Conspiracy: A True Story of Power, Sex, and a Billionaire's Secret Plot to Destroy a Media Empire

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Bollea was genuinely crushed by all these events. When he sued Gawker, though, he didn't really have a hope of winning. He wasn't nearly rich enough to take on the Gawker empire. Until Peter Thiel came along. Propaganda by Edward Bernays is the oldest conspiracy book on the list, originally written in 1928. The book outlines the psychology of manipulating the masses through the technique of public communication. Bernays is viewed by many media historians as the father of public relations. Noam Chomsky stated that: Trump understood the true nature of the Republican party better than those who were the party’s leaders,” Stevens writes of Trump’s first campaign, launched in 2015, a tacit admission that the author himself did not fully comprehend the world around him. It was about resentments, not upward arc: “Hate was creating a surge of appeal.” Cunning and resources might win the war, but it’s the stories and the myths afterward that will determine who deserved to win it."

I listened to the audio version of this book, and I must say, in the future, Holiday should hires someone to read it for him. He reads in a constant sing-songy decrescendo that gets more and more noticeable by the end of the book. His sentences are very short, which makes for an easy read, but makes for a difficult listen.He says: “Almost any conspiracy theory starts with a legitimate question that I would agree: yeah, let’s look into that, let’s see what we can find. It’s the refusal to accept evidence when the evidence doesn’t pan out in the way that you want it to that leads to problems because then what you have to do is construct an increasingly elaborate conspiratorial framework to explain why you’re not finding the evidence you were hoping for. That’s where you get completely lost in the weeds.” And speaking of agency: Thiel and Denton are clearly, in the words of Eric Weinstein, "high-agency people." They have a vision and execute on it. That trait is in limited supply, and tends to be selected-against in high-status education and the early stages of high-status jobs. In a sense, Denton was a class traitor, by using his Nietzschean will-to-power to build an institution that mostly swatted other unique people aside. The founding of Stanford University, however, was fraught with conflicts between Jane Stanford, who was obsessed with the spiritual world that she consulted to make academic decisions, and David Starr Jordan, the University’s founding President, who appointed his favorites and sycophants to the faculty. Ultimately it’s not about the key players, it’s about our history and the history of conspiracy, as an act. It’s a story of a modern day conspiracy and the players happen to be Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and Peter Thiel. But it’s more than that. It’s about our world and our current landscape, political and social. Absorbing + fascinating, one of those tales that's impossible to believe is a true story. Ryan Holiday is so quotable throughout the entire book, little nuggets of wisdom on society, moral high ground/obligation, conspiracy, power, history, perspective, decency, wealth, the media, the legal process, strategy, psychology, war-- I bookmarked a few of my favorites. So much to learn from this book, I wish all nonfiction was written this way.

Re-read and a radical shift of my opinion. I jumped to conclusions too soon first time round. I finally get this book! Disclosure: Gawker has tried to get more than one of my friends fired, so I didn’t shed any tears when justice was served. High-fives may have been exchanged. Witch trial in Salem, Massachusetts. Lithograph by George H. Walker. Undated. Photograph: Bettmann Archive While there certainly was intrigue, I did find the pace slower than I expected, especially with Ryan Holiday re-iterating multiple times the ideas around conspiracies and what happens when people feel wronged/vengeful, rather than focusing on the details of the story. As Stevens sees it, the late Weimar Republic and the US today have plenty in common. As was the case 90 years ago, democracy could be made expendable, particularly if the donor class goes along for the ride.

Conclusion

Also, for the greater context of the story, it was beneficial for me to read Robert Greene, Ryan Holiday's mentor. He is famous for: The problem with this book is at the very end, he suddenly turns it into an opinion piece on his belief that the Trump presidency is a disaster and proves more and more a disaster every day that passes...

After McConnell helped Trump’s judicial nominees over the finishing line, the senator became expendable. He emerged as a target for Trump’s rants and loathing, including potshots at Elaine Chao, McConnell’s Chinese American wife, who resigned from Trump’s cabinet – if only after January 6. At times, McConnell’s disdain seeped out. Ultimately, though, he maintained sufficient devotion to his Caesar: McConnell blamed Trump for January 6 but refused to vote to convict at the second impeachment trial. What I wanted to do with this book is to lay out that this is almost like a playbook that gets run and that one step to defeating it is being aware that it’s used like this. When the next one comes along – because there will be a next one – maybe we’ll be able to get out ahead of it a little bit faster.”With all the context above... this story reads like a great case study of the strategic thinking Greene promotes and the moral philosophy Holiday popularizes. So it was much more engaging and insightful this time. He quotes Mitch McConnell, the living embodiment of the Republican establishment, the Senate majority leader when Trump won the White House. With hindsight, McConnell sounds clueless, oblivious to the approaching storm.

This argument is counterintuitive, but not obviously wrong. And it's a good heuristic that when an argument is easy to dismiss but turns out to be hard to argue with, you should default to strongly believing it. If nothing else, when you find out you're wrong you do so in a way that leaves you better-informed than the conformists. The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.” The book's narrative does take an interesting turn into politics and aims to inspire people to take action during those times when they want to but feel they can do nothing about a certain situation — however, it fell short for me in being wholly inspiring. I've enjoyed other books by Ryan Holiday. I enjoy his stoic approach to things. He's a fascinating young man with an interesting, if not worldly, misguided insight into how things work.It does succeed in being reflective though — causing you to think: is it ever right to seek revenge when you've been hurt? Is it right to destroy an individual or institution that you think is incredibly damaging or hurtful to a wide range of people? The word 'conspiracy' tends to be viewed as automatically 'bad', but Ryan forces his reader to question that. Ultimately, I remain unconvinced with Ryan's hypothesis that we need more conspiracies in the world than we currently have. And yes, if you're wondering about all the other creative ways a billionaire could inflict retribution... Thiel thought about them, and discussed options with the chief architect of his campaign. Not purely out of scruples, they elected to follow a 100% legal strategy, eschewing even legal gray areas that Thiel could easily have funded.