Rex Sorgatz Discusses the Mechanics of Misinformation (Podcast)

and interesting tidbits. There were a run of things I was looking at back then, uh Copkey fam oculus, Um, just a handful of colossal uh that Boing boying. There was just a run of of differences that we're just collecting interesting, eclectic, unusual things back when the Internet was small enough that one person or a small group of

people could do that and find some really really fascinating things. Um. As it turns out, Rex Uh not only was a blogger, but he was a television producer, digital media consultants UM, and a writer. And I've followed his career over the years and have always enjoyed his work. We talked about the genesis of the book The Encyclopedia of Misinformation, which

is really quite fascinating. And if you are at all interested in web history, in in how and why memes catch on on the Internet, whether they're true or false, how they spread, I think you will find this to be a fascinating conversation. So, with no further ado, my interview of Rex Sorgats. My special guest today is Rex Sorgats. He is somebody I have been reading for several centuries now.

He is the author of the Encyclopedia of Misinformation. See what I did there, slipped a little misinformation and he has quite uh quite a bio. In addition to being a product designer a creative technologist, he is the founder of the New York media consultancy kind of sort of media, and he is the author of a book which may

have the longest subtitle I've ever seen. The book is The Encyclopedia of Misinformation, A compendion of imitation, spoof's, delusion, simulations, counterfeits, impostors, illusions, confabulations, skullduggery, fraud, pseudoscience, propaganda, hoaxes, flim flam pranks, hornswoggle, conspiracy, and miscellaneous fakery. Rex or Ghats,

welcome to Bloomberg. It is wonderful to be here. So I have to start with your bio, which begins Rex sor Ghats is a professional orson Wales impersonator and a third generation like in Thrope, who is responsible refore rebranding contrails as chem trails. Obviously none of that is true.

Tell us about your your background. I wrote that bio for my It's on my Amazon page because I started, I started writing a traditional bio, and then I was like, well, this is a book about misinformation, I should really just make a spoof of the whole idea. And I have to point out that, having read you over the years, first that fimaculus, then it wired. You're very much into um recursive fractals and regressions where there is an element

of a meta reflection on the underlying subject. For example, you many people do your year end lists. That doesn't work for you. You You do a list of lists, and we'll talk about that later. But the your self description as a hoax is perfectly consistent with not just the book,

but your own brand of recursive um writing. Fair fair statement. Yeah, for sure, Um there's a There's even an element in the book where I do I return to this trope a lot where I stayed a fact and then throw a footnote in there and then and then undermine the fact itself. Like I have this tendency to kind of not my writing. I don't I don't trust writing that asserts itself in some sort of like overly um unbiased intellectual way that just so firm and has no sense

of doubt about itself. So I think that I'm always I think everything I write is expressing um, is making a point, but it is like willing to say I'm not really sure about this. And I think that that's that we live in a media climate where that's I think an especially important trait, the certitude amongst people who have no basis for certitude seems to be the model. Are on the twenty four hour news channels, regardless of

political leaning. Yeah, I mean, I I don't know if I the last time I saw somebody on cable news and will include all networks there say get asked a question and say I don't know. You know, that just never happens, and I I always start with I don't know or I am not sure. Let me try to work this problem out. I've got a few ideas. Here are different opposing ways to think about it, and I think that that that whole notion has really disappeared from

media climate. To be honest, it gets said very rarely, and it's really hilarious to watch the anchor just suddenly. It looks like a fast driving car that suddenly hits a patch of oil. It's been all over the place, It's all over the ice. Date don't know how to deal with someone who says, oh, that's outside of my expertise. I can I really have nothing to add on that.

Their heads explode, yes, and writing a book about misinformation, which is not exactly a topic that, like, I had known a ton about the at least the social science part of it. I know the cultural part about it, like the part the kind of P. T. Barnumsesque qualities of our society and culture. But I had to do an immense amount of research into um. All of the research is going on right now around oh, fake news and what trusting the media and all of that stuff.

So that's that was all brand new to me. Well, we'll talk a little bit about fake news, and we'll talk about how the media has kind of painted itself into this corner. Let's let's stay with your background a little bit. You you do a lot of different things. You're a designer, and you were part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize. Assuming that that's not misinformation, tell us tell us about that. Uh, this is a story from a long time ago. Um, he's twenty one

years ago, I think now. Yeah, So in nineteen ninety seven, I was living in North Dakota, Grand Folks, North Dakota, and this little town of fifty thousand people suffered the greatest um disaster of the twentieth century for real American city. Well, and if you quantified in the sense of people evacuated, the entire town had to be a back of the town out and it was a flood, and Um Clinton was still president and he actually came to town and cried on national television. It was like it was kind

of the Katrina before its time. Not as severe a Katrina, obviously, but it was so all fifty thousand people are out. Were there any fatalities or there's interestingly zero zero fatalities. But the reason it became in such a strange national story is that in the middle of this flood, in which like six ft of water in downtown, it's like underwater. In the middle of this flood, a fire starts and

it seems like the ultimate sort of reckoning of hell. Yes, and it creates this paradox where there's all of this water, but there's a fire, and the fire can't be put out because the fire hydrants are on the water. And so there there are pictures out there a fireman kind of diving into the water to try to connect their hoses to the fire hydrants and then they finally get them connected. In there, there's no water pressure and so

none of it works. And uh. And I the reason I UM kind of became a notable person around the event was I was a person who decided not to leave and I was staying in my apartment because I lived next door to the Grand Forks Herald, the newspaper in Grand Forks, which back then was owned by night Ridder. There's a company that is no longer around UM, and it was working on the newspaper and trying to still get it out. We managed to eventually that newspaper burned down.

UM and I had to be rescued from my apartment in the middle all this flood fire and we want to pulletzerprise that. I hope you took lots of photographs from the vantage point that was pre iPhone or any kind of thing like that, and so none. I have zero photos. I've actually I just went back last summer or this this a few weeks ago, and uh, the town has recovered. There's there are no walls all over protecting it from the river coming though. Uh. And there's

pictures all over town, um, commemorating the event. Uh. And it was. It was a fascinating thing, and it was kind of in a weird This is weird to say, but I lost everything I ever owned. But it was sort of lucky because, um, you know, we won the pulletzer. I became known for it. Um, I was the internet guy in an arrow, which there, Yeah it was. I was the web master, which was a very valuable title back then. And uh, it allowed me to get out.

Really I didn't really have many other It was hard to foresee how I was going to get out of North Dakota. And this was like a quick Oh I got I got talent, now d git to exodus. I get it. Let's talk about this book, because I find it to be fascinating. That's why I wanted to have you on the show to go over this. Hey, we're in an era of alternative facts, so given that, why

do we need an encyclopedia of misinformation? Yeah? I thought I thought it was a good idea to try to compile all of the stuff out there that is not just misleading information, but it's about the theories behind it and how it evolves and where it comes from. And that's really what the book is. Like, I think sometimes people see the title, I think, oh, this is gonna be a list of hoaxes, or you know, it's gonna be like, here's a bunch of conspiracies, and there's a

little bit of that, But really it's about the theory. Um, here's a big scary word, the epistemology of of conspiracies, hoaxes and these and media And ultimately, I think I think of it as a book about trust, like who what's sources? Who what sources of do you trust today? And um, I don't say this out right, but I think it becomes implicitly clear that that's eroting, like our institutions are eroting and our faith in in UH knowledge bases is going and and I try to deal with

out in a playful way. I would point out that the erosion of trust in institutions is a feature and not a bug, because if the population doesn't trust the institutions, they're more likely to trust the grifters and con men who were trying to get over fair fair statement. Yeah, it's fascinating. I think that one of the I didn't talk about this in the book, but it's I'm going

to write about this at some point. I'm fascinated by the evolution of media literacy because I feel like I grew up in a time when people were told always distrust what you're the information you're given in and root out its source, and um, look look where it came from. And you it was like this idea that information should be immediately distrusted. And I think that sort of made sense in an era of kind of monolithic information and and kind of a state where we we built UH

knowledge bases that no one wanted to contradict. And now I believe that idea of constantly questioning has become so rampant and spread wildly on the Internet, particularly through places like Reddit that now we're left in this place where we don't trust anything, and like like there are people out there who don't believe that Charlemagne existed, you know, like all the parts of history are lies these days. The flat earth thing is probably the best example. Like

I didn't know how to write about that. That's a good example something I don't know how to write about in the book because what am I gonna do. Am I gonna like debunk the flat earthers? That just sounds boring. I'm gonna or I'm gonna make fun of them, or what what am I gonna do with it? And so what I chose to do with that entry is I thought, well, uh, what's interesting about this is that it's emerging right now.

But really it's emerging because people have there's this idea out there that historically they are all these times in history where people thought the Earth was flat. And I went back and looked at this turns out not to be the kid turns out not to be true at all. Like you have to go back way back, like to Homer to find out people who actually leave their earth was flat. There was no one during Columbus's time that

was flat. Even the Greeks understood the earth was the Aristotle play dont knew it was around, Like, uh, I mean even church figures. I mean the people who persecuted Galileo believe the Earth is round. They just didn't believe that the Earth was not the center of the universe. Like and Dante thought the Earth was round because if you drill the hole into the earth and you got to the inferno, you could come out the other side,

you know. And so this idea was like a it evolved because in the nineteenth century someone came up with the idea that I can use this as a cudgel too, like describe a certain kind of part of society that thinks that there's they're so stupid they think the Earth is flat. And it was kind of an accident of

intellectualism that this evolved. And um, sorry, like that that was the difficulty of this book is like, how do I write about these things that are kind of interesting, But I don't really want to be a book of debunking because that's so that raises the next question, how new is fake news? Yeah, when you when you write a book like this, you end up becoming a little bit weary with history, especially like there's a lot of

nineteenth century stuff in here. Um, and that was just an era of peer chicanery and uh and manipulation, Um, the gold in age of grifters. Yeah, it truly was. And Uh, if you look at someone like P. T. Barnum um, or just like all of the people spreading medical hoaxes at the time, you really kind of go, maybe today isn't that bad, Maybe the Internet isn't that bad.

And so I can't I can't draw exact distinctions. I would say that, um, something is coming up right now on the Internet that feels like the the change that started to happen in the early nineteenth century where um people found ways to game the system. And so I feel like we're kind of returning to an era right now. So so let's talk about the shifting Overton window. Explain

for listeners exactly what that is. Uh. The Overton window is a fascinating little idea UM developed by a researcher who he just kind of came up with the term. And it's for essentially, it's what are the topics that we allow into public discourse, what is safe for us to discuss and like in public discourse, I mean kind of the media, I guess, i'd say, but but general debate within a society, Yes, that's acceptable. Yeah, that that if you brought it up at a party, no one

would like, I think you're crazy or whatever. And it is a fascinating thing to watch, right, Like, things definitely move in and out of the over overtoned window. Um. And just for a little context, the the term comes from watching. I believe the phrase the description used was watching a parade through window and if you shift your position, you're seeing a different part of the parade from a

different angle. Is that yes, So so the overtoned window refers to how, at different times and different angles we are tolerating or discussing different topics. Is that Is that the metaphor? Yeah? And you could just like name something like, um, legalized marijuana, Like that's not something that was like readily discussed maybe ten years ago for sure, not twenty five

years ago. So there was a contingent of the population who believed in it, but it wasn't a mainstream idea or even just gave marriage like was not a real

mainstream I d until accelerated very quickly. Um. In recent years, but the term more now is used to apply to UH mostly about how the right, the far right, the right, whatever we want to call that group UM has entered, has has pushed into um public consciousness ideas that otherwise recently would have been considered outsider um extreme views on immigration,

for instance, UM. I mean, just open up Reddit now, go to the Donald un reddit and you'll just see like this rampant conversation about things that we obviously just sort of thought we're outside of discourse and now are allowed in and we have to take seriously. And so there's a kind of a good quality to it, right, because like our mind should always be open minded to

any kind of new ideas. At the same time, it's like we get we're we're starting to take things seriously that otherwise we're like, oh, that's for the freaks and the outsiders, and now we have to deal with debunking. Like flat earth is a good example, Like you know, we like now we have to we have to spend time on that topic. You mentioned read it twice, But you're not referring to things like Twitter or Facebook. Are they quantitatively or qualitatively different than the various subreddits that

really go so far into the weeds. I mean I sometimes get asked like which is the most dangerous one really kind of juggle around which social network and my most most troubled by UM read it is where the audience is smaller, still substantial, but smaller. But it's really where ideas get root. And you might consider it the

base of the of fringe ideas. People who used to be lone wolves in their town find life minded individuals who are similarly insane and basically allows them to reinforce their not whatever the mania of the moment happens to be, They find similar people and then they build propaganda around it.

They start memes, they make pictures, They kind of they become self edified by having on the people to talk through the ideas of the thing to go back to flat earth, like read it on flat Earth is fastening because people will come in and kind of contradict things and they'll have to like go, oh, I know how

to evolve this theory further. So it's like a breeding ground for like furthering these these thoughts UM and then eventually what happens is that stuff bubbles up to Facebook, and that's when it goes mainstream and then all of a sudden, your Grandma's like being presented with images of Peppie the Frog, And I think within that group, it's sort of self legitimizes what should really be a fringe set of ideas. Yeah, I don't it really should be

and it's depth. The Internet is definitely causing this weird fracturing thing right now where I I don't I feel like are not We used to have like a set of facts that we based everybody's understanding. Yeah, and now that thing is fracturing all over the place, and um,

I'm not optimistic about how that turns out. So I'm gonna be a little selfish year and I'm gonna say optimistically, if you're a high functioning idiot, if you believe things that are patently demonstrable untrue, we're just seeing the impact of that in things like elections, what have you. But over the course of our lifetime, when you believe in things that are apartently untrue and then you go out into the world, there will eventually be negative consequences, whether

that's um personally, politically, professionally, economically. But if you believe the world is flat, or if you believe you can walk through that wall, we'll act on it, and bad stuff is going to happen. So I'm hoping that eventually Darwin's Revenge sort of filters this out. You're trusting, like the socialization process to to adjust these people, or or mortality, one of the those are Those are the two I'm

I'm rooting for. And I think that there's a case to be made that socialization eventually wins that if these people, like a call it a different group, that kind of men's rights activists on on Reddit, if eventually those nineteen year old dudes gotta go find jobs, and is that all they are? Nineteen year old dudes, well, their sound spacemen.

There's unfortunately some forty five year old dudes out there too, but it's a lot of it's a lot of young men disenchanted with their either cultural or economic situation, and eventually they're going to come to the conclusion that, um, actually, maybe it's better for me economically not to have these really like horrible views about half of the globe, and that I need to adapt just to to like survive in the society because my views are going to be

considered out true. If I don't. I hope that's true. The problem is, at some point, do these people like find like minded people at work, you know, Well, they certainly have found them on the internet. And what we noticed with with some of the neo Nazi marches and other stuff, people have been identifying those folks and they've been getting fired. It turns out that being a Nazi and then being public about it is not a great career move. Yeah, and I think that there is a

corrective quality out there when those things happen. It does make me go, oh wait, maybe maybe I shouldn't be in such a panic about this. Maybe we actually are more we have we have stronger belief systems that are that are being more corrective to these these kind of ideas, and that it's just like a weird spurt in time, and that this always happens every once in a while and it's a messy transition until we sort of get

to whatever's on the other side. Yeah. And I mean, like this goes back to the very first thing I said, is like people seldom say I don't know, Um, there's a case where I don't know, really, I really don't know if I should be panicking about this moment time in history, or if it's kind of a rhyming thing that happens every once in a while and on any given day, I could change my view in this that some days I just feel like, oh, we've lost it. We like no one, There is no truth, Every world

is asunder, no one trusts anyone. If only there was an encyclopedia of misinformation that could help us through these challenging times. That's that's a good selling point for the book. Thank you. Let's talk a little bit about your early days as what you've described as a proto blogger, and I first came to know you a long time ago as the author of Vermaculous, A Thing that eats itself. Explain Explain what Faaculus is and was, and why you decided to launch it. Uh, it's really easy to say

that it was a blog before blogs. There was a right right before I guess the year two thousand. They're a handful of people who were making personal weblogs, which was the term at the time. Um, there's probably about a hundred people who were either writing um short entry about things that had happened in their life, a little more like a diary, or there were blogs that were just linking to stuff, and I was in the ladder category. I was fascinated by this emerging culture online that it

was coming about. Um, you know, this is long before long long before Facebook, but even before read It and and things like that. So but we there was a community of a hundred a couple of hundred people who were, um, just find on the internet all day and finding stuff and wanting to share it with other people and then had comments below. And who knew that that would actually become what the Internet is today, which is effectively, here's

a link and here's a bunch of comments below. But I think that's what blogging started off as, is like there's something that's interesting and it could be an article, it could be a painting, it could be whatever, and people would talk below it. And that was there was a discussion that happened. So let's talk about the list of lists. So and again I I referenced earlier, you have this sort of recursive meta, which makes sense for something that eats itself, something that consumes itself as a

a source of sustenance. So everybody does these end of year lists. These are the best books, these are the best movies, here's the best whatever, and you were so tickled by it you started a thing. And I want to say it really began right after Thanksgiving each year more or less the list of lists when one list ruled them all. Yes, it was. When I started, it was relatively easily. Basically I had a Google search alert for best of year or best of two thousand six

or whatever, and uh. And there was also a submission from the sites of people could send me stuff or just I looked around a lot and all it is accumulate them, list them. And I didn't even annotate them. I just said, here's the list, put in the category and uh. And then I dousic, film, books, sport, whatever it was. And then it somehow took off. But and I started it, there was probably it was easy to do. When I started it, it was probably two hundred lists.

Like uh, it's funny now like now there's easily two hundred lists that are best cars over the year, you know what I mean? Now would be thousands of lists. Well, there's also there's all these I don't want to say scam because they're not just outright scams, but through all these affiliate marketing sites where it's like dishwasher reviews dot com or I'm just making that up, but it's these really narrow niche things, and all they want to do is send you to Amazon and earn an affiliate fee

or wherever else they're earning an affiliate fee. And so when you go search for best anything, these things just populate Google on a pretty and I've played with with what does it, duck, dot Go and bing and some of the other search engines, and you still end up seeing these things. There's no avoiding them. Yeah, and it's the list itself is fast. How it became an industry.

I think the first place you started to see it become really popular was BuzzFeed, right there was They were ridiculed early on for making listical very popular though, but people, but the media community didn't like them, but they were wildly popular because it's not pros. It's just oh, you're interested in X, here's eighty x is and have fun

with you. And there was some something there was a perception that there was an inelegance to it and when in fact it's like that's actually just what people wanted, right um. And then the next evolution of that are are the the creation of sites like Wirecutter and those sites that are like, here are the best refrigerators, here are the best whatever, and they're using affiliate links on top of it. And that was back in the day. That was things like, um seen that and I'm trying

to remember. The other Ziff Davis property name is Escape, but it was a run of tech focus sites and it was the best computers, the best laptops, the best monitors. But there was some journalistic credibility behind that. I don't know if you get that anymore. Yeah, um, I think there's a there's a handful of honest attempts at it. Um, Like the Wirecutter is owned by the New York Times. That's and that's an honest application if you're, uh, there's

something weird about the wirecutter. Though, if you're like I want the best um drip coffee maker, it you type that best drip coffee maker into Google, you're gonna get work almost everything. Now you're gonna get work. And now it's like, do I trust this thing? That's like always the answer? Now, like it's it's inevitably always a going to be uh this one site and uh, there's like no competition and so so I'm using bing instead of

Google just for test purposes. The first thing that comes up is coffee maker picks dot com and they give you and then coffee Maker Picks is the next one. So these are these best digs dot Com. These are the sort of Finally halfway down the page is consumer Reports Epicurious Comparable Amazon Pets, which is kind of interesting. One of the things that Google. By the way, I could tell you what the best rip coffeemaker is without this.

But one of the things that Google does is it's sort of personalizes your search based on sites you've gone to before and things you like, and so every now and then it helps to open up I don't know what your browser of choices, but if you open up so I use Chrome, but if I'll open up Safari or Firefox where I'm not logged in and I don't normally Google over there, and I'll get a very different run of things than what I get on Chrome where I live, which is which is kind of fascinating that

even search has become biased and skewed in some ways. Yeah, And I mean they entry in the book that covers that topic is the filter bubble um, which is like you're You've posed an interesting scenario where you could type for best coffee maker and I could I could search for it, and we maybe have different results based upon the based upon Google having knowledge about us and presenting what we it thinks would be better. Um. Sort of a fascinating little conundrum. Right, Maybe maybe that is true.

Maybe there is a There is no best coffee maker. There is there's only a best for you. Well, that's sort of true about everything in life. The best for me is the brevel grind and brew it's beans over here, a thermis down here with a timer so you could set it to go off at four thirty. No radio

has no affiliate fees. You're not getting anything. Back in the day, when my blog was on type Pad, before even knew what affiliate fees were, I did a post called your coffee Sucks and basically explain why everybody's coffee is bad. First of all, you're buying ground beans and then sticking them in the shelf in the cabinet for

six months so they stink. You give me your rotten, crappy, mineral infested water, and using a really mediocre coffee maker that doesn't brew for long enough, and then burns the coffee on the So some of us are very particular about our drugs. So was that did your post? Uh do well? And search? Oh my god, it went crazy. Yeah, I have this thing still. I've you mentioned fam ocular smiled blog. I haven't updated it in eight nine years, probably, but I still get emails from people because it still

does pretty well in search. And I'll get emails from Uh, wait, you haven't posted on that in eight years other than too like other than to say, I wrote a book, here is a link to it. I haven't I haven't been, and you're not updating the list of lists. I'm trying to remember. I've stopped doing that about five years ago too. Um, I guess got too much. As I told someone on Twitter, I chose life. I would have had. That's a fair answer. I would have had to hire someone. It got so

all consuming. Uh And even even though it was even back in two thousand five, it was still like a pretty hard thing to do. Um, and now it's impossible for one person to do it. It sounds like the internet was like somebody needed to index the Internet back then, like there was like kind of like a Yahoo Ask kind of quality of the internet back then, that somebody could compile everything into a place, and that you could

you could consume all of you could. You could look at everyone's you could look at every list of the best albums of two thousand and six. At one point that was an actual thing one could do. Then you can hunt down two of them. Now it's millions. That's right. You could just simply couldn't do it now. Um, that's why we have Google. You don't have to do it anymore. Google, it will just tell you all. Heil are overlords, surgeon Larry I for one record, uh, welcome our new technology, overlords.

I'm looking forward to living in the future, whenever it chooses to arrive. I want to talk about your writing and your focus on technology and culture and media, because you've written some stuff that I found really really amusing, including some things that have mocked what I've done, either unwillingly or unwittingly. Um, but I'm always amused by that.

And one and this goes back to the recursive nature of your work, where you're always looking for these meta themes that show up in media, and you start to see the same ideas over and over again, and what what at one point in time might have sounded like a clever idea. When you see a hundred of them, it's like, oh, this is just a nonsense formula. So the one that struck me the other day because I'm

guilty of it, X should buy Y. I got. I thought you were going to point that one out well first, because years ago I wrote a terrible column for The Washington Post that Apple should buy Twitter. In hindsight, what an awful idea. But last year I wrote a column Apple should buy Netflix, and it turned out to be a great idea because at that time Netflix was like sixty or seventy million billion dollar market cap. It's now

coming up on one eighty or something insane um. And then I did a follow up, which is, all right, you missed Apple, you miss Twitter, Now go buy Disney. I usually don't like those sort of columns, but every now and then something happens. It's like, you know, the Apple Video store is not great, and the Twitter the Netflix version is, so it would make my life easy. By the way, everything I write, I don't know if you have this experience. Everything I write is for me.

And when I say Apple should buy Netflix, it's not because I have a grand vision of the future of technology that would simply make my life more convenient. So I don't I don't know how many how many people write like that or right for themselves, but so that cracked me up. What motivated extra by Why? So, uh, yeah, it was merely noticing a trope out there, which is

a lot of technology business writers. I sometimes feel like they've run out of like tricks they got to they have some they have to get three columns in this week, and they have to come up with one, and so they go Apple stop by Netflix, and they write that thing. And so I called it extra by Why, and I just listed a whole bunch dozen dozen And you realize quickly that this is like, uh, it's a you know, it's a trope or you know, if you want to

be more negative, gimmick, it's a gimmick. So when I read media criticism, I often say, this person doesn't understand the nuance. They don't get this, they don't get When I read that, I immediately said guilty, Yeah, I just like I'm nailed. Yeah. And the thing about it is like I could have been very um negative towards the trope at that, but I ended with by saying I've

I do this on Twitter all the time. And the reason that even though I think it is a bit a little bit of a lazy thing, there is something fascinating by the extration by y Trope that that kind of article is that I think in the article, I call it business fan fick because what allows you to do is kind of project a future in your head. What would it look like if the Wall Street Journal

bought Flipboard? Like that's one of those examples that like people would say five years ago, you there was like a big idea that that somebody should buy flipboard, And it's like that no one regrets not having bought flipboard today, right, Um or whatever? Startup? Like there's a lot of the small startups that you hear this said about Twitter should

buy Nuzzle or Microsoft should buy geth Hub. Yeah exactly, And that'll of a and uh And I think that there's like there's kind of a weird value in it because it allows you your mind to kind of wander and kind of speculate about that future and sort of

say with yourself, what would it look like if that happened? Um, Microsoft buying GitHub is like a fascinating one because if you had written it a few years ago to sound it had sounded preposterous um just because of microsoft stance towards the open source community, um, but also like uh it. No one would have foreseen the change in how Microsoft has been received over the past five ten years, and

the CEO did a lot to change the reputation. And then some of the other companies like Facebook and Google let's don't be evil, became a little bit evil, and I think everybody looked at Microsoft with a little I've always been a negative viewer of Microsoft, and I'm kind

of saying, oh, they're all bad guys. Yeah, well, my guest, I was taking an interesting thing lately where they're picking companies that are have good reputations, and so I always kind of thought they would buy Twitter, and that was just gonna be the worst outcome because it's the wrong company doing it, and it's it's mashing up to things that have negative emotions around them. And I'm really glad

for Microsoft that they did. And I mean, I think Twitter is valuable when and whatever, I just think it in a horrible matching of those two things. Somebody is going to start a new social network and uh, it

could be one of the big platforms. Um. There will be competition in the next year for Facebook, and whether it's somebody trying to buy something or or starting from scratch or just something that emerges from nowhere, I think it'd be a good time for Google to take a shot at doing a new social network that promises privacy. Um It. It'll be a hefty marketing effort to convince

people that Google will make a social network the promises privacy. Um. But I think that would be amazing if they took a shot at the most interesting aspect of that is if there was a way too. If you if you look at um how unsuccessful they've been at policing YouTube and coming up with um sifting out inappropriate things for

kids and whatever. So I don't know if if I'm confident that they have an ability to do what Facebook clearly has not shown ability to do, which is separate real from fake, identify what is valuable and what's not and not. None of the social networks do that any well, the exception being linked in because people's professional career, there are a whole lot of hoaxeres on LinkedIn posting fake

job like that stuff gets found out way too quickly. Yeah, and Zuckerberg is not being reassuring, and he says it should take us three years before we have solved this problem. And it's like three years. What I have to deal with? This must mentioned information for three years? Well you don't. You don't have to. I mean, you and I are of not that far apart generationally. How often are you on Facebook? I look at it once today. Really, I feel like I'm once a week, and I think that's

healthier if I could, if I could reduce that. Uh. I was never a daily user. And when I set up Facebook, I was always astonished at everything they asked. They don't have anything that's accurate about me except where I work and where I went to college and grad school everything else. No, you're not getting my breath day. No, you're not getting No, you're none of that stuff. Why? Why? And yet everybody voluntarily gives that stuff. Who's your favorite bands?

I don't know if you and my wife you would know that. But you're a for profit tech company. I have no interest in share. I don't want you to serve me ads on that I'm ignoring them anyway, but that I'm that's that's me. Let's let's talk about um. Some of your other columns that I found fascinating, especially in light of the Encyclopedia of Misinformation. Tell us about Steve wins Vermier. Oh headline, this is not a Vermier. Thank you. I was gonna ask what was the headline

of that story. So one of the things I'm fascinating with is art forgeries. And I wrote a five part series about all the different times we've been been manipulated, all the different ways we are manipulated with art, and one of them is really easy to point toward, which is um forgeries. And uh, that specific column goes through my desire to have a Vermier, and because who wouldn't

want one? There are only depending on who's counting vermer existence that we know of and theoretically and some that's the thing. Every once in a while that will be a new one added to the cannon. And it's not that somebody has discovered a painting. Usually it's something it's that somebody has decided, Oh, this thing that's that we've been debating for the past twenty fifty years finally gets led into the canon of allowed official Vermeer's formers um.

Steve Wynn bought one, uh, and I think his is fascinating because it was something that was not perceived to be part of official vermier Dam until he bought it, and then it became so. And what It's an interesting case because it it's like saying the verifying fact of art is not it's historical voracity or any kind of analysis on it, or yeah, it has something to do with that. It really has to do is did somebody

pay the money to make it worth it? So someone spent what do you spent thirty million dollars on a Vermeer of questionable uh provenance? Is that's their description? That's right? And is it now considered a real Vermeer? It is it's because somebody spent so much money on it that he was. There was no new historical analysis done on it, There was no no new scientific work done on it.

It was that somebody paid that amount and now it has to be And uh, did you track the recent da Vinci with the what was it the museum in somewhere Abu Dhabi or so, So essentially they figured out something that was of previously uncertain provenance and came to the conclusion it's legit and then paid an ungodly amount of money for And that's in a fascinating case because I think that that christ painting that was most da Vinci people did not think was real. I bet in

fifty years that will be the Mona Lisa. I really believe that history is going to reevaluate it and it's gonna and because it's become the most valuable painting about them, that must mean that it's not not only a da Vinci, but it's important and that it is deserving of of investigation, and it's it's even suddenly more mysterious, it's more artful. It's like it's full of all kinds of new value

just because somebody wrote a big check for it. Um. And I think that's a fascinating thing with the art world. UM and that that specific story. What I did was

I decided that I wanted my own Vermeer. And there's this thing in China whereas many many of these in China, hundreds of these companies where you can order whatever painting you want off the internet, and it's it's literally a painted forgery, stroke for stroke on the original one exactly right, and by sub estimates, there's like twenty people that are employed doing this all day long in two specific regions

of China. And uh, it's a lot of Westerners saying I have a favorite painting, please make it for a hundred bucks and send it to me, and really, and it shows up and so there's a roth go I'm very interested in. I would pay a hundred bucks for a roth cup and you could put it up and uh, only a handful of your friends might be able to notice that it's not real, and maybe not even them.

Do you remember the story about the Jackson Pollock um that supposedly was given to his girlfriend and it's provenance has been questioned and and it was up for sale some time ago, and I think it was there was a silly number like fifty thousand dollars. Is it worth it to roll the bet the dicellars for what could ultimately be worth fifty million dollars? Yeah? That that sounds like a good bet. Right. How did it turn out?

I don't I don't think it's ever been resolved. And there was an issue, uh with I think it was her estate as to what to do with this um in the new York Times sometime ago. Can you stick around a bit? I have so many more questions for you. Sure, we have been speaking with Rex Storgats, author of the Encyclopedia of Misinformation. If you enjoy this conversation, we'll be sure and stick around and check out our podcast extras. Will we keep the tape running and continue to discuss

all things misinformation like? We love your comments, feedback and suggestions right to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. Follow me on Twitter at rit Halts. You can check out my daily column at Bloomberg dot com. I'm Barry Ridhults. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. Welcome to the podcast, Rex, Thanks so much for doing this. During the break, we were talking about some of the ideas in the book and how you wanna get them out into the firmament, and we were

talking about podcasts and radio. Tell us what you're thinking in terms of setting doing the podcast, because you've done pretty much everything else in media. Yeah, you know what I didn't say during the broadcast. You were a producer at was a MSM dot com. How how did that work out? Um? It was alright, I was I was there for a couple of years. This is back when MSNBC dot com was in Seattle. People for people forget that the MS and MS was originally Microsoft. Is this

a Michael Kinsley joint? Originally it was originally Yes, I came in after he had been had left, but as was Slate. Slate was a Kinsley Microsoft fanchow and uh they yeah, eventually they packed up. Eventually NBC bought back there, the Microsoft part. And there is no such thing as a UM division of MSNBC inside of Seattle, inside of Redmond anymore as it once was. And that's where I worked out of Seattle, which is a real interesting town.

I've been to that Microsoft campus. It's astonishing, giant college campus. Yeah, it's Uh. I think I was too young to enjoy Seattle. I think I'd love it now. Um, But it was like Seattle was felt to me like a town of

UM middle managers. Like there was a lot of project managers at Amazon, and project managers at Starbucks, and project managers at Mobile and Boeing, and there was all of these companies, very successful companies, interesting places to work, but it was like a town where everyone was a project manager who wanted to be a vice president. That was my attitude about the place at the time that it was. I didn't feel like there was a lot of innovation there it, which is strange to say for a town

that's considered a technical hub. Right. Um, and I look back on that, I think that's that's actually just mostly my youthful arrogance. Like it was a fine It was actually a fine town, and I was I was just not like I was. I was too youthful and party ish at that time to really enjoy it. Now I go back and all of the people who I thought of as like, uh, you know, middle management are are actually those vps or e vps now of those places,

and they're fascinating. I don't know what my problem was. So, you know, Seattle and Portland's for that matter, are places where I visit fairly regularly, and wherever I go, I always say to myself, could I live in this part of the country, you know, permanently, not just for a couple of years. Um. Seattle is really uh, it's on fire. It's it's happening, as is Portland's. I mean, you can pretty much work you way down the coast and just

about every city is booming. But Portland's another one of those cities where gee, who who who knew that this own is just exploding? And I find that fascinating. Yeah, I bought when I went to Seattle in two thousand five, I bought a condo and by two thousand seven I was leaving, and by that time, the real estate market was falling apart. So I kept it because it was like everything was crumbling, and I thought, this is going to be the worst investment I've ever made. So did

you double your money or triple your money? More than triple? Now I still have it, And of course now it's Amazon has move since moved downtown. I bought a place downtown and Amazon has since moved their headquarters in New HQ. Is amazing. Yeah, And now it's like, oh, this real accident thing that I bought is actually going to turn out to be one of the wisest investments I've ever had to had. Right, So never confuse brains with the bull market, stocks or real estate, is absolutely true. So

are you out there often? Do you visit your place? Are you renting it? I rented out Um to continue will parade of Amazon employees who want to want to live nearby their new headquarters. Uh. And so you're gonna hold onto this for a while. That that's uh, that's pretty funny. Um. So what else did we get to that I wanted to talk about some some of your columns. Um.

We discussed the Jackson Pollock I mentioned. Uh. After I read that story, I showed it to my wife, who teaches fashion illustration and design, and she goes, oh, there, you can take a class and painting like Jackson Pollock. Like what, Yeah, they offer it. What go go sign up for that. If you really wanted Jackson Pollock, you don't have to spend fifty grand. It's Pollock. You could do it yourself. Okay, So we signed up for this class. It gets canceled last minute and we never redid it.

But I would like to hang a big Jackson Pollock. Um. The hard part is his signature. The rest of it isn't Isn't that difficult? So there's a famous instance of forgery out there of a Pollock that was revealed to have have benefittory because the misspelled Jackson Pollock. That's always a clue when you get the artist name wrong that that's never a never a good sign so I wanted to talk more about the book a little bit. What surprised you most when you were doing the research about this,

because there are some kind of interesting entries in here. Yeah, I guess, um, I think it isn't even actually what surprised me that there's all kinds of interesting ideas in it. The biggest surprise is actually what happened outside of the book. I was halfway done with the book, writing the book when um, wait an election and Trump got elected. So

this was you started this book. So my assumption in a book where Trump really is not mentioned by name, I think you said he's in one that maya was that this was pushed back to his presidency, not that you specifically reference him in any way, shape or form, but it's just sort of like, this is what grifters have done since the beginning of time, and here's a

million examples of it. Yeah. So the quick story is that it was originally titled it was sold to the publisher as the Encyclopedia of Fakeery, and that's a little

bit more playful title. Uh, And the the subject matter was a little bit more i'd say, aesthetics, culture, society, and it wasn't so it wasn't a very serious book, and I wouldn't say that the book you're holding now is not also not a super serious book, but it it took on a graver tone when halfway through writing it, UM, we had a ran new presidents, and all of a sudden, it was like the entire idea that knowledge is uh socially constructed, or that it's that what we know is

up for grabs, that kind of like that, which is a kind of a glib reaction to living in this society, that's like over over mediated, what do we know? We don't know anything. That kind of attitude suddenly became grave and I realized, like, oh, I have to make this thing more serious. And so that was the biggest changes that all of a sudden, I had to introduce a

lot more social science into it. UM. So there's things like, um, the backfire effect and filter bubble and these these topics that are much more from psychology and sociology UH that try try more to get to the underlying concepts of misinformation. My favorite word of the past decade has to be agnetology, which is culturally constructed ignorance. To go back to people, UM, the tobacco executives, more recently climate change deniers. UH, anybody

who has an interest in truth not getting out there. Uh. If you have enough resources, you have enough time, energy, money. We learned recently in the book Bid Blood and Theoropness they were they were kind of trying to do the same thing. Um, if you have enough money and enough willingness to gaslight a nation, you could create an alternative set of facts. And there are people who will unfortunately believe things that aren't true to someone else's advantage. It's

it's astonishing. The I like the my definition for agnetology in the book, it's uh, the science of creating stupidity. And what's interesting about it is that it's not when you think of propaganda, you tend to think that it's like uh, an attempt to convince someone of an argument, right, And it's through various means that you're trying to argue a point of view and eventually they'll adopt it. And what's interesting about the anatology stuff that is especially around

the tobacco companies, UM, some big oil. Especially what we learned around tobacco was that it wasn't that UM, the tobacco companies made an attempt to fill the information space with like corrective analysis. Like it wasn't trying. There was no like scientific studies done. It was actually just like continually bombarding it over and over and over and over again with more and more and more and more information.

And so it became like this endless thing where anything that you believed, you could find a resource for that. What's saying that thing. And there's a lesson there that we're going through right now, which is, UM, any belief that you have, you can google it and you will find someone on the internet who has the similar belief, and uh, if you don't want to find contradictory evidence for it, you don't have to. UM that's a big

problem we're going through right now. And I think that in some ways that tobacco, those tobacco lawsuits, they the science of creating stupidity that that those researchers developed, some of which are real powerful, well known psycho sociologists of the day, is coming back to haunt us. The the my favorite line and I'm trying to remember where I pulled this from. UM, tobacco companies sell two things, cigarettes and doubt. And that's really quite fascinating. Let me jump

to my favorite questions. This is what we ask all of our guests. Tell us the most important thing people don't know about your background. I was having dinner with my wife last night and I casually mentioned that I was once a flash developer, and flash the software, flash the softwarees and those like flash games, little interactives, and eventually video is what it became known for, and which is hard to it's almost gone from the innergry now

it's being expunged. Once Apple killed support for it. That was the beginning of the end. So uh, and it was It's funny that my my own wife, even ary two for two years, did not know this about me. UM. I don't know if that's important. I think it's funny that for years I did this job that is now completely defunk going away. Might as well be a steam engine fitter. UM. Tell us about your early mentors who helped you along with your career. UM, I think you know.

I grew up in very rural North Dakota, and there when I was growing up, I didn't know anyone who I didn't know anyone who went to college. I that's weird to say. What what is the prime economy and north I assumed some farm farming. Yeah, my graduating class was twenty seven people, twenty five of whom were farmers um and maybe twenty three of whom still are farmers. UM. And so I growing up, I didn't I didn't have role models really. I mean there are people that I admired. H.

I had a really great English teacher, Mr Olig. I guess that's who I would say is my my mentor in some ways, um, just because you know, he really encouraged me. But I grew up in a place where I didn't have like a uh like access to a lot about outside information. And when I said like I didn't know anyone who went to college, I really like, I I didn't know anyone who went to like the University of Minnesota, which would have been like the big school.

Still it's still eight hours away, but it would have been a probably the big state school to go to more much less did I know anyone went to Harvard? You know, I wouldn't would have like blown my mind. So when I started to go to decide to go to college, I it just never would have occurred to me that I would go to like any of those places ever in my life. So you applied to the University of Minnesota. I didn't because that that seemed like impossible.

I applied to the University of North Dakota, which was actually, uh five hours away. And it's the furthest that my mind could imagine going, and it's the furthest that anyone that I ever knew went, and it it's still in state, but it was five hours away, and it seemed like it seemed like I was pushing boundaries by doing that. Really, that's that's fascinating. So, as a Jewish kid grown up in Long Island, forget college. It was a given I

was going to law school. I was five, and I was pretty much told, yeah, you'll be going to law school or medical school that way. There was never any sort of, well, if you want to go to college, you can. If not here, here your other career options. It was pretty much, hey, we'll see how smart you are, maybe you'll get into medical school, and if you can, well we can always use another lawyer. It was never that that's fascinating that And yet you you go to

North Dakota, what was your experience like there? Uh? Und the univers Earth Dakota is it's pretty typical big state school. You know, twelve students. It's probably it's probably bigger when than what you when you hear the name that it probably is it. I don't think it was any different from going to like, you know, University of Michigan or

an Arbor or or any of the big football powerhouse. Yeah, it's it's It was a pretty typical big state school, and it was it was a transformative thing for me because suddenly, um, just wildly more diversity, but the basic North Dakotan's or was it a little more national reach. It's probably about North Dakotans ten percent Minnesota something like that,

and then UM. But the big thing was that, you know, when I was in high school, there was no outside media, and so I my high school library was the only thing. There's no in library and town. There's the high school library is the only accessed external information. This is obviously pre Internet. And the library had three magazines, UM Sports Illustrated, H Time, Newsweek, and one daily newspaper, UM the Bismarck Tribune, which had just it was basically a couple of local

stories and some a pr to cales. Other than that, I didn't know what was going on in the world. I wed the three networks, but no cable um and so I didn't know any popular music. And when I went to college, I suddenly discovered the Cars and the Pixies and the key here and every band that means with the that I had never Not only had had I never heard before, I never could have heard before because it was not on the radio and I didn't

I didn't go to record stores. I don't even I would have to travel forever to go to a record store. No local tower records where you grew up. So college Walthly was like uh an I opening thing to me, and I loved it, and I end up staying there for probably too long because I was like, this is great. I just sit around and learned stuff. So how long were you in college? For like six and a half years. That's why I was five years, So you're you're worse

than me. I got. I got a few degrees. I started, I started premed um, you know, I studied everything like Latin and first all the sciences, and then I got really interested in philosophy and literature. And by the time I was done, I remember ah going to my advisor and him saying, I think that you probably have taken more classes than anyone ever here, and I would like to actually go back and look, I bet that's probably true. Um, I got three majors and two minors, and I would

have stayed forever if I could. If you knew me at like twenty three, you would have guessed that it's impossible this person is not going to be a college professor, because like, that's just like what I loved. And whenever I'm run into someone who says they don't they didn't like college, I just go why, it's the best ticking in the world. You just around read books and talk about him. I why how could you not like that? Like,

speaking of books, tell us about some of your favorite books. Um, I think I'm gonna name a weird book that influenced my book. Um, do you remember this book early eighties called girdle escher Box. I swear to God, I knew you're gonna say that. I swear to God that that

was on the tip of my tongue. That book is sitting on the top shelf of my bookshelf in my office at home, and I am due to reread it because it's all about the recursive nature of of music, of mathematics, um and and of art and those three. I I'm just I almost was going to volunteer that, but I'm just um Douglas Hofstad so he. I think that book is fascinating because, uh, for a lot of reasons. One,

it has no single point. Like today, if you're going to write a book, you have to make a pitch that you can come up with in two sentences, probably too long, but you have to say precisely what this thing the elevator, Yes, And it has to be it has to be tight. And especially I think in the idea in the space of like idea books, whether they're marketing or business or whatever, it has to be so kind of like you're gonna drill this point home and

over and over and again. Um good. A lesser Bach was this, I guess the book of philosophy but also psychology, but also like it had plays and it had all of this like random assemblage of stuff and it never really tried to talk you into anything, and there's not

enough books like that. I think of my book in the same way is that I'm more interested in like playing around with ideas and experimenting and like and and not trying to talk you into any specific point of view, but just to like give you a space to kind of like let your mind wander. And it's little more atmospheric, I guess, um, And so I love That's why I love that book is that it doesn't ever browbeat you.

And it's also just like it's so many random things, Like it's like, here's an essay about mc yester's paintings, and then here's like a dialogue between tortoise, a tortoise and Achilles on a hill, and it's just it's like a weird collection. I had that assigned in college. And the thing that makes it a coherent whole is that theme that runs through everything of the self replicating, self repeating nature of mathematics and art, music and theoretically everything else.

It's a fascinating book. He had another book out after that, The Mind's Eye, Yes, which is another really interesting, more philosophical book. Um and not quite as um esoteric? Is that is that the right word? But he's a fascinating writer. Give us more what other books? Not that you really that one book is enough to keep most people occupied for a long time. I'll give an off subject one something has nothing to do with my book, but it's

always been something I've loved. Um, it's a probably more obscure. Um. Do you remember I shouldn't use past tense. This person is living, do you know? Uh, the architect rem Coolhouse. The name is certainly familiars a if it's in that category of stark atitect, like when there was that emergence of people in the nineties that was like they became the star architects. We're in the Bloomberg building right now. And I would not be surprised if he had some

influence on this kind of thing. Um. Well, he wrote a book in oh maybe like called Delirious New York and it's a history of New York City. But it's written in a specific time when you could write a book that allowed you to use really poetic language. And I say, we're poetic with some hesitation, because that makes

it sound like, you know, Flighty or something. But it was a book about a theory that posited New York exists this way because of this set of systems, and the specific system he was interested in was the grid. And and once you start to see the city through the lens of how he sets it up, which is, um, the innovation of New York is the grid and it's

the innovation of America. You kind of go, oh wow, this is really interesting, and he writes it into very um all against used the same adjective poetic way that is like, it's not um, it's not making a grand argument. It's simply like letting you understand a way to think about New York City, delirious new York, a retroactive manifesto from Manhattan, anything else. So we're gonna leave it with those two, both of which I think can keep people

busy for quite some time. UM. I read a lot of Jonathan Swift writing this book, just because he was the the satirist of of lore that is so important to our times. I have an entry about a modest proposal, and I went back and read the modest proposed it again for the first time. Brilliant stuff. Um. But he also did a series of essays on politics that are highly relevant to our time UM called the Art of Political Lying. Uh really recommend them Art of Political Lying.

All right, well we'll make a note of that. So, since you started your blog way back when, what do you think is the most significant thing that changed, uh for better or worse in in terms of blogging and and media? Oh uh, you know. I a researcher called me yesterday and asked me a bunch of questions about internet and media technologies, and the final question was what are you excited about? Question? Well, emerge these two together, and it was what are you excited about? And I

sat there and thought, I don't have an answer. If it had been on radio, they would have been dead air I had. I was like in my head, to do I want to say bitcoin? Do I want to say virtual reality? Do I? And I was like, I don't have an answer. And I think that it's because I grew up in an era where we were making um uh consumer facing products and more and more the startup world and the media world looks uh b two b um marketplaces and all of things that have value,

but they're just way less interesting to me. And so I have a really hard time getting excited about consumer technology at all. Right now, Uh, that's interesting. The things that I do, the things that I get excited about are strangely have gone to the completely other side. And it's content. Right. Netflix got really effing good, right like

TV got good, UM, podcasts got good. I don't know where it came from, but all of a sudden, like I wished I had made a choice so a few years ago and moved to l A and entered into the entertainment space. Decaisn't I never would have made five years ago, but I kind of wish I had because it's exciting right now to be in that world. But you don't have to be in l A. That's the beauty of the technology. You could do a podcast from anywhere. We happen to be in a radio studio in a

media building. But I have one of the guys in my office does a podcast. They skype. It's him and somebody who's in Michigan and Animal Spirits, Michael Batnick. They basically do this using really inexpensive technology. It's a it's a it's a radio. He ended up getting a fixed mic because it sounded better, and they use um either Skype or a direct line, so the quality of both sides audio is really good, and you end up with It's amazing what you could do even with very very

inexpensive technology. So you wouldn't have had it. Moved to an Yeah, for podcasting, I wouldn't have had to move, but to Besion TV, I would have had. Sure. Um, podcasting isn't just because it is. I mean New York is sort of the hub, but it's way more dispersed. It's all around the country that things are going on. Uh.

What do you do for fun? Uh? If if I could, if I could do anything in the world, it would be to like disappear into a cabin somewhere with a guitar and write songs that and put them on a four track and have no one ever hear them. That sounds like fun. That's what I That's what I do for fun, is I record some songs at home. Um that I have no It sounds like I'm an aspiring an aspiring performer. I have no desire to perform or have people hear it. I do it only for myself,

and so that's fun. That that does sound like fun. Tell us about a time you failed and what you learned from the experience. Um, we always in startups for a long time, so those are nothing but failures over and over again. Uh, so I could tell lots of stories there. So you don't have any Early Facebook stock is that what you're saying, I don't. I mean, I had I had some successes and so i'm things. I'm

proud of um and products we made. But uh, but but everyone who's done startups has like more, even the successful people have nine stories of failure. Um. I think I think the straw tell though, is that, Um, do you know I got sued by Garrison Keeler No so formally of Lake Woebegone NPR. And I think he kind of ran into a little trouble. He has, he has been in trouble recently. He's on a list of men that seemed to be involved in nefarious activities. Um, so

why did why did he sue you? This is a while ago, over ten years ago, back in the blogging era. I started, Uh. I used to be in Minneapolis, and I started a website called min Speak, which is basically a It was a kind of a local reddit, I guess like it was like you posted links and you talked about them, and it was a community site. It was a community news site and it was pretty popular. And I did a marketing campaign for the site that

was a bunch of T shirts. Um, and we made T shirts that said things like it was like an outline of Minnesota and it said land of ten thousand fakes rather than lakes. It was like little pond t shirts, and one of the T shirts was um Prairie Ho Companion. That's hilarious. I thought it was funny too. I had

a hundred fifty even printed up. Um. They sold out within six months, And about a year and a half after that, I got a letter from Keeler's lawyer with a season desist down that's saying please stop selling these. Uh No, I actually didn't say please. Now, isn't parody fair use for something like that is clearly parody. It seems really strange that one of America's leading satirists would be out trying to sue someone for poking fun at him.

It seemed absurd, right, So here's the thing I wanted to give the guy at the benefit of the doubt. So I called the lawyer of this name that was listed at the bottom, and I said, listen, your client is making a mistake if you pursue this thing. Here's all I'm gonna do. I'm gonna scan in this two

page cease and desist. I'm gonna I'm gonna put it on the Internet, and I'm gonna write on there about like this conversation I'm having, and I'm gonna tell everybody how absurd it is that this is happening that and I'm going to ask for help for like first offendin defense because I'm not going to defend it myself. And I'm gonna get it and I'm and I'm gonna make your client look like a fool. And the lawyer was like, are you threatening me, Mr Sargatts, And I was like, no,

I'm not threatening. I'm just telling you. Here are my cards on the table. I'm sharing strategy. I'm saying, don't pursue this. No one's gonna know. I'm not I don't have T shirts left, I don't know why you're doing this. I'm not selling this T shirt anymore. Just I don't. I don't want to make a big deal out of it. And he's like, well, I'll talk to my client. And ten days ten days later, he called back and he said, my client wishes to pursue this lawsuit. And I was like, oh, man,

you're asking for it. And so I did exactly that. I basically put the conversation that I had with him on on and I scanned the two pages and it was the biggest thing on the Internet that day. It went viral like crazy because both people from the left and the right liked it. It was the top link on Drudge Andrew Sullivan wrote a column about it. All of like the bloggers of that day were like it was a big deal for them, like people like Matthew Iglesias,

like the kind of first generation of of Internet. People were all about it and up in an uproar, and uh, I got six d comments and the A C. L. You called, the Standford Law School called and said they wished to defend me in this exactly what you predicted exactly. And uh when I take called back and say, all right, well we will going to let this go. Well that's what I thought was gonna be was gonna happen. I just let to sit there and let it sit there. And I thought to myself, I could pursue this, I

really could. And I have the right to write this is a first clear, first Amendment and I'm gonna win like whatever, and there's a principle here. But you should reissue that shirt. I could, I should. This would be a right time to do because he's not suing anyone now, Um, and I didn't. I didn't pursue it, and I look back on it. I think I made the right choice,

but I'm not sure. But here's why. I thought, do I really want to have this thing that I become a person who's who's litigated for even if I'm right that I'm litigated for using the word hope? And I was like, is that really something I want to defend? Um on a on a instant constitutional basis, I for sure do, But on a like personal level, is that something that I really was a very mature decision. So I decided not to do it, even though I know

him in the right. That's hilarious. That worked out well. Um, what sort of advice would you give a millennial, a recent graduate who was thinking about going into filling the blink content production, web design, media writing. What what advice would you give someone right out of college? Um? I have to give advice that's kind of based on my experience again and that that is again kind of growing

up in the middle of nowhere. And if I went back and gave like a graduation speech to kids and where I grew up, I would try as hard as I possibly could to convey to them this really simple notion that I think most millennials feel but probably don't feel where I grew up, and that is you really can do anything. It sounds so simple and kind of almost tried to say you can do anything, right, But it's not a thing I believed, no one. There's no way I thought I could do anything, and it wasn't.

It wasn't until deep into college that I thought I could do anything. And there's all stain. That's my first thing I would say is like you really, it doesn't matter. You can do anything. And the second thing is whatever your interest is, you will find a job or a career or perhaps fortune around the thing. Like I'll give

a quick example. One of my my favorite areas of interest in college was linguistics, and because it's a mix of science and art and it was like kind of like the perfect thing for me, and I didn't pursue it professionally because of that. No one really has careers in linguists. We're gonna be speech pathologist where you're gonna be today? Yeah, Google is so deeply in need of this linguists. Every tech company is, and I think that you wouldn't have foreseen that then. And uh, and I

think that you can name almost anything. I think that you'll find that eventually there will be an emerging you can own that category. And um, that's like a that sounds like a idealistic early Internet person like, because there was a lot of rhetoric around the early Internet that if you if you you care about ti vos, you can write a blog about tvOS and it will be successful. Uh. And it was like for years it was, um, you could whatever your passion is, you will find an audience

for it. I think it's still true though. It's like one of the pieces of the um utopian Internet that I still believe in is that, like, if you're passionate about something, you will find people an audience for it, and you can be known as the expert in that thing. And our final question, what is it that you know about writing and content production today that you wish you

knew twenty years ago when you were first starting. Um, I wish I wish I would have bought Apple, and I wish I would have taken up Seriously, all right, that's a fair enough point. We have been speaking with Rex Sregats. He is the author of the Encyclopedia of Misinformation.

If you enjoy this conversation, be sure and look up an Intra down an Inch on Apple iTunes, Bloomberg dot com, Stitcher, overcast, wherever your finer podcasts are sold, and you could see any of the other two hundred or so uh such podcasts that we've done previously. We love your comments, feedback and suggestions right to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. I would be remiss if I did not thank our crack staff who helps put these podcasts

together each week. Medina Parwana is my producer. Taylor Riggs is our booker, Attica val Brun is our project manager. Michael Batnick is my head of research. I'm Barry Ritolts. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio show.