Phil Elwood (on the dark side of PR)
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Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Buckheimer. I'm joined by Minical Loose.

There is a big through line in today's show with today's guest. There is? Yeah. Well, first of all, this is juiciest fucking salacious crazy guest we've had. Yeah. This story was nuts. It reminds me of that book, Something of an Economic Hitman. Do you know that book? It's very similar. Yeah. He really dishes. Oh, my God. So our guest, Phil Elwood, is a public relations operative, LR.

At the highest level in D.C. with foreign countries as clients. And the manipulation and stuff that was done that he has written about. And participated in. And participated in is pretty fucking mind-blowing. Yeah.

And he's here to talk about it. Confirms your worst fears. Yeah. His book is called All the Worst Humans, How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians. I loved this one. Me too. It was so fascinating. The through line is I majored in PR. Oh, that's right. And I never get to say I majored in. I know. I keep that close to the, is it close to the vest or the chest? Chest. Okay. Okay.

I don't get it. Vest probably works too because you would play poker with your vest on. Yeah, isn't it like vest your cards or chest your cards? Oh.

I'm going to say vest because, yeah, chest makes everyone think about my chest. That's not what I'm talking about. Playing it close to your chest. It's not very close to you, per se. Vest is the original. Vest is the original. It's the original, but people now equally use chest. Oh, okay. Thank you for clearing that up. Great. Okay. Well, I keep, I majored in PR close to my vest, close to my, the row vest. Anyway, so that's the connection. Yeah, we never hear about your major.

Mine. And I have two. You have two. Yeah. Congratulations. Thank you. Summa cum laude. Just to remind everyone. Thanks for doing that. Much higher than Magna. Please enjoy this very juicy episode with Phil Elwood.

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Hi there. Phil. Jax, nice to meet you. How old are you, Phil? I was trying to figure out while I was reading your book if we're similar age. Just turned 45. Younger man. It doesn't feel that way. I know, it feels like you've lived maybe more lives. My mom always says, Phil, it's not the years, it's the miles.

Oh, I'm sure, I'm sure. As someone who collects cars, that's very true. This is an extremely tasty topic you're tackling with your book. Oh my God. I mean, it kind of confirms what you think might be going on, but you certainly, or at least for me, I'm dying to know the mechanics of everything. Like, yeah, I know shit's happening, but like, how is it physically going down? And boy, do we get a big earful in this. Scared of what? Not of us, because we're pretty tame. I'm dangerous. Yeah.

Excuse me. Excuse me, Dax is extremely idiotic. You should be scared. Are you scared with this all out that you're a target? It's interesting because I'm an incredibly private person. I paid to promote the search engine optimization results for a different Phil Elwood. He was a jazz reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle who died a number of years ago. So I had a friend of mine who does digital optimization.

the results of the dead man to hide anything that had to do with me. Interesting. You were playing on people's laziness. You're like, you're going to have to go through four different pages before you get to me. 90% of people never go to the second page. Never. Do you? Be honest. Mostly no. I know, it's kind of crazy. But it too is manipulatable. It is. I can't trust anything anymore.

Okay, so I would love to give like an overview of the topic we're going to tackle, but then I want to start with your personal story because it's tasty. And I love anyone who's had a love affair with the devil's dandruff. Boogie shoogie. So first and foremost, your book, All the Worst Humans, what you explain in this is your experience as a public relations expert over two decades helping shepherds

shape the national narrative narrative within the government and the main tool of which is the press so you are very good at developing relationships with journalists and helping guide them to cover a story that would be beneficial to your clients it is a very fair characterization okay okay great within that there's a lot of underbelly there's a lot of we might call them bad actors on the scene

And you had a career dealing with some of the main bad actors we think of. You call them bad actors. I call them clients. Yes, exactly. Okay. But of course, this isn't even a job a kid knows about that exists. So it's not like one really sets their sights on this type of career.

And nor were you setting your sights on that. And I think maybe we should start in Washington with an early aptitude for debate. I started out in high school. I was a debater, mostly because I didn't like the school part of high school. Actually, I thought they called it high school for a different reason. I was stoned for most of it. I went to high school in Olympia, Washington. Not most of it, but there was a good period of time and I wasn't very interested in school. My high school GPA was, I think, about a 2.9, which is not

It's not up there in the Bs, yeah. Well, the school was known for grade inflation, so, you know, actually I was probably getting Ds. Dad's a pastor, which makes this even more intriguing. Preacher's kids generally go one of two ways. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and you went the other way. So when do you start blowing weed? Started smoking pot probably at 16 or 17, and never used Coke until I was 20. Right, at Mad Max.

Very good memory. Thank you. It closed recently. It was the most amazing place to work. What is it? It's a Mexican. Have you been? No. It's in Pittsburgh? Yeah, it's in Pittsburgh. No. I would have made a pilgrimage after hearing the description, but alas, it's closed. Mexican restaurant. Got it. Just super loud music. Everybody was on drugs. Oh.

And the cooks were all smoking pot. The waiters were all doing coke. I think the manager was on E. Oh, boy. I'm not quite sure how that worked out. So you had to. How was the food? The food was amazing. I could be their dynamite. You were a cook. Yeah. Of course, you would say it. If I was smoking pot, I was cooking slowly. Mm-hmm.

And the waiter who was high on coke would come back and be like, are you cooking with a fucking lighter back there? What is wrong with you? Yeah. What a mismatch of different experiences everyone was having on the many different drugs. Okay, but back to debate. So you're really good at debate and then presumably you get a debate scholarship, University of Pittsburgh? I did. I started out at the University of Pittsburgh.

And was recruited for their debate team. There were a few schools that wanted me to come debate for them. I almost said work, but it was kind of like work because it was the same as my job now. It's just taking the news and making an argument with it. And it's just now I'm at the creation of the news business.

It's a lot of the same skills, a lot of the same things go into it. And so I know what kind of debate we're talking about. I grew up with a certain idea of what debate was. And then I recently saw something, maybe you guys have seen this, where it's like, it's speed debate. This is the kind I did. Have you seen this, Monica? I don't think so. It's four to 500 words a minute. Oh,

Four to five hundred. They get up there and they go, they're talking that fast. It's like the micro machine, man. Are you reading or it's all extemporaneous? You're reading for a lot of it and you're doing analysis and talking at the same speed. And it's crazy because everybody in the room is basically transcribing the route. It's called flowing the debate. And so you've got everything written down. And if you drop one argument,

You lose. See, it's different than a presidential debate because there is both accountability and reasonable arguments. That is very different. Sometimes people ask me, as a debater, what do you think of this presidential debate? And my response is, different activity. When I saw this, I was like, this has become so abstract and weird. A, I don't understand how the debaters themselves are speaking as fast as they're speaking and reading as quickly as they are. But then also, I don't know how anyone's hearing anything.

And I don't know how anyone's evaluating the strength or merit of any of these points of view. So what are the metrics? How are they deciding who won? Well, it's that flow chart. You're counting on the judge's ability to write everything down and say, well, they dropped this argument. You won this argument. It's a very strange world and it has its own vernacular. It was a weird high school and college experience because I grew up living in hotels on the weekends in high school and college and

with the same group of kids. We all went to school at radically different parts of the country, but we were together every weekend. And this was for high school and college. So you get to know people pretty well. It's a real community. It's a very interesting, weird activity. And what personality type is drawn to it if you had to stereotype, or at least give me 51%? Like, did those kids party? Yeah. Because the stress level? The Harvard tournament can no longer get

a hotel in Cambridge to like let them be there because it got so out of hand with the drugs. Everyone's taking Adderall presumably. There were some people who were into coke. Ironically, I didn't get into the drugs because of debate. I got into it because of a restaurant debate. There was a lot of drinking and it was a party. I hope you don't take offense to this, but

You don't immediately present to me as my stereotype for a debater. Does he to you, Monica? That's a good question. You've got kind of like a laid back vibe. Yeah. Unassuming. But knowing what you do, it makes sense. Okay, now back to what it's evolved to. At one

point debate made a lot of sense in if you were going to pursue many different paths this would be a cool skill set of course presidential debate would be like the apex of this but you could see where it had some application but to me it seems now like this thing is for its own sake it doesn't really have any real world application lawyers aren't arguing cases in front of judges in this manner

No one in the real world is synthesizing information in this way outside of a debate stage, are they? Right, but it taught me how to think quickly and how to solve problems creatively. I've spent a small fortune on therapy trying to figure out why it is that I do what I do. And it seems that I am driven entirely by...

The need to solve problems and to tell a good story. Money buys convenience. It doesn't do much for me. I have friends who are like investment bankers. How they value themselves is that number that's at the end of the spreadsheet. That's not me. I barely know how to do finances. Right. Like personal finances. So just not motivated by money. Other than more is better, clearly, and safer. People are horrified by how little money I made doing these things. Oh.

Well, of course, I'm on the greedy end of the spectrum. I'm more like your financial friends. I'm like, how much? You got to get enough to be safe. So, yeah, when I'm thinking about the amounts of money that are transferring hands in pursuit of all these outcomes, I'm like, are you dipping your beak in that or figuring out how to funnel a little off? No, no, it's all black, dark money. Like, it's all shady. Can't we steal some of it? Anyways, so you're doing well and then you're at work and you're feeling a bit drowsy. And one of the kind and benevolent waiters...

It says, try a bump of this. Yeah. Within three months, you're failing all five classes. Yeah. It was a pretty fast train wreck. I called up my brother and he flew

flew to Pittsburgh, we were just like, what do we do? You know, the idea of dropping out of college is something that in my family does not go. We couldn't come up with anything. So on a rainy afternoon, we went to the registrar's office and dropped me out of college. And they sent me home to, at the time, Olympia, Washington, where my parents lived and got off the plane. I was intoxicated and clutching my Opus the penguin stuffed animal.

They made me go see a shrink and lied to the shrink. Didn't tell them about the drug problem and just said, you know, I was depressed. And the shrink said, well, you've got situational depression. I'm not sure if that's a real diagnosis. Right. They said, since you're out of the situation, you're no longer depressed. So they sent me off to live in Washington, D.C., not exactly the best place to dry out.

I don't know how much time you've spent in D.C., but wow. Well, I have to say, while reading about your experience, I definitely see a lot of crazy parallels between Hollywood and D.C., the ultimate company towns, the ultimate networking places. Status town.

backgrounds. Yes. Fast. Things are happening way after hours at night. There's so many parallels. Sometimes you guys try and crash our party, like the White House Correspondents Dinner. Hollywood's like, oh, we got to go to D.C. Everybody finds out that we have an airport and everything and they come visit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I did that once. Same. And what was your conclusion? It's a very inappropriate event, I think. It puts the media in a compromising position. It puts

policymakers in a compromising position, but we're just going to keep doing it every year because like, you know, we do it every year. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I had a very inappropriate request. I wanted a news organization to invite my client to come as kind of a move to do something with in a public relations way.

And they were just like, Phil, that's inappropriate. And my response was this whole event is inappropriate. It seems to be a non-unique arm. I think it's very interesting. I'm totally glad I went and saw it one time. But yeah, I don't need to ever do that again. But I'm glad I witnessed that whole thing. And then a lot of pressure for politicians to be comedians because they got to give these speeches and be funny. That's a whole sidebar that's interesting. It seems like the prerequisite to be a politician is that you need to be able to do stand up.

Exactly. What I'm saying is, with regard to Congress, if we could elect a few more accountants and a few fewer lawyers, that would really help me out. It's electing all the lawyers that allows people like me to do things that I have done. Yeah. Yeah.

Because why? They're so well-versed in the law, they know how to deal within the margins or... Morally deplete. I didn't say it, but I'm definitely going to buzz in on that one. Well, you're right. There is something implicit in the fact that as they should have, they have this client confidentiality, which...

Which is necessary, clearly. But once you enter into that, you're already in a very unique and privileged space. And I think you can build out of that a lot of questionable behavior that feels like it's anchored in something. Because you're already existing in a plane that doesn't really exist anywhere else. I don't know, it somehow motivates you to keep going in whatever direction serves your client or something.

It's hard to know. There's a lot of defending the indefensible, but someone has to do it. See, but that's a very interesting question. The second chapter in the book I titled Everyone Deserves Representation. And that is kind of one of the fundamental questions that I think the book asks is, is this true? I believe everybody deserves a lawyer. Yes. But does everybody deserve somebody like me? I used to think, yes.

I very much do not think yes anymore. Yeah. Okay, so you land in Washington through hook or crook. You've got a friend who's got a friend, and you end up being an intern for Senator Moynihan. And now the party fucking starts. Now, do you stop coke? When are you? You do. After the spin out in Pittsburgh. After it ruined my life. Okay, you're like, I'm not going back to that. And you never did? No. Even when blitzed, hammered? No. Wow.

No, I've been offered coke many times and have turned it down every time. Nowadays, it's because of fentanyl. If doing a line is going to cost you your life, the rush is not that much fun. The cost benefit. It's totally off. So no. And even before that, this almost ruined my life once. I'm not going to roll the dice again. I applaud that. But you're drinking your ass off as an intern. You ingratiate yourself quite successfully, right? When you volunteer to haul carts of liquor through the Capitol...

and stock the senator's liquor cabinet. Not that he drank at all. He would have people over to his hideaway office. Nobody knows about this. There are wonderful hideaway offices throughout the Capitol that senior senators get. Moynihan's had this beautiful view of Pennsylvania Avenue, and Levin had this beautiful view of the mall. Like, I got to watch the fireworks in his office once. Absolutely amazing stuff. These secret corridors that lead back to them. And their little clubhouses. They are.

What do you think the design intent of those was? They were the original offices. So in the Capitol building itself, you still have the old Senate chamber and the old House chamber, and you had the old Supreme Court. The movie Amistad, Steven Spielberg wanted to film in the old Supreme Court chamber in the Capitol. And I do not believe they let him do it. But you can still go into that chamber. Was it in the basement? Ground floor.

But it's so nuts. And there are so many cool parts to the Capitol. And it's all connected through underground tunnels. Now, this becomes very important when someone sends anthrax to the Senate. Because they sent it to the Hart Building. And so it infected the Hart Building. How did they get rid of the anthrax? They taped up all of the corridors and vents that connected the buildings. And they put it in a box.

and filled the heart building with chlorine gas. Wow. We were all still working in the building next door. And they're like, don't worry about it. We sealed up all the vents. And we're like, I'm making $23,000 a year to work here. The cost benefit analysis is not working out for me. But no, I had to get tested for anthrax a couple of times. And they give you a three-day supply of Cipro. And they're like, we really hope this works out for you. Chlorine gas is the street name. What is that? Is that mustard gas? I

I don't know, but the way it was explained to me was that we used the first chemical weapon to beat the first biological weapon. And I was like, okay.

Okay, so while you're there, your drinking is pretty out of control. You smash a car through the window of a library. It would have been better if it was a car. Oh, okay. It was actually just my body. Oh! There's a ground floor window into Gelman Library at GW. And this is particularly unfortunate because I had just been accepted as a transfer student to GW. Oh, no.

I thought I was getting my life back together. Everything was going to be fine. Moynihan's office wrote this really nice letter that got me into GW with some really crappy grades from high school. Pretty good grades in undergrad. When I dropped out, I had like a 3.9. Got me into GW and then I was promptly thrown out. I received a letter from GW days after my arrest saying,

that said, "Due to your involvement in the incidents of July whatever, your offer of admission as a transfer student has been rescinded." So I had no place to go to school, I had no job because Moynihan was retiring. And Moynihan, or not him personally, but his staff,

got the staff of Senator Carl Levin, the senator across the hall, to hire me. And I was the first one, I think, that they'd ever hired without a college degree. Moynihan was retiring and Hillary Clinton took, right. So yes, at this point, you have been infected with this DC lifestyle. You feel very at home. You want a career in this.

And then I think what's even more important is the series of events. So when you get arrested for going through the window and you're put in front of the judge, you get a really light slap on the wrist. Yeah, like 20 hours of community service. I heard from somebody in the office that somebody else made a call.

Right. And so maybe that happened or didn't. But certainly the letter to George Washington helped. And you get booted from there. And then the new person in Levin's office says, you should go to Georgetown. And you're like, I'm a shit student. That's not going to happen.

And then in two shakes, you're into Georgetown. So here's, I would imagine, the irresistible elixir of that place, which is, oh, there is a world in which the normal rules don't exist. And if you know the right people, I don't know how

anyone at 20 when presented with that superhero option isn't pulled towards that. Like, wow, it can work like this? Get out of jail shit? Get into any school you want? It must have been so attractive. The first time I saw what power was, I got to D.C. and I was working, I was an intern for the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. I was an intern for the guy that they named

the train station in New York after. I mean, he's kind of a big deal. Yeah, right. I got to drive him to the airport once. I got to talk to him a couple of times. And they talked to you. They told you about stuff. Yeah. And you got to hear funny stories about them from their staff.

And you learn that they're people, but they also wield just amazing power. The other thing I was thinking about Hollywood, D.C., is you're explaining your first minutes there in D.C. and just being outside and watching this senator and that senator and this senator. And you're naming them and, oh, this person's getting their bags carried by their two hot boy assistants. And I was thinking, like, I don't know any of these people.

And you probably don't know any of the executives or the writers or the directors. And it's like even how much you immediately when you come to a place like this, you just consume everything and learn all the important people really quickly. And you think the rest of the world knows. Nobody knows. Right? No. I don't think your average person can name more than 10 senators. That's good. One of the things I do not like that's going on is this kind of celebrity culture in Congress. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm sorry, you don't run for Congress to be an influencer. You run for Congress to compromise with your colleagues and make good policy that makes America better, not get more fucking Instagram followers. Yeah, but again, just as you were polled, we're all polled. We're all status monkeys. It's pretty intoxicating. It is. I can only be so judgmental as I sit here as someone who pursued all of it. So when you get to Georgetown, what happens? I stopped working for the senator.

and went to be a full-time student. And then one thing happened, and then I went back to working for the Senate. I worked for him part-time. I was managing his email account while I was a student. So I could do this at any hour of the day or night. So I spent a lot of nights from like midnight until 6 a.m. in the Russell Senate office building, totally alone, sorting the senator's email account. I think they paid me a full-time staffer's wage, and I lived in a dorm.

I was on a meal plan. One summer, this was between my junior and senior at Georgetown, I was out with some friends.

And we were drinking heavily. We were going from one bar to another. I was trying to hail a cab. Tried to hop over this Jersey barrier, one of these concrete barriers in the middle of the road. Caught my foot in just the wrong way. Landed on a curb. And the ball part of my femur came off. Oh, sure. The condal? Yeah. I got the cab. Now, that's the important part of the story. And it took me to GW's emergency room. Okay.

where I was seen by a trauma surgeon for a broken hip and woke up the next morning with my mother in the room. So I knew something was very, very wrong. So about three months later, I went skydiving for the first time. Oh, wow. Really enjoyed it. Told my surgeon at the follow-up appointment that he must have done some good work and he was real pissed. Yeah,

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Kind of a waste of his efforts. Yeah, I know. So I think safe to say there's some thrill-seeking. Oh, yeah. What was your major did you complete there? They called it government political science, is what it would be called anywhere else. Okay. And how do you end up at London School of Economics? I was graduation day at Georgetown.

And I got an email from the London School of Economics and they're like, you didn't finish your application to grad school here. And we're writing to tell you that if you do, you will be admitted. So on the day I graduated from Georgetown, I finished the application and hit send. And I was admitted. I went to London and went to a lot of very interesting classes with diplomats, kids and members of parliament's kids. And one...

student who was in his PhD program there was a man by the name of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi. There we go. Gaddafi's son. That was my first interaction with the family. Do you have a friendship at all there? Oh, no. I knew of him. He would walk around campus with security guards and he was mostly there for club openings and things like that. Yeah, yeah. What did he get a PhD in? Buying a PhD, I think, is what he got a PhD in.

I believe the director of the school had to resign after the Arab Spring because it came out that Saif bought his PhD with bribes. Again, how the world really turns. And what was your master's in? It was in something called Social and Public Communication.

And when I pitched this to my father, because I wanted him to help me pay for this, he said, Phil, let me get this straight. You want me to buy you a master's degree in talking to people? And I was like, well, yeah, but it's in London. So I went over.

But it was really an exciting time. I made some great friends that are still close friends of mine. They colloquially call it, "Let's see Europe." LSE. - Oh, that's nice, yeah. - I went to Amsterdam several times. I went all over Europe, visited Italy. It was great. - Yeah. And are you thinking at any point that you might start a career in public relations? - No, I really went to grad school to avoid getting a job. When I dropped out, I had to work and that was not very much fun.

And so I was like, I don't know what I want to do for a living. I don't want to work on the Hill. But I knew I wanted to be in D.C. And so when I came back from grad school, I just started applying everywhere. I applied at think tanks. I applied at lobbying firms. Thank God I didn't end up at a lobbying firm. I would definitely be in jail.

Yeah, yeah. Because, you know, they make a bunch of laws about what lobbyists can and can't do. Due to the First Amendment, they can't make a lot of laws about what PR people can and can't do. I like to say that my career is an unintended consequence of the First Amendment. Interesting.

You point out how lopsided this industry is in that there are seven PR professionals per one journalist. And that that number is growing on the PR side and shrinking on the journalist side. Yeah, there's like 10 people around to try to shape what the one person's doing. And the money is on the side of the...

Well, yeah. You get a job at a PR firm. You end up working for several. And when you first started, what is your understanding of it? How is it explained to you? Do you know right away this kind of could be shady? At first, it was pretty good guy stuff. I go to work at this firm. My first assignment is doing press for a documentary about the second war in Iraq.

about an artillery unit that lived in Uday Hussein's Bamda Palace in the Adameya section of Baghdad. And the movie was called Gunner Palace. It received from the MPAA an R rating because there's this rule that if the word fuck appears in a film more than once or twice, I don't remember,

You get one. But then you get an R rating. That's nuts. The word fuck appears in this movie like about a hundred times. Sure. Because one of the opening scenes is like a shootout. They're not watching their language. No. They're saying a lot of things. Also, the soundtrack for this movie, it should have won a Grammy because the soundtrack for this movie is all hip hop performed by the soldiers. Oh, wow. Talking about their experiences in Iraq. And it's

Absolutely amazing. It's a great documentary. So we do all this media appeal.

appealing the MPAA's motion because we wanted 15 and 16 year old kids to watch this movie because they were the ones who were thinking about enlisting. And at this point in the era, we didn't know we were going to be there 20 years. And so, you know, it was a great project to work on. It's so funny because I went to work for the lobbying firm upstairs from the PR firm after this project. And my client, I'm so sad this isn't in the book, my client was Bono, his one campaign.

My job as a lobbyist was to give away U2 tickets. This was before the gift rules. And so like we'd call up offices and say, do you want tickets to the next U2 show? Does your boss want to meet with Bono? And everybody said, yes, of course. Of course. Like you were talking about before, that celebrity meets power situation is a very interesting dynamic. Yeah, combustible. So

When you were doing that, I presume you were calling journalists. You were saying, we have this great movie. It should be seen by many people, but the MPAA is going to stand in the way of younger people. Watching this is an important cause. It's worth writing a story about. Is that pretty much the pitch? You got it. And you were successful in getting some stories written in some good places. Got some stories written. Got the director and one of the soldiers. I did what is called a hat trick. I got them on all three cable networks within like two days.

Uh-huh. I was like 24, and you ask if they explained this to me. No. They sat me in a windowless office with a touch-tone phone and a computer. Not even a laptop, like a computer with a CPU. And I'm sitting there, and they're like, put people on TV.

I don't know how to do that. They're like, here's how you build a media list. And I was like, okay. So I looked up some people and I called them up and they usually were like, this isn't what I do. But you were able to get people on the phone. I guess that's the first shocker. I would think there'd be a little bit of an impenetrable barrier around these people, but I guess not. It depends on the ear you get. I have met with journalists who have told me I've never gotten a story from a PR person. I get 87 pitches a day.

In my email or through Twitter or however the hell people are reaching journalists. I haven't sent a pitch email to a journalist in quite some time. It doesn't work. If you really want to pitch a journalist, you just text them one sentence. I've got some shit that nobody else has. Do you want it? Okay. So scarcity mentality. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert. If you dare.

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Okay, so you're doing work for the good guys. And what is the first toe in the water of, hmm, this feels a little unethical? When I was signing what's called a Foreign Agents Registration Act form, that is a form by the Department of Justice. It's called the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938. Hitler was hiring a bunch of PR firms.

to try and persuade the Americans to stay out of the war or persuade them that the Nazi way of life is a good thing. Well, really quick. So that's fun right there to know. So this game has been being played since before World War II. Yes. That's what's kind of threatening and scary is that countries are hiring American PR firms to ultimately sway Americans.

The government. I think that's why. I mean, it's like a step up from propaganda. That's the next thing. Well, it's propaganda from within the target. It's crazy. It's loud. Do you guys know how much foreign money is spent on PR firms and lobbying firms? What are we looking at? Billions. It's a lot of money. Now, the reason you don't know that is because this Foreign Agent Registration Act.

So it's supposed to all go in a database. So if you're working for a foreign entity, you're supposed to register so that everybody knows what you're doing. But this database is like impenetrable. It is designed to be shitty. Nobody can really figure out. I've searched myself and I can't find all my FARA forms. I've registered for probably a dozen different countries. And if I can't find my own,

What chance does a reporter have? - Yeah, this speaks to my great suspicion about, you know, people would get really freaked out as they should be about the government tapping into phones domestically, right? But my argument to that's always been like, yeah, A, it shouldn't happen.

You have a lot of confidence that they can actually synthesize the information they're gathering. They can't. They can gather data really easily, but no one can make sense of it or fucking sift through it. So this is a prime example. It's like there's 10,000 forms in there. You think someone's combing through and going to find something suspicious? It's not going to happen. No. And so you add up the FARA database and all the money that's in there. After 9-11, the Saudis obviously had a bit of a reputation problem.

I'm going to just go ahead and say understatement. And so they hired, you know, some PR firms to help clarify their position on the issue. Distance themselves from Osama, who was a prominent member of the Saudi family. Well, what they did was they created AstroTurf organizations to promote Saudi messaging about 9-11.

Explain that a little better. They created AstroTurf. Oh, that is the thing in PR. We always come up with cute nicknames for everything. Sure, euphemize all your evilness. My public relations strategies are things like detonate the bomb in a safe location and sink the body. But we also talk about AstroTurf organizations. So think about a good organization, like a grassroots organization, like the One Campaign. They built a beautiful system of like you text this number and then it

adds your name to the list. It's this wonderful thing. They became bigger than the NRA was what Bono liked to say at U2 shows. So,

So that's a grassroots organization. Now, an AstroTurf organization is a fake grassroots organization. It gives you the appearance of grass, the appearance of public support, but it doesn't exist. Right. Oh, I like that. It's fake grassroots? Yeah. So basically what it is is a tax filing in Delaware and a bank account.

And a website, probably. So it can be the people for a better American future. But it's really a Saudi fund to help untarnish the image of the Saudi government. All right, great. By the way, I'm a double major. One of them is PR. And this is just so funny because... Was any of this covered? No!

Of course not. You have like a week on crisis management. Oh. Because they don't want it to be this, right? Like they don't want you to think, oh, it's all about covering shit up, even though that's like the sexy stuff and the fun week of the year. They make it seem very... It's all documentaries about Iraq. It's all positive. To give you an example of what kind of dark side PR looks like, can I tell you a quick story about defending the Lockerbie bomber?

Please, I've got five stories earmarked that I want you to tell me. So yes, please tell this story. And don't spare a detail. Again, I don't think any of us really know the mechanics of what happens. It's like, take me from a client telling you, I want this, to your execution of that. The year is 2009. My client is the Gaddafi family. And...

Just wait. We need you here for 10 hours because I need to know how this even, like, what's that call? Like, what the fuck? Also, it's like you've clearly already drinking gallons of the Kool-Aid because on first glance, you just know that's not a client anyone should have. But go on. All right. So the client's the Gaddafi family.

And I didn't interact with the family members much. But the person I interact with is the ambassador. I get a call one day that I have to rush over to the Libyan embassy, which is in the Watergate Hotel. Perfect. Because nothing shady has ever happened. So I go in to the Watergate, get to the office, and I sit down with the ambassador. Now, keep in mind, the last time I was in this office with this ambassador, we were on the phone with this reality TV show host called Donald Trump.

And he wanted to set up a golf game with the Libyan ambassador down in Florida because he wanted access to Libya's $60 billion sovereign wealth fund. And he also wanted to build a golf course in Tripoli. Ambitious. So that was the last time I was in the embassy. And this time it was equally weird because the ambassador says to me, I have great news for you. A national hero.

is going to be returned to Libya in 48 hours. I don't know much about Libyan national heroes at the time, so I was like, well, who's that? He says the man's name is Al-Megrahi. And I knew who that was because I was alive in 1988 when he blew up Pan Am Flight 103, killing 270 people. On the way to Ireland? No, it was on the way to New York. Oh, on the way to New York. I think it was on the way to New York. It blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland. Oh, okay, that's why I'm thinking that. And...

Al-Megrahi was in jail in Scotland. He was going to be released. So they wanted my professional opinion as a media expert as to what I thought the reaction of the international media might be. This is shortly after 9-11. Terrorism's not hot right now. He's a terrorist. It's out of vogue. He killed a bunch of Americans. So they say, we need you to get us a positive piece of press. Oof.

The reaction the next day when everybody finds out is bad.

Robert Mueller, the then director of the FBI, writes a letter to the Scottish authorities saying this is a miscarriage of justice. Right, because he what served at this point, 20... He didn't go to jail for a while. It wasn't immediate. And then he was in jail for a little while. And then some Libyan doctors said that he had prostate cancer. And so the Scottish authorities released him. Okay, for treatment? Sure. So they released him and they throw him like a ticker tape parade in Tripoli. A hero's welcome. Obviously, the reaction's bad from the media. Yeah.

And so I'm frantically trying to figure out what to do to get some positive press. In my research, I find that the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee back in 2004 tried to help reopen the door to Libya because we wanted them to help us kill al-Qaeda. We wanted them as allies in the war on terrorists, the enemy of my enemy is my friend kind of mentality.

And Qaddafi did not like terrorists because they could undo his regime. So he had shared interests. Although he liked his own terrorists. Well, yeah, he liked his own. Those are national heroes. Get the verbiage correct. There was three or four congressmen. This one guy I had done a recent project with.

So I knew his staff pretty well. So I called them up and I said, look, this is going to undo the relationship. Libya is going to sever their diplomatic ties with us. It's going to be bad. Your boss needs to do something. They said, well, what did you have in mind? And I said, well, I've written this letter that your boss could sign. And it's a letter to Secretary Hillary Clinton. She was the secretary of state at the time. One of the messages of the letter, the direct quote was knock off the Libya bashing.

And so I got him to agree to sign that letter, and I leaked it to a reporter at Politico, who then, a couple of days later, had an article with the headline, Knock Off the Libya Bashing. And so getting a positive piece of press...

For the Libyans, the week Al-Megrahi was released, the way I put it in the book is that I deserve whatever the opposite of a Pulitzer is. Right, right. A shitski. Jesus, come up with something. Now, does the staff of the Congress person feel betrayed or?

Or like a pawn in something? Or they were happy to stand by that letter anyways. They assumed it would get out. Are you burning any bridges or is everyone happy in this scenario? I don't think the staff member was thrilled to read about it in the newspaper. And do they call you and go, why did you fucking leak that letter? Or they're not even sure who leaked the letter. They wouldn't do that because that would look bad on them. What would they say? A PR guy talked me into signing the letter up.

I mean, just mentally, they might call you and yell at you. I guess if I were them, my two options would be someone in Hillary's office leak this because they're mad at the congressman for sending this letter. Or my man Phil leaked this. What an asshole. But you didn't get a call like that from them. Are you making a calculation of like, okay, probably now next time I call them with something, they're not going to be receptive. Are you aware of the fact that some of these are one and done moves?

Yes. Sometimes you have to burn a bridge. It is hard to make that calculation. Do you have a sense of how much is that costing the Libyan government? You mean in retainers to my firm? Well, right. So I was curious what the pay structure is for these people. Is there a flat rate? Is it like lawyers and it's hourly? Is it per job? Because again, I would imagine you generally have everyone over a barrel.

Which is like, you're not going to be able to get anything positive about this person. This kind of thing is going to cost them $2 million. Who knows? The sky's the limit. So how is that negotiated? And what is a ballpark figure for a mission like that? It's available on the FARA forms, how much they pay you. And that stuff's not hidden? No.

This is all publicly available. Like, you can find out. So there's a major PR firm in the States. They're the largest privately held PR firm. And they represent Saudi Arabia. And they have to disclose exactly how much they're taking in. They submitted their contract to the Department of Justice in Arabic because that's how they delivered it to their client. Oh, man.

Talk about trying to hide things. So I think it was Politico paid somebody to translate it into English and they published it. They're on a retainer and then there's add-ons. Big dollars. Tens of millions, a hundred million. Let's go back to the Saudi Arabia example. 9-11 cost them in reported PR fees, 15 million. And then after they killed Khashoggi, it cost them 18 million. Childbirth.

Just for that. For that, yeah. Just that one issue. To the same firm. They didn't even like branch out and go to a different firm. I mean, they hired the same people. When I was reading this, I was reminded of the few times I have been overtly aware that this is happening. It's very seldom that I can sniff out what's going on, but certainly when MBS was,

making his debut to the world. I first was introduced to him and to remind people MBS is the current... Is he the king, I guess, of Saudi Arabia? He's the crown prince. Crown prince, okay. He was on 60 Minutes. And I watched 60 Minutes. He's talking about women's rights and he's gonna... Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was very positive piece on him. Yes. And it was among...

Maybe five or six I witnessed around that time. And to be honest, I bought in. I'm like, they finally have someone that's going to probably move them closer to our millennia. Nah. And then in retrospect, I'm like, yes, some really great agency got him. I can't get on 60 Minutes. I've been in show business for 20 years. I think what's actually sad is it wasn't that great. Go on 60 Minutes. It worked.

which is shocking, but that should be 101. Like we should have all seen through that and we didn't. It's kind of embarrassing. I think that's how the players in this space, and you can tell me, justify to themselves that they're doing it, which is it's ultimately on the public, right? Well, I think of myself as kind of savvy. I was like, oh, this guy seems promising and I can't get a segment on 60 Minutes. Tom Hanks does, right? So this person bought a segment on 60 Minutes

And it worked until there was too much evidence to the contrary. Ahmadinejad, too, he had around for a while. Putin had a period where he wrote an op-ed. Do you remember that for the New York Times? And I was like, wait, maybe this guy's got a point. I actually know the guy who placed it. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. I know the PR guy who edited and placed that piece. Yes. Wow. That is mind-blowing. It was a well-written piece, though. Did you read it? Sure. Does it surprise you that some of us know each other? No.

It doesn't, but that one's particularly tasty. Like if you were in the Department of Defense and you're like, yeah, my roommate was the guy who shot Osama. I'm pretty excited to know that. I had one journalist come to me once and I said, you really need to let the bad people handle this because we all already know each other. And would you get together and talk shop? Like, thank you for smoking a book I know you read and loved. Did you have those steakhouse dinners where you're like, you think that's disgusting? Here's what I'm doing in Egypt right now.

More than like a celebration of it, it was more of a confessional situation. The person who did this for me was my mentor, who I worked for after I worked for all the bad dictators, a guy by the name of Richard Levick. He was the kind of creator of crisis communications and litigation communications, and he was my mentor for a long time. He passed away recently, but he and I would get together and have dinner, and he was a great person to talk to about, I've done these things.

I don't know how to feel about it and I never want to do them again. And he would help keep me honest. Right. So he was being a nonjudgmental open ear in hopes of keeping you to go to the force. Yeah. But did you feel a high? Absolutely. Yeah. Like when that happened and it went off, were you just like, oh, fuck yeah. The rush I got, and this is horrible and I feel awful about it.

From seeing that article that said, knock off the Libya bashing. Yeah. That's like stopping time, manipulating the truth, and then watching it restart again. The power. I hate it when people call what I do a magic trick. But if we have to carry forward that analogy, the book is a little bit like a Penn and Teller routine. The two comedians who ruin magic tricks. Yeah. All I'm trying to do is tell people how the magic is done in order to increase media literacy.

So let's talk about and to remind people, there was a moment where Qatar was bidding for hosting the World Cup. We, too, were hoping to host the World Cup. There's numerous reasons why that one always smelled a little bit. Just merely the heat and not an ideal place to host. But walk us through being brought on to that project.

This is in 2010. ESPN said about the Qatari bid that it made more sense to play the Super Bowl in a lake than it made to play the World Cup in Qatar. Because due to the cycle, you'd have to play it in the summer, right? So you don't interrupt the European Soccer League.

So if you played it at that time, it would have been 120 degrees there. Oh my God. Sorry, guys. I've been to Qatar. It's lovely, but not a place I want to play soccer in July. It's a long shot bid. My job was to go negative on...

the opposing bids. The United States was the main opponent to host the 2022 games. So we're doing some things and nothing's really working all that well. Talk about an uphill battle. And then one day, Congress passed a sense of the House resolution. Now these mean nothing.

They pass one for the Girl Scout troop that sells the most cookies. So they pass the center of the House resolution saying, we think the United States should host the World Cup. Well, this enrages our client. And our client at the time was the Qatari royal family.

We worked for various aspects of the industry. They tell my employer, get your man in Washington, me, to get a resolution introduced into the U.S. Congress opposing their own bid to host the World Cup. And what I said to my boss, do you want me to also get a resolution introduced saying flag burning is mandatory in elementary schools?

That's not going to happen, my friend. And all he says to me was, I said it, you make it true. And then he hung up on me. So I went to a bar. It was like three in the afternoon. I was sitting outside. It's a bar called Fox and Hound. It's got a great patio. It's a terrible place. They serve you a glass of vodka and a side of tonic or soda. So if you have two or three of these, you're like...

Yeah, you're ready to fall back through that library window. Yeah, and at the time, it was only like $5.50 a drink. It was a good deal. I'm on my second or third, and this group of school kids walks by, and they are all morbidly obese. And I was like, shit, that's my answer. Oh!

That's my answer, Monica. Oh my God. It's hard not to respect the cleverness of a lot of this. I know, I know. Here we go. I got a cocktail napkin and a pen and I wrote this resolution that said the United States government would not support bids for any international games, World Cup or Olympic until we fully funded physical education programs in public schools. Monica. Monica Lily Padman. That's really...

Oh, yeah. The First Lady was all about childhood obesity and getting kids moving. But how does this work? So you ride it on a napkin, and then what are the steps? I don't understand this. Well, first step is finding this napkin the next day because he was in a blackout. Probably so. This is why drinking is kind of good. It's good, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a PR move for alcoholism for sure. This is a pro drink.

I hire him. What if his ultimate Machiavellian ploy was to come here, really? Like all of the good stories involved first getting drunk and on a certain brand of vodka, and we were missing it the whole time. Okay, so. The mechanics of DC. So if you want to get a resolution introduced, it's a good idea to go to a lobbyist. If you go to a big lobbying firm, they're going to ask all kinds of questions.

and they're going to make sure they appropriately file paperwork and things like that. If you go to an independent operator lobbyist, they're easier to work with. So I go to this guy who I know has a good relationship with a lot of members of Congress.

And I said, I'm working for the Healthy Kids Coalition. This guy didn't know who my client was. I'm working for the Healthy Kids Coalition. But is that made up? Well, that's the AstroTurf organization. Is it made up? Well, no, it's a tax filing in Delaware and a website. It has the ability to issue press releases. So it's almost an organization.

And so he's like, that'll cost $25,000. And I said, well, we only have 10. And he ended up taking it. He got Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick to introduce the resolution. Now, this is a member of Congress. She's retired. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick. And she chose to keep her middle name in play. Oh!

I like it. You like it? It's playful. It's a little playful, yeah. Sure. She was actually the mother of a guy named Kwame Kilpatrick, who was the mayor of Detroit, who went to jail. Oh, he had a lot of tasty stuff. I'm from Detroit. He bought a Lincoln Navigator...

under the government fund for his car. He's entitled to a car, but his buddy owned the Navigator dealership. And lo and behold, this Navigator was like 180,000. Well, there are only 80,000. I wonder where the other hundred went. There was a lot of hijinks. Well, a stripper disappeared. I don't know if they ever found her body. It's not great. So she had lost her primary and this lobbyist got her to agree to introduce this resolution on her way out the door.

So my job was to then get some press coverage of this. So I knew of this reporter at Politico who was a soccer fan. And I leaked him the resolution. He was like, oh, this is great. You know, he called the congresswoman's office. They confirmed it was real. And then he wrote an article with the headline World Cup versus gym class. So...

I will not in any way claim that I even switched one vote of the FIFA members. There was a lot of bribery. A lot of people are in jail over this. What it did was it provided cover to every voter who voted against the U.S. bid because they could say...

their own Congress doesn't want it. - The main strategy which you left out was if we could present to FIFA that the US itself is divided on whether or not they even wanna host it, that would be enough seed of doubt to tip it. - For sure. - Now, this was gonna be one of my follow-up questions about the Qatar case.

or Cuttercase specifically, when you're working with a client, you have to be aware that they're probably employing a lot of strategies. And as time would tell, they were. They were also bribing people. A, do you always assume that? B, do you ever attempt to guide them and say, allow this process to happen? Because if you muddy it up with these other angles, you're going to lose ultimately.

What happens with the multiple strategies? That gets confusing, which is why my favorite kind of client are the ones who are just like, burn it down.

We didn't have to worry about strategies intersecting in this instance because it was just make the Americans look bad. There was no like... Protect this, but not... Right. It gets complicated sometimes when you have multiple actors and multiple interests. In this case, it was simple to quote Shakespeare, cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war. That's my first time hearing this. Now, Monica, her other major was theater. I know. Unfortunately, I don't know.

I don't even know that I understand what it means. I didn't know AstroTurf and I didn't know Julius. You might want to ask for a refund at UGA, but then you went for free, so there's really nothing to refund. I could see a panicked Cutter family just deploying everything at their disposal and some of them tripping up other ones. I

I want to bring up one thing. There was an amazing frontline called Black Money, and it was about how a certain aircraft manufacturer in England was going to supply fighter jets to the Ministry of Defense in Saudi Arabia. And this was while Margaret Thatcher was the prime minister. The way this worked was the Saudi Minister of Defense went to

the airplane manufacturer and said, "We will buy $30 billion worth of jets, but we want $5 billion back." This was seen by Margaret Thatcher. Like this was all signed off on. And they had these Amex cards, the whole family, that really the airplane manufacturer paid for. And some of the expenses that came out was one of the wives of one of these princes flew on a 747 with just her and her dog

and went to Beverly Hills and shopped for five days straight and filled up the entire 747. Mind you, also she brought back like four Rolls Royces for her husband. And the entire bill's given to the airplane manufacturer and it's paid.

And like that's the level of bizarre kickbacks that are happening with these military contracts. Like there's so much fucking graph going on, it's crazy. So yeah, when I hear they're paying you guys however many hundreds of thousands to plant that story, like that's chump change. They're backdooring five billion dollars off a jet purchase. The Qataris I think paid us 80,000 a month.

And they ended up spending $220 billion on the games. Oh, God. Oh, my Lord. The numbers are fucking astronomical. Oh, my God. $220 billion. For 5,228 minutes of soccer. Right. Wow.

That would fund the FBI for 22 years. We were supposed to have a win bonus in our contract. It was seven figures. And the Qataris, before they signed their contract, redlined the bonus, signed the contract, told my employer there were no changes to it, and he didn't check. Oh. Oh.

So they spent $220 billion, but only $80 a month on PR? That doesn't seem fair. Yes, yes, you guys got underpaid. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

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Okay, I want to hear about more Gaddafi. Gaddafi? There are actually, I think, 25 accepted spellings of his name. Every review of this book so far has spelled it differently. Okay. It's crazy. Pronounce it however you want to. He's dead. Okay, so the son of Gaddafi.

of Gaddafi, who you were at, what was the fun acronym you gave? - Around Europe. - See Europe. - Let's see Europe. - Let's see Europe. - While you were at Let's See Europe, who was also there, you at one point got employed again by them to help with the situation he was in. - I never worked directly for him. I had to babysit Matassa. Is that what you mean? - Oh, maybe. There was a long weekend in Vegas with drugs, guns, and extreme high stakes. Walk us through that. - There are three important things to know

about the little episode in Vegas. The first of which is I had never been to Vegas before. As a tour guide, functionally useless. Right, right. Okay. The second is I didn't know why I was going to Vegas. You know, when they called me up, they said, Phil, need you to get on a plane, going to Vegas, pack a bag.

It'll be good. They did not mention the whole dictator's kid thing. Okay. I'm sitting in on the plane. They closed the aircraft door and an email bleeps through on my BlackBerry. That's what I was carrying at the time. Yeah. Nice instrument. Oh yeah. I miss it. A fucking hockey puck thing. Yeah. With a little dial. Yeah. The dial. Yeah. I'm scrolling and

And what I received, if you printed it off, would have been four or five pages long. It was an email from my colleague, and it was a list of demands, pretty much, from Muttasim Gaddafi. One of the sons. So he was the national security advisor of Libya. He was 35 years old.

He had recently done a photo op with Hillary Clinton, but had a news alert for Libya. So I read everything that came out in the U.S. media about the Libyans. So I knew about all their antics. So I knew about this guy. You know, he ran his own military unit. He had a doctorate from the University of Moscow, I believe. But he's the scariest person I've ever met. What does physically he look like? Physically, he was kind of wiry and kind of had this sunken face. But physically,

looked like a bad guy. Straight out of central casting, the clothes were on, the hair game was on point. I don't know if he killed anybody personally, but I know that in his 20s, he led a coup to try to overthrow his father. Oh, wow.

Oh, wow. That did not work out. And he remained employed. Part of the family. Look, man, Qaddafi took over the country in his 20s. He kind of thought, you know, game respects game. Wow. Sure. Proven that he would be a rightful heir, maybe. Right. Oh, God, it's like succession. Yes. Like, the crazier, the better. Well, there was this Game of Thrones going on about who would succeed Qaddafi. Yes.

Saif was in line. Hannibal thought he was in line. Mattossum thought he was. Hannibal's my favorite of the Qaddafi children. I could go on for hours about the eccentricities of these people. Real quick on Hannibal. Hannibal was arrested on every continent but Antarctica. Okay.

Okay. He once got arrested in Paris for driving his car the wrong way down the Saint-Chelise. Ah. He was a Maserati or something like that, but he, you know, of course, fled diplomatic immunity and he was just fine. Finally, his antics did come to a head when he was in Switzerland and he beat up a hotel employee and he was arrested. Said diplomatic immunity got out of the country.

But it pissed off Muammar Gaddafi so much that he divested $5 billion from Switzerland. Oh, he was so offended. Yeah, he suspended diplomatic relations. He caused a diplomatic spat with Switzerland. He arrested Swiss diplomats in Tripoli. My lord. Crazy. Who picks a fight with Switzerland? Their whole thing is that they don't fight with people. Yeah, so it was very odd. Fun fact, one of his daughters...

an attorney. Do you know who her most famous client was? Saddam Hussein. No.

At his trial where he was hung. I believe this is accurate. Double check me. His attorney was Gaddafi's daughter. Oh my God. Back to what I said. Sometimes they all know each other. I don't know why I'm inclined to say this, but I'm going to say it just because I try to not be terribly judgmental. I do think there is a worldview which is like, it's every man for themselves. This is how the world is. This is how nature is. It's every man for themselves. And we got to scratch and claw our way to the top. And if...

that's the worldview given to you by your parents. I don't know how you break out of that. I don't know how you just absorb morality from the ether. If this is a kill or be killed world you live in, and that's what we tell these kids, I would expect the worst. Yeah. So I knew a lot about the family and I knew enough to be afraid.

You know, I'd heard rumors that Gaddafi liked to shoot people as kind of a form of entertainment. It was a very frightening experience. So my assignment was to look after Matassa in Vegas for three days. Ostensibly to keep him out of trouble or to just help him navigate? Make sure nothing went into the press. Yeah. And also to pay for everything. Oh,

Because how embarrassing would it be to go to a strip club and throw down your credit card and it says Gaddafi? Keep in mind, this was the last week of Ramadan. Like the holiest time in the Muslim faith, we're partying in Vegas. Oh my God. Not great optics. The other sons were partying in different cities in America. The whole reason they were there is the brother leader was speaking at the United Nations. And he was going to address the UN General Assembly. And so we were all...

Anticipating that. Hanging out in Vegas for three days with this dictator's kid who had access to this $60 billion sovereign wealth fund. I mean, have you ever been to the Bellagio with somebody who confidently walks in the place and is like, yeah, I can buy this? Right. This is nice. And everyone in it. That was the mentality that he had.

But you have to somehow pay for everything so there's no paper trail of any of the shit he's doing? Right. We put everything on the room. I had nine rooms under my name. I threw down my corporate Amex card, which was not a black card. That's important to understand because in the end, my credit card gets declined.

Yeah. When I try to check out. But the whole time we're there, they want to do weird stuff. He wants to buy jean shorts. Okay. I'm not sure why that sticks out in my mind as being weird, but it was. I'm very human about that. It wasn't enough to breed any sympathy. He wanted to buy an Escalade. He wanted some...

Harleys shipped to Libya as one does. They wanted to go to a live fire shooting range. So there's a gun store in Vegas that has a shooting range and they wanted me to call and close that down so that we could go in there and shoot some guns. I didn't think that sounded safe. Well, cause they're hammered and on God knows what. Right. And are they going to turn the gun on me?

I don't know. Would they get away with it? Absolutely. So let's not do that. How many guys is he traveling with? I think there were nine in the entourage. Okay. This is a lot of testosterone. How old are you at this point? 30. Yeah, that's a lot. Yeah. I mean, when I told my friend that my employers were sending me to Vegas to babysit this dude, he was like, wait a minute.

Sending you to babysit somebody in Vegas is like fighting fire with gasoline. Like, what are they thinking? Yes. Like, of course this is going to go badly. I was basically their butler for like three days. And I had to look after them and arrange for private planes and go to their room and get money.

money. Did you find them coke? Yes. I haven't done coke since I left Pitt, but I know how to get it. Yeah. How did you get it for him in Vegas? It was pretty easy because I was dropping a lot of money with a concierge and I had a lot of weird requests. Like, how do I request four cabanas at the pool the next morning for three people? Well, why do you need four? I don't know. They want four. I got a call from one of them.

And I don't know which one because I didn't save their numbers on my phone. And he's like, we need Coke. By the way, if you're there to keep them out of trouble, you're not doing a good job. When they call and say we need Coke, you're supposed to say. But you also can't say no. They might kill you. This is an impossible mission. This is a very, very tricky situation. Right. We hired you to be a fixer, so fix things. It was great. I didn't have to interact with a drug dealer at all. All I had to do was call a number and say how much. And they were like, leave $1,000 in your hotel room. Great.

Leave the door propped open. We'll go in, drop off the drugs, take the money. What a service. It was. The worst thing about doing drugs is dealing with drug dealers. They just removed that. It was very turnkey. Did any trouble come out of that weekend? No, nothing public. I did my job. There was no public reference to...

Gaddafi's kid partying in Vegas. You still can't find it on the internet. Wow, wow, wow. There's one last one I wouldn't mind you telling me about, and then we're going to get back into your life story where this stuff obviously ends up adding up and the bill comes due, but instigating a trade war between Antigua and the U.S.,

Why, how, when? Who's the client here? The client was the government of Antigua. They had a thriving online gambling empire in Antigua. They were making about $3.4 billion a year. And the United States, even though we had signed international trade agreements and wrote those agreements...

saying that this was okay, we decided to shut it down on a day called Black Friday. We shut down online gambling in the hemisphere, pretty much. We seized a bunch of assets and just killed the online casino business in Antigua. Their GDP...

Last time I checked was about $1.2 billion. It's very small. It's two islands. It's like 65, 70,000 people. They got a great treatment center there, Crossroads. Yes. I sent my friend there. It's just wonderful. So they have this problem with the United States. My buddy was a political consultant who helped get the prime minister elected. So the prime minister called him one day and said, I'd like you to help resolve this trade dispute with the United States. And he said, well, I don't really do that. But my buddy, Phil, he does this kind of stuff.

And so they invited us down to meet with the prime minister and a few members of his cabinet. They were like, okay, come up with a way to solve this problem. They had been given the right by the WTO to issue sanctions on the United States. Well, how does the smallest economy in the world sanction the largest economy in the world? Right. Now, this is where the kind of economic jujitsu comes in. There's something called cross retaliation in international trade law.

And that is where you can punish a totally innocent industry to put pressure on the United States government, basically to turn them into your de facto lobbyist by threatening them.

So the industry that we picked, sorry to everybody here, was the entertainment industry. Interesting. It was movies, music, and software. And the reason we picked those is because it was super easy to create a file sharing website, particularly if you had experience creating online casinos. All we did was repurpose the tech that they already had on the island, well, threatened,

to. We never actually did this. You were going to open up a Napster for film and television IP. And we were going to sell it without paying royalties to anybody.

So we were going to get a lot of the right people calling the right people. You got it. So we were going to steal the money back from the United States that they didn't pay us. Right. Oh, wow. The reason the reporters loved covering it so much and why we got so much good ink was because it was a David versus Goliath story. The United States deserved it. We on the international stage don't play by the rules when it comes to international trade. We write the rules, then we decide we don't like them and we don't follow them.

And if you're not China and you take us to the WTO and we lose, our response is usually, well, what are you going to do about it? So this one you kind of felt good about. Oh, yeah. One of the politicians who called the prime minister of Antigua to make him stop doing this threat to launch a file sharing website. We threatened to do this. The United States government freaked out.

There was a lot of media attention about it. I got a call from the editorial board of the New York Times or one of the writers. And he was like, I want to talk to the prime minister. I tried to conference in the prime minister and he's at a steel drum competition judging a steel drum. And I'm like, Mr. Prime Minister, can you please leave the steel drum competition for just a minute and talk to the New York Times editorial board? Because it's very good for us. Yeah.

And so he talks to him for like five, ten minutes. The next day, they write a piece with the headline, A New Front in Global Trade Wars. And it says by the editorial board, what they said was, this is too dangerous a precedent to set in international trade law. Outright theft?

And so the United States government should settle with Antigua to make this go away. And as a result, Vice President at the time, Joe Biden, called the Prime Minister of Antigua and said, make this go away and we'll settle with you. Okay. And what did the settlement look like?

Were they allowed to resume gaming? This is the terrible thing. They never settled. Still an active dispute. And since that time, we've pretty much legalized all... We've legalized it. Yeah, so now they can't compete. It's just like the marijuana thing. So now it's legal pretty much everywhere I go. The other day, I got rejected for global entry. Ha ha.

And here's the thing. Not because of the ties to dictators. Not because of the ties to intelligence services. Because of a 24-year-old marijuana bust. Wow. I got denied global injury. Wow. Yeah.

Yeah, we got a half a million black folks rotting in prison for doing something now that's fine and no motivation to liberate those people. Yeah, go like, okay, we were heavy handed. Look, if you want to do another episode on the drug war, I'm down. I will come back and I will talk to you about the public relations strategies that got deployed during the drug war. I mean, it's crazy. Funded primarily by the government. Funded by the government. Yeah. Okay.

Okay, so you're doing this for 20 years. You're at home with your wife one morning. Your telephone rings and a kind woman on the other end informs you, hi, I'm with the FBI. Yeah. They actually tried to come to the apartment.

And here's the thing, we moved within the building. So they knocked on my neighbor's door at 6.30 in the morning and said, you know, we're with the FBI. Is Phil Elwood here? And they were like, we have no idea who that is. And so the agents went down to the lobby and called me. And they said, Mr. Elwood, where are you? And I said, you know, can you give me an hour? My wife needs to leave before we do whatever we're about to do here.

And so they gave me an hour. And really quick, at that moment, well, I know because I read it in your book, but this isn't a shocker. As you're cycling through what this could be about, there's a good eight, ten options on the table for you. Yes. The first question the agent asked me, and I'll never forget this, was, do you know why we're here? Oh, that's a good trap.

And I was just like, oh, shit. No. I had a sneaking suspicion of what it was about. That moment, it's horrifying because you replay every bad thing you've done in your life. And the other thing you think is how long have they had me? How long have they had a tap on my phone? How long have they been reading my email? Yeah. And I will say, because I've had moments like this in life and what is...

I think really interesting is while you're violating your own principles, you create a little compartment, you create a justification, you create a story, and it really works. And then you have the moment where the cops behind you, you're on the side of the road, and you go like, right, we're going to jail for DUI. I drink and drive every night. Of course this is... Like...

All those little compartments that were working, they dissolved immediately. It's like the most thorough and fearless moral inventory you can do in an AA sense happens in one second. It's terrifying and it's life-changing. If a case were to be brought against me, it'd be the people versus Phil Elwood and I would be in deep shit. The song, I fought the law and the law won. Very true.

Right. So weird they gave you an hour. Yeah, it was really nice of them. Yeah, but I mean, you could have been destroying all kinds of stuff, I guess. They could have entered your apartment and just smelled like burning plastic because you just fried a couple of laptops. Right. They probably had enough. That was the impression that I got when they got there. The FBI does not ask questions unless they already know the answer. They're there to see if you're going to lie. Yeah. Oh.

And so what do they want to talk to you about? They wanted to talk to me about my client. It was a rather exotic company. It was a private intelligence firm. How do you pronounce their name? PSY? PSY Group. And the PSY Group was founded, I think, a year or so before I started working for them. And they were founded by the former head...

of psychological operations for the Israeli Defense Forces. So if you want to get mind fucked, this is the guy to do it. I mean, this is pretty bad. They were a private sector intelligence. Absolutely. Until I read that, I guess I never even considered private sector intelligent agencies before.

Are they here in the U.S.? Oh, absolutely. There's one called Kroll that's very famous. Oh, yeah. Yes, son of Nick Kroll, great comedian. Private intelligence, private security firms very much exist. There are a lot of them in Israel because they have a coveted

talent base. Most Israelis do military service. It's two years, but if you choose the intelligence track, it's five years. Once you do five years in the IDF's intelligence division, you're very marketable. These guys would get out of service and go to work for outfits like the Psy Group or other intelligence companies. And what it is, is really just that. They privatized what they used to do for the government. So they would get intelligence targets.

So their client would come to them and say, we want to learn more about this company. Yeah, so there's corporate espionage and there's political espionage. Right. One of the ways they did it was to create a fake human resources company. This human resources company, they headhunter. They help people get jobs. So they would design jobs after an intelligence target. They tailor it.

to them and then they'd advertise the job to them get the person to apply for the job so the target thought they were soliciting them not the other way it's very important when you switch the power dynamic you can elicit information from them so

So people would apply for jobs that they were advertised. And then the avatar. Now, an avatar is a fake person. It's a personality online that has a Facebook account, Instagram account, a Gmail address. They all match. Everything goes together. That's an avatar. A deep avatar is more than that.

So the avatar would then engage the applicant in a discussion and get them to send them proprietary information. Stuff about their employer. Because what they're offering is a big salary, lots of travel. Now if this target was good, they would bring the avatar to life. They would lure the target into an optimal jurisdiction. So the Psy Group's kind of colloquial saying was, "Everything we do is legal in the jurisdiction in which we do it."

Great. So if it's not legal in America, lure somebody to Macau. Lure somebody to Cyprus. Shit's legal there that's not legal here. The benign example would be like it is illegal in California to tape conversations without the person's consent, but in many states it's not. So get that conversation happening over in Arizona. Oh, D.C. is a one-party consent state, baby.

So surreptitious recording, things like that, were how they would elicit information from targets. And that seems pretty bad. But they would do things to get their clients a leg up in litigation against opponents. They'd do things to try and make their product better. It was just statecraft being applied at the corporate level. They're maybe taking on clients that are against the political goals of Israel, too. I mean, this sounds weirdly very similar to what you're doing. They incorporated in Cyprus...

Because they had Gulf states as clients and Gulf states don't really like transferring money to Israel. They had accounts all over. And so they somehow pop up in the Mueller investigation and that's why the FBI is there. They're a client of yours and they are somehow entangled. They...

Had a meeting with the Trump organization about something called Project Rome, which I believe was a disinformation campaign against Hillary Clinton. And this all happened before I went to work for them. I didn't know this meeting took place. I found out from the FBI. And what work had you done for them that was of interest? Or did they more just want to mine you for whatever you could tell them about, Cy?

I don't think I was an intelligent asset of theirs. I was mostly there to do introductions. Business development was mostly what I did. So they would want to meet with corporations, lobbying firms, PR firms, anybody who could potentially hire them. And I set up probably 150 meetings for them. After the 2016 election...

They really wanted to meet with Cambridge Analytica. And so I brokered a meeting between the two of them and had lunch with Nix, is the CEO's name. Very boozy lunch with the spy and this guy who ran Cambridge Analytica and me. It was real strange. And Cambridge Analytica, if memory serves me, they were really adept at weaponizing Facebook. That was their big breakthrough. Yeah, they got a lot of great ink after the 2016 election. Right.

So how did the Mueller stuff and the FBI shake out? The opening line of the book is, when the FBI knocks, you are going to lose. And that's exactly what happened.

My client went away. I didn't have any clients. I pretty much lost my business. I didn't have anywhere to turn. It was scary. Mentally, you're kind of collapsing. Yeah. So we touched on this earlier that I was depressed when I was about 20. But what was really happening is that's when the onset of mental illness usually happens for people. And I wasn't really diagnosed mentally.

Until I was 35. So between the ages of 20 and 35, I was an undiagnosed person with bipolar 2 disorder. Break up bipolar and bipolar 2 for me. I wish I could do it better because I should know more. I have Googled bipolar 2 quite a bit. Uh-huh. Not as much as my wife, Lindsay.

She's read the end of the internet on this. It's a scary condition. It doesn't have the manic highs. Yeah, one of them has mania and the other one doesn't. Doesn't. I get the depression. No ramp ups, just depression. Yeah, not really. I have moments of rapid thoughts and really hyper about things, but I don't have manic highs.

Right, you don't ever think you're Jesus or anything. No, it's more characterized by swings and going real low. And you're also using alcohol a lot, which is only exacerbating this condition. You're smoking weed a lot. Treating it with depressants, which is a really dumb idea. It's no wonder you enjoyed Coke so much. If only it wasn't so bad for you. I know, I know. I wish they'd figure out how to do it where it's like you took it and it worked for two hours and then it was over.

That would be the magic bullet. Well, lithium is used for bipolar treatment. Bipolar 1, for the most part. Oh, Bipolar 1, okay. So Bipolar 2, and I don't even know why they sequelized. They should have just called it something else. But the other problem with Bipolar 2 is that suicidal ideation is a frequent component of it. And you had an attempt post the FBI showing up? Yes. I thought everything was pretty much...

I didn't see a way out. My job is about creating options. That's all it is, really, is creating options for my clients that lead to better outcomes. I thought I was out of options. I.e. is hopelessness. Yeah, and that's why they call it a death of despair. It was a very dark place, and luckily, my wife got there in time.

It was terrible. I really inconvenienced a lot of people. We only have one car. I don't like driving. So my wife actually drives most of the time. But I was out at our weekend place by myself and a good friend of my wife's actually drove her out there in the middle of the night when I was in trouble.

I owe a lot to that friend and a lot to my wife and a lot to the friend who I talked to on the phone. Yeah. What year was that? 2019. Oh, perfect timing. You get to then go into isolation, get back on that horse and fucking gallop into nowhere. I actually found a therapy that worked.

to treat this before the pandemic. I wouldn't have made it through that without the treatment that I'm on now. Yes, us non-bipolar two people struggled immensely. Oh God, the whole world was depressed. I was like, so everybody knows how I feel now. Yeah, yeah, welcome to the party. Hopeless, scared, pessimistic. How long do you kick around the idea of maybe writing this book? And I want to delineate it. It's worth doing. There's versions of this book.

And I definitely think this one falls into the expose category as opposed to the, you know, I was a piece of shit. Now I'm going to profit on it. And now I'm proud of it. Now it's braggadocious. It's not that it's very much an expose. When do you conceive of it? And then how are you evaluating, as Monica said, right out of the gates? A, there's.

some threat from previous clients. There's also the very real possibility that you have no more future clients because you're the type of person that might write a book. How do you go through that process before you commit to it? And I want to add, you're a great writer. It's shocking to me that you haven't been writing the whole time because you're really an engaging writer. Well, thank you. It comes from being a storyteller. So you asked the question, how did this come about? Well, actually, it wasn't my idea. I was talked into this.

Oh. Two reporters approached me at a breakfast one morning and said, Phil, we're writing a book about scumbags in D.C. Oh.

And they said, we'd like you to be a character. And I was like, guys, first of all, you really have to work on your pitch. Because there's absolutely no way anybody's going to go for this. And I politely declined. They said, Phil, your story is too interesting. You really ought to get out in front of it. Let us introduce you to a literary agent. That started the process. I actually took a long time with the agent to persuade me to do this. My wife's

Job kind of precluded somebody from doing a tell-all, but she moved to a different place and decided that I could do this. I wrote a proposal. I didn't think a publisher was going to buy it, but the publisher gave me eight months to write it. Ouch. That's short. I turned it in a week early. Oh, wow. Then it went through the editing process. I didn't like that process, but the writing process was fun. It was kind of painful. I mean, going through all of the mistakes you've made in your life and having to be honest, the thing about it is that given the reputation that

that my profession has. I had to be more honest than most other folks. I mean, most DC memoirs

are about three to four hundred pages of somebody telling you why they're the smartest person in the room. This is the opposite of that. This is, let me tell you how I messed up. That's why I hope people will relate to it. I know it's unrelatable, but you know. No, but everyone relates to mistakes. Yeah. Okay, I have a few questions that I die into now. I feel like you'd be the person, if ever, I got to get answers to these. Are there better or worse publications?

You got stuff in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker. Are there better or worse stories?

I mean, it goes without saying the stories ultimately are factual. They're not printing unverifiable stuff, but there's a heavy degree of manipulation happening. And are some better or worse? Yes. I don't like to look at it as like the New York Times is better than the Washington Post. The way I look at it is which paper has the better reporter for what I'm doing? Sports reporter for the Wall Street Journal. The two that I work with are absolutely amazing.

If I have a sports story, I'm taking it to the journal. I know that sounds weird, but actually their sports coverage, really amazing. They have a great investigative sports team. If your story is one about DC intrigue, go to Politico.

Because they're going to run that. You know, if it's a policy type thing, go to the Washington Post. Yeah, you're more just looking at what is the most effective... Messenger. I'm trying to get to the reporter. I also will say that I am a little bit of a snob. I prefer to work with the top papers in the country because they write history. Do you...

Do you think, or in all your travels in these thank-you-for-smoking steakhouse dinners with other folks in your profession, have you heard of stories of journalists taking straight-up bribes? Not an American journalist. One of the operatives for the Psy group was a former journalist who stopped being a journalist after it came out he was taking bribes. Well, that's good to know. That is mildly comforting. I would never pay a journalist or offer money for a story. I would also never lie.

to a journalist. It's a bad business model because they're gonna catch you. These people investigate people like me for a living. Yeah, not worth burning that bridge. That burns all the bridges. No, and they all know each other. You know, if you lie to the New York Times, their colleague at the Washington Post is gonna hear about it. No one's ever gonna take your call again. No. The only reason I'm employable at all is that reporters know that I'm good for repeat business because I'm usually in trouble.

I'm usually operating on something that's interesting. The real trick to being good at this is being willing to put kind of your body in between a piece of information and the media. And that is a scary place to be. How did Twitter disrupt this business? Because obviously nobody,

shifted dramatically and things that would catch fire on Twitter would all of a sudden be put at the top of all these pages. I mean, to me, this is one of my great complaints about modern journalism is what seems like a groundswell of reaction is really very few people. It's definitely the tail wagging the dog.

It's an astroturf. How has Twitter disrupted that? And how does someone in your field try to leverage Twitter to work for you? Well, as someone who values communication and believes that words matter more than anything else, I think Twitter is an abomination. Limiting people to a certain number of characters to express a point. It's digital graffiti.

I am often called a Luddite. I'm not big into social media. I know that there is a huge part of my business that deals with social media outreach and influencers. That is not what I do. But many of the companies you have worked for must have pivoted and put big resources into creating that tiny appearance of a groundswell to back channel the media ultimately. Exactly. And so it's an echo chamber that doesn't go anywhere.

It just doesn't come in handy for what I do. But is it safe to say people have cracked that code and they know how to get something trending? You can go to somebody to get that done? I would be very skeptical of anybody who said that they can engineer a viral moment. I mean, that's like saying you can design an earthquake. I mean, it's not possible. Predict lightning. You can't do that. But sometimes...

It happens. But I would imagine it's a numbers game. It's a percentage. And if you do throw enough, I mean, look, Russia was very effective at weaponizing Twitter. What I loved is there was a front line about this, too. Even Occupy Wall Street, both parties had been duped. They were good at just creating disharmony.

And they seem to master that. I have to imagine there's some American companies that have also figured that out to some degree. Yeah, you mentioned Twitter, or X, or whatever it's called now. And my concern is that most people don't know one of the largest investors in Twitter is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. So we have Elon Musk and the Saudis.

controlling the thing that is supposed to give us free speech? Sure. Has some red flags. Yeah, a couple. So I'm saying maybe having these two controlling the mouthpiece for free speech is a little strange. Right. As I learned about the mechanics of all this stuff, here's where my imagination ran wild. For people who didn't follow the 2008 financial meltdown closely, what really happened was Bear Stearns

There was basically a rumor that they were insolvent, which created a mass panic of people and a run on that bank. And it collapsed. And then as I learned more about it, I found out there were these things, credit default swaps. So you could buy insurance on a company failing.

And you didn't have to own any shares of that company, but you could insure fake shares. And the payouts were astronomical. They were 20 to 1 or whatever they were. So the fact that there were people that were heavily, heavily incentivized for a bank to collapse and that the collapse did end up being a rumor does make me think that potentially someone could employ someone like you to start that. Yeah.

And made me suspicious that perhaps that kind of stuff has been at play in the financial market as well. They don't hide it. Short sellers deploy PR firms to cover their short. That is true. Again, talk about something that should be absolutely illegal. I know. Right. Bill Ackman is famous for the Herbalife short. Tell me that. I don't know that. Bill Ackman's an investor. Can't remember the name of his firm, but he shorted Herbalife and hired several PR firms to pump negative news about... It's not illegal. It's not illegal.

I mean, it's outsider trading more than it's anything else. Right, but if insider trading is illegal, why isn't this? It's all the same. I know what their argument will be, right, is that ultimately the facts they're bringing to light are probably true. Yes. Now, whether something deserves a well-financed campaign to bring all the cracks in any given business to light...

With the outcome of destroying it so that your short works out that seems like we might be able to legislate that part out Yeah, personal gain. They're probably working within the boundaries obviously, right? I mean if you want to talk about trading on inside information and then you say shouldn't they make a law about it? Have you ever heard of the stock act?

This stands for Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge. This is the act that Congress passed to stop themselves from trading on inside information, which is totally legal. Yeah. Absolutely. And guess what? The Stock Act precludes nothing. It doesn't stop anything. Really? After they pass the Stock Act, if you look at the records,

Congress got a briefing on COVID. All the members of Congress left that briefing. They found out before the rest of America. They called their brokers. They adjusted their stock portfolios. And then they told the rest of America. Yes.

Yeah, I mean, guys, that just can't be how it is. So I understand you're angry at short sellers, but I'm a little more angry at Congress. Yeah, so why is Martha Stewart going to jail when this is happening? Yeah, she's wonderful. Let's keep her out. Move, Martha. I don't know. I mean, going to jail was really good for her street cred, though.

I mean, talk about PR. It made her and Snoop really good friends. And that's a win. I might go to jail for a little minute at a time to become friends with him. Okay, maybe knock on wood. Okay, we're going to knock on wood. Kids, stay out of jail. I only spent one night there, but it was not pleasant. Yeah, let's not do that. If we can help it. Yeah, there's some backroom stuff going on, Monica. I know. What's funny is part of me goes like, can you really defeat it? And is your only choice to try to figure out how to get on the inside? No.

No, it doesn't have to be either one necessarily. Stay awake. Oh, boy. Do you think this is... I'll give an example. I watch a great documentary on chess masters, and so many of them follow this pattern of becoming...

paranoids by the time they retire because the area of their brain they've spent the most time in is forecasting doom, right? This is what they do masterfully is they see 25 moves ahead, everything that can go wrong. And it ultimately does affect their worldview. Do you think your job is

affected your worldview and can you feel that and do you have any desire to take on different information because you could have a very cynical view of the world and certainly that's warranted to some degree and also not i am an optimist actually what i'm trying to do now with my career is to deploy all of the things i've learned working for these questionable people

On behalf of better causes, I'm trying to ask the question, should I do things, not just can I do things? But one of my favorite authors is Michael Crichton. His books are always like, science is good, and then man gets involved and science goes real wrong.

And the message of most Michael Crichton books is you got to ask the question, should we do this? Should we bring back the dinosaurs? Probably not. Should we create AI? Oh, let's see. Probably not. Have you missed the six Terminator movies they made? Or the Matrix? Yeah. Should we make ourselves second smartest thing on this planet? Yeah, let's do it. Yeah.

There's something intrinsically wrong with that idea. Right, because the first thing AI is going to do is be like, humans? Probably bad for the Earth. Yeah. Well, because it's proven. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. There is a parasite here. Yeah. It's humans. We didn't ever actually get an answer. Did the MPAA grant the dock a PG-13? Yeah, if you look up Gunner Palace, it's still rated PG-13. Oh, that's great. Ah, so that was a good guy's victory. It's not all bad stories. Some of it

very good. My profession has an amazing power to help shape the way people view the world. And when it's applied for good things, it can really do some great stuff. Would you say that the inherent conflict is that the bad guys pay more than the good guys? That's not always true. There are some

Good folks that have paid large fees for us to do what we were doing. Let's just say like, but generally people pay more. Yeah, the U.S. isn't going to spend $220 billion to bring the World Cup here because we don't need to. So we don't. But the place where it's way too hot to play soccer in July that wants it, they're going to have to pay. Are they though? Sports washing works. Qatar won the 2020 games. No matter what happened on the pitch, they won. Do you know who's hosting it after the U.S.? No. Saudi Arabia.

Okay, another great place to play. They didn't even bid on it. There was a report released by, I think it was Amnesty International just last week that said they're using indentured servitude to build the stadiums, just like they did in Qatar. Okay, really quick. I was landing the plane, but I don't...

I don't know if I believe sports washing is effective. You do. I do. You think that Saudi's ownership of Live Golf has made people go, Saudi Arabia is a great place to raise a daughter. No, but I believe that McKinsey, the consulting firm that came up with Live Golf, it was called Project Wedge, was this memo that McKinsey and company, you know, the people that came up with outsourcing? Yeah, so...

In Saudi Arabia, they're called the Ministry of McKinsey because they run so much of the government. So they came up with this memo called Project Wedge. And they said, hey, Saudi Arabia, if you want a short circuit buying influence in the United States, don't spend money on lobbyists. Don't spend money on public relations firms, buy.

by the game of golf because that's where decisions are made. So all they had to do was show the Saudis images of Michael Jordan playing golf with Clinton and Bush and every president on the golf course in America where decisions are made on the golf course. It was easy to say that to them. My argument isn't that it happened or that it was pitched to them. It's that I personally don't think, and maybe I'm naive, that anyone's watching Phil Mickelson and goes,

Well, this guy loves Saudi Arabia. I don't think that. I think they go, this guy loves hundreds of millions of dollars. I don't know that it actually...

changes anyone's opinion about Saudi Arabia. Like it's been an effective in that they got their own golf league and now it's even merging with PGA. But is there polling data that says like, how did people feel about Saudi Arabia before live and how do they feel after? Oh, it was a failed experiment. Okay, great. I'm just saying what they were trying to do was buy influence quickly in the United States. Yes. And part of me is this is what I think. Great. Let them give us all their money. It's not working.

I don't think it's moved the needle on how people feel about Saudi Arabia. So I wasn't judgmental of the golfers or anyone else. I was like, yeah, take all that money. No one's going to feel differently about Saudi Arabia. And who feels bad about taking the money? Right. But it works with some people. So members of Congress are going to say, well, Saudi Arabia is okay. They've got a golf league. Give them

a little cover. It educates the American public about Saudi Arabia and something that they don't associate with them. It's a kind of deflection, but Saudi Arabia gets pretty much whatever they want from the United States. When was the last time we turned down an arms sale? Well, I was going to say that's all driven by the arms money. Oh, yeah. But I mean, Trump's first international trip abroad was to Saudi Arabia. Biden fist-bumped MBS.

Because they couldn't figure out if he should fist bump him or shake his hand or hug him or what they should do. This isn't England we're dealing with. I don't know who's laughing last. I think if you milk this thing for all this money and everyone feels the same way, I think weirdly, okay. I think that's a win for the people who took all the money.

When I see someone walking down the street that's got like a kick-ass shirt that just says Saudi Arabia on it or something, I might go like, oh, well, they've really figured it out. But I don't think I've noticed that needle move. Well, if you watch ads on CNN, they have tourism in Saudi Arabia ads. They're doing what they can. Okay, sorry. I know I got a little abstract. Okay.

Phil Elwood, I hope everyone checks out this most fascinating book, All the Worst Humans, How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians. Phil, this was among the most interesting topics we've ever got to cover. Yeah, thanks for coming in. Absolutely. All right, be well. Stay tuned to hear Miss Monica correct all the facts that were wrong. That's okay, though. We all make mistakes.

How was Palm Springs? Oh my God. We had such a good time. It was so fun. It was so hot. Record-breaking temp. Did you read that? No. I'm out of the loop. Tell me. It was 124 degrees. Oh my God. When is it like deathly?

I mean, I think that was pretty close. 124? It was like, it was record-breaking. Oh my gosh. That scares me. You would think it would scare us, but didn't. We just kept it moving. It electrified you?

We just lived in the pool, which was so, so, so nice. Delicious meals. Charlie made an incredible steak dinner, which you would have loved. He really knows what he's doing on that grill. Yeah, the steak was delicious. He made... Did he make coleslaw? He did not make coleslaw, so you don't have to be that upset. Thank God, yeah. He probably didn't make it because you weren't there. Okay, good. But he made a baked potato bar, which you know I love. Okay.

A bar. You know, he made baked potatoes and he had all the things you can make your baked potato. The fixings. I like it fully loaded. Was there bacon? Yeah.

Bacon, sour cream, cheese, butter, chives. Yeah, chives. Chives. Wedge salads. Oh, mama. And then we went into town the next day, the adults did. Right, because in the past, we're always so far out, you can't go anywhere. Exactly, but we were really, really close to town. Yeah, we were in Palm Springs proper. Yeah.

And so we went into town. We had another steak dinner. Oh, my gosh. That was delicious. And more wedges there. We were really indulged. There were wedges. Okay. Wedges are complicated food for me. How so? It might be my favorite. Well, it's definitely my favorite salad. I know. And then close to just my favorite item, period.

I know. I want to love it. And I love it aesthetically. Oh, yeah. It's a good presentation. Beautiful presentation. But, you know, I don't like blue cheese.

Yeah, I love it. Love it. I know. And it's critical. Do you like Bob's Big Boys blue cheese? Of all the blue cheese dressings, that is the one I can eat and like. Yeah. Because it tastes more like ranch to me. Yeah, it's not aggressively stanky. No, exactly. Earmark that. Eric thought that I had ordered a thousand-day aged steak. What?

Which would just be a big wad of rancid, decayed meat. Oh, my God. But it was thousand-day-aged cheese on an endive salad. But when I ordered it, he's like, wow, you're going to get the thousand-day-aged steak? Are you nervous about that? And I'm like, Eric, I don't think they can age a steak a thousand days. That's three years. Yeah, that's tricky. I would not co-sign that purchase at all.

But yeah, no, we had a blast. It was really, really fun. I had said, but you didn't hear me. I said, any injuries? A lot of pool time, running, jumping. No major injuries. No major injuries. Yeah, well, Wilder fell. You know, the child fell off the horse. The other child hurt his finger, but everyone was fine. And this is a development. You're starting to knock past tense now. You knocked on wood past tense. Yeah, because I don't want an injury happening

That wasn't a big deal to actually hemorrhage or something. Okay. Grow into something larger. Yeah. You get it. Yeah. You know, what was really sweet about this trip? That's different than most. We all sort of commented on this.

The kids are getting older and they hung out with us like a lot of the time, most of the time. Really? Yeah. And we're all in the pool. We were playing games and the kids all played. Yeah. That's how I feel about- It was sweet. Yeah. I've been saying that a lot on here, but yeah, Lincoln's becoming my bro. Like on this trip, whenever I hold her hand, I now call her my show pony. So-

If we're walking and there's like an obstacle, I go, and I hold her hand and she's going to jump up on it like a pony. I go, good, good, good, good. So everywhere we're going, she's leaping up onto things and then she does a trot. She does it and I go, oh, it's so fun. It's like being with Aaron. It is fun.

That's so stupid. Oh, that's cute. Yeah. Yeah, it was different in that way and like really sweet. I like it. Well, I will say this. This didn't happen in Iceland, but it happened twice already here in Norway, which is I'm walking down the street tonight and it's crowded pedestrian and we're about to cross the street en route to a restaurant and I'm walking with Lincoln and then I'm looking over here and then I look to the right and

And there's Lincoln, and I'm about to touch her head, and I'm like, wait, she's not wearing a blue coat. Oh, my God, no. Oh, Lincolns are a dime a dozen here. Our server at the restaurant was probably 21, but she was Lincoln. And then the little girl looked at Lincoln, and they looked at each other, and they knew, too, like, whoa, this is weird. Oh, my God. So Lincolns abound. And I am so average here, as you know.

Yeah. How does it feel? Do you like it or do you not like it? No, it's so boring to be the exact same height as everyone else. Same color, same height. Same eye color. Yeah. Molly's like, she's like an exotic leopard here. Yeah. Yeah. And which we should tell people, people probably if they follow us have seen pictures of her, but she's half Ecuadorian. And so she has a beautiful face.

Olive. Olive, yes. Olive skin tone. But I do... I'm probably going to get in trouble for this, but I do make fun of her when I say I'm a minority and she says me too. I say no. Oh, you don't? You're not allowed? I don't allow it. Really? Ecuadorian? I mean, she is. She is. It's a joke because she is. But...

She's half and she just looks too beautiful to be a minority. Sure. I understand. I can't count it. That's loaded, yeah. The implication being that minorities aren't beautiful, which they are. She could just be a tan white person. Sure, sure, sure. But she hides from the sun. In fact, that was another thing that I said to Eric. We were sitting outside. We were about to go see this geyser.

I made so many bad jokes about the geyser. Oh, boy. Yep. Yeah. That Paul Geyser was going to be there signing autographs. That it was the first insurance company. Geyser Permanente. No one liked any of it. It was like my pangolin joke. I kept repeating it. Oh, I was thinking you were making sexual jokes. So I actually like these. Yeah. Geyser Permanente. Yeah, that's funny. Paul Geyser, star of Mad About You. Yeah.

Yeah. I like that. Fall geyser. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But anyways, we were waiting to cross the street there. We're sitting outside and Eric and I are like kind of getting some sun. She's hiding from it. And I said, Eric, can you imagine having such olive skin that you could afford to just hide from the sun and keep your skin fresh? I've got to just take the wear and tear to get a little melanin going. Oh, yeah. Okay. So this circles back to one of our previous arguments about sunscreen. Mm.

Yeah. Where you were against it, but I have a confession. Okay. Unless I already said it on here. Maybe I did. You didn't wear any sunscreen on this trip? I have not worn sunscreen in months. In months. Yeah. Because to be fair to me,

I know it's bad. Yeah. I want to wear it. Yeah. Yeah. But I have to get my skin figured out before I can add sunscreen back into the mix. I got you. I've tried multiple. Well, I've tried so many. They all break me out. And my skin is so sensitive right now. So I press pause on it. But it's important for me to come clean. Did you get you didn't burn at all? Of course. No. But look, I look. Don't I look much darker than the last time you saw me?

I want to say yes, but I can't tell in this FaceTime. Oh. Like, you know how FaceTime can wash you out. Well, I'm significantly darker. Oh, okay. I was wearing a face. I was wearing a little sunscreen on my face because I don't know about the Arctic sun. Oh, I already told you this, but so first night there in Iceland, we're like, I wonder what time it's going to get dark because it's late and it's very bright out. Look it up. It's going to get dark at 1148. Okay.

Oh, my God. But then the sun's going to come out at 3.30. So really, it's going to go down for three and a half hours. But surprise, I wake up to pee in the middle of the night during the, you know, quote, nighttime. It's not dark at all. It's just twilight. So it doesn't. It's crazy. You would never have to have headlights on there. That's crazy. But and so is it affecting your sleep or did it affect your sleep? Well, there were good blunders.

blinds at the hotel but then also we we were warned and we were prepared and we all had eye masks so eye masks on and the blinds drawn so it was fine you know first night was a mess because of the huge time change but then second night was fine but then this morning we had to wake up at five

to fly to Norway. And then, so now everything's scatty wampus again. But look, it's, let me see, it's 10, 17 p.m. here. And let me show you out the window here. Yeah, show me. Why?

Wow. Yeah, it's just daytime. It looks like 4:00 PM. Oh my God. Yeah, and it's even, you know, it's not as bad here as it was in Iceland. We're not as far north. So you have an admission that is mildly embarrassing and I applaud it. And then I have one too, which is, you've seen the pictures from Iceland, right? You've seen people in the geothermal pools where like you're in the blue water.

Okay, so that was my primary desire to go there, was those geothermal heated, you know, huge lagoons. Like hot springs. Yeah, hot springs. I thought those were natural. Did you? Oh, yeah.

Well, I think, I thought they were, like the ones in New Zealand are, I think. Well, New Zealand has some, yeah. But this is very much like, it is geothermal. The whole enormous pool is being heated by that. And there's a ton of like silica in the water. And it's all very minerally and natural.

But it is a swimming pool that's been poured. That's just like, it's like a lake. And I thought that, I stupidly and naively thought that nature just offered an enormous...

swimming pool. Yeah, I thought, I think I thought that too. Okay. I was relieved that Molly did think that as well. So we were, and then we were wondering how many people travel there under the belief that those just exist in nature as seen on Instagram. Yeah.

Do you think you might want to sue the country? I don't because you know what? It was really fun. And you do a mud mask. There's like three stages. Yep. You do a black mask. And we were taking photos and we thought this might be interpreted wrong if it got out. Actually, yeah. Don't post those. Yeah. But then all white face was the next stage. You can post that. Okay. That just looks like bukkake or yeah. Ew. Ew.

Oh, my God. Gross. Yeah, they're pretty gross. It also just looks like ding, ding, ding sunscreen probably. But like caked on like a birthday cake. Yeah. So we look kind of crazy in all those photos. And then you could go with the – for the last one, you could go with a milder one or like a green tea one. I wanted the green tea one, but they did say it was more abrasive and if you had sensitive skin. So I played it safe.

I didn't get, I didn't get that. I guess that would have been Martian face. I didn't get that. Sure. Yeah. Green. I think you, you can post that cause the aliens aren't very sensitive. No, they've seen it and done it all. They've crossed the galaxy divide. Yeah. Um, so that's so cool. Did your skin feel so nice after it felt really nice? Yeah, it did. And then this, so that was, you're encouraged to go there directly from the airport cause you're close to it. And then the,

you know, Reykjavik's another 45 minute drive or whatever. So day one was get off the plane, go straight there. And we, you know, paddled around and did our masks. And I was a noodle afterwards. I was pretty warm. I mean, I was exhausted to be honest, after three hours in the geothermal pools. And then the next day we hit it very hard. We did the golden loop and we,

Now you brought up New Zealand, ding, ding, ding. My favorite part of New Zealand is that you see every single kind of environment within like 300 miles. There's like deserts, there's snowy mountains, there's beaches. It's just like, it's changing so fast.

Similarly, on the Golden Loop, it's like, I don't know, maybe a five or six hour drive. But you get to a park and that's where the North Atlantic tectonic plate meets the European plate. So there's this huge, cool rift. And then an hour later, you had this huge geyser, the original Paul Geyser, and a little mini one called Lil Geyser. Lily? Yeah.

Yeah, it was like little, but whatever, the Icelandic version of it. It was a little different. And that was radical. And then another hour, and we're at this gigantic waterfall, like Niagara Falls, huge waterfall. Yeah, all in a few hours. Now, two things. One, Eric planned that, right? Is that the train thing? That's coming up. That's not tomorrow, but the next day.

Okay. That's in Norway. Yeah. So Eric, as you've said before, has these guides, he plans, he has like a whole plan. Specifically his, it's Rick Steves. He writes these travel guides and he talks about his friend Rick and he and Rick were speaking and we should do the golden route and don't take this other route that's quicker because Rick Steves told him. His friend Rick told him that. Yeah. And

Eric and I are sort of, I think, similar a little bit in this way where it's like this is what you're supposed to do when you go to this place. So we got to do it. Yeah. And he told me about this train thing you're going to do. And I was like, oh, my God, does Dax know about this? He is going to he is not going to like that.

Because why? Because I'm captive? Yeah. And it's a long time. Yeah. Yeah. You had a good inclination. Like I've certainly been hiding that. But yeah, the notion that I don't have a steering wheel or there's no pulling out. It's like you get on a boat and then 12 hours later, you're getting off and you've taken a train and a bus and a boat.

Yeah, and it sounds just like a very big day. And not full of a lot of control for me. Yeah, and a lot of seemingly logistics in some ways. Like you got to get on a thing and off a thing and on a thing and off a thing. Schedule, yeah. Schedule, exactly. With children, and I could just see you feeling a bit overwhelmed in that situation. Sure.

I think he said, like, I hope Dax likes it or something. Like, he said something like that. And I said, you know what? I'm actually proud of him that he is giving up control to you to plan that. And so I'm proud of you. Yeah, I've completely surrendered to Eric and Rick Steves for better or worse. Yeah. I bet it's going to be great. It'll be great. It'll be great. Cool.

Yeah. We did have... We have... I'm not going to say any names, but we are at a Soviet-era hotel right now. Okay. And that Eric picked? Yeah. But...

You should have seen Molly and I trying to, A, find the place. We had to go get rental cars. So it was decided when we landed, Eric's like, you guys go get the rental cars. We'll go to the hotel and start checking in. We go to the rental cars place. And not to put Eric on blast, but he has been red taped or, you know, he is not allowed to rent from Hertz anymore. He, a decade ago. Oh.

sustained a lot of damage on a rental car. And then even worse was late for his flight. And you know, the worst part, he just pulled up to the airport in like somewhere in Spain and just got out and went and got on his flight. He didn't, he left it right in front of the terminal. So,

He is not allowed to rent from Hertz. Sure. And so Molly rented from Hertz. And then the other reservations in my name. So Molly and I, we take a cab to Hertz. She's checking in. All of a sudden, some really weird questions start popping up. Like, can we have your social security number? And she looks at me and I'm like, yeah, I've never had to give my social security number for a rental car. And they're like, well, it's asking for us to run a credit check on you.

And so this goes on for a really long time. And then ultimately they say that even though she reserved it and it's confirmed in the whole thing and she already checked in,

They say that her license has been flagged and they can't rent to her. What? Yeah. And then we sit there for a half hour where like many people come over to the computer. Then they call a supervisor. Of course, we don't speak Norwegian, so we don't know what they're saying. But ultimately what had to happen is I rented two cars and put her as a second driver on one of them. Oh my God. All this to say, Molly and I are like, what's going on? Why is your license working and mine's not? She has zero points the whole nine yards.

And I was like, do you think they have figured out you're married to Eric? And they're like, no, this person, this person, no one in this family can have a car. This is like when you try to get into India. Yeah. And of course, as we said already, she is exotic. They looked at me and they were like, yeah, yeah, you're from here. So go ahead. You're an average person.

This sounds like definitely a racist. This sounds definitely. This is racist. No, they were ultimately very helpful. And I feel like they might have bent the rules a little bit to do what they did. I rented two cars, but I could only drive one of them away. And just to know, like the guy was calling me Max the whole time. So it's not like I had any kind of help. Privilege. No privilege. Other than white privilege. Other than average privilege. Yeah. Yeah. So anywho. And then, yeah, we got to the...

And the guy that was giving keys was also cooking eggs. For real. Did it smell? You know, it's...

I'm just going to leave it at, I'm going to leave it where I left it. You can leave it there. Yeah. There's a lot of fabric. There's a lot of older fabric here in the room and, but it'll be fine. So. It's a vibe. I bring all that up to say like, I've been being a good boy and whatever we do, we do. And I don't complain, but I did have to bring up at dinner. Maybe we don't stay as long here as we were planning.

Oh, okay. No, we're flexible. Let's go to the next spot or the clerk where the concierge is not cooking eggs, you know? Okay. Yeah. That's fair. You can make suggestions on your trip. That's fine. Right, right. Okay, is it time for me to talk about my next confession? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's go.

which you already know about. Although, you know, for the record, you wouldn't need to. I know. Thank you for saying that. Yeah. It's not like in all truth, if you hadn't said anything to me, I wouldn't have been like, what looks different about you? Yeah. Thank you. I mean, that's the goal. So that's very high praise. Okay, good. Because that's the goal. Because that's what you want. You want to just like

Slide under. Look good. Yeah. You don't want it to be obvious, but I did tell the armchairs that if I did something, I would say. Right. Yes. I feel fairly sensitive right now to the armchairs. Oh, yes, yes. To certain ones. Very specific ones. Yes. Small minority. So I'm a little nervous to say it, but I will because also who cares? Yes. So I got chin filler today. Uh-huh. Yeah.

To make their chin pop. Yeah. And it is tiny. It's very little. But he did some other stuff too. He like put some Botox in in areas to just help. I just told him I don't like my chin or my neck. Uh-huh. And he talked to me through some options. He...

confirmed that he did not think Kybella was right for me because I don't have much fat. Right. Okay, good. So you were happy that you didn't go through with that. Yes. And he was so wonderful.

Now, this is why podcasts can sort of change lives, because I found this guy through a podcast. Oh, you did? Mm-hmm. Whose? Eyewitness Beauty. It's a beauty podcast that I love, and the hosts are Nick,

and Annie, and Nick's husband is the guy. - Person. - Well, he's a nurse practitioner. He has a lot of medical history. He went to Duke, he went to Columbia. Like he's done a lot of things that I find reassuring. - Impressive. - I felt safe with him. Like he said, "You definitely don't need to do this or this." And he said, "If anyone ever, ever tells you to do anything to your lips,

run out of there. He was like, you have perfect lips. Good. Which was very sweet. Yes, of course. So his eyes worked.

Well, look, a lot of places. Yeah, I know they're crazy. You're right. They go. They, of course, would be like, oh, and you could do a little here, and you would just do a little here, and a little. And he wasn't like that. Yeah. So he was lovely. If you're in LA, I mean, I'm afraid to do this because I don't want to not be able to get it back in there. But he's really good. His name is Casey. Casey Welk. Contra Posto Clinic. Okay.

And it's gorgeous in there. Like, it's a very beautiful aesthetic, and it doesn't feel cold and, you know, weird. Oh, great. So it's very pretty, so it feels nice. Anyway, so I got all that done today. West Hollywood. Oh, West Hollywood. Close to Beverly Hills, though. Okay.

On La Cienega. But yeah, I was scared. It was my first time. And they were really impressed by my pain tolerance. Uh-huh. And you told them about being a high flyer. Oh, my God. Almost forgot the most important thing. You have to watch the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders show. Oh, we started the first episode on our last trip with the girls. Oh, my God. I love it. I love it.

Love it. I have, I think, one and a half episodes left. I started it yesterday and I watched basically the whole thing.

I've got a rec for you, Sprinter on Netflix. Lincoln and I started watching that, and it's so good. And it's perfect to watch before the Olympics start, because now I know all these runners. Like now I have their personal story. I can look forward to seeing them. I'm going to watch that too. That'll be next. Yeah, watch that for sure. You're going to love it. Okay, but the DCC.

Yes. As they called themselves. Is so interesting because talk about identity. Yeah. Oh my God. Oh my God. Yeah. Like-

Whew. It is so ingrained in who they are. Most of these girls have been wanting to be one since they were like four. One of them's second generation. A couple of them are. It's so good. It's such a wild ride psychologically. What I was shocked by is how insanely talented they are. Like, they're all professional dancers. They know like every kind of dance. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. I didn't know that either. I thought it was just like, you learn these steps and you're pretty. Yeah. That was like maybe pom pom or. Definitely recommend the show. There's a lot there. When you finish, we'll talk more about it, but yeah,

man, oh man, is it intense, really intense. But it's so funny because I found myself, it was like judging a lot of it. Uh-huh, sure. And then relating a lot. Exactly. Then also relating so much. And then realizing that what I related to was also bad. A lot of the push until you are going to die. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was...

I was just like, well, yeah, that's what you, you got to do that. Like that's part of it. Standard. That's standard. But then I kind of removed myself and thought, oh, if I was watching this and I had no experience in that, I would be like, what the fuck? Like give them a break or this is insane. Yeah. And then the body stuff, like a lot of body. Mm-hmm.

having your body look a certain way and yeah really really crazy it's really interesting of course we're all like looking at everything through our own lens but of course I was watching it a lot of the times thinking like boy you make this two guys talking right now and we have major issues yeah

I know. But because it's like woman on woman, it's like, it's fine. And by the way, I don't even, I don't know. I don't have a position on it. Actually. I just was like, I was imagining hearing these same sentences come out of a guy's mouth and just being like, oh, wow, that would be career ending. Oh my God. There is a scene with this.

tour guide of the stadium. Uh-huh. And you see him like giving some people a tour and he takes them into the cheerleaders locker room and he's basically like, stand underneath your favorite one.

And like, because there's pictures of them and it's like, stand underneath your favorite one. And then he says, there are strict rules for the cheerleaders to not fraternize or date the football players, but there's no rules against them dating the tour guides. Oh. Oh, it was so disgusting. It was so disgusting.

It's crazy to me how a lot of these things still exist. That would not exist here. Yeah, you're also observing a lot of different cultural differences. If you live where we live versus Dallas, which is, those are two different cultures. Again, I don't think, I have no position on who's- One's not better. Right. It's just like, oh, wow, that's different. That wouldn't happen in LA. God and church are,

Is a through line throughout the whole show. Again, Texas. Like, it's very...

It's very prevalent. I just, you forget, like you really forget how different this country is depending where you are. I actually, I like that. I like it too. Yeah, I was watching it and I was like. I think it makes it diverse. Yeah, and I was like, yeah, you know, it's a very vast country and you can, whatever your vibe is, you can pretty much go find it and you should be able to. You should go like, you know, if everyone's into the thing and everyone's consenting and happy, then I'm so for it. Because sometimes actually,

My bigger fear is that everything's become completely homogenized and unicultural because of the internet. But I'm weirdly delighted when I see like, oh, no, no, it's much different all over the place.

I think we're still, not I think, we 100% are still the most diverse country, period. Right. If you go anywhere else, it's all a lot more homogenized. Yeah. And I agree. I like that about us, but it's also why we are so polarized. It's the reason for all the bad stuff and it's the reason for all the good stuff. Yeah. Mixed bag, mixed bag. It's really fun to watch. Okay. Well, I have a few facts. Oh, great. I like facts.

Okay, this is for Phil Elwood. Oh, wonderful. Okay, he said 90% of people don't go to the second search page. Mm-hmm. I believe that. Yeah, according to multiple studies, it says only 25% of users go to the second page of search results. So 75% stick to the first page. Okay. Situational depression, he had been diagnosed with early on. And he was like, I don't know if it's real. It's...

Real as far as like it isn't something they diagnose people with and it's a period of depression that can be triggered by a stressful or traumatic event It can feel similar to clinical depression, but it's usually less severe and can go away on its own over time

As your situation changes? Yeah, I think so. I looked up if Amistad, if Spielberg tried to shoot in this original Supreme Court, because he said that and he said that he wasn't able to. I couldn't find that info. So he's probably right. If I can't find it, he's right. Yeah, that's right. That's how it works. If you can't debunk it, then it's... Now what's interesting, debunk's an interesting word. You debunk it, which implies that bunk is real.

Right. And bunk is not real. No, because you couldn't debunk it. So I guess it is bunk. But bunk is also bullshit. Or you're getting the bunk out of there. So that makes sense. Okay. I get it. You're like weeding out the bunk. Yeah. Okay. Okay. We did it. Yeah, we did it. We figured it out.

Okay. Chlorine gas. You asked if the street name was mustard gas. Yeah. Those two are different. They were both chemical weapons used in World War I, but they're different. Okay.

However, are you thinking halogen? No, I was just thinking of mustard gas. Oh. So big in the World War I, mustard gas. Yeah, they were both used. Okay. But halogen, meaning salt producer, was originally used for chlorine in 1811. So maybe that's a street name for it. Or if it's not, it could be. Okay. And that's all. Okay. Okay, I'll be honest. I'll give another...

I'm just so honest now. Yeah, you're really, really couldn't be more honest. I'm not done with this episode. So there might be more. Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. Let me put them in the description of the show. Yeah. Okay. Look, we're, we're, we're, it's summer, you know? Oh, oh, oh, I have one more thing. There's a video of speed debate.

I wanted to play a little bit. Yes. I didn't know what it sounded like. No one can understand what anyone's saying. And there's no. All right. But go ahead. They're just reading as fast as they can. OK. OK. Ready? And. I'm a 12th grader at Lexington.

This happened last time again. I don't know how it knows not to let me hear that, but I can hear you. Yeah, that's so weird. But you could hear it. I could hear it and it's crazy. Yeah. No one can understand what's being said. You can't think about it and then respond to it. You're just reading your argument. Well, that's what I'm confused about. Yeah, they prepare their argument and read as much as humanly possible in their time slot.

But the people judging, they don't understand. There's no way they understand it. There's no way they can. That's what I'm confused by. I don't know. I guess. Yeah. Okay. We don't know. We don't get it. Maybe we need like a Dallas cheerleader documentary on speed debating. Maybe. I would love that. Hope to understand it. Maybe one of the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders is a debate person because they all have jobs because it's just, it's like a part-time thing. Yeah.

And they don't really get paid very much. Oh, gosh. Okay. Also, so there, oh, that's probably a spoiler. But there's, I'll just say there's an Indian girl. Oh, I know. Yeah. She was in the first episode. I'll leave it at that until you're done. And hopefully by then everyone will be done. That was Delta's favorite. Oh, it was. Yeah. Yeah. Of course it was. She loves me. Yeah. Yeah.

And you know what? She's 31. Which is old, right? Extremely. Extremely geriatric. The second oldest is like 25, I think, and she's on her fifth year. Right, right. Yeah, it's a young gal's racket. It is. Yeah. It is. I won't say anything else, but...

I was really, I really liked her. I was proud of her. She was an incredible dancer. Yeah. And they're going like, is she, she's, they're like dancing around like, she's Indian? Yeah. Remember that part? Yeah. Yes. That's what I'm saying. So I was, they're like, what is she? Oh, Indian? Okay. Yeah. I was trying not to be triggered, but of course I was because it's this Indian girl amongst the,

Many white girls. And there's black girls too, but she's the only, they don't like, I was realizing this when I was watching, especially in the South, in certain areas, not just in the South, actually, just all over and certain areas of the country. It's like, they know what a white person is. They know what a black person is. They know what a Latino is. It's the middle ground they do not know.

Well, and they know Latinos, certainly in Texas. Here, and in Texas, for sure. But yeah, a lot of the country doesn't have any Indians or Latinos still. Yeah. Yeah, I think a lot of people are quite confused about, yeah. Like Middle Eastern. Like, they just don't know. And they don't know where to play. It's like...

There's this ambiguity around them. Like, we don't really know where to place her, you know? It's really interesting. Yeah, it's not hostility. It's total ignorance, right? There's like, they don't know.

Don't know. I mean, in 2024, you should know. You should know more. Yeah, yeah. But I was having a lot of clarity around, because you've asked this question before, you know, you've noticed that some Indian, especially boys, really gravitate towards black culture. Yeah. I was like, oh, that's why. Because you pick black.

As someone in the middle or where there's no, like, space for you, you decide. You decide if you're going to be a white person or you're going to be a black person. Uh-huh. Yeah. Those are the two dominant culture strains. Yeah. And it was, yeah. It was just like, oh, yeah, this is why. She crushed those. She was so good. Yeah. You'll keep watching. Yeah. Anyway. Well.

That's it. All right. Well, more tales from the trip coming soon. Yeah. I can't wait to hear. Oh, I've done the boat, train. Planes, trains, automobiles. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll see. We'll see if I figure out how to get myself off of that and back to the hotel. Okay. All right. Love you. Love you.