Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Buckheimer. I'm joined by Minical Loose. There is a big through line in today's show with today's guest.
There is? Well, first of all, this is juiciest fucking salacious crazy guest we've had. Yeah, this story was nuts. It reminds me of that book, Something of an Economic Hitman.
Do you know that book? It's very similar. Oh, yeah, he really dishes. Oh, my God.
So our guest, Phil Elwood, is a public relations operative at the highest level in D.C. with foreign countries as clients. And the manipulation and stuff that was done that he has written about. And participated in.
And participated in is pretty fucking mind-blowing. And he's here to talk about it. And confirms your worst fears. His book is called All the Worst Humans, How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians.
I loved this one. It was so funny. The through line is, I majored in PR. Oh, that's right.
And I never get to say, I majored in. I know, you don't want to. I keep that close to the, is it close to the vest or the chest? Chest, chest.
Okay. The vest probably works, too, because you would play poker with your vest on. Yeah, isn't it like vest, is it vest your cards or chest your cards? I'm going to say vest, because yeah, chest makes everyone think about my chest.
That's not what I'm talking about. When it close to your chest, it's not very close to you, per se. Vest is the original. That is the original, but people now equally use chest.
Oh, okay. Thank you for clearing that out. Great. Okay, well, I keep, I majored in PR close to my vest.
Right. Close to my, the row vest. Anyway, so that's the connection. Yeah, no, we never hear about your major.
Mine. I have two. You have two, yeah. Congratulations.
Sima Cum Laude. Just remind everyone, I'm much higher than Magna. Please enjoy this very juicy episode with Phil Elwood. Hi there.
Phil. Zach, nice to meet you. How old are you, Phil? I was trying to figure out what was in your book, if it was similar age.
Just 25. Younger man. Doesn't feel that way. I know, it feels like you've lived maybe more lives.
It's not the years, it's the mind. Oh, uh-huh, sure, sure. As someone who collects cards, that's very true. This is an extremely tasty topic you're tackling with your book.
Oh, my God. I mean, it kind of confirms what you think might be going on, but you certainly, at least for me, I'm dying to know the mechanics of everything. Like, yeah, I know shit's happening, but like, how is it physically going down? And boy, do we get a big earful in this.
Scared of what? Not of us, because we're pretty tame. I'm dangerous. Excuse me.
Excuse me, that's extremely good. You should be scared. Are you scared with this all out that you're a target? It's interesting, because I'm an incredibly private person.
I paid to promote the search engine optimization results for a different Phil Elwood. He was a jazz reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle, who died a number of years ago. So I had a friend of mine who does digital optimization, promote the results of the dead man, to hide anything that had to do with me. You were playing on people's laziness.
You're like, you're going to have to go through four different pages before you get to me. 90% of people never go to the second page. Never. Do you?
Be honest. Mostly no. I know, it's kind of crazy. But it is manipulatable.
It is. I can't trust anything anymore. Okay, so I would love to give an overview of the topic we're going to tackle, but then I want to start with your personal story, because it's tasty. And I love anyone who's had a love affair with the devil's dandruff.
Boogie Shogie. So first and foremost, your book, All the Worst Humans, what you explain, and this is your experience as a public relations expert over two decades, helping shape the national narrative, narrative within the government, and the main tool of which is the press. So you are very good at developing relationships with journalists and helping guide them to cover a story that would be beneficial to your clients. This is a very fair characterization.
Okay, great. Within that, there's a lot of underbelly. There's a lot of, we might call them bad actors on the scene. And you had a career dealing with some of the main bad actors we think of.
You call them bad actors? I call them clients. Yes, exactly. Okay, but of course, this isn't even a job a kid knows about that exists, so it's not like one really sets their sights on this type of career, and nor were you setting your sights on that.
And I think maybe we should start in Washington with an early aptitude for debate. I started out in high school. I was a debater, mostly because I didn't like the school part of high school. Actually, I thought they called it high school for a different reason.
I was stoned for most of it. I went to high school when I went to Washington. Not most of it, but there was a good period of time, and I wasn't very interested in school. My high school GPA was, I think, about a 2.9, which is not stellar.
It could be better. Well, the school was known for grade inflation, so actually, I was probably getting these. They have the pastor, which makes this even more intriguing. Preacher's kids generally go one of two ways.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and you went the other way. So when did you start blowing weed? Started smoking pot probably at 16 or 17, and never used coke until I was 20. Right, at Mad Max.
Very good memory. Thank you. It closed recently. It was the most amazing place to work.
Wait, what is it? It's a Mexican restaurant. No, it's in Pittsburgh? Yeah, it's in Pittsburgh.
No, I would have made a pilgrimage after hearing the description, but Alaska's closed. Mexican restaurant. Just super loud music. Everybody was on drugs.
And the cooks were all smoking pot. The waiters were all doing coke. I think the manager was on E. Oh, boy.
I'm not quite sure how that worked out. So you had to. How was the food? The food was on the diet.
You were a cook. Of course, you would say it. If I was smoking pot, I was cooking slowly. And the waiter who was high on coke would come back and be like, are you cooking with a fucking lighter bag?
What's wrong with you? What a mismatch of different experiences everyone was having on many different drugs. Okay, but back to debate. So you're a really good debate, and then presumably you get a debate scholarship at the University of Pittsburgh?
I did. I started out at the University of Pittsburgh and was recruited for their debate team. There were a few schools that wanted me to come debate for that. I almost said work, but it was kind of like work, because it was the same as my job now.
It's just taking the news and making an argument with it. And it's just now I'm at the creation of the news business. It's a lot of the same skills. A lot of the same things go into it.
And so I know what kind of debate we're talking about. I grew up with a certain idea of what debate was, and I recently saw something. Maybe you guys have seen this where it's like, it's speed debate. This is the kind of, have you seen this, Monica?
I don't think so. It's four to five hundred words a minute. Oh, wow. Four to five hundred words.
They get up there and they go, oh, they're talking that fast. It's like a micromachian, man. Are you reading or it's all extemporaneous? You're reading for a lot of it, and you're doing analysis and talking at the same speed.
Wow. And it's crazy, because everybody in the room is basically transcribing the route. It's called flowing the debate. And so you've got everything written down, and if you drop one argument, you lose.
It's different than a presidential debate, because there's both accountability and reasonable arguments. That is very different. Sometimes people ask me, as a debater, what do you think of this presidential debate? And my response is, different activity.
When I saw this, I was like, this has become so abstract and weird. I don't understand how the debaters themselves are speaking as fast as they're speaking and reading as quickly as they are. But then also, I don't know how anyone's hearing anything, and I don't know how anyone's evaluating the strength or merit of any of these points of view. So what are the metrics?
How are they deciding who won? Well, it's that flowchart. You're counting on the judge's ability to write everything down and say, well, they dropped this argument, you won this argument. It's a very strange world, and it has its own vernacular.
It was a weird high school and college experience, because I grew up living in hotels on the weekends in high school and college with the same group of kids. We all went to school at radically different parts of the country, but we were together every weekend, and this was for high school and college. So you get to know people pretty well. It's a real community.
It's a very interesting, weird activity. And what personality type is drawn to it, if you had to stereotype, or at least give me 51%? Like, did those kids party? Yeah.
I mean, the Harvard tournament can no longer get a hotel in Cambridge to, like, let them be there, because it got so out of hand with the drugs. Everyone's taking Adderall, presumably. There were some people who were into Coke. Ironically, I didn't get into the drugs because of debate.
I got into it because of a restaurant. Debate, there was a lot of drinking, and there was a party. I hope you don't take offense to this, but you don't immediately present to me as my stereotype for a debater. Does he, to you, Monica?
You've got kind of a laid-back vibe. Yeah. Unassuming. But knowing what you do, it makes sense.
Okay, now back to what it's evolved to. At one point, debate made a lot of sense in if you were going to pursue many different paths, this would be a cool skill set. Of course, presidential debate would be, like, the apex of this, but you can see where it has some application, but to me, it seems now like this thing is for its own sake. It doesn't really have any real-world application.
Lawyers aren't arguing cases in front of judges in this manner. No one in the real world is synthesizing information in this way outside of a debate stage, are they? Right, but it taught me how to think quickly and how to solve problems creatively. I spent a small fortune on therapy trying to figure out why it is that I do what I do, and it seems that I am driven entirely by the need to solve problems and to tell a good story.
Money buys convenience. It doesn't do much for me. I have friends who are like investment bankers. How they value themselves is that number that's at the end of the spreadsheet.
That's not me. I barely know how to do finances. Well, of course, I'm on the greedy end of the spectrum. I'm more like your financial friends.
I'm like, how much are you going to get enough to be safe? So, yeah, when I'm thinking about the amounts of money that are transferring hands in pursuit of all these outcomes, I'm like, are you dipping your beak in that or figuring out how to funnel a little off? No, no, it's all black dark money. It's all shady.
Can't we steal some of it? Anyway, so you're doing well, and then you're at work, and you're feeling a bit drowsy, and one of the kind and benevolent waiters says, try a bump of this. Yeah. Within three months, you're failing all five classes.
Yeah. It was a pretty fast train wreck. I called up my brother, and he flew to Pittsburgh. We were just like, what do we do?
You know, the idea of dropping out of college is something that in my family does not go. We couldn't come up with anything, so on a rainy afternoon, we went to the registrar's office and dropped me out of college. And they sent me home to, at the time, Olympia, Washington, where my parents lived, and got off the plane. I was intoxicated and clutching my Opus, the penguin, stuffed animal.
They made me go see a shrink and lied to the shrink. Didn't tell them about the drug problem and just said, you know, I was depressed. And the shrink said, well, you've got situational depression. I'm not sure if that's a real diagnosis.
Right. They said, since you're out of the situation, you're no longer depressed. So they sent me off to live in Washington, D.C. Not exactly the best place to dry out.
I don't know how much time you've spent in D.C., but wow. Well, I have to say, while reading about your experience, I definitely see a lot of crazy parallels between Hollywood and D.C., the ultimate company towns, the ultimate networking places. Status towns. Yes, fast.
Things are happening way after hours at night. There's so many parallels. Sometimes you guys try and crash our party, like the White House Correspondence Center. Hollywood's like, oh, we've got to go to D.C.
Everybody finds out that we have an airport and everything, and they come visit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I did that once. Same.
And what was your conclusion? It's a very inappropriate event, I think. It puts the media in a compromising position. It puts policymakers makers in a compromising position.
And they were just like, Phil, that's inappropriate. And my response was, this whole event is inappropriate. Right, right, right. It seems to be a non-unique arm.
I think it's very interesting. I'm totally glad I witnessed one time, but yeah, I don't need to ever do that again, but I'm glad I witnessed that whole thing. And then a lot of pressure for politicians to be comedians, because they've got to get these speeches and be funny. That's a whole sidebar that's interesting.
It seems like the prerequisite to be a politician is that you need to be able to do stand-up. Exactly. What I'm saying is, with regard to Congress, if we could elect a few more accountants and a few fewer lawyers, that would really help me out. It's electing all the lawyers that allows people like me to do things that I've done.
Because why? They're so well-versed in the law, they know how to deal within the margins? Morally deplete. I didn't say it, but I'm definitely going to buzz in on that one.
Well, you're right. There is something implicit in the fact that, as they should have, they have this client confidentiality, which is necessary, clearly. But once you enter into that, you're already in a very unique and privileged space. And I think you can build out of that a lot of questionable behavior that feels like it's anchored in something.
Because you're already existing in a plane that doesn't really exist anywhere else. I don't know, does it somehow motivate you to keep going in whatever direction serves your client or something? It's hard to know. There's a lot of defending the indefensible, but someone has to do it.
See, that's a very interesting question. The second chapter in the book I titled, Everyone Deserves Representation. And that is kind of one of the fundamental questions that I think the book asks is, is this true? I believe everybody deserves a lawyer.
Yes. But does everybody deserve somebody like me? I used to think, yes. I very much do not think yes anymore.
Yeah. Okay, so you landed watching it through hook or crook. You've got a friend who's got a friend, and you end up being an intern for Senator Moynihan. And now the party fucking starts.
Now, do you stop coke? When are you? You do. After the spin-out in Pittsburgh.
After it ruined my life. Okay, you're like, I'm not going back to that. And you never did? No.
Even when you blitz-hammered it? No. Wow. No, I've been offered coke many times.
Oh, wow. And have turned it down every time. Nowadays, it's because of fentanyl. If doing a line is going to cost you your life, the rush is not that much fun.
It costs benefits. It's totally off. So, no. And even before that, this almost ruined my life once.
I'm not going to roll the dice again. I applaud that. But you're drinking your ass off as an intern. You ingratiate yourself quite successfully, right?
When you volunteer to haul carts of liquor through the Capitol and stock the Senator's liquor cabinet, not that he drank it all, he would have people over to his highway office. Nobody knows about this. There are wonderful highway offices throughout the Capitol that senior Senators get. You know, Moynihan's had this beautiful view of Pennsylvania Avenue, and Levin had this beautiful view of the mall.
Like, I got to watch the fireworks in his office. Like, absolutely amazing stuff. These secret corridors that lead back to them. And they're little clubhouses.
They are. What do you think the design intent of those was? They were the original offices. Oh.
So, in the Capitol building itself, you still have the old Senate chamber and the old House chamber, and you have the old Supreme Court. The movie Amistad, Steven Spielberg wanted to film in the old Supreme Court chamber in the Capitol. And I do not believe they let him do it. But you can still go into that chamber.
Was it in the basement? Ground floor. But it's so nuts. And there's so many cool parts to the Capitol, and it's all connected through underground tunnels.
Now, this becomes very important when someone sends anthrax to the Senate, because they sent it to the Hart Building, and so it infected the Hart Building. How did they get rid of the anthrax? They taped up all of the corridors and vents that connected the buildings, and filled the Hart Building with chlorine gas. Wow.
We were all still working in the building next door, and they're like, don't worry about it. We sealed up all the vents. And we're like, I'm making $23,000 a year work here. The cost-benefit analysis is not working out for me.
But no, I had to get tested for anthrax a couple of times, and they give you a three-day supply of Cipro, and they're like, we really hope this works out for you. Chlorine gas, is that the street name? Is that mustard gas? I don't know, but the way it was explained to me was that we used the first chemical weapon to beat the first biological weapon.
I was like, okay. Okay, so while you're there, your drinking is pretty out of control. You smash a car through the window of a library. It would have been better if it was a car.
Oh, okay. It was actually just my body. Oh! There's a ground floor window into the Gelman Library at GW, and this is particularly unfortunate because I had just been accepted as a transfer student to GW.
Oh, no. I thought I was getting my life back together. Everything was going to be fine. And Moynihan's office wrote this really nice letter that got me into GW with some really crappy grades from high school.
Pretty good grades in undergrad. When I dropped out, I had like a 3.9. Got me into GW, and then I was promptly thrown out. I received a letter from GW days after my arrest that said, due to your involvement in the incidents of July whatever, your offer of admission as a transfer student has been rescinded.
So I had no place to go to school. I had no job because Moynihan was retiring. And Moynihan, or not him personally, but his staff, got the staff of Senator Carl Levin, the senator across the hall, to hire me. And I was the first one, I think, that they'd ever hired without a college degree.
Moynihan was retiring, and Hillary Clinton took you. Right. So yes, at this point, you have been infected with this D.C. lifestyle.
You feel very at home. You want a career in this. And then I think what's even more important is the series of events. So when you get arrested for going through the window, and you're put in front of the judge, you get a really light slap on the wrist.
Yeah, like 20 hours of community service. I heard from somebody in the office that somebody else made a call. Right. And so maybe that happened or didn't, but certainly the letter to George Washington helped.
And you get booted from there. And then the new person in Levin's office says, you should go to Georgetown. And you're like, I'm a shit student. That's not going to happen.
And then in two shakes, you're into Georgetown. So here's, I would imagine, the irresistible elixir of. that place which is oh there is a world in which the normal rules don't exist and if you know the right people i don't know how anyone at 21 presented with that superhero option isn't pulled towards that like wow it can work like this get out of jail shit get into any school you want it must have been so attractive first time i saw what power was i got to dc and i was working i was an intern for the chairman of the senate armed services committee i was an intern for the guy that they named the train station in new york after he's kind of a big deal yeah right i got to drive into the airport once i got to talk to him a couple of times and they talked to you they told you about stuff yeah and you got to hear funny stories about them from their staff and you learn that they're people but they also wield just amazing power the other thing i'm thinking about hollywood dc you're explaining your first minutes there in dc and just being outside and watching this senator and that senator and you're naming them and now this person's getting their bags carried by the two hot boy assistants and i was thinking i don't know any of these people and you probably don't know any of the executives or the writers or directors and it's like even how much you immediately when you come to a place like this you just consume everything and learn all the important people really quickly and you think the rest of the world knows nobody knows right i don't think your average person can name more than 10 senators that's good one of the things i do not like this going on is this kind of celebrity culture in congress yeah i'm sorry you don't run for congress to be an influencer you run for congress to compromise with your colleagues and make good policy that makes america better not get more fucking instagram followers yeah but again just as you were polled we're all polled we're all status monkeys it's pretty intoxicating it is i can only be so judgmental as i sit here someone who pursued all of it so when you get to georgetown what happens i stopped working for the senator and went to be a full-time student and then one thing happened then i went back to working for the senator work for him part-time i was managing his email account while i was a student so i could do this at any hour of the day or night so i spent a lot of nights from like midnight till 6 a.m in the russell senate office building totally alone sorting the senator's email account i think they paid me a full-time staffer's wage and i lived in a dorm i was on a meal plan one summer this was between my junior and senior at georgetown i was out with some friends and we were drinking heavily we were going from one bar to another i was trying to hail a cab trying to hop over this jersey barrier one of these concrete barriers in the middle of the road caught my foot in just the wrong way landed on a curb and the ball part of my femur came off oh yeah i got the cab now that's the important part of the story and it took me to gw's emergency room where i was seen by a trauma surgeon for a broken hip and woke up the next morning with my mother in the room so i knew something was very very wrong so about three months later i went skydiving for the first time oh wow really enjoyed it told my surgeon at the follow-up appointment that he must have done some good work and he was real pissed yeah yeah kind of wasted his effort yeah that's something safe to say there's some thrill-seeking what was your major did you complete there they called it government political science is what it would be called anywhere else okay and how do you end up at london school of economics i was graduation day at georgetown and i got an email from the london school of economics you didn't finish your application to grad school here and we're writing to tell you that if you do you will be admitted so on the day i graduated from georgetown i finished the application hits end and i was admitted i went to london and went to a lot of very interesting classes with diplomats kids and members of parliament's kids and one student who was in his phd program there was a man by the name of safe al-islam qaddafi there we go qaddafi son that was my first interaction with the family do you have friendship at all there oh no i knew of him he would walk around campus with like security guards and he was mostly there for like club openings and things like yeah yeah what did he get a phd in buying a phd i think i believe the director of the school had to resign okay because it came out that safe bought his phd with rent again how the world really turns and what was your master's in it was in something called social and public communication and when i pitched this to my father because i wanted him to help me pay for this he said phil let me get this straight you want me to buy you a master's degree in talking to people i was like well yeah but it's in london uh it went over but it was really an exciting time i made some great friends that are still close friends of mine they colloquially call it let's see europe i went to amsterdam several times i went all over europe visited italy yeah and are you thinking at any point that you might start a career in public relations no i really went to grad school to avoid getting a job when i dropped out i had to work and that was not very much fun and so i was like i don't know what i want to do for a living i don't want to work on the hill but i knew i wanted to be in dc and so when i came back from grad school i just started applying everywhere i applied at think tanks i applied at lobbying firms thank god i didn't end up at a lobbying firm i would definitely be in jail because you know they make up like a laws about what lobbyists can and can't do due to the first amendment they can't make a lot of laws about what pr people can and can't do i like to say that my career is an unintended consequence of the first amendment interesting you point out how lopsided this industry is in that there are seven pr professionals per one journalist and that that number is growing on the pr side and shrinking on the journalist side yeah there's like 10 people around to try to shape what the one person's doing and the money is on the side of the pr oh yeah you get a job at a pr firm yeah i'm working for several and when you first started what is your understanding of it how is it explained to you do you know right away this kind of could be shady at first it was pretty good guy stuff i got to work at this firm my first assignment is doing press for a documentary about the second war in iraq about an artillery unit that lived in ouda hussein's bandha palace in the atamia section of bagdad and the movie was called gunner palace it received from the mpaa an r rating because there's this rule that the word fuck appears in a film more than once or twice i don't remember you get one but then you get an r a okay the word fuck appears in this movie like about a hundred times because one of the opening scenes is like a shootout they're not watching their language no they're saying a lot of things also the soundtrack for this movie it should have won a grammy because the soundtrack for this movie is all hip-hop performed by the soldiers talking about their experiences in iraq and it's absolutely amazing it's a great documentary so we do all this media appealing the mpaa's motion because we wanted 15 and 16 year old kids to watch this movie because they were the ones who were thinking about enlisting and at this point in iraq we didn't know we were going to be there 20 years and so you know it was a great project to work on it's so funny because i went to work at the lobbying firm upstairs from the pr firm after this project and my client i'm so sad this isn't my client was bono his one campaign my job as a lobbyist was to give away youtube tickets this was before the gift rules and so like we'd call up offices and say do you want tickets to the next youtube show does your boss want to meet with bono and everybody said yes of course of course like you were talking about before that celebrity meets power situation is a very interesting dynamic yeah combustible so when you were doing that i presume you were calling journalists you're saying we have this great movie it should be seen by many people but the mpaa is going to stand in the way of younger people watching this is an important cause it's worth writing a story about is that pretty much the pitch yeah and you were successful in getting some stories written in some good places got some stories written got the director and one of the soldiers i did what is called a hat trick got them on all three cable networks within like two days uh-huh i was like 24 and you asked if they explained this no they sat me in a windowless office with a touchtone phone and a computer not even a laptop like a computer with a cpu and i'm sitting there and they're like put people on tv i don't know how to do that they're like here's how you build a media list and i was like okay so i looked up some people and i called them up and they usually were like this isn't what i do but you were able to get people on the phone i guess that's the first shockers i would think there'd be a little bit of an impenetrable barrier around these people but i guess not it depends on the year you get i have met with journalists who have told me i've never gotten a story from a pr person i get 87 pitches a day in my email or through twitter or however the hell people are reaching journalists i can send a pitch email to a journalist in quite some time it doesn't work if you really want to pitch a journalist you just text them one sentence i've got some shit that nobody else has do you want it okay so uh scarcity mentality yeah yeah yeah stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare okay so you're doing work for the good guys and what is the first toe in the water of hmm this feels a little unethical when i was signing what's called a foreign agents registration act form that is a form by the department of justice it's called the foreign agents registration act of 1938 hitler was hiring a bunch of pr firms to try and persuade the americans to stay out of the war or persuade them the nazi way of life is a good thing really quick so that's one right there to know so this game has been being played since before world war ii yes that's what's kind of threatening and scary is that countries are hiring american pr firms to ultimately sway the government i think that's why yeah i mean it's like a step up from propaganda that's the next thing well it's propaganda from within the target it's crazy it's loud do you guys know how much foreign money is spent on pr firms and lobbying firms what are we looking at billions it's a lot of money now the reason you don't know that is because it's foreign agent registration act so it's supposed to all go in a database so if you're working for a foreign entity you're supposed to register so that everybody knows what you're doing but this database is like impenetrable it is designed to be shitty nobody can really figure out i've searched myself and i can't find all my far forms i've registered for probably a dozen different countries and if i can't find my own what chance does a reporter have yeah this speaks to my great suspicion about you know people would get really freaked out as they should be about the government tapping into phones domestically right but my argument that's always been like yeah it shouldn't happen b you have a lot of confidence that they can actually synthesize the information they're gathering they can't they can gather data really easily but no one can make sense of it or fucking sift through it so this is a prime example it's like there's 10 000 forms and you think someone's combing through and gonna find something suspicious it's not gonna happen no and so you add up the fara database and all the money that's in there after 9-11 the saudis obviously had a bit of a reputation problem let me just go ahead and say and so they hired you know some pr firms to help clarify their position on the issue distancing themselves from osama who was a prominent member of the saudi family well what they did was they created astroturf organizations to promote saudi messaging about 9-11 explain that they created astroturf oh that is the thing in pr we always come up with cute nicknames for everything sure euphemize all your evilness like public relations strategies or things like detonate the bomb in a safe location and sink the body okay but we also talk about astroturf organizations so think about a good organization like a grassroots organization like the one campaign they built a beautiful system of like you text this number and then it adds your name to the list this wonderful thing they became bigger than the nra was what bono like to say at u2 shows so that's a grassroots organization now a astroturf organization is a fake grassroots organization it gives you the appearance of grass the appearance of public support but it doesn't exist right oh i like that it's fake grassroots yeah so basically what it is is a tax filing in delaware and a bank account and a website probably so it can be the people for a better american future but it's really a saudi fund to help untarnish the image of the saudi government all right right by the way i'm a double major one of them is pr and this is just so funny because was any of this covered no of course not you have like a week on crisis management oh because they don't want it to be this right like they don't want you to think oh it's all about covering shit up even that's like the sexy stuff and the fun week of the year they make it seem very it's all documentaries about iraq it's all positive to give you an example of what kind of dark side pr looks like can i tell you a quick story about defending the locker b bomber please i've got five stories earmarked that i want you to tell me so yes please tell this story and don't spare detail again i don't think any of us really know the mechanics of what happens take me from a client telling you i want this to your execution of that the year is 2009 my client is the qaddafi family and the just wait we need you for 10 hours i didn't know how this even like what's that call like what the fuck also it's like you clearly already drinking gallons of the kool-aid because on the first glance you just know that's not a client anyone should have but go on all right so the client's a qaddafi family and i didn't interact with the family members much but the person i interact with is the ambassador i get a call one day that i have to rush over to the libyan embassy which is in the watergate hotel perfect because nothing shady has ever happened so i go in to the watergate get to the office and i sit down with the ambassador now keep in mind the last time i was in this office with this ambassador we were on the phone with this reality tv show host called donald trump and he wanted to set a golf game with the libyan ambassador down in florida because he wanted access to libya's 60 billion dollar sovereign law fund and he also wanted to build a golf course and truly ambitious so that was the last time i was in the embassy and this time it was equally weird because the ambassador says to me i have great news for you a national hero is going to be returned to libya in 48 hours i don't know much about libyan national heroes at the times i was like who's that he says the man's name is al mcrocki and i knew who that was because i was alive in 1988 when he blew up pan am flight 103 killing 270 people on the way to ireland no it was on the way to new york oh i think it was on the way to new york it blew up over at lockery scott okay that's what i'm thinking and al mcrocki was in jail in scotland he was going to be released so they wanted my professional opinion as a media expert as to what i thought the reaction of the international media might be this is shortly after 9-11 terrorism's not hot right he's a terrorist he killed a bunch of americans so they say we need you to get us a positive piece of press the reaction the next day when everybody finds out is banned robert moller the then director of the fbi writes a letter to the scottish authorities saying this is a miscarriage justice because he what served at this point he didn't go to jail for a while it wasn't immediate and then he was in jail for a while and then some libyan doctors said that he had prostate cancer and so the scottish authorities released him okay for treatment sure so they released him and they throw him like a ticker tape parade in tripoli a hero's welcome obviously the reaction's bad from the media and so i'm brantically trying to figure out what to do to get some positive press in my research i find that the chairman of the house intelligence committee back in 2004 tried to help reopen the door to libya because we wanted them to help us kill al-qaeda we wanted them as allies and we're on terrorists the enemy of my enemy is my friend kind of mentality and qaddafi did not like terrorists because they could undo his regime so he had shared interests but like his own terrorists get the verb it's correct there was three or four congressmen this one guy i had done a recent project with so i knew his staff pretty well so i called them up and i said look this is going to undo the relationship libya is going to sever their diplomatic ties with us it's going to be bad your boss needs to do something they said well what did you have in mind and i said well i've written this letter that your boss could sign and it's a letter to secretary hillary clinton who's the secretary of state at the time one of the messages of the letter the direct quote was knock off the libya bashing and so i got him to agree to sign that letter and i leaked it to a reporter at political who then a couple days later had an article with the headline knock off the libya bashing and so getting a positive piece of press for the libyans the week al-magrahi was released the way i put it in the book is that i deserve whatever the opposite of a pulitzer is right right now does the staff of the congress person feel betrayed or like a pawn in something or they were happy to stand by that letter anyways they assumed it would get out are you burning any bridges or is everyone happy in the scenario i don't think the staff member was thrilled to read about it in the newspaper and do they call you and go why did you fucking leak that letter or they're not even sure who leaked the letter they wouldn't do that because that would be bad on them what would they say a pr guy talked to me into well i mean just mentally they might call you and yell at you i guess if i were them my two options would be someone in hillary's office leak this because they're mad at the congressman for sending this letter or my man phil leak this what an asshole but you didn't get a call like that from them are you making a calculation of like okay probably now next time i call them something they're not gonna be receptive are you aware of the fact that some of these are one and done moves yes sometimes you have to burn a bridge it is hard to make that calculation do you have a sense of how much is that costing the libyan government you mean retainers to my firm well right so i was curious what the pay structure is for these people is there a flat rate is it like lawyers and hourly is it per job because Again, I would imagine you generally have everyone over a barrel, which is like, you're not going to be able to get anything positive about this person. This kind of thing is going to cost them $2 million.
Who knows? The sky's the limit. So how is that negotiated? And what is a ballpark figure for a mission like that?
It's available in the FAR forms, how much they pay. And that stuff's not hidden? No. This is all publicly available.
Like, you can find out. So there's a major PR firm in the States. They're the largest privately held PR firm. And they represent Saudi Arabia.
And they have to disclose exactly how much they're taking in. They submitted their contract to the Department of Justice in Arabic, because that's how they delivered it to their client. Oh, okay. Talk about trying to hide things.
So I think it was Politico paid somebody to translate it into English, and they published it. They're on a retainer, and then there's add-ons. $8. Tens of millions, $100 million.
Let's go back to the Saudi Arabia example. 9-11 cost them, in reported PR fees, $15 million. And then after they killed Khashoggi, it cost them $18 million. Just for that.
Just that one issue. To the same firm. They didn't even branch out and go to a different firm. I mean, they hired the same people.
When I was reading this, I was reminded of the few times I have been overtly aware that this is happening. It's very seldom that I can sniff out what's going on. But certainly, when MBS was making his debut to the world, I first was introduced to him to remind people MBS is the current... Is he the king, I guess, of Saudi Arabia?
He's Crown Prince. Crown Prince, okay. He was on 60 Minutes. And I watched 60 Minutes.
He's talking about women's rights, and he's going to... Yeah, it was a very positive piece on him. Yes, and it was among maybe five or six I witnessed around that time. And to be honest, I bought in.
I'm like, we finally have someone that's going to probably move them closer to our millennia. Nah. And then in retrospect, I'm like, yeah, some really great agency got him. I can't get on 60 Minutes.
And I've been in show business for 20 years. Yes, you can. That's what I think what's actually sad is it wasn't that great. Go on 60 Minutes.
It worked, which is shocking, but that should be 101. We should have all seen through that, and we didn't. It's kind of embarrassing. I think that's how the players in this space, and you can tell me, justified to themselves that they're doing, which is it's ultimately on the public, right?
Well, I think of myself as kind of savvy. I was like, oh, this guy seems promising, and I can't get a segment on 60 Minutes. Tom Hanks does, right? So this person bought a segment on 60 Minutes, and it worked until there was too much evidence to the contrary.
Bachman did a job, too. He had a round for a while. Putin had a period where he wrote an op-ed. Do you remember that from the New York Times?
And I was like, wait, maybe this guy's got a point. I actually know the guy who placed it. Oh, really? Oh, yeah.
I know the PR guy who edited and placed that piece, yes. Wow. That is mind-blowing. It was a well-written piece, though.
Did you read it? Sure. Does it surprise you that some of us know each other? It doesn't, but that one's particularly tasty.
Like, if you were in the Department of Defense, and you're like, yeah, my roommate was a guy who shot Osama. I'm pretty excited to know that. I had one journalist come to me once, and I said, you really need to let the bad people handle this, because we all already know each other. And would you get together and talk shop?
Like, thank you for smoking a book I know you read and loved. Did you have those steakhouse dinners where you're like, you think that's disgusting. Here's what I'm doing in Egypt right now. More than like a celebration of it, it was more of a confessional situation.
The person who did this for me was my mentor, who I worked for after I worked for all the bad dictators, a guy by the name of Richard Levick. He was the kind of creator of crisis communications and litigation communications, and he was my mentor for a long time. He passed away recently, but he and I would get together and have dinner, and he was a great person to talk to about, I've done these things, I don't know how to feel about it, and I never want to do them again. And he would help keep me honest.
Right. So he was being a nonjudgmental, open ear in hopes of keeping you to go to the force. Yeah. But did you feel a high?
Absolutely. Yeah. Like when that happened and it went off, were you just like, oh, fuck yeah. The rush I got, and this is horrible, and I feel awful about it, from seeing that article that said knock off the Libya bashing.
Yeah. That's like stopping time, manipulating the truth, and then watching it restart again. The power. I hate it when people call what I do a magic trick, but if we have to carry forward that analogy, the book is a little bit like a pen and teller routine.
The two comedians who ruin magic tricks. Yeah. All I'm trying to do is tell people how the magic is done in order to increase media literacy. So let's talk about, and to remind people, there was a moment where Qatar was bidding for hosting the World Cup.
We too were hoping to host the World Cup. There's numerous reasons why that one always smelled a little bit. Just merely the heat, and not an ideal place to host. But walk us through being brought on to that project.
This is in 2010. ESPN said about the Qatari bid that it made more sense to play the Super Bowl in a lake than it made to play the World Cup in Qatar. Because due to the cycle, you have to play it in the summer, right? So you don't interrupt the European Soccer League.
So if you played it at that time, it would have been 120 degrees then. Sorry, guys. I've been to Qatar. It's lovely, but not a place I want to play soccer in July.
It's a long shot bid. My job was to go negative on the opposing bids. The United States was the main opponent to host the 2022 games. So we're doing some things, and nothing's really working all that well.
Talk about uphill battle. And then one day, Congress passed a sense of the House resolution. Now, these mean nothing. They passed one for the Girl Scout troop that sells the most cookies.
So they passed a sense of the House resolution saying, we think the United States should host the World Cup. Well, this enrages our client. And our client at the time was the Qatari royal family. We worked for various aspects of the industry.
They tell my employer, get your man in Washington, me, to get a resolution introduced into the U.S. Congress opposing their own bid to host the World Cup. And what I said to my boss, do you want me to also get a resolution introduced saying flag burning is mandatory in elementary schools? That's not going to happen, my friend.
And all he says to me was, I said it, you make it true. And then he hung up on me. So I went to a bar. It was like three in the afternoon.
I was sitting outside. This is a bar called Fox now. It's got a great patio. It's a terrible place.
They serve you a glass of vodka and a side of tonic or soda. So if you have two or three of these, you're like gone. You're ready to fall back through that library window. Yeah, and at the time it was only like $5.50.
It was a good deal. I'm on my second or third, and this group of school kids walks by, and they're all morbidly obese. And I was like, shit, that's my answer. Oh my God.
That's my answer, Monica. It's hard not to respect the cleverness of a lot of this. I know, I know. Here we go.
I got a cocktail napkin and a pen, and I wrote this resolution that said the United States government would not support bids for any international games, World Cup, or Olympic until we fully funded physical education programs in public schools. Wow. Monica. Monica Lily Padman.
That's really good. Oh yeah, the first lady was all about childhood obesity and getting kids moving. But how does this work? So you write it on a napkin, and then what are the steps?
I don't understand this. Well, first step is finding this napkin the next day because he was in the blackout. This is why drinking is kind of good. This is a PR move for alcoholism, for sure.
I hired him. All of the good stories involved first getting drunk and on a certain brand of vodka, and we were missing it the whole time. Okay, so the mechanics of D.C. So if you want to get a resolution introduced, it's a good idea to go to a lobbyist.
If you go to a big lobbying firm, they're going to ask all kinds of questions, and they're going to make sure they appropriately file paperwork and things like that. If you go to an independent operator lobbyist, they're easier to work with. So I go to this guy who I know has a good relationship with a lot of members of Congress, and I said, I'm working for the Healthy Kids Coalition. This guy didn't know who my client was.
I'm working for the Healthy Kids Coalition. Is that made up? Well, that's the AstroTurf organization. Is it made up?
Well, no, it's a tax filing in Delaware and a website. It has the ability to issue press releases, and so it's almost an organization. And so he's like, that'll cost $25,000. And I said, well, we only have 10.
And he ended up taking it. He got Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick to introduce the resolution. Now, this is a member of Congress. She's retired.
Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick. And she chose to keep her middle name in play. I like it. You like it's playful?
Yeah, sure. So she's actually the mother of a guy named Kwame Kilpatrick, who was the mayor of Detroit, who was a jail. Oh, he had a lot of tasty stuff. I'm from Detroit.
He bought a Lincoln Navigator under the government fund for his car. But his buddy owned the Navigator dealership. And lo and behold, this Navigator was like $180,000. Well, there are only $80,000.
I wonder where the other $100,000 went. There was a lot of hijinks. Well, a stripper disappeared. I don't know if they were from her body.
It's not great. So she had lost her primary, and this lobbyist got her to agree to introduce this resolution on her way out the door. So my job was to then get some press coverage of this. So I knew of this reporter at Politico, who was a soccer fan, and I leaked him the resolution.
He was like, oh, this is great. He called the congressman's office. They confirmed it was real. And then he wrote an article with the headline, World Cup versus Gym Class.
So I do not in any way claim that I even switched one vote of the FIFA members. There was a lot of bribery. A lot of people were in jail over this. What it did was it provided cover to every voter who voted against the U.S.
bid because they could say their own Congress doesn't want it. The main strategy which you left out was if we could present to FIFA that the U.S. itself is divided on whether or not they even want to host it, that would be enough seed of doubt to tip it. Now, this was going to be one of my follow-up questions about the Qatar case or Cutter case specifically.
When you're working with a client, you have to be aware that they're probably employing a lot of strategies. And as time would tell, they were also bribing people. A, do you always assume that? B, do you ever attempt to guide them and say, allow this process to happen?
Because if you muddy it up with these other angles, you're going to lose ultimately. What happens with the multiple strategies? That gets confusing, which is why my favorite kind of client are the ones who are just like, burn it down. We didn't have to worry about strategies intersecting in this instance because it was just make the Americans look bad.
There was no like, protect this but not. Right. It gets complicated sometimes when you have multiple actors and multiple interests. In this case, it was simple.
To quote Shakespeare, cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war. That's my first time hearing this. I know. Unfortunately, I don't know.
I don't even know that I understand. I didn't know. I didn't know. I could see a panicked Cutter family just deploying everything at their disposal and some of them tripping up other ones.
I want to bring up one thing. There was an amazing front line called Black Money. And it was about how a certain aircraft manufacturer in England was going to supply fighter jets to the Ministry of Defense in Saudi Arabia. And this was while Margaret Thatcher was the prime minister.
The way this worked was the Saudi minister of defense went to the airplane manufacturer and said, we will buy $30 billion worth of jets, but we want $5 billion back. This was seen by Margaret Thatcher. This was all signed off on. And they had these Amex cards, the whole family, that really the airplane manufacturer paid for.
And some of the expenses that came out was one of the wives of one of these princes flew on a 747 with just her and her dog and went to Beverly Hills and shot for five days straight and filled up the entire 747. Mind you, also, she brought back like four Rolls Royces for her husband. And the entire bill is given to the airplane manufacturer and it's paid. And like, that's the level of bizarre kickbacks that are happening with these military contracts.
Like, there's so much fucking graph going on. It's crazy. So yeah, when I hear they're paying you guys however many hundreds of thousands to plant that story, like, that's chump change. They're backdooring $5 billion off the jet purchase.
The Cutteries, I think, paid us $80,000 a month. And they ended up spending $220 billion on the games. Oh my God. Oh my Lord.
The numbers are fucking astronomical. $220 billion. For 5,228 minutes of soccer. Right.
Wow. That would fund the FBI for 22 years. We were supposed to have a win bonus in our contract. It was seven figures.
And the Cutteries, before they signed their contract, redlined the bonus, signed the contract, told my employer there were no changes to it, and he didn't check. Oh. Ah. So they spent $220 billion but only $80 a month on PR.
That doesn't seem fair. But yes, yes, you guys got underpaid. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. Okay, I want to hear about more Gaddafi.
Gaddafi? There are actually, I think, 25 accepted spellings of his name. Every review of this book so far has spelled it differently. Okay.
It's great. I'm pronouncing everyone. He's dead. Okay, so the son of Gaddafi, who you were at, what was the fun acronym you gave?
Around Europe. Yeah, Leisurely, Leisurely, Leisurely, Leisurely, Leisurely, who was also there. You, at one point, got employed again by them to help with the situation he was in. I never worked directly for him.
I had to babysit with Tussum. Is that what you mean? Oh, maybe. There was a long weekend in Vegas with drugs, guns, and extreme high stakes.
Walk us through that. There are three important things to know about the little episode in Vegas. The first of which is I had never been to Vegas before. As a tour guide, functionally useless.
Right, right. Okay. The second is I didn't know why I was going to Vegas. You know, when they called me out, they said, Phil, need you to get on a plane, go to Vegas, pack a bag.
It'd be good. They did not mention the whole dictator's kid thing. Okay. I'm sitting on the plane.
They close the aircraft door, and an email bleeps through on my BlackBerry. That's what I was carrying at the time. Yeah, nice instrument. Oh, yeah.
A little dial. A little dial, yeah. I'm scrolling, and what I received, if you printed it off, it would have been four or five pages long. It was an email from my colleague, and it was a list of demands, pretty much, from Matasem Qaddafi, one of the sons.
So he was the national security advisor of Libya. He was 35 years old. He had recently done a photo op with Hillary Clinton, but had a news alert for Libya. So I read everything that came out in the U.S.
media about the Libyans, so I knew about all their antics. But I knew about this guy. You know, he ran his own military unit. He had a doctorate from the University of Moscow, I believe, but he's the scariest person I've ever met.
What does physically he look like? Physically, he was kind of wiry and kind of had this sunken face, but looked like a bad guy. Straight out of Central Casting, the clothes were on, the hair game was on point. I don't know if he killed anybody, personally, but I know that in his 20s, he led a coup to try to overthrow his father.
Oh, wow. That did not work out. And he remained part of the family. Look, man, Qaddafi took over the country in his 20s.
He kind of thought, you know, game respects game. Sure. Proven that he would be a rightful heir, maybe. Right.
Oh, God, it's a succession. Yes, he wants him to be better. Well, there was this Game of Thrones going on about who would succeed Qaddafi. Safe was in line, Hannibal thought he was in line, and Mattassum thought he was, Hale's my favorite of the Qaddafi children.
I could go on for hours about the extracurse of these people, but real quick on Hannibal. Hannibal was arrested on every continent but Antarctica. Okay. He once got arrested in Paris for driving his car the wrong way down the St.
Louis Seck. It was a Maserati or something like that, but he, of course, fled diplomatic immunity and he was just fine. Finally, his antics did come to a head when he was in Switzerland and he beat up a hotel employee and he was arrested. Said diplomatic immunity, got out of the country, but it pissed off Muammar Qaddafi so much that he divested $5 billion in Switzerland.
Oh, he was so offended. Yeah, he suspended diplomatic relations and he caused a diplomatic spat with Switzerland. He arrested Swiss diplomats in Tripoli. My Lord.
Crazy. Who picks a fight with Switzerland? The whole thing is that they don't fight with people. Yeah, so it was very odd.
Fun fact, one of his daughters was an attorney. Do you know who her most famous client was? Saddam Hussein. No.
At his trial where he was hung. I believe this is accurate. Double-checking. His attorney was Qaddafi's daughter.
Oh, my God. Back to what I said. Sometimes they all know each other. I don't know why I'm inclined to say this, but I'm going to say it.
I try to not be terribly judgmental. I do think there is a worldview which is like, it's every man for themselves. This is how the world is. This is how nature is.
It's every man for themselves. And we've got to scratch and claw our way to the top. And if that's the worldview given to you by your parents, I don't know how you break out of it. I don't know how you just absorb morality from the ether.
If this is a kill-or-be-killed world you live in, and that's what we tell these kids, I would expect the worst. Yeah, so I knew a lot about the family, and I knew enough to be afraid. You know, I'd heard rumors that Qaddafi liked to shoot people as kind of a form of entertainment. It was a very frightening experience.
So my assignment was to look after Matassi in Vegas for three days. Oh, simply to keep them out of trouble or to just help them navigate? Make sure nothing went into the press. And also to pay for everything.
Just how embarrassing. seem to be to go to a strip club and turn down your credit card and says Gaddafi. Keep in mind, this was the last week of Ramadan, like the holiest time in the Muslim faith. We're partying in Vegas.
Oh, my God. Not great optics. Other sons were partying in different cities in America. The whole reason they were there is the brother leader was speaking at the United Nations, and he was going to address the UN General Assembly.
And so we were all anticipating that. Hanging out in Vegas for three days with this dictator's kid who had access to this $60 billion sovereign wealth fund. I mean, have you ever been to the Bellagio with somebody who confidently walks into place and is like, yeah, I can buy this? Right.
And everyone in it. That was the mentality that he had. But you have to somehow pay for everything so there's no paper trail of any of the shit he's doing? Right.
We put everything on the room. I had nine rooms under my name. I threw down my corporate annex card, which was not a black card. That's important to understand because in the end, my credit card is declined.
Yeah. I'm going to try to check out. But the whole time they're there, they want to do weird stuff. They want to buy jean shorts.
I'm not sure why that sticks out of my mind as being weird, but it was. I'm very human about that. It wasn't enough to breed any sympathy. They want to buy an Escalade.
They wanted some Harleys shipped to Libya, as one does. They wanted to go to a live fire shooting range. So there's a gun store in Vegas that has a shooting range. And they wanted me to call it close that down so that we could go in there and shoot some guns.
I didn't think that sounded safe. Well, because they're hammered and on God knows what. Right. And are they going to turn the gun on me?