Nevertheless, people continue to find ways to screw up egregiously. If your PR strategy ends with you and your former employer paying $57 million dollars in legal settlements, you have screwed up.

A couple of weeks ago, e-commerce site Ebay settled a lawsuit with David and Ina Steiner, editors of EcommerceBytes, a trade news website, concluding a case that dates back to 2019. In 2020 the New York Times published a long a deeply reported piece on the scandal, and it’s worth a read if you want all the grisly details. If you don’t have that kind of time, a July 28th Times story on the settlement has a summary:

In the spring of 2019, eBay was under pressure from an activist hedge fund. A handful of Ms. Steiner’s articles, including one about a bar [then Ebay CEO Devin Wenig] had built on eBay’s campus, infuriated company executives, according to texts revealed by prosecutors. Further details of the stalking operation were later revealed by journalists and the Steiners’ own lawsuit, which was filed in 2021.

“Take her down,” Mr. Wenig told his communications chief, who in turn told the security team leader to do “whatever it takes.”

The Steiners were bombarded with anonymous material including deliveries of live cockroaches and a bloody pig mask. They were threatened online. Much of the material they were sent, including a funeral wreath and a book on surviving the loss of a spouse, suggested imminent death. The security team was on the verge of breaking into the Steiners’ garage to put a tracker on their car when the plot was derailed.

No! Wrong! Bad! If you are a communications chief and you get a request like this, you have two options:

1. Counsel your executive on why this is a bad idea and offer alternatives.

2. Resign on principle.

You may have to do both of these things, in this order!

The communications chief who relayed Mr. Wenig’s order was named Steve Wymer. Here is how the 2020 New York Times article introduces him:

[Wenig and Wymer] shared an aggressive streak. Mr. Wenig had spent most of his career in East Coast financial media, as a lawyer and executive at Thomson Reuters, and he maintained a certain New York alpha quality. Before working as a technology spokesman, Mr. Wymer had spun for three Republican senators in Washington, and he kept up an interest in politics. When Representative John Lewis tweeted about the civic importance of getting in “good trouble, necessary trouble,” for instance, Mr. Wymer replied that he had “another view on how the USA should be governed. My view is equal to your view.”

Publicly, Mr. Wenig celebrated eBay’s five community values — among them, “People are basically good” and “We encourage you to treat others the way you want to be treated.” But together, he and Mr. Wymer worked to forge a more combative eBay, one that drew less inspiration from the Golden Rule and more from “The Sopranos.” (They did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and eBay would not make any executives available for interviews.)

This is unscientific, but I feel like about fifteen years ago the Valley began importing more chief communication officers from the political world and some (not all!) brought with them an aggressive and confrontational style of comms. Call it the Roy Cohn-ing of Valley PR. This is also about when I came back to the US from China, so it may also simply reflect my introduction to Valley PR from the collegial but swampy world of late 2000s China PR.1

I am non-confrontational by nature. I’ll get on the phone and argue my employer’s corner. I might even wheedle. But I keep it civilized because I don’t think yelling helps and I need to have constructive, long-term relationships with the reporters covering my employer and our industry. One reporter who covers a lot of big Valley companies for a global news organization told me he loves it when he gets yelled at because he knows he’s landed a punch and if there were an actual mistake they could just email him with the receipts.

I might not like “aggressive” PR, but I can sort of understand it. What I can’t understand is how a CEO and chief communications officer, both whom had established corporate careers, decided to leap from aggressive to thuggish.

One of my early mentors in PR taught me that comms people should be the conscience of the organization, and that’s been one of my guiding principles ever since. Another guiding principle is that I am not any executive’s comms person, I am the company’s comms person. If an executive’s interests or instructions diverge from the company’s interests, my duty is to the company. I recognize that can be easier in theory than in practice, when you’re face-to-face with the person who controls your paycheck, but if you’re going to sit in the big comms chair, that’s the gig!

If your CEO asks you, a comms chief, to “take down” a reporter and “do whatever it takes,” your actual job is specifically to not do whatever it takes. Your actual job is to ask a bunch of clarifying questions about what, specifically, the CEO means, to draw a clear line between what is acceptable and not, and to propose alternatives that aren’t ethically compromised. If necessary, your job is also to resign on principle, both because that’s the ethical thing to do and because the reputation risks of following through on the request are extreme. Seven years later, the gruesome consequences are still landing for Ebay and its former executives.2

An important comms leadership skill is helping senior management understand the difference between “a PR problem” and “a business problem with PR consequences,” because they require different solutions. If nobody knows about your cool, new product or technology, that’s a PR problem! Go do some PR! (And some marketing.)

If, as with Ebay, the press is reporting that you have a bar that serves liquor on your corporate campus and that it is contributing to poor employee behavior, while you are under pressure from an activist investor, you do not have a PR problem. Or rather, you have a PR problem, but it is downstream of a business problem. The business problem is that you have a bar on campus and it is contributing to poor employee behavior. The solution is to close the bar and address the employee behavior issues and then use PR to explain the steps you’ve taken. The PR is last in the chain. There’s also the separate problem of the activist investor, but having your house in order is helpful there, too.

Often, when a CEO or other senior executive wants a comms team to “fix a PR problem,” what they are actually asking is for the comms team to quick-fix the reputational consequences of a business problem. You might be able to bullshit through it for a while, but there is no long-term PR solution unless the company addresses that underlying business problem. If your senior management doesn’t grasp this, or isn’t interested, they don’t understand the role of communications and they will use PR as a blunt instrument at best and unethically at worst.

A comms leader shouldn’t have to stand alone in arguing this. Where was the general counsel? There was clearly legal risk because Ebay got sued and settled for tens of millions, and much of the detail in the stories above comes from legal discovery. I’m a big fan of making friends with company lawyers. Climb the chain as far as you can. Take your company’s senior in-house litigator out for coffee. They’ll be a useful ally when you need to scare an executive straight.3

All this for an auction website

What elevates this story from tragedy to satire is that this was Ebay! Ebay is not the CIA. Ebay is not even one of the Magnificent Seven technology companies that are arguably systemically important. Ebay is a website for selling secondhand sneakers! There is no reason to start launching ratfucking shadow ops like you’re the G. Gordon Liddy of Willow Glen. The stakes just aren’t that high. If Microsoft vanishes tomorrow, governments and corporations will grind to a halt. If Ebay vanishes tomorrow, people will list their old surfboards on Facebook Marketplace and use Checkout.com instead of Paypal.4

Also, Ebay risked its reputation to go to war with EcommerceBytes, a literal mom-and-pop trade news site! Trades can be super important. Nobody outside an industry will have heard of most trades that cover it, but people inside an industry can take them very seriously. Trade reporters can be knowledgeable and well sourced, and good trades often lead mainstream coverage. But nothing EcommerceBytes was writing seemed existential for Ebay, even with a notorious activist investor nipping at them. They weren’t about to take down Ebay, Theranos style.

Faced with a trade website picking at a business problem at a moment of vulnerability, Ebay chose violence, or at least it implied violence. I do not understand the theory of victory. Do you think experienced, professional reporters aren’t going to try to unravel the story of a harassment campaign just because they don’t work for the Wall Street Journal? Do you think because they’re trade reporters they’re going to fold? Do you think big-time media won’t pick up the thread and detonate your reputation? Was nobody prepared to tell truth to power and explain why this was all a bad idea?

It’s easy for me to tell other people that they should be prepared to resign on principle and give up their paychecks. I’ve never had to do that, or even threaten it, although I’ve always had a clear idea of where my uncrossable lines are. Online commentary is worth what you pay for it ($0 here!) and Monday morning quarterbacking is easy. Also, it’s a very different leadership team at Ebay seven years later, and none of this is about them.5

But this case is a reminder that part of being a comms leader is being clear-eyed about risk and willing to tell truth to power. It sucks to be in the position where your options are to burn for doing the right thing, or burn for doing the wrong thing. But if you’re in the reputation business, you might as well burn for doing the right thing. At least then you can rise from the ashes. The alternative is just ashes.

A thing about time is that if you wait long enough, even the remotest of deadlines will eventually arrive. Zach turned eighteen in March, which makes me…well, still best to not think about that. He graduated from high school two weeks ago and I am all the things you’d expect: proud, a little sad, mystified at how the years of his childhood seem to have compressed into a heartbeat. Relieved that I don’t have to change diapers at 2AM anymore.

Despite mostly growing up in California, Zach is obligated to return to Singapore for 22 months of national service starting this August. When he was born, my wife and I didn’t know whether we would return to Singapore, where she is from, or to the US. We hedged our bets and got him both passports. The Singapore passport was hand-delivered to our apartment by two young embassy staffers along with a national service obligation and, to cushion the blow, a delightful gift basket. A reasonable trade, I thought, as I ate the butter cookies in the basket. Somebody had to eat them, and Zach didn’t have any teeth yet.

Friends have asked me over the years if I couldn’t get Zach out of national service, but this misunderstands my feelings. I am fully NS-pilled and excited for him to do it! This is easy for me to say since I’m definitely not the one doing it. But, in hindsight, a couple of years of discipline before I showed up for university would have done me good. I sacrificed my freshman year on the altar of monster bong rips and two-liter Sapporo mini-kegs before my parents gave me The Talk.

Fortunately, Zach is a better student than I was and has no discernible interest in monster bong rips, which are frowned upon in Singapore, or Sapporo mini-kegs, which start good but finish flat, warm and pungent, like a road-killed tanuki in a Hokkaido summer. He’s grown up knowing that NS was coming and seems to accept it as the price of being half-Singaporean.

My wife and I have always planned to return to Asia while Zach is in NS. For a long time this was a distantly appealing prospect that we chatted about with other parents at playdates full of six year olds. It was a thing that would happen, you know, someday, like AARP membership or a prescription for statins.

Well, motherfucker, someday is here and now we have to move back across the Pacific. I also get regular AARP membership pitches in the mail, which makes me…honestly, best not to think about that.

My adult life is defined by three big international moves. In 1995, fresh out of grad school and glamorously penniless, I moved from San Francisco to Singapore to do an Internet games startup. This blew up spectacularly due to widely distributed incompetence, including my own, but I stayed in Singapore.

In 2004, recently married, I quit a perfectly good agency PR gig to go to Beijing for a summer language program, which was a way of getting myself there so I could look for a job. Amazingly, this stunt worked and Zach was born halfway through our eight-year stay in China.

In 2013, my then employer offered to move me back to Silicon Valley. Zach was about to turn five, and we had to decide where we wanted to raise and educate him. It was too good a deal to turn down. The company flew us back to the US business class and the flight crew invited Zach into the cockpit of the 747 before takeoff. He sat in the captain’s seat with his hands on the throttles and has been infatuated with aircraft ever since.

Back in the Bay Area, we crashed with my mom for a few months while I tried to prove to the credit rating agencies that I had not died mysteriously in West Virginia, which turns out to have zipcodes similar to a Singapore post code I had lived in. Once that uniquely American hex was lifted, we rented for a year or so and then bought a small house in a scruffy neighborhood in Redwood City, at the time one of the last semi-affordable parts of the San Francisco peninsula. We got into a bidding war, which ended with me taking on what the banks cheerfully describe as a “jumbo” mortgage and the man who sold me the house retiring to Maui to be a dive instructor. This is the house Zach grew up in, where we’ve lived for nearly twelve years.

The fundamental equation of suburban American living is this:

stuff = space x time

This, by the way, means that time is simply (stuff / space), which is big if true.

Even in a small house like ours there is still a garage, and an attic over the garage, and a shed in the garden, and various closets, and twelve years is a lot of time. Zach’s fish tank that last had a fish in it six or seven years ago? That can sit on a shelf in the garage until geological time swallows California. The Beijing-era Halloween stuff including an orange fright-wig that was uncomfortable even when I had hair? It can go into the attic. The three tubs of Asian bric-a-brac my in-laws sent after they retired and closed their stores in Singapore? They can sit in bins in my wife’s study, shrouded in bubble wrap and masking tape. You never know when you might need an old batik press.

We had twelve years of decisions like that, incrementally entombing ourselves in the consumer detritus of our lives; our personal, if modest, fossilized Pompeiian domus. It turns out you will never need an old batik press, and neither will anyone else.

Moving back to Asia is an elegant forcing function. The house must be rented; it is easier to rent an empty house; therefore, the house must be emptied. Simple to write, a bundle of barbed wire up the ass to actually do. Some things will go to Singapore. Some things will be stored, but no more than necessary as every square foot of storage costs money. The rest we’ve been selling, donating or, as a last resort, tossing. There is no other option.

Thus began the Summer of Sales. Everything must go! (This is why I’ve not had much time for writing recently.) We put stuff on eBay and Facebook Marketplace. This revealed a possibly irreconcilable divide between me and my wife. We want different things from selling our possessions. I want to get rid of as much stuff as possible, as fast as possible. My wife, who embodies the Singaporean spirit of “kiasu,” wants to win. This means I have to pre-haggle with my wife on behalf of our notional buyers over the prices we should sell things for.

My wife [holding some random object]: What do you think we should sell this for?

Me: I don’t know. Ten bucks?

My wife [turning the object, studying it critically]: I was thinking $100.

Me: It cost, like, $50 new. Ten years ago.

My wife: OK. $80.

Me: …

My wife [hitting the “post” button]: Try, lah!

I love her for her optimism and her relentless aversion to booking a loss. In the dot com crash, she rode her modest stash of Enron stock down to zero.

But we’ve made progress! We got rid of the pair of filigreed Chinese bookshelves that were a magnet for cat litter dust and impossible to clean. A nice nonbinary kid from Burlingame jammed one into the back of their Prius and liked it so much they came back the next day for the second one. “My partner adores the shelves,” they said. Wait until you have to dust them, I thought, while I smiled beneficently.

We got rid of our bed frame, the Devourer of Shins in the Night. This frame was eight inches wider than the mattress in all directions and a fucking magnet for collisions. It was beautiful, but my wife and I had both grown to loathe it as we collected scars. Bam! Fuck! was our midnight serenade. A young couple disassembled the frame and threw it into the back of their colossal Rivian SUV. You paid $80,000 for a car, but you’re buying a used bed frame covered with mysterious bloodstains at shin level? Welcome to Silicon Valley! They seemed nice and I felt honor-bound to warn them of the shin thing. They took the frame anyway.

In a stroke of tremendous luck (for us), our neighbor across the street got tempestuously divorced from his stridently MAGA wife of two years and she took everything, leaving him with an empty house. We got rid of a couch, a bureau, two end-tables and an old Chinese chest, and he got his place refurnished on the cheap. Everybody wins!

A middle-aged Chinese guy showed up for the crate of old Peranakan pottery that my wife’s parents had sent along with the batik presses. He held each piece up to his ear and flicked it with a finger, listening to the ping! it made. “These are fake!” he declared. My wife wasn’t home to argue, so I said, “I’ll give you the whole bin for $100.” He took them all. Maybe they were real. Good riddance. He didn’t take the batik presses.

This has felt great. Every time we say goodbye to something I get a rush. No need for monster bong rips, I’m getting high on disposal. Maybe the Buddhist ascetics are right, and the path to bliss is renouncing all worldly possessions. Imagine the otherworldly glow when I get rid of the cars in a few weeks. I might levitate when I cancel the insurance!

But I still kept a lot of stuff, so I guess I haven’t quite attained enlightenment. At least it’s the stuff that I truly value, and not just the cruft of a decade of suburban inertia.

The only part of this process that has been bittersweet is dealing with my son’s room. As he grew, he didn’t get rid of stuff so much as deposit new strata that created a geological record of his childhood. Thus the current photographocene of elaborate camera gear sits on top of the prior tweenozoic airplane layer, which itself rests on the Legolithic and, at the very deepest, the fossilized stuffed animals and plushies of his smallest, primordial boyhood.

Every layer we go through brings back a sense-memory of that stage of Zach’s life, of the evenings reading Dr. Seuss and Jules Verne to him, of the hours building Lego creations on the floor of his room or getting my ass thoroughly kicked at Monopoly, a game I find tedious but that for some reason lights his own kiasu fire. As he drifts inevitably away from us and closer to his buddies and girlfriend and adult life I feel the weight of not just him leaving the nest, but of us collectively emptying the nest and scattering its fibers to the wind.

But it is time. We’ve been anchored in place long enough for Zach to grow up in stability, which was a gift for him. His national service is the nominal reason for us to move back to Asia, but it’s also an excuse for me. I’ve been ready for a few years for the sloughing of possessions and routines, and for distance from the peculiar madness of America and Silicon Valley, at least for a while.

So my wife and I (and two unwilling cats who have cruelly been denied a vote in this matter) will follow Zach to Asia because it’s as good a reason to go as we could have. Then, in two years, when he heads back to the U.S., we’ll decide what comes next. Zach has already chosen a university on the east coast, which means less pull back to California.

The house is always there, waiting to refill according to the laws of suburban accumulation physics. But maybe we’ll stay abroad for a while longer. Two years would be a quick turn to bounce back across the Pacific, cats and all. Typically, I’d settle someplace for at least seven or eight years before getting itchy feet.

Of course, seven or eight years from now I’ll be…well, absolutely best not to think about that.

The videos for “Beat It,” “Billie Jean” and “Thriller” were credited with breaking the “color barrier” on MTV, which was barely a year old and a new taste-making force in pop music. Seven of the nine tracks on Thriller were top-ten hits and the album was number one on the Billboard charts for 37 weeks. Michael Jackson, 24 years old but nearly two decades into his pop-music career, reached celebrity escape-velocity and became the King of Pop™.

Jackson’s life story is fascinating. Molded into early celebrity by a domineering father, he appeared to spend much of his life in arrested childhood. Neverland Ranch, Bubbles the chimp, his extreme cosmetic surgery and progressive de-blackification, his masked kids. A troubled late-career shadowed by debt, drug abuse, deep eccentricity and several credible allegations of child sexual abuse, most famously covered in the 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland.1 Finally, death at 50 from a drug overdose on the eve of a series of comeback concerts in London. Fertile territory for a biopic on race, celebrity, sexual pathology and the cost of fame!

Alas, that is not the biopic you’re going to get. The biopic you’re going to get is Michael, and it is reportedly on track to be a monster hit. But the movie elides all that late-career complexity and ends with Jackson’s triumphant concert at Wembley in 1988, when he was still on the rise and before any troubling child sexual abuse allegations.

This is standard stuff for a musical biopic. You need cooperation from the artist or estate to get life and music rights, so rough edges get sanded off and personality defects are depicted as the necessary price of genius. The reviews for Michael reflect the typical mediocrity of these movies. Hagiography is boring, even with a banging soundtrack.

But Michael isn’t just the standard-issue celebrity glazing. The movie is part of a campaign to rehabilitate Michael Jackson’s reputation and unlock the potentially vast value of his catalog. It’s a family enterprise, down to starring Jackson’s nephew, Jaafar Jackson. Earlier this month, the New York Times published a 5000 word story on the development of the movie and how it fits into Jackson’s legacy. There are some amazing nuggets:

The original script, a copy of which I obtained, went to great lengths to exonerate Jackson [of child sexual abuse allegations], portraying him as the victim of a shakedown by the family of the first child to come forward, Jordan Chandler. Larry Feldman, who negotiated a multimillion-dollar settlement for Chandler in 1994, told me the terms of the agreement meant that “neither side was allowed to do anything about publicizing or communicating what occurred, except to the extent that the Chandler family was allowed to talk to the police and testify under oath.” When I described scenes in the early draft exonerating Jackson and discrediting the Chandlers, Feldman laughed and said he had no knowledge of the contents of the script. But, he said, “that’s exactly what they couldn’t do.”

This required a bunch of reshooting and a rethink of the scope of the story and incinerated millions of dollars, leading to an all-time self-soothing statement from the studio:

A spokesman for Lionsgate confirmed that substantial footage had to be scrapped because it violated the Chandler settlement, adding that “the unusual circumstances gave us the opportunity to shoot more material for what is effectively a Part 1 — the making of a king — while preserving the opportunity to tell more story in a subsequent film or films.”

Great work! Looking forward to “more story,” wherever that may lead!

You will be shocked to hear that online discourse about the movie is polarized. Here’s a common point of view:

He calls anyone pushing back in his mentions a “pedophile defender,” which is exactly the nuanced debate we’ve come to expect on social media. Meanwhile, there are plenty of Jackson stans who will point out (in this case, in my own mentions) that a criminal investigation did not lead to a conviction and echo the movie’s abandoned subplot that the accusations are shakedowns.

Maybe, but it seems uncontroversial to say that Jackson was weird as fuck. His behavior with children was, in the most charitable reading scientifically possible, deeply questionable, and not something that would be tolerated from any adult male who wasn’t an ultra-celebrity. If your neighbor in the cul-de-sac told you he was having sleepovers with 12-year-olds in any situation that didn’t involve tents and merit badges, you would call the cops promptly.2 Rolling Stone has a good timeline of the allegations against Jackson and repeated settlements. It is uncomfortable reading.

But in this case the stans are going to win. The biopic is going to make hundreds of millions of dollars and I suspect that will open the door to greater comfort with Jackson’s legacy and use of his catalog for commercial purposes.

Good Art, Problematic Artist

The world is complicated and engagement-bait social media absolutes aren’t always adequate to the task. One can acknowledge multiple things about Michael Jackson at once:

• He was a supremely talented performer

• His run of four records from 1979 to 1991—Off the Wall, Thriller, Bad, Dangerous—is one of the all-time great pop music runs.

• He was profoundly damaged and there are credible allegations of child sex abuse that lead to multiple settlements.

• He is dead, and beyond personal accountability.

• His estate is trying to whitewash his reputation posthumously.

There are healthy ways to interact with the works of problematic artists, of which there are many. You can separate liking the art from providing material support to the artist or their estate. You can, if you wish, re-evaluate the art or abandon it altogether. How to manage that tension and where to draw the line is a personal decision that depends upon your relationship with the art and the artist.

I have a vinyl copy of Thriller that I bought at my local used record store some years ago. I played it a couple of days ago when I was thinking about this piece, and that album slaps from the first track.3 You can instantly hear why it went to the moon. Then I streamed the other three albums in ‘79 - ‘91 run. I don’t feel especially morally compromised. If I wanted to listen to any of them regularly, I’d go back to the used record store so I wasn’t sending dollars (or, in the case of streaming, pennies) to the estate.

But I won’t go see the movie. It’s one thing to play the music of a dead artist who is beyond accountability and enrichment. It’s another pay to support a new movie that is a piece of propaganda designed to rehabilitate Jackson’s image and enrich his estate. These are meaningfully different acts to me, though perhaps not to you.

Part of having a healthy relationship with a problematic artist is acknowledging the totality of the person, including their flaws and, if necessary, their crimes. You could make a remarkable movie about the totality of Michael Jackson, and the tension between his talent and celebrity and his pain, dissolution and even (alleged) crimes. But the system doesn’t work that way and we’ll never see that movie, so we’ll have to make our peace with his art in other ways.

Another nugget in the New York Times piece above is about a screenplay for an alternative Michael Jackson movie that circulated in Hollywood some years ago:

In 2015, the hottest Jackson-related biopic making the rounds in Hollywood was not about Jackson himself; it was a dark comedy called “Bubbles.” The script, by Isaac Adamson, opens at a Florida ape sanctuary, where Bubbles, “a grizzled, paunchy, middle-aged chimpanzee” lives, then flashes back to survey his time with Jackson — hitting some of the same beats as the early draft of “Michael” but feeling, oddly, much more honest. There are appearances by Prince, who is invited to sing on “Bad” but can’t get past the first line, “Your butt is mine,” and by the members of Bon Jovi, who party with Bubbles in a Tokyo hotel room. (Both are based on real anecdotes.) But the story darkens when 12-year-old Kyle Bosman, a fictional character based on Chandler, the first Jackson accuser, begins to spend time at Neverland, and Bubbles senses a rival. In his initial drafts, Adamson maintained a sense of uncertainty regarding Jackson’s guilt or innocence. “Of course it’s going to be ambiguous,” he told me, “because Bubbles doesn’t understand what’s going on.”

Straight up, I would have gone to see that shit in IMAX. Alas, it was left to Robbie Williams to attempt a chimp-themed pop-music biopic, with last year’s Better Man. It bombed so hard that Robbie Williams is in British witness protection and anyone proposing a chimp movie now is going to get blacklisted like Dalton Trumbo.

That’s a shame, because apes have a proud legacy in American pop culture. For our sins, Michael is the biopic we’re getting. But I think Bubbles is the biopic a damaged and hurting nation deserves.

You record a four minute video in which you offer condolences for deaths of the pilots and explain what you are doing to support the passengers and other crew members. You are appropriately solemn. You say all the right things, considering the circumstances. Job done, right?

Maybe not…

It is a public relations truism that poor communication can make a crisis worse. Typically, that means things like responding too late, getting demonstrably ahead of the facts, omitting or obfuscating important information, or releasing inconsistent or muddled messages.

Or, one might be “tone deaf,” meaning your remarks sound poorly calibrated to the gravity of the situation or the feelings of stakeholders. A canonical example of tone deafness is a remark by Tony Hayward, CEO of BP during the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill. In the midst of apologizing for the situation on TV during what was supposed to be a shirtsleeves “we’re fixing it!” PR hit, he said, “There’s no one who wants this thing over more than I do. I’d love my life back.” This was after 11 people died on the rig and the gulf coast fishing industry was wiped out.

Three days later, he was apologizing for his apology. Always a bad sign! A few weeks later, he was out.1 The statement wasn’t the only reason but it sure didn’t go in the board’s “keep him” column. Here is advice: live your life so you are never used as a case study of crisis comms gone terribly wrong!

Could you be considered tone deaf just for delivering an otherwise appropriate statement in the wrong language?

Yes! In Canada, you could be considered politically tone deaf for that, and politicians are a stakeholder group, especially if you’re the Canadian national air carrier.

In his video, released the day after the crash, Air Canada CEO Michael Rousseau delivered all the right messages. Within a day he was blasted for delivering his remarks only in English, though with French subtitles. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney criticized Rousseau directly, and a parliamentary committee that oversees Canada’s language laws invited Rousseau to explain himself. Within three days, Rousseau was apologizing for his apology, Tony Hayward-style. Lawmakers pressured him to resign.

Eight days after the crash, Air Canada announced that Rousseau had informed the board of directors that he would retire by the end of September. The statement made no mention of the controversy. It didn’t need to.

With an exception we’ll get to below, CEOs are the ultimate owners of accountability and crisis communication at a company. Airline CEOs carry a special burden. It is blessedly rare, but there is always a chance an airline CEO might have to communicate about an air crash, among the most traumatic, high-pressure and news-generating corporate crises possible.2

I assume that airline CEOs are appointed mostly because boards of directors think they will be good at managing the stupendous operational complexity of a modern airline. But, ideally, you also want someone who can communicate effectively in the event of a crisis. It’s not just for crashes! Airlines have labor issues and network disruptions, any of which can leave tens of thousands of customers vocally enraged. Here’s a well-known video of Southwest CEO Bob Jordan addressing a catastrophic holiday network disruption three years ago.

Watch Bob Jordan, and then watch Rousseau’s video from after the Air Canada crash, in the tweet above, if you haven’t already.

Rousseau is not good at this! He’s struggles to read smoothly from the prompter. His delivery is halting, there are obvious edits, and he mispronounces some basic words. I have done TV from a prompter, when I had a brief stint as a television software reviewer in Singapore back in the nineties. It’s a skill and it takes practice! You don’t want to discover this in a crisis.

But the halting delivery could be forgivable as long as the demeanor and messaging are correct, which they are. The thing that sunk Rousseau was that, two words aside, the address was in English.

Language is political, especially in multilingual countries. It’s definitely political in Canada, where the Quebecois have both an independence movement and a fierce dedication to preserving the French language. The BBC gets into why this was a specific problem for Rousseau:

Rousseau lives in Montreal [Quebec] but is an anglophone. His uniligualism was the subject of criticism from some when he was appointed as CEO of Air Canada in 2021.

Shortly after his appointment, he was asked by a journalist why he has not learned French despite living in Quebec for more than a decade.

Rousseau responded: “If you look at my work schedule, you’d understand why” - a comment that garnered backlash from both Quebec and federal ministers at the time.

Rousseau later apologised and committed to improving his French.

…

Air Canada began as a federal public corporation and has been private since 1988. It remains subject to Canada’s Official Languages Act, however, and announcements on board planes are made in both English and French.

I recently wrote that one of my first questions in a crisis situation is, “who is this a crisis for?” The Air Canada situation started as a crisis for the Airline, but within a couple of days it had become mostly a crisis for the CEO. Suddenly, you’re solving a different problem!

Imagethief’s Theory of Unresolved Tension

In my PR career, I’ve learned to be wary of the risks of what I think of as, “unresolved tension.” This is the material fact not disclosed, the thing someone might want to leak, the issue you hope won’t be discovered. It might be something scandalous, or it might be just the awkward gap between a significant corporate decision and the official announcement. It can be anything that would invite a reporter to dig for “the rest of the story.” In all cases, I would rather relieve the tension on my own terms than have the media or political antagonists do it for me on ground of their choosing. In a big company, there is always a certain amount of unresolved tension, and you learn to recognize the stuff you should worry about.

Rousseau’s lack of French language ability was unresolved tension that existed from the moment he was appointed. It was a known problem that had been publicly reported on, but as long as things at Air Canada were business-as-usual, it could be ignored. The moment Rousseau’s limitations were exposed by a crisis requiring a very sensitive kind of public communication, he was in trouble. The booby trap was set years ago. The LaGuardia crash just hit the tripwire.

Could Rousseau have faked his way through the video? Maybe, but he struggled to deliver his remarks from the prompter in English. I suspect he would have mangled French to the point of ridicule, and perhaps made the situation even worse.

One could argue that this is a silly standard by which to judge a CEO who seemed to be delivering solid business results, or that the outrage was politically motivated. But it doesn’t matter. Language is political, and, as a Quebec-headquartered company, the bilingual expectations of an Air Canada CEO were widely known and codified in policy.

If Rousseau had admitted six months ago that his French still wasn’t up to scratch and publicly redoubled his efforts to learn it, he could have relieved the tension on his own terms and it might not have been a scandal. Maybe he would have bought himself enough grace to get through the crash.

But the crash let the issue escape containment and Rousseau’s antagonists set all the terms for the PR battle that followed. The crisis switched from managing the accident to managing a problematic CEO. I said above that the CEO is accountable for a company crisis, with one exception. The board of directors is accountable for a CEO crisis. I don’t know if Rousseau made the decision to resign or if the board pushed him out, but either way, they’re probably happy he’s leaving. In a delicate moment, he had become, as they say, a distraction.

I don’t know much French, but I know this: C’est la vie!

Everyone: Merry Christmas!

Me [scrolling Bluesky]: Hey, have you seen how many people get violently sick from bad eggnog?

Everyone:…

Me: Noël! [Dumps eggnog back into punchbowl]

If you’re going to prepare for crisis communication, you need to be able to have frank discussions about the possible crises. Death. Crime. Disasters. Whatever. Does it seem silly to prepare for a global pandemic that shuts everything down for a while? Guess what!

There is an infinite number of bad scenarios, you can’t prepare for everything, and not all risks demand the same degree of preparation. There is a simple matrix that comms people (and our friends in risk management) sometimes use to think through which scenarios we should be spending time on:

Obviously, this is oversimplified. “Probability” is timeline dependent and “impact” is contingent on various assumptions. You’re not so much plotting points as little clouds. People will argue about where in the matrix to place things. Sometimes they’ll argue for motivated reasons, like protecting a revenue stream. That’s another risk!

But it’s a useful heuristic. Alien invasion? High impact! Vanishingly small probability. Don’t worry about it. If it happens, no one will blame you for not having a comms plan and your boss will be too busy fleeing to his luxury bunker in Big Sur with a suitcase full of ketamine to give you a hard time.

The landscape is always changing and risk maps are dynamic. Two years ago, tariffs weren’t a major consideration. Today they are. What fun! We’re always assessing new risks, or considering what might be causing current risks to shift their position on the matrix.

Often, you’re just tweaking the map. This or that risk becomes incrementally more likely or potentially more damaging, so you move the plot a few pixels. But occasionally something novel sprouts on the map like a poisonous mushroom. The thing that made me realize there is a shift in the risk landscape was this tweet from NBA star Giannis Antetokounpo, a few weeks ago:

We not all on Kalshi, Giannis!

Giannis’ investment prompted reasonable questions, but maybe it will be fine! When has the collision of sports and gambling ever been a problem? And between the two main prediction markets, Kalshi is the sober option, as amazing as that is.

But a current star player becoming an investor in a lightly regulated prediction market app seems like hurdling the Rubicon and landing in brand new risk territory much broader than sports. Since that tweet, things have got weirder as the prediction markets have been implicated in several “insider trading” events and novel controversies: 1

• An anonymous account on Polymarket made suspiciously timed trades on the capture of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela that netted more than $400,000.2

• OpenAI fired an employee for trading on confidential information on Polymarket.

• Kalshi banned and fined an editor for mega-YouTuber Jimmy “Mr. Beast” Donaldson for betting on planned stunts he had knowledge of and a California gubernatorial candidate for betting on his own candidacy.

• Mystery bettors on Polymarket seemed to have the inside track on the start of American bombing in Iran. $529 million was wagered in total and six suspiciously new accounts cleared a million each with uncanny knowledge of the timing.

• Two Israeli reservists were arrested for using classified information to place bets on Polymarket.

Listed companies have always had insider trading risk. But the domains of insider knowledge that mattered were relatively constrained: financial results, major transactions, other material corporate developments. Such information is also often restricted to specific teams or departments. Venues for trading on that knowledge were also limited and tightly regulated, at least in the U.S.

The prediction markets explode the available domains for insider trading to literally anything you can imagine about any organization. Executive hiring and firings, layoffs, product decisions and sales, whatever. This includes governments. Want to bet on the monthly jobs report? The next Fed interest rate change? Any particular policy being implemented? War is apparently great for insider trading!

At the same time, prediction markets have reduced the friction of betting on these things to approximately zero, in the same way that sportsbook apps reduced the friction of sports betting to zero. This moves insider trading risk way up the “probability” axis on the matrix, and plops it like a seagull turd onto the risk maps of organizations that aren’t publicly listed.

There is also a second-order effect, in that the prediction markets can incentivize behaviors that lead to payoffs. If you can place an anonymous, crypto-backed bet on outcome X, and you have direct control, or just influence, over outcome X, you have a potential conflict of interest. Bad incentives and low friction are a dangerous combination. With some of the prediction markets offshore, crypto-based, and having apparently squishy know-your-customer requirements, opportunity just a VPN away.

Will people do this? I don’t know! Is it a risk? I think so! As we’ve established, I am professionally disposed to imagine bad outcomes! I think there are going to be some amazing corporate and government crises rooted in these markets. Time to update those risk maps!

Respectability Before the Storm

The prediction markets are working hard to build a veneer of respectability. Their communications emphasize particular language: “markets,” “traders” (not gamblers!), “contracts” (not bets!). They’re just like derivatives trades on regulated exchanges! Or, that’s the idea. They speak in the language of truth and discovery. Here is Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour in Wired this month:

“[Kalshi users] have found an exercise that is intellectually stimulating, that gets them more calibrated and objective about their views about the world, where the conversation is more like mathematics. It makes things less subjective and more objective. It depolarizes the conversation, and it helps us get to more truth.”

Polymarket published the following notice on the page for the bet on when the U.S. would initially strike Iran:

Note on Middle East Markets: The promise of prediction markets is to harness the wisdom of the crowd to create accurate, unbiased forecasts for the most important events to society. That ability is particularly invaluable in gut-wrenching times like today. After discussing with those directly affected by the attacks, who had dozens of questions, we realized that prediction markets could give them the answers they needed in ways TV news and 𝕏 could not.

Honey, I’m not gambling! I’m harnessing the wisdom of the crowd to create accurate, unbiased forecasts for the most important events to society! I’m performing a public service! Also, I lost the tuition money, sorry.

What are the most important events to society? I’m glad you asked:

Last month, Kalshi published its first “notices of disciplinary action” against users, which is how the Mr. Beast and California gubernatorial candidate cases became public. That document is a good place to see Kalshi’s language choices in action. The violation is “trading on material, non-public information,” which is the SEC definition of insider trading. The document looks like an SEC enforcement notice, down to being released as a PDF and carrying a document number. But it’s not a regulatory action. It’s Kalshi’s own enforcement of its terms and conditions done in a manner designed to look regulatory in nature.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is the actual regulating authority for prediction markets in the US. They’ve noted Kalshi’s enforcement actions, while reserving the “full authority to police illegal trading practices occurring on any [Designated Contract Market]”, which includes prediction markets. It will be interesting to see if and when they feel the need to assert themselves. So far they are taking a light touch.

Meanwhile, one advantage of being regulated as a futures market rather than a gambling app is that you can operate in all fifty U.S. states and promote yourself relentlessly to people under the age of 21 because college students are famously prudent.

It’s smart of Kalshi and Polymarket to make themselves as respectable as possible while they can. There have already been some scandals, and I think more and bigger ones are in the wind.

When I talk to students about crisis comms, I will often present a scenario and then ask, who is this a crisis for? The point is that there are generally multiple stakeholder groups in a crisis, and the crisis can hit them all in different ways. If a CEO engages in termination-worthy bad behavior, that’s a crisis for the company, but it’s a different crisis for the CEO. PR people have to know which crisis they are working on.

When the really incandescent prediction market crises happen, that will be a crisis for the organizations and people directly implicated. But it might also be a big crisis for the prediction markets themselves. Will they build enough respectability to insulate themselves before that happens?

Seems like a good question for a prediction market.

I can hear my lawyer friends clenching their jaws, but hear me out. Contracts are communication. Courtrooms and arbitration hearings are communication. Demand letters are communication. And class action lawsuits are definitely communication, often written both to advance a legal argument and to generate press attention.

Here’s a fun example: "Le, Lynch, Baker and Wilson v. McDonalds Corporation.” The complaint is entertaining, and the first two paragraphs set things up better than any summary I could write:

1. “The McRib is back!” is a phrase recognized across the United States, stirring excitement among McDonald’s customers eager for the limited-time sandwich offering. For decades, McDonald’s has cultivated a sense of anticipation around the McRib, leveraging its scarcity to drive sales across its many locations. Fans eagerly await each return, trusting that the sandwich they’re biting into is exactly what the name implies: a sandwich crafted using pork “rib” meat, which is prized by consumers for its high fat content and rich flavor.

2. The reality, however, is far from what McDonald’s advertising and branding suggest. Despite its name and distinctive shape—its meat patty has been deliberately crafted to resemble a rack of pork ribs—the McRib does not contain any actual pork rib meat at all.

The italics are in the original, just to make sure you get it.

If the McRib isn’t rib meat, what is it? I’m glad you asked, and so are the lawyers who filed the suit!

Instead, [the McRib’s] meat patty is reconstructed using ground-up portions of lower-grade pork products such as, interalia, pork shoulder, heart, tripe, and scalded stomach.

“You sold people a sandwich marketed as a ‘McRib’ that contained no rib meat” isn’t Love Canal-level on the harm-o-meter, so the gross-out line is there as a lure for the press and social media posters. Did it work? You bet it did! Here’s the New York Post:

The primary ingredient of the sandwich, which has found a cult following thanks in part to its on-again, off-again status on McDonald’s menu, is restructured pork composed of parts like shoulder, heart, tripe and scalded stomach, the complaint alleges.

The alleged ingredients also get repeated by CBS Chicago, NBC Chicago, USA Today, MSN and Newsweek, among others. I love that the Newsweek article has a breathless, Axios-style “Why It Matters” section for a sandwich lawsuit. But why settle for that when you can read the actual Axios article? Naturally, someone on Bluesky invoked Upton Sinclair’s gross-out labor classic, The Jungle:

McDonalds is headquartered in Chicago, which probably explains the prominence of Chicago media in the early coverage. I assume the plaintiff’s lawyers shopped the complaint around to the media. I would! The idea is to put reputation pressure on McDonalds, presumably to encourage a settlement. The nasty ingredients add a little zest to what is otherwise a pretty low-stakes complaint, “Why It Matters” notwithstanding.

It’s interesting to follow the sourcing on the organ meat allegation in the complaint. The footnote points to a Chicago Magazine article from 2011 about the invention of the McRib that is not especially negative. The part that invokes the specific organ meats is drawn from a 2011 book about processed meat in general. Here’s the quote from the book, as reproduced in the Chicago Magazine article:

“Most people would be extremely unhappy if they were served heart or tongue on a plate,” he observed. “But flaked into a restructured product it loses its identity. Such products as tripe, heart, and scalded stomachs are high in protein, completely edible, wholesome, and nutritious, and most are already used in sausage without objection.” Pork patties could be shaped into any form and marketed in restaurants or for airlines, solving a secondary problem of irregular portion size of cuts such as pork chops. In 1981 McDonald’s introduced a boneless pork sandwich of chunked and formed meat called the McRib, developed in part through check-off funds [micro-donations from pork producers] from the NPPC [National Pork Producers Council]. It was not as popular as the McNugget, introduced in 1983, would be, even though both products were composed of unmarketable parts of the animal (skin and dark meat in the McNugget). The McNugget, however, benefited from positive consumer associations with chicken, even though it had none of the “healthy” attributes people associated with poultry.

The “he” in the first sentence above—the source of the list of organ meats—is a Mr. Roger Mandigo, who is described by Chicago Magazine as, “a longtime prof at [the University of Nebraska, Lincoln] a recent inductee into the Meat Industry Hall of Fame and an innovator in restructured meat products.”

I did not know there was a Meat Industry Hall of Fame. Now I do, and so do you! If you’re interested, this year’s induction ceremony is on January 26th, at the Georgia World Congress Center, and there is (barely) still time to RSVP. Please go, and send me a report!

More relevantly, the quote above states that “tripe, heart, and scalded stomachs” are commonly used in processed meats. It also notes that the McRib is “composed of unmarketable parts of the animal.” It does not specifically state that tripe, heart, and scalded stomachs are in the McRib. They might be, but we don’t know that from the citation in the lawsuit. But the implication was enough for the plaintiff’s lawyers to run with.

I don’t know if that will matter legally, but it was great PR, because the press couldn’t resist the ick! factor. The media all used some form of “the lawsuit alleges” in their articles because they have their own lawyers looking over their copy. It’s lawyers all the way down.

McDonalds’ statement on the issue is what I would call principles-focused, and it doesn’t exactly refute the list:

“We’re committed to using real, quality ingredients across our entire menu,” McDonald’s USA wrote. “Our fan-favorite McRib sandwich is made with 100% pork sourced from farmers and suppliers across the U.S. We’ve always been transparent about our ingredients so guests can make the right choice for them.”

Does the USDA definition of “pork” include organ meats? Unclear! And perhaps context-specific. There is apparently some distinction between “pork” and “pork products” or “byproducts.” But I promise you that McDonalds’ lawyers signed off that “100% pork” formulation.

The lawsuit’s point isn’t that it is intrinsically wrong to sell someone a pig-innard sandwich. The lawsuit’s point is that it’s deceptive and harmful to (allegedly) market a (by implication, nasty) pig-innard sandwich as a scrumptious pork rib-meat sandwich. Presumably, if McDonalds marketed it as something like McChitlin Deluxe, that would be fine. To set this up, the complaint asserts that pork rib meat is a premium cut:

“Pork rib meat is derived from the muscle and fat found on a pig’s rib cage. The two main types of pork rib meat are spare ribs—thick, juicy cuts from the bottom of the rib cage—and baby back ribs—leaner but tender cuts cut from the top portion of the rib cage. Both are considered “premium” cuts of pork that command higher prices to match.”

More on “premium” later! Also, this bit is entertaining:

“Additionally, consumer confusion surrounding the true contents of the McRib is exacerbated by McDonald’s efforts to promote the McRib as a special, limited-time item. This cycle of sporadic availability creates a sense of urgency that discourages deep consumer scrutiny and deters sustained discussion or scrutiny into its actual ingredients, which further bolsters the longevity of consumer misconceptions regarding the sandwiches’ rib meat content.”

Consumers will be in such a hurry to get their limited-time McRibs that they’ll forego the thorough and diligent research that might otherwise lead them to discover the true composition of the sandwich! The plaintiffs lawyers have more faith in the rigor of the American consumer than I do.

Marketing the unmarketable meat

What’s desirable meat and what’s undesirable—or “unmarketable”—is a cultural artifact. When Roger Mandigo says, “Most people would be extremely unhappy if they were served heart or tongue on a plate,” I think he means most white Americans would be unhappy.

My wife is Singaporean and one of her favorite meals is Teochew kway chap, which is all of these same pig parts in soup form. Our local Chinese supermarket sells pig bung (sphincter), as well as kidneys, brains and many other unglamorous parts. So do the carnicerias in my heavily latino neighborhood.

The role of meat in national diet is also a cultural and political creation, as is apparent from the masculinization of red meat consumption in America. Mandigo, ever the advocate for processed and restructured meat products, notes that miscellaneous organs and scraps are acceptable even to the organ-averse when made into sausage.1

These perceptions evolve over time. Pork ribs might be a premium cut today, as the complaint asserts, but they were originally cast-offs, harder to ship and sell than the premium cuts of the time. There is a long tradition of marginal foods being elevated into gourmet treats.

The complaint against McDonalds wants to have it both ways. The harm it asserts is not that consumers were placed at physical risk, but that they overpaid by a couple of bucks for an allegedly deceptively advertised sandwich. But it relied on disgust and implied unwholesomeness to drive publicity. And it worked! I am unqualified to assess the legal strategy, but the PR strategy was effective.

I doubt it will make much difference to McDonalds in the long run. The McRib has been around for more than forty years. I don’t know if McDonalds has been sued over it before, but it has had many prior bouts of bad press. Here’s a story from just over a year ago. Back in 2014, McDonalds hired former “Mythbusters” cast member Grant Imahara for a video designed to de-mystify the McRib. There is a long-running conspiracy theory that the McRib’s unpredictable sales are designed to take advantage of changes in pork prices. And the Simpsons poked fun at the McRib more than 20 years ago, with the Krusty Burger Ribwich.

Arguably, the McRib itself is a kind of PR masterpiece. It keeps on generating press. And it keeps on selling. You can’t go wrong with mystery meat in sugary sauce! But it would be fun if a McRib scandal made it to trial. Especially a criminal trial! Picture the scene in the courtroom:

Prosecutor: And this sandwich you ate, you were led to believe it was premium pork rib meat?

Witness: Yes. I was promised thick, juicy cuts.

Prosecutor: And what was it actually?

Witness: It…it was…[breaks down sobbing]

Prosecutor: [Gently] Take your time.

Witness: [Resolve stiffening] It was pork shoulder, heart, tripe, and scalded stomach.

Audience in gallery: [Gasps in horror, except my wife, who looks intrigued]

Prosecutor: And is the person who perpetrated this outrage here in the courtroom?

Witness: [Jabs a finger at Ronald McDonald, seated at the defendant’s table] It was him!

Prosecutor: We rest our case

Judge: [Scowling at Ronald] You’ll burn for this, clown.

[Law and Order noise]

Justice is served with your choice of BBQ, Spicy Sichuan or Honey Mustard sauce.

It’s been getting harder to pee.

It’s not that I can’t pee. That would be time to rush for the emergency room and get catheterized, something that (so far) I have not had to do. But for several years the stream has been getting thinner. There is also turbulence in what should be—forgive me for this—a smooth, laminar flow.

I’m told that this is a normal part of male aging. The prostate enlarges. The urethra is compressed. Take it in stride, like hair growing from your ears or junk mail from the AARP. Fair. I’m pushing 60 and I count myself lucky that, other than back pain, I haven’t had to manage chronic health issues. It couldn’t last forever.

Reduced flow has led to some embarrassing moments. Once this happened at Changi Airport in Singapore as I was waiting with my family to board a 15 hour flight back to the U.S., an awkward moment to low-key wet yourself. I’ll often sit to pee if that is option. Most men’s bathrooms at public venues have a high urinal-to-stall ratio, so this can be a pain. I know that women have lived with this inconvenience since the Greeks invented theater 2500 years ago. But also, as you’ve suspected, men are filthy.

I like to think that I am an intellectual, above comparing myself to other men in superficial ways. But when I’m squeezing out a thin stream and the guy one stall over sounds like he’s emptying a margarita pitcher into the bowl, I can’t help but think, fucking large-bore show-off, I hope you get hit by a Cybertruck and dragged three blocks before the driver notices. Uncharitable, I know.

In one of the most traumatizing rituals of American life, I recently had to switch health insurers. For thirteen years I’d been with an HMO, where the insurer is also the provider and all the costs are internalized, so you are made to go through elaborate rituals and attestations before you can see a specialist. This saves money for the HMO and you’re never going to get a surprise bill, but the failure mode is death because they missed a problem.

I had raised the slow cinching of my prostate with two doctors at the HMO a few years ago. Neither felt it was worth escalation, which was probably correct at the time, though I did get my inaugural digital rectal exam. It was quicker and less mortifying than I had feared. Societies have all sorts of rituals for welcoming young men into adulthood, from the bar-mitzvahs of Brooklyn to the bullet ants of the Satere-Mawé. But we all get ushered into old age with a finger up the ass.

My wife thinks this is hilarious. When I sulked about it, she reminded me that I haven’t had a lifetime of pelvic exams and mammograms. “At least you don’t get the speculum,” she said. Implied: you wuss.

My new health plan is a standard PPO where everything is fee-for-service and the model is that providers use the patient to wring maximum billings out of the insurer. This makes it much easier to see a specialist, but the failure mode is a surprise bill that forces you to liquidate your house. Is that better than the HMO failure mode of death? How much is your house worth?

My primary care now comes through Amazon OneMedical because I traded my immortal soul to Jeff Bezos at a crossroads in Clarksville, Mississippi in return for free one-day shipping of USB cables. I got on a zoom call with the OneMedical GP and said, “I need to see a urologist.” She said, “sure,” ordered some preliminary tests and made the referral to UCSF in the system. Amazon now knows both that I own an expensive electric guitar and that I have a bad prostate. It does not take billions of dollars of AI infrastructure to profile me.

Breaking into a medical practice as a new patient is like breaking into show business. There is lots of rejection along the way, and eventually someone will grope you. Instead of sending headshots, I left increasingly pleading voice mails for two weeks. I had finally given up and sent a despairing email to OneMedical when the UCSF clinic called me back.

The clinic was in a strip mall in Redwood Shores, a spit of Bayshore landfill that supports liminal office parks and canal-side subdivisions hammered into grim uniformity by HOA Stalinists. “My urologist is in Redwood Shores” is among the least surprising combination of words possible in the English language.

I checked in at the clinic and took my place in the waiting room among the old and infirm. “I am not like them,” I thought to myself, warding off the specter of age. “Are you sure?” my prostate whispered to me. If you are having an inner dialogue with your prostate in a clinic waiting room in Redwood Shores, you are among your people.

The urologist, Dr. Ahn, was congenial, youthful, and radiated big top-of-his-class energy. I bet his prostate is tip-top. He looked at the results of the tests that OneMedical had ordered and said all looked good. He gave me the finger (medically speaking) and detected nothing alarming. Then he had me urinate. This was difficult because I had no urge to go at the time but I wrung about 50 milliliters into a specimen toilet sternly labeled, “Do not use this toilet unless directed by a doctor or nurse.” Fuck you, toilet, I’m authorized.

Dr. Ahn then did an ultrasound of my bladder and said there was still about 250ml of liquid in it. For the metrically challenged, that’s a half pint. Like, I could pee, and still have two-thirds of a can of Coke sloshing around in there. But it explained a lot, including my ride-or-die commitment to aisle seats on my frequent trans-Pacific flights. Can’t be climbing over someone once an hour to pee, unless you want to be beaten to death with a rolled-up copy of the China Airlines duty free catalog, an embarrassing way to die.

“The next step would be medication to open up the prostate,” doctor Ahn said.

Ah, I thought, this is it. The beginning of the medicine chest full of prescriptions.

The truth is, I’ve been proud of making it this far without needing any regular medication. This is obviously dumb. People have medications for all sorts of reasons at all sorts of ages. Genetics, luck and relative wealth probably have more to do with it than virtue.

But it did feel virtuous, especially in a country awash in pharma advertising. Ask your doctor about…[a weightless collection of vowels that sounds like a Polynesian god or an angular set of late-alphabet consonants that looks like a Polish surname by way of Jupiter]. Chase with a list of contra-indications and body horror side-effects speed-read by a livestock auctioneer. Don’t take Oowoovu if you drink water. Consult your doctor if you bleed from the eyes for more than twelve days.

But what was I expecting? Medication was the least bad outcome. Like, did I think the doctor was going to suspend a crystal over my groin and pronounce my prostate chakra re-aligned? Not in Redwood fucking Shores. Your chakras wouldn’t be caught dead there.

The doctor and I compromised. I’ll go back to the clinic in April for another ultrasound, this time starting with a fuller bladder for a better baseline to assess my “ability to evacuate.” But I already know the outcome. I’m just basking in my medication-free status for another three months.

It’s weird getting old. Objectively, I’m fortunate and life is good. But the evidence is seeping through the chinks in my armor of denial. A few months ago, I was fumbling with the settings in Discord, the complicated messaging platform beloved of Zoomers. My son eased me aside and dealt with it so we could get back to gaming. Oh shit, I thought, it’s happening to me.

I can’t be obsolete! I work in Silicon Valley, which has usurped Hollywood as ground zero for America’s cult of youth. If I were one of the Valley’s ghoulish Transhumanist billionaires, I would start eyeing my son’s blood plasma. But he’s working on his college applications and I don’t want to screw that up by siphoning off his youthful essence like Temu Nosferatu.

Anyway, I’m not searching for immortality. I just want to be able to pee with abandon, like I did in the old days. That’s the real fountain of youth.

Note: For Christmas dinner this year, my sister in law, who was hosting, asked everyone to give a creative performance. I read this in front of everyone, including the teenagers. I have seldom felt so figuratively naked. In honor of that experience, I have included an audio version. Happy New Year to all readers!

The CEO of software company Astronomer, Andy Byron, and the head of human resources, Kristin Cabot, were caught in a suggestive embrace by the “kiss cam” at a Coldplay concert. Both of them radiated such instantaneous and intense shame that the video became a TikTok sensation and both subsequently left the company.

I wrote about the PR implications in a post called “The Kiss-Cam of Annihilation.” This was about why the implied affair was a reputational problem for Astronomer, and also an opportunity to have a go at Coldplay because I am a hater. No regrets. I have my own musical shame.

Five months later, Cabot has launched a rehabilitation tour with simultaneous profiles in the New York Times and the U.K. newspaper The Times.

Once upon a time, if you’d been disgraced, you might have re-emerged with a soulful TED talk that you’d deliver right after Malcom Gladwell explained something counterintuitive about spaghetti sauce. Today, the New York Times, America’s sole surviving general-interest daily, is platform of choice for post-crisis reputation laundering. Wait a graceful interval, and then make yourself available for a (hopefully) soft-focus profile.

Former New York Magazine political journalist Olivia Nuzzi took this approach last September, with a 3000 word Style section profile that was one part rehabilitation for her sexting affair with RFK, Jr. and one part memoir launch. Nuzzi’s campaign incinerated after jilted fiancé Ryan Lizza—2025 finalist for the Nobel prize for being That Fucking Guy—nuked her with a tell-all Substack on the eve of her book release. Lesson: for a rehabilitation campaign, there needs to be no more dirty laundry left to air. Especially if there is someone out there who is motivated to air it. Also, it helps if the memoir is not apparently 100,000 words of weapons-grade cringe.

We Can Rehabilitate You For Wholesale

I note that women are often the ones having to dig out in these situations. Cabot, Nuzzi, Amber Heard (whom I wrote about a year ago). What Cabot has going for her is that, unlike Nuzzi and Heard, she doesn’t seem to be in open reputational warfare or litigation with her partner in viral infamy. Byron has so far kept his head down.

Still, the Internet does love to burn women at the stake. Bluesky, which I use as methadone for my long-standing Twitter addiction, went feral on Nuzzi.1

But could one use a viral shaming as a fulcrum for changing the narrative? Look at the headline of the New York Times profile of Cabot in the Bluesky post above. “The Ritual Shaming of the Woman at the Woman the Coldplay Concert.” It centers the reaction to the scandal. When I saw the headline and photo, I immediately thought, “She’s hired a communications pro and this a strategy.” And the story is transparent about that:

Cabot hired a communications consultant to help her tell her story while minimizing further damage to herself and the people she loves — a high-wire act that felt, in her presence, at times anguishing and at times too pat.

Nothing wrong with that! I’m in favor of hiring communications pros if you have to do tricky reputational recovery work. It’s not typical for the comms pro to come out from behind the curtain. More on that later.

The story pays off the promise of the headline in the first few paragraphs, which are all about the grim abuse Cabot suffered after the scandal. It’s narratively useful. One cannot help but sympathize with her for what she and her children (mentioned in the first graf) went through.

Now that we’re all sympathizing, a mix of exculpation and mea culpa in the first big quote:

[Cabot] was not in a sexual relationship with her boss [Andy Byron], she said. Before that night, they had never even kissed.

“I made a bad decision and had a couple of High Noons and danced and acted inappropriately with my boss. And it’s not nothing. And I took accountability and I gave up my career for that. That’s the price I chose to pay,” she said. “I want my kids to know that you can make mistakes, and you can really screw up. But you don’t have to be threatened to be killed for them.”

That’s good messaging. I made a bad decision. I took accountability. A lesson for my kids. The abuse was disproportionate. Also, I did not know what a High Noon was. Apparently, it’s tequila, Campari and grapefruit juice. Two of those and I would be in jail or intensive care. Or both.

The next section of the story details how the relationship between Cabot and Byron came about. It’s humanizing and there are more key messages. The first one is that both Cabot and Byron were separated from their spouses. Read: this wasn’t infidelity. Then there is this, in which I have bolded the load-bearing sentence:

For Cabot, the shared acknowledgment “sort of strengthened our connection,” she said, and a close working relationship grew even closer. At work, they shared confidences and made each other laugh, and for Cabot “big feelings” grew fast. She began to allow herself to imagine the romantic possibilities, though she knew she couldn’t keep reporting to Byron if the relationship progressed. She loved her job, and with two kids and a large, extended family of stepparents and siblings, she was incredibly busy. “I didn’t really get too carried away because he’s my boss,” she said.

There is an explicit and implicit message here. The explicit message is that she was well aware of the ethical line she was crossing and already considering how to manage it appropriately. The implicit message is that events got away from her before she could follow through on that plan. Read: I know the expectations for my job.

Cabot’s description of the moment she and Byron were caught on the kiss-cam also carries a message:

“I was so embarrassed and so horrified,” she said. “I’m the head of H.R. and [Byron’s] the C.E.O. It’s, like, so cliché and so bad.” Cabot and Byron fled back to the bar. “We both just sat there with our heads in our hands, like, ‘What just happened?’” Even before leaving the stadium, they began to discuss how to manage their public transgression. “And the initial conversation was, ‘We have to tell the board.’”

Again acknowledging the professional transgression, and also asserting that she and Byron proactively disclosed the situation to Astronomer’s board of directors. Later, the article says that following their investigation Astronomer asked Cabot to return to her role. Byron had already resigned, and Cabot said she did not feel she could return while she was “a laughing stock.” Astronomer declined to comment, so we have to take her word for it, but it aligns with her later departure from Astronomer. Also, it’s a positively framed way of saying, “I wasn’t fired.”

The last part of the article gets into detail on the brutal public shaming and harassment directed at Cabot. There is also one more section of critical messaging:

Cabot wants to rebut the assumption that she slept her way to the top. She has worked from the age of 13, having decided that she never wanted to depend financially on a man or worry, as her mother did, about a heating bill. When she divorced her first husband, the father of her children, in 2018, and he became unemployed, “I supported my family entirely on my own, and I was able to keep my kids in incredibly fantastic schools and live in a comfy, warm house,” she said. “I have never been more proud of anything in my entire life.”

“I spent so much of my career pulling men’s hands off my ass,” she continued, so the notion that she earned her place in the C-suite because she was “sleeping around,” as she put it, infuriates her. As she begins to contemplate how she will return to work, she worries about how #coldplaygate will influence how anyone in a hiring position will view her. The reputational damage has been extreme.

One can see this as a general, feminist message. I know how women are judged. I got where I was on grit and talent. I also see another implicit message here, directed at future employers. If you reject me because of this situation, you’re the problem.

So, 3500 words, several glamorous photos, and these key messages:

• Kristin Cabot is a three-dimensional human being, not an Internet caricature.

• Her relationship with Andy Byron was sincere and morally appropriate.

• She recognized the professional ethical implications of the relationship and was already taking steps to address them.

• She has been disproportionately punished and deserves sympathy.

• She is a professional who earned her position.

Was it effective?

I think so! I read this story as a comms pro in analytical mode. I came away with sympathy for Cabot, and…rooting for her? Well played! Also, just because something is a calculated PR strategy doesn’t mean it is false. Our work is to look at the totality of a situation, consider the PR objectives, and craft a story that is rooted in truth but also calibrated to achieve our goals.

Out From Behind the Curtain

Cabot’s publicist, the fabulously named Dini von Mueffling, seems to feel good about how this profile landed. Five days after the New York Times profile, there was a “behind the scenes” piece in comms trade PR Week with the long headline, ‘You’ve definitely not seen the last of Kristin Cabot’: Dini von Mueffling on representing the woman in the Coldplay kiss-cam video.”

The story summarizes the comms strategy:

“What we saw is that it never ended and that anytime anybody sneezed the media would report on it again,” von Mueffling said of the subsequent coverage of Cabot resigning and later filing for divorce. “It became clear that it was not going to go away and that the portrait that had been portrayed of her was going to stay that way unless she did something about it.”

…

In line with the NYT feature, von Mueffling’s strategy for Cabot includes tackling the issue head on to regain her “stellar reputation” of an in-demand executive that she had prior to transitioning from a private to public figure quite literally overnight.

“Going silent frequently makes the problem worse. The media has a job to do and opening the lines of communication to them is really important,” von Mueffling said.

Who might help you open those lines of communication? Dini von Mueffling! But I agree with the doctrine. If you’re not telling your own story, others will tell it, probably in ways you don’t like.

The rest is a Q&A with Cabot herself on why she hired PR counsel and how it worked out. It’s a big endorsement of von Mueffling. Coming out with a trade piece like this five days after the profile landed seems aggressively promotional. But von Mueffling is an independent publicist who has to kill what she eats, while I’m a corporate PR man who works in the bosoms of big companies. I get a paycheck even on quiet weeks, and when my name is in the paper it usually means something has gone wrong.

I wonder if participating in this story was part of an in-kind deal between Cabot and von Mueffling. Honestly, for 10% off the fees it’s probably worth an email Q&A saying how great your publicist was. Or maybe she’s just thrilled with what looks like a big win.

Will that bear out in the long-term? Podcaster Michael Hobbes posted a thread on Bluesky theorizing that the article would attract more abuse for Cabot. His theory was immediately validated in the mentions. It’s worth a read to see how people reacted. Also, Hobbes is all-time Internet warrior.2

As a corporate PR man, when I wrote my original post I focused on the implications for Astronomer. And on making fun of Coldplay. A relationship between the CEO and the head of HR at any professionally managed company is bad. From a corporate reputation perspective, it was correct for the company to sever the relationships and move on. Ultimately, Cabot and Byron made a serious professional mistake.

But Cabot is a real person, not an Internet caricature. Does she deserve forgiveness for the relationship? Yes! Does she deserve another chance professionally? I think so, though any company that hires her will have to have some spine.

Does she deserve redemption for Coldplay?

Absolutely not. That one sticks to you for life.

But when I look at old photographs of them together I see it. She’s the American anglophile abroad in London, waif-slim in a peacoat and ‘60s bangs. He’s raffish and good looking, a Hampstead rebel, pouting and restless. They look beautiful and intense, youth on the threshold of a new era.

They came to San Francisco in the late sixties, had two kids while still in their early twenties, me and my younger brother, and then it all fell apart. Then it fell together again for one more kid, my youngest brother. Then it all fell apart again in 1975 or 76, this time for good. My mom moved down to Palo Alto with my brothers. But my parents wanted to keep me in the same school I’d been going to, so I moved into my dad’s recently acquired ramshackle Victorian in the Castro.

In the late ‘70s, the school bus used to drop me off at 17th and Clayton, at the top of the hill between Cole Valley and the Castro. I would walk down 17th Street to Castro, and then up Castro to Liberty Street, where my dad’s house was. By then, the Castro had supplanted Polk Street as the epicenter of late ‘70s transgressive gay culture, and my walk took me right through the heart of it. This was the era of leather boys in assless chaps and chains, spilling out of the Phoenix bar and onto the sidewalk. I used to go into Mainline Gifts, next door, because they had an R2D2 cookie jar I was infatuated with. They also sold marzipan cakes shaped like giant dicks out of their glass deli case. That was the Castro in the late ‘70s. Also, I like marzipan. Make of that what you will.

A great thing about being a kid is that the neighborhood is just the neighborhood. I took the weirdness for granted, and nobody ever hassled me. But behind the good times and sex a contagion was lurking, about to devastate the generation of young men I walked past every afternoon.

In 1981 I moved down to my mom’s house in Palo Alto for high school. Meanwhile, my dad was finishing his PhD in epidemiology at Berkeley. I didn’t think much about AIDS until I got to UC Santa Cruz in September, 1985. That was the month President Reagan first mentioned AIDS, in a press conference, but it was the safe sex lecture from the gay resident assistant of my dorm hall and the AIDS prevention posters on every billboard that made an impression on me. I was in approximately zero danger of being sexually active my freshman year, my efforts notwithstanding. but it was hard to miss the message. The first anti-retroviral treatment was a couple of years off and AIDS was still considered a long-fuse death sentence.

Back in San Francisco, my dad had been thinking of little but AIDS since 1982. He’d emerged from his Berkeley PhD program into the teeth of the terrifying, new disease and been swept into the complicated epidemiological investigation and even more complicated San Francisco city politics. It was a defining moment in the city’s modern history.

For the last year, my dad, Andrew, has been publishing Ward 86: An Epidemiologist in the AIDS Epidemic on Substack. This is his memoir of the emergence of AIDS in San Francisco and the politically fraught efforts to understand and control a terrifying, novel disease that was devastating the gay community. Ward 86 was the AIDS ward at San Francisco General Hospital, where my dad spent much of his career. He’s published twelve chapters so far, and it is both a wonderful memoir of his early career and a window into the terrible pandemic of the 1980s.

Parents’ inner lives can be inscrutable to children. Like the neighborhood, their work is a thing you take for granted. I’d experienced my parents’ vulnerability from their fights and separation, but I knew little of their professional lives, fears or ambitions. Ultimately, they both became successful academics and researchers. But they each had to find their way there.

My dad’s memoir made me think about what it means to build a career on the back of a tragedy. I suppose that’s an occupational risk for epidemiologists, just as it is for crisis comms people. Our work is often based on someone else’s misfortune. It’s clear that my dad felt deeply what was happening around him, and experienced the toll first hand as people he knew died. But, as a newly graduated epidemiologist, the emergence of AIDS in his literal backyard was also an opportunity for him to establish himself professionally. He would spend more than 30 years at UCSF and go on to work on tuberculosis in the San Francisco homeless population, among other things.

Reading Ward 86 is a window into what my father was going through as he tried to establish his career in the midst of AIDS, grapple with the stress of the epidemic, and stay connected to me and my brothers. He was a straight man—an outsider—trying to access a traumatized gay community at a time when being gay was widely stigmatized and when many Americans were happy to link AIDS to moral taint.

Along with using morality as a cudgel, Americans are world champions at stuffing things into the memory hole. We did it with Covid, and that was less than six years ago. I kept a journal of the early Covid months, and also reviewed all my Covid-era work emails a couple of years ago when I wrote an article about doing comms during the early pandemic. Revisiting these is a reminder that we were collectively terrified. Today it feels distant and hazy, long since reduced to an annual vaccination (for some of us) and political rhetoric divorced from actual human cost.

It’s been forty years since the peak of AIDS, and for the last thirty HAART has made it a manageable condition. It’s easy, even seductive, to forget how scary and traumatizing AIDS was in the early days. My dad has excavated all of that from the memory hole with a personal journey back to those raw days.

I am an interested party, but you don’t have to be Andrew Moss’ son to appreciate Ward 86. I recommend it to anyone interested in AIDS, epidemiology, the recent history of San Francisco, or just good memoir. If you’ve read other books from that era, you’ll see characters you know, but from different directions.

If there is a genetic component to writing, I get it from my dad. But we are different kinds of writers. My dad is open and vulnerable, transparent about his fears and hopes. I’m guarded and remote and use humor as a shield. I’ve made a living from writing proficiency, but I’m reluctant to reveal myself. Maybe that is a legacy of the trauma of the divorce. Or maybe it’s just me. I remember being in a car with my dad when I was in my mid 20s and him chiding me for being uncommunicative. Fair. I’m wrestling with a memoir project myself, and I’ve tried to take a lesson from this. This blog is a convenient way to avoid working on the thornier parts of my own memoir.

I moved back to San Francisco in 1990 and rented the basement apartment in my dad’s house while I was in grad school at SF State. It was already a different era. The Castro was still the gay neighborhood, but the freakier edges had long since been sanded smooth by mortality, time and gentrification. The outrageous young men I’d walked through in my childhood were long gone, dead or aged out of such things.

For a while I sublet a room to a young gay man named Mike who had moved down from Seattle to experience the legendary center of gay culture. He moved home after six months, telling me it wasn’t what he expected, and he hadn’t found whatever it was he was looking for.

Maybe it was already too late.

Ward 86 - Chapters so far:

• Chapter 1: An Epidemiologist in the AIDS Epidemic

• Chapter 2: Strange Ways of the Oncologists

• Chapter 3: Kaposi’s Sarcoma Saved me

• Chapter 4: Into the Castro

• Chapter 5: Research

• Chapter 6: From a Symptom Diary

• Chapter 7: My Data

• Chapter 8: From an AIDS Diary

• Chapter 9: Conrad

• Chapter 10: In the Shilts Archive

• Chapter 11: The Wonderful City

• Chapter 12: Jimmy

More to come!

I was eleven in 1979 when my dad took me to see Ridley Scott’s Alien at the Geneva Drive-In, in South San Francisco. I watched from the back seat of the car, peeking over the front seats and retreating to the safety of the footwell when things got too intense. I saw about half the movie, by which I mean about half of the screen at any given moment.

46 years and endless sequels later, we forget how revolutionary the alien was as a cinema monster. The face hugger. The elongated head, ooze and dento-phallic jaws of the final form. It was a psychosexual nightmare rendered in latex and KY Jelly.

Alien fucked up my head for years. Well into adulthood, if I was stressed out about something the alien would stalk my nightmares. At some point I started kicking its ass and it fucked off from my dreams, to be replaced by other stress proxies, like the nightmare I had last week where I couldn’t navigate Spotify. I preferred the monsters.

Alien is my favorite movie of all time. I still have the complete set of trading cards, two copies of the Heavy Metal magazine comic adaptation of the movie, a vinyl of the original soundtrack, and the photo book of the film. Relics of me, age 11.

It is a truism that most science fiction is about the present, using fantasy and extrapolation to tell stories about contemporary society. Alien takes place on a spaceship, but it’s a 1970s labor movie from the cinematic era of Norma Rae, Blue Collar and F.I.S.T. Seven schlubby, grease-stained astronauts fly a grimy, long-haul space tug while dealing with contractual issues and an employer so cold and remote that it is only referred as “the Company.”1 The first intelligible dialogue in the movie is the engineers bitching about their poor pay relative to the other, whiter-collared crew members.

The most constant and interesting relationship in the Alien universe is that between “the Company”, properly the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, and the alien. The Company’s desire to possess the alien is a factor in Alien, Aliens, Alien III, Prometheus (sort of ), Alien Romulus, and Noah Hawley’s recent series, Alien: Earth. The Company is the dog forever chasing a drooling, toothy car. Humans, androids, innocent sheep and possibly planet Earth are casualties of that obsession.

The Company’s want is eternal, but the Company itself evolves through the franchise to reflect contemporary anxieties. In the original movie, it’s a distant and abusive trucking company. In 1986, James Cameron released the first and still the best sequel, Aliens, awash in Reagan-era military hubris. It’s the time of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street and the financial scandals of Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky. Cameron personified the company in the character of Carter Burke, a treacherous, suit-wearing douchebag who definitely went to Harvard Business School. In a raunchier version of this movie, he would be caught snorting cocaine off of a sex worker’s tits in an airlock.

Noah Hawley’s recent Alien: Earth series belongs to our era of giant tech companies, AI hype and incomprehensibly wealthy and weird Silicon Valley founder-prophets. The two companies in the show, Prodigy and old friends Weyland-Yutani, are globe-spanning cyberpunk megacorporations that rule huge chunks of the planet. The founder of Prodigy is an extreme caricature of a youthful, sociopathic tech bro, and is named “Boy Kavalier.” This is so on-the-nose that only an auteur showrunner like Hawley could get away with it.

Alien: Earth is pretty good if you’re into Alien stuff. It avoids obvious traps and introduces some fun new creatures as well as an original take on the androids that are another strand of franchise connective tissue.

But portraying the corporations as cartoon supervillain organizations is boring. I get that it is a product of how multi-trillion dollar tech companies are now seen, and the normal escalatory path of all franchises as the stakes go ever upward. Fifty years after the original, the Company can’t just be callous and remote. It has to be epochally, world-threateningly, mustache-twirlingly villainous.

My work has taught me a few things about big companies. They are principally financial actors that operate in a system where financial outcomes are paramount. They are complicated stacks of bureaucracy, incentive systems and ingrained culture that emerge from the financial imperatives. And, most interesting for the purposes of this blog, companies and executives tell themselves stories about why they are virtuous.

There is a saying that every villain is the hero of their own movie. No company thinks it is evil. Companies don’t advertise on LinkedIn by saying, “We’re extremely evil. Join us and unleash your personal evil!” That’s why “mustache-twirling” is a condemnation of creativity. It means a cartoon villain who is evil for the sake of evil—Snidely Whiplash—rather than operating with complex and interesting motivations and beliefs.

You don’t have to render corporations and CEOs accurately for the sake of drama. Sometimes a mustache-twirler does the job. But the recent Star Wars TV series Andor succeeded as grown-up entertainment because it ignored Darth Vader and the Emperor and focused on the motivations of the people operating in the Imperial system, all of whom believe they are doing the right thing in their individual contexts. That’s interesting, even if you think their motivations are shit!

Carter Burke’s sweaty, coked-up middle-manager energy from Aliens is more interesting than the interplanetary supervillain machinations of Boy Kavalier. Burke is recognizably human, doing the kind of dumb shit people in companies have done since companies were created. He’s sleazy and morally vacant, but he didn’t start out evil. Probably loves his mom. Has a pug in his apartment on earth, mostly because it helps him meet chicks at the dog park. But he was greedy and stupid and not as wealthy or powerful as he felt he deserved, and he followed the lure of the main chance into the abyss.

I like to imagine that the Weyland-Yutani corporation believes its own slogan, “building better worlds,” and that people who work there believe in that mission. It’s a cold and dangerous galaxy, but through advanced robotics, space travel and terraforming, the Company is helping to make it more welcoming to human beings. If, in the quest for that indisputably noble outcome, some mistakes are made, some bodies are buried, some faces are hugged by parasites, that’s the price of progress.

I’d also like to believe that the Company’s quest for the alien happened for the dumbest corporate reasons, like a soft quarter and a bad forecast. Imagine the executive committee brainstorm:

CEO: Look, we’re short of consensus revenue this quarter and we don’t have any new growth initiatives on the board. Let’s go. No bad ideas.

SVP, Terraforming: We could do custom scents for the atmospheres of the planets we’re terraforming. Like, we could offer a strawberry scented world. Or fudge brownie.

CEO [scribbling on white board]: Good. What else we got?

SVP, Robotics and Synthetic Human Systems: We’re looking at a line of synthetics with six fingers on each hand. Raise manual dexterity by 20 percent. We think it would be popular in the precision applications, medical and sex-bot lines.

CEO: I like it. More?

SVP, Defense Systems: It’s a bit of a flier, but research picked up a deep space signal that has potential. Indicates a species with possible multiple weapons applications. Needs lots of R&D, but high upside, good growth story. I think the market will like it.

CEO: Interesting. Cost of a retrieval?

SVP, Defense: Steep for a dedicated mission. But we’ve looked into it and there is a transport flight back to Earth scheduled through that sector this quarter.

SVP, Space Transportation Systems: Hang on, Ted. You’re not risking one of my commercial rigs for a bullshit biological retrieval.

SVP, Defense [enthusiastic]: That’s the beauty of it. Our analysts model some crew risk, but minimal risk to hull and cargo.

CEO: Financial implications?

CFO: Insurance will cover crew losses, especially if it’s categorized as accidental or misadventure. If the crew is diverted for regulatory reasons, like an SOS, we’re fully covered on the downside. Even hull and cargo.

CEO: SOS, huh? I like it. Give me a plan.

SVP, Terraforming [chuckling]: Glad I’m not on that ship.

General Counsel [whispering to the corporate secretary]: No need to minute this one.

Of course, this scheme ends in disaster. Continuing the thread of treating Weyland-Yutani as a normal company, and my occasional tradition of pro-bono PR for cinema villains, here is the apology post on the Weyland-Yutani corporate blog after the Nostromo is blown up with the apparent loss of all hands:

Strengthening Our Crew Safety Policies

The loss of the USCSS Nostromo and its crew was a tragedy for all of us

By Bert Schmigley, Senior Vice President of Space Transportation Systems, Weyland-Yutani Corp.

By now you will have heard the tragic news of the loss of the Weyland-Yutani towing vehicle USCSS Nostromo, along with its crew of six and one synthetic. On behalf of everyone at the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, and especially those of us in the Space Transportation Division, I extend our deepest and most heartfelt condolences to the family, friends and colleagues of the crew.

Space Transportation Systems is the critical link that connects Earth with our interstellar colonies and resources as we strive to fulfill our mission to build better worlds. No one is more dedicated to this system than the men and women who crew our ships, and who deal with the hardships of remote ports, shipboard life and long stretches of hypersleep.

Trust makes this system work. We trust that our crews will safely shuttle passengers and cargoes where they are needed. Our crews trust that we will always have their best interests and well-being at heart. When that trust is violated, the entire system suffers. In such situations, the path forward is through accountability.

Following the loss of the Nostromo, we retained the law firm Boise, Schiller and Flexner to conduct a rigorous investigation to ascertain the cause of the disaster, and identify any steps that would help us prevent such tragedies in the future. While we must keep the full report confidential for crew privacy and competitive reasons, we’re immediately implementing several of its recommendations to strengthen safety:

• Commercial spacecraft crews that lack specialist training in contact protocols and bio-safety will no longer be required to investigate transmissions that indicate possible intelligent life, and will not forfeit shares for declining such investigations. They need only log transmissions for later action by the company.

• In the interest of transparency and crew comfort, full disclosure of synthetic crew members will be required prior to any voyage.

• Commercial ships in transit will no longer be subject to re-tasking by Weyland-Yutani divisions other than Space Transport Systems.

• We have created an ethics hotline for crew members to report any situation that they feel is in violation of these policies. Weyland-Yutani Corp. maintains a strict “no retaliation” policy for whistleblowers.

• Following the investigation, Senior Vice President of Defense Systems Ted Bartholomew has been separated from the company. We thank him for his contributions.

These are just the first steps. We operate in a challenging environment and there will always be risks, but we owe our crews nothing less than our full commitment to their safety. Our mission to build better worlds is interstellar in scale, but it starts at home.

-Bert

In a realistic universe, if the company ever had got its hands on the alien it probably wouldn’t have ended all life on earth. Like many such corporate projects, it would have burned up a ton of cash, never really panned out, and been quietly shuttered after a few disappointing quarters. The alien would have been sold off to a startup that wanted something cool for their office lobby.

If that doesn’t fill you with terror, what will?

When people who don’t like Oasis find out that you do like Oasis, they will often try an intervention, like they discovered you’re in a cult where everyone wears white Skechers and signs a suicide pact. People who are musically inclined will explain that your taste is basic, and start suggesting bands that use weird time signatures and exotic modes. If I wanted to listen to King Crimson, I would just listen to King Crimson.

Plenty of Oasis’ music is simple. “Columbia” is A-D-C in a loop for five minutes. But AC/DC proved fifty years ago that there is a bottomless appetite for three-chord party rock, and I think it comes down to branding. Britpop produced a lot of interesting and thoughtful bands—Stone Roses, Suede, James, arguably Radiohead—and then there were Liam and Noel Gallagher, a two-headed wrecking-ball of surly Manchester sex-appeal.

This branding divide was captured in the short-lived but intense Oasis vs. Blur Britpop rivalry of the mid-nineties:

Blur:

• Thinking person’s Britpop band

• Sing about gender fluidity

• Rhyme “Balzac” and “Prozac”

• 7 million albums

Oasis:

• Wankers

• Concerts full of chavs

• “Fuckin’ in the Bushes”

• 75 million albums

Behold your revealed preferences.

The Gallagher brothers famously despised each other and the band broke up in acrimony in 2009, years after their creative peak. But the shimmering aura of money has magical healing properties, like an amethyst chandelier, and the brothers embarked upon a reunion tour this year.

My family and I lucked into tickets to the concert at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena last month. The Gallaghers could remember at any moment that they hate each other and tumble back into violence, so we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see them together as it might never happen again. We had a great time.

A few days after the show, I had breakfast with a guitar-playing professional contact who lives in LA. I told this person I’d been in LA for the concert and, in classic fashion, he told me in detail how much he doesn’t like Oasis. “I like the four good songs,” he said, without specifying what he thought they were, “but I can hear them in a bar.”1

As somebody who recently hated flagrantly on Coldplay, that’s fair! Music tastes are personal. There’s a cheesy, late-stage Moody Blues album that I love to this day because a friend and I listened to it while we were driving off of Mount Lassen at sunset in his RX-7 when we were nineteen years old.

I told my companion that I’d enjoyed the show and he asked me what I’d liked about it.

I had to think about it a bit to get past the prosaic. (“It was a good mix…”) One thing that stood out was how enthusiastic the crowd was. Many had waited seventeen years since Oasis’ last tour, and acted like it, greeting every song with a roar, dancing and lofting a cloud of ballistic beer cups for every big hit. I said that I had enjoyed that the show was a giant, collective experience.

“So were the Nuremberg rallies,” he replied.

I’m sorry, the what?

This is the Oasis effect in action. I bet if I’d told my companion I’d been to see Taylor Swift, and 90,000 Swifties were really into it, the response would not have been, “Oh, just like Nuremberg!”2

But, as a student of propaganda, I found it interesting that Nuremberg was thing that had leaped into his mind. The Nuremberg Nazi party rallies were nearly a century ago, and there are many more recent spooky-crowd references, including a colossal and widely covered Chinese military parade just three days before the Oasis concert. But the imagery of Nuremberg is iconic of fascism to this day. For that, blame director Leni Riefenstahl and her film of the 1934 Nazi Party Congress, Triumph of the Will.

Riefenstahl was a ghoulish propagandist, but a talented and innovative filmmaker. She shot four days worth of rallies and edited them into two hours of epically scaled images designed to sell the inevitability of Nazism and equate Adolf Hitler with the party, the army and the nation.

Riefenstahl’s film-making and Nazi architect Albert Speer’s vast production design created an enduring visual language for totalitarianism: monumental stages and sets, Hitler as an Olympian figure, the swastika as religious symbol, the masses, the torch rallies, the military parades. Ninety years later, these are still the tropes of mid-century fascist imagery. Riefenstahl walked in 1934 so a bunch of chuds with tiki torches could walk more stupidly in Charlottesville in 2017.

Beyond being fetishized by neo-Nazis in polo shirts, these tropes are constantly recycled as pop-culture signaling mechanisms. When modern film makers—especially in science fiction and fantasy—want to signal “these are bad guys,” they often use imagery that nods to Triumph of the Will. An on-the-nose example from Star Wars: The Force Awakens:

Star Wars has always been pretty out front about this. You can see it through the eras.

1976: Star Wars

Producer: And how do we show that the Empire is evil?

George Lucas: We’ll make them look like Nazis. We’ll call the soldiers “Stormtroopers.” They’ll blow up a planet. Also the main bad guy will choke people with his mind.

2013: The Force Awakens

Producer: And how do we show that the New Order is evil?

J.J. Abrams: We’ll make them look like Nazis. Domhnall Gleeson will give a Hitler speech. They’ll blow up a planet. Also, the main bad guy will choke people with his mind.

2023: Andor

Producer: And how do we show that the Empire is evil?

Tony Gilroy: In a nod to Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, we will show how colorless but self-interested bureaucrats are cogs in the genocidal machinery of fascism.

Producer: But will the main bad guy choke people with his mind?

Tony Gilroy: Grow the fuck up.

Here’s sneakier example from Starship Troopers:

It’s sneaky because these are the nominal protagonists of the film, who fight monstrous but possibly blameless giant bugs. Verhoeven is weird that way.

Producer: How do we show that the bugs are evil?

Verhoeven [Dutch accent]: Curious. Why do you think the bugs are evil?

Producer:…

Verhoeven:…

Producer: But Casper Van Dien is very handsome!

Verhoeven: Indeed. The humans are all beautiful. Almost Aryan.

Producer: Aryan?

Verhoeven [leaning in]: I make them get naked.

Also, an honorable mention for the brief Harkonnen military parade scene in the recent Dune: Part 2, which is part of a sequence rendered in black in white.

I have a blind spot for games since I don’t play them much anymore, but here is a scene from 2017’s Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus that evokes Reifenstahlian imagery, with a nod to filming at lower left:

Because this is a game, there is also a weirdly sexualized beheading that mashes up the 1975 exploitation film Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS and a famous photograph of an actual WWII beheading conducted by Japanese soldiers. The whole scene is set on the Lincoln Memorial. 10/10, no notes.

The result of all of this is that the iconography of the Nuremberg rallies is endlessly recycled back into the public consciousness even as other history of that era passes out of memory.

So, Is an Oasis Concert Fascism?

No. Of course not. Don’t be daft. My companion was making an offhand remark that I’ve used as an excuse to go down a rabbit hole of recycled Nazi imagery because I am weird that way.

But, also, he was not entirely wrong. An aesthetic line connects Speer’s “Cathedral of Light” and monumental staging of the Nuremberg rallies to modern stadium rock concerts. Like some religious services, both offer sensory immersion and submission of the individual as pathway to the ecstatic, and possibly something darker.

The band Pink Floyd and film director Alan Parker understood this, explicitly presenting a concert as a fascist rally in the film Pink Floyd’s The Wall.

Look again at the photo of the Oasis concert up top. The stadium rocker is elevated to godhood. Who could blame modern politicians for wanting a taste of that?

Although the imagery lives on, the Nuremberg rallies are an anachronism, designed and staged for amplification via radio and cinema, the electronic media of 1934. Today, fascism—like most political communication—is mostly atomized and intimate, delivered to tiny phone screens in the form of the trusted influencer, the confrontation engineered for a short video or the meme that spreads through instant messaging. The group identity is forged online, and not in the expanse of the rally grounds. If you’re looking for the masses of SA and SS, you’re looking for the wrong thing.

So, go to a stadium concert and have a good time. A band wants you to surrender to the collective for two or three hours, buy an expensive shirt, and then go home and sleep it off.

A totalitarian state wants you to surrender forever, which sounds both more dangerous and more tedious. But, on the bright side, you might get the shirt for free.

The Stats!

Thanks to all 4651 of you who subscribe as of this writing! I am obviously not a threat to the Substack leaderboard, but I appreciate every subscriber and I still get a little thrill every time someone signs up. (I also want to walk into the ocean every time someone unsubscribes, which is just typical being-a-writer.)

Some of you subscribe to 200 newsletters or more. This is not an exaggeration - I get the stats for each new subscriber. I am inbox-zero person and that would make me insane. I assume most of those are symbolic subscriptions, a sort of extra-vigorous “👍”, but I still appreciate it!

Subscriber growth tends come in clumps when I drop a particularly successful post, or when Bill Bishop, my #1 cheerleader here and an old friend from our mutual days in China, gives me a boost. (Subscribe to Bill’s excellent Sinocism newsletter if you are at all interested in China or geopolitics!)

Page views have trended steadily up, which is nice. The open rate is about 45%. I am inconsistent about promoting my posts on social media, but the best referring platform by far is (brace yourself) LinkedIn, followed by Bluesky, which is a recent artifact driven by some big-V reposts, and Facebook because I’m old. Everything else is rounding errors. I don’t post on Twitter anymore and only rarely on Threads. The one time I got good traffic from Threads is because I got into an argument with someone over my “Return to Commuterstan” post. The algorithm loves conflict.

I’ve aimed for a post roughly every two weeks and I managed 29 over the first year, which was more or less on target what with an all-consuming job, kid, etc.

The Top Five

These are the best performers of the past year by page views. They bias later due to audience growth. Three of them focus on communications craft, in my weird way, which makes sense as that is my expertise and I presume why at least some of you are here.

We Can Character Assassinate You for Wholesale — (Jan 1 2025, 1.26K) Poor hygiene from the crisis PR pros representing Justin Baldoni in his lawsuit against Blake Lively is bad for him, but entertaining for us.

The Kiss Cam of Annihilation — (July 19 2025, 1.18K) I had a foolproof approach for how the two people outed in this dumb scandal could have saved themselves. It would only have taken superhuman reflexes and Spock-like detachment under immense pressure.

The Ticking Spine Bomb — (May 17 2025, 1.15K) I have chronic lower back pain and writing this was therapeutic for me and, apparently, for many of you. Bonus manatee porn. Newly salient today as my back has gone out again.

Good PR People Don’t Lie — (June 26 2025, 1.05K) Probably could have stopped right after typing the title, but I also explained why.

Imagethief is Dead! Long Live Imagethief — (December 1 2024, 0.93K) In which I admit that this newsletter is really just the continuation of my old China blog and rebrand accordingly. Drove more subs than any other post by nearly an order of magnitude, for mysterious reasons.

A Couple of Personal Favorites

Not as high-performing, but I like them. Both are PR gag posts.

Who Speaks for the Killer Shark? — (July 5 2025) Fifty years after the release of the movie Jaws, the entirely innocent giant shark gets some desperately needed crisis PR representation from me, a shark-hugger.

Growing Popularity of Alien Brain Squids Sparks Controversy — (August 31 2025) This the most recent post and the only one that noticeably caused me to lose subscribers. Not many, but enough for the correlation to be clear. It was a satire of the “voice from nowhere” / both-sides approach to reporting from mainstream media organizations that are struggling to rise to the political moment, borrowing from an old “Futurama” gag. It was meta, and I didn’t offer any setup or explanation.

The template was a post I wrote on Imagethief v1 nearly 20 years ago, “How to write a generic China bird flu story,” an old favorite that had more annotation. This time, the joke didn’t land as well as I hoped. But it made me laugh while I was writing, and sometimes that’s what is going to motivate this blog. Also, the original name for the think tank in that post was “The Absolute Motherfuckers Institute” and, in hindsight, I wish I’d kept that.

Thanks to all of you for sticking with me! Back to normal for the next post.

First noticed in social media posts from a handful of local residents demanding the immediate and unconditional surrender of humanity, the unconventional headwear has since become widespread. Students, professionals, and even the mayor have flaunted the oozing accessories.

The appearance of the social posts and tentacular headgear was first reported in “Obvious Shit More People Should Be Talking About,” a newsletter written by Rachel Kaplan, a Des Moines-based independent journalist.

At first confined to this historic agricultural capital, the trend has since spread to other cities in the region, with people in Cedar Rapids, Omaha and St. Louis sporting so-called “brain squids”.

The new fashion is linked with an emerging set of beliefs based on the conquest of all human life and its subjugation to the demands of a mysterious authority figure sometimes referred to as “the supreme mollusk.”

Speaking to a reporter in Clark’s All-Day Breakfast, in the Des Moines neighborhood of Beaverdale, diners sporting brain-squids said that these beliefs were heartfelt.

“The supreme mollusk commands us,” said Ryan Salt, 42, an electrician, as other patrons nodded in agreement. “We will march forth across the world to harvest all vertebrate meat-bearing organisms to nourish the Great One and its progeny. All who resist will be destroyed.” Munching on a bite of blueberry waffle he added, “It seemed like a bummer at first. But I woke up with a squid on my head this morning and now I’m super happy about it.”

Despite its growing popularity, some experts dismissed the novel headwear and associated beliefs as a fad that would eventually blow over.

“No one in the Upper West Side has a brain squid,” said Rupert Chortle, a private equity investor in New York City. “So I see this as an attractive short-term investment opportunity, but not something that will impact day-to-day life in my neighborhood.”

Others caution that the brain-squids represent a grave threat, and more should be done to halt their spread.

“Why is nobody talking about the huge flying saucer hovering over the city?” said Ms. Kaplan, the newsletter writer. “The one that appeared the same day as the squids? There is obviously a connection and we should take the squid people’s threats seriously.”

Mr. Chortle dismissed such concerns as alarmism. “If this were an alien threat to mankind, I’m sure they would have started someplace important, like Manhattan,” he said.”

Some say that it is offensive to dismiss wearers of the organic headpieces, and that more effort should be made to understand their point of view.

“Throw around a word like ‘alien’ and you’re shutting down discussion rather than engaging,” said Spencer Needle, an analyst at the Generically Pro-American Name Institute, a squid-leaning think tank. Mr. Needle does not wear a squid himself, but said the squid-wearers make compelling points. “They represent an authentic voice and we shouldn’t reject their views out of hand just because they’re possibly extraterrestrial,” he said.

“Many people in this country believe that humanity should be sacrificed to the bottomless cravings of a shadowy squid god,” added Mr. Needle. “Our efforts are better spent addressing the economic forces behind these sentiments than censoring people just because they want to feed some of us to an almighty space-mollusk.”

Ms. Kaplan disagreed. “These people have alien brain parasites on their heads,” she said as she grabbed a bike helmet, baseball bat and a box of Panko bread crumbs. “There’s no ‘understanding’ them. Now get the fuck out of my way. I’ve got to tenderize some squid.”

In Washington, national political leaders debated whether a broadcast this morning that interrupted all global media and directed people without squids on their heads to “report to the fattening pens” should be taken literally, or seen as a metaphor for economic concerns.

Back at Clark’s All Day Breakfast in Des Moines, the mood turned philosophical. “Where’s your squid?” asked Mr. Salt as he brandished a steak knife.

Other diners joined in, chanting in unison as they surrounded a reporter, “Where’s your squid? Where’s your squid?”

CORRECTION: The first version of this article did not include that Ms. Kaplan was the first person to report on the appearance of the brain squids. We regret the omission, but are not including a link to her post because there is no affiliate revenue.

When I finally wrote about work, I started with a post on a China PR practice that I found deeply weird. This was the “transportation claim,” the practice of giving every reporter who attended a press event an envelope of cash. Coming from obsessively Windexed Singapore, where I had started my PR career, this seemed sketchy. But my colleagues assured me that it was standard practice.

In those days the going rate was 200RMB (then about US$25) for a Beijing print reporter who had come from in town. There were different rates for television crews and out-of-town reporters.

Was giving a modest envelope of cash to a reporter who worked for state-owned media a violation of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act? I didn’t know! But the leadership of the Beijing office of the big U.S. PR firm I worked at didn’t seem concerned, so, 🤷.

I jokingly titled that old post, “A scholarly analysis of the economics of PR in China.” In it, I used beer, the PR pro’s favorite commodity, as a unit to assess the value of the transportation claim on a purchasing-power parity basis. In 2005 you could get a tall Yanjing or a pint of Beijing Asahi for RMB3 if you knew where to drink. Deducting the average cost of two typical Beijing taxi rides from the transportation claim, I calculated you’d have about RMB150 left over, or enough for up to fifty beers.

In Singapore, which was my frame of reference, I calculated you’d need an envelope with a minimum of SGD$270 (about USD$180 at the time) to achieve the same thing.2 Hand a lot of those out and you would be at real risk of a sweaty afternoon in the basement of the Corrupt Practices Bureau.

For what it was worth, the transportation claim was transparent. We included it as a budget line item in PR event quotations to clients. Journalists had to sign for their money at event reception, and were noted against a list of attendees. The money was visibly handed over in a plain white envelope.

Unlike what happened in New York City last Wednesday, the money was very much never in a red packet stuffed into a bag of Herr’s brand sour cream and onion potato chips and pressed into an American reporter’s hands in a Whole Foods supermarket. From The City, a New York indie news organization:

A former top City Hall advisor and current campaign confidante to Mayor Eric Adams attempted to give money to [reporter Katie Honan] from THE CITY following a campaign event in Harlem Wednesday.

The failed payoff — a wad of cash in a red envelope stuffed inside an opened bag of Herr’s Sour Cream & Onion ripple potato chips — was made by Winnie Greco, a longtime Adams ally who resigned last year from her position as the mayor’s liaison to the Asian community after she was targeted in multiple investigations. She resurfaced recently as a consistent presence in his re-election campaign.

On Wednesday, City Hall reporter Katie Honan spotted Greco near the announcement of the opening of Adams’ newest campaign office, in Harlem. Greco later texted Honan after the event when she spotted her again and asked her to meet across the street from the campaign office next to a TD Bank.

Greco and Honan walked to the Whole Foods next door. While inside the store, Greco handed Honan the opened bag of chips with the top crumpled closed. Honan, thinking it was an offer of a light snack, told Greco more than once she could not accept the chips, but Greco insisted that she keep them.

Amazing!

Greco is of Chinese extraction and has previously operated as New York Mayor Eric Adams’ liaison to the Chinese community. In a statement to The City, Greco’s lawyer said this:

“I can see how this looks strange…but I assure you that Winnie’s intent was purely innocent. In the Chinese culture, money is often given to others in a gesture of friendship and gratitude. Winnie is apologetic and embarrassed by any negative impression or confusion this may have caused.”

This true! Giving cash as a gift is common practice in Chinese and diaspora culture. In my half-Singaporean family, we give red packets at weddings and to children during holidays. I’m a big fan of cash as a gift! You can use it for anything! But—and I cannot stress this enough—such red packets are typically given proudly and not handed over furtively and hidden in snack packets.

Also, sour cream and onion? In a green packet? If you’re going to claim Chinese culture as a defense, at least hide the money in a more appropriate packet of chips. There are plenty of options, flavor and color-wise. How about this:

Evaluating a New York payoff on the international beer metric

I thought it would be fun to apply the beer metric to this situation. Curiously, The City does not say exactly how much cash was in the envelope, describing it as, “at least one $100 bill and several $20 bills.” Doctrinally, I would expect the number to be $180 (要发-IYKYK). [Update below! -ed] I’ve never paid for a beer in New York City, but at Sylvia’s Restaurant, a couple of blocks from the Whole Foods where this went down, beers are $9. This suggests that, to achieve a fifty-beer and two car-fare parity with a 2005 Beijing transportation claim, Greco should have stuffed at least $500 into that Herr’s Potato Chips bag.

If it was a bribe, it was a crap bribe. Thus, my alternative line of defense for Ms. Greco’s laywer:

Get real. You can’t buy shit in Manhattan for $180 in this economy. Only an idiot could see this as anything other than a symbolic gesture like, say, an electronic greeting card from a PR agency or a high school promise ring.

OK, maybe not a huge improvement, but less insulting to those of us who give red packets in good faith.

The day after the report in The City, the New York Times came out with a fast-follow on the Adams campaign’s apparent widespread use of red packets with Chinese language and diaspora press, fitting this week’s Greco affair into a broader pattern. This led to some hand-wringing on Bluesky, along the lines of, “The New York Times didn’t give a shit about this until someone else broke the story.”

The Times has plenty of problems and is struggling to rise to the challenge of [waves at everything], but it’s been on the Winnie Greco beat for a while and one of the reporters who has been involved is Mike Forsythe, an absolute wrecking-ball when it comes to Chinese corruption and influence.3 The Times’ day-after article provides some useful context and includes this:

In China, it is common for domestic reporters to receive red envelopes with cash, which are often referred to as a “transportation fee.” But companies there know not to give money to international reporters. No established American news organization permits its reporters to accept cash payments for covering events. The Times’s ethical guidelines explicitly prohibit receipt of such gifts.

The bit about companies knowing to not give money to international reporters is true. At the agency I worked for in China, our team was under firm instructions to not offer transportation money to foreign news organizations, or to the few Chinese news organization whose ethical guidelines prohibited such things.4

Squint and you can possibly read the Times’ follow-up as bolstering Greco’s defense that she made an honest mistake rooted in cultural differences. But Greco isn’t a recent arrival to the U.S. or U.S. politics who can easily claim, I didn’t understand your ways! And the awkward manner in which she offered the money to Ms. Honan suggests that she knew it was problematic. It is certainly providing fodder for the press and Mr. Adams’ rivals in the mayoral race, as in a fun video from intergalactic communication prodigy Zohran Mamdani.

Ms. Greco has now been suspended from Mr. Adams’ re-election campaign.

Maybe corrupt, definitely corrosive

A few months after using beer as a joke bribe metric, I went to bat for the ethics of MNCs and foreign PR firms in China in a much more serious post. I wrote why I didn’t think the transportation claim was corruption, although I also admitted that I might be rationalizing.5

There were lots of reasons why such a practice could take hold in post-WTO China. Money was flowing, media ethics were nascent, and the idea of independent accountability journalism as the fourth estate was complicated by the hand of the government.

But even if the transportation claim wasn’t corruption at an individual level, it was corrosive on a systemic level. Chinese reporters were notoriously poorly paid, and I did back-of-the-envelope calculations that showed how transportation claims could easily account for half or more of a Beijing reporter’s income. That’s a hell of a subsidy by the PR industry and an obvious conflict of interests.

In an era where accountability journalism is in retreat, media jobs are vanishing, and reporters are under increasing financial pressure, one can imagine the allure of allowing businesses and politicians to help reporters out with a little extra here and there. Maybe it’s accepted practice in some cultures.

But whether the money comes with an auditor’s stamp of approval, or stuffed into a packet of potato chips, it was a mistake in China, and it’s a mistake here.

Update 8/25

The City now reports it was $300 in the envelope. That’s significantly more beers than my guess of $180, even at Manhattan prices, and places this affair deeper into unsavory territory. (Not counting the bar snacks one should have with their corruption beers, which should obviously be very savory indeed.)

This was 2010 and the iPhone was popular, but not yet the Greatest Consumer Product of All Time. Smartphones hadn’t changed the world, but you could feel the change coming and everyone wanted in on the action.

I’d been smitten the first time I handled an iPhone, in 2008, and I’d bought a first-generation model shortly thereafter, on a work trip to San Diego. At the time, all iPhones were U.S. only and locked to AT&T. I had to jailbreak mine when I got it back to China so I could use it on China Mobile. This was terrifying, like performing brain surgery on your child with kitchen implements. I was sure I was going to lobotomize my new $600 superphone.1

Amazingly, the patient lived. I promptly abandoned both my Motorola Razr V3 flip phone and my Burson-issued China Mobile Blackberry, which looked like a prop from the old Adam West “Batman” TV show. This lasted until I got a nastygram from Burson’s IT department scolding me for using an “unauthorized client.” Reluctantly, I shifted my work email back to the Bat-Berry. But I used the iPhone for everything else.

No regrets! As small and slow as early models were, touchscreen smartphones were obviously going to revolutionize mobile computing and change our experience of the world. I’d known that the moment I saw the New York Times home page microscopically rendered on a 3 1/2 inch display, and again the first time I saw the map application tracking our location in real time while in a car. The only thing I regretted was losing the tactile snap! of slamming the Razr shut. Hanging up on someone would never be as satisfying again.

I was in love with smartphones and when Motorola came calling, I was ready. Motorola was still a behemoth in 2010, but activist investor Carl Icahn was cleaving the company in two. Motorola Mobility, the new smartphone-focused business, had lured Sanjay Jha away from Qualcomm to be CEO. Jha was all-in on Android, and Motorola had launched the first Android smartphone in China, the lozenge-shaped XT800. I shelved my iPhone for an Android-powered handset, a goony Motorola Milestone with a slide-out keyboard. The future was wide open and the smartphone market was there for anyone to seize!

In theory.

Running Asia-Pacific comms for Motorola was my first in-house gig and a big, wet kiss of a job. I was still based in Beijing, but I looked after the region and bounced around the great cities of Asia launching increasingly cool Android smartphones.

I thought I knew something about smartphones. After all, I’d had Motorola and Qualcomm as clients. I was an early adopter! I was so ignorant. I understood the technology stack in the broadest terms, but I knew nothing about the phone supply chain, licensing and regulatory issues, distribution, carrier relationships, pricing, consumer marketing, product management or anything else that made the phone industry tick. The job was an education. If you want variety, be in an agency. If you want to go deep, be in-house, preferably for a company you find fascinating.

The APAC gig lasted about two years. Google bought Motorola Mobility in May, 2012 and promptly started withdrawing the brand from China, where they had an awkward history. They also sold or closed Motorola’s factories in China, Brazil and India, a project I worked on for a year and which culminated in a round-the-world comms operation that was choreographed like D-Day. I had the miserable experience of laying-off most of my team. Wracked with guilt, I bought them all Prada wallets as farewell gifts.2 It was China.

In early 2013, I moved back to Silicon Valley3 to work in Motorola’s new Google-adjacent headquarters in Sunnyvale. Mrs. Imagethief and I bought a tiny ranch house in Redwood City, planted an orange tree in the back yard and set about raising our son on the Peninsula. After 17 years of roaming Asia, I was domesticated. I haven’t touched a Prada wallet since.

Working for Google-era Motorola was a trip. We were kept at arm’s length and instructed that under no circumstances should we oil-stained hardware goblins consider ourselves Googlers. Our snacks improved, but our cafeteria was strictly pay-for-play. That said, the Google transplants who were seconded to Motorola’s comms and marketing team were a delight to work with. There was a growing sense of possibility as new talent came in and we re-invented the product line, abandoning ye olde Motorola’s black-themed severity for a more playful and freewheeling aesthetic.

The hero of the revamped Motorola Mobility product line was Moto X, launched in August, 2013. This was a state-of-the-art Android smartphone that supported mass-customization options so you could personalize your device with different combinations of colors and materials. It was a beautiful, curvy little phone—for a while I had one with a gorgeous wooden back—and well reviewed.

A key part of the story of Moto X was that we assembled4 them in the U.S., at least for a while. Motorola announced U.S. manufacturing plans for the Moto X in May, 2013, in the lead-up to the launch. Just after the launch, we hosted a publicity event to show off the giant assembly plant in Fort Worth, Texas. This was a repurposed Nokia facility operated by Flextronics, the contract manufacturer that had acquired Motorola’s China and Brazil manufacturing operations.

Fort Worth was the highest-profile and most glamorous event I ever worked on. A bunch of national media were there, along with such luminaries as Google chairman Eric Schmidt, Texas governor Rick Perry, and celebrity entrepreneur Mark Cuban. I got bumped off a helicopter ride to make room for CNN, which, fair. The tape comes first!

It didn’t last. The Moto X struggled in the market. Nine months after skimming the glitter off my champagne in Fort Worth, I called a reporter at the Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco bureau and said we had an exclusive for him. That was how we disclosed that we were winding down U.S. phone assembly. The launch had been celebrities and helicopters. The shuttering was us carefully telling the story to one reporter that we felt would be at least fair to us. It was always going to hurt, but sometimes all you can do is embrace the suck like grown-ups and provide as much context as possible so you can move on.

More than a decade after I helped to launch and then bury Motorola’s venture in Fort Worth, U.S. manufacturing is a hot topic again, and Moto X is back in the news. A couple of weeks ago Fortune ran a big story on the attempt to make Moto X in the U.S. and why it didn’t work out. Reporter Verne Kopytoff spoke to a number of former employees on-the-record, including our then supply-chain chief, Mark Randall, and my old PR colleague Gabe Madway, among others. It is an excellent dive into the details of the project and why it failed. Here’s Randall on spinning up the factory:

When it came to the Moto X, Flextronics, from the outset, anticipated a shortage of skilled engineers in the U.S. To get around the problem, it drafted engineering talent from its factories across the globe, including from Hungary, Israel, Malaysia, Brazil, and China, and splurged on moving them to Fort Worth just to get the operation running as quickly as possible.

“We had to bring in a very cultural cast of characters,” said Mark Randall, who led Motorola’s supply chain and operations.

Rank and file assembly line workers, along with supervisors and managers, were easier to recruit locally [in Fort Worth] because of the area’s status as a telecom manufacturing corridor, he added. Of the nearly 3,800 staffing the facility at its peak, most didn’t require intensive training.

And product manager Mark Rose on the failure of the “Made in America” message to drive sales:

One of the company’s big assumptions about the phone had turned out to be wrong. After betting big on U.S. assembly, and waving the red, white, and blue in its marketing, the company realized that most consumers didn’t care where the phone was made.

“One of the learnings was that assembled in America wasn’t resonating,” said Mark Rose, a senior director of product management with Motorola at the time who now coaches product managers as a consultant.

Could it have worked out differently? At the end of the story, Randall and Madway both point out that the phone simply never sold enough to support a U.S. assembly facility:

In the end, Motorola’s failed U.S. adventure had little to do with where the Moto X was assembled, by all accounts. The phone simply didn’t sell well enough to justify a U.S. assembly line.

“If it had sold better off the jump, the whole story would have been different,” said Gabe Madway, who worked in Motorola’s public relations at the time and is now at online investment management service Wealthsimple.

Randall, meanwhile, put it even more bluntly, saying the phone’s failure “had very much zero” to do with U.S. manufacturing and everything to do with the iPhone being a better device with bigger brand recognition than the Moto X.

In the few months between the event in Forth Worth and the disclosure that we would cease U.S. assembly, Google announced plans to sell Motorola Mobility to Lenovo, which had its own smartphone division. After the shuttering of the Fort Worth plant I focused on comms for the closing of the sale to Lenovo, which happened in October of 2014.

I’d come back to the U.S. for several reasons. I’d been abroad and far from my parents for a long time; I thought the Bay Area would be a good place to raise my son; and I had a company offering to pay to move me and my family home, not something any long-time expat should take for granted! Also, after years in the Asian operations of western companies, a headquarters gig was a big selling point. My boss had made that part of her sales pitch for my move back to the U.S., pointing out that Google’s acquisition had shifted Moto’s center of gravity from Chicago to my old neighborhood in Silicon Valley.

For a couple of years, that worked out well. But the closing of the Lenovo transaction was the beginning of the end of my time at Moto. I had come back from Beijing for a headquarters gig, but through a curious chain of events found myself in a department within a department of a company headquartered back in Beijing. I had lots of respect for Lenovo and enjoyed working with their comms team, but it was time to go. In early 2016 I moved to Intel, where, a few years later, I would help tell a different version of the made-in-America story as we advocated for the CHIPS Act.

It was a different era twelve years ago. What happened to the Moto X isn’t necessarily a template for how things will go today, with other companies or in other industries. Moto X wasn’t a huge seller and Motorola’s lack of pricing power meant that every dollar of margin was precious. Mototola Mobility’s most successful phone was the capable, value-priced Moto G, which took off in emerging markets, but was never a candidate for U.S. assembly. A decade later, Lenovo still sells the current versions of Moto G and Razr, but Moto X is history.

I loved my years in Moto, and my colleagues in both China and the U.S. It was some of the most fun I’ve had in my career. Kopytoff’s story is a blast of nostalgia. It’s also a fascinating look back at a well-intentioned but doomed attempt to bring just a slice of smartphone manufacturing back to the U.S.

In a bit of symmetry, that effort coincided with my own return to the U.S. I’m still here, but it turns out not everything can come home again.

Here is proof that the universe hates you:

You go to a Coldplay show with your paramour thinking you will be safely anonymous in a darkened arena full of 50,000 people with similarly questionable music taste. Suddenly, like the eye of Sauron, the arena kiss-cam falls upon the two of you. Your canoodling mugs are now up there on the Jumbotron, illuminated and 10,000 times larger than life.

If you’re at the concert with your date-who-is-definitely-not-your-spouse and with whom you have a professional relationship that absolutely precludes getting handsy at a Coldplay show, and the spotlight hits you, what is the move?

Counterintuitively, the move is to kiss for the kiss cam, and maybe smile and wave. In short, do what you’re supposed to do in that situation, and, in so doing, be unremarkable so the camera moves on.

The problem is that in this situation the human instinct to cower, hide and radiate high-energy shame particles is so lizard-brain reflexive, you’d have to be the genetic cross of Ethan Hunt and Mr. Spock to suppress it in the moment.

In this very real and not-theoretical situation, two people conspicuously did not suppress the instinct to cower and radiate shame particles. Instead, when the kiss-cam found them, they acted as guilty as a couple on a tryst could possibly act:

@instaagraacetrouble in paradise?? 👀 #coldplay #boston #coldplayconcert #kisscam #fyp

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It is physically impossible to act any more busted than that. The LeBron James of acting busted1 could not act more busted.

Humans are social animals and naturally wired to recognize deep cringe. Coldplay singer Chris Martin and everyone else in the arena noticed this behavior. Within moments it was all over the Internet and the couple was promptly identified as the married CEO of software company Astronomer.io and his head of human resources who is definitively not his wife. It has since ascended into mainstream national media.2

This is a crisis! A personal crisis. A corporate crisis. And definitely a music taste crisis. Let’s take them in order.

Personal Crisis

He’s getting punched in the face by his wife, right? Possibly literally, likely in the legal sense. Lawyer up and book a hotel room. As for the HR chief, I am not sure of her marital status, so maybe that isn’t an issue. But going nationwide like this is going to haunt her for a while. The Internet is unkind to women at the best of times, and most definitely in these situations. There is already an attempt to memeify the couple in a way that suggests poor understanding of the broader context:

Solid work.

Corporate Crisis

If the CEO is having an affair with someone who doesn’t work at the company, questions of judgment aside, that’s mostly the CEO’s problem. If the CEO is having an affair with his direct report, that’s the company’s problem. These two scenarios require different solutions. I’m a corporate PR guy, not a publicist, so I’ll focus on the company’s problems.

Most companies consider relationships within a chain of command an ethics violation for good reason. No one will think you’re going to be an impartial manager of someone you’re in a sexual relationship with. On what basis are you making promotion decisions? Compensation decisions? Any decisions? I worked at a company where the CEO was turfed out for a relationship with a subordinate that happened before he was CEO, but never disclosed.

And the other party is the HR manager! That’s very bad! Employee behavior and ethics is literally her turf! She’s supposed to know better. What if you’re an employee who wants to make a complaint about the CEO to the HR department? Will you get a fair hearing? What if you don’t like Coldplay?

So it’s bad judgment all around.

Slow down, you say. All we have at the moment is a brief video. It’s suggestive, but not a literal sex tape. We don’t know for sure that the CEO and HR manager are having a relationship. Maybe they were just in an embrace that, while it looked very intimate and inappropriate for colleagues in a direct reporting line, was in fact completely innocent. Maybe he slipped on spilled beer and found his hands around her waist. In slow motion. While smiling.

When I started drafting this, on Friday in Taiwan before a flight home, there was no statement from Astronomer yet. At the time, I wrote this:

The CEO is a board member, and I don’t know what the voting structure at Astronomer is, but if I were the PR advisor for the board I’d recommend they immediately place both executives on leave pending an investigation. It’s a prudent move you can make right away, and it buys some time for you to find the facts and consider longer-term decisions.

That was PR 101, not rocket science, so hold your applause. But it was validating to see that on mid-day Friday U.S. time (while I was in the air) Astronomer posted this statement on X:

“Astronomer is committed to the values and culture that have guided us since our founding. Our leaders are expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability. The Board of Directors has initiated a formal investigation into this matter and we will have additional details to share very shortly. Alyssa Stoddard was not at the event and no other employees were in the video. Andy Byron has not put out any statement, reports saying otherwise are all incorrect.”

Alyssa Stoddard is another company executive who was mistakenly reported to be at the event, and there was a fake statement from the CEO, Andy Byron, circulating widely on the Internet on Thursday. Hence the two clarifications at the end.

A few hours later, the company posted a follow-up:

“Cofounder and Chief Product Officer Pete DeJoy is currently serving as interim CEO given Andy Byron has been placed on leave.”

Weirdly, neither of these is on their corporate newsroom, and it’s odd to me that they’re separated, even if only by a few hours. But Astronomer is privately held and customers are their main external stakeholder, so I guess they can do what they want on disclosure. Also, what are the “values and culture” that have guided them since their founding? If I were drafting this, I might list a couple of them rather than leaving it to the imagination of obscure PR bloggers.

Finally, there is no mention of the head of HR, a senior executive who reports to the CEO (whom, I remind you, evidence suggests she is in a relationship with). I am curious what was communicated internally, to Astronomer’s employees. She still appears on the company’s executive page, although the CEO does not. I am very surprised that she apparently hasn’t also been suspended and I think it’s a bad look.

Music Taste Crisis

Speaking of bad looks, when you go down, do you want to go down for Coldplay, the nonstick frying pan of pop music?

If you’re doing something sleazy and dangerous, wouldn’t you want to go down for a sleazier and more dangerous band? Peak career Prince, when half of his songs were straightforwardly about fucking and the other half were about Jesus? Early Guns’n’Roses, when they seemed like reptiles that had crawled from the sewers of Hollywood? Or whatever the current incarnation of this kind of sexualized danger is? Idk, man, I’m old. Maybe go down for a Cardi B show. I’d respect that!

If you’re going to a tryst gig, it shouldn’t be an arena show for a mid AOR act calibrated for wine moms looking for a non-threatening evening out. You should be in some smoky, subterranean dive watching an ancient bebop crew called something like, “Nasty-Sax Hawkins and the Heroin Spoons” and where they serve martinis that would delaminate battleship armor.

But Coldplay? Going to Coldplay compounds the error of judgment. You can build a 2x2 risk matrix to analyze this:

Now that I think about it, the fact that they were at a Coldplay concert opens up a few possible PR angles for all parties involved.

For the CEO:

• “Yes, we were having an affair, but we were at a Coldplay show so obviously its sexless.”

For the HR executive:

• “He’s a monster. He used his power to coerce me into Coldplay. I feel violated.”

For the Company:

• “An affair with a subordinate we could forgive, but going to Coldplay is a clear violation of our employee code of conduct. He left us no choice.”

It’s Coldplay game theory! You just have to be the first one to play the card. Who will break first and seize the advantage?

Ultimately, my professional PR advice is this: If you’re going to have a tryst at a Coldplay show, you should use protection. By which I mean that you should both wear Groucho glasses so that you are protected if, against all odds, the kiss-cam finds you.

In fact, now that I think about it, if you’re going to go to Coldplay at all, wear a pair of Groucho glasses.3 Keep your shame secret and spare your loved ones the pain.

Update - 7/21/25

On Saturday the 19th, Astronomer posted a statement, again only on X.com and not on their newsroom, that the CEO had tendered his resignation:

As stated previously, Astronomer is committed to the values and culture that have guided us since our founding. Our leaders are expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability, and recently, that standard was not met.

Andy Byron has tendered his resignation, and the Board of Directors has accepted. The Board will begin a search for our next Chief Executive as Cofounder and Chief Product Officer Pete DeJoy continues to serve as interim CEO.

Before this week, we were known as a pioneer in the DataOps space, helping data teams power everything from modern analytics to production AI.

While awareness of our company may have changed overnight, our product and our work for our customers have not.

We’re continuing to do what we do best: helping our customers with their toughest data and AI problems.

It’s fine as such things go (points for acknowledgment of the awkward notoriety) and a quick resolution. But still no mention of the now twice-cited values, and no mention of the fate of the HR executive. She’s also still on the website. If this was a consensual relationship, then that’s a surprise. If it somehow wasn’t, well then the CEO‘S quick resignation is even less of a surprise. -WM

In those days, if you wanted to see a movie after its theatrical run, tough shit. If you didn’t catch it in a second-run theater, you’d have to wait for one of the big-three networks to broadcast it. I didn’t know anyone who had a VCR or cable TV until I was in high school. Network premieres of hit movies were big events, hyped for months.

I was living with my dad in the top two floors of his ramshackle four-story Victorian in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood. He was a relaxed parent, and not hung up on the child-appropriateness of media. Earlier that year he’d taken me and my younger brother to see Ridley Scott’s Alien at the Geneva Drive-In, in Daly City. That movie fucked my head for years. I still love it.

Jaws was ABC’s Movie of the Week, at 8:30PM on a Sunday night. I remember watching the first part in the living room with my dad. He’d recently upgraded his old black-and-white TV to a larger color set, a revelatory change.

About halfway through the movie, my dad sent me to bed. Maybe he thought it was getting too gruesome, but it was also a school night. Fair enough.

Old, serially remodeled Victorians have lots of eccentricities. In my dad’s house, one such eccentricity was a star-shaped cutout in one of the risers of the steep staircase up to the attic, where the bedrooms were. It was only four or five inches across, but it had oblique line-of-sight through the downstairs hallway, into the living room and to our new television. I watched the entire second half of the movie crouched on the stairs, eye glued to the star-shaped cutout.

Steven Spielberg was 27 when he made Jaws, kicking off an epic run that defined cinematic pop culture for my generation:

• 1975 Jaws

• 1977 Close Encounters of the Third Kind

• 1979 1941

• 1981 Raiders of the Lost Ark

• 1982 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

That is a set of all-time bangers! And also 1941.

I re-watch most of those movies every couple of years. But Jaws hit something that the other movies didn’t, my lifelong fascination with things that live in the water. Especially sharks.

That interest took me to U.C. Santa Cruz for a marine-focused biology degree. I spent a memorable quarter doing field work on the beach at Año Nuevo Point, where elephant seals breed. White sharks patrolled the sound between the point and Año Nuevo island, where there was a giant sea lion rookery. (Test your olfactory resolve by eating a sandwich downwind of a seal rookery.)

Occasionally, an elephant seal would haul out with a white shark bite. Sometimes it was just a ring of comically huge tooth marks, an aborted attack. Sometimes a beachball-size chunk of skin and blubber had been torn out. Only a two ton mega-seal (we weighed them!) could survive those bites. I would often stare at the water and wonder where the sharks were, under the surface and obscured from my gaze. Then I would go back to my actual job, assessing the causes of pup mortality.

People go in the water in California because they have no idea what they are swimming with. On a seasonally adjusted basis, if you’re in the water here, you’re in the water with white sharks. There is plenty of drone footage of sharks idly sculling near clueless surfers and swimmers. Fortunately, the local sharks don’t give a shit about people. Every now and then, one mistakes a person on a surfboard for a seal, which is bad for everyone involved, but mostly they’re indifferent.

Eventually, I decided that I didn’t want to be a scientist. In grad school I pivoted to media and the Internet, which was a better fit. After moving to Singapore in 1995 I redirected my ocean fascination into scuba diving and underwater photography. Shark sightings were rare, and the sharks were often leaving quickly. “Wild dogs of the reef,” one of my dive instructors said, evoking furtive, slinking creatures. But to me they were grand and elegant, like lions on the savannah, predators effortlessly at home in their world.

The ocean is spooky. It’s unnerving to gaze into the fathomless blue. Mrs. Imagethief and I eventually got into technical diving, using mixed gasses to go deeper and venture inside shipwrecks. That often meant an hour or more of decompression time on the way up, hanging on a bar a few meters under the boat with nothing to do but stare into the deep and wonder if something big would emerge. Occasionally, something did. But never anything dangerous.

There are lots of things way more likely to kill you in the ocean than a shark. These include boats, the water (in several ways), various species of jellyfish, a bad gas mix, and diving beyond the limits your training or equipment. Sharks just aren’t on the list.

But in the movies a shark will fuck you up, and I love it! I am always up for a killer shark movie:

• Deep Blue Sea ✅

• The Meg ✅

• The Meg 2 ✅

• Sharknados 1-∞ ✅

• That weird movie where the sewers of Paris are full of sharks ✅

Is Jason Statham is going to fight a giant shark? Shut up and take my money!

But Jaws stands apart. I watched it again last week and it remains nearly perfect. The cast, the pacing, the dialogue in both writing and delivery, it’s all great.

It was a famously troubled production. Part of the reason the shark isn’t fully revealed until the third reel is that the animatronics refused to work and they couldn’t complete many shots. The film is better for it. The shark in Jaws isn’t evil, it’s a force of nature, like a coming hurricane, looming on the horizon and felt more than seen. That a movie with a muppet shark could endure for fifty years is a testament to how much of its success is rooted in the non-shark bits.

I Will Speak Up for the Killer Shark!

I was originally going to write about Jaws as a crisis communication scenario. The town of Amity faces a public safety crisis that threatens its business. There are lessons. Blah, blah.

So! Fucking! Boring!

Upon re-watching, I realized that every death in the movie is attributable to bad decisions by humans. On reflection, the real victim is the shark. So, as a professional PR person and confirmed shark-liker, I wrote statements on behalf of the shark for each of the fatalities in the movie. The basic strategy is DARVO, “Deny. Attack. Reverse Victim and Offender.” This is an oily technique often used by accused sex pests, but it also works when you’re representing a giant shark with a problematic taste for human flesh.

Here we go, in order, with links to the relevant scenes on YouTube. Spoilers! (As if it matters.)

The Death of Chrissie Watkins

This is the opening scene, in which a possibly inebriated young woman goes for a night-time skinny-dip and is promptly eaten. The discovery of her remains kicks off the story. Although newly appointed Amity Island police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider, in nebbish mode) assumes a shark attack, the local medical examiner succumbs to political pressure and rules the death a boating accident.

Statement:

We offer our condolences to the family of Ms. Watkins.

Local authorities have attributed Ms. Watkins’ death to an unfortunate boating accident. On behalf of our client, and in the interests of public safety, we urge all beach-goers to swim only in daylight, wear proper swimming attire, and not swim while inebriated.

The (Presumed) Death of Pippet the Labrador Retriever

Foreshadowing the death of Alex Kintner (below), a young man is throwing a stick into the ocean for his dog to recover. Just before the attack on Kintner, the young man walks along the beach, calling in vain for his suddenly missing dog.

On-the-record:

Decline to comment.

Off-the-record:

Don’t come to our client with every fucking mammal that goes missing in the ocean. Do you know how offensive that is? Are dogs marine mammals? ARE THEY? That’s right, they are not. And you know as well as we do that they have zero business being in the ocean. Why don’t you do a story on Amity Island’s irresponsible dog owners, you hacks. Get a fucking grip. [Performatively slam phone down.]

The Death of Alex Kintner

Despite the death of Chrissie Watkins, Amity Mayor Larry Vaughn decides to keep the beaches open in the interests of commerce. Having (allegedly) whetted its appetite with Pippet the dog, and with dozens of people in the water, the shark eats Alex Kintner, a young boy on an air mattress. The attack is gruesomely visible, but the shark is obscured.

Statement:

We offer our deepest condolences to the Kintner family.

There is no evidence linking our client to this situation. Despite a prior fatality, Amity Mayor Larry Vaughn recklessly insisted on keeping on keeping local beaches open, a move sure to confuse and alarm any passing apex marine predator with predictable consequences. The blame for this situation lies with Amity Island’s political leadership, who are evidently more concerned for the health of their wallets than the safety of visitors and residents.

The Death of Ben Gardner

Ben Gardner is a fishing boat captain. We don’t see his death, but Brody and marine biologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss, also in nebbish mode, which is just normal mode for Dreyfuss) find Gardner’s small boat at night while looking for the shark. This is after dozens of local fishermen and assorted yahoos have spent the day out shark hunting for a bounty, and have caught a large tiger shark that Hooper does not believe to be responsible for the deaths so far. Gardner’s boat is foundering and a skin-diving Hooper discovers that it has been shattered below the water line. He also finds a white shark tooth embedded in the hull, but drops the tooth when he sees Ben Gardner’s mangled corpse. Later, Brody and Hooper confront Mayor Vaughn. But, as Hooper has lost the tooth that was his evidence, Vaughn still refuses to close the beaches.

Statement:

We offer our deepest condolences to the Gardner family.

However, we must condemn the ceaseless attacks on our client, which are motivated entirely by shameful anti giant-shark bias. So-called “marine biologists” are fake scientists who can’t get real jobs and will tell any story that helps them to secure funding or publicity. You don’t have to take our word for it. Mayor Vaughn said as much after Dr. Hooper slanderously accused our client:

“Love to prove that, wouldn’t you. Get yourself into the National Geographic.”

Furthermore, this tragedy comes after several dozen lawless hooligans spent the day cruelly shooting and harassing local wildlife from boats, resulting in the shocking death of an innocent tiger shark that was going about its business. Faced with such persecution and violence, it is understandable that members of the local shark community would take matters into their own fins and come together to defend themselves and their families.

We call upon the residents of Amity to abandon prejudice and be more inclusive of sharks, who struggle every day for acceptance despite being the original inhabitants of the area.

The Death of the Man in the Rowboat

Satisfied that the dead tiger shark is the culprit, Mayor Vaughn has ordered the beaches opened for the 4th of July. As people pile into the water, Brody sends his kids to sail in a nearby estuary, thinking they will be safer there. On the estuary, a man in a small rowboat is giving Brody’s kids sailing advice. The shark enters the estuary, flips the rowboat and eats the man in full view of everyone. This is the first real look at the shark in the movie, more than halfway through. Plausible deniability is out the window, so the messaging strategy has to change.

Statement:

Our client takes full responsibility for this situation and deeply apologizes for any distress his instinctive and natural feeding actions may have caused. We offer a dialogue with local community leaders to seek reconciliation and a constructive path forward. As a gesture of good faith, our client pledges that there will be no eating of further persons in the Amity vicinity without written authorization.

We would like to offer our condolences, however we note that this man is identified only as “Estuary Victim.” He will nevertheless be fondly remembered for his seamanship, toned legs and conspicuous New England accent.

The Death of Captain Quint and the Sinking of the Orca (Posthumous)

In the climax of the movie, the shark hunter and shark attack survivor Quint (Robert Shaw, absolutely not in nebbish mode) has pursued the shark obsessively, shooting it three times with harpoons tied to floating barrels. The shark has attacked Quint’s boat, the Orca, crippling it. The shark eats Quint, fulfilling Quint’s destiny and proving that Jaws is the first Final Destination movie. In an extremely plausible ending, Brody jams a scuba tank into the shark’s mouth and, with the shark making a last charge as the boat sinks, shoots the tank while muttering the memorable line, “Smile, you son of a bitch!” This detonates the tank and turns the shark into a shower of shark bits. We last see the decapitated shark sinking into the depths.

Statement:

We are devastated to report that our client Mr. Jaws was confirmed dead this morning at the hands of Amity Police Chief Martin Brody, Captain Quint and Dr. Matthew Hooper.

While this outcome is shocking, it is not surprising. It is a foreseeable consequence of the escalating hostility and rampant anti giant-shark bias that has been allowed to fester unchecked on Amity Island for too long.

Local police, a mentally ill mariner on a personal vendetta, and a so-called “scientist” of questionable credentials who hatefully described our client as “an eating machine” together undertook what can only be described as a lawless vigilante mission. Their sole aim was to kill Mr. Jaws, whose “crime” was nothing more than to be a giant shark with an occasional taste for human flesh, entirely in keeping with the long traditions of his species.

Relentlessly hounded for 24 hours, lured with chum, shot at with rifles and handguns, and harpooned three times, our client was afraid for his life and sought only to defend to himself, as anyone would in such circumstances. Shockingly, Mr. Brody reportedly taunted our client as he fired the fatal bullet.

The abuse of state power to persecute and murder our client in his own environment cannot be allowed to stand. We intend to sue the government of Amity Island, including mayor Larry Vaughn and Mr. Brody; Dr. Hooper and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution where he is tenured faculty; and the estate of Captain Quint. On behalf of the Jaws family, we also plan to file a complaint for the violation of Mr. Jaws’ civil rights.

While no amount of financial restitution can make up for our client’s tragic and senseless death, it will be of solace to know that Mr. Jaws’ family, including Ms. Jaws and his many sharklings, are provided for. We hope that it will also send a clear message that anti-shark hate has no place in this world.

It was Mr. Jaws’ dream that killer sharks and people would someday be able to live together in harmony, and that the occasional devouring of a human would be celebrated as a reminder of our diversity, the fragility and beauty of life, and the splendor of the ocean.

In Mr. Jaws’ memory, we dedicate ourselves our fulfilling this dream, in the form of fifty years of shark movies.

I hope all my American readers are enjoying a lovely holiday weekend, and encountering sharks only if they want to!

It was late 2001 and startup number two in Singapore had imploded following the collapse of the dot-com bubble and some poor management choices. Italian furniture isn’t cheap. Six years and two dead startups into my Singapore journey, it seemed like time for a change of vocation. Also, no one was hiring “Internet” people in 2001. Sitting in the oily puddle at the the bottom of the trough of disillusionment, we were best not touched with bare hands, like medical waste.

Some of my beach football friends worked for the Singapore office of a small New Zealand-based PR firm. They had a problem in the form of Microsoft Singapore, one of their clients. Nobody at the agency knew much about technology, and the notoriously demanding Microsoft team was losing patience.

On the beach, a ropey and affable New Zealander, who was amazingly fit and fast at the inconceivably geriatric age of 45, made the pitch. I had worked in radio and television in San Francisco and co-written two books about computer games, and I had just done several years of technology project management and had a good grasp of Microsoft’s products. Had I ever considered working in public relations?

I had not. Not only that, but at startup number two I’d held our PR woman in cold contempt. I didn’t understand her job. Her requests seemed burdensome and trivial. I had important things to do!

Karma is, as they say, a bitch. I owe her the hugest apology.

I met the agency’s Singapore office leader, Kylie, a radiantly charismatic Australian woman who was the team rainmaker. “Ehhh,” she drawled when I pointed out that I had zero PR experience. “You can write and you understand tech. We can teach you the PR bit.” Also, she offered double what anyone would pay me to do Internet related work.

I negotiated the final details of the job a week or two later, while in Laos with my father, standing ankle-deep in the Mekong in Vientiane so I could catch a Thai cell signal from across the river. And that is how, at the age of 34, I made a mid-career switch into comms. And probably also got some kind of hideous river-borne blood parasite.

Kylie put me in charge of a small team, introduced me to the client at Microsoft and turned me loose. It was hard. As Kylie had said, I could learn the basic craft: how to write a press release, how to organize an event, and so on. And I could talk literately about the products. But there was lots I didn’t know.

I’ll never forget my first cold pitch call. This was to the then editor of the Computer Times, the weekly IT supplement of the Singapore Straits Times, the big English language daily. The editor was notoriously tough on PR people and I did not have my pitch tight. The editor cut me off, started upbraiding me and did something that few people on this earth have ever accomplished: she rendered me speechless.

While I stammered and mumbled she said acidly, “You want to take some time, work it out, and call me back?” Click. I gazed at my desk phone like it was a plague rat and thought, I’ve made the worst mistake of my life. (That editor later worked in PR.)

I learned quickly and things got better. It helped that I’d written a locally notorious online journal about the rise and fall of startup #1, a game company, and our high-profile backers. Lots of the technology reporters in Singapore had read it and many of my phone calls were greeted with, “Aren’t you the guy wrote about that game startup?”

Yeah, I was the guy. Anyway, let’s talk about Sharepoint, you poor bastard.

The most crucial lesson I learned in that first PR gig was the importance of building trust with both the clients and journalists. I wanted clients to take my advice. And I needed reporters to know I was a useful conduit to the clients and reliable source of information. Trust was the basic currency of that work. I’ve carried that lesson with me for more than two decades.

I suppose if I were burning my way through relationships like some kind of PR arsonist, trust might not matter so much. Seems like a bad way to build a career. But I’ve been working in the chip business in the Bay Area for almost a decade now, talking to the same group of reporters covering the industry and the geopolitical issues impacting it. These relationships are essential to my ability to do my job.

So why would I torch them, possibly forever, by lying?

This seems super basic to me. But PR people do sometimes lie. I know because I’ve had more than one reporter bitch to me in confidence when they think other PR people have lied to them. The grudges and loss of trust at a personal and institutional level are real. I can’t imagine anything worse than having reporters talk about me or my employer that way to my peers. (I don’t mind hearing the gossip about others, though. Call me!)

Sometimes reporters complain publicly. If the liar is lucky, this is an anonymized gripe, like the one on LinkedIn from a reporter (now editor) I knew in China years ago that got me thinking about this. If the liar is unlucky, they might end up a named character in some reporter’s best-selling business scandal book.

Trust with reporters goes both ways. There are reporters I know I can have really open discussions with, and trust with information on background or off-the-record. (Yes, I think there are appropriate times for such discussions.) And there are reporters and media organizations that I will treat with much more caution. Sometimes I’ve just got to get to know you.

This is a dumb oversimplification for the purposes of framing, but I think lying in PR broadly happens at two scales.

Strategic lying is when the PR industry supports a client organization or industry that depends upon long-term deception or obfuscation. This where much of our industry’s reputation as a bunch of greasy propagandists comes from. I don’t like this, but I understand how it happens. There is a lot of money behind this kind of work, and a pool of people who are true believers, masters of self-justification1, or simply willing to void their ethics for a sufficiently large check. I think if you’re talking to a representative of the tobacco industry or some thuggish junta, you know what you’re in for.2

Tactical lying is what I think the editor on LinkedIn was complaining about. This is saying something that is expeditious in the moment but patently untrue and at risk of being revealed as such. A transaction is not in the works (when you know one is in the works). Layoffs are not going to happen (when you know that layoffs are imminent).

I absolutely do not understand tactical lying. Either you’ve been lied to by your client or in-house exec, which is a very bad situation, or you are knowingly lying to a reporter, which risks torching your personal reputation and credibility as well as that of your employer. Good PR people don’t do this because it’s bad for our long-term professional effectiveness. Tactical lying is a gun we can fire only once, with a bullet that tends to ricochet into our faces.

But what if you don’t expect the truth to ever be discovered?

The basic ethics aside, I have a theory of PR that comes from my crisis work and is based on the idea of unresolved tension. I hate unresolved tension. Unresolved tension makes reporters want to keep digging. Unresolved tension is leak risk. Unresolved tension sets land mines that will go off at the worst possible time. I strive to reduce unresolved tension. Lying, even over something you think won’t be revealed, creates unresolved tension. You’re burying landmines in your own garden. Eventually, one is going to explode.

I get that declining to comment, or even delivering an annoying non-answer, can leave unresolved tension. But at least I haven’t mortgaged my credibility on it. If the mine goes off, I’d rather it isn’t directly under my tender bits.

To boil all of this down to something practical, here are my own guiding principles:

• Work for ethical companies. I have to be an evangelist for my employer, so I want to believe in them. (I also want to be fascinated by them, and I’ve been lucky on that front.) Companies are complex and imperfect baskets of economic incentives and fallible human beings. They make mistakes. They implement questionable policies. They do dumb stuff. But you can look at the business a company is in and their overall behavior and make an informed call on their ethics. You can also make principled decisions based on things you learn along the way.

• Don’t lie. I may give you a non-answer, or decline to comment, or just not pick up the goddamned phone. I might cajole, bargain, wheedle or get on my knees and beg. I will choose my words with exquisite care and consult a lawyer and you will think, “weasel.” I might deflect you into light chit chat about your family. But I won’t lie. The cost to me is too high.

• Don’t ask my team to lie. My job is to protect my team, not expose them, and to be an ethical role model. I won’t ask an agency to lie, either, and I would expect to be fired as a client if I did.

• Don’t tolerate being lied to by an employer. Trust works in all directions in my business. I need to be able to trust my employer (or client), especially because I sometimes work on delicate or high-stakes situations. If I find out an employer has lied to me or used me to launder lies to the press, I will walk. Because:

• Be ready to lose a job over principles. That would suck, and it’s never happened to me. But trust is my currency and I’ll need it for the next job. I think it’s good to have clear ethical boundaries, and to be mentally prepared to act on them. Think about this before the moment strikes.

I’ve been doing PR in Asia and the U.S. for a long time now. I have a track record, a reputation and the seniority to assert myself in front of senior executives. I have a lot of established relationships with reporters. I have savings. All of this makes it easier for me to lay my job on the line on principle if I have to.

Younger professionals will face different pressures. But my advice is that is that it is never too early to think about your principles and ethical boundaries. Find a mentor you trust and talk through these issues. That will help you to make good choices that lower your risk of even being asked to do something that compromises your ethics.

And that’s where you want to be. Because you don’t want to be asked to do something that might temporarily protect your employer, but screw you forever. And you definitely don’t want to be the subject of some reporter’s angry social media post.

“Nachos.

Nachos Bel Grande.

Burrito.

Burrito Supreme.

Burrito Supreme…with hair.”

I don’t remember if we actually ordered anything. Or, if we did, what it was. But it says something that the image of a Burrito Supreme with hair has been stuck in my head since 1989.

A lot of my college experience lay at the intersection of my friendship with Darren, our youthful love of the herb, and snacks.2 There was the time we dried some leaves from the plant in Darren’s room in an electric kettle (not recommended!), smoked it all and then bought every cookie in Sluggo’s, the dorm coffee shop. After dividing the cookies, we slunk back to our respective dorm rooms to devour our prey in solitude, like stoned leopards.

There was the time we roadtripped up to Berkeley to visit our high-school friend Bruno and made very special spaghetti sauce. I had a panic attack and was sure my heart was going to stop. If anything was going to stop my heart, it was the stoner dessert sandwiches we made out of soft wheat bread, sweetened condensed milk and chocolate chips. (Not recommended!)

And there was the time during sophomore year, when I lived off campus near Seabright Beach, when Darren, Bruno and I prepared for a big evening by raiding Day’s Market, the local bodega.

Me: [Drops two bags of Doritos3, two pints of Haagen Dazs and a package of Oreos on the checkout counter.]

Cashier: Smoking out tonight, huh?

Me [voice breaking]: Um…No?

Obviously, yes. We could have brought a four-foot mega-bong and an actual reggae band into Day’s Market and it would have been just another evening at work for the dude at the counter. That was Santa Cruz in the eighties.

Later we tried to sneak onto Seabright Beach after hours, high as B-52s and with me carrying a jingly bunch of Whippets in my jacket pocket. (Absolutely not recommended!) We were not the first geniuses to come up with this idea, and we only got a few steps down the beach before a cop pinned us in the light of his car and got on his loudspeaker:

“Get off the beach! You are going to jail!”

[Cork-squeaking sound of three idiots’ assholes clenching simultaneously.]

We were white college kids from Palo Alto, so we did not go to jail. We just got scolded and slouched back to my apartment, where we consoled ourselves with our bounty from Day’s Market.

Good times! But I haven’t really thought about Taco Bell since those days. I didn’t encounter them much during nearly two decades in Asia, though there were a few here and there. Asia was bad for Mexican food in general, though it had other culinary charms.

Today I live in Redwood City, which has a vigorous Latino community and is blessed with various Mexican provincial and Central and South American cuisines. We’ve embraced the liberal dream of a taco truck on every corner in the best way possible. For a while, a Salvadoran woman sold home-made pupusas from the yard of a duplex at the end of my block. They were great, and I’m crushed that she moved away.

Of course, Taco Bell isn’t “Mexican” any more than Panda Express is “Chinese.” It’s an American consumer fantasia, a confection of loose ideas and shapes that nod to an over-the-horizon heritage long ago remixed into drive-thru impressionism by industrial chefs. The only reason Mexicans work at our local Taco Bell is because immigrants hold up the entire Peninsula restaurant industry, from the fanciest venture capitalist watering holes in Palo Alto down to the roadside BBQ chicken cart that sets up near our local Costco.

So, let’s say you’re Taco Bell’s PR person, and you’ve just been given a mandate. That mandate is to get some press for the twentieth anniversary of the “Crunchwrap Supreme,” one of Taco Bell’s impressionist confections.

That’s hard! I mean, this is a wholly imaginary, rigorously engineered stoner snack designed to be as cheap and replicable as possible. It’s a mid quesadilla with a fancy fold. The starting point is, who gives a shit?

Well, someone absolutely nailed the assignment. Look at this presentation in the New York Times:

Following this splash are 1300 words, with several amazing photos, on how a bunch of hipster chefs have reinterpreted the Crunchwrap Supreme for their own restaurants. It’s an ouroboros of food culture, but, honestly, some of this stuff looks delicious.

OK, I can’t prove this story was pitched. But Luke Fortney, the author, is a Mexican-American journalist who has done a lot of food writing for various publications. If I were casting around for a reporter to pitch this to, he’d be a top-tier candidate.

Also, the angle is great! The focus is less on Taco Bell and the original than on innovative chefs who are reinterpreting the basic Crunchwrap template in creative and appetizing ways. Read this and tell me you’re not hungry:

At Cariñito, a pop-up taqueria in Manhattan, the owners David Verástegui and Joaquin de la Torre stuff Sichuan-spiced ground beef into a miniature Crunchywrap. At Kim Jong Grillin in Portland, Ore., the “Chopped” competitor Han Ly Hwang folds bulgogi and pickled banchan into a Munchwrap Extreme.

The chefs Oliver Poilevey and Marcos Ascencio bathe their Chingón Crunchwrap in buttermilk crema and chile de arbol salsa at Taqueria Chingón in Chicago. And Ali Elreda, the owner of Fatima’s Grill, fills his Crunch Wrap with chicken shawarma and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos at six locations of the restaurant across the country.

…

Kris Yenbamroong, an owner and the chef of Night + Market in Los Angeles, added a Thai Crunchwrap to his menu in 2023. Even before the rapper Action Bronson called it one of his “favorite things on Earth” last year, it was a hit: The restaurant sells as many as 20 wraps a night, and it’s not uncommon for a table of four to share two.

His Grapow Crunchwrap Supreme replaces the tostada with a fried wonton wrapper and the ground beef with pad grapow gai. These ingredients don’t appear together anywhere else on the Night + Market menu. But wrapped inside a flour tortilla, they make a whole lot of sense.

Sign me up for any of these! (I am writing this at lunch time and a bit hungry.) That’s also four paragraphs, each of which contains the word “Crunchwrap” or a very near approximation. The effect is to reflect all this innovation, and the aura of “14-hour pernil”, back on the original Crunchwrap Supreme, which is still a mass-produced fast-food snack. There is also a Taco Bell exec in the story, explaining why the company hasn’t sued the shit out of everybody:

It is nearly impossible to patent food recipes in the United States, allowing indie Crunchwraps not only to exist, but also to flourish. And while Taco Bell maintains a trademark on the name, it rarely enforces it when it comes to independent restaurant operators.

“Times have definitely changed,” said Liz Matthews, the chief food innovation officer for Taco Bell. “In the past, you would develop things and you would keep it secret and you would launch it.” Now, the imitations are essentially free advertising.

Yes, indeed. Especially in the context of this story. Also, suing a bunch local chefs and corner eateries out of business is extremely bad PR. Plus, if we’re being honest, the original “crunchwrap” is the Chinese jianbing (IYKYK), the origins of which allegedly date back to the three kingdoms.

Even if this story wasn’t pitched by Taco Bell, and the pitch was Mr. Fortney’s to the editors of the New York Times, sometimes good PR is making the most of the opportunities that come your way. And Taco Bell is good at PR. Two years ago, the New Yorker, America’s gold-plated maximum prestige magazine for tiresome coastal intellectuals (I’m a subscriber), produced a 5,000 word feature on the company’s “innovation kitchen.” The spine of the narrative is a history of the creation of the Crunchwrap Supreme, which the company obviously considers its magnum opus. I read that story when it came out. It was fascinating. Stories that take you behind the scenes of things you take for granted often are.

I’ve never been a natural at product PR. There’s a razzle-dazzle element that I struggle with, and I’m better suited to corporate reputation and issues management work. But when you come up in the agency world, you get all kinds of assignments. I helped launched Swanson Chicken Broth in South China back in 2007, when I lived in Shanghai. Chicken broth is an MSG and salt delivery mechanism that props up lots of Chinese cooking and is as much a commodity as soybeans or lumber. How do you persuade a bunch of aunties that some foreign brand is worth shelling out for? I recall we did a lot of work recruiting celebrity chefs and kitchen-god types who could advocate on blogs and in media appearances.

Also, it didn’t hurt that Swanson had come up with one of the better sinicizations of a western brand: 史云生 (Shǐyúnshēng).

史: shǐ (history)

云: yún (cloud)

生: shēng (fresh)

Buddy, 史云生 isn’t just soup in a box. It’s fucking tradition! Or, anyway, that was the story we told. It was in fact soup in a box. You work with what you’ve got.

Chicken broth wasn’t the least sexy thing I ever worked on. That was the General Insurance Association of Singapore, in my very first PR gig more than twenty years ago. Let’s not talk about that.

Less sexy than chicken broth, but infinitely more sexy than a bunch of insurance bosses, was packaging foam, which I worked on the same year as I was doing soup in a box.

You know when you buy a new TV or other appliance and it comes padded in a set of molded foam blocks? That’s packaging foam. Now, if you’re an undiscerning troglodyte, you might use common expanded polystyrene. (Often known as “Styrofoam”, though this is a branded version of extruded polystyrene produced by DuPont.) But there are fancier foams out there, including my then client’s product, and vicious battles are fought in the darkness to persuade big appliance makers to switch foams.

There are companies that think about nothing but packaging strategy. Something like 200 million televisions are sold each year. That means 200 million televisions are shipped each year, and each of them is some kind of protective packaging. The breakage rate is 1-2 percent, or 2-4 million sets, representing (back of the envelope) something like $1.5 billion in annual losses. That’s also lots of new TVs needlessly condemned to e-waste rather than fulfilling their god-given purpose to show Arrested Development reruns to stoners eating Crunchwrap Supremes.

And so a story takes shape. I said above that it’s interesting to go behind the scenes of things people take for granted. You can do that for packaging foam. And you can do that for food. And if you’re very, very clever, you can take people behind the scenes of products that aren’t yours, but that are inspired by yours, and spin a story that way. That’s what Taco Bell did. Slow clap!

Elsewhere in restaurant PR, here’s a Wall Street Journal story on how an operator of mass-casual restaurant chains plans to introduce AI into its business:

The company behind Applebee’s and IHOP plans to use artificial intelligence in its restaurants and behind the scenes to streamline operations and encourage repeat customers.

Dine Brands is adding AI-infused tech support for all of its franchisees, as well as an AI-powered “personalization engine” that helps restaurants offer customized deals to diners, said Chief Information Officer Justin Skelton.

Look, I work for a chipmaker and AI pays all my bills, so I’m all for talking it up. And this is a story pointed at investors, so there is no luscious food photography and you won’t feel hungry after you read it. But you will learn about this:

The company’s personalization engine, which also uses generative AI, automatically recommends new or additional items to customers based on their prior purchases and the purchases of diners similar to them, Skelton said.

This is just old-school collaborative filtering with an AI glow-up, right? But you can’t blame a company for trying, and I can’t think of a better target audience for this technology than the world’s munchie-tortured stoners:

Stoner: Um. Yeah. So, like, you know [giggles for twenty seconds] I’d like, um, a cheeseburger.

AI voice: Customers who ordered cheeseburgers also ordered…

[30 seconds of three blinking dots]

AI voice: FRIES!

Stoner:

AI voice: How many orders of [pause] FRIES [pause] would you like?

Stoner: Um, twelve?

Why not? After a night of epic bong rips, you can never have too many fries.

I arrived in Amsterdam at 6AM on a Monday morning with a full work day ahead. It’s always a treat to stay awake and productive after a sleepless flight and an early arrival. By the afternoon my eyeballs are vibrating like tuning forks. Finally going to sleep after one of these days is the purest bliss. It’s like rediscovering the whole idea of a bed. It’s so soft and welcoming and flat!

The hotel in Amsterdam was joined to the airport by a long corridor, which was convenient for everyone flying in for our event. But I stayed in a room with an inward-facing “atrium view” and for three days I saw little unfiltered daylight. This creates a space-station vibe that is bad for your body clock. Who cares what time it is when you’re unshackled from Earth’s natural rhythms like a Morlock?

After a long-haul flight, the thing I want most is a shower to remove the film of plane-sweat and the lingering scent of disposable upholstery and economy class ravioli. The hot shower is one of the crowning creations of industrial civilization, something so pure and good it seems impossible that you could fuck it up. Unfortunately, some malignant tinkerer invented the “rain” style shower head, the kind mounted in the ceiling directly above you.

I assume hotels install rain showers out of sadism. The shower cubicle is inevitably designed so you have to stand directly under the shower head to use the valves. These will be elaborate, like the controls of a steam locomotive, and nothing will be labeled. Just a collection of unmarked brass cranks and levers. I guess wrong 100% of the time and get blasted from above by the initial rush of cold water. What’s wrong with on/off, hot/cold? If I wanted horrifying Victorian plumbing, I’d live in London.1

Then it was on to Taipei, a brutal 18-hour travel day. I had a three-hour layover in Munich, so I tried to talk my way into a Star Alliance lounge on the back of my outrageously expensive airline-affiliated credit card. According to my inexpert reading of the alchemical matrix on the credit card’s website, this should have worked, but the woman at the counter wasn’t having it. There is no walk of shame longer than the one after you’ve been tossed from the rope-line of a middlebrow airport lounge by a woman with a German accent. No cheese cubes for you!

Flying from Europe to Taiwan is weird now due to the need to wind around various war zones and hot spots. The flight path looked like the pilots were slightly drunk and having trouble flying in a straight line. The world is troubled and unstable and everywhere there is strife and tension. If only there were something—some kind of Forum—where leaders from government, business and civil society could come together to discuss meaningful solutions and collaborate to make the world a better place…

Hold that thought.

Decapitation!

Some years ago I was the spokesperson on duty when the CEO of my then employer was fired. Technically, the board of directors asked for his resignation but, you know, that’s fired.

I found out about this during my evening commute when the head of investor relations called me and asked if I was alone. I was, and he told me the news and that the press release would go out pre-market the next morning. I was the only person on the in-house PR team who knew. I assumed the head of IR had called me because I led crisis comms and was the kind of hardass pro you want for a tight spot. But he just needed someone who knew how to manage the distribution of the press release over the BusinessWire service.

Hilariously, I did not know how to send a release over BusinessWire, so he also had to read-in our newsroom editor, who did that sort of thing. We were both grimly informed that our heads would join the CEO’s on the block if we breathed a word to anyone.

Neither of us broke the cone of silence and the announcement went off as planned the next morning. Even though it was for the wrong reason, it was good that I was tagged in as I was able to be prepared and on-station early to manage the incoming press calls. My boss, the chief communication officer, joined me in a conference room the moment the news broke and we worked the phones together. It was awkward that she hadn’t been informed beforehand, but she was a pro and didn’t blame me for that.

Rather than work with the in-house PR team, the board had retained our then issues and financial comms agency to help prepare for the announcement. I understood why. CEOs often work closely with comms teams and the web of allegiances and obligations might not be clear. Also, outside comms advisors specializing in financial and crisis comms probably aren’t going to gab to their colleagues or leak to the press and start a fire of market-moving rumors. (That’s the bankers’ job.)

I can’t take credit for the strategy, but it was sound. The press release was transparent enough about the reasons for the departure that it removed most of the impetus for reporters to scratch around for “the real story.” That was important. Departure statements are often negotiated, and sometimes there are compromises in the messaging, but the goal is to clear the air in one news cycle so the company can move forward. A sense of unresolved tension or obfuscation can motivate reporters to dig for a backstory and draw out the news cycle. If a bunch of other execs is eager to settle scores through anonymous sourcing, you might be in for a rough time and it won’t help the company’s reputation.

There were some creative theories about the departure, but they stayed at the fringes of coverage. A credible interim CEO was named and there was strategic continuity. The departing CEO didn’t litigate. Life moved on. A good outcome, under the circumstances.

You know how people sometimes discover at awkward times that the HR or legal team at their company is there to defend the company’s interests, and not theirs? That’s true of PR teams as well.2 Working directly with CEOs and senior executives is one of the privileges of my job. But I am interested in working with them only insofar as they are vessels for advancing the company’s reputation.

I’m a corporate reputation person, not a personal publicist. That will become clear the moment an executive’s interests diverge from the company’s. Occasionally, I’ve had to develop contingency plans to go to PR war with execs departing in tense circumstances. Fortunately, these plans have all stayed in the realm of “break glass in case of…” and none was ever triggered. Everyone loses when a departure turns into a public shitfight.

But sometimes a departure is messy. A year ago, the Wall Street Journal published an exhaustively reported story alleging a toxic work culture within the World Economic Forum (WEF) and implicating the founder and executive chairman, Klaus Schwab. I expect the editorial and legal review on that story was rigorous, given how connected Schwab is. Indeed, the story notes:

In a memo to staff on May 21 [2024], Schwab announced that he planned to step aside as executive chairman, which he indicated was part of a long-planned transition. He said he will stay on as nonexecutive chairman of the board of trustees. The announcement came after Schwab sent a letter to the Journal’s publisher and editor in chief to share concerns about the reporting for this article.

I have complained to beat editors (usually futilely), but I don’t have the juice to go straight to an editor in chief. Klaus Schwab does! He’s probably brunched with lots of EICs and publishers, though going to publishers is fraught at reputable news organizations that separate business and reporting. But I guess if the crisis is existential you pull every lever you have.3

At the time, the Forum defended Schwab vigorously. Their interests were apparently aligned. Indeed, Schwab seems likely to have been dictating the PR strategy, as we’ll see. WEF’s statement, published on their website the day after the Journal’s report, is a zero-contrition knuckle-duster that accuses the Journal of “knowingly publishing demonstrably false assertions to mischaracterize our organization, culture and colleagues, including our founder.” It also laments the “the Journal’s steady decline” and threatens a defamation lawsuit.

In April of 2025, the Journal, apparently unintimidated, ran another WEF story. This one reported that the Forum had opened an investigation into new whistleblower allegations that Schwab had misused Forum funds and real estate and ignored credible reports of sexual harassment in the organization. The Journal also reported that Schwab resigned as non-executive chairman when the Forum’s board of trustees decided to proceed with the investigation, against his wishes.

Suddenly, Schwab’s reputational interests and the Forum’s were diverging. The Forum’s statement to the Journal abandoned the punchy tone of a year ago for a more measured approach:

[T]he Forum said its board unanimously supported the decision to initiate an independent investigation “following a whistleblower letter containing allegations against former Chairman Klaus Schwab. This decision was made after consultation with external legal counsel.”

The Forum said it takes “these allegations seriously, but they remain unproven, and will await the outcome of the investigation to comment further.”

The Forum’s newsroom statement is similarly restrained and focuses on an orderly leadership transition.

Meanwhile, Klaus and his wife Hilde Schwab now have their own spokesperson, and some familiar-sounding messaging:

The Schwabs said through a spokesman that they deny every allegation in the whistleblower complaint. To protect their reputation, Klaus Schwab intends to file a lawsuit against whoever is behind the anonymous letter and “anybody who spreads these mistruths,” the spokesman said.

There’s the aggressive tone of the statement from a year ago, and a clue as to who was setting the PR strategy then.

Completing its reporting trifecta, the Journal ran a story on May 13th with the spectacular headline, “The Unraveling of the King of Davos.” It confirmed that Schwab had gone to war with the Forum’s board of trustees over their planned investigation of the whistleblower allegations:

[By] Friday, April 18, the trustees’ audit committee recommended opening a probe into a new wave of whistleblower allegations against Schwab and his wife, Hilde.

Incensed, Klaus Schwab fired off a two-paragraph message to the board’s audit committee, threatening trustees with an investigation into how they were carrying out their duties and accusing them of risking the future of the organization.

“You have the opportunity to withdraw your note to the board in the next 24 hours with the specific regret to have put into question my reputation,” his email said. He offered some advice: “To facilitate such a move, you could refer to the fact that I will file a criminal complaint.”

Schwab has his own PR strategy now, designed to protect his reputation rather than the Forum’s. He spoke to the Financial Times (conspicuously, a rival to the Wall Street Journal) on May 29th, saying that his lawyers were filing a criminal complaint against the still anonymous whistleblowers. The Forum declined to comment.

In justifying some of his management decisions to the FT, Schwab also outed European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde as considering cutting her term short to become chair of the Forum. This forced the ECB to issue a denial and the Forum to decline to comment. Awkward!

The allegations against Schwab and the Forum’s culture cut to the heart of the Forum’s image as a worthy organization that, in the words of its mission statement, strives to “bring together government, businesses and civil society to improve the state of the world.” Whether you believe that, or think that WEF is a bunch of swells descending on a Swiss resort town in private jets to grease each other up and talk about le décarbonisation, that’s the brand.

By fighting his case publicly and dragging out the story, Schwab risks more damage to the reputation of the organization he created, and I don’t think he’s helping himself either. The tension radiates like a bug-lamp for reporters. Accepting responsibility might be too much to ask, but Schwab is 87 and was already working on a leadership transition. He could have made a personal sacrifice to preserve the legacy of the Forum and his own dignity, perhaps with (just spitballing) a statement like this:

“While I have always endeavored to act with integrity, the most important thing is that the World Economic Forum is able to focus on its mission to improve the state of the world. Effective immediately, I am relinquishing my responsibilities and stepping back from Forum activities. It is time for fresh leadership that can bring the Forum into the future and ensure that it remains vital to world affairs for decades to come.”

But Schwab’s nature is evidently to fight, publicly if needs be. That puts the Forum in a difficult position. Ideally, the Forum would vigorously distance itself from Schwab and move forward. This is the moment when it’s about the organization, not the executive. Break the glass and activate the “in case of emergency” PR battle plan!

But Schwab wasn’t just chairman. He’s the founder and for fifty years the incarnation of the World Economic Forum. Schwab made the Forum, and the Forum made him a global statesman. That’s a trickier situation than severing the relationship with a professional CEO or senior manager. And Schwab might still command loyalties within the organization and among partners and other outside stakeholders with whom he has built relationships.

But the break with Schwab is an opportunity for WEF to visibly reset its culture for the future. Perhaps the best strategy for them is to take the highest road possible and capitalize on the useful parts of Schwab’s legacy while letting him fade into the background as much as his PR campaign allows.4 It will help to name a new permanent chair with a mandate to champion the organization’s evolution and step into the public advocate and convener role that was Schwab’s for so long.

The Forum itself is a kind of PR triumph. A private organization, it has ascended from its 1971 origins as a management symposium to occupy mental space adjacent to multilateral bodies like the United Nations, World Bank and International Monetary Fund. CEOs, journalists, public intellectuals and heads-of-state attend in droves. Companies use the Forum for PR, business development and executive positioning, and they pay lavishly for the privilege.

Organizations that concentrate wealth and power can breed imperial leaders who become entitled and gloriously detached from earthly concerns like ethics and treating women and junior employees as human beings. WEF has modeled itself as a virtuous global NGO committed to human betterment. But there is a grubbier model lurking in the shadows, that of the international sporting bodies that combine otherworldly glamor with ludicrous entitlement and serial corruption.

I sometimes wonder if the Forum will lose its luster. Is there a gnawing unease among its executives and attendees that there is somewhere a more rarefied and exclusive gathering for the real power brokers? Sun Valley? The Bohemian Grove? That one tent at Burning Man? Something you haven’t even heard about because you don’t own a boat with a postal code and a helicopter pad?

Over an Indonesian dinner in Amsterdam—a WEF-coded phrase if ever there was one—I and a European friend who works for a strategic comms agency discussed this. We agreed that the Forum still has critical mass. Everybody goes there because everybody goes there. That gravitational pull will survive Schwab’s departure, even if that departure is messy and protracted.

As for me, I’ve never been to WEF.5 Hell, I can’t even get into an airport lounge in Munich. But my idea for improving the state of the world is simple and actionable:

Get rid of the fucking rain showers.