1330: Truthteller, An Investigative Reporter’s Journey Through the World of Truth Prevention, Fake News & Conspiracy Theories by Stephen Davis

Thanks for your support, Jason. I appreciate yours and Carrie's support and your whole network.

It's really been very beneficial to me.

And a whole lot of others. I encourage everyone to use your resources that you have. But thanks. Thanks, Jason.

Welcome to the Creating wealth show with Jason Hartman. You're about to learn a new slant on investing, some exciting techniques and fresh new approaches to the world's most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self made multi millionaire who's actually been there and done it. He's a successful investor, lender, developer and entrepreneur who's owned properties in 11 states, had hundreds of tenants, and been involved in thousands of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to your Financial Independence Day. You really can do it. And now, here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.

Welcome to episode 1330 and greetings from a cabana by the pool at the beautiful Dorado Ritz Carlton resort in Puerto Rico. And I gotta tell you, I remember years ago. Well, I've given this advice to many people many times, but I'll just give you one example of that. I had this new real estate agent working at my traditional real estate company years ago. He was not a person with any advantages. Kind of like the way I grew up, right? I didn't have any connections, didn't have any money, didn't have much of an infrastructure or anything like that for my life. So this agent, his name was Mike, came to my firm as a total newbie and I trained him and he became a very successful agent. And early on in his career, I gave him the book Earl Nightingale's Greatest Discovery that you can probably still get, but it's out of print, so it's not easy to get. But a fantastic book had a huge influence on me. One of the things that I took from that book, although Earl Nightingale never said this specifically, but conceptually the message was there and it was, if you want to become more successful, hang around with successful people. Obviously, I've told you about the Jim Rohn quote. I repeat often on that, you know, your income will be the average of the five people you spend most of your time with. Certainly true about that. You know, a lot of us have these old friendships and old relationships from high school or college or whatever. And life isn't all about money, obviously, but look, this show is about money. So that's what I'm talking about. Okay, so I get it that there's more to it than financial success, right? Obviously. But a lot of us sort of just sit and find ourselves in these old relationships that, that we started many years ago. And you know, whoever said you have to be friends with, you know, your old friends all your life, you know, people grow in different directions and want different things out of life. And so, so that all happens. Anyway, let's go back to Mike for a minute. And of course, this is a 10th episode show and we'll have our guest here, the Truth Teller, talking about investigative reporting. One of my favorite topics in a moment. But the thing I told Mike is I said, look, Mike, you haven't been around much success in your life. You haven't seen that. You haven't been exposed to it. And when I was younger, neither was I. You know, I hadn't really been exposed to that too much. And I said, here's what I want you to do. I want you to go to the Four Seasons Hotel in Newport Beach. It's now called the Island Hotel in Fashion island, which is right near where we held our last meet, the Masters of Income Property event several months ago in Fashion Island, Newport Beach. I said, mike, I want you to go and I want you to just go to the Four Seasons Hotel and I want you to sit in the lobby and I want you to just observe. I want you to watch people. I want you to get a seat in the middle of that lobby and just sit and watch the people. I want you to notice how they're dressed, how they act. I want you to look around at the beautiful environment you're in, the decorations. I want you to notice the staff and how the staff treats the customers and all that kind of stuff, right? And you know, you want to hang around successful people. If you can't do that, you want to do it virtually through podcasts and audiobooks and written books and so forth. Oh, and by the way, I got an interesting thing about written books in a moment. Another tangent. Tangent alert, right? So you want to hang around success and be in a successful environment, in an good looking environment, an environment that is appealing and good for your soul. And the environment I'm looking at right now is absolutely gorgeous. There is this beautiful pool. I mean, you can look this place up online and you can see it. It's absolutely beautiful. You know, this beautiful restaurant, bar area that we've eaten at several times here on this trip. And last night we ate dinner at a different place within the Ritz Carlton resort. And you know, just being in this environment is so. It's inspiring. The message I'll give you today about that is the same message I said when I was in Peru about maybe. What was that? About four years ago, I was, you know, I came on the podcast and that was an arranged trip. Part of a mastermind group I was in at the time paid a lot of money to be in that mastermind group and paid a lot of money to go on that trip to Peru. And so none of us paid for the hotel directly, one of the hotels we stayed in, but we got there and it was just unbelievable. It was so gorgeous. And a couple of us on the trip in the mastermind group went down to the front desk and said, you know, what does it cost to stay at this hotel? And, you know, this is probably the rack rate. I'm sure they got a better deal, the people organizing the mastermind group trip. But they said it was $900 a night. And that hotel was absolutely spectacular. It was. I mean, you open up the closet in that hotel, it had multiple choices of clothing. Literally, you know, four different choices of bathrobes, you know, different choices of slippers and workout clothing, and just everything you would want. I mean, just super well appointed, fantastic food, fantastic environment. My message on that podcast years ago was, whatever you do, you know, just get this one thing out of your way. And here's the thing, it's the money thing. So we all have many tasks in life, many duties in life, and we can help you with this one. We can help you take care of the money thing. Just get it out of your way. You know, whether you, you love money, you hate money, it doesn't matter, just get it out of the way. Check it off the to do list. Get your income property portfolio going. If you've got it going, increase the size of it and increase your reach and expand your horizons. And that's what we're here to help you do. Lots more@jason hartman.com Our team can help you with that. That's our mission in life, is to help you climb the money mountain to get to the. The top of it. But hey, I have bad news. You'll never get to the top because the mountain keeps getting higher. Okay? But at least get to where you feel comfortable and where the view is nice. And I tell you, the view right here as I'm sitting in this cabana with my microphone and, and my dog looking at my friends in the pool, and I gotta jump in the pool there with them so we can talk about doing big things. Take care of the money thing. And that's what we're here to help you do. We are your guide. We are your team. We are your resource to help you take care of the money thing. So take advantage of it. Our consultations are free. Go to jasonhartman.com we're here to help. Okay, another interesting point. When we were at dinner last night at one of the Ritz Carlton restaurants here, I had an interesting conversation with a gentleman who's here as part of the mastermind group. His name is Tom, and he's a consultant. He's been a consultant for many different real estate gurus over the years and, you know, had some really interesting insights into how sort of shady some of them are. And, hey, no surprise there. There's a lot of shady players in every industry. Certainly real estate is no exception. No exception at all. And so it was interesting hearing about that. And he said it, well, in a really politically correct way. He said, you know, these people, they're not necessarily shady, they're not necessarily bad people. They just use the tools that are available to them and work the system. Now, you know, there's a difference between law and ethics, right? There's a difference between law and ethics. Okay? Law is the last stop, right? That's when you've really got to hold someone accountable for their actions. You use the law. Hopefully, before you get to the law, ethics will kick in and people will realize, hey, look, you know, this isn't the right thing to do, right? As I've said, one of my favorite quotes is this one here it is. It applies to women, obviously, but the quote says gentlemen, right? So it says, the definition of a gentleman is someone who has the advantage but doesn't take it. It's someone who has the advantage but doesn't take it. That's the gentlemanly thing to do. That's the ethical thing to do. Right? So anyway, that wasn't really the topic of the conversation I wanted to share with you. It was about the printing press. And I just found this to be really interesting. So I did not know this. So this guy, he's a big fan of Victor Hugo, talked about how throughout history, people tried to preserve and give messages down to future generations through my favorite art form, architecture. He said architecture was the way they really did that. They did it with architecture, whether it be the pyramids or Notre Dame or whatever. Right. Architecture was the way they passed things down and left a message for future generations. But what kind of. Although it didn't kill it, but to some extent it did. What killed architecture, interestingly, was Gutenberg's printing press. When the printing press came along, people had a new way to pass down their message and their legacy for posterity, right. To future generations. They had books, they had the written word. Before that, there wasn't much of the written word. You know, it was clay tablets and handwritten documents and things like that. You couldn't do much with that. Right. But with the printing press, you could scale it. So I just thought that was kind of an interesting point. Anyway, that's kind of the topic of our show today. And it was the topic of my opening talk at our recent Profits in Paradise event to an extent, too, when I talked about information and the bits and the bytes versus the atoms. If you were there, you, you know, the reference at Profits in Paradise a few weeks back. Anyway, we're talking to an investigative reporter today. That's our 10th episode show guest. Remember 10th episodes, we go off topic and don't directly talk about income, property and real estate. Every 10th show, we do something of general interest, and today's no exception. So we will talk to the truth teller. And here he is.

It's my pleasure to welcome Stephen Davis. He is the author of Truth Teller An Investigative Reporter's Journey through the World of Truth Prevention, Fake News and Conspiracy Theories. Stephen, welcome. How are you?

I'm very good, thank you.

Jason, good to have you on the show. So we live in a world of propaganda and misinformation, all sorts of tactics that the bad apples out there use to hide the truth, shade the truth, spin the truth. In your book, you start off talking about character assassination and then you talk about conspiracy theories. And it's just a very interesting topic, how our minds are influenced by the media and such. Tell us more about that.

The first thing to say is that fake news and conspiracy theories and disinformation, misinformation has always been with us. You know, the papers in colonial America and Victorian England were basically propaganda sheets. The difference is now on social media is the volume and the speed with which it travels around the world. And my concern is that there is so much misinformation and disinformation out there that beneath that, it makes it easier now than ever before for governments and corporations and dictators to lie to you and to get away with actual scandals. And of course, the group that you relied on to uncover these things, investigative reporters such as myself, there are fewer of us around than there used to be.

Yeah, that's definitely true. It's interesting that we've seen this era of media fragmentation, as I call it, where there are fewer media outlets and you. You'd think on one hand, of course, that's good because a lot more people have a voice. I think you could certainly argue that the media is much more democratized than it's ever been. But at the same time, you have the opposite trend. You have the major media companies that have consolidated like crazy. And then as you see this fragmentation of the news media landscape, and so many media outlets, the big outlets have really almost done away with investigative reporting, investigative journalism, because the budgets have been cut as they all vie for advertisers amongst so much competition there. It's really interesting we're talking about this today because just yesterday, literally on my personal Facebook page, I posted that famous Mark Twain quote that says, you know, a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes. And I think Winston Churchill said it.

Another way, but whatever, you get the idea.

Kind of help us understand the media landscape. And I don't know, is it really worse than it has been? I mean, people are certainly more skeptical than they were in the past, aren't they?

On the skeptical issue, of course, it's in the interests of liars and deceivers that there'd be so much fake information that we all just throw up our hands and say, well, can we believe anything? And let's get on with our lives and let's not take part in politics or civic life. That makes it easier for people to lie and deceive. The Mark Twain quote is interesting because now, of course, the equivalent is Twitter. And studies show that fake news travels faster on Twitter than the truth. And very often people retweet things without even getting to the end of the 140 characters. So you have this disinformation traveling around the world at vast speed. The major media can't keep up with it. Somebody might put a lie on Twitter, and 5 million people have seen it, and an hour later, the BBC or the New York Times or the Guardian might point out why it's wrong. But by that stage, it's too late, and not enough people have read the real version of events. As far as the media landscape goes, the major issue with, I have you call it the democratic kind of nature of things now, which is fine, but, you know, I think the problem is a lot of people think they're citizen journalists and don't have the training to be proper journalists, but are treated as proper journalists by the media. So anybody can kind of tweet from the scene of someplace you don't even know if it's a real person. That's an issue for me. And of course, for investigative reporting, the issue is really resources. Serious investigations take time and money. In Truth Teller, I tell the story about how I was sent to the Amazon to investigate a tip that bp, the world's largest oil company, was destroying part of the rainforest. It owned a mining company that was destroying the rainforest. Now, what I've just told you was all we knew about the story when they sent me to Brazil, the London Sunday Times sent me to Brazil. Literally a needle in a haystack. Because the Amazon, as you know, is bigger than Western Europe. I spent weeks and weeks out there investigating it. I found the mine, I smuggled myself in, I got a photograph, it exposed bp, which at that stage was branding itself green. It was a big piece of investigative reporting. I can tell you absolutely now, Jason, that no major media company would fund an investigation like that and spend that amount of money on as little information as they had to start with. And what's worse is, you remember we were all reading stories about the importance of the Amazon rainforest to the environment. In the research for Truth Teller, I actually went back to contacts in the province that I'd been in all those years ago, and people are destroying the rainforest at an even greater rate than they were then. And it goes virtually unreported because these days, reporters don't get out of the office. Reporters don't get sent to the deepest, darkest parts of the Amazon rainforest to get stories. So society is missing out.

Yeah, they are missing out. But what is the solution? If you agree that the problem is sort of as I outlined it, I'm sure you could do a better job being so deep in it. But we've got this fragmented environment. On the one hand it should be good, on the other hand, it's bad. We just don't have. I mean, 60 Minutes is kind of the last bastion of big time investigative journalism, isn't it?

Okay, so 60 minutes is still very good, by the way. Well, the solution is I lecture journalism students all over the world. I've lectured several thousand journalism students in the last 10 years from about 30 different countries, including the United States. And I always say to them, if you want a future of good journalism, you have to pay for it. That's the generation that's interested, used to getting stuff for free, free music, free this, everything on the Internet. I tell them, if you want free stuff, you're liable to get propaganda and fake news. If you Want real journalism is labor intensive and which cost money. You have to pay for it. Now, it's slightly encouraging that a few, that people all over the world or a group of people have adopted that idea, that a million people last year made voluntary contributions to the Guardian, that the New York Times has over two and a half million digital subscribers. Now, the simple truth of the matter is for the public, if you want good journalism to survive, you have to pay for it.

But don't we all. But I mean, just one moment on that though. If we argue like 60 minutes, right, nobody pays for 60 minutes. They just pay by watching ads. So what's wrong with the advertising model? Is that broken because of the advertisers influencing the journalism? I certainly, I think that's true with the drug companies because they don't sanitize.

The model is broken because, you know, newspapers and television programs were funded by advertising. And it used to be said that, for instance in print, when the print advertising disappeared, it would be supplanted by digital advertising online. And that hasn't happened. And the reason it hasn't happened is because Facebook and Google have hoovered up all the advertising. So that model has been destroyed and now the media are left to, I mean, act on digital subscriptions. And, you know, you mentioned 60 million minutes. It still does. Well, it still rates and advertisers still like it. But the simple fact is that the level of advertising on broadcast television is also falling because as you quite correctly said, the audience is diffused now and might be watching, you know, 200 different channels instead of three.

Okay, so what do we do? I mean, okay, so people have to pay for it. And you're saying that it can't really be supported effectively by ads. Okay, so people pay 10 bucks a month to subscribe to their favorite news outlet, but you know, they're just going to get one opinion. All this news has become so biased and so over editorialized. I mean, where's the, you know, it's not even news anymore. It's just opinion, most of it.

Well, I would disagree with that. I mean, there is a lot of opinion crept in. And it's actually, of course, you look at a TV channel, for instance, a cable news channel, it's cheaper, much cheaper to have two blokes on giving their opinions and shouting at each other and call it a TV show than do actual investigative reporting like 60 Minutes does. But, you know, for 10 or 12 bucks a month, you could subscribe to three different sources and then you could look at the BBC, which is the national broadcaster in Britain. And then you could. You could have access to the ABC Online in Australia and you could get yourself a collection of sources which would practice proper journalism and not cost you too much money. I mean, if you don't want to pay, as I said, then serious journalism, which is incredibly expensive and time consuming and employs people who spend years training to be good at it, that's going to die off. But what you can do as an individual as well alongside this is you can take responsibility for the information you share and consume. It's not good enough to say, I just passed on something, I didn't really know it was fake, because then you're just part of a long string of people around the world passing on falsehoods and sharing falsehoods you can't claim. Like the getaway driver from the bank robbery.

I didn't know they just robbed the bank. Right.

So I believe what will happen, Jason, in the next decade is that media literacy courses of the kind that I just designed for the University of Otago in New Zealand to be open source and available to students all over the world. Media literacy courses will be seen as right up there and as important as English, history, geography and maths. And they'll be widely taught at every level. And the aim will be to get people to become ethical consumers and sharers of information. If people have to share less, so be it. If Facebook have to change their business model because people share less and are more careful, so be it. I mean, personally, I think Facebook is acting with a great deal of social irresponsibility.

I couldn't agree more.

It means outrageous. For instance, you have a video, a fake video of Nancy Pelosi that they know is fake and they refuse to take it down. I mean, the problem with Facebook is.

That'S sort of surprising, though, because Facebook leans to the left. You'd think they'd want to protect Nancy Pelosi.

You know, I don't know.

It's kind of odd.

Yeah, but they want to protect more, Jason. The idea that they not be treated as a publisher or broadcaster. I mean, for years, they've convinced themselves of that. I've said a lot of interviews on this book tour. I've been interviewed by the BBC and media everywhere, all over the world. And of course, everything we say on that media, the media platform is responsible for what you say and do, broadcast or publish, because they are a publisher or broadcast. Now, Facebook, of course, is actually a publisher and a broadcaster.

I'm sure they are. Yeah.

But it's somehow convinced us over the years that it not be treated as a public.

It's not just this is, this is, this is, this is absolutely ridiculous. Same with Google, same with every blog platform out there. Somehow they get to escape the responsibility that a media outlet has. Let me give you an example, okay? And I'm sure you're going to agree with this. If you write a defamatory, libelous article about someone or something, some company or some person, and you get that somehow published in the New York Times as an op ed, for example, right. The New York Times will be liable for that. But if you publish it on pretty much any Internet site, they're going to say, well, we're just a platform. We're protected by the Communications Decency act, which nothing could be further from the truth. There's nothing decent about that act at all. And so we can put up our hands and claim that we're just a platform and we don't have any responsibility. That is ridiculous. The law has got to change. And you know what, thank God that the European Union is starting to change this. And I think ultimately it will change in the U.S. you know, when it changes is when the politicians get affected by it. That's when it changes. They don't care about us, but they care.

Sorry. Facebook has always fallen back on the idea that it's kind of extraterritorial. Whenever somebody's tried to regulate it says, well, we're not really in your country, we're kind of of the world.

Yeah, right.

But you're quite right. I mean, a profound change needs to happen and it needs to be that Facebook is responsible for everything it publishes and everything.

It's not just.

Oh yeah, I just use Facebook as the last example. Google and others got it.

I think we got that point. And you and I agree completely. Let's take the other side of it though. What about them shutting down the people they don't like? Alex Jones comes to mind. Not that I agree with or want to defend Alex Jones, but why is it that some non governmental entity that you have no recourse against can just destroy you? You know, Twitter, PayPal, even the payment platforms do the same sort of discrimination. They cut off WikiLeaks. You know, they, you build a whole life on their platform and then they can just take it away and they don't have to explain it, they don't have to answer to anybody. You know, that would be fine. In a world where there's a whole lot of choice, where there's a whole bunch of platforms out there. Where, oh, look, if you don't want to do business with me, fine, the company down the street will do business with me, you know, and it'll be a free marketplace. But it's not that way. These companies are bigger than most countries. I mean, it's absolutely the scale that they've been able to benefit from on a platform that they use and did not build or pay for, called the Internet. They didn't build that. You know, like to go back to Obama saying you didn't build that.

Right.

Well.

I actually agree with him here. Why do they get to be the arbiters of who gets to speak and who doesn't?

I think this comes down to the classic and long standing debate between freedom of speech and speech which tips over into harm. You know, the classic harm principle as outlined by the philosopher John Stuart Mill, which he essentially said, just to sort of remind people the villains of the age were the corn merchants who were putting up the price of bread for poor people. And he said, basically you can make a speech saying the corn merchants are villains, the corn merchants can go to jail, you can say all sorts of terrible things about them. What you can't do is get a mob to go and burn down their house and kill them. That tips over from free speech to hate speech. So we're trying to work out a difficult line here. Now, the Alex Jones of this world, I mean, he's an appalling individual who caused tremendous and unnecessary grief for the victims of Sandy Hook.

Fair enough. But some of his stuff to something maybe we should see. You know, it's not all that I.

Was about to say. Personally, I think the man is laughable. But look, I think if you try and suppress his speech, you only help him. And I don't think that what he says tips over into hate speech. Where I do think they need to clamp down is the actual hate speech which circulates on the Internet, which is actually urging people to commit violence. And we saw the terrible consequences of that in my home country recently where a disgruntled young man got guns and murdered a lot of people in a mosque in Christchurch. So I agree with you absolutely, Alec Jones of this world.

Let me tell you what's interesting about that though, and I'm sure you'll have an opinion about this one. Why is it that the movies and video games are never criticized? I mean, there's almost zero criticism against them and against the pharmaceutical companies that make these drugs that make make people crazy. I mean, it's like you don't Even bring it up. There's no discussion about this in the media anymore. There used to be. I remember back in the 70s, they would discuss violence on TV constantly. But now it's like almost just go through your Netflix queue or not your cue, but just surf movies online, IMDb, whatever, and you'll see that almost every movie poster has a gun in it.

Nobody.

Every video game is a shooter game. Nobody talks about that. It's amazing.

Well, a lot of people used to talk about it, you're right. And it seems to have kind of slightly become less of a story these days, I guess, though, from my point of view, they may be entertainment I like or don't like, but it's clearly entertainment. I might not be entertained by it. Somebody is. But there's a world of difference between that and somebody broadcasting as they did a live shooting of actual people being killed. It may not look the same, but one is clearly real life and one is not sure. And if it's not real life, like a whole fantasy world or, you know, science fiction or whatever, I guess that that's entertained some people and they should be allowed to see it.

It's just amazing that, you know, they only run to the gun manufacturers. That's all they talk about. And they never talk about any of these other issues that influence this kind of terrible, tragic behavior, which is crazy. Okay, so since we did get a little conspiratorial, you've got a chapter ahead about conspiracy theories. It's aptly titled. I think it says, my conspiracy theories are better than your conspiracy theories. Tell us about that.

Yeah. In Truth Teller, I outlined various tools which governments and corporations use to deceive you. Actually quite sophisticated tools which they're quite good at. And one particular one is the creation of conspiracy theories to hide an actual conspiracy theory. And in Truth Teller, I give an example. When a former Russian intelligence officer called Skripal was poisoned in the United Kingdom and the finger was pointed at the Russians, it seems pretty clear they were the only people with the motive to do it. And in fact, two of their officers happened to be in the same town at the time of the poisoning and were caught on CCTV camera. But within 10 days of that story I was tracking around the world, four other conspiracy theories had been generated and circulated about what happened. So now if you look back at it, if I ask my students to go and investigate it, and they'd come back and say, well, Mr. Davis, there's five different theories on this. How do we know what to believe? So what a very Very effective way of obscuring the truth. Simply create a conspiracy theory and float it online.

Yeah. Okay, so what are these other tools that these oppressive regimes, whether they be government, corporations, anything, Tell us some of the tools they use.

Okay. One classic, which is used in fact by Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and others, is the big lie. And it's based on the way our brains work. Our brains are wired to treat information that's familiar, that we hear often is trustworthy. That's logical if you think about it. So you tell a big lie and initially a lot of people might not believe you, but you repeat it again and again, month after month, year after year, and eventually a lot of people will start to believe it.

Because isn't that like what Joseph Goebbels said or something like.

Yeah, absolutely. No, it's a theory that goes back quite a way, but it's very effective and I give examples of it in the book. Another really, and this is really kind of quite common now, is the character assassination. I personally have had my character attacked by senior police officers, by a senior minister in the British government. And of course with the Internet, as you know, it's very, very easy to circulate false rumors and assassinate people's character and then have them not believed. In the book, I tell the story about MI6 agent called Richard Tomlinson who was trying to blow the whistle on things the British government was doing and they had him chased around the world and they were deliberately trying to assassinate his character so that nobody would believe him. They told the Swiss police when he was living in Switzerland that he was a paedophile. It was a completely invented story.

And then look at Elon Musk with the Thailand divers, or, you know, you remember the story. Anyway, I'm glad that guy sued him for saying that.

I, I don't know what the outcome.

Was, but I hope he wins.

But you know, it's very effective, as you know, because you float this stuff and you get it online and then people who are searching you a year or two later and they come across it. Oh, well, okay. Sometimes enough to make the allegation it's.

A drive by shooting, it's a hit and run where the perpetrator can be anonymous. But, but just so you know, that's not actually true. You can find them. We've hired cyber investigators and it is fascinating. That is a fascinating world. It's very hard to actually be totally anonymous online. It may seem easier than it really is, but that's another show in and of itself. But yes, in principle, you're absolutely right.

I think intelligence agencies are very good at covering their tracks, though.

Oh, well, if it's the government, yes, that's probably a lot harder to.

A lot harder to hold them accountable.

Absolutely. But yes, it is a huge problem. I couldn't agree with you more. And if you're an investigative reporter, you're going to have enemies because you're, you.

Know, one, one side's going to like.

You and the other is going to hate you. That's just the unfortunate reality, right?

It is. In Truth Teller, I described one particular memorable occasion. I. I did an investigation into what happened to the human shields of the first Gulf War. There's a whole lot of people, British, American, French and many other countries who were taken hostage by Saddam Hussein and used as human shields. And there was a secret report into it which was covered up by the British government, but which is explained in my book Truth Teller. At one stage, a British member of Parliament asked questions about this in Parliament to the then Labour Defence Minister. Government Defence Minister Jeff Hoon. And at the end of it, Hoon says to the mp, I need a private word with you. And so they come to the office, a private word. And Hoon says to the mp, you've got to be careful of that Stephen Davis. I think he's a bit of a fantasist. And when the MP told me this. Yeah, when the MP told me this, after I'd finished laughing about it, I thought, how ironic that a member of a government that produced a totally fantastical weapons of mass destruction dossier that took Britain into war in Iraq should turn around and make that accusation of me. But it's very typical of things. And of course they will say it privately. He'd never be caught dead saying this publicly where I could challenge him. It's the kind of private conversation, the whispers, by which they seek to undermine the journalists integrity and therefore stop them being an effective investigative reporter.

Wow. Yeah.

It's just amazing how that works. Do you think human perception will change? Do you think humans are becoming skeptical of the fake reviews? I mean, take for example, the website Yelp. You know, competitors write negative reviews about their competitors on there. I hope everybody knows that. And then they have their own people write fake positive reviews. Right. You know, who do you believe? Does this stuff have any credibility anymore?

I think people realize that a lot of it is not true. The problem is we can't have everybody switching off entirely and saying, I can't believe anything anymore. Because that in itself is a gift for those who lie to you course and deceive you because then they'll get away with it more often. I was asked by another interviewer whether I was an optimist or a pessimist after Truth Teller, and I said I'd begun it as an optimist and ended as a pessimist because I think things are going to get worse before they get better because of deep fakes, artificial intelligence, truly creating false worlds. But I also think alongside that, and you use the reviews thing and the hotel reviews and all these other things, I think people are learning to be more skeptical. So if we give them an alternative, if we give them education programs to help them, I think there is a chance that we can turn this around. One of my favorite ever quotes that the great author H.G. wells said history is a race between education and catastrophe. And I think that's true. And I think education has got to win, basically.

That's A good quote, H.G. wells.

Good stuff.

We'll wrap it up with any closing thoughts, maybe address anything I didn't ask.

You whatever you like.

And please give out your website too.

Truth Teller is available now, I think, in pretty much in all Barnes and Noble stores in the States and on Amazon. There were two reasons to buy it. One is because I think it's a good book and spent two years researching it. But two, I really think people should think seriously and take part in a good public debate about misinformation and disinformation and the sheer volumes of it which are damaging so many parts of society, politics, medicine, health. For more about this, you can go to my site, which is simply called stephendaviswriter.com Good stuff.

Stephen Davis, thank you for joining us and keep up the good work. Society really appreciates people like you doing the tough work and taking a lot of heat for it, too. But it is very, very important. You're keeping a lot of people honest out there or at least preventing them from doing too much harm. So thank you very much.

Thank you, Jason. Great to chat to you.

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