If we changed the dates and names, and moved this story back to the Gilded Age, we’d think, “Man, Cornelius Vanderbilt did it again!” Or if I told you that this was the plot of one of Shakespeare’s plays, no one would bat an eye. In fact, the more you zoom out, the less remarkable these events from 2007 to 2016 really seem, or at least less uncommon. I don’t think any good student of history should be surprised. RH: It’s interesting to me just how shocked everyone was that a powerful billionaire would strike back against a media outlet that had so thoughtlessly and flippantly attacked him. So do you think there is something classical about the lingering animosity between Peter Thiel and Nick Denton? Is it a feud that would have been out of place in ancient Rome? It’s a bit surreal to read about Hulk Hogan’s sexual antics with his best friend’s wife interlaced with references to Seneca, Cicero and Machiavelli. It just feels like something that should have happened in Shakespeare or Plutarch.ĪK: Yes, the whole saga seems to have really resonated with your interest in the philosophies of both antiquity and the Renaissance, particularly in stoicism. Needless to say I’ve felt very tied to this book for a lot of reasons and the story is something still that consumes a good part of my mind. Maybe it was a matter of fate, I don’t know. When Thiel had reached out to me in 2016 to talk and that conversation had turned toward the idea of doing a book and when Denton had reached out to me about some other writing I’d do and I mentioned my plans to him, I certainly did not expect that months later I’d find this incredible coincidence. I was hardly dragged into writing the book, what I was referring to in that sentence was the way that somehow my writing and the ideas in my writing had unwittingly wormed their way into the actual events of the trial themselves. It was the case of your lifetime and you get to have a much smaller part in it than you originally thought? But if we win, you get to take credit.” That phrase… I made it up! I wrote a book with that title. “If you want to win, ‘ego is the enemy,’” Peter said, “and the anti-ego thing we did was downgrade Harder’s role in the trial. I’d also find out in interviews that articles I’d written about Gawker over the years had been read by the conspirators during their planning phase and then I think the weirdest convergence was when I was asking Peter about the decision to ask Charles Harder, the lawyer who had represented Thiel’s interest from the beginning, to step aside and let a local counsel make the arguments in the courtroom in Florida. I had been researching the book for several months and interviewed all these people and then suddenly there I was actually in the legal record of the case. Attached as an appendix to a pre-trial motion with a series of tweets from one of Gawker’s editors was a tweet I had sent back and then a response from the editor to me. Ryan Holiday: One of the strangest experiences of writing the book came when I was about two thirds of the way through reading what was close to 20,000 pages of legal documents. Did Peter Thiel or Nick Denton select you to write the chronicle of their feud? How and when did you realize that you needed to write a book about what happened? But in C onspiracy, everything Holiday tells us about Thiel’s meticulously planned plot to destroy Gawker-so he promises anyway-is true.Īndrew Keen: In explaining how you chose to write the book, you say, “it somehow dragged me in, too.” But I can’t imagine you being dragged into anything you didn’t want to do. Holiday’s first bestseller was entitled Trust Me, I’m Lying. Ryan Holiday’s new book, Conspiracy, focuses on the story of Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s successful vendetta against the website Gawker. In our conspiratorial times, it’s hardly surprising that we have books about conspiracies.
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