Phil Elwood (on the dark side of PR)

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts. on Expert. I'm Dan Buckheimer. I'm joined by Minnikle Luce.

There is a big through line in today's show with today's guest.

There is? Yeah. Well, first of all, this is juicy as 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.

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-.

And he's here to talk about it.

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. Me too. It was so fascinating.

The through line is I majored in PR.

Oh, that's right.

And I never get to say I majored in.

I know you-.

I keep that close to the, is it close to the vest or the chest? Okay.

I don't get it. 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?

Oh.

I'm going to say vest, because yeah, chest makes everyone think about my chest. That's not what I'm talking about.

Playing it close to your chest. It's not very close to you per se. Vest is the original. Vest is the original. Vest is the original, but people now equally use chest.

Oh, okay.

Thank you for clearing that up. Great.

Okay. Well, I keep, I majored in PR, close to my vest, close to my, the row vest. Anyway, so that's the connection.

Yeah. No, we never hear about your major. Mine, hourly.

And I have two.

You have two. Yeah. Congratulations. Thank you. Summa Cum Laude.

He's an object spanner.

He's an object spanner.

Hi there. Phil.

Dax.

Nice to meet you. How old are you, Phil? I was trying to figure out, while I was reading your book, if we're similar age.

I just turned 45.

Younger man. It doesn't feel that way. I know. It feels like you've lived maybe more lives.

My mom always says, Phil, it's not the years, it's the miles.

Oh, uh-huh. Sure, sure. Well, yeah. As someone who collects cars, that's very true. This is an extremely tasty topic you're tackling with your book.

Are you scared?

Scared of what?

Not of us, because we're pretty tame.

I'm dangerous.

Excuse me. Excuse me, Dax is extremely, 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? No. Be honest.

Mostly. no. I know.

It's kind of crazy, but it too is manipulatable.

It is. I can't trust anything anymore.

Okay. So I would love to give like 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 shoogie. So, first and foremost, your book, All the Worst Humans, what you explain in 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.

It is a very fair characterization.

Okay. Okay. Great. Within, that, there's a lot of underbelly. There's a lot of, we might call them bad actors on the scene.

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 in Olympia, Washington.

It's not up there in the Bs yet.

Well, the school was known for grade inflation, so actually I was probably getting Ds.

Dad's a pastor, which makes this even more intriguing.

Preacher's kids generally go one of two ways.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you went the other way. So when do 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.

What is it?

It's a Mexican. Have you been?

No. It's in Pittsburgh?

Yeah, it's in Pittsburgh.

No, I would have made a pilgrimage after hearing the description, but alas, it's closed. Oh. A Mexican restaurant.

Got it. Just super loud music. Everybody was on drugs. Oh, wow. And the cooks were all smoking pot, the waiters were all doing Coke, I think the manager was on E.

So you had to. How was the food?

The food was amazing.

It could be their diet of money. Because you were a cook. Yeah. Of course, you would say it.

I would say, 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 back there? What is wrong with you?

Yeah. What a mishmash of different experiences everyone was having on the many different drugs. Okay. But back to debate. So you're really good at debate, and then presumably you get a debate.

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 them. I almost said work, but it was kind of like work, because it was the same as my job.

And so I know what kind of debate we're talking about. I grew up with a certain idea of what debate was, and then I recently saw something, maybe you guys have seen this, where it's like, it's speed debate.

This is the kind I did.

Have you seen this, Monica?

I don't think so.

It's 400 to 500 words a minute.

Oh, wow. 400 to 500.. They get up there and they go, they're talking that fast.

It's like the micromachine, 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.

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. A, 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 flow chart. 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 what personality type is drawn to it, if you had to stereotype, or at least give me 51%? Like, did those kids party? Yeah. Because the stress level?

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 it 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? That's a good question. You've got kind of like a laid-back vibe. 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 could see where it had 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.

Right, but it taught me how to think quickly and how to solve problems creatively. I've 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.

So just not motivated by money, other than more, is better, clearly, and safer.

People are horrified by how little money I made doing these things.

Oh, wow. Well, of course, I'm on the greedy end of the spectrum. I'm more like your financial friends. I'm like, how much? I've got to get enough to be safe.

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.

Well, I have to say, while reading about your experience, I definitely see a lot of crazy parallels between Hollywood and D.

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 Correspondents' Dinner. Hollywood's like, oh, we 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 in a compromising position. But we're just going to keep doing it every year, because, you know, we do it every year. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think it's very interesting. I'm totally glad I went and saw it 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 got to give these speeches and be funny.

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 have done. Yeah.

Because why? They're so well-versed in the law. They know how to deal within the margins or...

Morally deplete.

Oh, yeah.

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.

It's hard to know.

There's a lot of defending the indefensible, but someone has to do it.

See, but 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 land in Washington 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.

After it ruined my life. Okay.

You're like, I'm not going back to that. And you never did? No. Good for you. Even when blitzed, hammered?

Wow. No, I've been offered coke many times 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.

The cost benefit.

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 hideaway office. Nobody knows about this. There are wonderful little hideaway offices throughout the Capitol that senior senators get. Moynihan's had this beautiful view of Pennsylvania Avenue, and Levin had this beautiful view of the mall.

And they're little clubhouses. They are. What do you think the design intent of those was?

They were the original offices. So in the Capitol building itself, you still have the old Senate chamber and the old House chamber, and you had 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 are 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?

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 to 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 the street name. What is that? 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 was a ground floor window into Gelman Library at GW.

Oh, no.

I thought I was getting my life back together. Everything was going to be fine. 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..

Moynihan was retiring, and Hillary Clinton took.

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.

First time I saw what power was, I got to D.

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 was thinking about Hollywood, D.

That's good. One of the things I do not like that's 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. Yeah. But again, just as you were pulled, we're all pulled. We're all status monkeys. It's pretty intoxicating.

I stopped working for the senator and went to be a full time student. And then one thing happened and then I went back to working for the senator, worked 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.

Oh, the condle?

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.

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, yeah.

Kind of a waste of his efforts.

Yeah, I know.

So I think safe to say there's some thrills seeking. Oh, yeah.

What was your major? did you complete there?

They called it government, political science, whatever 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 and they're like, 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 and hit send 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. One student who was in his PhD program. there was a man by the name of Saif Al-Islam Qaddafi.

There we go. Qaddafi's son.

That was my first interaction with the family.

Do you have a friendship at all there or you just knew him? Oh, no.

I knew of him. He would walk around campus with security guards and he was mostly there for club openings and things like that.

Yeah, yeah. What did he get a PhD in?

Buying a PhD, I think, is what he got a PhD in. I believe the director of the school had to resign after the Arab Spring because it came out that Saif bought his PhD with bribes.

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? And I was like, well, yeah, but it's in London.

That's nice.

Yeah. I went to Amsterdam several times. I went all over Europe, visited Italy. It was great.

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.

Yeah, yeah.

Because, you know, they make a bunch of 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.

Well, yeah.

You get a job at a PR firm. You end up working for several. And when you first start it, what is your understanding of it? How is it explained to you? Do you know right away?

At first, it was pretty good guy stuff. I go 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 Uday Hussein's Bamdab Palace in the Ottomia section of Baghdad. And the movie was called Gunner Palace. It received from the MPAA an R rating because there's this rule that if 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 rating.

Okay. Nods.

The word fuck appears in this movie like about a hundred times. Sure. 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.

Yeah, combustible. So when you were doing that, I presume you were calling journalists, you were 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, this is an important cause, it's worth writing a story about. Is that pretty much the pitch? You got it. 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. I got them on all three cable networks within like two days. I was like 24 and you ask if they explained this to me. No, they sat me in a windowless office with a touch tone phone and a computer, not even a laptop, like a computer with a CPU.

But you were able to get people on the phone. I guess that's the first. shocker is, I would think there'd be a little bit of an impenetrable barrier around these people, but I guess not.

It depends on the ear 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 haven't sent a pitch email to a journalist in quite some time. It doesn't work.

Okay. So, scarcity, uh, mortality. Yeah. Yeah. Stay tuned for more armchair expert.

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 that the Nazi way of life is a good thing.

Well, really quick. So that's fun 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 wild.

I mean, it's like a step up from propaganda. That's the next thing.

Yeah. 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 this 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.

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 to that's always been like, yeah, A, it shouldn't happen. B, you have a lot of confidence that they can actually synthesize the information they're gathering. They can't.

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.

Distance 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 a little better. They created AstroTurf.

Oh, that is the thing. in PR. We always come up with cute nicknames for everything.

Sure, euphemize all your evilness.

By public relations strategies or things like detonate the bomb in a safe location and sink the body. 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. It's this wonderful thing.

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.

You got it. Oh, God. All right. Great. By the way, I'm a double major.

Was any of this covered?

No, of course not. You have like a week on crisis management 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 though 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 Lockerbie 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 a detail. Again, I don't think any of us really know the mechanics of what happened.

The year is 2009.

I'm just waiting.

We need you here for 10 hours, because I need to know how this even, like, what's that call?

Like, what the fuck? Also, it's like, you've clearly already drinking gallons of the Kool-Aid, because on first glance you just know that's not a client anyone should have. But go on.

All right. So the client's the Gaddafi 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 up a golf game with the Libyan ambassador down in Florida because he wanted access to Libya's $60 billion sovereign wealth fund. And he also wanted to build a golf course in Tripoli.

On the way to Ireland?

No, it was on the way to New York.

Oh, on the way to New York.

I think it was on the way to New York. It blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland.

Oh, okay. That's why I'm thinking that.

And Al-Megrahi 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 now. He's a terrorist.

Not cute. It's out of vogue.

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 bad. Robert Mueller, the then director of the FBI, writes a letter to the Scottish authorities saying this is a miscarriage of justice.

Right. Because he what served at this point? 28?.

He didn't go to jail for a while. It wasn't immediate. And then he was in jail for a little 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 frantically 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 in the war on terrorists.

Although he liked his own terrorists.

Well, yeah, he liked his own.

Well, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Those are national heroes. I just wanted to...

Get the verbiage correct.

Sorry, right. 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.

Right, right. A shitsky. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, Jesus, come up with something.

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 this 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 look bad on them. What would they say? A PR guy talked me into signing the letter?

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 leaked this because they're mad at the congressman for sending this letter. Or my man, Phil, leaked 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 or something, they're not gonna be receptive.

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 in 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 it's hourly? Is it per job?

It's available on the FARA 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.

it. They're on a retainer. And then there's add-ons.

Big dollars.

Tens of millions, a hundred 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. For that, yeah.

Just that one issue.

To the same firm. They didn't even like 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 and to remind people, MBS is the current, is he the king, I guess, of Saudi Arabia?

He's the 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- Oh yeah.

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, they finally have someone. that's going to probably move them closer to our millennia.

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, justify to themselves that they're doing it, 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.

I actually know the guy who placed it. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. I know the PR guy who edited it and placed that piece. Yes.

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 the 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.

Right. So he was being a nonjudgmental open ear in hopes of keeping you to go to the force.

Yeah. 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. 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 Penn and Teller routine, the two comedians who ruin magic tricks. 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.

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 an 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 the 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.

Yeah, you're ready to fall back through that library window.

Yeah, and at the time, it was only like $5.

That's my answer, Monica. Would you hear how twisted? It's hard not to respect the cleverness of a lot of this.

I know, I know. Yeah, yeah. 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. Fuck. Monica Lilly 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 a blackout. It's so shitty. Probably so.

This is why drinking is just kind of good. It's good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a PR move.

This is a pro drink.

For alcoholism, for sure.

I hired him.

What if his ultimate Machiavellian ploy was to come here, really, just like all of the good stories that involve first getting drunk, and on a certain brand of vodka, and we were missing it the whole time?

Okay, so.

The mechanics of DC. 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.

But is that made up?

Well, that's the AstroTurf organization.

That's the AstroTurf organization. Is it made up? Well, no. It's a tax filing in Delaware. in a website.

Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick. And she chose to keep her middle name in play.

I like it.

You like it? It's playful. Yeah. Sure.

She was actually the mother of a guy named Kwame Kilpatrick, who was the mayor of Detroit, who went to 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. He's entitled to a car. But his buddy owned the Navigator dealership.

There was a lot of hijinks.

Well, a stripper disappeared. I don't know if they ever found her body.

It's not great. It's not a big deal. 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.

The main strategy which you left out was if we could present to FIFA that the U.

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.

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. Now, Monica, her other major was theater. I know. She probably should know.

Unfortunately, I don't know.

Damn it.

I don't even know that. I understand what it means.

I didn't know AstroTurf and I didn't know Julius Caesar.

You might want to ask for a refund at UGA, but then you went for free, so there's really.

nothing to refund.

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 frontline 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 Qataris, I think, paid us $80,000 a month and they ended up spending $220 billion on the games.

Oh, my God.

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 Qataris, 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.

Yes, yes. You guys got underpaid. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

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 crazy. Pronounce it however you want to.

Okay, so the son of Gaddafi, who you were at, what was the fun acronym you gave?

Around Europe.

Leisurely. Let's See Europe. Let's See Europe. While you were at Let's See Europe, 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 Matassim. 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. When they called me up, they said, Phil, need you to get on a plane, go into Vegas, pack a bag, you'll be good. They did not mention the whole dictator's kid thing. I'm sitting on the plane, they close the aircraft door, and an email bleeps through on my Blackberry.

Nice instrument. Oh, yeah.

I miss it. A fucking hockey puck thing. Yeah.

With a little dial.

Yeah. I'm scrolling, and what I received, if you printed it off, 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 Muttasem Gaddafi. One of the sons. 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.

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. That did not work out.

And he remained employed.

Look, man, Gaddafi 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 like succession.

Yes, he wants him to try to.

There was this Game of Thrones going on about who would succeed. Gaddafi. Saif was in line, Hannibal thought he was in line, Muttasem thought he was. Hannibal's my favorite of the Gaddafi children. I could go on for hours about the eccentricities of these people.

Oh, he was so offended.

Yeah, he suspended diplomatic relations. He caused a diplomatic spat with Switzerland. He arrested Swiss diplomats in Tripoli.

My Lord.

Crazy. Who picks a fight with Switzerland? Their whole thing is that they don't fight with people. Reality, yeah. Yeah.

No.

At his trial, where he was hung, I believe this is accurate, double check me, his attorney was Gaddafi'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 just because 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.

Yeah. So I knew a lot about the family and I knew enough to be afraid. You know, I'd heard rumors that Gaddafi liked to shoot people as kind of a form of entertainment. It was a very frightening experience. So my assignment was to look after Matassim and Vegas for three days.

Oh, sensibly, 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. Oh, because how embarrassing would it be to go to a strip club and throw down your credit card and it 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. The 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 dollar sovereign wealth fund.

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 Amex card, which was not a black card. That's important to understand, because in the end, my credit card gets declined when I try to check out.

I'm very human about that.

It wasn't enough to breed any sympathy. He wanted to buy an Escalade. He 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 and close that down so that we could go in there and shoot some guns.

Well, because they're hammered and on God knows what.

And are they going to turn the gun on me? I don't know. Would they get away with it? Absolutely. So let's not do that.

How many guys is he traveling with?

I think there were nine in the entourage.

Okay. This is a lot of testosterone.