1: I still believe in is that, like, if you're passionate
Speaker 1: about something, you will find people an audience for it,
Speaker 1: and you can be known as the expert in that thing.
Speaker 1: And our final question, what is it that you know
Speaker 1: about writing and content production today that you wish you
Speaker 1: knew twenty years ago when you were first starting. Um,
Speaker 1: I wish I wish I would have bought Apple, and
Speaker 1: I wish I would have taken up Seriously, all right,
Speaker 1: that's a fair enough point. We have been speaking with
Speaker 1: Rex Sregats. He is the author of the Encyclopedia of Misinformation.
Speaker 1: If you enjoy this conversation, be sure and look up
Speaker 1: an Intra down an Inch on Apple iTunes, Bloomberg dot com, Stitcher, overcast,
Speaker 1: wherever your finer podcasts are sold, and you could see
Speaker 1: any of the other two hundred or so uh such
Speaker 1: podcasts that we've done previously. We love your comments, feedback
Speaker 1: and suggestions right to us at m IB podcast at
Speaker 1: Bloomberg dot net. I would be remiss if I did
Speaker 1: not thank our crack staff who helps put these podcasts
Speaker 1: together each week. Medina Parwana is my producer. Taylor Riggs
Speaker 1: is our booker, Attica val Brun is our project manager.
Speaker 1: Michael Batnick is my head of research. I'm Barry Ritolts.
Speaker 1: You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio show.