SXSW 2008 has ended
Thursday, March 13 • 7:15pm - 9:15pm
Bulletproof Salesman


Fidelis Cloer is a self-confessed war profiteer. In a career spanning two decades of global turmoil, he has supplied kings, presidents and the odd dictator or two with the finest luxury armored vehicles that money can buy. In his world, security is a commodity that can be bought and sold and violence is to sales as the weather is to wheat futures. Always with an on eye on growth opportunities, Fidelis found The Perfect War when the US invaded Iraq: it wasn't about selling a dozen cars, or even a hundred, it was a thousand car war where security would become the ultimate product. Driving into Baghdad after it fell to American troops, he remarked, "This is the end of the beginning of the war," and so began his darkly comedic drive down the road to opportunity. Before the war, when clients were concerned with bullets and not bombs, his sales mantra was "I sell a good feeling": a sense of safety, security and confidence in superior German engineering that came across like a VW commercial gone wrong. But come 2004, and the threat of armor shredding Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), survivability became his sales pitch and he quickly found himself engaged in a pathological arms race with the insurgents who upped their explosive ante to defeat his increasingly higher (and more expensive) levels of armor. In war, like life, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

Thursday March 13, 2008 7:15pm - 9:15pm
Austin Convention Ctr Room 9

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