October 25, 2013 • 26 mins
Nowadays Edward Bernays remains a relatively obscure historical figure. His legacy, however, is thriving around the globe, and his techniques are found in everything from the food we eat to the things we believe. But who was this man, and how did he get his start? And how does his work affect you today?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
From UFOs two, Ghosts and government cover ups. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello, everyone,
Welcome to the first episode ever of Stuff they Don't
Want You to Know, the Audio Podcast. My name is
(00:22):
Matt Frederick. I'm the editor and producer on this show.
And my name is Ben Bolan. I am I guess
I just right do some research now. Uh? In audio,
you're the face, man, you're the voice in the face.
You're also on camera. I'm one tenth of the face
that you are, sir, But I like that position. I'm
one tenth to tell it. There you are, Yeah, there
(00:44):
we go. So yes, Matt, as you said, this is
our first audio podcast. This is a new thing for
us because a lot of the other house Stuff Works
podcast started out audio and they went video. Yeah, we're
reversing that process and hopefully it's gonna be a highly
lucrative process. We're reverse engineering lucrative in terms of rewarding no, no,
(01:08):
no money, all of the money. We're gonna make so
much money with this audio podcast. It's crazy. People would
laugh if they saw how much money we don't make exactly.
That's how I explained it to people. But so we
wanted to kick off these audio podcasts by uh doing
something that's kind of show notes, right, But that's the
(01:28):
way to look at Yeah, this is kind of getting
you guys to see the the behind the scenes of
what we do every week on our show. Yeah, and
in some of these episodes will be talking about previous
episodes we've done in our original series. Um. I guess
in the future we might talk about some other things,
topical events, updates on mysterious deaths, just to be a
(01:51):
bit somber for a moment, Matt, It's frightening how many
mysterious deaths there are. Uh oh, certainly the yeah wow,
yeah you really you really turned the corner there. Huh. Sorry, Okay,
I've been I've been reading some stuff lately that will
come up in another episode. But my friend I digress. Um,
(02:11):
can I tell you a story? Okay, It's it's short, everybody,
So this the whole podcast won't be a monologue, all right. So,
once upon a time, Ben Bullen them, the younger type
version of me was a huge sucker for advertisements. Now,
when I grew up my parents for a while for
(02:34):
a period refused to get cable on principle. So and
I'm gonna date myself here. We had, you know, one
of those rabbit ear antenna fuzzy screen thing, just because
I guess they didn't want me to watch a bunch
of television. So as soon as I was around television's
uh with cable and stuff like that, I went nuts
for commercials. You know, I would see commercials for toys.
(02:58):
Of course, every kid falls for the was and I
would go nuts and bananas over that. Let's see commercials
for stuff that a six year old was not reasonably wants,
like a truck, like an actual truck, Toyota, like a
pickup truck. Yeah, and I would go, you know, I
should learn to drive so I can buy one of those.
And I'm six, and then uh an ambitious and to
(03:19):
be candid, a lot of it stuff I didn't understand,
you know, a lot. I'm I'm fair looking back, I'm
fairly certain that I saw a tampon commercial and didn't
know what they were selling, but liked the music and thought, yeah,
I should find out what that is. I think, and
and even now even now, I'm still um when I'm
(03:40):
driving somewhere, or I'm walking by and I hear the radio,
I am that one person out to tend. We'll hear
you know, a burger king ad or something. Go when
was the last time I had a whopper? Forgetting? Yeah,
forgetting that, I've never actually eaten a whopper in my life. Really, yeah,
it's true. Really, yes, dude, scouts on or I might
(04:02):
have to all right, I'm gonna have to get into you.
I'm gonna have to talk to your friends and figure
out if that's the true story, because the whopper man,
you've got to have a whopper before call the n
essay they can verify my story. Well, for me, it
was the nerf NERF commercials, super soakers, anything like laser
tag commercials. All that kind of stuff got me. I
was such a little non military kid that the fantasy
(04:25):
of having a gun that I can shoot no matter
if it shoots foam or water, that was my big fantasy.
And those man it's got me hook line and sinker
and so. End of the story is still pucker about advertising,
both of us. But I think we're very much more
aware of it than we were advanced. Uh. We we
have done some cool experiments This is something that's a
(04:46):
great experiment for every listener to try pick a day,
pick a day like a week from now, and say,
from the moment I wake up, I'm going to keep
count of every advertisement I see or hear. That's going
to be a full day. It's it's so difficult to
do so, it's like trying to count the uses of
the word the in a in a paragraph. But why
(05:10):
has advertising become so ubiquitous? Why has it become so pervasive?
Why were we living in an age where everything can
be for sale? Well, first of all capitalism. But there's
one very important gentleman who hasn't influenced pretty much everyone
(05:31):
who has worked in the advertising industry since the nineteen twenties,
I believe, and his name is Edward Burns. I should
have said that more on ominous. Well here, just try
it again. Edward Berne's dumb changed up the sound. I
still like it. Yeah, it was, it was good. We'll
(05:52):
keep that one. But but yes, Edward Berne's This is
an historical figure that you and I examined in our
three part series on Edward Burnet is known as the
father of public relations, nephew of Sigmund Freud wrote a
book called Propaganda, which is probably one of the most
(06:14):
influential obscure books in modern history. You know. Yeah, it
influenced a lot of people, including some rather nefarious people
like who was that guy, Joseph Gebel's Yes, yes, he
also a member of the Nazi Party. Joseph Garribele's uh
followed the work of Edward Burns and used it to
(06:36):
help some social engineering, some marketing to win over the
German public during the Nazi regime's reign. Yeah, but not
just nazis his book, the book Propaganda, really it delved
into public relations like we're talking about, and really advertising
and how to kind of manipulate not kind of how
(06:57):
to manipulate people into believing certain thing, but manipulating opinion. Right, Yeah,
And in our episode we talked about some excellent examples
of this. Let's see, let's just toss out some examples. Bacon.
He made bacon part of breakfast. He did that by
didn't he He sent out a letter to I guess
(07:17):
physicians and inquired about, well, should should a person eat
a light breakfast or a hearty breakfast? I mean again,
I'm distilling that and most of these doctors, and most
of these physicians said, yes, a hearty breakfast, you should
definitely eat that, and they actually cited eggs and bacon. Yeah,
And the way the questions were framed in this letter,
(07:38):
it was um any doctor worth their stethoscope would have
chosen the option be the healthy breakfast over whatever option
A was. Maybe it was like chards of glass and Nichols,
I don't know, but but the way he framed it
was so clever that all of a sudden he had
a group of medical professionals saying that you should have
(08:04):
a hearty breakfast, and then they jumped from there to
say that bacon was part of a hearty breakfast. But
the whole reason he got this gig was because pork
manufacturing and pork livestock companies. Yeah, the beech Nut Packaging
Company specifically, Yes, the beech Nut Packaging Company had a
bunch of what we would call American bacon, right, you know,
(08:27):
it's not the bacon that flies and the rest of
the world. They had a bunch of this stuff and
they couldn't sell it, and so they can contracted Edward
Burnet's to help them sell it. So instead of going
with advertisements, he created an opinion that he could market
and made it, made it an appeal to authorities by
having the doctors say it. And that's far from the
(08:49):
only thing he's done. But and and this, so this
idea fascinates me greatly, the idea that I'm not going
to sell my product by advertising it in a traditional way.
I'm going to I'm gonna go around that advertising avenue
and I'm gonna make you believe, I'm gonna almost incept
an opinion inside of you that then will make you
(09:11):
want to purchase my product. Yeah. Absolutely, And I agree
with that because it's one of the turning points I
think in the history of advertising. Now. Of course, Edward Berness,
even though it's called the father of pr was not
the only person to do this stuff, but he was
by far and away the most successful at the top
(09:34):
of his class. Another another example that we talked about
in the videos was the Lucky Strike campaign, the cigarettes campaign,
which you you might remember if you haven't seen our
episode already, you might remember from the mad Men pilot
where they talk about lucky strikes and how it's toasted
spoiler alert, I guess, and just that you know it's
(09:55):
a show that's really all about advertising, mad men is
and they chose and their pilot up so to look
at Lucky Strikes. And to me that it makes a
lot of sense when we're talking about this guy who
is again the father of pr and advertising. Right, so
Bernes's uh figures out how to sell how to sell cigarettes.
The Lucky Strikes company asked him to make Lucky Strikes
(10:18):
cigarettes more marketable to women, right. And he looks into it,
and one of the first things he finds, if I
recall this correctly, is you got to change the color
and the green he didn't like. And then they said,
and and the women uh that he was asking about this,
they didn't like the color either at all. It's so
(10:39):
Lucky Strikes comes back to him and they say, Uh,
it's too much money for us to change the color,
so make it work. And then this is brilliant. Uh.
He links it to women's suffrage, and he has fashion designers,
again appealing to experts, declare that this particular shade of green,
not any green, The Lucky Strikes green particular is the
(11:01):
color of the season, and they're throwing green galas. It's
crazy to me, that kind of thinking is so outside
of my thinking that it's hard for me to even understand.
I just, yeah, you know that that kind of for me,
it's manipulation. That's what rings in my ears want to
hear that kind of thing. But it's so smart, man,
You've got to I've got to kind of envy the
(11:24):
ability to do that. It's inception. I love that you
say incepted because he really did. And then of course
fast forward. We don't want to just rehash the whole episode.
Please do watch it. If please do watch the series.
If you haven't watched it yet, you know we've We've
actually got a playlist on our YouTube channel. If you
go there you can watch all the episodes. Yeah, and
that's YouTube dot com slash conspiracy stuff. We often return
(11:48):
to the idea of Edward Bernese because the techniques, um,
the inception, as you said, man, which I'm gonna use
for the rest of the uh, the inception inceptive techniques
there are still in use in the modern day. Um,
perhaps more so now than ever. What's the there's a
(12:09):
news stations like now more than ever, we should make
that our thing. It's just that's all we'll say on
the business card. Now more than ever stuff they don't
want you to know now more than ever. But the
so the idea what another example of how these ideas
(12:30):
can be used. Um, we know that psychologically, as individuals,
a human mind tends to seek consensus. A human mind
tends to seek some sort of affiliation in a tribal
group and some sort of place of power within that
hierarchy or place in the right side of history. So
(12:53):
of course, of course we're hardwired to want to agree
with someone who is a doctor because they seem like
they are of some tribe that has this knowledge, and
we would like to be favorably associated as individuals on
a primal level exactly know, the one of the worst
feelings as feeling as though you're you're dumb, comparable to
(13:13):
or inferior to, especially mentally, at least that's in my
life personally. Um, And so I can completely see why
that would be just a human thing. And this is
kind of this kind of a brain hack or a
psychological hack to to circumvent people's usual critical thinking skills
this way, and we see it. We see it today
(13:36):
so often on the Internet people will say, well, I
uh saw this study that told me that avocados are
actually the lucid dreams of watermelons, and you go, oh okay,
and study study becomes this buzzword, this magic base that
people just tapping conversations um to say whatever without may
(14:00):
be looking at the methodology, looking at other studies that
may have found similar or dissimilar results, And sadly, or
I guess distressingly enough, it's it seems even more common
to have those sorts of appeals. And what I've liked
about this episode, the third part of the episode that
(14:22):
we that we did was I I really enjoyed at
the end. Usually, you know, we just give the facts
and we say this is what someone believes, is what
someone else believes, maybe it could be true. Here's some
stuff we're against it. But in that in that third episode,
we actually stopped with kind of a cautionary note, right,
(14:43):
and we warned people two, be very careful when you
hear someone just citing a vague study without citing anything
else against it. You know, that's that's a huge point.
And that's why we've started putting in a our episodes
the if you ever see the little black bar that
comes up and it says search, and then I'll put
(15:05):
the keywords in there, and if you type those keywords
into a search engine, it will get you exactly the
source that we looked at. And because we like this,
we like to even say this, we question ourselves because
we're we're going online and we're talking to people or
reading books and we're getting information as well as we can.
But we want you, whoever you are, to go and
(15:26):
research this stuff as well, so that you can really
see the sources. And we also know something that I
think is increasingly important. Watch out for appeals to emotion,
you know, and uh, in our research on techniques descended
from the original Burnese stuff, we found that the same
(15:49):
techniques used to convince people to buy cigarettes or to
buy bacon can also be used to convince people that
a war is necessary or just or even made for
a completely fabricated reason. And this um that we specifically
refer to some episodes that occurred in the ninety nineties,
(16:15):
I believe. But also, you know, it's it's very easy
to incite the mob appeal when you when you again
appeal to something that theoretically and on principle, most people
would be against, you know. And it's strange because often, uh,
there is a contingent of people in the United States
(16:37):
who would say that the United States government is guilty
of this, however, not that it makes it any better
or any worse. This is a common game that countries
and governments and even corporations play with customers and citizens
and um, just regular regular Joe like Matt and Ben.
(17:01):
So when you hear a lot of disightful stuff and
people are telling very emotionally reasoned things and not really
citing something that is concrete, quantifiable, falsifiable, even then you
have to take it with a grain of sand or
(17:21):
a grain of salting either will barrow of salt? Well, yeah,
So to that point, we this is one of the
things we talked about, and I think it was the
third episode the Hill and Nolton Strategies, and there the
whole Nurse Naria Nariah thing. Um, yeah, that's exactly what
Ben is talking about. And it was a corporation that
was paying someone allegedly ten million dollars to make up
(17:46):
a story that was so if you were against if
you were against that story, just like you said, Ben,
you're a terrible person. Yeah, And the story really did
pull at emotional heart strings. This uh nurse Naraya was
speaking two was at the U n I honestly don't know. Okay, yeah,
(18:07):
we've got it in the episode. But in her speech,
which was disseminated widely across the Western world and the
lead up to um the Gulf War, this nurse was
saying that Saddam Hussein Iraqi forces were doing something, um ruthless, right,
(18:29):
they were taking babies, they were killing babies by taking
them out of incubators. And it started off being hundreds
and hundreds and hundreds. Turns out that probably never ever happened.
And the quote unquote nurse was not a nurse. She
(18:49):
was the daughter of an ambassador, right, which is still
we still have to attack and allegedly on that, I
mean she was that actual person was definitely the daughter
of the ambassad or we have to attach that allegedly
tag on there, just because there wasn't much fallout from
this from this crazy um you know, at the risk
(19:10):
of sounding callous, it's kind of a viral marketing campaign
for a war. It really was, and we see the
same thing in other countries. One of the great things
to do, excuse me, one of the stabilizing things to
do if you are the head of a country and
the people are unhappy that people are rebelling, maybe their starvation, inflation,
(19:32):
quality of life goes down. Is that you find some
cause that everybody can get behind, whether it's the persecution
of some other minority, whether it's the idea that there
is an external threat that we all need to band
together against um or you can always just throw around
that great word freedom and or a democracy. Oh I
(19:53):
wanted to talk about that. Yeah, Uh, it gets me.
It gets me when people say when people can say, well,
the facts may the facts may not match exactly what
I'm saying, or the facts may not be on my
side now. But I know in my heart I hate
it when people say they know in there are you
know maybe I'm I know in my heart that the
(20:15):
Whopper is actually a much better burger than you would
like to think. Maybe I should like, at this point,
will the Whopper even match the hype? Oh? No, not
at all. We should point out we're not being paid
to mention whoppers. Sorry, we can bleep it out and
or so it's just like the and then we'll bleep it.
It'll be redacted. But then by this point in the show,
(20:36):
people wonder what we were talking exactly. Oh that is good.
All right, let's let's assume that got fixed. Well, Matt,
I wanted to before we get out of here, I
wanted to ask you a couple of questions about Edward Burns.
If that's okay, Yeah, absolutely, all right. So do you
think that Edward Burns should have made these discoveries or
(21:01):
made these techniques? Should he have made them? Well, if
Edward Burns hadn't made these discoveries, I'm fairly certain someone
would have just from the way psychology was moving at
the time. It's it's a hard question because in my head,
it fuels this massive consumerism where there's a lot less production,
(21:25):
creative production, and much more consuming from a public standpoint, Yeah,
I've heard that. I've heard that argument before. I don't
know if advertising can be can be linked to that specifically,
because advertising, you know, predates companies. One of my favorite
early examples of advertising was I believe I can't remember
(21:48):
his Ancient Greece the beer commercial ancient room. No prostitutes
used to have arrows on their sandals in in these yeah,
in ancient Greece. Now, I'll figure out the specifics on
this so that when people saw them walk by, they
would be able to follow the arrows to the brothels.
(22:09):
That is a true advertising. I think is UM a
natural mode. It's sort of an antenuated or focus method
of communication. The idea that we can hack things um,
or we can hack somebody's perception of it, has been
approached from a scientific perspective quite recently in the story
(22:32):
of human history. But people have always been trying to
sell things. What I what I think might be more
dangerous to that point, and I do agree that it
is becoming an increasingly consumer based society rather than producer.
I think the phrase that's been used by I don't
want to quote anybody, but the phrases the feeders, the feeders, Yeah,
(22:55):
for just the standard public. Uh, but you know that's fine,
we can get into that later. That's terrible, man. But yeah,
I see that idea. But I think what's happening more
is not so much based on advertising as it is
the near continual sources of stimulation. But it's it's strange UM.
(23:16):
I was talking to someone gosh years back when we
first kind of started the show, and one of the
things they said to me was that in the pre
digital age, the control of information was sort of a
a control of omission. So if, for instance, we had
(23:36):
if we were um part of the government agencies obsessively
monitoring Martin Luther King Jr. Then we would just prevent
that information by coming out, by never disseminating the documents,
and by never snitching on each other. But now in
a world where there is this constant simulation, this digital age, um,
(24:00):
it seems that disguising the truth has turned into inundation
rather than omissions. So instead of worrying about keeping one
thing out, just put on five fake things and see
what happens. So, I know that sounds ridiculous, um talk.
I know we're getting a little bit ahead of ourselves,
(24:21):
but that's something that I think Bernese would do. And
I am not inherently against advertising. I think people need
to be aware of it. I think you're absolutely right
Ben being aware of just being a conscious consumer, because
that's what we all are. Just be conscious about the
advertising that's hitting you, and know that it is seeping
(24:44):
in there somewhere, no matter whether you're watching it, listening
to it, or both. And speaking of watching and listening,
thank you so much for listening to our first ever
audio podcasts of Stuff that wants you to know we
appreciate your pay s is work the kinks out speak
of watching. You can go straight to YouTube dot com
(25:05):
slash Conspiracy Stuff to check out our episode of Edward
Burns And if you guys and gals out there are
listening and you feel ambitious, then we would love to
hear you do this experiment with us. Pick a day
in the future, give yourself some time, you know, don't
(25:26):
be drunk at four in the morning, and say you're
gonna do it tomorrow. Give yourself a week, and then
say one day out of out of this week, I'm
going to count every single piece of advertising I see
from the moment I wake up to the moment I
go to sleep. I'd be I'd be very interested in
seeing that number, and I'll do it too. Yeah, I'm
(25:47):
a great So we're agreed, and you can tell us
about the number that you've found. You can also give
us suggestions for an upcoming show. You can do all
of this by hitting us up on our social media. Yes,
you can find us on Twitter, We're at Conspiracy Stuff.
You can find us on Facebook. We're also Conspiracy Stuff there,
or you can send us an email, good old fashion
(26:09):
email to conspiracy at Discovery dot com. From more on
this topic, another unexplained phenomenon, visit test tube dot com
slash conspiracy stuff. You can also get in touch on
Twitter at the handle at conspiracy stuff
From UFOs two, Ghosts and government cover ups. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello, everyone,
Welcome to the first episode ever of Stuff they Don't
Want You to Know, the Audio Podcast. My name is
(00:22):
Matt Frederick. I'm the editor and producer on this show.
And my name is Ben Bolan. I am I guess
I just right do some research now. Uh? In audio,
you're the face, man, you're the voice in the face.
You're also on camera. I'm one tenth of the face
that you are, sir, But I like that position. I'm
one tenth to tell it. There you are, Yeah, there
(00:44):
we go. So yes, Matt, as you said, this is
our first audio podcast. This is a new thing for
us because a lot of the other house Stuff Works
podcast started out audio and they went video. Yeah, we're
reversing that process and hopefully it's gonna be a highly
lucrative process. We're reverse engineering lucrative in terms of rewarding no, no,
(01:08):
no money, all of the money. We're gonna make so
much money with this audio podcast. It's crazy. People would
laugh if they saw how much money we don't make exactly.
That's how I explained it to people. But so we
wanted to kick off these audio podcasts by uh doing
something that's kind of show notes, right, But that's the
(01:28):
way to look at Yeah, this is kind of getting
you guys to see the the behind the scenes of
what we do every week on our show. Yeah, and
in some of these episodes will be talking about previous
episodes we've done in our original series. Um. I guess
in the future we might talk about some other things,
topical events, updates on mysterious deaths, just to be a
(01:51):
bit somber for a moment, Matt, It's frightening how many
mysterious deaths there are. Uh oh, certainly the yeah wow,
yeah you really you really turned the corner there. Huh. Sorry, Okay,
I've been I've been reading some stuff lately that will
come up in another episode. But my friend I digress. Um,
(02:11):
can I tell you a story? Okay, It's it's short, everybody,
So this the whole podcast won't be a monologue, all right. So,
once upon a time, Ben Bullen them, the younger type
version of me was a huge sucker for advertisements. Now,
when I grew up my parents for a while for
(02:34):
a period refused to get cable on principle. So and
I'm gonna date myself here. We had, you know, one
of those rabbit ear antenna fuzzy screen thing, just because
I guess they didn't want me to watch a bunch
of television. So as soon as I was around television's
uh with cable and stuff like that, I went nuts
for commercials. You know, I would see commercials for toys.
(02:58):
Of course, every kid falls for the was and I
would go nuts and bananas over that. Let's see commercials
for stuff that a six year old was not reasonably wants,
like a truck, like an actual truck, Toyota, like a
pickup truck. Yeah, and I would go, you know, I
should learn to drive so I can buy one of those.
And I'm six, and then uh an ambitious and to
(03:19):
be candid, a lot of it stuff I didn't understand,
you know, a lot. I'm I'm fair looking back, I'm
fairly certain that I saw a tampon commercial and didn't
know what they were selling, but liked the music and thought, yeah,
I should find out what that is. I think, and
and even now even now, I'm still um when I'm
(03:40):
driving somewhere, or I'm walking by and I hear the radio,
I am that one person out to tend. We'll hear
you know, a burger king ad or something. Go when
was the last time I had a whopper? Forgetting? Yeah,
forgetting that, I've never actually eaten a whopper in my life. Really, yeah,
it's true. Really, yes, dude, scouts on or I might
(04:02):
have to all right, I'm gonna have to get into you.
I'm gonna have to talk to your friends and figure
out if that's the true story, because the whopper man,
you've got to have a whopper before call the n
essay they can verify my story. Well, for me, it
was the nerf NERF commercials, super soakers, anything like laser
tag commercials. All that kind of stuff got me. I
was such a little non military kid that the fantasy
(04:25):
of having a gun that I can shoot no matter
if it shoots foam or water, that was my big fantasy.
And those man it's got me hook line and sinker
and so. End of the story is still pucker about advertising,
both of us. But I think we're very much more
aware of it than we were advanced. Uh. We we
have done some cool experiments This is something that's a
(04:46):
great experiment for every listener to try pick a day,
pick a day like a week from now, and say,
from the moment I wake up, I'm going to keep
count of every advertisement I see or hear. That's going
to be a full day. It's it's so difficult to
do so, it's like trying to count the uses of
the word the in a in a paragraph. But why
(05:10):
has advertising become so ubiquitous? Why has it become so pervasive?
Why were we living in an age where everything can
be for sale? Well, first of all capitalism. But there's
one very important gentleman who hasn't influenced pretty much everyone
(05:31):
who has worked in the advertising industry since the nineteen twenties,
I believe, and his name is Edward Burns. I should
have said that more on ominous. Well here, just try
it again. Edward Berne's dumb changed up the sound. I
still like it. Yeah, it was, it was good. We'll
(05:52):
keep that one. But but yes, Edward Berne's This is
an historical figure that you and I examined in our
three part series on Edward Burnet is known as the
father of public relations, nephew of Sigmund Freud wrote a
book called Propaganda, which is probably one of the most
(06:14):
influential obscure books in modern history. You know. Yeah, it
influenced a lot of people, including some rather nefarious people
like who was that guy, Joseph Gebel's Yes, yes, he
also a member of the Nazi Party. Joseph Garribele's uh
followed the work of Edward Burns and used it to
(06:36):
help some social engineering, some marketing to win over the
German public during the Nazi regime's reign. Yeah, but not
just nazis his book, the book Propaganda, really it delved
into public relations like we're talking about, and really advertising
and how to kind of manipulate not kind of how
(06:57):
to manipulate people into believing certain thing, but manipulating opinion. Right, Yeah,
And in our episode we talked about some excellent examples
of this. Let's see, let's just toss out some examples. Bacon.
He made bacon part of breakfast. He did that by
didn't he He sent out a letter to I guess
(07:17):
physicians and inquired about, well, should should a person eat
a light breakfast or a hearty breakfast? I mean again,
I'm distilling that and most of these doctors, and most
of these physicians said, yes, a hearty breakfast, you should
definitely eat that, and they actually cited eggs and bacon. Yeah,
And the way the questions were framed in this letter,
(07:38):
it was um any doctor worth their stethoscope would have
chosen the option be the healthy breakfast over whatever option
A was. Maybe it was like chards of glass and Nichols,
I don't know, but but the way he framed it
was so clever that all of a sudden he had
a group of medical professionals saying that you should have
(08:04):
a hearty breakfast, and then they jumped from there to
say that bacon was part of a hearty breakfast. But
the whole reason he got this gig was because pork
manufacturing and pork livestock companies. Yeah, the beech Nut Packaging
Company specifically, Yes, the beech Nut Packaging Company had a
bunch of what we would call American bacon, right, you know,
(08:27):
it's not the bacon that flies and the rest of
the world. They had a bunch of this stuff and
they couldn't sell it, and so they can contracted Edward
Burnet's to help them sell it. So instead of going
with advertisements, he created an opinion that he could market
and made it, made it an appeal to authorities by
having the doctors say it. And that's far from the
(08:49):
only thing he's done. But and and this, so this
idea fascinates me greatly, the idea that I'm not going
to sell my product by advertising it in a traditional way.
I'm going to I'm gonna go around that advertising avenue
and I'm gonna make you believe, I'm gonna almost incept
an opinion inside of you that then will make you
(09:11):
want to purchase my product. Yeah. Absolutely, And I agree
with that because it's one of the turning points I
think in the history of advertising. Now. Of course, Edward Berness,
even though it's called the father of pr was not
the only person to do this stuff, but he was
by far and away the most successful at the top
(09:34):
of his class. Another another example that we talked about
in the videos was the Lucky Strike campaign, the cigarettes campaign,
which you you might remember if you haven't seen our
episode already, you might remember from the mad Men pilot
where they talk about lucky strikes and how it's toasted
spoiler alert, I guess, and just that you know it's
(09:55):
a show that's really all about advertising, mad men is
and they chose and their pilot up so to look
at Lucky Strikes. And to me that it makes a
lot of sense when we're talking about this guy who
is again the father of pr and advertising. Right, so
Bernes's uh figures out how to sell how to sell cigarettes.
The Lucky Strikes company asked him to make Lucky Strikes
(10:18):
cigarettes more marketable to women, right. And he looks into it,
and one of the first things he finds, if I
recall this correctly, is you got to change the color
and the green he didn't like. And then they said,
and and the women uh that he was asking about this,
they didn't like the color either at all. It's so
(10:39):
Lucky Strikes comes back to him and they say, Uh,
it's too much money for us to change the color,
so make it work. And then this is brilliant. Uh.
He links it to women's suffrage, and he has fashion designers,
again appealing to experts, declare that this particular shade of green,
not any green, The Lucky Strikes green particular is the
(11:01):
color of the season, and they're throwing green galas. It's
crazy to me, that kind of thinking is so outside
of my thinking that it's hard for me to even understand.
I just, yeah, you know that that kind of for me,
it's manipulation. That's what rings in my ears want to
hear that kind of thing. But it's so smart, man,
You've got to I've got to kind of envy the
(11:24):
ability to do that. It's inception. I love that you
say incepted because he really did. And then of course
fast forward. We don't want to just rehash the whole episode.
Please do watch it. If please do watch the series.
If you haven't watched it yet, you know we've We've
actually got a playlist on our YouTube channel. If you
go there you can watch all the episodes. Yeah, and
that's YouTube dot com slash conspiracy stuff. We often return
(11:48):
to the idea of Edward Bernese because the techniques, um,
the inception, as you said, man, which I'm gonna use
for the rest of the uh, the inception inceptive techniques
there are still in use in the modern day. Um,
perhaps more so now than ever. What's the there's a
(12:09):
news stations like now more than ever, we should make
that our thing. It's just that's all we'll say on
the business card. Now more than ever stuff they don't
want you to know now more than ever. But the
so the idea what another example of how these ideas
(12:30):
can be used. Um, we know that psychologically, as individuals,
a human mind tends to seek consensus. A human mind
tends to seek some sort of affiliation in a tribal
group and some sort of place of power within that
hierarchy or place in the right side of history. So
(12:53):
of course, of course we're hardwired to want to agree
with someone who is a doctor because they seem like
they are of some tribe that has this knowledge, and
we would like to be favorably associated as individuals on
a primal level exactly know, the one of the worst
feelings as feeling as though you're you're dumb, comparable to
(13:13):
or inferior to, especially mentally, at least that's in my
life personally. Um, And so I can completely see why
that would be just a human thing. And this is
kind of this kind of a brain hack or a
psychological hack to to circumvent people's usual critical thinking skills
this way, and we see it. We see it today
(13:36):
so often on the Internet people will say, well, I
uh saw this study that told me that avocados are
actually the lucid dreams of watermelons, and you go, oh okay,
and study study becomes this buzzword, this magic base that
people just tapping conversations um to say whatever without may
(14:00):
be looking at the methodology, looking at other studies that
may have found similar or dissimilar results, And sadly, or
I guess distressingly enough, it's it seems even more common
to have those sorts of appeals. And what I've liked
about this episode, the third part of the episode that
(14:22):
we that we did was I I really enjoyed at
the end. Usually, you know, we just give the facts
and we say this is what someone believes, is what
someone else believes, maybe it could be true. Here's some
stuff we're against it. But in that in that third episode,
we actually stopped with kind of a cautionary note, right,
(14:43):
and we warned people two, be very careful when you
hear someone just citing a vague study without citing anything
else against it. You know, that's that's a huge point.
And that's why we've started putting in a our episodes
the if you ever see the little black bar that
comes up and it says search, and then I'll put
(15:05):
the keywords in there, and if you type those keywords
into a search engine, it will get you exactly the
source that we looked at. And because we like this,
we like to even say this, we question ourselves because
we're we're going online and we're talking to people or
reading books and we're getting information as well as we can.
But we want you, whoever you are, to go and
(15:26):
research this stuff as well, so that you can really
see the sources. And we also know something that I
think is increasingly important. Watch out for appeals to emotion,
you know, and uh, in our research on techniques descended
from the original Burnese stuff, we found that the same
(15:49):
techniques used to convince people to buy cigarettes or to
buy bacon can also be used to convince people that
a war is necessary or just or even made for
a completely fabricated reason. And this um that we specifically
refer to some episodes that occurred in the ninety nineties,
(16:15):
I believe. But also, you know, it's it's very easy
to incite the mob appeal when you when you again
appeal to something that theoretically and on principle, most people
would be against, you know. And it's strange because often, uh,
there is a contingent of people in the United States
(16:37):
who would say that the United States government is guilty
of this, however, not that it makes it any better
or any worse. This is a common game that countries
and governments and even corporations play with customers and citizens
and um, just regular regular Joe like Matt and Ben.
(17:01):
So when you hear a lot of disightful stuff and
people are telling very emotionally reasoned things and not really
citing something that is concrete, quantifiable, falsifiable, even then you
have to take it with a grain of sand or
(17:21):
a grain of salting either will barrow of salt? Well, yeah,
So to that point, we this is one of the
things we talked about, and I think it was the
third episode the Hill and Nolton Strategies, and there the
whole Nurse Naria Nariah thing. Um, yeah, that's exactly what
Ben is talking about. And it was a corporation that
was paying someone allegedly ten million dollars to make up
(17:46):
a story that was so if you were against if
you were against that story, just like you said, Ben,
you're a terrible person. Yeah, And the story really did
pull at emotional heart strings. This uh nurse Naraya was
speaking two was at the U n I honestly don't know. Okay, yeah,
(18:07):
we've got it in the episode. But in her speech,
which was disseminated widely across the Western world and the
lead up to um the Gulf War, this nurse was
saying that Saddam Hussein Iraqi forces were doing something, um ruthless, right,
(18:29):
they were taking babies, they were killing babies by taking
them out of incubators. And it started off being hundreds
and hundreds and hundreds. Turns out that probably never ever happened.
And the quote unquote nurse was not a nurse. She
(18:49):
was the daughter of an ambassador, right, which is still
we still have to attack and allegedly on that, I
mean she was that actual person was definitely the daughter
of the ambassad or we have to attach that allegedly
tag on there, just because there wasn't much fallout from
this from this crazy um you know, at the risk
(19:10):
of sounding callous, it's kind of a viral marketing campaign
for a war. It really was, and we see the
same thing in other countries. One of the great things
to do, excuse me, one of the stabilizing things to
do if you are the head of a country and
the people are unhappy that people are rebelling, maybe their starvation, inflation,
(19:32):
quality of life goes down. Is that you find some
cause that everybody can get behind, whether it's the persecution
of some other minority, whether it's the idea that there
is an external threat that we all need to band
together against um or you can always just throw around
that great word freedom and or a democracy. Oh I
(19:53):
wanted to talk about that. Yeah, Uh, it gets me.
It gets me when people say when people can say, well,
the facts may the facts may not match exactly what
I'm saying, or the facts may not be on my
side now. But I know in my heart I hate
it when people say they know in there are you
know maybe I'm I know in my heart that the
(20:15):
Whopper is actually a much better burger than you would
like to think. Maybe I should like, at this point,
will the Whopper even match the hype? Oh? No, not
at all. We should point out we're not being paid
to mention whoppers. Sorry, we can bleep it out and
or so it's just like the and then we'll bleep it.
It'll be redacted. But then by this point in the show,
(20:36):
people wonder what we were talking exactly. Oh that is good.
All right, let's let's assume that got fixed. Well, Matt,
I wanted to before we get out of here, I
wanted to ask you a couple of questions about Edward Burns.
If that's okay, Yeah, absolutely, all right. So do you
think that Edward Burns should have made these discoveries or
(21:01):
made these techniques? Should he have made them? Well, if
Edward Burns hadn't made these discoveries, I'm fairly certain someone
would have just from the way psychology was moving at
the time. It's it's a hard question because in my head,
it fuels this massive consumerism where there's a lot less production,
(21:25):
creative production, and much more consuming from a public standpoint, Yeah,
I've heard that. I've heard that argument before. I don't
know if advertising can be can be linked to that specifically,
because advertising, you know, predates companies. One of my favorite
early examples of advertising was I believe I can't remember
(21:48):
his Ancient Greece the beer commercial ancient room. No prostitutes
used to have arrows on their sandals in in these yeah,
in ancient Greece. Now, I'll figure out the specifics on
this so that when people saw them walk by, they
would be able to follow the arrows to the brothels.
(22:09):
That is a true advertising. I think is UM a
natural mode. It's sort of an antenuated or focus method
of communication. The idea that we can hack things um,
or we can hack somebody's perception of it, has been
approached from a scientific perspective quite recently in the story
(22:32):
of human history. But people have always been trying to
sell things. What I what I think might be more
dangerous to that point, and I do agree that it
is becoming an increasingly consumer based society rather than producer.
I think the phrase that's been used by I don't
want to quote anybody, but the phrases the feeders, the feeders, Yeah,
(22:55):
for just the standard public. Uh, but you know that's fine,
we can get into that later. That's terrible, man. But yeah,
I see that idea. But I think what's happening more
is not so much based on advertising as it is
the near continual sources of stimulation. But it's it's strange UM.
(23:16):
I was talking to someone gosh years back when we
first kind of started the show, and one of the
things they said to me was that in the pre
digital age, the control of information was sort of a
a control of omission. So if, for instance, we had
(23:36):
if we were um part of the government agencies obsessively
monitoring Martin Luther King Jr. Then we would just prevent
that information by coming out, by never disseminating the documents,
and by never snitching on each other. But now in
a world where there is this constant simulation, this digital age, um,
(24:00):
it seems that disguising the truth has turned into inundation
rather than omissions. So instead of worrying about keeping one
thing out, just put on five fake things and see
what happens. So, I know that sounds ridiculous, um talk.
I know we're getting a little bit ahead of ourselves,
(24:21):
but that's something that I think Bernese would do. And
I am not inherently against advertising. I think people need
to be aware of it. I think you're absolutely right
Ben being aware of just being a conscious consumer, because
that's what we all are. Just be conscious about the
advertising that's hitting you, and know that it is seeping
(24:44):
in there somewhere, no matter whether you're watching it, listening
to it, or both. And speaking of watching and listening,
thank you so much for listening to our first ever
audio podcasts of Stuff that wants you to know we
appreciate your pay s is work the kinks out speak
of watching. You can go straight to YouTube dot com
(25:05):
slash Conspiracy Stuff to check out our episode of Edward
Burns And if you guys and gals out there are
listening and you feel ambitious, then we would love to
hear you do this experiment with us. Pick a day
in the future, give yourself some time, you know, don't
(25:26):
be drunk at four in the morning, and say you're
gonna do it tomorrow. Give yourself a week, and then
say one day out of out of this week, I'm
going to count every single piece of advertising I see
from the moment I wake up to the moment I
go to sleep. I'd be I'd be very interested in
seeing that number, and I'll do it too. Yeah, I'm
(25:47):
a great So we're agreed, and you can tell us
about the number that you've found. You can also give
us suggestions for an upcoming show. You can do all
of this by hitting us up on our social media. Yes,
you can find us on Twitter, We're at Conspiracy Stuff.
You can find us on Facebook. We're also Conspiracy Stuff there,
or you can send us an email, good old fashion
(26:09):
email to conspiracy at Discovery dot com. From more on
this topic, another unexplained phenomenon, visit test tube dot com
slash conspiracy stuff. You can also get in touch on
Twitter at the handle at conspiracy stuff
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