The Jordan Harbinger Show - 1018: Phil Elwood | Manipulating Media for All the Worst Humans

Episode Date: July 16, 2024

All the Worst Humans author Phil Elwood is here to illustrate his past life as a PR operative who made powerful pariahs palatable to public perception! What We Discuss with Phil Elwood: Phil Elwood's career as a PR operative for notorious figures was essentially a real-life version of being a supervillain's henchman, involving ethically dubious practices to manipulate public perception. Phil's work took him into the belly of the beast, collaborating with shady organizations and visiting dangerous locations to spin narratives for some of the world's most detestable characters. The moral weight of constantly lying and bending the truth for nefarious clients exacted a heavy toll on Phil's mental health, leading to substance abuse and requiring intensive therapy. Phil's experiences provide a rare, candid glimpse into the dark underbelly of global PR and political spin, exposing the extent to which public perception can be contrived. Despite his ethically questionable past, Phil's story offers hope for redemption. He has since established clear moral boundaries in his work, demonstrating that it's possible to learn from past mistakes and align one's career with their values. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1018 This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. It was weird. They had these briefcases. They were black, snake-skin briefcases that were filled with money. And the bills were like they were in plastic wrap. You just take the garbage bag out and you fill it with cash. And then you walk through the Belagio with this garbage bag. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people

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Today on the show, a man whose job was to generate fake news and get things done in government or in Vegas for some of the world's worst people, frankly, Phil Elwood has been a PR operative and fixer for dictators, royals, spies, and crooked politicians alike. not good for your soul, unsurprisingly. The man has some stories, and I'm keen to dive in. So here we go with Phil Elwood. Thanks for joining me, man. Your job was slash is?

I have was, but I guess is, to make some of the worst people on earth seem not only palatable, but frankly help them get their way, kind of regardless of how tasteless or possibly, is it, say, if it's illegal that their agenda is? It's not illegal, maybe, but it's quite distasteful. You know, I promised my wife, that I'd stay away from saying what's legal and illegal. Is your wife also your lawyer? No, my lawyer is my lawyer.

My wife is my wife. And both of them have veto power over anything I do. I think that's a good idea. I mean, as a lawyer or not your lawyer, probably shouldn't say all the illegal things that you've done on any podcast. Yeah, we go with words like questionable. Questionable. Questionable is a good one.

I should have thrown that in there. That's definitely the way to go. But I don't any longer work for dictators. I won't work against democracy and I won't break the law. It's a low bar. It's a low bar film. Well, you know, we're working on it. Gotcha.

Every life is a work in progress. All right. Let's, we'll back up and start a little earlier. So you dropped out of college. Can you tell me why? Yeah. I developed a bit of a cocaine problem. Gotcha.

When I was about 20 years old. The way I like to look at this, the early part of my life is in kind of two ways. So there's the Instagram way or the LinkedIn way. And then there's the reality of the situation. Right. So if you look at my LinkedIn profile, it says, that by the age of 24, I held degrees from both Georgetown and the London School of Economics. And also worked for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the chairman of the Finance Committee,

and Senator Carl Levin, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee. In reality, at the age of 20, I dropped out of college because of a drug problem and moved to D.C. to dry out. I don't know how much you know about D.C., but that's not exactly the place to do it. But did successfully kick the drug issue and interned for Senator Moynihan. and their office helped me get into George Washington University, pretty good school in D.C. I was promptly thrown out after I drunkenly fell through the window of Gelman Library at GW one afternoon. Monahan was retiring, so he couldn't give me a job in his office, so he leaned on Carl Levin's office.

They were across the hall in the Russell Senate office building to hire me. Why did he do that for you? Because that's... Because that was a good intern. Okay. Because dropping out of college, joining the office, and then getting thrown out of the... of a college they get you into because you fell through a window through negligence, right? Right.

It's like, you must have been a really good intern. I was well liked. Yikes. I was well liked. Good. Well, that seems to be your superpower, I suppose. Getting to know people and getting to trust people and getting people to trust you is a skill. You told me earlier that my job isn't to manipulate the narrative.

My job is to get media gatekeepers like CNN to do it for me. And it's not just CNN, right? What does this mean? because it's kind of a damning indictment of media when it's like, oh, I can just get these guys to do dishonest stuff. Well, the first thing I want to say is that the purpose of this book was not to increase cynicism or skepticism, but rather to increase media literacy. Good. And, you know, I want people to understand how the news is made. But the important part of that sentiment is that the media is just that.

They're just a thing in between. I'm not terribly interested in getting a reporter to write a story unless it does. does something kinetically out in the world. So you do a story in order to punish a villain or get a law changed or, you know, expose corruption of some kind. That's why you do a news story, not just to see your name in the newspaper. But your job was to get your clients, not just their name in the newspaper, but to do those kinetic things in the real world.

Right. And I've suddenly become very aware that you're on my podcast and we're doing media about the... But it's interesting because thinking about it, podcasting has become part of this sort of potential toxic ecosystem. Well, first of all, an example from my own life is China trying to pay me to post this video about how COVID must have come from the American white-tailed deer. It's like this poorly narrated, animated video, and they were just going through everybody with a YouTube following. And YouTube is like 1% of this audience, so the bar is pretty low.

And it's like a fake ad agency or a real ad agency based in, you know, some country that may or may not be China. And they're trying to pay you a pittance to post this. And when you say, actually, my following is mostly audio. They're like, oh, let's see what we can do with this. How big is it? And it's like, would you consider doing an audio version or maybe discussing the topic of how COVID must have only definitely come from the American Whitetail Deer? And it's just like, that's a clumsy example of something that maybe resonates a little bit with what you do or had done in the past? Sure. So there was a time later in my career when I was working for some former Israeli spies. And their trade craft, their method of extracting information from targets, was to create online

avatars. They, it would create like open job postings for a desirable job and have the target in mind and advertise that job posting at the target in order to get them to apply for a job. So this is like a LinkedIn trap. Absolutely. So what they do is get them to apply for a job and then have them turn over work product from former employers who they knew very well who they formerly worked for because they were the target of an intelligence operation. And if the source was really good, they would bring the avatar to life

and lure the target into a jurisdiction where it's legal to audio or videotape someone and they would extract additional information from them. Really? Okay. Their tagline was something along the lines of everything we do is legal in the jurisdiction in which we do it. Sure. Right. That's hand. You hear also about Russia, China, Iran doing similar things. A lot of the focus is on China. I'm not just obsessed with China. I mean, I am, but a lot of the focus is on China right now because you hear these academic professors or whatever going over there,

giving a talk, and then they get invited to a dinner. And it's like, tell us how this machine metal printing innovation thing works. And they're like, well, I'm not going to give away anything secret, but I'm going to get right up to the edge. And then they have another guy come in the same industry, and they ask them different questions. And he's like, well, I'm not going to give anything away secret, but I'm going to go right up to the edge.

But it's like the other side, and it's eventually so obvious. Maybe they don't tell you what's in the center, but they make the outline of the thing around whatever's in the center at some point, if this analogy makes sense. It does. And then by the time they've gotten four or five of these guys over there, they've maybe found one who's like, I will divulge stuff I probably shouldn't for $500,000 and luxury trips to China, where I see my fake girlfriend that's an intelligence officer or something in China. And they eventually just get that IP. Everybody thinks they just barely maybe did something that they kind of sort of wouldn't normally have done, but it's no big deal. Once you make that equation, it's just like it adds up to valuable intellectual property. Other sort of dishonest medias, I mean, RT, I know you talked about that in the book. They tried to hire me a long time ago. And I was just like, you're just going to plant stories. And they're like, look, people do this for this paycheck.

Your journalism paycheck is crap. They didn't do their homework. I was a lawyer and then I did this. So I either made a lot of money or no money and then back to a lot of money. So then offering me like 80 grand instead of 40 or whatever they thought they were going to, you know, most people in my position were making it was not worth it. But that's the lure. So when you wonder why crazy people on RT are putting fake stories and it's because their paycheck is doubled or their nuts or both. Yes. Right. And so my experience with RT was a little different than that. They were a client of the firm. So at the time we had two media companies as clients, Al Jazeera and Russia today. Okay. And so cleaning up after Al Jazeera was a little difficult because this was just post. 9-11. America didn't really want the, you know, Middle Eastern perspective on what we were doing over there. But RT was an interesting assignment because I had to meet up with, and I always say her last name wrong, had to meet up with Margarita Simoleon and take her on a tour of

newsrooms of New York and meet with my employers. So who is this person? She was the 25-year-old at the time managing editor of Russia today. 25-year-old managing editor. It was a really, she was a little young for the position. I would say. But yes, Russia today, for those who don't know, is kind of the English language mouthpiece of the Russian government, Putin's kind of English language mouthpiece. She and I met up at a bar, I believe in Hell's Kitchen, at 1130 in the morning, and started drinking martinis. Okay. As one does. I mean, that's very New York, though, too. Very, very New York, very Russian. It was appropriate for the situation. I can't recall with with any certainty because we kept drinking.

And I can't recall with any certainty any of the meetings we went to with the exception of the last one, which was at the nation. We met with the editor of the nation and I can't remember any of the substance of the media, but they really got along very well and it was a very odd, odd interaction.

Yeah, to have a Russian mouthpiece getting along with it. An American. Yeah, an American user. So what are we doing for RT, what are we? What are you doing for RT in Al Jazeer? I shouldn't use the Royal We when we're talking.

talking about this stuff. What are you doing for RT and Al Jazeera at this point? Because you gave her a tour of American newsrooms, but Al Jazeera is like, that's what, a Qatar-based? Yes. And I won't say propaganda mouthpiece, even though it, would you say propaganda mouthpiece? I'll let you say it instead of me. They have done in the past some very good, legitimate journalism. Yeah. And some great people have worked for Al Jazeera over the years. I remember one anecdote that a manager, I don't remember his name, but the managing editor of Jazeera was on a panel with somebody from CNN and somebody from another news network. And they said, you know, how can you be legitimate journalism, your state funded? You get your money from the government.

And he turned it around on him and said, how can you be legitimate? You get your money from corporations who have a vested interest in your coverage. It's, you know, an interesting question of if money's going to corrupt, where does the money come from? I'm not defending Al Jazeera. I'm just saying that there are complications in every media environment. Would you trust news from those sources? It would depend on what kind of news it was. Qatar was under an embargo from four of their neighbors for a number of years,

and their coverage of their neighbors wasn't exactly objective. So, like, do I believe Jazeera's coverage of what's going on in Saudi Arabia? I don't know. Or in the United Arab Emirates or in Egypt, I'm not sure. but they have done some legitimate journalism in the past. I know that. What about RT? Would you trust news from R.T.?

No. No. Okay. That's what I'm getting at. No. No, I'm afraid not. I've got a friend who thinks R.T. is the only real legitimate news source, and it's because he's living in what my friend René DeResta, who you would love, calls a bespoke reality.

It's not a shared reality with other people who live in the same universe as us. Sure. It's a person who's terminally online and doesn't understand motivated reasoning and cognitive bias have completely taken over his brain. Oh my gosh. And it's sad, right? Because he's genuinely concerned about me and my media diet because I read a variety of news sources, all of which are totally fake and fabricating and trying to get me to believe the narrative that, you know, whatever disease is actually a real thing or like whatever sort of political situation is it's crazy. But it's a cult kind of. But that's the point, right?

Right. So, all right, backing up a little bit, why would a journalist on a major news channel platform your guy or help you achieve your ends? You know, you've got a client and they say, hey, I want to put this into the zeitguise. Why would they do that for you? Usually because it's true. So an example that I can give is from 2009. So I was summoned to my client's embassy. My client at the time was the Gaddafi family.

So the dictator of Libya. Yeah. And I was summoned to the embassy for the Libyans in Washington, D.C., which, strangely enough, was at the Watergate Hotel. Okay. Because nothing shady has ever happened in there. So I get to the embassy, and I sit down with the ambassador, and he tells me that in 48 hours, a national hero is going to be returned to Libya, and it's going to be a great day. And they're going to throw like a ticker tape parade or something like that for this guy. And I'm like, well, who is he?

and he tells me his name is Al-Magrahi. And he was in jail until then because he was responsible for blowing up Pan Am Flight 103 and killing about 270 people. So this guy's a terrorist who blew up an airliner? He is a terrorist who blew up an airliner and he was set to receive a hero's welcome in Tripoli. And the ambassador wanted to know

what I thought the global media was going to do with this piece of information. And I told him it was going to go very big. badly for us. And he told me that my job was to get a positive piece of press for the Libyans that week or else we were in danger of losing our contract. I see. So this is like, we're going to release this guy or we're going to get this guy and it's going to make us look bad. So find a way to use magician's misdirection so that when they do that, it's big in Libya and everybody, it gets buried by something else. Right, right. You know, put lipstick on this

pig somehow. So I had in my research known that The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee helped open the door to Libya back in 2004 when we wanted their help in the war on terror. I went to his office. I had some contacts there due to a recent operation I did with them. And I said, look, Libya is getting the shit kicked out of them in the media right now. If we don't do something, they're going to pull away from us and become our enemies again and undo all the good work you did. So I had drafted a letter from the congressman to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the time. And the letter said, knock off the Libya bashing. And I leaked this to a reporter at Politico. And the headline that ran the next day was

knock off the Libya bashing. So I actually secured a positive piece of press for the Libyans the week Al McGrawi was released. Wow. And I think that, you know, the way I put it in the book is that I deserve whatever the opposite of a Pulitzer is. The opposite of a Pulitzer? Yeah. I don't know how to say that backwards. I wish I did. This is, well, first of all, working for Gaddafi, I mean, this is a real detestable character and set of characters. I mean, this is, what are some of the horrible things it is? So he sponsored up the destruction of that airliner, which was just a bunch of innocent people traveling. What was the point of that again? I mean, it was terrorism, but to what end? I don't know. He said he was trying to get back at us for something we did,

and it's all ridiculous. Right. I mean, he's just a delusional psychicraft. You can't justify any. I mean, I could talk for this entire show about the idiosyncrasies of this family. I mean, well, good there. We got some good stuff. Feel free to begin now. Begin now. Yeah. Okay.

Let's just get into his protection detail. Oh, right. Yeah. Let's do that. 400, what did he, virgin nuns who were all trained in the martial arts. So he literally had an all-girl army of kung fu killers protecting him. Didn't they ride horses? I don't know.

I don't know. They rode horses. Probably that would be on brand for this man. It was like a showman thing, but it was also like a, it had like a pervy element to it. It really did. It really had a, there was a lot of that. There was some weirdness. You know, he had a thing for Condoleezza Rice.

That's hilarious, actually. And he had, like, in his compound when it was uncovered, he had like this weird book of pictures of Condoleezza, like a scrapbook that he put together. Wow. I would love to ask her about this. She for sure knows. I mean, is she on the podcast next week? Not next week, but I would love to have Ron some time. But I don't think I can say in my pitch,

and I want to talk about Gaddafi's scrapbook of photos. Because she'll be like, the Secret Service will be like, we just want to have a talk with you, Jordan. We just want to chat. Could you just come to this room back here with no windows? That's right. Yeah, I've been in that room. It's not so weird.

What a weird. I mean, he was a weird. When you look at him also, he had like Michael Jackson level plastic surgery on his face. He was such a freak, this guy. Everybody who interacted with him said he was on drugs. He took over the country in his 20s, ruled it like a god for 40 years. Like Kim Jong-un-un style. There were more pictures of Gaddafi on the street than there were stop signs.

You can even talk about the family a little bit more. I mean, his daughter, who, you know, the reputable one was an attorney. And her client was Saddam Hussein. Right, okay. Just before he was hung. She was his attorney. I mean, it's this weird kind of. Where'd she go to law school?

I don't wonder. Was it at the U. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. In the book, you do a good job of describing the Libyan, the embassy. Tell me about that. Because it just sounds like walking into the 80s. Like, yes, the 80s, but also like kind of a dive bar in the 80s. Yeah. But it's an embassy. But it's an embassy. And, you know, no alcohol because. Yeah. So a lame dive bar. A lame dive bar. Because, you know, the Libyans or the Gaddafi's at least, were very observant Muslims, you know, until you get to Vegas. And then it's a little different. Well, we'll get there. But, you know, the embassy was just old. It was everything smelled like cigarette smoke. It was just kind of a dodgy place. And you go in and you sit there.

And the first time I went into the embassy, we were on a conference call trying to set up a golf game between the ambassador and Donald Trump. And Trump was on the other end of the phone talking about how he, you know, wanted to do business with a Gaddafi family and open a golf course in Tripoli and all kinds of. I didn't know who was the strangest person on the call, actually. That sounds like a hot golf course. Oh. You're not dangerous golf. Yeah, possible. Now it's a dangerous golf course.

Yeah. Tripoli was probably, was it dangerous back then? I mean, cities where there's a dictator running, things are usually quite safe because the criminals are all dead. Right. Right. The violent criminals on the street are all dead. The real criminals are the people controlling the police.

Running the country and controlling the $60 billion sovereign wealth fund. Yeah. Jeez. My God. So the smell and look of the Libyan office, yeah, it's like 1980s, but really does sound like a madman style office, but decrepit 40 years out of date. Fewer women. No women and no booze. So what did you do for them?

You talk about this trip to Vegas with the doctor. Yeah. Tell me about this guy, because this is the worst trip to Vegas ever. Oh, well, it was three important things to know about the Vegas trip. The first of which is I had never been to Vegas before. Oh, wow. Yeah. I had never even seen the hangover.

I believe because it was just coming out and I watched it on the flight home from this horrible trip. I watched the hangover and I was like, well, that's kind of wild, but not nearly what I just went through. Right. So I'd never been to Vegas before. The second thing you have to understand is that I didn't know why I was going until they closed the door on the airplane. I received an email if it was telling me what I was going to be doing for the next three days. Oh, so you didn't travel with them. It was just like, go to Vegas.

You have a client meeting. And you're like, all right. Totally just, you got to go to Vegas. I thought I was going for like some conference or something like that. Right. World of Concrete. Yeah, not this. And so I read this email and I'm like, can I get off this plane?

Because it's nuts. If you printed it out, it would have been four pages long. And there was a list of demands from Matasem Gaddafi, who was one of the sons of Muammar Gaddafi, the brother leader. He was the national security advisor of the country. He was 35 years old at the time. And he wanted to party in Vegas before his father spoke at the United Nations General Assembly the following week. So his other sons were in different cities in America and we had teams with them and I was just assigned to be the babysitter in Vegas. And I knew about this family because I had a Google news alert for Libya, and I'd read it every day.

So I read about his brother Hannibal. Now, Hannibal got in a little, who the fuck names their kid, Hannibal, by the way? I mean, yeah, he's naming after the guy who took the elephants across the mountains. Or the leader of the A team, but yes. Or the leader of the A team. I don't think that, I don't think Mulmerer Gaddafi was a big fan of the A team. No. I don't know, man.

They love the 80s, so you never know. They do. would they do. So I'm thinking about his brothers, and his brother Hannibal has been arrested on every continent but Antarctica. He once got arrested in France for driving the wrong way down the San Chile-Sé. Oh, wow. Yeah, this is not a normal family. Right. When he got in trouble in Switzerland, that caused a diplomatic kerfuffle. Gaddafi divested billions of dollars from Switzerland. He arrested Swiss diplomats in Tripoli. He called on the United Nations to revoke their charter as a country? I mean, who picks a fight with Switzerland? Yeah, well, they're neutral. That's like their whole

thing. Right. Our brand is, we don't mess with you. I know. Wow. Wow. So why did he get arrested in Switzerland? He was beating up a hotel employee. Oh, I heard about this. Yeah, it was real bad. I think he spent the night in jail and pled diplomatic immunity. He got released the next day, but they were so mad that the Swiss authorities had the audacity to arrest this God King's child. So this is the mentality that I have in the back of my mind when I'm landing in Vegas. So as I land, I turn on my phone and I get a call from the head of security for Matassa. And he says, they're throwing us out of our rooms. I'm like, what do you mean they're throwing you out of that?

And I quickly realize they're trying to clean the rooms. Oh, right. And there is a language problem going on. So he starts swearing at me in Arabic, and I'm like, I don't speak that. And so we get a result. But like the second I get to the Pelagio, I run to the concierge's desk. And I'm like, look, I got to tell you some stuff I'm not supposed to tell you. This guy is staying in your hotel.

His father runs Libya. I'm going to give you a bunch of money to help make this go easier. And so we all understood the gravity of the situation and they didn't clean their rooms anymore. Sir, this is Las Vegas. I know exactly what you need. And here's the duffel bag that you can fill with cash in order to make this go smoothly. You know what you won't have to sell your soul to afford? The fine products and services that support this show.

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Now, back to Phil Elwood. Because it's like any place in the world is going to be like, Oh, we understand that you want discretion and unreasonable requests 24 hours a day. We're here for you. It's Las Vegas. It is. But I didn't know that. You know, I was very new.

Why did they pick you for this gig, man? They should have sent me. They should have said. They should have sent anybody. I mean, the way I was telling my buddy, I talked to my buddy Preston a lot while I was there. You know, he said a couple of things about it when I interviewed him by the book. He was like, well, this is the first time I ever heard you truly afraid at work. And also when I told them that I was going there, he said, well, you, baby sitting somebody in Vegas is like fighting fire with gasoline.

What are they thinking? Were you supposed to keep them out of trouble or just be like the person who talks to the hotel staff? Apparently, I was supposed to be the person who was drunk the whole time. We were pretty much drinking every moment we were awake the entire time we were there. It was one outrageous demand after the next. and, you know, we had these, like, four-car motorcade that would go through, and getting from point A to point B on the strip is impossible. Now try doing it with four cars.

So these are, like, security vehicles and whatever, oh, my gosh. No, there were, the entourage had some security people and some friends and his trainer and his girlfriend's friend. And there were a lot of people. Was his girlfriend Libyan? No. No. Where was she from?

I'm curious. Europe. Somewhere in Europe. European model, I think. Shocking. And her friend was, I would imagine, also. Also a model. Yeah.

These guys are really predictable. They really are. Yeah. They like blondes. I don't know what that's about. Can't walk around with those in Libya, maybe. What I love about this is the guy has jeans shorts that he's wearing the whole time. Well, he wants shorts.

Those are aspirational shorts. Where can I get the shorts with the jeans? Yeah. Bro, you want a pair of jorts? Torturers and jorts is what you should have named the book. Well, there were a couple of titles that came up. I mean, it's... But I have to explain why he couldn't find jorts

is because they were out 20 years before he wanted to go buy it. Look, let's just go buy a pair of jeans and a pair of scissors and make your own joists. Make your own jorts. Yeah, we'll get a member's only jacket. It'll be great. You can hang out with Medina Jod or whatever and your member's only jacket. It's every Iranian president has one of those. We did throw a party for the Libyans once at the Willard Hotel to celebrate 40 years of Gaddafi's wonderful leadership.

And, you know, I was thinking to myself as we were putting the invite list together for this party, I'm like, no one's going to come to this. And then Obama announced he was giving his first address to a joint session of Congress the same night. I'm like, well, definitely no one is coming to this event. But the room was full. I mean, I don't know what that says about D.C., but, like, we had a major speech by the president going on. This is the party celebrating 40 years of Gaddafi's leadership. And we were able to pack a room at the Willard.

People who knew how to party were like, one of these is going to be way more fun than the other. And one of these is going to be covered in the news. The other one's not. Let's go to the one that's not going to end up in the newspaper. Probably. Well, it was a dry reception. So don't tell anybody this. It's a dry reception.

And so what I did was went to the bar. There are several bars in the Willard Hotel. So I went to two of them and I opened with different credit cards tabs. And the people I invited the party, I told them to take their juice drink upstairs, have it spiked on my tab and then come back to the party. That makes sense. Well, you know, I mean, it was so strange. What's weird is why pretend to be an observant Muslim, then go to Vegas and do blow the whole time while you're drinking? and then you have a hotel party and you're like,

don't put the alcohol in the room. It's like, no one's going to, first of all, no one's going to find out, certainly no one's going to say anything because you will kill them if you were. So the whole charade is so ridiculous to me. It is. And, you know, when we were in Vegas,

it was the last week of Ramadan, which is like, you know, a pretty sacred time. We were not observant. We were definitely not praying five times a day. No, no. And he wants, what, share tickets? Yeah.

Oh, we also saw, it wasn't a blue man. group. It was Cirque to Solay. Well, that's solid. And that was weird. I mean, so what I'd do is I'd go and buy tickets, the best tickets, nine of the best tickets, all of the shows on the strip that night so that they could pick what they, this is not an efficient way to spend money. No. But it is a way to spend a hell of a lot of it. The only cool part about the Vegas trip is that I got to go with an unlimited amount of money. So if you can go to Vegas and like spend with reckless, with reckless, abandon. Right, like hundreds of thousands or possibly millions of dollars. Yeah. I mean, I have

no earthly, I think I have blocked out what the final bill was at the Belagio, because they presented to me in this, like, it looked like a Russian novel. And I don't know, I don't know what it was. Let me just call American Express before you try to run this. My card got rejected. Absolutely the first time. It was just like, nope, this isn't running. And so that was a little awkward. Yeah. I don't know what they do to you in Vegas if you can't pay your seven-figure bill. I mean, it was a town founded by gangsters, so I have to assume it's not good. Right. Yeah, the first call is not to the police. That's the corner. Man. These guys, do they bring cash with them or is it just like, we'll pay you back later? Because it seems like a cash kind of, God obviously seems like a cash guy.

Cash guy. Cash guy. No, it was weird. They had these briefcases. They were black, snake skin briefcases that were filled with money. My God. And I had to pop open one at one way. And the bills were like they were in plastic wrap. Like they'd come straight from the treasury, you know, and thrown in. Yeah, just thrown in the briefcases and handed to these guys. I have no idea how much.

I mean, they sent me up there several times to just grab cash so that they could continue gambling. Go in the room and get us $200,000 and bring it back in here? No, it was nothing like, there were no specific numbers. It was just, give us a bag. Money by the bag. Yeah, got it. It was either a stack or a bag. And so what you do is you get the garbage bag out of the little garbage can that they have in the room.

You just take the garbage bag out and you fill it with cash. And then you walk through the Belagio with this garbage bag. Wow. What the fuck else you get in it. Right. And what's weird. is you're not the only person walking through that Blasio with a garbage bag full of $100 bills. No, no.

Maybe the only one giving it to Libyan dictator's kids. Probably. The problem with this book is that it feels like it's not relatable because a lot of people can't say like, oh, yeah, the first time I went to Vegas, I had to babysit this lunatic. But the relatable portions of the book really come if you've ever been asked to do something you're uncomfortable with at work. Yeah, this is an extreme example of that. This is an extreme example of that, but like everybody has had a situation where their employer was like, hey, just write out that number, like, you know, punching for me or, you know, whatever. But this is 270 pages of really awkward requests from your employer. Wow.

What are these people like? I mean, they're angry. They're spoiled. But are they also kind of pathetic and maybe scared? Well, they had reason to be scared. to Matasum gained notoriety later in his life because he was executed next to his father. When the Arab Spring really got down to business in Libya. How did they kill Gaddavi again?

You remember? Very badly. He was thundering through the desert in a 75-car motorcade. And, you know, our surveillance drones caught this. Also, we intercepted a phone call. One of our predator drones operated by somebody in Vegas, actually. Fire. Fired.

Yeah, I know. Fired on the... This is what you get for not paying the bill. Yeah. For overpaying the bill. Yeah. Yeah. So they fired on his motorcade and then the French fired, I think.

And then that gave the Libyan people enough time to catch up to the brother leader. And he was beaten very badly and tortured, as was Mattossum. Metassum was shot a few times. The brother leader, there's video of this. I remember watching it. I don't remember if it was... on the internet or on Jazeera. They showed him and a gun is put to the back of his head.

And the last words out of his mouth are, do you know right from wrong? And then they shot him. I mean, true psychopath who just had no clue. Right up until the end. Yeah. There was no moment of reality ever. But I know, or I have heard,

that dictators around the world watch the footage of get off his execution as a cautionary tale. Geez. Wow. Wild trip to Vegas. Yes. Yeah. Haven't been back. Well, I went back once. I went back I did a favor for a friend of mine and he gave me tickets to the Grammys in exchange for the favors. So I went back to Vegas one. It was nicer. I stayed at the Pelagio, but it was, it was. Oh, you're back. No, no, no, no. It's just me. It's just me. The concierge should retire. Yeah. But you are on a list of like, if this guy walks in, grab his bags, make him feel at home. Because they're just like, this is a guy who paid a $7 million or whatever bill. And all we had to do was fumigate the room and

replace the bed spread in the carpet. Nine rooms. Yeah, nine rooms. Yeah, whatever. I mean, it was worth it. They made the margins were nice on that trip. I'm sure. You talk about sinking a body. Yes. Tell us what this is. Tell me about this. So I come up with cute nicknames for PR strategies. So sinking the body is a strategy for, you know, concealing the truth when something really bad is going on. Now, the way I tell this story in the book is it's the only story from my childhood. And it's when I was 12 years old. My job was to be the altar boy from my father, who was an Episcopal priest. So I would be his altar boy at weddings, but more often funerals.

And I got paid $50 a funeral to stand there, hold the cross, and look sad for the whole time. So we're doing a funeral. And, you know, I did a lot of them in middle school. We're doing this funeral, and the backhoe has come and dug the grave, and they've lowered the coffin into the grave, and we're doing the service. But there's this row of flowers, so nobody can see into the hole, except my father and I. So we're talking here. My father's doing the yay that we walk through the valley of the shadow of death. I hear water.

Looking at the hole, and sure enough, it's filling with water. Oh, no. And the coffin is rising. Because those are sealed in there with the body. Yeah. Oh, no. It's floating up to the surface, and I kind of, I nudge my father and I try to get him to look at this to see what's going on. His response is to start talking faster.

Oh, no. To get the service over with. And at one point, the coffin is nearly level with the ground, and I nudge him again. And I'm like, what do I do? And everybody in the audience is just crying and moaning and they're very sad about this person who has died. And my father tells me to put my foot on the coffin, to submerge it. That's a bit. I mean, this is a last-ditch effort at this point, right?

Like, someone's going to go, did you see the altar boy step on the coffin? Is that supposed to happen? And your dad's, like, doing this calculation in this head. Like, they're going to notice that, but what's worse is going to be when the whole thing sort of right sides itself and points straight up in the air. And everyone starts screaming because grandpa's alive after all

and trying to escape the coffin. You've got it. Oh, my gosh. You've got the problem. So, you know, he ushers, he finishes. So the back. It dinged like a sprinkler or a water main or something. It was low on the water table.

It was a place next to the ocean. So it dug a well by mistake. Accidentally sprung a leak in the hole. The coffin's coming. It was a mess. So it ends with he ushers the congregation away without them noticing. And he just says to me as he's walking away, deal with this. All right?

Like 11? 12. So after everybody's gone away, I jumped on the coffin to submerge it. I fell in the grave. Oh, man. Pulling myself out of the grave and walking back to our house, which was just a couple hundred yards away, rang the doorbell because I didn't have my keys. My mom answered the door.

Looked to me. Covered in mud. Very confused as to what had happened at this funeral. Oh, my gosh. How did they eventually bury that body? I mean, they might have to move it, I assume. You know, I spent the rest of the day in my room crying. Yeah.

I don't think that I really checked. Yeah. That's understandable. My God. And that has to do what with PR now? Well, sometimes you have to distract the audience and sometimes you have to sink the body of the truth in order to deflect away from something that's going on. So a lot of people are going to say, oh, this guy's a publicist. You're not a publicist, though. You say you're a political operative or a publicity operative? Sure, a PR operative.

Okay. What's the difference? Well, there are many good publicists, and that is a great profession. It just isn't what I do. So a publicist is there to take inputs and amplify them. Yeah, those are the people that send me your book and say, this guy would be interesting for your show. And then they write a really generic two paragraphs or whatever. Some bullet points. You got to bold some shit in there too.

Yeah. And, you know, you got. Crocus Reviews loves this book. Yeah. Here's the three people that wrote on the back, one of which you've, heard of, maybe. Right. Hey, actually, one of the great thrills of my life was corresponding with Christopher Buckley during writing this book. He wrote, Thank You for Smoking. Yeah, this book definitely reminds me. There's a few places in the book where I'm like, oh, this is that guy.

Yeah. We'll get there. So tell me, so the publicist writes a pitch, pitches journalists, sure, et cetera. You're not doing that. No, I haven't sent a pitch email in, other than for the book, In years. That's not how I do it. What I do is work with people in newsrooms. So I don't send them a pitch email. I send him a text message or an encrypted messenger service message that just says, hey, I've got some shit that nobody else has. Do you want it? And then that starts a conversation. I always come from the position of, I'm willing to put my body between a piece of information and the media. which is a very dangerous place to be. And most publicists wouldn't do that.

A publicist is a, it's a safe job. I once had a, one of my bosses once turned to me when I was questioning what we were doing is, you know, the safety of what we were doing. And he said, Phil, we didn't pick a safe profession. And I'm like, dude, I did. Yeah. Public relations. I just Googled this the other day because I heard it. I couldn't believe it.

Public relations executive is one of the most stressful jobs in America, they say. Really? In the top ten? I don't believe that. Should it became a cop. Should have been a cop or a neurosurgeon. That's right. Would have been able to relax.

You know what? Won't cost a duffel bag full of unmarked bills to afford. The fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. All of the deals discount codes and ways to support this show are searchable and clickable over on the website at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals.

If you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find the code. Please email me, Jordan at Jordan Harbinger.com. I am happy to surface that code for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now, for the rest of my conversation with Phil Elwood. The way you spun this Iraq War documentary, that's what reminded me of, Thank You for Smoking. Tell me about that.

This is like, in Thank You for Smoking, it's a great movie. The guy gets kidnapped. He's a publicist, sort of a PR operative for the smoking industry, tobacco industry. And these activists in one of the scenes, they kidnap him, they throw him in the back of a van and they stick like hundreds of nicotine patches on him to basically let him die from nicotine is like a message. And he doesn't die. He's in critical condition. He's in the ICU. He comes back, recovers. And then he goes and says, smoking saved my life. I would not have had the nicotine tolerance. I would have been in cardiac arrest if otherwise. But thank God, I smoke cigarettes.

And it was just like, at that point you go, oh, you'd learn nothing. You learned nothing. You've learned nothing. Absolutely nothing from the history. And that's what this Iraq war documentary is, is the embodiment of that. It was the first PR assignment I'd ever worked on. You know, I was working at this PR firm. It was like two other people and me. And we had this client that was this documentary film, Gunner Palace. It was about the Iraq war. It was about an artillery unit that lived in Uday Hussein's bombed out palace. in the Ottomia section of Baghdad during the Second Iraq War. And it was one really cool thing about the documentary

is that the entire soundtrack was hip-hop done by the soldiers. The problem with that is that the word f***re appears in the film like 100 times. And the motion picture association of America says if the word f***ke appears in the movie more than once, I think it's twice, he gets an automatic R rating. Well, what we were trying to do was get people who were like 15 and 16 to watch this documentary because they were the ones who were considering enlisting in the military. I see. And we wanted them to see what it was like for a scene.

Like, there's a shootout in one of the opening scenes of this documentary. And it really shows people what it's like to be there. And yeah, the word, it appears several times in the movie, but it's still important for kids to see. We appealed to the Motion Picture Association of America. We put them on TV talking to, you know, facts, CNN, MSNBC. And every time they were like, look, we need a PG-13 rating here. These people have to see this. And to this day, it is rated PG-13, and it's one of the most profane PG-13 movies in existence.

So you just applied enough pressure saying this is a, if you put this as are, you're doing a disservice to essentially the military. Right. The armed forces. The armed forces. I mean, why not? And, you know, Fox, when they had us on, or when they had the director and the soldier on, tried to position it as an anti-war documentary to kind of push their agenda. And that's not what this was.

This was like the most pro-soldier documentary I've ever seen. What's it called? Gunner Palace. Okay. Maybe we can link to it in the show notes, or at least the IMDB people could find it. So it seems like you get between the source and the journalist and you do the spin. Right. Yeah. Sometimes I do a lot of litigation communications, so I'm involved in lawsuits. And when I tell the lawyers that I work with is, you know, if the journalists had gone to law school and the reporters and the lawyers had spent any time in journalism school, I wouldn't have to exist. But really what I do is mediate between the source and the reporter and help the source get the reporter what they need in a format that tells a story. How expensive is this?

Asking for a friend. Asking for a friend. Well, it depends. Sometimes it's very expensive. If you're working for a country, the price tag is very high because you have to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act with the Department of Justice, which is a whole expensive and time-consuming paperwork process

in order to do any of this stuff. Well, theoretically, most people register and then they don't actually fill out the forms entirely to let everybody know what they're doing. The FARA database is one of the most impenetrable in the world. Glad to hear we're on top of all that here. Oh, yeah. There are like four people that work at the FARA office in the Department of Justice. So, I mean, they're buried in paperwork.

They're buried, and there's no chance. And you have firms that are like one of the firms working for Saudi Arabia. They submitted their contract to the foreign agent's registration office in Arabic. We don't have a rule against that. No. So Politico had to pay to translate the entire contract into English and then they published it. So, you know, kudos to them for doing that. I get a man in the far office.

It's like, hey, can we get a copy of that so that we can read it too? Because it's an Arabic in her office. Exactly. Good Lord. Could you guys help us out a little bit? I mean, well, you know, people think this is uncommon, but it's all publicly disclosed who is working for whom kind of in this world. my firm that I was working, I was taken to task once by Richard Aedleman. Have you ever heard of the PR firm, Aedleman?

Yeah. Okay. They're the largest privately held PR firm in the world. Okay. Adelman, after it came out that we worked for the Gaddafi's and the Assad's and the Qatari's and he was all very bad, he said, you know, not everyone deserves representation and that PR people are not defense attorneys and that we were awful people basically for taking these countries. acts. I see. Now, I will have you know. Last year, Richard Aedleman personally registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act to work for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, more specifically Muhammad bin Salman. Right. So if not everyone deserves representation, I'm sorry, what the fuck was his point again? Yeah. His point was, I don't get these clients and I'm mad about it. Oh, you're, oh, you want to hire me? You know, maybe I should rethink my position, given my $18 million, contract with Saudi Arabia.

Right. It's very uncomfortable. And what you will find is that there are people in Washington, in America, who are willing to take these contracts. Sure. It's almost like insider trading, but for the media, except it's also legal. Yes. Yes. It's the Faustian deal we've made with the First Amendment.

It's nearly impossible to restrict what we can do. The Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 gives it a shot. But I really think we need to update that law to have better tracking and better transparency. What about Putin? He seems like a guy would retain services from folks like you, if not you, directly. Sure. I mean, I talk about this in the book. Putin had a contract for, or Russia had a contract for a very long time with a PR firm called Ketchum, which is owned by a big holding company. But no, they worked for them totally legally registered, believe they helped place an office. by Putin in the New York Times.

Yep, about the Syrian War. About the Syrian War, yes. What was that supposed to do? Like, people listening at home, they're jogging their grocery shopping, right? Mike and Amy are grocery shopping. They're like, what are you talking about? Putin hired a PR firm to put an op-ed in a New York Times for the Syria. They're lost right now.

So hold our hand through this one. Sure. As we walk through the Dairy Isle. Some of it is just normalizing it. You look to the origins of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, you know, 19, It was we created that law because of Hitler because he was hiring American PR firms to promote op-eds and articles and newspapers that were sympathetic to the Nazi cause. Just after 9-11, Saudi Arabia spent millions hiring firms to clarify their position on the issue, to basically do covert propaganda. And it's so common in the world and this field.

in this field, I mean, I have chosen not to do it anymore and rather to kind of take what I've learned working for these folks and apply them to better causes. You don't do this anymore at all now. You're on the up and up now. That's fine and good, but I still want to talk about all the bad shit you've done in the past. Yes, of course, of course.

Tell me a little bit about how your firm made money, right? You get the retainer from the client, but it sounds like also, hey, we need a private plane to go from here to Vegas. And it's like, sure, I'll charter that for you. You assume there's a markup on stuff like this. Sure, sure. How does that work? So in normal PR firm, there is a 17.5% markup on any expense.

So say you go out to dinner, you have a tip the waiter, the whole thing gets added onto the bill plus 17.5%. Oddly specific number. I don't know where it came from, but it's kind of. 20's too high. It's kind of like 17, a little bit too low. It's kind of like tipping, you know. 17.5. I'm not sure exactly.

I guess when you're talking about millions of dollars. There's the 0.5. That's like three people's entire year, like salary or whatever. It seems silly. But yeah, so there have been occasions. There was one specific occasion where I had to get a private plane for somebody and I got the invoice and I sent it to my company for approval. And then they sent it back to me and they had, you know, whited out the numbers and added about $10,000 onto the invoice. And they're like, just get paid in cash. It'll be fine. And so, you know, this happens over and over and over again, and I end up stealing, I don't want to use the word stealing. I end up appropriating. Yes. You did use the word stealing, but that's okay.

We knew you meant appropriating. We knew you meant appropriating. Right. You know, several tens of thousands of dollars from my client. These dictators, though, not that this justifies it, but unlimited resources, unlimited resources that they have plundered from their country's treasury. So this is a drop in the buck. Like, even if you took $100 million.

from the Gaddafi family, they would go, oh, I don't know, we probably shouldn't hire that guy again. Anyway, what's for lunch? Right? It would just be irrelevant completely. And you're dealing with these disgusting people. It's got to be really easy to sort of morally justify. Look, if you're working for, like, the church or a family that's a nonprofit that's helping kids in Africa, you probably go, oh, man, I'll see what I can do, negotiate the price a little, maybe the minimum markup, whatever it is. You're not, hopefully, stealing tens of.

thousands of dollars from this charity. But when it's Gaddafi or Saddam Hussein, modern day Hitler, you're just kind of like, you know what, 10 grand? It's actually better off not in your hands anyways. We're going to, I'm going to do better things with this money than you literally. Anybody would do better things with this money than you. Yeah. Oh, man. You went to Sarajevo, though, as well. That's an interesting city man. I went there and it's got to be kind of tough to go to a place like that and work with the quote unquote bad guys. Because Sarajevo, to give people a picture, there's a soccer stadium that used to be an Olympic, where they had the Olympics in, I think, 1984. And it's full of graves. And the reason it's full of graves is they couldn't get

the bodies out that were shot and blown up by Serbian snipers during the war because the city was surrounded and under siege and people were starving. And they would shoot people waiting in line for bread. And I mean like kids, they would launch mortars into the city from places. And there's all these holes in the ground and the pavement and they fill it in with red gummy plaster so that you can see where people died from these just totally random terroristic mortar attacks from the either Bosnian Serb army or militias and things like that. It was just really gross. So when you go to a place like that, you don't want to be on the retainer of the bad guys. The way I put it in the book is that this was the first time I had to see what the business end of my business looked like. And it was incredibly

hard for me to go through because it is. It's a living, museum to the atrocities that were committed against these folks. So you say you don't want to be on the payroll of the bad guy. Well, think about the Bosnian War. Who was the bad guy exactly? Yeah, yeah. Because the Bosnians are Turkic, Muslims, the people who were killing them were Serbs, Christians. So when the Americans first heard about this, during the Clinton administration, the American response to this was to institute an arms embargo against the Bosnians. So not only didn't we help them, we stopped them from getting what they needed to defend themselves. Sarajevo was a mixed city.

So the people who got blown up and shot there were Christians and Catholics and Muslims and, you know, it was just they didn't give a shit. It was just kill anybody who's-kill them all. Yeah. And, you know, the United States, so we knew it was happening and we stood by, I don't know how many Bosnians you talked to when you were there, but they're happy to meet a member. Americans. Yeah, I live. But there's this, there's this giant fucking asterisk next to that happiness to meet Americans. And that is, why didn't you help me? Yeah. Did you go to the tunnel that they dug under the airport? That was increased. So there's a tunnel there that Muslim Bosnians had dug underneath the UN controlled airport because they couldn't get food and bodies and weapons in and out.

So they dug this tunnel into the airport. Because even if they were walking, the UN wouldn't let them traverse the airport because this sort of thing was, hey, if you're going to let people traverse the airport, we're going to shoot people who are at the airport. So we're going to consider it a military target. And the UN was like, we need this place. So the only thing they could do is dig a tunnel. There's some sort of rumor like, did they know the tunnel was there? Probably. It's really hard to dig a tunnel underneath an airport. But were they going to do shut it down? They had plausible deniability. But it's creepy going in there, man. I mean, it's small and you just think, wow, everybody who did this risk their lives. And it sort of comes up in like some dude's backyard. And they said there's a shed around this

and we basically just trucked dirt in and out for three years digging it. It's like a Shawshank Redemption style prison escape. It was just absolutely incredible. Sarajevo is an amazing place. People should go there. People should go there and eat the food and hang out. It's amazing. It's amazing. And drink the coffee. Yeah, people who want to sow instability in this country or want to see, you know, bad things happen.

I always tell them, try visiting Sarajevo. It's a wake-up call, man. Yeah. Go someplace. where this happened, where brutality against people just really, I don't know. It's very sobering. So if you're watching us on YouTube, there's a table in front of us and we got some chairs in a couch. And it's about, this area is about the size of a large-ish bathroom.

You in Sarajevo would see a little park, like a patch of grass like this. And there would be probably six people buried on it because they had no other place to put the bodies. and you see the gravestones. The Muslim gravestones are like these sort of obelisks. There would be six of them. And I just remember, go, what are these? Why are these all over the place thinking, like, what Goddy design?

And my friend's like, those are graves, man. Yeah. Those are probably, you know, a family could have been sitting here and took a mortar. And that was the end. And they're all buried here. And it's just like, it's absolutely sobering. I mean, you will not. But it's not a depressing place at the same time.

No. It's so interesting how they've managed to thread the needle with this. It's like, it's not Auschwitz, right? Where you come out crying and you have, nightmares for a month. It's like, yeah, it's just very hard to explain. I highly recommend in case people haven't figured it out traveling to U.S. Lover. And there's a fountain. They say if you drink from it, you'll go back. You'll go back. Yeah. I would not drink from a public fountain in a city and Yugoslavia. Yeah. And have you been back? Yeah, no, no. There you go. I'd like.

There you go. Tell me about the World Cup sabotage job. This is interesting. And I think probably a lot of sports fans maybe know a little bit about sports watching. We did an episode about We did a sports washing episode, episode 829. This is kind of the same thing. It's the other side of that coin. It was a long shot sports washing campaign. My client at the time was the government of Qatar. And they got in their head that they wanted to host the World Cup in 2022.

And ESPN said at the time it would make more sense to play the Super Bowl in a lake than it would to play the World Cup in Qatar. So those were the odds we were kind of facing. But, you know, the Qataris were very persuasive with certain members of the FIFA committee. Persuasive, eh? The root of all evil. Duffel bag full of cash persuasive. Well, people, I don't want to make, you know, accusations, but there are people in jail for having received bribes related to this bid. Yeah, that's true.

And so one day, the U.S. Congress, who is our opponent, to host the games. This is another dark secret. My job wasn't to support the cutary bid. It was to go after their opponents, which is against FIFA's rules. So I think I will be banned from ever working on another FIFA bid because I'm admitting this. I see. Which is fine. You know, I don't really need to do that again. So the U.S. Congress introduced a resolution supporting our own bid to host the games, a sense of the House resolution. These mean nothing. So my employer called me up and said, you know, The Qatari saw this resolution. They're upset. They want you to get a resolution introduced into the U.S. Congress opposing their own bid to host the games. And I said, that's impossible. And then he said something like, I said it, you make it true, and hung up on me. So I went out to a bar at around three in the afternoon on 17th Street in DC. It was a place called Fox and Howe. And I was sitting there, having Avod Casota, and this group of school children walks by. And they were all more obese. And I was like, there's my answer. On a cocktail napkin, I wrote a resolution, and the resolution

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. I then met up with a lobbyist who agreed to get a member of Congress to consider introducing the resolution for a fee. So he got this Congresswoman to introduce the resolution. You said for a fee, that sounds like something Congress people are not supposed to do. Right. Well, see, the lobbyist thought that he was being hired by the Healthy Kids Coalition, which is what a fake? Yeah. AstroTurf organization. Can you explain briefly what these are? I mean, people probably know, but. Sure. So it comes from a grassroots organization is a good group of people. It's like the Brady campaign or something like that that gets a bunch of people together to support a cause. An astro turf organization is a fake grassroots organization. It's a fake grassroots organization. that gets a bunch of fake people together and makes it look like a bunch of people support a cause. But it's like one person,

one corporation or one country's agenda. You hear about these a lot. You're like, oh, the citizens for a better Ohio wants me to vote yes on Prop 4. And then you're like, let's read Prop 4. Open a casino in the middle of, like abolish school lunches for poor people. And it's like, wait, wait, wait. Citizens for a Better Ohio,

I almost voted for this without reading it because the name is your Astroids, turf organization is what like citizens for a healthy kids you said healthy kids coalition right and this is just Qatar going ah we want the world cup we don't want the u.s to outbid us on this so let's make a fake organization that pretends to care about no no Qatar didn't make the astroturfing that existed that I just borrowed that from a friend oh you oh you just borrowed the fake organization yeah the fake organization existed for something totally unrelated I see years before I just went and I was like hey can I borrow this

Healthy Kids Coalition, it sounds good. But it was for the purposes of getting Qatar the World Cup. It had nothing to do with kids. The kids were a random afterthought while you were nursing your cocktail in the afternoon. Right. Right. Okay. And so I get this resolution introduced.

I leaked the resolution to a reporter at Politico, who I knew was a sports man. And he wrote a story with a headline, World Cup versus Jim class. And what this did, now, I don't know if this switched any votes. But what it did was provide cover to absolutely everyone who voted for the Qatari bid. Because they could say, look, the United States Congress isn't on board with hosting the games. Why would we give the games to them? Why not give it to Qatar, who 100% of the people who are allowed to talk say they support it? Right, right, right.

I'm surprised. It seems like the Detroit mayor should have hired you. That guy was a real scumbag. Guamese. Guamacro. Yes, yes, yes, very interesting guy. Yeah, he's a interesting. is a good word. Is he still in prison? I don't know the answer to that. He was for quite some time,

and then he had some problem and then got out and Matthews. I don't know. You have a lot of stories in the book working for Kim.com. Yes. But you have interesting PR rules, and one of them is all press is good press, and that's a myth. Tell me about why. Well, I mean, all press is good press. I personally point to Gaddafi's visit to New York to speak at the United Nations as the moment he lost control of Libya because it was the first time he was shown in the global media and to his own people to be a human, to be mortal. And it was embarrassing. The press coverage that he got on his trips to New York was just awful. And I think the people in his country saw that and for the first time realized that he could be killed. And that unraveled everything. So all

press is good press? Absolutely not. Yeah. This is why you don't see Kim Jong-un giving a conference of the, well, anywhere, other than something tightly under his own control. Right. Vladimir Putin doesn't do things. They're not 100% control. Yeah, very interesting. Another rule is never repeat the negative. Give me an example of that. Sure, sure. So if you, any of your listeners were alive for Richard Nixon, if you had to say, quote Nixon, give me a Nixon quote, the only one you'd be able to come up with is, I am not a crook. Okay? That's the only thing I, yeah.

Attribute another quote to him. Nobody can. Nobody can. So I am not a crook. He cemented in the historical record that he was probably a crook by just repeating the negative. Like that's all he had to do is one sound bite. I mean, it's, if somebody asks you, you know, when did you stop setting house fires? Right.

You don't say, I'm not an arsonist. you say I believe in the fire codes, you know? I think we should have sprinklers. You just up to skate a little bit. You set this trade war with Antigua in the United States. Explain this, because this is particularly adept, I would say. This is like a country like Antigua doesn't have any leverage against the United States, except... What if you can find leverage?

Right. That's the whole trick to this game that we play is finding a leverage point, finding an inflection point. So, yes, I was working for the government of Antigua. They had a longstanding trade. Small Caribbean island. Small Caribbean. Eastern Caribbean country. You got to take two planes to get there.

There are no direct flights in the United States. Beautiful. I mean, they call it the island of 365 beaches. But wonderful place. So they've been in this longstanding dispute with the United States over online gambling. So we went through, we shut down the online gambling business, basically in the Caribbean. And they took us to the WTO. And the WTO said, well, yes, the U.S. is in violation of international trade laws, not only that we sign, but that we wrote. So there's no excuse for us not following these trade laws. And so finally, the WTO said, okay, you can sanction the United States government. Well, how would they possibly do that? Well, there's a provision in international trade law called cross-retaliation. Most people don't know about this. But about a decade prior, Brazil, you

it absolutely perfectly. They were in a trade dispute with the United States over dumping cotton, so selling cotton for less than its worth in the Brazilian economy. We were dumping hundreds of millions of dollars of cotton. So they said, through cross-retaliation, we are going to mass manufacture U.S. AIDS drugs, brand name AIDS medications, and give them away for free to Africa to dilute the market and put U.S. pharma companies out of business. So then the pharmaceutical companies suddenly got very interested in cotton subsidies in Brazil and leaned on the administration to put a stop to it, which they did. So we just decided to modify this a little bit by having, instead of mass producing a pharmaceutical product because Antigua doesn't have pharma industry. They did have a lot of servers laying around because they ran an online gambling empire.

So we could just launch a file sharing website like Kim.com's mega upload and sell US movies, music, and software on the open market without paying royalties to anybody. And that was the threat. And you could afford to do that just at the cost of the electricity and server maintenance, right? So instead of $10 for a movie, it's like a buck $99 or something like that. Exactly. Exactly. So what we said we were going to do was sell this stuff on the market until we earned back all the money. that the United States had taken, that owed us.

Right. And so now you've got the MPA and the music company's going, excuse me, White House, we are losing our shirts because the entire world is now shopping in Antigua for 80% off. And we didn't even have to launch the site. I'm sure. All we had to do was threatened to do it. Oh, really? So you didn't have to make the thing. We didn't even make it.

Wow. We didn't even have to use the servers they had laying around. We just said, we're thinking about doing this. And it caused a media shitstorm. I bet. Somebody did the math. The New York Times editorialized that the United States needed to settle this. Oh, wow.

I mean, look, you're not always in beautiful places. Well, I shouldn't say that. I was going to use that to transition and segue to Nigeria. Nigeria is probably actually beautiful. It's just a, it sounds. It's not the part I went to. It's not safe. Not safe.

Right. Tell me about Nigeria. How does it feel when you're there, first of all? It was scary. So I had an Uber, very scary. I had an Uber driver the other day from Nigeria. And I was like, you know, I've been to Nigeria. He's like, oh, when did you go?

I was like 2014. He goes, oh, shit. Yeah. It wasn't safe. The year I skipped going home for Christmas because, you know, I was like, he was like, well, that was a bad time to go. And I was, yes, it was. It was during Boko Haram is a terrorist organization.

Right. They were having a particularly active time in Nigeria. Is this when they kidnapped all those girls? Yeah. So they kidnapped about, there's two or three hundred girls from the Chewok region. They were in a Christian school, I believe, and they were taken and sold as ISIS brides. And we were hired by the government of Nigeria, by Good Luck, Jonathan, to help communicate what the government was doing to get these girls back. And this is another instance where you have, your mindset, you have to shift a little bit.

Because the people in the government that we were talking to, it's not that they didn't think this was a problem. They knew it was a problem because the world's media had descended upon. Michelle Obama was like, hold it, yeah, hashtag bring back our girls, right? They knew it was a problem. But kidnapping is a business there. I mean, it's pretty common. So they did not understand what all. all this was about and why the world was so upset. The government wasn't exactly competent.

They weren't doing anything. Yeah, but they weren't. My friend's girlfriend's uncle was kidnapped in Nigeria and he was working for the government of Nigeria. They shot up a train, they stopped it and they took a bunch of people off. They ended up shooting him in the arm or whatever, a shoulder, took him into the jungle and he was released, I think, recently. Oh, Jesus. Yeah. I mean, this is, you know, This is a place where people who even work for the government get kidnapped on train heists. I mean, you don't want to be, you don't mess around in Nigeria. It was a frightening place. We did have a great security detail.

I bet. The cars were armored. Everybody had guns. It was. Except for the police in an army in Nigeria who sell their guns because they need to eat. Right. To Boko Haram a lot of the time. Yeah, that was an arms trafficking problem.

Yeah. I would imagine everyone has a bodyguard unless you are just. at the bottom of the food chain in Nigeria. Yeah. The arms dealers, some of them had bodyguards and some of them didn't. The guys I remember most from the Hilton and Abuja were these guys from Idaho who were there building shooting ranges for the military. And these were some Second Amendment enthusiasts, if I've ever met one. Sure.

I grew up in Idaho, which means that I learned how to shoot a gun before I learned long division. So I really got along with these fellows. and they had a very interesting perspective on the conflict with Boko Raab. Hmm, I'm curious, but one thing at a time here. By the way, I had dinner with Malala Yusuf Zai. Yes, that was a flex. Last night, actually. No kidding.

And she, yeah, and she makes a cameo in your book. She does. It was her 17th birthday party. My buddy organized it for her. She can't. That's a little unexpected. Very. Okay.

Very. Before anybody jumps to conclusions. She's an amazing human being. Amazing human being. Amazing. Like, one of the least. meeting human rights activists in the world. Nobel Prize winning.

The story is amazing. You know, she was persecuted for trying to learn how to read and for teaching young girls how to read. I mean, it's just an amazing story and a human rights icon, even at the age of 17. Yeah, we cooked brownies together last night as part of the dinner party and we, it did not go well.

Her and I are not good at cooking brownies. Oh, no? No, it's, I should save the story for when she comes on, but it was, yeah, she's like, you know how to do this. this right and I was like, no, you don't know how to cook. She's like, no, my mom was the cook. So it was quite funny. It was like, between us, you know, Nobel Prize winner and some schmucky podcaster, neither of us could make

fricking brownies, which by the way have like three ingredients. Right, right. It comes in a pre-made box. Yeah, yeah. It's, how many eggs? Well, it says this, but we're making more than, and I'm like, I'm lost. I can't do it. Can't do the math. Well, no. Malala was, she was the perfect person to give us what we deserved, which was, She came to Nigeria and made us look terrible. I mean, me and the other public relations executives that were working on this account were doing all we could to make good luck Jonathan look like he was on top of the situation and doing everything right. And so we're like, yeah, let's do a photo op with Malala.

This is going to be a good idea. Right. And so we do. And then she kind of talks to the international media and makes us all. look terrible. I refer to this kind of in my mind as the time I got my ass kicked by a 17-year-old human rights actor. Oh, yeah. And she's soft-spoken and she will adviscerate you. Done. Yeah. Done. I mean, I, we didn't, we didn't have a chance. But, you know, it ended up with the world kind of reacted poorly. The hashtag someone tell Levick. That was the name of the firm I was

working for at the time. Levick. The hashtag someone tell Levick was trending for like a week. And it was just like, what are these people doing going to Nigeria trying to tell them? Whitewash Boko Ra. Yeah. Or, well, whitewash the regime who is incompetent against Boko Aram. What's the difference? Some of these Israelis that you worked with as well are really sketchy, man. This, what is it, Cy Group? The Cy Group is the name of the organization. So who are these guys?

This is a black cube. And if you know, black cube. A competitor to play. Yeah. But people don't know what that is either. So tell us about this. Okay. So where to start?

So you have Ways on your phone, right? No. Okay, well, a lot of people have Ways on their phone. Ways started out as an Israeli military program to help them move military equipment throughout cities more efficiently. Well, somebody from the IDF retired, the guy who designed it, retired, did a civilian version and sold it to Google for a bunch of money. Right. So the Israelis that I worked for did the very same thing. It's just they didn't design apps for the IDF.

They ran the psychological operations for the IDF. So the fellow who founded the SI group recruited out of the Israeli defense forces and the Mossad pretty exclusively. Younger operatives. So kids who are doing their military service, if you do militaries, if you live in Israel, you have to do military service for a couple of years. If you choose the intelligence track, it's a five-year term. So once they get out, they have a number of skills that are marketable. to the private sector. So all they were doing was privatizing what they used to do for the Israeli government, but doing it for corporations in the United States and abroad. Okay. That sounds like

spying on behalf of corporations. You really does, doesn't it? It does. So, I mean, I'm trying to, I know you got to dance with us a little bit. Yeah. So I'm not here to hold your feet to the fire on this. I'm here to get the story out in a way that doesn't require you going to talk to the FBI after this conversation. Again. Yeah. Because, so what I found in the book, which is just ridiculous, is they give you this laptop and it's on. And they're like, put this in your desk drawer and leave it on and then leave it plugged in forever. And then lock the drawer.

Yeah. Do you have any idea what that was for? None. Okay. So I asked people that might know the answer to those types of questions. Awesome. That definitely know the answer to those types of questions. And it turns out that they run a special version of Linux and they put these essentially

sort of overblown Wi-Fi cards in there. Some of them are actually Wi-Fi cards. And they will connect to any device that gets near it. So any meeting you have, I was probably also listening to you, of course, but any phone call you have, any meeting you have, if I walk in with my cell phone, it'll connect to that computer and they're like, oh, okay, who's this phone? Well, they go through the database, whatever the thing is, they hacked. And they go, oh, Jordan Harbinger visited him.

Why would that guy be there? Huh. Okay, so they start to map all of your connections, listening to your meetings, your phone calls, even people walking by outside, they can go, why was that guy in a car out front for 15 minutes? That's unusual. That's what those laptops can do. I think it's funny that you just went, okay, and just no questions whatsoever. I mean, that's like, there's like a bumper sticker for your job, which is don't ask.

Don't ask questions. Don't ask. Yeah. It seems like you just had to do that kind of thing. You know, I was talking to a reporter about this the other day, and they said, Phil, how much of this was willful ignorance. Just 80%. The question absolutely floored me.

Yeah. And the only thing I could come up with to say is that, you know, where I hate the characterization, I can't disagree. The whole industry is duplicitous, right? You mentioned the side group. They're being paid by the Gulf states, right? The Gulf states don't want to be on the records with wiring millions of dollars of money to Israel and people who work at the bank are like, why aren't we paying Israel?

Aren't we supposed to be kind of like enemies of those guys? So they're wiring money through the Sishel and Cyprus because they don't want the optics of looking at it. So somewhere in Cyprus and Sishel are bankers that are just loaded taking a percentage that they can put a rubber stamp on a money transfer from the Israeli government. It's just from the Gulf states to the Israeli corporations, not the government. It's just banana. The whole thing is just such a layer of spray paint on a crumbling facade. I wish I could say that I've only been paid from a. Cypriot account once.

Uh-huh. But it's happened multiple times. And this group is under investigation by Robert, or was under investigation by the FBI, Robert Mueller. I mean, these are like not typically people you would hang out with if you're a corporation is totally above board. Right, right. A few things on that.

I mean, it is shocking the number of legitimate corporations that met with us that we're considering using these folks. It's amazing what people do. can get away with. When did this start affecting your mental health? Yeah, that's um, not did it, when did it, right? Because I'm like, there's an African proverb that also is in your book that I love. I'm remembering this forever. 99 lies will help you. It's the 100th lie that hurts you. Yeah. And that certainly was true of me. My mental health started, I've worked with a lot of doctors on this. Yeah. So we've kind of pinpointed that the depression and some other things hit when I was about

about 20, which was what caused the problem in college. Things just kind of piled up, and I didn't get a proper diagnosis really until I was about 35. Wow. So you suffered for a decade and a half or longer? Yeah. Yeah. Just thinking all of this stuff that's in the book was normal.

Well, and you're drinking. Yes. And you're probably sleeping like crap. Yeah. Right. I mean, I was definitely treating my problems with alcohol and pot and not sleeping. And it does catch up with you. I mean, I don't know if this is 100% analogous, but in the Harry Potter movies, they talk about how it, when you kill somebody, it tears the soul.

And it just continually does that. And didn't expect a Harry Potter reference in this podcast. My wife's a huge Harry Potter fan. I mean, I'm not against it. I just thought, hmm, we're talking about depression, mental health, espionage, Gaddafi murdering people. By the way, in Harry Potter. Harry Potter. Yeah, no, I'm always there with a weird reference.

I appreciate them here for it. But it did catch up with me. It was one thing on top of another until I thought that I'd, my job is all about creating options. I just thought I was out of options. How bad did it get emotionally or mental health was? How close did you get to the bottom? Well, I could definitely smell it. I was near the end of my rope because I just didn't know, didn't know where to turn.

and ended up strangely enough finding a solution to the mental health problem through ketamine therapy. Tell me about that. I tried that with a doctor. Yes. Yeah. A lot of people are like, oh, yeah, me too, bro. No, with a doctor. But I don't have depression or anything.

It was just a doctor who's a friend was like, hey, a lot of people really like this. Which is a strange thing to do with medical treatment. Now that I think about it, he meant well, right? Because I had a bunch of friends that were doing it that were like recommending it. And I, maybe he just assumed that I was also in that. But I tried it. And it was, it was terrifying because it feels, I don't know, I've never been head into your death experience.

I can imagine this is probably kind of what it's like. It's like dying. Falling through the floor and then you're in space, but then space opens up and you're falling through a hole in space. And I remember saying, because you're still, you're not totally out. No. I told the nurse, there's a nurse there. Thank God.

Because otherwise, you know. And I said, I'm dying. You need to turn it down. And she was like, oh. and she did and then I became way more sort of sober and then I said I have a family I can't die she's like no and the doctor came in and he's like it's fine whatever I you know they had a conversation but it was clearly I just was very alarmed at the fact that my body knew to say I'm dying because maybe I was dying because ketamine is not something you sort of screw around with you know it really is and intravenous ketamine yeah it's I want to say one thing don't do drugs before we start talking about this, I have never used ketamine outside of a doctor's office, and I never would. You should not. Yeah, it's not. Any of that shit, do not fuck around with this. But in a doctor's office, under the supervision of an anesthesiologist and an ER trained nurse. Yeah, that's what this guy's

anesthesiologist. By the way, I'm happy to refer people to this practice in the Silicon Valley area of California because I don't want people ordering ketamine from the dark web and giving it a shot because It's expensive where they are illegal. Yeah. You don't want to do any gray or black market stuff with this shit, especially with like fentanyl rolling or anything. No. No.

Just go to the doctor's office. They'll give it to you. And you're hooked up to a blood pressure monitor and a blood oxygen monitor and heart rate monitors. It's all very safe. And that is the thing you have to understand is that it's temporary. Uh-huh. And you will come out of it.

It's the disassociation is very jarring. the first time. I thought it was five hours. It was 20 minutes. Yeah. Yeah, you're in the chair for an hour total. But it's, I don't know what it does exactly, except that for me, it cures depression and suicidal ideation and reduces panic attacks a great deal. I was taking one to two, one milligram Xanax pills a day just to live.

Just to not, yeah, just to live. Yeah, and you were also drinking? Yes. Holy, that is so dangerous. Yeah. That's the old, remember in the 80s? I don't know how old you are. You're about my age practice.

Yeah, that's how a zillion famous people died, right? They would take sleeping pills, quote, unquote, and then they would have a martini, and they would just zonk. That would be it. Yeah. It was scary, and, you know, I was working with a psychiatrist who had me on a bunch of different SSRIs and other. medications that didn't do anything. And finally it came to a head. You know, I went into my doctor and

she said, well, I think you have treatment resistant depression. Sure. And I said, well, duck, that sounds an awful lot like a death sentence after, you know, I mean, this isn't good. Are you giving up? And she said, you know, we should try ketamine therapy. And how are you feeling now? Feel great. Good. I mean, for me, it truly is a performance enhancing drug, Because if your baseline depression level is if you're feeling like a two or a three, you can't really do anything. Right. It's impossible to get out of bed and be creative. I wouldn't say that I'm a confidence man.

But I mean, my job requires a great deal of confidence in order to pick up the phone and do these things. And if you feel like you have nothing left, there's nothing. Have you ever used this skill set for anything good? Oh, yeah. Okay, let's talk about that. Like, I don't want, you know, because you sat here sort of in the confessional. Flogging myself. Right.

And it's like, well, all right, didn't you rescue some gymnasts from Ukraine? I mean, tell me, tell us about this. Oh, okay. The Ukrainian story is good. My favorite kind of good guy story from early in my career, actually, when I was working for all the bad folks was there was this barber, a Turkish, barber in Saudi Arabia. He had a barbershop and Jeddah. And one day he got into an altercation with a customer and said the words, God damn it. And the customer called the religious authorities. He was arrested the same day. He was given a one day trial with no lawyer and no translator.

He didn't speak fluent Arabic. And he was sentenced to death for saying, God damn it. Right. And so I went to my client, a Turkish American, translated an article from the Turkish press for me, sent it to me and said, get the English-speaking press to write about this. So I called up my buddy, Peter Slutsky, still a very good friend, wrote for the Huffington Post at the time. And he wrote this wonderful 750-word piece about the injustice of this. How wrong it was. And then the Saudis were hosting a conference at the UN on religious, tolerant. or something like that. Oh, the irony is so rich. So I sent some reporters to this conference to have them ask questions about this barber, Sabri Bagh day. And then the next week, he received a pardon

from the king of Saudi Arabia. And he was given a one-way ticket to Istanbul. Yeah. And said never to come back to the kingdom. Sure. And so he's alive. This guy's about my age and he has a family. Does he know you did any of this? No. No. If anybody knows this guy. guy. This would be such an interesting way to connect. Because there's definitely, we have tons of Turkish listeners. Unfortunately, that name is probably massively. But someone's going to be like, wait, I think that's my friend's uncle who's the guy who runs the bar. I think he's still, I haven't heard any updates like nobody has. Cut in hair like nobody's business enjoying every day of his freedom, probably. I hope so. It's not why I do this. People have asked several times like,

why do you do this? Is it for the money? And I didn't get rich. doing this stuff. I mean, when I was working for all of the dictators, I was making less than $100,000 a year. Really? That's such a low price. Right. Here I am thinking like, well, a lot of people would do things for $850,000 plus bonus. What? You're making as much as like a paralegal selling your soul? Paralegals get to go home at five usually, right? They're making, those people are really important, by the way. But they are not selling their soul by any stretch. Right. I didn't do it for money. I honest to God, think, that I do this, that I'm driven by the story.

Like, I have to be... You know, there's other professions where you can be driven by the story. It's called journalism. You might want to give it a shot. They'd never have. For crying out loud, start a freaking podcast, anything but helping out who's up. Kim Jong-un or whatever the next client is. Jesus Christ, don't say that in Saudi Arabia.

Oh, my God. I guess you could probably say that in Saudi Arabia. Yeah, I don't think I'm going to be traveling to the Middle East anytime, Sharon. Jeez. The things you know, and there's these tips in the book that just give like an insight into your life. You said in Lebanon, always stay above the sixth floor because car bombs typically only damage the lower floors. Yeah. And I'm thinking, here in New York, you're like, can I get like a, you want to be low enough that the fire truck can rescue you? Right. High enough where like you're

not taking a shower and you look out the window and you realize the hot dog cart vendor can see your wiener. It's just like, you know, those are the calculations we're making here. Right. Over there, a completely different game. It is. Beirut was a very interesting trip. It was both scary because of the reason that we were there, but it was also really beautiful. They're not kidding. It is like the Paris of the Middle East. I haven't been back since the blast.

I understand that was pretty bad for the city. Yeah. On that same token, you've been to some of the worst places in the world to work with some of the worst people in the world. Yeah. What's a surprisingly awesome place apart from, let's say, the murderous dictator in charge. You mentioned Lebanon.

Anything else come to mind where you're just like, wow, this place would be great except for the guy murdering everybody who jaywalks. I have heard the Roman ruins in Libya are absolutely outstanding. Yeah, I heard the same.

I have heard the soccer stadiums in Doha are really ugly, but they at least disassembled most of them and got rid of them. Where is a nice Antigua, of course, is wonderful. Trying to think of the best. Yeah.

Nigeria is not, I wouldn't recommend a booja, I'm sorry. Yeah. I think D.C. is the place that everybody should go visit. Or, I mean, look, Lebanon, I've tried to go there a few times. Unfortunately, there's either an invasion or a civil war or some kind of thing every time I've made. I've tried three times. Once Israel invaded another time, there was something going on with Hezbollah. And I was like, you know, the universe, which I don't love this phrase, but the universe is trying to tell me something. If I'd had to cancel three trips to Lebanon over a period of that. a decade. Like, my timing is off on this. Although next time I go, or next time if I manage to go, I'll stay on the seventh floor. Well, where I think people should get Turkey. I love Turkey.

Is the best food ever. The best food ever, some of the best beaches, just absolutely a beautiful country. I can't say enough good things about visiting Turkey. I don't have a clever ending to this particular podcast. Well, you know, we could, you know, we could just make one up and. Yeah, well, that's what I Usually do. Yeah, it's been a pleasure talking with you, man. He really has bad. You're still in the game, though, right? I am. I am. So long as you're not a dictator or working against democracy. I was going to say, did you draw any, have you drawn a line in the sand as it were? Absolutely. No dictators, nothing against democracy and nothing illegal. Those are the lines that I've demarcated. There's a little bit about the word deadline. Would you like to hear that? Yeah, let's do it. Okay, so in newsrooms, everybody's life is governed by a deadline. So I decided to look up the origin of this word.

And it turns out it comes from the American Civil War, and it has to do with a line around POW camps, prisoner of war camps. And they would draw a line in the dirt and put a sniper at each four corners and told the inmates, if you cross this line, you will be shot. And it was known as the deadline. Now, how that migrated into newsrooms, I'm not entirely. entirely sure. A lot darker than I thought it was going to be.

Yeah. But for me, you know, a deadline is something that I set after all of these things happened that I couldn't cross or else I wasn't going to live. Well, I'm glad you're alive. Hey, me too. Happy to be here. Yeah. Thank you.

Thank you. Here's a sample of my interview with Amanda Knox, who was coerced into wrongfully confessing that she was at the scene of her roommate's grisly murder. without being made aware of her rights or being given access to a lawyer. Here's a quick look inside. I was 20 years old. I was studying abroad in Italy. The day after Halloween, I came home to find a murder scene.

The cops arrived. They break down my roommate's door and find her body there. And for the next five days, I was at the disposal and mercy. of the police officers who, unbeknownst to me, had targeted me as a person of interest. My thought was to just take direction. I did what I was told. And what I was told was by the police to come in every day for questioning. And I sat for hours and hours and hours. I often worried that maybe the reason that they were upset or short with me was because I just wasn't speaking Italian well enough. I thought that was the reason why they kept asking me questions over and over and over again.

No matter how many ways I answered the same question, they never seemed happy with it. I just sort of submitted myself to what was ultimately a very coercive interrogation technique that culminated with an overnight interrogation and broke me. I was made to believe that the reason they were upset with me was because I didn't remember correctly. I realized that the truth didn't matter and that I couldn't count on the truth to save me. People believed it. I was convicted. I spent four years in prison. For more, including why it's not uncommon for an innocent person to give a false confession to a skilled interrogator, check out

Episode 386 on the Jordan Harbinger show. Foo, yikes. I could not do that job and also sleep at night. And apparently Phil could neither, hence the ketamine therapy. Really interesting line of work. I think he's a good dude at heart. I think he's, man, the things we do for money, I suppose. From what I can see during my brief experience with him, this is not some sort of like nefarious evil guy.

It's just sort of a job that he fell into. I don't think I could stay in it, though. Thank you to him for being so candid on the show here today. Off air, by the way, Phil told me that if a reporter doesn't explicitly agree that something is off the record, then it is not off the record. And so that might be useful to some of us. I guess I'll have to remember that if I ever really decide to get dirty over here. But that's something that can trip up a lot of people. It's tripped up a lot of people. In fact, that's why he told me that. So that's why I'm sharing it with you all as well. All things, Phil Elwood will be in the show notes over at Jordan Harbinger.com.com. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show. All at Jordan Harbinger.com.com. deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Don't forget about our newsletter as well, We Bit Wiser. Every Wednesday we give you something specific, something practical, something that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology and your relationships in under two minutes, making Webit Wiser quite Wee. And if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out.

It's a great companion to the show. Jordan Harbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Don't forget about six-minute networking as well over at six-minute networking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And this show has created an association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting.

The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. So if you know somebody who's interested in these kind of lesser-known careers, a little bit of shady stuff that might appeal to one of your friends or loved ones, definitely share this episode with them in the meantime. I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast.

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