Ryan Holiday, author of Trust Me I’m Lying, visited Stockton this Thursday to talk about his former life as a media manipulator for the freshman convocation. After warm opening statements from the president of the Student Senate Victoria Dambroski, Holiday took to the stage and began.
Ryan Holiday signing books after his “Trust Me I’m Lying Talk”
He started off with a brief recall of his first month of college where he, similar to us, was given a book to read over the summer and had to attend a talk from the author. Holiday described how this was the first time he had met a writer and how awed he was to see firsthand that she was just another person. It gave helped him realize the freedoms he had in the sense that he was not confined to any one role or profession, he could buy and large be as creative as he wanted in finding ways to finance his mortgage.
After a segue into how he met his longtime friend Tucker Max and an overview of his work as a publicist at American Apparel, Holiday broke into his three main points. First was the understanding that the public’s outrage is being taken advantage of. He pointed out at two examples of the same “Kellyanne Conway being fired” story from left and right perspectives, and then divulged that the articles were written from the same source as a way to keep the political dichotomy hot. The second point was about understanding the digital divide, and knowing that internet literacy is a very real skill that a very real portion of the population does not have. In this portion, he explained how 44% of Americans get their news from Facebook. His third and last idea was to unsubscribe from the news. So much of the breaking news today is speculation or has no direct impact on your life, and Holiday proposes just… not listening to what isn’t pertinent. Stop the push notifications. Stop the noise. Simple as that. He ended the presentation with pictures of his pet donkeys. Not a total loss.
After the convocation, I had a chance to meet Holiday and ask him a question while he signed my book. Everything he discussed about the news culture was centralized to America, so I wanted to hear his view internationally. I essentially asked how or if his tactics of manipulating the media are applied in areas without the freedom of the press we experience her in the US, places like Syria, Ukraine, and Russia.
Holiday explained that it was often the government executing these techniques. In order to appear as if the country does have a free press space, the regimes will bombard citizens with so much information that they cannot discern what is truth from what is fact. He described this as a “top-down” technique and commented on its irregularity, and he used North Korea in his explanation.
When he returned my copy of Trust Me I’m Lying, there was a small note above his signature. It simply read “Use this book for good and not evil.”