Phil Elwood | Confessions of a Public Relations Operative

“I deserved whatever the opposite of a Pulitzer is.”

Phil Elwood is the author of All the Worst Humans, a confessional memoir from the dubious world of public relations.

As a PR operative. He helped Qatar win the 2022 World Cup. He spun the release of the Lockerbie bomber into a “positive headline.” Had the Gaddafi family, the Assad regime and plenty more among his clients. 

Phil speaks with humility and incredible clarity about what he learned from that world. The moral grey zones, the craft behind the spin, and how media manipulation really works in practice.

It’s a rare, honest window into an industry that prefers the shadows.

• How propaganda and PR actually get executed behind closed doors
• The mechanics of “first ink,” astroturfing, and reputation laundering
• The moral compromises behind Qatar’s 2022 World Cup bid
• Sportswashing, Liv Golf, and the new global game of influence
• Whether the media is more easily manipulated than ever?
• Whether AI and independent creators can break the old PR machinery

00:00 — Who is Phil Elwood?
04:57 — Lockerbie bomber: how he manufactured “positive press” for Libya.
11:14 — “Opposite of a Pulitzer” treating the news like a solvable game.
12:30 — What a PR operative really does; “infect a newsroom.”
18:28 — First Ink masterclass: Antigua vs USA
27:44 — Qatar 2022: going negative on the US bid
40:15 — Is Sportswashing PR? Is it all bad?
49:57 — “Buy the printing press”: oligarch media ownership.
55:01 — News collapse, AI replacing reporters, and why that’s dangerous.
57:21 — Andrew Callaghan. Do gatekeepers still matter?
01:05:53 — “Digital fentanyl”; treat content as a public-health issue.
01:10:27 — Rebranding Zuckerberg; persona as PR product.
01:22:44 — Bots: PR firms pitching bot farms
01:34:30 — Practical playbook & media-literacy plus a nice close.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Phil Elwood is the author of a confessional memoir titled All the Worms. It stories his life working as a PR operative for some pretty dodgy guys. The clientele that he could legally mention includes the Gaddafi family, principally Muammaz Gaddafi's son, Mutasim, the recently fallen Assad regime of Syria, Phil playing a pivotable role in the Rose in the Desert piece of propaganda that Vogue famously published, the Qatari government and their bid for the 2022 World Cup, Boko Haram in Nigeria, the US government and plenty more here and there between the lines. And as Phil just said to me, it is a tell sum, not a tell all. Were he to reveal the full list of clients, he'd either be in a morgue or for the rest of his life in prison. What stood out to me so much from this book was just how untrustworthy and easily manipulated the media ecosystem is. Phil writes in the book that there is as much as a six to one ratio of PR operatives to journalists, therefore more of those whose interests lie in spinning the news rather than reporting it. And in a rotten race for breaking scoops, the quid pro quo that passes hands between these two parties cannot leave you anything else but cynical. It's stuff like a PR operative trading a scoop on something unrelated for the right headline for their client. In other words, it is spin all the way down, changing the conversation, crafting the framing, appeals to authority, whether manufactured or real. But never until this book had I heard an explanation for how that spin is actually executed. You'll hear terms like astroturfing, first ink, reputation laundering, media gatekeepers. This book is the world of media manipulation, all in the service of driving forward the interests of the client. But I wonder whether this toolkit is only applicable to a much older media environment, one where very powerful and influential media names and organizations dominated public opinion, and whether all this PR work is still as relevant and powerful today when the majority of people's information is consumed via user-generated content on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. How far does a well-spun New York Times headline get your clients now? I'm extremely keen to get into it. Phil is a self-confessed, reformed PR operative. Now only doing the work for the good guys. He teased me earlier that he might get to talk about one of his current clients, a name you will for sure all be familiar with. And so, Phil, I absolutely loved your book. It was uh great speaking with you this morning. I'm really keen to speak to you now, and I hope that introduction doesn't frame you in too negative of a light. It is my thrill to welcome you to the podcast.

SPEAKER_04 2:35

Oh, you should have seen some of the reception I've gotten before. I mean, that was pretty light compared to some some of the reviews I've gotten for this. Give us a flavor. What's the worst you've gotten? Oh, uh it's just sometimes the I you know, and I've I've kind of stopped looking at reviews online, like user reviews of the book through certain platforms, because it's it's some, you know, a lot of people are overwhelmingly positive, but some people call me, you know, the devil incarnate, an irredeemable asshole, is one of my favorite lines from one of them. Uh so I mean people can be pretty harsh on the internet, and that's you know, one of the things I'm worried about is kind of the the social media, like the algorithm that gears people towards anger and hatred and animosity is something that people in my profession harness to accomplish pretty evil ends. So when the user buys into it and gets angry and feeds that rage machine, all you're doing is helping us out. Right. You're helping out the bad people, you know. So people need to realize that the best the best revolution against the rage machine and the algorithm that's dominating so much of our political discourse is to just be nice.

SPEAKER_00 3:54

In all of that negative feedback, was there any lines of truth that maybe hit particularly hard?

SPEAKER_04 4:00

Sure, sure. I had one reporter from the Times of London who wrote a a really wonderful profile piece on me. Uh at the end of our interview, she turned to me and said, Phil, level with me. How much of this was willful ignorance? And it just absolutely floored me. I mean, um I I said that I I where I didn't like the characterization, I couldn't disagree with it. And I think one story that really highlights that probably willful ignorance is a good way to put it, would be, well, there are two of them. The first of which is the public relations work on behalf of the Qaddafi family and the Libyan government, in the wake of Al-Mahrahi, the Lockerbie Bomber, being released. And a second is one I'm sure we'll get into the World Cup bid by Cut. So the first one, the Lockerbie Bomber. This was shortly after I started working for the company that represented the Qaddafi family. And uh I didn't interact with the family all that much. I mostly interacted with the Libyan ambassador to the United States. And one day I was beckoned to the Libyan embassy in DC, which was in the Watergate Hotel. So I go over to the Watergate Hotel and I'm sitting down with the ambassador, and he says to me, you know, Phil, uh, tomorrow is going to be an amazing day. A national hero is set to be released and returned to Libya. And I didn't, I wasn't sure who he was talking about, so I was like, Well, who's that? And he said the man's name was Al McGrahee. And for those of your listeners who don't know, Al McGrahe is the uh terrorist who blew up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerby, Scotland, killing 270 people. Uh, this guy, in the most polite terms, is a mass murderer. And Scotland was releasing him because a couple of Libyan doctors said that this guy had prostate cancer. Now, I don't know whether he that was an actual diagnosis or it was an excuse to let him out, but Al-Magrahi was released and returned to Libya. Now, the day that that happened, and he landed in Tripoli, the capital of Libya, he was given a hero's welcome, a ticker-tape parade for all intents and purposes. And so the ambassador and I were having this meeting. He's like, What do you think the global media's response to this is gonna be? And I said, Well, it's gonna be pretty goddamn terrible because the man is a terrorist. This isn't shortly after, uh not shortly after, a few years after 9-11 happened in our country, terrorism was not something that was acceptable. And so I said, This is gonna be really bad, and it turned out it was. So for about 36 hours, thirty-six, forty-eight hours, the global media just came after Libya. I mean, every single paper ran a story. It got so intense that Robert Muller, the then director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, wrote a letter to the Scottish authorities calling it a miscarriage of justice and demanding that they you know rescind this decision. And so the Libyan ambassador says to me, Well, you need to get us some positive press about this uh incident. And I was like, that's that's that's just not possible. And so I started doing a little research, and it turns out that back in 2004, 2005, uh a group of Congress uh people went to Libya from the United States to open the door. Now, why did we want to open the door with Libya? We wanted them to be allies in the war on terror. This was during the uh George W. Bush administration, and we wanted Libya to help us kill Al-Qaeda in Africa. And so one of those congressmen who went over was the Democrat chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. And I had recently done a project with him in Mexico, so with his staff in Mexico. So I called his staff and I said, Hey, you guys worked really hard to open the door to Libya to get them to be an ally in the war on terror, and we we can't let this go away. So please work with us. And they said, you know, what do you want us to do? And I said, Well, I've drafted a letter. This is a little secret that nobody knows, that letters from congressmen are often drafted by lobbyists or public relations people, and then it's like ghostwritten. It's ghostwritten. And so I wrote a letter, and one of the lines in the letter was knock off the Libya bashing. And this letter was from the congressman to, I believe, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the time. And so I gave the letter to the congressman's office. I waited about a day. They sent the letter back to me, signed, with absolutely no changes. I then leaked this letter to a reporter at Politico, and he wrote uh he wrote a story with the headline, knock off the Libya Bastion. So I got a positive piece of press for the Qaddafis the week Al-Magrahi was released. Now that is an example of, I mean, willful ignorance, I will say, is how we started this conversation. Willful ignorance. I mean, I knew what I was doing, and I knew what I was doing was wrong. It was something kind of took over in me that was just a desire to accomplish the goal.

SPEAKER_00 9:44

Right. And there must have been a great feeling of status and power associated with a lot of the actions that you would pull off.

SPEAKER_04 9:52

Yes. Yes. I mean, the way I describe it in the book is that I deserved whatever the opposite of a Pulitzer is. And, you know, I feel now I feel haunted by the actions that I took. I it was not like I was a young kid at the time. I was 30 or so when I did this. But I think I was really naive because where I was old in not old in years, but I I was I was new to this world. The firm that I was working for at the time was a firm called Brown Lloyd James. And they are they were a very unique public relations firm. They're they're essentially a relationship brokerage for people all over the world. And I had previously worked in kind of domestic, US domestic public relations. I had dabbled in a few things. I'd done PR for a documentary and for some some healthcare groups in the United States, but I hadn't done anything like this. On another case, uh we were working on, a friend of mine turned to me and said, Phil, isn't this just like model United Nations in school? And I was like, Yeah, it's just like that with real fucking countries. So, I mean, when you just look at it like it's a game and you remove the horrible things and the humanity from it, and you just you just look at it like a problem to be solved, some pretty horrible things can happen. And that is one of my deeper regrets.

SPEAKER_00 11:23

Well, look, the intent of this podcast is definitely not to ask you to apologize or feel ashamed or you know, express your regret for the things that you've done. That's definitely not the direction I want to take it. It's more just around the day-to-day actually, what is a PR operative? How does it work? As a window into the world, this is what the book gave me, at least. The media ecosystem that we inhabit is so malleable and sufficiently more so than even the most cynical of us might think it is. So look, Phil, pretend that someone listening to this, they would have gotten an idea by now, but just blank slate, what is a PR operative?

SPEAKER_04 12:02

A public relations operative, and there aren't many of us. Okay, so there are, you know, in the world, millions of people who work in the public relations industry, probably. I I don't know. I thought I saw the worldwide statistics somewhere, I don't remember what it is. But there are a lot of people who work in the public relations industry. There are holding companies that own a bunch of PR firms, and so you run the book, it's a $192 billion industry. $129 billion. And so it's it's a big business. But what I have found working in public relations for 20 plus years is that these PR firms don't have a lot of people like me. I am an oddity in a PR firm. I'm kind of an anachronism. Like it's I'm old school because I have spent 20 years getting to know journalists. Like 90% of my friends in DC are reporters because they're who I spend all my time with. What I do is talk to reporters about 50% of the stories I do are for money, 50% are just to traffic in information. So a public relations operative, when done correctly, works with the media on stories that they're paid for and stories that they are not paid for in order to maintain those relationships. And what we do is kind of infect a newsroom. So you get to know one reporter real well. And then if you need to know, like so say you know the sports reporter at uh the Wall Street Journal, you can ask that reporter to introduce you to the reporter who covers technology or who covers healthcare, and they will refer you and say, This is, you know, Phil, he is a good source of mine. He's never given me bad information. You should talk to him about the story that he's working on. And so that's basically what I do is just leapfrog from reporter to reporter inside of a newsroom until I can pull up my phone and type in New York Times and 50 journalists come.

SPEAKER_00 14:10

Yep. And the idea is that it's quid pro quo. So when you're introduced to the healthcare analyst as, you know, my mate Phil is a really good source, they might know, all right, well, he works for BLJ, his MPR, but some of his clients might be in the pharmaceutical supply chain, and occasionally he'll be able to give me really good uh information. So then when the time comes around and you say, by the way, I've got a really good story for you, even though it might not be in the best interest of the journalists, they're prepared to make that trade-off because of all the other good juice that you give them.

SPEAKER_04 14:42

Right. Now, and I want to I want to make one thing very clear. When you said it's a quid pro quo, it's more of an exchange of information. So information is the only currency in the kind of economy that I work in. So I can't like give a reporter money to write a story, but I can come back to them with information. And one of the reasons reporters honor my requests, like I'd like to be on background right now, meaning they can't report my name, or I'd like to be off the record, meaning they can't report on what I say. The reason that reporters don't betray me is that I'm very good for repeat business. So the reputation I have amongst reporters is that I'm pretty much always in trouble. I'm always in the middle of something newsworthy, and that I don't take on clients that are that don't have a story to tell. Right. And that is a very good reputation to have. So even reporters that I've done kind of, as I say, like, and and it's never been a physical altercation, but even some reporters that like I've done combat with, because that a lot of the times my job is verbal combat. Like I am not one of these, so there are some public relations operatives. This is all getting to answer your question, like, what is a public relations operative? There are certain operatives who take a very aggressive approach with journalists, and they try to force a story down their throat. Um there I don't do that. I am much more of a soft sell, like nice guy approach that I'm just trying to help the reporter out. Like in my ideal universe, I become kind of an intern to the reporter. I become a research assistant. And so they, you know, they'll come to me and say, like, okay, I've talked to your client, I got their input for the story. Now I need something else for the story, like a third party. Well, okay, I can go help find that.

SPEAKER_03 16:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 16:37

Because a reporter has to fill 750 words in their story. So a lot of the times when you're pitching a story to a journalist, a good journalist, will listen to the pitch and say, okay, right, but what does the 11th paragraph of this story say? And unless you can really answer that question, you're not doing your job. So, like I said, 750 words is the general length of a story. And what I tell my clients is that I'm fighting for 376 of those words. 50.1, I just want the bigger half. And so the more information that I can provide, and there's a horrible phrase that people use called flooding the zone. And so it's the more information you provide to the journalist, the more words you control in the story. And so it's it's a very, it's a very interesting game.

SPEAKER_00 17:34

Link this then to first ink.

SPEAKER_04 17:36

So one case where getting first ink was the most important thing to me was when I was working for the small island nation of Antigua. So this is an eastern Caribbean island that most of your listeners probably have never heard of. It was a British protectorate for a little while. But Antigua, you see, had a very big, thriving online gambling industry. They were making about $3.4 billion a year on online gambling. And the United States didn't like online gambling, even though we had signed trade agreements and written those trade agreements saying that it was perfectly legal. We decided on one day called Black Friday that we were going to shut down online casinos in the hemisphere. So we shut them down, we ceased their assets, we we issued indictments for a lot of their owners, and this crippled the Antiguan economy. Like remember, I said they were making $3.4 billion a year on gaming. Well, after what the United States did, Antigua's general uh GDP was uh $1.4 billion. So we took away two-thirds of their economy, and that's real bad. We put a lot of people out of work, and so Antigua, believing in the rule of law, took the United States, the World Trade Organization, and said, this is a violation of trade agreements that you signed. And the World Trade Organization ruled in their favor. And the problem with the World Trade Organization and non-governmental organization or non-governmental organizations like that is that there's no the United States, when the WTO rules against them, oftentimes takes the position of, what are you gonna do about it? Right? Are you gonna come in with a World Trade Organization army and arrest us? Or what are we what are you gonna do? And so we just ignored the ruling. Antigua took us to the WTO on five separate occasions, they won every single time, and they were ordered to pay Antigua uh, you know, restitution. And so we refused to pay it. So the prime minister called me down to the island, and I met with he and his cabinet, and he said, Okay, well, fix this problem for us. This trade dispute had been going on for like eight years at the time. And so I I I kind of devised a plan using WTO rules to punish the United States. And so, what it is is in the W so you think about it, like on a global economy basis, Antigua, one of the smallest economies in the world, wants to sanction the United States, the biggest economy in the world. Well, there's no lever they can pull to do that. Like China can sanction us, China can put tariffs on our goods, China can do all those things. We actually want things from China. Right. And Antigua has a tourism-based economy. Like, what are they going to do to sanction us? And so what I found in international trade law is a provision called cross-retaliation. Now, this is where you punish a completely innocent industry in the offending country to basically put pressure on their lobbyists and their influence they have with the government to do what you want. So it's kind of a triangle of influence. And so Antiga, like I said, had a thriving online gaming empire. So they had a lot of servers laying around, had a lot of computer programmers laying around. So we I told them to threaten the entertainment industry or the IP industry. I was like, what we're going to do is threaten to start a website uh uh similar to uh a site you might be familiar with, MegaUpload, which was Kim.com, another former client website. Uh, and that's where I got the idea. Uh I basically told the prime minister we were going to start megaupload.antiga and steal US movies, music, and software and sell them on the open market to recoup the losses that the WTO said we could do. So we threatened to do this. Now, when I say first ink, this was very important because this is this was unprecedented in global. Global trade at the time, for this little country to kick back at the United States in such an aggressive way. So, how how do you release this information to the general public?

SPEAKER_00 22:13

For mass consumption or maybe targeted consumption to the decision makers. What's the most important factor there?

SPEAKER_04 22:20

This for this, it was mass consumption. What I was doing was I needed one story that would pitch all of the other journalists in the world.

SPEAKER_00 22:28

Right. And then they start writing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 22:30

And so when you have a story like that, it's good to go to a wire service. And the largest news gathering organization in the world is the Associated Press. So I contacted the, and the Associated Press has reporters everywhere in the world. So I contacted their Caribbean correspondent, who is actually based in Jamaica at the time. And I called him up and I said, Hey, how would you like an exclusive on uh a trade war that is starting between Antigua and the United States over online gambling? We're going to steal potential, or we're gonna we're gonna cost the IP industry in the United States billions of dollars over this 10-year-old trade dispute. Now, this is the ultimate man-bites dog story. And so this reporter really wanted this exclusive. And I said, Well, I have some terms, and this is where the engineering happens. So I called the reporter on a Thursday and I said, Okay, I will set up an interview for you today with the Minister of Finance, and then tomorrow, Friday, you can talk to the Prime Minister, and you will have the weekend to get a response from the U.S. government, and I need your story. And we embargoed the story, meaning it couldn't run until a certain point. Uh, we embargoed the story until midnight the following Monday. Now, what this did was it guaranteed the APA and exclusive and that I wouldn't go to somebody else with a story, and that's why they made this deal. But it also made it so they had to contact the U.S. trade representative, USTR, on either late Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. And so, as a result, in the article, the only thing it says from the opposing side is the USTR was not available for comment. The other 749 words in the story were all. And so that's how we dominated that story. And the story actually started with the with a line in what has become a David and Goliath battle. I believe is the opening of the story. And that's exactly how we wanted to frame it. So one of the things I talk about in the book is how every story has three parts a villain, a victim, and a vindicator. Okay? And when you one way to tell this story is Antigua tried to steal from the United States. So that would make Antigua the villain. But we frame the story as Antigua was the victim. And the only way they could get vindication was through theft.

SPEAKER_00 25:18

Which is so morally dubious.

SPEAKER_04 25:21

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:22

And as well, you know, another way to tell the story is gambling's really bad for the individual. Here are three stories of how it destroyed people's lives: people like you and me, people who who we can relate to, and this is why it's actually a moral good, and America is therefore morally superior for having done something like this. But I love that story so much, and as you started telling it, it was coming back to me from the book because it's just the ultimate example of how malleable the way we think about a certain story is. Had you not intervened there, come up with the idea of starting mega upload, had the connections, it could have gone a thousand different ways. Most likely it would have just kept going on now in whatever the traditional legal battle was, and no one pays attention to it because it's Antigua. But it's yeah, it's so exemplary of just how what I made in the opening remarks, how much cynicism one can apply to the media landscape because what are the forces actually telling these stories?

SPEAKER_04 26:20

It is it is scary to imagine, you know, what's behind certain motivations. And uh, you know, I I alluded to it earlier in the conversation, but one of the things that I absolutely regret the most, and one of the more distorted things I did in the media was when uh when my client was the nation of Qatar. And this was back in 2010, and Qatar got it in their head for some reason that they wanted to host the World Cup. They wanted to be the first Middle Eastern nation to host the World Cup. Qatar, like let's start with the logistics of this thing. If you played it under the regular schedule, it would be 120 degrees in Qatar when they were trying to play the games. Players would have died, okay, of heat stroke, and that probably wouldn't have been good on national or on international TV. So they had to adjust the schedule. But the Cuttery bid was such a long shot that when it was first announced, ESPN said that it made more sense to play the Super Bowl in a lake than it made to play the World Cup in Qatar. Okay. This is these were the odds we were against. Everybody saw it as a long shot bid, never gonna happen. My job, and this is this is you know one of the one of the things that I try to clarify for people, like my job wasn't to be a publicist for the cuttery bid. A publicist pushes out press releases, tries to get people to write nice stories, positive stories about what their clients are doing. That was not what I was here for. I didn't pitch a single positive story about the cuttery bid. My job, and this is in direct violation of FIFA's laws, rules, they don't not a government, uh, was to go negative on the opposing bids to host the games. And the primary opponent to host the games was the United States. So that was my job was to go after the U.S. bid. And so one day the U.S. House of Representatives passed a what is called a sense of the house resolution. Just mean these have no forms of we think this, you know, we think around, or you know, whatever. And so they passed a sense of the house resolution saying the United States should host the 2022 World Cup. So this enraged my client for some reason. They were like, How can the Congress say this? This is bad for us, blah, blah, blah. And so the cutteries told my employer, we want you to get your man in Washington, me, to get a resolution introduced into the US Congress opposing their own bid to host the games. And when my boss called me and said, told me this, I was like, yo, this is impossible. I cannot, this is like define gravity. I won't do this. And he said, I'll never forget what he said to me. He said, Phil, I said it, you make it true. And then he hung up on me. So I retreated to my local bar and uh was sitting outside. It was about three in the afternoon. Uh, I was like three or four cocktails deep, and this group of school kids walks by, and they're all morbidly obese. And I was like, there's my answer. And on a cocktail napkin, I wrote a resolution that said the United States government would not support bids for any international games, World Cup, or Olympic, until we fully funded physical education programs in public schools. Okay, at the time, it was during the Obama administration, the first lady's whole initiative was childhood obesity. So I figured I could get some friendly members of Congress to probably introduce this resolution. So what I did was I hired a lobbyist. And I went out to a steakhouse with this lobbyist. I gave him a check for $10,000. Uh, I told him what I needed done. He was under the impression I was working for an organization called the Healthy Kids Coalition, uh, which didn't exist.

SPEAKER_00 30:27

You spanned up as a non-uh shell company, not-for-profit, right?

SPEAKER_04 30:31

An Astroturf. And it was actually not me who created it. It was created years ago by another interest who was not really in the interests of children, but it was so I basically just used a dormant Astroturf organization to this. And so I wrote this resolution, got the lobbyist to get a member of Congress to introduce it. She was uh she was uh uh not a not the most well-respected Congresswoman. Uh, she was from Detroit, and she put the resolution forward. So then I leaked the text of the resolution to a reporter at Politico. And I said, you know, hey, do you want an exclusive on a resolution that opposes our bid to host the World Cup? And he was like, Yeah, that sounds great. And so he called the Congressman's office, they confirmed it was real, then he wrote a story with the headline World Cup versus Gym Class. And this article came out two or three days before the vote in Switzerland over who would host the games. And so what we did is we printed off, you know, 30 copies of this article and passed it out to the 22 people who voted on who would host the games. And our talking point was very, very simple. It said in the United States, funding for infrastructure for the World Cup could become a political football. Qatar, the emir determines how the money gets spent. So we showed that there was dissension in the United States, Congress, in the US public about whether we should even host these games, which gave cover to absolutely every FIFA voter to say why they voted for Qatar because the United States didn't want him. Yeah. And so it was misdirection. It was it was just it was a it was a really ingenious idea to do a pretty horrible thing. And the fallout from that, I mean, I I know we're not here to flog me and and have me apologize for an hour and a half, but you know, the fallout from that was what what started off as a prank for me, like get a resolution introduced into the US Congress opposing their own, like that's that's a prank. What resulted from that prank was a human rights violation. Um you know, in the in the in the years leading up to the building of those stadiums in Qatar, uh, the Qataris maintained that only two people died building those stadiums. And then on the eve of the games, Qatar's government put out a press release saying actually that number was probably more like 500. Yeah. And Amnesty International put out a press release saying actually it was more like 5,000.

unknown 33:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 33:23

But do you know what?

SPEAKER_00 33:24

No one cared. No one cared. That that really fucked me about the 22 bid. I remember I interviewed a journalist called Martin Schiber in Sweden. And he did this thing called Cards of Qatar, and he was really hoping that it would be able to make some type of difference. But he went to Nepal and tracked down 130 of the families of people who had died, and he created little football cards, but with the with the faces and like the name and the details, like a profile of all the people that had died. And basically it got a lot of attention leading up to it, and then Messi wins for Argentina, and that's the driving story.

SPEAKER_04 33:57

Sportswashing is a very interesting topic. It's an in germane to public relations because so much money is spent sports washing. And what I I mean, I believe that it works because, like, okay, you're walking around. Uh, I'm in LA right now, I was walking around today and saw somebody wearing a shirt that just said it was a soccer jersey or football jersey that said fly emirates. Right, right. That's of because the Emirates own uh a football team. Or they're the the jersey sponsors of a football team. Oh they sponsor also, yeah. Yeah. Millions and millions of those jerseys. Yeah, and you know, you see, and so um having that kind of branding on that regime is very interesting. I don't think we're far from seeing people walk around with jerseys to say like visit Saudi Arabia. Totally. I don't I don't know, but the thing about sportswashing that gets me that I always run into a problem is what is the end game here? You know, they spent billions on live golf, uh you know, the rival to the PGA tour that is entirely Saudi funded, and they're giving out you know nine-figure, eight-figure contracts to golfers to come. I believe they offered Tiger Woods, I think this is public information. I think they offered him $800 million. That sounds about right. It was ungodly money. And I I wish I understood their end game better. I think so. You know, the the purpose of LiveGolf, the origin of LiveGolf was from uh McKinsey and Company. They're the biggest consulting firm for Saudi Arabia. They actually are referred to as the Ministry of McKinsey in Saudi Arabia. And so McKinsey wrote this memo called Project Wedge. And the whole thrust of the memo was you know, don't spend money on lobbyists, don't spend money on PR in the United States. If you want to gain influence in the United States, buy the game of golf, right? Because for my entire life, I have seen photo ops of presidents playing golf with Michael Jordan, with other sports figures, with other celebrities. It's a belief that in the United States, so many business decisions take place on the golf course. So if Saudi Arabia could just buy the golf course, then they could control the decision. I mean, a lot of people say, like, oh, it's, you know, what's the big deal? They're wasting all this money, they're giving it to Americans. What's the problem with it? They want something for it. Okay, this is altruism, this isn't charity.

SPEAKER_00 36:47

No. But you know, I I mean, I I've listened a lot to a guy called Bradley Hope on this. He wrote a biography of Mohammed bin Saman up until I think 2022 of his life, and uh lived himself in the Middle East as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. You know, this guy's an amazing journal. He maybe is in your contact list, I don't know. Um, have you heard of him? Bradley Hope, former Wall Street Journal reporter. Yeah, okay. So I came to him with this very hard-nosed, it's all sports washing. All they want to do is soften their image for the West. And he responded, I think, really compellingly, which was simply just that there's 40 million people in Saudi Arabia, and their standards and expectations for a life well lived are evolving, and they want to watch sport. They want to be involved in sport because it's not just soccer and it's not just golf, but cricket is getting huge amounts of investment. Formula One, tennis, probably a bunch of in other international sports. This comedy festival that's happening there right now. Like there is like Mohammed bin Salman, he kind of has this, he said this wild thing in an interview not too long ago, which is that the Quran is open to modern interpretation, which for the unofficial head of the Islamic State is the most unfathomable thing you could ever think he would say. But as the you know, de facto single leader of 40 million people, perhaps there is actually just an altruistic thing if he wants his people to have a better life. And in addition, if we can curry favor with the international community, but by us having, you know, a Netflix show that's gonna have the eight best tennis players in the world do a tournament and throw hundreds of millions of dollars at Tyson Fury to have the biggest boxing matches in the world and Francis Ngano. I don't know. It's here again, it's just the the the waters get muddy. I don't exactly know what to believe. I don't think it's cut and dry sports washing.

SPEAKER_04 38:31

Well, it's inf it's it's all about the game of influence. Okay, so throwing money in a different than a sports washing context, but more in an entertainment washing context. Are you familiar with the 1980s movie Red Dawn? Not enough. Tell me. Okay, Red Dawn is about a Soviet invasion of the United States in the 1980s at the height of the Cold War. It's basically the Cold War goes ha, and we have to fight a defensive war on U.S. soil. And it follows this group of kind of high school kids who become guerrilla warriors fighting against this Soviet occupation. So, as with everything in Hollywood, you know, this was a very successful, kind of key movie from that time, so they thought, let's remake it. And so they were gonna remake Red Dawn, and the villain instead of the Soviets was going to be the Chinese. So the studio shoots the movie in Detroit, and my parents lived in Detroit at the time, and they sent me pictures of the massive Chinese flags that they hung from buildings in Detroit. Now, China is a you know billion plus person market for movies. They like U.S. movies, they fund a lot of U.S. movie studios. China called the studio and said, you're not making us the villain in the remake of Red Dawn. You're just not doing it. And Hollywood backed down. Rather, so what they did was they used CGI. Remember those flags that I said they hung on the buildings?

SPEAKER_03 40:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 40:05

They used CGI to make them the North Korean flag. Oh man. And made North Korea the villain in this movie. It delayed the production for about a year and made it an absolutely unwatchable, terrible people movie. And it was all influence washing by China to protect their image, to protect their reputation. And so a lot of what I think happens with sports washing is so that they can continue to do things just so they can change their image a little bit without having to change too much. But the other side to sports washing is that counter-influence. So one of the things I studied a great deal in school is power. So I was a big I read a lot of Michel Foucault, and he describes power not as lost or won, but as a zero-sum gain. So if you imagine a toothpaste tube, if you squeeze one end of the tube, the other end inflates, right? And if you squeeze the other end, the other end inflates. So what I'm interested in is the kind of bi-directional power dynamic of sports watching. Sure, the Saudis are trying to trying to influence us by spending billions of dollars on live golf, but is there a is there a counter-reaction? Is there an equal and opposite reaction that golf could have a positive impact on their culture? You know, one of the one of the issues with Islam is that they never had a reformation. Like Christianity had a reformation that helped to splinter the influence, the dominant influence of the Catholic Church, and into smaller sects that had different beliefs, but it also watered it down so it wasn't quite so extreme. Islam has never had a reformation. And it would be very interesting if sports was what caused a reformation in the Islamic faith.

SPEAKER_00 42:03

Talking about the numbers on some of this, you don't have to say what you made, but do you have any sense for what the Qatari government paid the firm for your services overall?

SPEAKER_04 42:15

Absolutely. So anytime you go to work for a foreign government as an American citizen, you have to sign a form with the Department of Justice called a Foreign Agents Registration Act form. It's called the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938. So what was happening in 1938 or in the years before is Hitler was hiring a lot of PR firms in the United States to clarify the Nazi position, to like promote the Nazi position and to keep America out of World War II. And it worked for a little while. I mean, the Nazis had a lot of fans in the United States. Um, but and actually the Nazis got a lot of their ideas from the United States. They sent a delegation over to uh see how we handled people we didn't like. And so Congress passed this law that you have to register. So when you register, you have to also submit your contract that has the amount you're being paid. The amounts are all public information, theoretically.

SPEAKER_00 43:22

A lot of times they surely some of it's going through shells and so forth. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 43:26

They find workarounds and stuff like that. But like for the most part, you can see what a firm is paid by a foreign power to accomplish an end. The firm I worked for at the time had several contracts with the government of Qatar. And so on this specific contract to work for what was called the Supreme Committee for Legacy and Delivery, my firm was paid $80,000 a month.

SPEAKER_00 43:49

$80,000 a month. Okay. So I believe that's correct. And then that is obviously split between all the various admin at the firm, your own fee, everyone else that worked on it. It's it's just uh compared to some of the figures that I took from your book for some other major PR cleanups that we know of at least, it is on the low end. The DC firm took eighteen point eight million dollars from Saudi Arabia in PR cleanup fees after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, and a New York agency was paid forty million dollars by Putin's Russia to burnish his image ahead of the Sochi Olympics. So I was wondering if you could sort of peel the curtain back a little bit as to for as to the best of your knowledge, right now, who are the major clients that are spending millions of dollars per annum on PR?

SPEAKER_04 44:38

Well, I mean, the Middle East is a huge spender. So Qatar employs one thing that happened that isn't covered in the book is Qatar was blockaded by four of their neighbors for quite some time. So Saudi Arabia led a blockade against Qatar, and Bahrain, the UAE, and Egypt joined that blockade. Okay, so all of those powers decided to fight a proxy war in DC. So when when cut when Qatar was blockaded, I shit you not. The joke in bars in DC was it was the DC Lobbyist Full Employment Act. Okay, because they all hired up. Like we're talking 25, 30 firms each. Right. And this was millions of dollars to each of these firms. The blockade was such a boondoggle for DC lobbyists and public relations operatives that I can't even I can't even describe it. And that where that blockade has ended, that escalation of lobbying and using DC as kind of a proxy battlefield for regional rivalries is still going on. So Qatar employees like, I don't know, a quarter of the lobbying firms in DC. It's just it's a massive list.

SPEAKER_00 46:00

There are so many consequential downstream effects from that.

SPEAKER_04 46:05

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:06

I mean, what the hell?

SPEAKER_04 46:08

Absolutely. Saudi Arabia pays big dollars to firms. Who are the other Israel used to be a really big spender?

SPEAKER_00 46:17

You don't think anymore? I mean, they're they're at the height of a PR disaster in modern history.

SPEAKER_04 46:24

Yeah, and you know, they they the the only kind of hold on to support in the United States government this long is because of the decades-long lobbying and public relations campaign. I mean, Israel has been the number one spender on congressional travel, international congressional travel for decades. Okay, they're always number one. Uh, and that means that they are taking members of Congress on trips to Israel to influence their decisions. And APAC is the lobby in the United States for the Israelis, uh, for the Israeli kind of movement, and they spend massively. Their political giving, and you're not supposed to have foreign money in U.S. elections. I know that we've kind of gotten rid of that law, or we don't enforce it anymore. But theoretically, you're not supposed to have the state of Israel funding campaigns. That's not how it goes. They wash the money in certain ways. So it's not a direct from a foreign government, it's come from American sources. But Israeli giving to the American political process is massive. There were two decisions that really made money speech. And this is one of the points that I make at the end of the book that the United States government is the only democracy in the history of the world that has codified in law that money is speech. They're the same thing, as far as we're concerned. So that was established by Buckley v. Vallejo, the Supreme Court case that took place two years or three years before I was born. So it wasn't my fault. But this decision said money is speech. And so, since we have a First Amendment that says you can't restrict speech in any way by process of elimination, says you can give as much as you want. And then there was another decision called Citizens United that said, oh no, you can give unlimited amounts of money. And that is really what set the United States on a collision course with disaster. When you when you can just buy government, it's it's not a good situation because the poor's voices get lost. Like then it's rule by the rich. It's rule, it's like he with more money has more speech. Direct violation of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, the Equal Protection Clause, but nobody's ever brought that up because the interests that control Congress are the very people who are funding it.

SPEAKER_00 49:05

And in the last year, that sort of depressing oligarchic focus which is given to America these days. Yes. Having, I think, over a thousand people with a billion plus dollars, which is just an astronomical amount of money for an individual to have, and all of the power with which they can therefore influence their own politics. Talk to me about the PR operatives and the PR operations that you're aware of for these types of individuals. The the Jeff Bezos's, the Bill Gates, the Elon Musk's, the Larry Ellisons, and so forth, those who are injecting their ungodly fortunes into politics, surely they also have a big PR engine behind them. And I just wonder, you know, for me in the audience, if there are a few things we can look at in the news and realize, oh, there's a PR operation behind that. This isn't just some organic piece of media that's come about.

SPEAKER_04 49:57

Well, if you're an oligarch these days and you want to get good press, you just buy the printing press. I mean, there's no line, there's no line in the United States that says, you know, there's a free press for everybody who owns one. Okay, so you've got one oligarch owning the largest social media platform. You've got one oligarch owning one of the newspapers of record in the country. You've got several. I mean You got the Ellisons buying Paramount. Yeah. So like they just buy the apparatus that makes the truth, and then it's it's it's it's all just lost.

SPEAKER_00 50:38

But that's not that sophisticated. That's nothing like as sophisticated as the stories you were telling. Like I imagine that there'd be a little bit full finesse to it.

SPEAKER_04 50:47

No, they're not smart and they're not creative, and they're not using uh they're not using a skill set. It is brute force might makes right. And so that's why I shy away from working for organizations like that, because it like what's the point? Like, well, we can just buy our way out of the problem. Well, that's not creative. I mean, deploying money in an interesting way is creative, but like this the idea that you know, I have the most money, therefore my voice should matter more than yours isn't very smart. That's that doesn't lead to a good situation. I mean, what we're experiencing in the United States right now with the rise of the oligarchy is similar to what happened in Russia when the Berlin Wall fell. Uh, you had a uh kind of a collapse of their economy, and oligarchs were able to come in and buy it up cheap. My suspicion of what is going on right now is that it's the same thing in this country. We're having a massive consolidation of wealth. You know, fewer people hold more money than ever before. And once it's all a system of control.

SPEAKER_00 52:07

Yeah, it's uh it's a pretty grim outlook, but you know, we can also just get swept up in the recency bias of what we're looking at. But I can tell you from over here in Australia and in Sweden where I've lived the last five years, the perception of the states has only gone down. You know, not to disparage uh my my very faithful and loyal American listeners, I still feel like San Francisco is probably the best city in the world to live in if you're an ambitious person. But still, broadly just the perception of the states. You gotta uh you know put your hat on for the good guys and somehow spin America's uh reputation back into the into the green graces of where it was, the the American dream. You know, you can be anyone and you can do anything. I mean, that's so aspirational.

SPEAKER_04 52:50

Well, the American Dream is a PR campaign.

SPEAKER_00 52:52

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_04 52:54

The land of opportunity. I mean, it's it's never been true, but it's it's it's a it's it's a myth that we are told in order to, like I said before, in order to enforce a system of control. So the only what I hope for is kind of a renaissance in America where we stopped deifying these these oligarchs as like what we want to be. There needs to be, so we had Teddy Roosevelt throughout in history. He was the trust buster, right? He was the one who came and crushed the robber barons, forced them to actually pay taxes and and get got rid of their monopolies. And I think that the pendulum of American politics will swing eventually back. It's just whether we can save ourselves before we absolutely go down the road of Russia. I mean, what people need to be paying attention to at this juncture in history is Russia in the night. It's what's happening here. And you have, you know, unfortunately, we have a president and an administration that is pushing us that that liked the dictator model, that likes what Putin did, that likes what Qaddafi did. I mean, when you have a president putting 40 store, you know, 15-story banners of their face on government buildings, that's something that you would see in Libya during Qaddafi. That's not something that you should see in Washington, D.C.

SPEAKER_03 54:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 54:26

When you have a sitting president who wants to put his face on money, okay, that's in direct violation of US law. We we early on said living people cannot be put on money because we didn't want a monarchy. Yeah, yeah. You can't do these things in America, and unless we learn from the mistakes. And you know, we have things like the Pentagon saying we want to approve anything before you report it. They're saying that to reporters. That is in direct that's directly against what America is all about.

SPEAKER_00 55:01

And then the PR operative who's uh got the guy at the Pentagon in his network, he's never had an easier job.

SPEAKER_04 55:07

No, and it's it's a really uh it's it's it's a scary, it's a scary time to be in this field to read what is going on in the news because the news business is collapsing right now. You have more consolidation, more being bought up by oligarchs, and fewer and fewer reporters. And now you have people saying, well, we can replace reporters with AI. That is the biggest mistake we could ever make because AI is created by the oligarchs.

SPEAKER_00 55:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 55:42

So what do you think it's going to report?

SPEAKER_00 55:44

Well, you you do talk a lot about the manipulation of gatekeepers as you know, one of the go-to tools in your toolbox as a PR operative. But sort of like I alluded to in the in the opening remarks, is that sort of network of powerful, reliable, dominant neat media outlets, whether it's CNN or the New York Times, and there are a couple of names who everyone respects there, has that tool lost its edge because of the amount of self-generated content and where most people consume their information, which is one of the social media channels. Do the gatekeepers still play a role in the modern PR operatives playbook?

SPEAKER_04 56:26

Sure. No, I think the news organizations still break a lot of the news. We do have independent creators, like a guy that I'm very good friends with, that I work with sometimes in a in a public relations capacity, a guy named Andrew Callahan. He is uh he's a he's a journalist, an independent journalist who publishes over uh YouTube, over uh his platform is called Channel 5. One of the best. And Andrew is doing remarkable work. But you know, when I talk to him about this kind of new media versus old media, he really wants them to complement each other. He doesn't view them as rivals, he doesn't view them as like, oh, the independent journalists are gonna topple the establishment media, they should be complementary, they should work together. It shouldn't be a it shouldn't be uh one or the other or a zero-sum game. It should be a cooperative thing. And so I think it's great that we have new independent journalists that are pushing the media to cover other stories. But if you really want to make a dent still, kind of decision makers, if you want to impact the price of the stock of a company, you're gonna want to still go to the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times or the Washington Post or the Financial Times. You know, there is a role for independent journalists. And so it's kind of a it's kind of a give and take between the smaller players and the bigger players. I mean, Andrew's not a small player, he's got like three million subscribers or something like that. So he's getting more eyeballs than CNN or MSNBC to a lot of his clips. And that is, I think that's great. I think that is the democratization of media, which is the direction we should absolutely be heading in. But the problem is the mainstream media is incredibly threatened by people like Andrew. And what we're trying to do is create a symbiotic relationship between content creators and the media. But that's the lat the last oligarchs who are buying up media companies, one is the democratization of news.

SPEAKER_00 58:39

I see. Well, look, you know, his interview with Pete Buttig, just to take one of many, many examples, is significantly better than it would have been had he gone on an MSNBC or so forth. But as a PR operative, what is the outcome that you're driving for Andrew in this particular case? Is it to get him on these mainstream platforms more often? So therefore his own perception isn't just that of an independent content creator who's kind of freelanced, but rather a serious journalistic figure to be listened to and respected?

SPEAKER_04 59:14

Yes. It's it's to increase his kind of credibility in the market, to grow his audience even more, and to have him be a complement to the establishment media. Right. So what I want them to do is work together. So Andrew breaks a story, it's amplified by the New York Times. New York Times breaks a story, Andrew finds an element of it. Oh, sounds perfect.

SPEAKER_00 59:42

It sounds perfect.

SPEAKER_04 59:44

That's how this should work.

SPEAKER_00 59:45

That's also how you restore trust in these media outlets that have such low trust, because uh a lot of Andrew's audience will implicitly believe and trust what he's saying is in fact the case as he saw it. And were the New York Times to also support him in that, then people whose perception of the New York Times beforehand may have been it's all fake news might but then also I suppose you run the risk of the opposite happening, which is Andrew sold out, he's now part of the fake stream news. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_04 1:00:13

Knowing Andrew, I don't think he ever will.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:15

He's uh he's kind of he's kind of a No, not suggesting he would, but that could be the perception just by associating with a institution that has low trust. You know, so that's like part of the delicate balance, I suppose you as the PR operative have to play.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:30

Sure. And I have a real problem with people who characterize news organizations as the New York Times is bad because X. Well, the New York Times isn't one entity. The New York Times is made up of thousands of people who are individuals who are working. So there are good reporters at every publication and there are bad reporters at every publication. There is a, you know, a good editorial board, or uh there are good people on editorial boards, and there are not so good people on editorial boards. So I don't like to look at things like as black and white as the Washington Post is good or they're bad. I like to look at the specific reporter who works for them and what they do. And I think one of the things that we're going to see more of is uh trust. And you ask, you know, why why do I work with Andrew? And it's it's to increase his trust. Yeah. It's to get more people to trust what he says so that they listen to him, so that they subscribe, so that they are influenced by the news that he's creating. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I really this give and take is very important between the new media and the traditional media, and we need to find that symbiotic relationship.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:48

Do you think that we could just be in the throes of the growing pains, in between the radical transition from how people do consume or then use in media, and that because of the growing pains, ultimately you'll end up, you know, maturing into the fully grown body, which could just be all the shit is still out there and it's all shit, but it's been shit for long enough that people know it's shit, and all the good ones are out there for long enough that you know to trust them and believe them. And so it's sort of the same outcome as we may have had before, where you trust certain institutions, but just because we're going through all the growing pains of it, there is all this crap that's you know rising to the top in the meantime. Did that question make sense?

SPEAKER_04 1:02:29

It does. It does. What we're going through is a period of kind of technological adolescence. So, like one of my favorite authors is Michael Kright. Okay, and then he wrote Jurassic Park, he writes these books that start out with real science and then kind of extrapolate it out to the worst case scenario. Yeah. So, like, hey, should we maybe bring back the dinosaurs? Sounds interesting, and then it goes really good.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:54

I still want them to do it.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:56

Oh, yeah, well, of course. But you know, we create these new technologies and we put no guardrails up. We have no idea how to deal with them. So the internet has been around for what, like 30 years or you know, much longer, but it's been in everyone's home since the late 90s. Okay. The news media still hasn't figured out how to operate with just the internet.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:22

Okay. They haven't figured out a business model for how to make the internet work with the news business.

unknown 1:03:28

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:30

So before we've even figured out the internet, now we're gonna throw AI into the mix. And you know, there really needs to be attention paid to people that that are saying, you know, just because we can do something doesn't mean we should. No. And that can-should question isn't asked by people in power, they just say, can we do it? And there's no education, there's no you know there's a funny meme that says, you know, do you remember back in the early, early before the internet, when we believed that access to information was the problem? It turns out that wasn't the problem because we now have access to all of the information in the world from our own. Oh, yeah, and you have more ignorance than you have ever had before. I mean, it's just astounding. It's astounding, yeah. It's astounding. It's like it's like we're given this huge library of books, but we're completely illiterate. And what we need to do is just like we wouldn't hand somebody Ulysses or the works of Markt and say, figure it out without first teaching them how to read. So what we need to do is, and it starts with education, we need to teach people how to be discerning consumers of media. It's it's it's become it's come to the the media illiteracy, at least I I can speak to the United States. I can't speak for the rest of the world, but the media illiteracy in the United States is the most shocking thing I have ever heard of. The comments you see, uh, if you ever go into a news article and read the comments, it's a cesspool. But I mean, it's just the ignorance is just astounding. Yeah, and so it's it's like we're we're operate, we're a bunch of illiterate people operating in a world filled with books.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:33

Yeah, shit is most buoyant on the internet, it rises directly to the top.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:39

That and that's how the algorithm is written, and that it's precisely done to create anger animosity aggression. Best description I've heard of social media is calling it digital fentanyl. Right, totally. That's a great description. One of the aspects that we that we haven't covered in the podcast. Far is uh kind of drug use. Well, it's very easy to use drugs and get addicted to them. And it's it's it's it's a temporary solution to the problem. And so people go to it, we need to start addressing the internet and information as a public health issue. Just like we should be combating drugs as a public health issue and not a criminal issue, we need to start educating people that using this digital fentanyl is dangerous. Totally. And we need to we need to we need to think about information and well not information, we need to talk about content as a kind of drug. Okay, and how do we how do we restrict access to it? How do we make sure that if if you know if people are gonna drink, that's fine. Just you can't drink a bottle of Jack Daniels and get behind the wheel of a car and see what happens because that's gonna impl that's gonna impact other people's freedom. That's gonna impact other people's lives and livelihoods. But there's no the idea that an eight-year-old can start an Instagram account and start, you know, direct messaging with pedophiles, like is no one, are there no adults in the room here? Well, the the we restrict tobacco, we restrict drugs, we restrict alcohol. You have to be 21 to use these things. Yeah, yeah. But we'll let a 10-year-old create an Instagram account. This this doesn't make sense.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:40

No, no, it doesn't. That's that's where it just gets so grim, so dark, and so depressing. And I was surprised. Australia recently passed a law. Can't exactly remember what it was now, but I think it was either you can't create a social media account under 18 or or you can't go and certain apps if you're under 18. Obviously, regulating this is much harder, but just for the state to come out and say this is now a law is a big step. And shockingly, even after Jonathan Haidt's book, I think it was called The Anxious Generation, and what you just say, and everyone having multiple anecdotes about how the social pressures on a young person who's 14, who's on Instagram, both boys and girls, and the type of shit they're exposed to and the type of things that they think that that they should be doing to get attention and so forth, is just so all grim. But somehow people still, you know, can spin a whole narrative about how this is a big nanny state government sort of telling you how to live your life.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:34

Yeah, the drugs comparison is absolutely apt because drug dealers, drug pushers recruit children to, you know, sell their product and use their product because if you hook them young, you've got them for life.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:47

That is the same mentality that social media companies use. How is that okay? Yeah. How is that okay? Why are we totally okay with somebody saying, well, we got to hook the kids so that they're addicted to our product? I mean, there's one internal study, I think, at TikTok, that says they can get somebody addicted in less than eight minutes. Like that, we need to we need to treat content as a kind of controlled substance.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:16

This is a, I think, a good leeway back into PR. So Mark Zuckerberg, who created a product, obviously didn't intend for all the outcomes that it's that it's created, but nonetheless, still spearheads, probably one of the most damaging softwares on the planet, right? If you even balance it out the good and the bad. Yet, Zuck's image has gone from this kind of weird lizard guy to the cool tech billionaire aspirational, right? There must have been PR involved in this, from the stylist to the interviews it goes on to the media training, all of that. Can you offer any insight into that? You know the transformation I'm referring to, right?

SPEAKER_04 1:09:58

Yes, I know. I mean, I think you know, Facebook started out as a website to rate women. It was absolutely misogynistic in its origins, you know, to say this one's hotter than this one. And what it has become is and so like the evolution of Facebook itself is similar to the evolution of the oligarch who owns it, in a in a very simple way. Um I want to be a little careful because I do know one of the big PR guys at Facebook. Um, but good friend, but the the evolution of Facebook, yes, it it's it's it's it is a PR, it is a spin campaign. You know, he's spending a lot of time in the gym and wants to be like this ripped, but he's an he started out as a nerd. So, yes, the evolution of the person behind the apparatus is very similar. Now, one thing I will say about Zuckerberg is he and his friends at Harvard did create something new. Elon Musk just wanted power and control, so he bought Twitter. And so there's a difference between those two. But yes, it is it is shocking that all of these oligarchs want to be seen as like, you know, ripped, jacked bros.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:16

And uh it's but I'm I'm more I'm more trying to drive home the point of how affecting the work of a good PR operation can be, which is that in this world where people are becoming more conscious about how bad Facebook is for them, the image of the guy attached most closely to Facebook has shifted to counterbalance all the negativity towards Facebook. You know what? Maybe Zuck is a really smart, powerful, influential, aspirational, caring, cool guy. You know what? Maybe I maybe I might want to be something like him versus what it was before, which is well, Facebook shouldn't look at their look at their leader. You know, he's a weird guy, he's a lizard person, you know, which is getting to the very base sort of reactions that people might have. But I don't know, just as you were talking, it sort of occurred to me like this this could be one of the outcomes of a really effective PR operation.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:07

You just Well, he seems to be a very weak person because he's thrown in different directions based on what external forces are doing. When it was hip for oligarchs to like say, I'm gonna give all of my money to charity, you know, Warren Buffett is a good example of like trying to push the oligarchs to do good things. Bill Gates is a great example of trying to, you know, do good things and invest in health throughout the world. But now there the cool guy image is to be a greedy oligarch. So the image has gone instead of like making the world better for other people, it's I'm gonna get jacked. Right. I'm gonna look like an athlete, I'm gonna be an UFC fighter. Yeah. I mean, what is this? Yeah, you know, so instead of trying to make the world a better place, they want to have a more opulent life so more people admire them.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:02

I was thinking about that the other day. Topic that's really close to my heart is geothermal energy. And Bill Gates, through uh, I think it's called it's called Emergent Ventures. No, that's Tyler Cohen's Breakthrough Energy, through one of Bill Gates' many non-for-profits, or rather, you know, philanthropic efforts. Break Breakthrough Energy is invested in this company called Fervo, and they're doing the best in ESG technology for geothermal. And Bill Gates was promoting all this stuff, and it's amazing. And I just thought, I don't know enough about Bill Gates. You know, there's like very salacious rumors about him and a very negative reputation. How much of that is that just me, what I consume on Twitter? You know, how much of it is true, whatever. But I was thinking, shouldn't there be a really, really, really good PR operation to turn Bill Gates into that type of aspirational guy? We uh of rather than I just got jacked and I, you know, am really cool in flying private jets, it's rather not only did I create multi, multi-generational wealth, but I'm actually trying to change the world with it. Like that's such a it's significantly more aspirational and relatable and and uh um I don't know. I just wonder, is that a PR fail on his on his end?

SPEAKER_04 1:14:09

Well, you know, I mean Zuckerberg kind of like I said, he blows with the wind. So when it was hip to be in charities, he and his wife started a foundation. And then when Trump came back into power and it was no longer hip to help poor people, he went in the other direction. And so, I mean, this I wish we had some people with some spine, with some character, and with some real vision for how to make the world a better place. Like the oligarchs, the robber barons of old built the libraries, right? Right, they built infrastructure in this country to do wonderful things and make it better. People now seem to be building doomsday bunkers and um, you know, going to space. Uh, and it's just so we have a complete mismatch. And to bring this back to public relations, I think if they stood for something and invested in something and kept with it, then people would like them more.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:14

Yeah, yeah, maybe right. Again, the quick change of topic. I realize we've been talking for quite a while now, so I appreciate the generosity of your time, Phil, but it's late for you there. You just tell me when you uh need to go back to bed. Um, so put on your uh your old PR operative glasses back on right now. You don't necessarily have to be working for a bad client, but you've definitely got a client who is uh you're working for. Give me a game plan for how you would leverage the sub stacking and podcasting landscape to their benefit.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:52

Ask me the question again.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:54

So you would have seen that a couple of very famous conservative podcasters in America, whether knowingly or unknowingly, they shared a bunch of Russian propaganda early this year, right? So they were the victims of some good PR on the Russian side. So I'm asking you now, put yourselves in the shoes of your old PR operative guy. Doesn't matter who your client is, what's your game plan to leverage Substacks and podcasts? Just give me a sense for what it looks like, because I want to see if I can identify if this stuff is already happening in the network that I follow closely.

SPEAKER_04 1:16:27

Well, um give them access. So you wanna if you if you're a if you're a foreign power who's trying to influence, you you need to propel them, you need to make them big. So give them a big story that gets them a big audience, and then continue to inf cultivate that relationship. So maybe don't pick the number one substack or the number one podcast. Like don't go to Joe Rogan. Go to like a more nascent organization, help build them up and uh and give them access because that's the only access to information is the number one thing in my business. It's like I said before, the only currency in my economy is information. So using whatever means you have, whatever information you have at your disposal, give it to that person and cultivate the relationship with them.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:23

So I'm trying to think of an example.

SPEAKER_04 1:17:32

You know, it was very important, like podcasts have become so important in the American media landscape. So, you know, a lot of people point to the reason that Trump won this this most recent time is because, you know, he did things like the Nelk Boys and Joe Rogan's program. Kamala Harris didn't want to, she didn't want to go to Rogan's studio. And so she just didn't do his podcast. And that was a huge mistake because you need to meet the people where they are. And if people are if people are being influenced by these organizations, and like I said, it's that it's that back and forth between the two. So you can start a story on Tucker Carlson's podcast or Joe Rogan's podcast that then the mainstream media has to cover. I see. And then you can get things in the mainstream media and then take a piece of that and go to a Rogan or go to Tucker Carlson and get it on their air too. So it's it's it's like I said, it's it's this kind of information adolescence that we're going through. We don't understand how to filter information and know fact from fiction. Yes, there is like saying that Russia and China are not trying to wage an information war on us is the most ignorant thing I've ever heard of. Like, they spend billions on this, and they're really good at it. I mean, gathering compramot on people, blackmailing people, influencing the media in a number of ways, planting stories, you know, and they are, I believe they're thinking about lifting the prohibition on Russia hiring American PR firms. So if that can happen, I don't know where the next step is.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:25

Holy hell. Can you give some more evidence or examples in the real world to support that statement that China and Russia are spending billions on misinformation?

SPEAKER_04 1:19:35

Yeah, I mean, it was a lot of it came out during um in the wake of the 2016 campaign, the the Russian efforts to influence, you know, Twitter and Facebook. And I don't want to wade into if they were trying to help or hurt Trump because that's a question that that is above my pay grade. But no, the the Russians have an entire part of their intelligence, I can't remember what the unit is called, it's like three digits or something like that, that is entirely meant to influence the US media. And it's it's it's very funny. Marx had a line that always sticks out in my head. Marx? Karl Marx? Karl Marx had a line that the communists will sell the capitalists the rope they hang themselves. And he's right.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:29

Oh yeah. That guy was so good.

SPEAKER_04 1:20:31

I mean, he's right.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:20:34

And we're falling into the trap that was set for us so many years ago. By just allowing this sort of disinformation, manipulation to occur, we are letting the let's call them the East and instead of the communists, because you know they're it's a bastardized version of communism now. You know, they really are selling us the rope that we're hanging ourselves with. And what they're trying to do in this country is so divisioned. Like they want a civil war here because they can't attack us because we're, you know, geographically blessed with an ocean on each side. So an offensive war probably won't work out. And we have like, I don't know, what is it? A hundred or no, I think there are 300 million firearms in circulation in the United States.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:28

Yeah, don't fuck with America.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:30

Yeah, like an offensive war probably wouldn't go very well. I would stay away from Idaho if you're an aggressive force, because absolutely every home in Idaho has a gun in it. So my parents retired to Idaho. The you know, so they can't do an offensive war. So the only thing they can do is sow division in this country. And every time I see acts of political violence, every time I see acts of aggression or, you know, it's it's all we're doing is falling into a trap that Russia and China have set for us. And we can't let them do that. We need to be smarter, and we need to uh we need to trust, we need to build more trust in in the American media, is what we need to do. No one I mean, Congress has a higher trust rating than the media does in this country. Oh, it's fucked. Which is absolutely crazy.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:30

Uh something we we haven't mentioned yet is, but although you definitely just brush up against it, is the role of bots in all of this. So this isn't the sort of PR operations that you would have been doing yourself when you were working. But presumably I'm imagining all of these big PR firms, you know, so when they go in with the nice suit and tie and they take them out to lunch and they're sort of pitching them why they should use us and not the other one, is a big thing they'll say is look, we've got these four guys over here, and they're the best in the world at bot farming and bot management and bot creation. Is this uh an exaggerated idea of what's happening? Or do all these PR firms have elite bot operations that they just deploy for their clients?

SPEAKER_04 1:23:10

I don't know how elite are they. They promise their clients they can do things like that. One firm recently, uh a liberal public relations firm in the United States was just outed for offering to do bot farms for the state of Israel in the aftermath of their of their actions in Gaza. And they, after it came out in public and they got beaten up for it, they terminated the contract the next day. So that's an example of like a PR firm doing something bad, using bot farms to try and influence people, getting caught by the media, and then terminating the agreement. We need more of that. The media is supposed to hold power to account, it's not supposed to be the tool of the powerful since the thing. I mean, we need to have a reframing of how this works in the United States and throughout the world. The media, and this is this is an ongoing debate, like ownership of media. Al Jazeero was a client of mine while I worked at Brown Lloyd James. And I remember we put the um the managing editor or the whatever news director of Al Jazeera on a panel with a bunch of American news directors. And the the guy from he was one of the main mainstream publications said, Why should anyone believe anything that Al Jazeera says? You're funded by the government. And the guy from Al Jazeera, without skipping a beat, said, You're funded by corporations. Why should anyone believe what you say?

SPEAKER_03 1:24:44

That's a good line.

SPEAKER_04 1:24:45

Like, think about it. You have ABC News that is owned by the Disney Corporation. Are you gonna trust an ABC News review of a Disney movie? Right. Absolutely not. So, I mean, this idea that corporate ownership of media or private ownership of media is better than state ownership of media is kind of a myth. I'm not saying that media should be owned by the state, but I'm saying that the media should be funded in a way that doesn't conflict them so massively. It was ABC that suspended Kimmel because, you know, they all had their different motivations in that instance, like the the uh cable operators wanted to merge so they could become bigger, so they're trying to placate the Trump administration. You have Disney, who has certain things that they they don't want to be punished further by the Trump administration, so they're silencing this comedian. But the conflicting the conflicts of interest in the media make it so no one trusts the media. So we need to find a way to remove those conflicts of interest and to have a more believable media landscape.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:00

Do you have any actionable solutions?

SPEAKER_04 1:26:07

Study history. I mean, everything that's old is new again, right? I mean, this this is all happened before. And it's just it's when a when a society is confronted with a new technology and they don't know how to use it. I mean, it's it's almost like we learned nothing from uh okay, so when the nuclear bomb was invented, like I think the day after the explosion, an organization was formed called the Union of Concerned Atomic Scientists. So the very people who made the bomb were like, we fucked up.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:26:45

Like we did some, we just proved that.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:47

That sounds sorry to interrupt you, Phil. That is exactly parallel to the guys at OpenAI leaving and saying, we've fucked up.

SPEAKER_04 1:26:56

Yes, yes. So like we create these technologies that can destroy us and we put no guardrails on them. So it's it's like we didn't learn anything. When we dropped, okay, we we tested the nuclear bomb in Nevada, okay. The radiation had not stopped spreading when we dropped two on Japan. So we didn't know if it would consume the entire Earth. So we were totally fine destroying the planet. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:29

So this was one of the great rolls of the dice.

SPEAKER_04 1:27:32

Yeah, this is my point is that we we've now created these technologies that can destroy cultures, civilizations, and we put no guardrails on it. Nuclear weapons, we were like, okay, we got to restrict who can have these. And so we put some safeguards with the internet, with AI, we're just like, ah, well, it's pretty destructive, but let's let everybody have it.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:54

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:27:55

And let's not educate anybody about how to use it. It's kind of it's one analogy is like like buying a gun. Okay. In the United States, it's enshrined in the Second Amendment, right to bear arms. Everybody should be able should you know be able to buy a gun if they want to. That's the American ethos. The problem with that is that there are no risk, there are no there's no education that goes along with it. You know, you can go into a gun store, buy an AR-15 with a 30-round magazine, and you know, do whatever you want with it. There's no license. The American dream. However, if you want to drive a car, you have to get a license. And if you want to drive an 18-wheel truck, you have to get an even more specific license. So I would argue that the idea that you can just set loose a technology with no restriction is going to lead to absolute chaos.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:28:58

And so I don't I don't want to say we should restrict freedom of speech, but in a country that says that money is speech, that is an incredibly dangerous proposition.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:11

You you say uh read history, but as you were um finishing the response, you made the observation that AI is in the hands of absolutely everyone and there's no training manual for how to use it. This may be truly unprecedented. And therefore, as we peek over the horizon as to what tomorrow is going to look like, that there is no sort of historical context to make sense for how a software which can be printed infinite amount of times, even if open AI are blocked by the state or by bad actors, anthropic and deep seek will just pick up where they left off. It could be truly, you know, unprecedented.

SPEAKER_04 1:29:50

It could be. And so it's it's when I say read history because okay, so go back to the closest analogy to the creation of the internet and the creation of AI could be the creation of the printing press. So the Gutenberg press changed everything. You could mass produce things that people could read. There could be a common understanding. What happened right after the printing press? The Enlightenment. I mean, we had a great growth of thought and uh democratization, and we moved away from monarchies and into democracies, and so it was a wonderful thing. We're and we should be figuring out ways to harness these new technologies in that way. Or not. We're using them to create division, to create aggression, to create these algorithms that feed the anger machine. So we need to, and that's why I say learn history, because I just want to make one more point. I mean, AI, yes, it's scary, but there are other technologies on the horizon that are even scarier. And if we don't put guardrails, so I don't know how familiar you are with nanotechnology, but okay, nanotechnology is molecular engineering, right? So that's the next step. So AI will help us learn more about nanotechnology. Now, nanotechnology was originally thought of by a man named Eric Drexler, and he wrote a book called Engines of Creation, right? Okay, that's the first half of the book. The second half of the book is called Engines of Destruction. And it's about how if we develop nanotechnology, yes, we'll be able to cure cancer. We'll be able to manipulate things at the molecular level, we'll be able to create nanomachines that hunt down cancer cells and kill them. Okay. The other side of that of molecular engineering is you can also do some pretty destructive shit to nature. And so if we don't learn from the internet and how to deal with that technological adolescence first, before we jump into AI and jump into that technological adolescence, if we jump to nanotechnology without some sense of like, should we do this? Not just can we do this, we're going to melt the earth.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:18

Yeah, but look, we've been running what, how long has it been? 20 years, people have known about climate change. The science has been pretty inconclive. You know, there's a carbon cycle and we dig out rich carbon from the ground and a release into atmosphere. Running that same analogy you just gave, it's it seems like the Modus of Brunday is if we can, we will. Should doesn't necessarily factor into it at all. And you know, that might be a sort of cynical idea for where we're going. But I I just wanted to tag on to the analogy you gave from the Gutenberg press leading to the Enlightenment. But before that happened, you know, the church reformed that a bunch of wacky Protestant sects grew up all around the Netherlands and Germany, and a lot of misinformation was spread, and a lot of people got to play God for a short amount of time. So if we just map that knowledge analogy onto now, it could be the growing pains before the enlightenment as an optimistic way to look at it, but yeah, it's it's it's the problem is now is that the technologies can really destroy us.

SPEAKER_04 1:33:20

Yeah. Like it the this we need to have um we need to have a new reformation or a new enlightenment about this technology before we just go absolutely crazy.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:31

Phil, one more for you, since you've been so generous with your time. And this is a little bit of a meta question, so forgive me if it's a bit sappy or if it doesn't make any sense. What do you think that the best PR operatives understand about attention, which the general populace just totally miss?

SPEAKER_01 1:33:55

Everybody's looking for the five-second soundbite now.

SPEAKER_04 1:33:59

Okay, they they want the thing that'll pop, the seven-second video that'll get them a million subscribers. And reporters are pitched stories by public relations professionals who are going for that very same thing. I go in the other direction. I I'm playing the long game, and I wish more people would play the long game. Uh, so really building connections with people and really and not falling for it. Like, we're all falling for the bait of this clickbait, bullshit, dopamine hit of news. Having a longer attention span will be better for you in the long term. But there is, but like I said, there's no media literacy curriculum in this country or any other country that I know. I mean, there may be, but I mean, there's no movement to educate the consumer before giving them the technology. Okay, like do you read the instruction book for like your TV or your phone before you start using it? No. You just open the damn thing up and you're like, okay, here we go. And it's understanding that new technologies come with responsibilities. They come with a uh an a need to understand what you're doing rather than just to do it and see what happens. So I would I would implore people to have longer attention span, to read the longer article, not just the tweet about the article, because all you're doing there is reading somebody filtering something that's already been filtered. So, what I'd urge people to do is slow down, make real connections with people. You know, don't just try to own the libs, try to understand their perspective. I try, look, my whole family is incredibly conservative. And I try really hard. And and I myself, I like to tell people that I've always wanted to be a small government conservative. It's just nobody will let me do it. Because I can't stand what the small government conservatives, well, they they say they're small government, but they want to get into your doctor's office, they want to get into your bedroom, they want to get into your bank account. I'm not okay with that. And so what I want is more of a dialogue between different opposing views. And so I try to do that in my own family. Like I try to have reasonable conversations with them about their perspective, my perspective, and how we can find a common ground or to compromise on it. I mean, that was the whole idea of our Congress was to elect people of competing political philosophies, have them come together in the same room and make compromises that make the best policies for the American people. That's the idea. But unfortunately, we have completely lost that. Now it's I want to dominate the other party, I want to crush them, I want to make their party illegal. I mean, that is the direction we're going in this country. There's no there's no wanting to harmonize them. It's just like human beings are the only species on the planet that doesn't have a symbiotic relationship with their environment. What does that say to you? Yeah. Like we're doing this wrong. Like every other species has a symbiotic relationship with their environment. All we try and do is destroy it. And that's and that bleeds into every other aspect of life and even into public relations.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:54

Phil Elwood is the author of All the Worst Humans, his debut book, and truly made up. I mean it, it it it it sort of opened up this door, which I sort of had an idea for what was behind that, but it was all spotlighted for me. The total and utter manipulation of the media is rampant, and uh, like you say, it's just up to the individual to be a conscientious consumer. It seems to be the only way out of it. So thank you so much for all your time.

SPEAKER_04 1:38:24

That's one of the main reasons I wrote the book, was hopefully to start on this process of media literacy.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:29

Well, any last words, Phil?

SPEAKER_04 1:38:33

Oh, you know, it's I never know how to end these things, but I've really I've really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope people listen to it. I hope people read the book. And uh, you know, the the first step to combating ignorance is education. And so I hope I just the last thing I'll say is I hope this doesn't increase citiz the book doesn't increase citizens cynicism amongst the news consuming public. I hope it just asks them to ask better questions. So that's that's all I will say. Study history and ask better questions. Amazing, man.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:08

Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_04 1:39:09

Thank you.