The Karol Markowicz Show: Media Misreporting, Information Warfare & Why We Must Question The Narrative with Ashley Rindsberg

Summary

The Karol Markowicz Show: Media Misreporting, Information Warfare & Why We Must Question The Narrative with Ashley Rindsberg

Podcast: The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show (iHeartPodcasts)
Episode Date: August 27, 2025
Host: Karol Markowicz
Guest: Ashley Rindsberg (Senior Editor at Pirate Wires, Author: The Gray Lady Winked)

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Episode Overview

This episode features Karol Markowicz in conversation with journalist and author Ashley Rindsberg, focusing on media misreporting, institutional bias, and information warfare, especially in the digital era. The conversation explores the historic and ongoing consequences of misinformation, the manipulation of major platforms like Wikipedia, and the challenges facing truth-seeking in an AI-driven age. The episode also opens with a Q&A advice segment with Buck Sexton, discussing personal relationships and trust.

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Key Segments & Discussion Points

[03:14] Listener Q&A: Relationship Dilemma with Buck Sexton

Scenario Presented

A newlywed listener, married four months, discovers his wife slept with someone else early in their dating relationship (before being official). He grapples with feelings of betrayal despite the lack of exclusivity at the time.

Buck Sexton’s Perspective

• Dating Expectations:
  “We have a...dating culture in America...people sleep with people. That is a thing that is happening on a regular basis.” [05:38]
• Rules of Engagement:
  “There are rules. And the rules are you have a conversation about exclusiveness and monogamy. And until that conversation occurs, you try to be respectful of the person. But they can’t have expectations beyond what has been stated and understood.” [07:29]
• Marriage vs. Dating:
  "I think that marriage...is such an elevation...if you’ve taken that step of marriage with somebody and...you're building a good life together, the dating phase is a different thing with entirely different expectations." [10:47]

Karol Markowicz’s Perspective

• Personal Standard:
  "If I found out today that my husband slept with somebody in the first few months we were dating, I don’t know that I would get over it.” [08:02]
• Advice to the Listener:
  “If you know yourself, and you don’t think you can live with yourself four months into the marriage, I think you have to make a very serious call. Don’t let it be four years into the marriage where you decide you can’t live with it anymore.” [13:22]

Notable Moment

• Buck urges counseling and clear communication:
  “I think having a conversation though...you may be able to reach a point where you realize: what she did when she didn’t really know you is not necessarily a reflection of her feelings for you now and how she will be as a spouse.” [16:36]

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[21:59] Interview with Ashley Rindsberg: Media Misreporting & Information Warfare

Ashley’s Background & Influences

• Born in South Africa, raised in America.
• Not a career journalist by training; began by following a curiosity about misinformation after working at Internet Archive.
• The pivotal information: Discovery that the New York Times, on the day World War II began, printed Nazi propaganda as fact (“Poland invaded Germany”).
  • “How could the New York Times think that in 1939?” [23:13]
• This discovery led to his book The Gray Lady Winked, examining how the New York Times’ errors altered history.

Major Themes

1. Institutional Interests and Media Bias

• On the New York Times and the Ukraine famine:
  • “It was all about the New York Times ownership and business interest, as it always is with the New York Times…it was all about money, and it was all about getting access to the Russian market. And they denied it because that was in their interest to do so.” [25:12]
• Media errors can have devastating, even lethal, consequences.

2. Wikipedia as a Battlefield

• Ashley covers information warfare at Pirate Wires, focusing on platform manipulation.

• Wikipedia is being “hijacked by essentially edit gangs…pro-Hamas, pro-China…they’re able to completely contort all the articles in that given area and nobody really knows that. And it’s all getting fed into the LLMs and it’s getting pinned into Google as the top result, and we’re just not aware of it.” [28:40]

• It’s not just governments:
  “It’s everybody that’s involved in gaming every other platform…and gaming the entire digital information ecosystem…There is a massive…pay to play cottage industry…every single day on a massive scale.” [30:52]

3. Social Media, AI, and the Spread of Disinformation

• Young generations may be moving away from legacy platforms — but the “ideas seep in, the language seeps in. People start thinking in the way that they talk.” [37:31]
• LLMs (large language models) are already being manipulated:
  • “People are figuring out how to hack the LLMs just by publishing stuff online that just gets pulled by the machine and then spat back to the user.” [39:38]
  • Example: Pro-Hamas propaganda on Reddit doing just this.

4. The Speed and Scale of Modern Propaganda

• The pace: “Traditional media…played out slowly. Here, it’s just moment by moment.” [40:35]
• Reflects on the overwhelming volume of information, “some of it is just completely fake, just bought and paid for…this is what we consume. This is what our children are consuming.” [32:12]

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On the New York Times’ Power:
  “If people had known that this was happening…5 million people…could have changed things for America…Americans geopolitics…” (Rindsberg, [25:12])

• On Wikipedia Manipulation:
  “There is a massive, let’s say, pay to play cottage industry where if you want changes to an article…you’re going to pay these people illicitly. It happens every single day on a massive scale.” (Rindsberg, [30:52])

• On Social Media’s Insidious Effects:
  “We live our lives inside of social media…this is what we consume. This is what our children are consuming.” (Rindsberg, [32:12])

• On Advice to Listeners:
  “Read more and … read the books that are a little scary to you because they feel intimidating and challenging…sometimes those end up being books that give you a lot because you’re really with it.” (Rindsberg’s tip for self-improvement, [42:38])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [03:14]–[17:37]: Listener Q&A: Relationship dilemma and trust with Buck Sexton
• [21:59]–[43:32]: Main interview with Ashley Rindsberg
  • [22:18] Rindsberg’s career origin story
  • [25:12] NYT’s failings and historical impact
  • [28:40] Wikipedia as a battleground
  • [32:12] Social media and propaganda worries
  • [39:38] LLMs and the future of information warfare
  • [42:38] Life advice from Rindsberg

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Takeaways

• Historic Media Misreporting: Even “elite” institutions like the New York Times have contributed to mass misinformation with devastating results, often driven by financial motives.
• Wikipedia’s Vulnerabilities: Far from being the impartial, crowd-sourced encyclopedia many trust, Wikipedia can be (and is) systematically manipulated by states, terrorist groups, and commercial interests—often for money.
• Digital Information Warfare: The fight over information is now automated and global. Platforms, LLMs, and search engines inadvertently amplify distortion, and most users are totally unaware.
• Skeptical Engagement: Readers and information consumers must question sources, seek context, and go beyond the surface, especially as AI-generated content and manipulated platforms become the norm.
• Personal Improvement: Read more—and challenge yourself with books that are daunting or outside your comfort zone to grow intellectually.

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Closing Thoughts

This episode lays bare the dangers of media manipulation—both intentional and systematic—across old and new institutions. Ashley Rindsberg offers a rare insider’s look at the hidden machinations of information warfare, with urgent implications as AI and digital platforms reshape knowledge and belief. The message: Everything must be questioned, even (or especially) the information we take for granted.

Transcript

[Carol Markowitz]

This is an iHeart podcast.

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[Carol Markowitz]

Hi, welcome back to the Carol Markowitz show on iHeartRadio. I'm introducing a new segment today where I start some episodes off with answering your questions that you could submit anonymously through the forum that I post on X today. I'm joined for this segment by my good friend, co host of the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, Buck Sexton. Hi, Buck. So nice to have you on.

[Buck Sexton]

Hey, thank you, Carol. Appreciate you having me.

[Carol Markowitz]

You and I get into all kinds of topics and a lot of times we talk about, you know, relationships and dating and marriage and friendships and all that kind of stuff. And I think our conversations on it are smart and can be helpful to other people. So I figured why not let the Carol Markowitz show audience in on it. And we're going to get started with a real doozy today. This question, I got a lot of questions. I got a lot of responses to my ex post about you coming on and joining me for this segment. But this question, I was like, this is going to be the first question I ask for sure. Here we go. Our first question was submitted anonymously and this person writes, hi, Carol, new listener to both of your shows, which I found through Clay and Buck. And while I like your approach, I was hesitant to write in this one because I felt like I needed a man's opinion. Mm. When you mentioned you were doing this with Buck, I figured it would be good to hear both a female and male perspective on my problem. I got married four months ago and a month before our wedding, it came out that my girlfriend of three years had slept with someone else several times in the first few months of our relationship. I say came out because she didn't tell me. I learned this information in a surprising way, which made everything worse. She says we weren't exclusive then, which is true, but she was applying pressure to make us exclusive. And while I was resistant, I Also wasn't sleeping with anyone else. I'm sickened and not sure I can get over it. The first four months of our marriage have been okay, and I do love her, but this is stuck in the front of my mind. What do you think about this book?

[Buck Sexton]

Well, I think that the situation, the clarity offered there, or the clarification is very important, which is. Why does it bother you? I mean, in our. I'm going to sort of back into this one. Right?

[Carol Markowitz]

All right. I feel like we might disagree right off the bat.

[Buck Sexton]

Okay, I'm going to back into this one. We have a. Generally speaking, a dating culture in America, you know, for. Let's just say, adults, post college, where, you know, people. People sleep with people. That is a thing that is happening on a regular basis.

[Carol Markowitz]

I've heard about that.

[Buck Sexton]

Yeah. I've heard rumors and stories about this. And the expectation, I think, that most people have in dating is that you have a. There is a conversation and understanding that you have at some point, like, hey, and this is for, you know, emotional and relationship reasons, also for, I think, health reasons in some contexts, too. You know, are we. You know, are we dating? Are we exclusively seeing each other? And, you know, that, I think, is. That makes a lot of sense. And I think that the issue that comes up here is, okay, well, if you're not. If you haven't entered in that contract, so to speak, that verbal contract, what are your expectations?

[Carol Markowitz]

So we are going to disagree. I see.

[Buck Sexton]

No, we are.

[Carol Markowitz]

Oh, we are. We are. Okay, keep going, because I'll tell you my perspective.

[Buck Sexton]

Look, I think that, you know, if you. I think that if you're playing the field and you're a single person, you know, you conduct yourself, hopefully male or female, as. With kindness and with respect for your fellow human beings in these relationships you're in. But I. I think that until you've had the talk, there's no expectation of. I mean, I think until you've had a discussion about monogamy, if you're two people that haven't been monogamous, like, or haven't been celibate before, that it doesn't.

[Ashley Rinsberg]

It's.

[Buck Sexton]

So now I understand why somebody might be kind of emotional. By the way, I didn't know I was gonna get this kind of question. I thought it was gonna be like, how do you get a girl?

[Carol Markowitz]

Do you want to hear the question? And you were like, no, I got this.

[Buck Sexton]

No, I think. I think this is not nom. There are rules. And the rules are you have a conversation about exclusiveness and monogamy. And until that conversation occurs, you try to be respectful of the person. But they can't have expectations beyond what has been stated and understood.

[Carol Markowitz]

So I'm going to have to disagree here. And maybe it's because I was in, you know, I haven't been in the dating world in a long time. I've been married for over 15 years. It's been definitely possible that things have changed. I get that. But I will say that this guy, it's clear that it's eating him up. And I don't know personally, if I found out today that my husband slept with somebody in the first few months we were dating, I don't know that I would get over it. I really don't.

[Buck Sexton]

That's kind of a different. Isn't that a little bit different?

[Carol Markowitz]

But he's saying, what do I do? And I. Not that I'm saying leave your wife. Look, I'm, you know, nobody's pushing any divorce here, but I don't know that I would be able to get over it. And if you're the kind of person that will not be able to proceed in this marriage and be happy in your life and it's going to eat you alive, which. It would totally eat me alive, I don't know. He is not married. He's married. He's married for four months and he found out a month before he got married. So he's only had this knowledge for five months. But four of those, they've been married and I, I don't know, I would not be able to live with it. And look, I know people forgive.

[Buck Sexton]

And what does that mean then? Carol, I'm going to cross examine you if you wouldn't be able to handle it, but you don't want divorce. What does that mean? By the way, are there kids here too? Because I always view that as, I.

[Carol Markowitz]

Mean, I don't know, because somebody submitted this anonymously. He didn't give any name. So I have no clue about who it is, but I assume no because it's only four months. Right. But they dated for three years. But let's go with no kids. Right. But I just, yeah. Again, I'm not going to say get divorced.

[Ashley Rinsberg]

Right.

[Carol Markowitz]

You're not going to get me on a technicality. I'm not going to. Well, there's what's unethical on a break.

[Buck Sexton]

No, there's what's unethical and then there's what you can handle.

[Carol Markowitz]

Well, yes. Right.

[Buck Sexton]

Those are, those are different things. Right. Or rather, those aren't Necessary, I should say. Those aren't necessarily the same thing. I mean, because here, here, for example, it's like, okay, well what also are the rules here for when people are in the first stages of, of going? I've heard rumors there are guys and girls who are men and women who are popular with the opposite sex. And when they are dating, they will go out with different people over the course of a week. And that will even include if they kind of like somebody, but they're not sure. Do you have to disclose, like, should you sit down with somebody on a second date and be like, hey, I'm really enjoying this? Just so you know, I'm sleeping on the neighbor. I met some other guy last night because I just want to be totally honest with you and transparent. But I mean, you know, no. Right.

[Carol Markowitz]

Do people no longer have the who I've been hooking up with during this time period talk? Is that just not something that goes on when you, when you do enter into a formal relationship?

[Buck Sexton]

I mean, my, look, my, my sense of this is, it's a lot cleaner for everybody involved. My personal belief is that, you know, if you're sleeping with somebody, that's the person you should be sleeping with.

[Carol Markowitz]

And that is that crazy, right? But that's the whole thing. He didn't want to be in a relationship, but he also wasn't sleeping with anyone else.

[Buck Sexton]

So, But I, I do think that, you know, it's, you get into gray area with like, what, what are expectations? I mean, also the, the notion that it's eating him up so much. I mean, I, I think that marriage, and I'm a new, I'm like relative newlywed compared to Carol. I think that marriage, there's such an elevation and you know, it's obviously in the Catholic faith, it's a sacrament and it's considered something so far beyond dating that if you've taken that step of marriage with somebody and in, within the marriage they have been a good spouse and you think you're building a good life together, you know, the dating phase is a different thing with entirely different expectations. And I think that people should understand that at some level.

[Ashley Rinsberg]

Right?

[Buck Sexton]

I mean, now whether that means you can go around and act like a, a floozy. I think that's the term that was.

[Carol Markowitz]

Used in the, isn't that 40s?

[Buck Sexton]

In the 40s, yeah, like a floozy. I, I, I am, I am anti acting like a floozy out there. But I will tell you that even as a, from a male perspective in the dating and I was in the dating world for many, many, many years because I didn't get married until I was 40. From the male perspective, it's actually a challenge sometimes to slow down women who want. And it's going to sound very like, let me tell you about the challenges of life some of us have had. But sometimes women want to accelerate the physical part of the relationship because they view it as like, you know, locking things in a bit more.

[Carol Markowitz]

Oh, interesting.

[Buck Sexton]

As a guy, you're in this position where it's like, well, I don't want, I actually don't want to like be the, you know, first of all, your guy friends find out, I do not want to have sex with her this soon. Like, yeah, and that can be its own problem. So. But sometimes women are the ones that actually are really trying to move along the physical part of the relationship a lot more. And I also believe, and this maybe is controversial these days, although it shouldn't be at all because of like all of human history. The physical and chemical reactions that women get from that level of intimacy, I think are just, look, they take more biological risk and I think they have more built in biochemical attachment than men do. And I, I think that's pretty clear. Even though.

[Carol Markowitz]

So even more so if he's like thinking that back to his girlfriend in the first few months of them dating, sleeping multiple times with somebody else. Okay, so what's our advice to this anonymous person? I'm saying if you know yourself and you don't think that you can live with yourself four months into the marriage, I think you have to make a very serious call. Don't let it be four years into the marriage where you decide you can't live with it anymore.

[Buck Sexton]

I think if you have somebody who, whether it's a priest or a rabbi, perhaps a trusted intermediary.

[Carol Markowitz]

Yes, us, that's. This is who he's coming to.

[Buck Sexton]

Well, but I mean to sit down with, with his spouse and that person and just really have a, really have a conversation about it. But you know, I mean, I'm inclined to say, I think, I think you in this situation. Unless he's unhappy in the marriage itself. I mean, he's holding somebody to a standard of. I think at some level it's unfair to hold somebody with standard that you didn't set and that you just figured now the technicality. Yeah, fair versus. Look, there's also things we don't really know here. Okay. I mean, when he says, in the early stages of our relationship, did his wife sleep with somebody when they were on their, like, second or third date.

[Carol Markowitz]

Well, he says that she was pushing for them to make it official, and he was resistant. And during that time where she wanted to be official with him, she said, this is what.

[Buck Sexton]

I mean, this is what happens with guys. And this doesn't get talked about very much, but I do know of this from my male friends in the dating world and from what I was observing out there in the world is if you're a guy and you're with a girl who is. Who is, you know, sort of high value, a lot of. A lot of men are interested in, and she's like, let's go. Let's take this to the next level. And you slow that down physically. In a lot of cases, what happens is the guy who's in the number, number two slot, so to speak, is like, oh, I'll just. I'll. I'll. I'll escalate. Like, I'm. I'm happy to be a. To be a, you know, villain.

[Carol Markowitz]

Oh, this is all horrible. I'm so glad that I'm not dating.

[Buck Sexton]

The dating world, really, it's really. It's carnage out there, man. I mean, the dating world is a lot. It's because of the online stuff has all sort of commoditized it, and everyone has endless options. And they think they have a video game. No, it's like a video game.

[Ashley Rinsberg]

And.

[Buck Sexton]

And it really has. It has made it, unfortunately, all too easy, which I think has really. All aspects of it are sort of too straightforward now and too simple, and I think that has really bad ramifications. So I feel for this guy, for sure. And I get that, you know, if we could have, like a sort of a lighthearted moment about it. I mean, it's like, didn't Jerry in Seinfeld find out that a girl like Newman broke up with a girl that was beautiful, that he.

[Carol Markowitz]

That's different. Did you find out your girlfriend slept with Newman?

[Buck Sexton]

No, but, you know, I'm just saying, like, there was that, you know, Jared, she was, like, beautiful, and he thought she was really cool. But it's like, oh, man.

[Carol Markowitz]

No, you can't live with. If it's something you can't live with, you might have to let them go. And I hate starting the first episode being like, hey, maybe break up your marriage, but kind of, you know, I.

[Buck Sexton]

Really like, you know, marriages for life. Unless.

[Carol Markowitz]

I know, I know, but this is like. But it's also like, if you. If it's not going to work, like, stop it as soon as you can, don't go have kids and go, you know, for years and years holding this grudge. I think you don't let it go or, or, you know, get off the pot, whatever.

[Buck Sexton]

I think having a conversation, though, that's what I meant about like the third party or, you know, the, you know, marriage counselor, whatever it is you want to say and where you have it. Because I think he may be able to reach a point where he realizes, like what she did when she didn't really know you is not a reflection necessarily of, of her feelings for you now and how she will be as a spouse. Like when you've made a vow, you know, there's a difference between I think someone's going to do something and I've given someone my word that I will do something. And I think that's very important.

[Carol Markowitz]

You're right.

[Buck Sexton]

I think civilization is kind of built on that. Like, you know, I keep my word. You know, my word is my bond. I give you my word about this. I pledge myself to you.

[Carol Markowitz]

Yeah.

[Buck Sexton]

If you're assuming something that's a different, it's a different situation. So, you know, you, you're, I don't know, I, I feel like I agree with you on so many things.

[Carol Markowitz]

I'm, I'm psyched, I'm very hard ass on this. Like, I'm psyched that we got to.

[Buck Sexton]

Throw down a little bit on this one.

[Ashley Rinsberg]

You know.

[Carol Markowitz]

Started our first.

[Buck Sexton]

You didn't even make fun of my salmon colored T shirt, which I love.

[Carol Markowitz]

Your salmon colored T shirt actually. It looks very good on you. Very, very much. Suits you. Thank you for coming on Buck Sexton. For our first segment where we give advice to my listeners, please write in to the Carol Markowitz showmail.com or if you want to do it anonymously, find my form on X. I repost it all the time. Stay tuned for my interview with Ashley Rinsberg.

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[Carol Markowitz]

Come on. Why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient.

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[Carol Markowitz]

Hi, and welcome back to the Carol Markowitz show on iheartradio. My guest today is Ashley Rinsberg. Ashley is a senior editor at Pirate Wires and the author of the Gray Lady Winked how the New York Times Misreporting Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History. So nice to have you on, Ashley.

[Ashley Rinsberg]

Thank you, Carol. I'm happy to be with you.

[Carol Markowitz]

I've been reading you for a while and I would say out of all of my guests, I know least about you. I literally, when you came on, we were chatting right before this, I wasn't sure if you were gonna have a British accent. I don't know. I literally know nothing about you. If you wouldn't mind, but you do live in London and I don't know why I expected you to be British. Tell me about yourself. How did you get into this whole thing that we do?

[Ashley Rinsberg]

Oh, wow. Yeah. So I'm, I'm American and, well, I grew up in America. I was born in South Africa and I was after university doing that kind of figuring it out thing and decided to get a job on a sailing yacht as a deckhand, so helping move the boat from Italy to Greece, so southern Italy. We sailed it for like two months with me and me and another hand and this.

[Carol Markowitz]

That's a nice route.

[Ashley Rinsberg]

It was a great route. And you learn you're. You're literally traveling backward through time to the land of Odysseus, sailing through the Ionian Islands, sailing through the Aegean, the Corinth Canal. And we got the boat to its destination and it was time for me to move on. I didn't want to go back to the US I'd been living in San Francisco working at Internet Archive, which is the Wayback Machine, guys.

[Carol Markowitz]

Oh, I love that.

[Ashley Rinsberg]

Yeah. So I moved onward towards Israel. And I went to Israel and I stayed there for a while. And it was there that I was reading through books and just leafing through stuff that you find. And there's a lot of books around Israel. And I found this book about the Second World War. World War called the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. And in that book was a little tidbit about the New York Times saying that on the day that hostilities broke out, the New York Times reported Nazi propaganda saying that Poland had invaded Germany. And I was like, excuse me, what crazy New York Times lead story? Poland had invaded Germany? Like, how could anybody think that in 1939? How could the New York Times think that in 1939? So I started to wonder how many more errors of that order the New York Times had made in history. How many times did its misreporting actually change the course of history? That was the. That was the bar for the book. I'm like, I'm going to do a chapter if it changed history in some meaningful way, not just some, like, piece of gossip. So that became the book the Great Lady Winx. I wrote it in Tel Aviv.

[Carol Markowitz]

Wow. So, you know, on the Amazon page, there's kind of the subhead, think a newspaper can't be responsible for mass murder. Think again. That's. I mean, a powerful statement, but I don't think it's overblown when we're talking about the New York Times.

[Ashley Rinsberg]

You know, if you look at a case like Ukraine famine, which they completely fell down on, and it was done more or less deliberately, and I believe it was done not just with the complicity of the New York Times institution. Forgetting Walter Durante as an individual, who. Who's the one who'd made the lie? Who. Who denied that there was a famine in Ukraine in the early 30s, and it all got shuffled onto him. They just blamed him. I don't think that was the case. I think it was all about the New York Times ownership and business interest, as it always is with the New York Times. We factor out that it's owned by a family, the Sulzbergers. It's a dynasty. It's one of the last great remaining American industrial economic dynasties. We just don't talk about it. That's the people who own that, who control that newspaper. And for Them it was all about money, and it was all about getting access to the Russian market. And they denied it because that was in their interest to do so. So in that sense, if people had known that this was happening, if people had known that Stalin was perpetrating mass starvation to the effect of 5 million people, it could have changed things for America. It could have changed things for American geopolitics, could have changed a lot of the decisions that were being made at the time about communist Russia and how we would treat communist Russia, whether as a legitimate government or as this evil unknown, which is actually what it was.

[Carol Markowitz]

So you're in Israel, you find this book, you decide, you know, how many more stories are there in the New York Times. But if you're not already a writer, how do you make that leap to writing a book?

[Ashley Rinsberg]

It was just one of those things that almost happened on its own, which, like, I've written lots of different things in my day, including books, and that almost never happens. And it just was. I just enjoyed it so much. I didn't think about it, you know, like, when you hear great, like athletes, I mean, not to say I'm great, but when you hear athletes talk about, you can be great, I mean, maybe one day I will be. But, you know, they. They forget themselves in that. In that activity. And that's kind of how it was. I forgot myself, and I was just. That's all I did. I didn't. I mean, there was always, you know, stuff going on in Tel Aviv and the nightlife and everything happening around you, but for the most part, I just went to a cafe every day on Disenf street and sat there and wrote the book and did as much research as I could.

[Carol Markowitz]

So what would have been plan B? If you didn't become a writer, what would have been an alternate path for you? Or would you have stayed in, like, was it tech that you were in?

[Ashley Rinsberg]

I was never. I was never. I would say in tech, I was always around it. Plan B. Oh, my God. I honestly, I think I tried plan B and C and D and E and F, and they all failed. So I just had to go back to plan A, which is being a writer. Yeah. I think I would just kind of.

[Carol Markowitz]

Not stay on the. On the ship, not. Not be a deckhand.

[Ashley Rinsberg]

I did think about it at that moment, like, because it's something people do, but it just. It felt like. Like standing in place a little bit too much. Like, you just kind of get lost in that. And there was just something that felt like it was pulling me forward towards some kind of, what turned out to be like, you know, quite a chaotic, like coming from the tranquility of Greece and then into Tel Aviv and just at the end of the intifada, the second intifada, the tail, tail end of it, and a massive, massive shift, but one that was really meaningful.

[Carol Markowitz]

What do you consider your beat at Piratewires?

[Ashley Rinsberg]

I cover at this point a lot of. I mean, some just plain tech, but mostly the thing I do, or at least that I'm known best for, is information warfare type stuff. Right now, what's happening on Wikipedia where you're seeing entire topic areas hijacked by essentially edit gangs, Some of them are, let's say, pro Hamas, some of them are pro China, some of them are whatever they are and they're able to completely contort all the articles in that given area and nobody really knows that. And it's all getting fed into the LLMs and it's getting pinned into Google as the top result, and we're just not aware of it. So a lot of that kind of story where things are happening on these big platforms and they're very, very significant, but no one has any idea that it's even happening.

[Carol Markowitz]

How do you let the American people know how big of a problem that is? I just feel like the average person would be like, well, so don't use Wikipedia, just use something else. But it's kind of hard to convey to people that Wikipedia is this giant thing that needs to be somewhat correct and it needs to be somewhat fair. Do you find that argument difficult to make to kind of the normies?

[Ashley Rinsberg]

I don't think I've tried to yet, and I don't know that anyone else has either. I think it's probably actually, I'll take it back. The one person who has is Elon. Elon Musk has actually really done that in a big way, as he would. Aside from him, I don't think that story's really been told. And I think it's confusing for a lot of people when they see it. Like when Elon's like, Wikipedia is broken, he's drawing on so much knowledge that he has and so much institutional experience with the entire ecosystem, not just Wikipedia, that for him it's obvious, but for most people, I would say 99.9% of people, and sometimes including myself, you don't quite understand what it means until you really dive into the details of how it worked and why it works that way and who decided it should work that way. And that's when you Start to really open your eyes. And I think it's about telling that story to as many people as you can.

[Carol Markowitz]

Is it governments that are gaming Wikipedia or individuals?

[Ashley Rinsberg]

It's everybody. It's everybody that's involved in gaming every other platform and gaming the entire digital information ecosystem system. So that's governments, that's terror organizations, that's people aligned to those types of groups. It's corporate, it's just individuals, it's business interests. There is so much going on underneath the hood of Wikipedia. There is a massive, let's say, pay to play cottage industry where if you want changes to an article, if you want an article created or removed, you're going to pay these people illicitly. It's against the rules, but it is absolutely diffuse. Like it happens just every single day on a massive scale and everybody knows it, except for the people on the other end of this thing. The regular user doesn't know any of this, and the people on the inside know all of it.

[Carol Markowitz]

Is there a Wikipedia book in you? Is that the next kind of topic?

[Ashley Rinsberg]

I think, you know, I think right now my instinct is that, like, people really like video. And I, I think that's an amazing way to tell this particular story. Yeah, I think it can be chopped up. I think it can be shown to be. If you show it graphically sometimes, like visually, it just becomes more accessible to people and that. So maybe that's what's first.

[Carol Markowitz]

What do you worry about?

[Ashley Rinsberg]

I worry about a lot of this stuff. I worry about the propaganda. I mean, I go on social media and I'm just, I'm flabbergasted. And this is. We live our lives inside of the media. Right now. We live our lives inside of social media. And I go on to X number of, and not to use the word X number two, coincidentally, but you just see such insane stuff happening. You see so much of it and, you know, so much of it is just completely fake, just bought and paid for. It's, it's. Sometimes it's just random and sometimes it's ideological, sometimes it's warfare, and sometimes it's just business, but it's so much of it. And you're like, this is what we consume. This is what our children are consuming.

[Carol Markowitz]

Yeah.

[Ashley Rinsberg]

What is going to happen? How are we going to continue to be. To educate ourselves about the world, to communicate and connect with each other freely when you've got this thing in the middle that's real, just garbage, but garbage screaming about its own right to free speech?

[Carol Markowitz]

We're going to take a Quick break and be right back on the Carol Markowitz Show.

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[Carol Markowitz]

Why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient.

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[Carol Markowitz]

It'S interesting because you say, you know, we are so inside the media and I think you and I certainly are. But like, how much of this filters out? And I guess this is something that I think about a lot, like what normal people see and think how much of it is crossing over. And I'm definitely worried about my kids in the future and that kind of thing also. But do you think that we're seeing kind of not a rebuff of this kind of thing, but definitely somewhat moving away from it, especially in the younger generations where they're not on X all day, they're not consuming what we're consuming all day.

[Ashley Rinsberg]

That's true. And I think there's definitely some new path that's being forged right now by the younger generation of users online. I don't know exactly what it is. I know it's a lot about messaging and that's like primarily what they're doing. But I think these, these forms of information, they sort of seep into the groundwater. So the ideas seep in, the language seeps in. People start thinking in the way that they talk. And I think it has that effect anyways. Maybe not a total effect, but it's there.

[Carol Markowitz]

Are you optimistic about, I don't know, the future, I guess in general, or we're sort of in a real moment of optimism in the US right now. Every guest I kind of have had recently is sort of like Looking to the future very positively. It definitely is the Donald Trump election. Very vibe shift. You don't seem as optimistic.

[Ashley Rinsberg]

It seems. Yeah, it seems like people are just at loggerheads with each other all the time. Not just in the US I think it's all over the place. And when you see that kind of like people not just fighting on social media, like fighting almost sounds too coy. It's war. It's internecine war all the time. And you think, how can you ever resolve that? You know, how. How does that actually get resolved into something that's at least a discourse? And I actually have no idea.

[Carol Markowitz]

Can it get resolved? I guess that I like. I, I almost feel like, yeah, they'll. They'll keep fighting, but the rest of the world will move on without them. Do you not think so?

[Ashley Rinsberg]

Yeah, you know, that might be. I think we, you know, they say Twitter is not real life or X is not real life.

[Carol Markowitz]

Yeah, right. Do you think it is? Oh, you do agree that it's not.

[Ashley Rinsberg]

Oh, no, it's not real. Yeah, it's totally fake life. It's the fakest of fake life.

[Carol Markowitz]

But yeah, we spent a lot of.

[Ashley Rinsberg]

Time on it and buying into it.

[Carol Markowitz]

Yet I refresh it all day long. What comes next? What's the kind of next frontier of this kind of thing?

[Ashley Rinsberg]

You know, I, I actually had. Don't know. I think it's a great question. I think we, we are obviously going to all be paying attention to the LLMs. There's just no way we're getting around that. And that's going to become a focus of how, how information gets parceled out and what can. What's considered reliable, not reliable, how you hack that system. And it's already begun. People have already. On a business level, and I'm sure, and for sure on a propaganda level, people are figuring out how to hack the LLMs just by publishing stuff online that just gets pulled by the machine and then spat back into the user. So, you know, I reported on how that's happening on Reddit. A pro Hamas propaganda network active on Reddit has learned how to do that. And they're not the only ones. So I think that'll be.

[Carol Markowitz]

We're recording this shortly after Grok lost its mind and called itself Mecca Hitler and.

[Ashley Rinsberg]

Yeah, and Elmo got hacked and talking about, like, Jeffrey Epstein and Jews and like, it's just replete. It's replete. So the AI, the hacking, the like, all of it together, it's all just this one strange thing right now. And it's so fast. Like unlike traditional media, which had its own propaganda issues, it kind of played out slowly here. It's just moment by moment.

[Carol Markowitz]

Yeah. I almost feel like because it's so fast, people don't treat it as seriously as they would, you know, the traditional media or things that move slower and they kind of get used to in a deeper sense. It's interesting. I would love to read more about it. So if you're up for writing another book about it, if you're up for writing a book about it, you let me know.

[Ashley Rinsberg]

I will definitely do that.

[Carol Markowitz]

What advice would you give your 16 year old self if Ashley had to do it all over again? Are you still on that boat from Italy to Greece?

[Ashley Rinsberg]

Yeah, I would definitely. I don't know if I would tell my 16 year old. Actually I would because when I was 16 I was definitely interested in, in doing that kind of sailing or even more intense. And I think a lot of the times you get held back by the unknown and the uncertain and what's scary. I think I would be more like I would want to have taken more of those risks younger, even though I took enough. Right.

[Carol Markowitz]

Yeah. It sounds like you took some risks.

[Ashley Rinsberg]

I took some risks, yeah. But I feel like it's like fractal, like a babushka within the risk you take. You can continue to take smaller risks as you live it out. And I think that's always an important thing. But at 16 in particular, I would have said that.

[Carol Markowitz]

Well, I love this conversation. I loved getting to know you a little more. Leave us here with your best tip for my listeners on how they can improve their lives.

[Ashley Rinsberg]

I would just say to read more and to read the books that are a little scary to you because they feel intimidating and challenging and, you know, but sometimes those end up being books that give you a lot because you're really with it. So that is what improves my life a lot. And staying out of social media, another good one.

[Carol Markowitz]

I would love to start taking that advice. But, you know, easier said, I guess I do take my Twitter breaks and I'm, I'm heading to vacation soon, so I disconnect from Twitter completely. I take it off my phone X. You know. Yeah, read more is always a good piece of advice. He is Ashley Rinsberg, senior editor at Pirate Wires. Check out his book the Gray Lady Winked anywhere you buy your books. Thanks so much for coming on, Ashley.

[Ashley Rinsberg]

Thanks, Carol.

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Ugh. Come on. Why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient.

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