
Conspiracy
A True Story of Power, Sex, and a Billionaire's Secret Plot to Destroy a Media Empire
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Narrated by:
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Ryan Holiday
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By:
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Ryan Holiday
About this listen
An NPR Book Concierge best book of 2018!
A stunning story about how power works in the modern age - the book the New York Times called "one helluva page-turner" and The Sunday Times of London celebrated as "riveting...an astonishing modern media conspiracy that is a fantastic read." Pick up the book everyone is talking about.
In 2007, a short blogpost on Valleywag, the Silicon Valley vertical of Gawker Media, outed PayPal founder and billionaire investor Peter Thiel as gay. Thiel's sexuality had been known to close friends and family, but he didn't consider himself a public figure, and believed the information was private.
This post would be the casus belli for a meticulously plotted conspiracy that would end nearly a decade later with a $140 million dollar judgment against Gawker, its bankruptcy and with Nick Denton, Gawker's CEO and founder, out of a job. Only later would the world learn that Gawker's demise was not incidental - it had been masterminded by Thiel.
For years, Thiel had searched endlessly for a solution to what he'd come to call the "Gawker Problem". When an unmarked envelope delivered an illegally recorded sex tape of Hogan with his best friend's wife, Gawker had seen the chance for millions of page views and to say the things that others were afraid to say. Thiel saw their publication of the tape as the opportunity he was looking for. He would come to pit Hogan against Gawker in a multi-year proxy war through the Florida legal system, while Gawker remained confidently convinced they would prevail as they had over so many other lawsuit - until it was too late.
The verdict would stun the world and so would Peter's ultimate unmasking as the man who had set it all in motion. Why had he done this? How had no one discovered it? What would this mean - for the First Amendment? For privacy? For culture?
In Holiday's masterful telling of this nearly unbelievable conspiracy, informed by interviews with all the key players, this case transcends the narrative of how one billionaire took down a media empire or the current state of the free press. It's a study in power, strategy, and one of the most wildly ambitious - and successful - secret plots in recent memory.
Some will cheer Gawker's destruction and others will lament it, but after listening to this audiobook - and seeing the access the author was given - no one will deny that there is something ruthless and brilliant about Peter Thiel's shocking attempt to shake up the world.
©2018 Ryan Holiday (P)2018 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Performance
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For the ancients, everything worth pursuing in life flowed from a strong sense of justice—or one’s commitment to doing the right thing, no matter how difficult. In order to be courageous, wise, and self-disciplined, one must begin with justice. The influence of the modern world often tells us that acting justly is optional. Holiday argues that that’s simply untrue—and the fact that so few people today have the strength to stand by their convictions explains much about why we’re so unhappy.
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Echoes left wing narratives
- By Jesse Williams on 07-02-24
By: Ryan Holiday
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Stillness Is the Key
- By: Ryan Holiday
- Narrated by: Ryan Holiday
- Length: 6 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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All great leaders, thinkers, artists, athletes, and visionaries share one indelible quality. It enables them to conquer their tempers. To avoid distraction and discover great insights. To achieve happiness and do the right thing. Ryan Holiday calls it stillness - to be steady while the world spins around you. In this book, he outlines a path for achieving this ancient, but urgently necessary way of living.
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Needs to be read by a professional voice talent
- By Kindle Customer on 10-08-19
By: Ryan Holiday
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The Daily Dad
- 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids
- By: Ryan Holiday
- Narrated by: Ryan Holiday
- Length: 9 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Becoming a parent is more than just a biological process—it’s a lifelong commitment to sacrifice, service, and most importantly, love. It’s a challenge to get up every day and put your kids first. You will experience moments of heroic compassion and humiliating failure, sometimes within the same day. But you don’t have to do it alone. From Ryan Holiday, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the smash hit The Daily Stoic, The Daily Dad provides 366 timeless meditations on parenting in a few manageable paragraphs a day—useful for even the most sleep deprived new parent.
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I love the stories …..but it’s full of ESG BS
- By Steven B on 09-20-23
By: Ryan Holiday
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Growth Hacker Marketing
- A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising
- By: Ryan Holiday
- Narrated by: Ryan Holiday
- Length: 2 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Growth hackers have thrown out the old playbook and replaced it with tools that are testable, trackable, and scalable. They believe that products and businesses should be modified repeatedly until they're primed to generate explosive reactions. Best-selling author Ryan Holiday, the acclaimed marketing guru for many successful brands, authors, and musicians, explains the new rules in a book that has become a marketing classic in Silicon Valley and around the world.
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Good for stimulating thought short on substance
- By Amazon Customer on 03-09-19
By: Ryan Holiday
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The Obstacle Is the Way
- The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph
- By: Ryan Holiday
- Narrated by: Ryan Holiday
- Length: 4 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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The book draws its inspiration from stoicism, the ancient Greek philosophy of enduring pain or adversity with perseverance and resilience. Stoics focus on the things they can control, let go of everything else, and turn every new obstacle into an opportunity to get better, stronger, tougher. As Marcus Aurelius put it nearly 2000 years ago: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
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Brilliant book; Terrible Reader
- By Jeffrey Dickinson on 06-24-23
By: Ryan Holiday
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Lives of the Stoics
- The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius
- By: Ryan Holiday, Stephen Hanselman
- Narrated by: Ryan Holiday
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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From the best-selling authors of The Daily Stoic comes an inspiring guide to the lives of the Stoics, and what the ancients can teach us about happiness, success, resilience, and virtue. In Lives of the Stoics, Holiday and Hanselman present the fascinating lives of the men and women who strove to live by the timeless Stoic virtues of Courage. Justice. Temperance. Wisdom. Organized in digestible, mini-biographies of all the well-known - and not so well-known - Stoics, this book vividly brings home what Stoicism was like for the people who loved it and lived it.
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Awful narration
- By Jordan Bailey on 10-03-20
By: Ryan Holiday, and others
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American Conspiracies and Cover-Ups
- JFK, 9/11, the Fed, Rigged Elections, Suppressed Cancer Cures, and the Greatest Conspiracies of Our Time
- By: Douglas Cirignano
- Narrated by: Mel Foster, Tom Parks, Joyce Bean
- Length: 16 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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America’s Conspiracies and Cover-Ups brings together interviews with the bestselling and brightest minds in the alternative history world to create the definitive guide to our country’s biggest secrets. Jim Marrs and G. Edward Griffin, along with scholar Noam Chomsky and others experts, come together to answer questions about your favorite conspiracies: Is the Federal Reserve System unconstitutional? Was the IRS created to bail out Big Banks? Are cancer cures and cheap alternative energy being suppressed? Are elections made fraudulent by hacked voting machines?
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An excellent collection of must know information
- By Nick on 12-06-20
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The Spider Network
- The Wild Story of a Math Genius, a Gang of Backstabbing Bankers, and One of the Greatest Scams in Financial History
- By: David Enrich
- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
- Length: 15 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2006, an oddball group of bankers, traders and brokers from some of the world's largest financial institutions made a startling realization: Libor - the London interbank offered rate, which determines the interest rates on trillions in loans worldwide - was set daily by a small group of easily manipulated functionaries, and that they could reap huge profits by nudging it to suit their trading portfolios.
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Does anyone "proofread" the audio book?
- By Gracie on 07-04-18
By: David Enrich
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The Obstacle Is the Way Expanded (10th Anniversary Edition)
- The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph
- By: Ryan Holiday
- Narrated by: Ryan Holiday
- Length: 4 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Since bestselling author Ryan Holiday introduced Stoicism to the world with The Obstacle Is the Way in 2014, this simple but powerful philosophy for life has taken the world by storm. This brilliant and engaging book is an invaluable source of wisdom for anyone who wants to become more successful at what they do, whether you’re a student, a parent, a professional athlete, or a world leader. Now, Ryan Holiday has updated and expanded this modern classic with a new introduction and new content featuring a diverse set of inspiring characters.
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Book to be read or listened to annually
- By Wade on 01-04-25
By: Ryan Holiday
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Conspiracy
- Why the Rational Believe the Irrational
- By: Michael Shermer
- Narrated by: Michael Shermer
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Michael Shermer presents an overarching review of conspiracy theories—who believes them and why, which ones are real, and what we should do about them. Trust in conspiracy theories, he writes, cuts across gender, age, race, income, education level, occupational status—and even political affiliation. One reason that people believe these conspiracies, Shermer argues, is that enough of them are real that we should be constructively conspiratorial. But Shermer reveals that other factors are also in play: anxiety and a sense of loss of control, as well as certain personality traits.
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Shermer's Books Are Getting Less Good
- By HisNameWasBruce on 11-30-22
By: Michael Shermer
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The Swerve
- How the World Became Modern
- By: Stephen Greenblatt
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late 30s took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic by Lucretius—a beautiful poem containing the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles.
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Very compelling history, a less compelling thesis
- By A reader on 05-01-12
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Hidden History
- An Exposé of Modern Crimes, Conspiracies, and Cover-Ups in American Politics
- By: Donald Jeffries
- Narrated by: Lars Mikaelson
- Length: 18 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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The US government has spent half the time covering up conspiracies as it has spent helping the American people. In Hidden History, you will see the amount of effort over the past fifty years that our government has dedicated to lying and covering up the truth to the world. Starting with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Don Jeffries chronicles a wide variety of issues that have plagued our country's history.
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Good information with too much opinion.
- By humble on 12-29-19
By: Donald Jeffries
What listeners say about Conspiracy
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- Kat - Audible
- 03-13-18
Captivating account of one of media’s strangest sagas
I was an avid Gawker reader who was horrified to learn that billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel had secretly bankrolled the Hulk Hogan lawsuit that brought down the website with a shocking $140 million verdict in 2016. I considered myself reasonably well informed about the ins and outs of the affair, as well as my opinion on the subject and its players. Nevertheless, Ryan Holiday's insanely good Conspiracy had me gasping at the audacity and intricacies of Thiel's plot -- from the ambitious young businessman who cooked up the scheme to the astonishing patience, calculated cunning, and ruthlessness required to pull it off. Holiday also reexamines Gawker from a 2018 lens, deconstructing its problematic approach and how errantly it drove the nail into its own coffin. Hubris plays a part in both sides, it turns out, and in Holiday’s hands the story takes on the outsize dimensions of Greek tragedy. With the Machiavellian concept of conspiracy as his foundation, he combines anecdotes from history and literature with lucid analysis and fascinating character studies of Thiel, Hogan, and Gawker founder Nick Denton to craft a riveting narrative of one of modern media's most explosive episodes. Holiday narrates his own work, and while at times I found his delivery somewhat heavy-handed, I believe this is uniquely his story to tell. Highly recommended.
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- Mom in SF
- 06-19-18
Well researched and well told
The narration is halting, but you’ll get used to it. The story of how Peter Thiel took down Gawker is as fascinating as it is depressing. Effective use of framing this against other great and not so great conspiracies throughout history.
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- jeffery
- 03-02-19
Not enough courtroom drama
I was looking forward to learning more about the trial. Unfortunately there was very little coverage of the actual testimony and almost nothing quoted from the closing arguments. It seemed to me that the author was more interested in demonstrating his knowledge of, and philosophy behind, other conspiracies.
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- 94Hawkeye
- 04-19-18
Amazing storyteller
I really enjoy reading and listening to Ryan Holiday’s books. I have read a couple books of his and every time he has an amazing way of telling stories. At one point in this book, I was getting upset with some of the comments that Ryan was sharing that other people were making about the how Peter handled things which shows how he pulls you into the story. In the end, I really think this book makes you think about how and what the implications are for a conspiracy story. That is what Ryan does best; making you stop and think.
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- Anonymous User
- 03-17-18
A Good Listen!
A Ryan Holiday style recounting of "The Billionaire The Hulk & The Internet Troll". An easy listen chalked with historical ancient truths and unbaised accounts of the legal,emotional, and strategic shootout.
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- M. Twain
- 01-21-21
Weirdly Anti-Trump
Extremely entertaining - until it takes a radical anti-Trump turn during the final hour, and uses Thiel’s 2016 campaigning in support of Trump to argue Thiel got some sort of comeuppance from the media. Which was the point of his support of Trump. Or something. It was weird and opinionated and had nothing to do with the rest of the story.
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- Adam Drake
- 10-05-21
Fascinating Tale with Questionable Narration
A reliance on Machiavelli's quotes aside, the story was well-crafted and kept me interested throughout. Mr. Holiday does an excellent job of presenting a holistic view of the situation, taking us through it in intricate but accessible means, and peppering it with unobtrusive opinions when appropriate. I expected the book to be a hatchet job on Peter Thiel, but was pleasantly surprised when Thiel's motivations were given more nuance and depth than just that of revenge. I look forward to exploring more works by the author.
The narration, however, was dismal - something I blame on the producer rather than the author/performer. It's as if Mr. Holiday has never seen these words before, and rushes through the last few words of each sentence as if they were a surprise to him. Further, it appears he suffers through a cold 2/3 of the way through; why the producer insisted on keeping his stuffy-nose reading on the recording is questionable and sloppy. It would have benefited the book and the listener greatly if they'd found someone else to record the audiobook.
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- CLT Reviewer
- 03-17-22
Great for 90%, then ends bashing Trump
His voice wasn’t my favorite, but I got over it. The Gawker/Hogan story was told in detail, then the author couldn’t help himself and dedicated the last hour to bash Trump. Listen to the story, skip the ending.
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- Patricia Steever
- 03-23-20
Loved this book, but
The narration was awful. Stuck with it because the story was great and eventually you get used to it. Hulk Hogan was the cog in the machine, but the overarching themes were so much more. You could think of this book as two massively wealthy and powerful egos fighting to the death. But what has our current lack of civility and civil court system wrought that fosters this. Moreover, this is a story about a bunch of people who - to a lesser or greater degree - left morality, ethics, and basic decency behind.
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- Paul-Maurice Dube
- 07-04-18
A good story told terribly
I appreciate the time, work and effort that went in to compiling the information for this book and I really wanted to hear this story. It is fascinating to me, but you lost me as a reader/listener because of the narration. You made a fascinating tale boring and it was almost impossible for my mind not to wander to things like, should I do my dishes now or start the laundry. I found myself having to rewind because I could not stay focused on what the narrator/author was saying. It wasn't because of substance. I would try again to listen to this if someone who knew how to narrate a book, would. I was so disappointed.
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