1018: Phil Elwood | Manipulating Media for All the Worst Humans

25:00You know what? You won't have to sell your soul to afford the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing authors, thinkers and creators every single week, it is because of my network, the circle of people I know, like and trust. I'm teaching you how to build the same thing for yourself. I know you're not booking for a podcast, but you're probably doing a job. Maybe you're retired. You just want to up that social life. This is worth a dive in. Trust me, folks. This course is all about improving your relationship skills, inspiring other people to want to develop a relationship with you.

25:29And it's non-cringy. It's very down to earth. Just takes a few minutes a day. And many of the guests on our show subscribe and contribute to the course. So come on and join us and you'll be in smart company where you belong. Again, the course is free over at sixminutenetworking.com. 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 uh you know i was very new why did they pick you for this gig man they should have sent me they should have said yes i would have said yes anybody i mean the way i 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 for the book he was like well this is the first time i ever heard you truly afraid at work and also he when i told him that i was going there he said well you baby and sitting somebody in vegas is like fighting fire with gasoline yeah what is 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 well we were we were pretty much drinking every moment we were awake the entire time we were there It was one outrageous demand after the next.

26:48And we had these 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, the entourage had some security people and some friends and his trainer and his girlfriend 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 uh i think shocking and her friend was i would imagine also also a model yeah yeah these guys are really predictable they really are they they like they like blondes yeah i don't know i don't know what that's about can't walk around with those in libya maybe and so what i love about this is the guy has jean shorts that he's wearing the whole time well he wants jorts those are aspirational jorts where can i get the shorts with the jeans bro you want a pair of jorts

27:52torturers and jorts is what you should have named the book yeah well there were a couple of titles that came up i mean uh it's um but i have to explain why he couldn't find jorts is because they were out 20 years before he wanted to go buy look let's just go buy a pair of jeans and a pair of scissors and make your own jorts make your own jorts yeah we'll get a members only jacket it'll be great you can hang out with a medina jot or whatever in your members only jackets every iranian president has one of those yeah we did we did throw a party for the libyans once at the willard hotel to celebrate 40 years of qaddafi'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.

28:34And then Obama announced he was giving his first address to a joint session of Congress the same night. So 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 DC, but 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.

29:10Probably. 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. tabs and the people i invited to 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 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 gonna first of all no one's gonna find out certainly no one's going to say anything because you will kill them if you're right 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 the blue man group it was uh cirque de soleil 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 abandon right like hundreds of thousands or possibly millions of dollars yeah i mean i have no earthly i think i've blocked out what the final bill was at the bellagio 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 yeah the card got my card got rejected absolutely the first time it was just like nope this isn't running and uh 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 to 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 get off he seems like a cash guy cash guy cash guy you know they were it was weird they had these briefcases they were black snakeskin briefcases that were filled with money.

31:43My God. And I had to pop open one, and the bills were like, they were in plastic wrap. Like they had come straight from the treasury, you know, and thrown in. Shrink wrapped, wow. 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. Like go in the room and get us$200 ,000 and bring it back down here? There 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.

32:24You just take the garbage bag out and you fill it with cash. And then you walk through the Bellagio with this garbage bag. Wow. Cash. What the fuck else are you going to do? Right. And what's weird is you're not the only person walking through that Bellagio with a garbage bag full of$100 bills. No, no. Maybe the only one giving it to a 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.

33:05Yeah, this is an extreme example of that. This is an extreme example of that. But everybody has had a situation where their employer was like, eh, just write out that number, punch in for me, or 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 Matassam 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 Gaddafi again?

33:48You 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 full circle yeah i know fired on this is what you get for not paying the bill for overpaying the bill we 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 matassam Matasson was shot a few times. The brother leader, there's video of this.

34:31I 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, a true psychopath who just had no clue. Right up until the end. There was no moment of reality ever but i know or i have heard that dictators around the world watch the footage of gaddafi's execution as a cautionary tale jeez wow wild trip to vegas yes yeah haven't been back well i went back once i went back what i did a favor for a friend of mine and he gave me tickets to the grammys in exchange for the favor so i got back to vegas one it was nicer i stayed at the bellagio but it was oh you're back no no no it's just me this time it's just me the concierge should retire yeah but you are on a list of oh god 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 seven million dollar or whatever bill and all we had to do was fumigate the room and replace the bedspread in the car nine rooms yeah nine yeah whatever i mean it was worth it they made the margins were nice on that trip i'm sure.

35:47You talk about sinking a body. Yes. Tell us what this is. Tell me about this. 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 for 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.

36:28And 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 and the coffin is rising. Because there's air 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.

37:06his 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 his head like they're going to notice that.

37:41But 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 backhoe had 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 coffins come i'm 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 day like 11 12 so after everybody's gone away i 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 key and my mom answered the door looked at 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 had to move it i assume and you know i spent the rest of the day in my room crying yeah i think i don't think that i really checked yeah no that's understandable my god and that has to do what with pr now well sometimes you have to distract the audience.

39:02And 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. PR operative. OK. 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 they write a really generic two paragraphs or whatever.

39:43With some bullet points. You got to bold some shit in there, too. Kirkus 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. We'll get there. So tell me, so the publicist writes a pitch, pitches journalists, et cetera. You're not doing that. No, I haven't sent a pitch email in, other than for the book, in years.

40:23That'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 them 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, 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.

41:07And 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 10. I don't believe that. I should have became a cop. You should have been a cop or a neurosurgeon. That's right. You 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.

41:43All of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support this show are searchable and clickable over on the website at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. If you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find the code, please email me, jordan at jordanharbinger.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.

42:16The 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 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 I was able, and it was just like, at that point you go, oh, you learned nothing.

42:52You learned. You've learned nothing. Absolutely nothing. And that's what this Iraq war documentary is. I mean, 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, Gunnar Palace. It was about the Iraq war. It was about an artillery unit that lived in Uday Hussein's bombed out palace. in the Atomia 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*** appears in the film like 100 times.

43:34And the Motion Picture Association of America says if the word f*** appears in the movie more than once, I think it's twice, it 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 first. 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 appears several times in the movie, but it's still important for kids to see.

44:13We appealed to the Motion Picture Association of America. We put them on TV, talking to, you know, Fax, 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, 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.

44:55And that's not what this was. This was like the most pro-soldier documentary I've ever seen. What's it called? Gunner Palace. 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 what 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.

45:30But 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.

46:13The FAR database is one of the most impenetrable in the world. Glad to hear we're on top of all that here as a country. Oh, yeah. There are like four people that work at the FAR 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 Agents Registration Office in Arabic. We don't have a rule against that. No. Come on, man. So Politico had to pay to translate the entire contract into English and they published it. So kudos to them for doing that.

46:48I get a man in the far office is like, hey, can we get a copy of that so that we can read it too? Because it's in Arabic in her office. Exactly. Good Lord. Could you guys help us out a little bit? I mean, well, 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 Edelman. Have you ever heard of the PR firm Edelman? Yeah. Okay. They're the largest privately held PR firm in the world. Okay. Edelman, after it came out that we worked for the Gaddafis and the Assads and the Qataris, and it 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 contracts.

47:35I see. Now, I will have you know, last year, Richard Adelman personally registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act to work for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, more specifically, Mohammed 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 want to hire me? You know, maybe I should rethink my position. I mean, my 18 million dollar 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.

48:15Sure. 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 who 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 Russia had a contract for a very long time with a PR firm called Ketchum, which is owned by a big holding company.

48:56But no, they worked for them totally legally, registered, believe they helped place an op-ed 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, they're 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 the New York Times for the Syrian? They're lost right now. So hold our hand through this one. Sure. As we walk through the dairy aisle. Some of it is just normalizing it. You look to the origins of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, 1938.

49:33We created that law because of Hitler, because he was hiring American PR firms to promote op-eds and articles in 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 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.

50:19Yes, 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. Assume there's a markup on stuff like this. Sure, sure. How does that work? In normal PR firm, there is a 17.5 % markup on any expense. So say you go out to dinner have to 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 - Like 20's too high. It's kind of like - 17, a little bit too low.

50:55It's kind of like tipping, you know? 17.5. I'm not sure exactly. I guess when you're talking about millions of dollars, the 0.5, that's like three people's entire yearly salary or whatever. It seems silly. But yeah, so there have been occasions. there was one specific occasion where I was, 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, onto the invoice. And they're like, just get paid in cash. It'll be fine. So, you know, this happens over and over and over again.

51:32And 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 butt. Like, even if you took a hundred million dollars from the Gaddafi family, they would go, oh, I don't know. We probably shouldn't hire that guy again.

52:05Anyway, 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 to 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.

52:40We're going to - I'm going to do better things with this money than you are. 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. Yeah. 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.

53:16And 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's 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.

53:52And 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? 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 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 americans yeah i live there's this there's this giant fucking asterisk next to that happiness to meet Americans.

55:06And that is, why didn't you help me? Yeah. Did you go to the tunnel that they dug under the airport? That was in Christophe. 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.

55:38So 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 risked 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's like a Shawshank Redemption style prison escape.

56:06It 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 and a couch. And it's about, this area is about the size of a large-ish bathroom.

56:44You 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, what are these? Why are these all over the place? Thinking like, what God do you 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.

57:15I 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 go, 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 Yugoslavia. And there's a fountain there. 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 in Yugoslavia. Yeah. And have you been back? Yeah, no, not yet.

57:46There you go. I'd like to. 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 washing. 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.

58:23So 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 Qatari 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.

59:08I 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 Qataris 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.

59:45It was a place called Fox and Howe. And I was sitting there having a vodka soda and this group of school children walks by and they were all morbidly 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.

1:00:21You 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 astroturf organization. Can you explain briefly what these are? Sure. 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 astroturf organization is a fake grassroots organization that gets a bunch of fake people together and makes it look like a bunch of people support a cause.

1:00:59But 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 AstroTurf organization is what like Citizens for Healthy Kids. You said Healthy Kids Coalition. Healthy Kids. Right. And this is just Qatar going, ah, we want the World Cup. We don't want the U.S.

1:01:35to outbid us on this. So let's make a fake organization that pretends to care about. No, Qatar didn't make the AstroTurf. That existed. I just borrowed that from a friend of mine. Oh, you just borrowed the fake organization from a friend of mine. The big organization existed for something totally unrelated years before. I see. And 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.

1:02:04Right. Right. Okay. And so I get this resolution introduced. I leaked the resolution to a reporter at Politico who I knew was a sports fan. and he wrote a story with a headline world cup versus gym 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 cuttery 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 a hundred percent of the people who are allowed to talk say they support it. Right, right, right.

1:02:44I'm surprised. It seems like the Detroit mayor should have hired you. That guy was a real scumbag. Kwame Kilpatrick. Yes, yes, yes. Very interesting guy. Yeah, 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. Yeah, problem. 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. 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.

1:03:25Because it was the first time he was shown in the global media and to his own people to be a human, to be a mortal. and it was embarrassing. The press coverage that he got on his trip 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 at the... No. Well, anywhere, other than something tightly under his own control. Right. Vladimir Putin doesn't do things they're not 100 % controlled.

1:04:05Yeah. 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 was one soundbite. I mean, it's, if somebody asks you, you know, when did you stop setting house fires?

1:04:45Right. You don't say I'm not an arsonist. You say, I believe in the fire codes, you know, Oh, I think we should have sprinklers. You know, then you just up to skate a little bit. You set this trade war with Antigua and 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 long-standing trade.

1:05:24Small 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.

1:06:01And 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 used 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.

1:06:46pharma 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 a 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 U.S. movies, music, and software on the open market without paying royalties to anybody.

1:07:28And 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 movie it's like a buck 99 or something like that yeah 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 mpaa and the the music companies going excuse me white house we are losing our shirts because the entire world is now shopping in antigua for 80 off and we We didn't even have to launch the site. I'm sure. All we had to do was threaten to do it.

1:08:03Oh, really? So you didn't even 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. Such that - Somebody did the math. The New York Times editorialized that the United States needed to settle this. 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 in, it's not safe.

1:08:35Not safe. Right. Tell me about Nigeria. I mean, 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. Yes, because 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?

1:09:11Yeah. So they kidnapped about two or three hundred girls from the Chibok 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, hashtag bring back our girls.

1:09:57They knew it was a problem. But kidnapping is a business there. I mean, it's pretty common. So they did not understand what all this was about and why the world was so upset. The government wasn't exactly competent. They weren't doing anything. 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, geez. Yeah. I mean, this is, you know, this is a place where people who even work for the government get kidnapped on train heists.

1:10:40I 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 and army in Nigeria who sell their guns because they need to eat. Who sold their guns. 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. The arms dealers, some of them had bodyguards and some of them didn't. The guys I remember most from the Hilton in Abuja were these guys from Idaho who were there building shooting ranges for the military.

1:11:22And these were some Second Amendment enthusiasts, if I've ever met one. I can imagine. 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 Haram. I'm curious, but one thing at a time here. By the way, I had dinner with Malala Yousafzai. 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 yeah amazing like one of the leading 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 and how to read.

1:12:15I 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 a dinner party and it did not go well. Her and I are not good at cooking brownies. Oh, no? No, I should save the story for when she comes on, but it was, yeah, she's like, you know how to do 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, she had a Nobel Prize winner and some schmucky podcaster, or neither of us could make fricking brownies, which by the way, have like three ingredients.

1:12:46Right, right. It comes in a pre-made box. Yeah, yeah. How many eggs? Well, it says this, but we're making more than one. And I'm like, I'm lost. I can't do it. I 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, we're doing all we could to make good luck Jonathan look like he was 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 right this is gonna be a this is gonna 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 eviscerate 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 Whitewash Boko Haram.

1:14:08Right. Or, well, whitewash the regime who is incompetent against Boko Haram. What's the difference? Some of these Israelis that you worked with as well are really sketchy, man. What is it? Psy Group? The Psy 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 Waze on your phone, right? No. Okay. Well, a lot of people have Waze on their phone. Waze started out as an Israeli military program to help them move military equipment throughout cities more efficiently.

1:14:46Well, 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. 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 Psy 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 military, 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.

1:15:26So 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. It 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 and 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 um because so what I found in the book which is just ridiculous is they give you this laptop and they 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.

1:16:14Yeah. 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 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 wifi cards in there. Some of them are actually wifi 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?

1:16:46Well, they go through the database, whatever the thing is that 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, what, 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.

1:17:16Yeah. It seems like you just had to do that kind of thing. 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 Cy 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?

1:17:55Aren't we supposed to be kind of like enemies of those guys? So they're wiring money through the Seychelles and Cyprus because they don't want the optics of looking bad. So somewhere in Cyprus and Seychelles 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, but it's happened multiple times.

1:18:30And this group is under investigation by 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 were considering using these folks. It's amazing what people can get away with. When did this start affecting your mental health? Yeah, that's... 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.

1:19:1199 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. So we've kind of pinpointed that the depression and some other things hit when I was 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. Just thinking all of this stuff that's in the book was normal. Well, and you're drinking. Yeah. And you're probably sleeping like crap.

1:19:48Yeah. 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 - In Harry Potter. No, I'm always there with the weird reference.

1:20:28Sorry about that. I'm here for it. But it did catch up with me. It was one thing on top of another until I thought that I, my job is all about creating options. I just thought I was out of options. How bad did it get emotionally or mental health wise? You know, 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.

1:21:09No, with a doctor. But I don't have depression or anything. It was just a doctor whose 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 book. I tried it and it was, it was terrifying because it feels, I don't know. I've never been ahead of near 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.

1:21:43And I remember saying, cause you're still, you're not totally out. No. I told the nurse, there's a nurse there, thank God. Cause otherwise, you know, and I said, I am 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.

1:22:18And intravenous ketamine. Yeah, it's, I want to say one thing 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 an anesthesiologist. By the way, I am 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.

1:22:54Yeah. You don't want to do any gray or black market stuff with this shit, especially with like fentanyl rolling. 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. And it's all very safe. And that is the thing you have to understand is that it's temporary 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. You're in the chair for an hour total. But 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.

1:23:44I 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 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.

1:24:27I went into my doctor and she said, well, I think you have treatment-resistant depression. Sure. And I said, well, Doc, 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? I 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. Right. It's impossible to get out of bed and be creative. And 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.

1:25:13And if you feel like you have nothing left, there's 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've 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 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 barber shop in 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 and he was arrested the same day he was given a one-day trial with no lawyer and no translator uh he didn't speak fluent Arabic and he was sentenced to death for saying, God damn it.

1:26:16And 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 tolerance 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 Bagde.

1:26:55And then the next week, he received a pardon from the king of Saudi Arabia. And he was given a one-way ticket to Istanbul 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. if anybody knows this 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 it's like john smith 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 cutting 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 a hundred thousand dollars a year really that's such a low price to right here i am thinking like well a lot of people would do things for eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars plus bonus what you're making as much as like a paralegal yeah 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.

1:28:12Right. 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 true. 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 soon. Jeez.

1:28:42The 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. But 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. uh it's just like you know those are the calculations we're making here right over there completely different game it is beirut was um a very uh interesting trip it was both scary because of the reason that we were there but it was also really beautiful yeah just a great 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.

1:29:34On 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...

1:30:09Antigua, of course, is wonderful. Trying to think of the best. Yeah, Nigeria is not... I wouldn't recommend Abuja, 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 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 had to cancel three trips to Lebanon over a period of a decade.

1:30:46Like, 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 just make one up. Yeah, well, that's what I usually do. Yeah, it's been a pleasure talking with you, man. It really has been. You're still in the game, though, right? I am. I am, so long as you're not a dictator or working against democracy.

1:31:24I was going to say, have you drawn a line in the sand? Absolutely. As it were. 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 sure a lot darker than i thought it was going to be.

1:32:12Yeah. But for me, you know, a deadline is something that I set after all of these things happened that that I couldn't cross or else I wasn't going to live. Well, I'm glad you're alive. Hey, 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.

1:32:56The cops arrive, 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 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.

1:33:46No 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.

1:34:44whoo yikes i could not do that job and also sleep at night and apparently phil couldn't either 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.

1:35:18And 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 JordanHarbinger.com. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show. all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Don't forget about our newsletter as well, Wee 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 Wee Bit Wiser quite wee.

1:35:56And if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It's a great companion to the show. jordanharbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Don't forget about 6 Minute Networking as well over at 6minutenetworking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And this show has created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, 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.

1:36:25The 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.

1:37:05best and worst ways to apologize. Probably could have used that recently. Why couples hate to talk about money. No matter the topic, Mike asks the questions you'd want to ask. Getting straight to the good stuff and the conversations are always engaging, always insightful, guaranteed to leave you a little smarter than before. They've got thousands of five star reviews. But do you even need that? I'm recommending it. You don't need other people's opinion, right? At this point, I would hope. Anyway, give it a listen. Just search for something you should know wherever you get your podcasts. Look for the bright yellow light bulb and start listening to something you should know.