Live in Chicago: How Public Relations Works

After a year of taking it on the road, Josh and Chuck are releasing their show on public relations. Learn all about the ways you're manipulated on a daily basis and the man who invented it in this fascinating live episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you should know from house stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and we are here live
at the beautiful Athenium Theater in Chicago. Ill no very nice,

(00:37):
we should say the sold out Athenian Theater than to Chicago.
We feel very loved here and big thanks to the Athenian.
Guy has been awesome in a e g. The promoters, Uh,
let's do this, buddy, Let's man, I'm sweating already. Good lord,
what's wrong with It's a It's a hot show, hot
hot show, right everybody, and it's me. Let's be honest,

(00:58):
Well you're a hot hot pot castor did we say
who is who? By the way, I think everyone knows
you guys know right that that's Chuck and I'm there's
a spelt handsome guy and there's a chubby bearded guy.
We really like to keep ourselves on the opposite inspect.
Jerry is not here. I'm sorry it's not here. That
is so sweet of you guys. Every time we say

(01:21):
Jerry's not here and cheers when she is here. I
wish we could say why, but we'll announce it soon.
She has some top secret business going on. Yeah, that's
not cryptic at all. Yes, she's leaving us for another podcast.
She she's not allowed to leave. She would never leave it.
We fired her, So that's not true either. So, um,

(01:45):
you guys know how you have no idea what topic
we're doing tonight? You're about to understand why, because we're
doing public relations. And before you leave, a please hang
on because actually, public relations is one of the most
interesting topics we have ever ever encountered. It has it all.

(02:05):
It has manipulative psychology, it has old tiny history, it
has cool ads, it has like mind control. It's got
it all. It has it all. Nazis like the thing
is involved in public relations. And as a matter of fact,
we're sitting right smack dab in the middle of the

(02:27):
world that public relations built, and we should say, we
should say, are there any PR professionals here tonight? Yes? Well,
we want to apologize in advance. Everybody'd be nice to
those guys. The bartman of the show. Sorry, sorry about that.
Did everybody get drink? Everyone settled in? Any lord? Did

(02:51):
they serve my lord here? What what is that? I
told myself I had to mention, my lord, what is it? Mlord? Well,
what is it? It's uh, it's a it's wormwood. Right,
I was gonna guess wormwood. What is this stuff? It's
it's made me psychic. Yeah, it's uh, it's it's it's

(03:12):
from Chicago, I believe, right, or at least very big here,
and it's it's the most disgusting thing you will ever
have cross your tongue. But does it give you pretty buzzed?
I don't know, because I've never had more than a sip,
and then three days later, I'm still like brushing my
teeth with steel wool trying to get the taste out
of my mouth. Yeah, the aftertaste is pretty special. I

(03:34):
got you? Are you guys? I'm alert right now? A
couple of people are Huh, I've heard it's a hipster thing.
Now I can buy it? Can you? Shot a M
alert in a PBR and some steel wool, but only
our teasonal steel wool. I'm sorry, artisanal steel wool. Wow?

(03:57):
All right, so let's get this thing going. Uh it
you go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics website like
we do, just to read uh. You can look up
pr specialists and has anyone heard are the recent one
on publicists? This is tangential, but this is better because
we like to save the good stuff for live. Uh.

(04:19):
If you look up PR specialists you can find this definition.
They are someone who creates and maintains a favorable public
image for the organization they represent, designing media releases to
shape public perception of the organization into increase awareness of
his work and goals. Sounds very nice and innocuous, doesn't it.
Chuck just started with a quote from the Bureau of

(04:43):
It's not if you read any podcasting handbook, they specifically
say not to start the show off like that. And
you know, because you wrote it. Uh, it's self published.
But still, I mean it's it's there. I think it's
gaining some steam here doing fine. So it seems like
a pretty straight ahead And if you hear publicist is
pretty straight ahead. But the creator of PR there was

(05:04):
literally one dude who created the job of public relations,
uh specialist, and his name is Edward Burns. Anybody familiar
I heard of that guy. A couple of people. That's
good for the rest of you. Prepare to have your
minds balloon. Yes, this guy is arguably tied for first

(05:24):
second most evil person in the twentieth century, and that's
really saying something because there was at least one really
really evil dude in the twenties. I would go number
two behind a certain German Man. There's the Nazis appearance.
That's the parents one. By the way, Yeah, they're doing
me like at least three Nazi references. Uh So he

(05:49):
was voted by Life magazine is one of the one
most influential people in the twentieth century. And we easily
agreed that he's like a top tenner, right, we say
bosh to Life's stupid rating system. Cars is better. I
would say top six, top six, top six, most influential,
maybe top three. Oh yeah, And and it's it's not

(06:11):
just us like hating on Edward Burney's Are you guys
familiar with The New York Times. It's a newspaper and
they write obituaries Suntimes, I'll give you that, uh or
Tribune alright? Which one? Did Ebert work for Tribune? Right? Times?
The Times? Really? I thought it was a Tribune guy.
It's okay, alright, dude, Sometimes I got it was the

(06:34):
School the other newspaper where they rival newspapers. Oh really, man,
I used to love that. You love this town? Man,
have you seen have you seen that documentary? Man, we're
already sidetracked about the Ebert document that God's so good
and like, get the box of tissues ready when you

(06:56):
watch it too, unless you have no heart, like we're
Berne if you're dead inside. Yeah, So the The New
York Times wrote an obituary. Eb Bernis lived to be
a hundred and three. By the way, because the most
evil ones do rr Burns, Dick Cheney, they all developed
like a huge hump and like caw like fingers, you
know that kind of thing. Ever Bernis was among them,

(07:18):
lived to a hundred and three, and when he finally died,
The New York Times wrote an obituary. And I think
they try to be hard hitting yet polite. So this
is the most polite that The New York Times could
possibly be. They said that ever Bernis was quote either
a benefactor of the human race or someone who had
a lot to answer for they left off in hell

(07:41):
at the I'm sure a relatives like that was nice. Yeah,
at least he was in the Times. I guess so
he because he lives so long His career literally spanned
from World War One, not World War two, world War
one to the beginning of the information age in the
midnight nineties. So he had a lot of influence, to

(08:03):
say the least. Yeah, man, I hope you do that
like eight times tonight. So he's a very controversial guy.
And what he did was he realized early on that
he could lift weirdly enough, he could lift a lot
of his practices from Sigmund Freud. Freud came along and
he said, you know, there's this thing called the self,

(08:25):
these unconscious desires and fears that all of us have.
We don't know about them because they're unconscious and just
it's a thing with every human being. And Berne said,
you know what, I think I can use that to
manipulate people into being interested in products. And uh, Sigmund
Schlomo Freud, by the way, did anyone It's true he didn't.

(08:49):
He didn't go by Shlomo. He was very much ashamed
of his middle name. And so he he basically lifted
this stuff, this fear and desire and praying on that
because uh, he was his uncle. So Freud was Berni's uncle,
and we call Freud uncle Shlomo for the rest of
this podcast. If you get confused, just remember that Uncle

(09:13):
Shlomo equals signal or greater than Sigmund Freud's. So so
Uncle Shlomo was fairly innocent in this whole affair. Like
basically as far as psychology goes, he just basically stumbled
across the self this idea that we're all driven by
selfish desires that were not aware of and that we
all subscribe to a herd mentality, and that like, you

(09:36):
guys all care what the group thinks more than anything else,
and that's how you think, and same with us and anybody, right,
And so this is what what Shlomo came up with,
and it was a big deal. Like up to this point,
like people didn't talk about their feelings, they didn't think
about their feelings. They certainly didn't think that they were
driven unconsciously like automatons, by these crazy desires. And the

(09:58):
first thing Berni's thinks of is like that would be
a great way to sell the people exactly. I think
I can exploit that and sell more stuff. So if
you think about like the advertising you see every day today,
it's it's a different world than it was back then,
Back in the day, um advertising was very straightforward and
it literally just advertised how a product worked as it should,

(10:21):
Like you would you would see an advertisement about a
car like the new Forward runs like a cautioned run,
and it looks like this and it gets you from
point A to point B. Good night. That's all or
the again more blender, it really blends. Well, that was advertising,
Yeah it maybe maybe maybe in like the more expensive Edge,

(10:41):
there'd be like a hand drawn finger pointing at you
and it was a you in all caps with some
exclamation points, thing like you buy this morphine because it
will give you the buzz you're looking for, you know,
that kind of thing. But it was based on this
idea that you were a rational actor in charge of
your own decisions, and that you would want to buy
this if you if it was explained to you that

(11:03):
the Ford was the best choice for you. It was
treated you like a human being. In other words. When
Freud came along and came up with the self and
then Bernes figured out how to hijack it, all that
went out the window and all of a sudden we
were all kind of slaves to these selfish desires. Well, yeah, basic.
I mean, think about the ads you see now. If
you can find an ad that doesn't prey on some

(11:23):
fear or desire, it's either, uh, you've had a rough day,
indulge in that Ben and Jerry's chuck. Have you guys
noticed that Ben and Jerry's ads now stay chuck at
the end of all of them. They know their audience
or or a fear um or you deserve like the
sports car, like all these things that you know you

(11:44):
deserve all this stuff old. Don't you want to stay
relevant by the sports car? All of your friends are
going to tour two goa and having fun. Why aren't you? Right?
Would you like to stay relevant? We have a product
for you that will help you feel young again. Or
at the base of it all, use this mouth waw
or you'll die alone? Right, which is kind of accurate

(12:05):
as far as advertising goes. And back in Burnet's day,
the reason they they had ads like that is because
you literally use something until it was done Back then,
like you drove your car until it quit running, or
you had your blender until it quit blending. There was
no such thing as buying the new version of the
thing you already have. And I know, no one here

(12:27):
has a phone in their pocket and another phone at
home that still works, use the new model exactly. So
that was a completely new thing to to buy something
before it had worn out. After World War Two, manufacturing
uh kind of dried up, and they were kind of worried.
They're like, we've sold all of our stuff and everyone's

(12:49):
got everything they need. So they were like, well, we
need to think of new ways to sell things to people. Yeah,
we need we need to sell people stuff that they
don't need exactly, And the best way to do that
is to prime those on conscious desires, to prime those
unconscious fears, and then in the next breath, stay and
by the way, this product will fulfill all of your
desires or will vanquish all of your fears. And people

(13:12):
came to identify themselves with products uh and and all
of that is frankly because of Bernet. So basically all
of the weird, quiet maltreatment that every living person in
the Western world undergoes on a daily basis can almost
without hyperbole, be laid at the feet of Edward Bruney's
you guys get this now, right. So he had a

(13:36):
super long career, like we said, and he worked. I mean,
this is just a smattering of people. He worked for, Uh,
President Eisenhower. I think he worked for like five or
six presidents. Do we have any Eisenhower fans in the
crime you liar? Thomas Edison was a client, al right, right? Wow,
that really is an Eisenhower fans. Henry Ford was a client.

(13:57):
Samuel Samuel Goldwin of MGM was a client, eleanor Roosevelt.
And those were just a few. And reportedly this is
Nazi reference number two. Reportedly, Hitler wanted to hire Edward
Burns to run his propaganda wing and he turned him down.
And we can't find really good verification of that. So

(14:19):
what we think, because we've studied Edward Burne's is that
he actually took that up to tell people, like, you know,
turned down Hitler to make himself look good. We uncovered
some Edward Burne's b s He wanted me, but well,
you know, I had some other clients. So whether that's
true or not, there's actually if this floats your boat
at all, Guys, if you leave this this place thinking

(14:41):
like I really want to know more about us, go
check out this really cool documentary called A Century of
the Self, Right, fourth part BBC documentary. It delves into
a lot of this stuff, um, and it keeps going
even further beyond that. But one of the things that's
featured in this documentary is newsreel footage of Joseph Gerb
the Nazi propaganda minister, Nazi reference three, three of three.

(15:05):
Is this it? Yep, you get no more Nazi reference guys.
This is the end of the road with the Nazis.
So Gebel's um is talking on film about how much
he admires Edward Burney's and his writings and ideas and
how it's directly influenced the Nazi propaganda machine. Again, Yes,

(15:26):
do you like those gasps? Now do the thing? Yeah,
there we go. Uh. He was the first person to
use pulling, like to pull the public and tell the
public what he you know, everyone should think about products.
He was the first to use expert opinions, uh, like
nine out of tend Dennis a blank. He was the
first person to do that. He was the first person

(15:48):
to use product placement in movies UH and TV and
films and UH. He had a really great knack for
getting lots of different people to write him big checks
for the same work. Smart guy. He's very wealthy too,
by the way, because of this. So for instance, he
had at one point, Um William Randolph Hurst, the great

(16:10):
uh publisher, newspaper and magazine publisher, came to Berne's and
he said to Mr Burnet's fuel that was selling a
lot of magazines too. Men. That's a that's a great nurse,
by the way, but I think women would like to
read magazines as well, So how can I sell magazines
to women? Having too cloza And he just went weirdly

(16:33):
British all of a sudden, so bad my impressions. I
appreciate that. Uh. So he went to Berne, and Berne said,
you know what, here's what we'll do. Let's start. Let's
start putting ads in magazines that cater to women. Um,
like like diamonds. Women love diamonds, right, so let's put
diamond ads in your magazines. The diamond people were his clients.

(16:56):
So he was like, I got two checks now, but
why stop there? Yeah? I stopped there. Let me get um,
let's let's put like a famous actress in there and
these ads. No one had ever done that before. And
let let's get like Clara Bow and let's put her
in these diamonds in the magazine. Clara Beau was also
a client, So he's getting three checks for the same
stupid diamond ad to sell the same stupid women's magazine.

(17:19):
And then women's magazines were a thing. I'm not saying
that's bad. They're great. Yeah, this is this is not
about women's magazines. That'd be weird. But before all of this,
before he, uh, he gained his massive amount of wealth
and influence, he was just a little bitty, regular baby.

(17:39):
Because babies aren't evil. I think he might have been
an evil baby. All babies are good. I don't know
about this one, at least for a few weeks. Uh.
He was just a little baby born in Vienna, Austria,
in eight one of five children of Eli Bernis and
Anna Freud Berne's and uh they were This had always

(18:00):
melted my brain how it works out with the relationship
with the sigmund I'm sorry, Shlomo SloMo, so I need
you to explain because I can never get it right.
So Berne's mother was Freud's sister and Bern's father was
Freud's wife's brother. So it sounds gross, but idea what

(18:21):
that means. There was just some siblings swapping going on,
which is legal in all countries. It seems like incests,
but it's really not. It's fine. They're just tighten and family,
that's right. So by nineteen twelve he made contact with
Uncle SloMo. Through the years, he visited Vienna and the
he you know, he eventually moved to New York and
then visited his uncle in the summers. But eventually, in

(18:42):
nineteen twelve he graduated from Cornell University and he had
his first um gig. It's a sort of influence what
his career would be when this producer of a play
came to him and he said, you know, I've got
this play and you're a young, upstart person that thinks
you know what you're doing. And I'm not selling many
tickets and I could use your help. It's about this

(19:03):
couple with syphilis. It's called Damaged Goods and no one's
coming and I can't for life. And you figured out
why people are lined up around the block at the
Anthenium Theater. Chuck is totally serious about this. It might
have played here. This place has been around for like
since the early years. Yeah, no reactions over, no respects

(19:27):
for anything. Maybe so he goes to Berne's and he said,
I need some help selling tickets, and Burnet said, you
know what we'll do. I have a little plan. Let's uh,
let's make this not a dirty thing. Let's get out
in front of this, because you know what, we should
be talking about syphilis, because it's a problem. Everyone's got it.
Everybody had syphilis at the time, and you're brave enough

(19:48):
to do a play about it. So get out in
front of it, and let's make this part of the
national conversation. And he injured. Wasn't a huge play, let's
get real, but he engineered a little campaign. In all
of a sudden it started selling tickets. So he had
his first little like a feather in his cap and
all that sounds fine, sounds great. Like he was the
first person to use let's get out in front of

(20:09):
this as a phrase. Um or he uh, he started
in national dialogue or whatever about syphilis, which is a
good thing. And this is very Bernesian, right, So you
think you're distracted over here by the good that it did,
but really, if you look at it, he just did
the whole thing totally cynically to sell tickets. Just play

(20:29):
called damage goods, and that was very Bernie. So he
wrote a book. His first book in nineteen was called
Crystallizing Public Opinion. And he was really excited to send
it to Uncle Schlomo because he had used his work
to influence him. And he sent it to him, and uh,
he didn't get like the most well, he got a
very schlomo lean response. So do you guys know, SloMo

(20:52):
he did in America. We should change that, no more Freudian.
You have to add an extra l Well, Olean, try
and say it without the extra. It's impossible. I'm not
eve gonna try. So Shlomo writes him back and says, um,
he says, I have received your book Ellipse, which it's

(21:14):
not good in a letter as a truly American production.
It interested me greatly when he went right. And everyone
knows Freud was psychic, so when he did that, when
when he wrote the letter, and then while Berne was
reading it, he did it again because he knew he

(21:35):
was reading it right then and it would really drive
the point home. He was not satisfied with just an ellipse,
No he was not, But that takes a lot of
effort to actually write the lips dot dot dot yeah
with a feather and I'll oh no, wait, I guess
it pens at that point, so Freud was he's a
look cool. No, no, they had pens. Okay, oh no,

(21:58):
on the joke. I thought it was a great joke.
I didn't realize it was a joke. So yes to everything. Okay, good?
Uh so Uncle Shlomo wasn't super impressed, which, um it
bothered uh young Edward a little bit, Young Eddie, and
uh but it came back to roost a little bit
when Shlomo came up on hard times because apparently he

(22:21):
didn't make a windfall of cash. No, he did well
at first, the Austrian economy fell apart and inflation went
through the roof and his bank accounts went and he
found himself broken, right, so he needed some dough and uh,
little Eddie helped him out, and he said, you know what,
let me let me publish. Help you get your works
published in America, which again sounds nice, But Berne's retained

(22:43):
the publishing rights in America, that's right, and didn't he
He actually tried to get him to write articles for
one of the new women's magazines, Cosmopolitan. Can you believe
that like he Fred came back close to writing a
column in Cosmo. No, seriously, how to satisfy your man
in five easy steps. Number one, stroke his beard, smoke

(23:07):
a cigar. Oh the cigars. Not always a cigar, No,
especially not in Cosmo. Well, and actually, didn't someone give
someone a box of cigars in this transaction? So when
when Berne's sent Freud a box of cigars? Freud sent
Berne is a book of his general Introductory Introductory Lectures,

(23:30):
which is what inspired all this in Berne's he actually
sent him a box of fars, not ironically, And can't
you just see like just like hypnotizing himself, like shaking
this box of cigars, just trying to convince himself a
cigar is just a cigar. He was a sick Oh, yes,
I can't put it in my mouth for some reason. Wow,

(23:54):
all right, he writes a second book and at this
point he's not even trying any where. He calls it propaganda.
That was the name of his second book, which was
the original name for pr literally, and he was like,
you know what, maybe we should change that. So he
invented the term propaganda. I'm sorry, p R. Because propaganda

(24:14):
he thought kind of had a bad rap. And it
had a bad rap because at number four the Nazis,
I knew we could do it. So he said he
was interviewed when he was a hundred and he said, uh,
propaganda had a bad name, so I made up a
new one, called it public relations his word. So you
actually read propaganda, right, or a lot of it? I
read a lot of it. It's not a long read,

(24:36):
but it's what if I wrote a blurb for it,
I would call it a brilliant comma despicable read because
the title gives it all away. It's basically a handbook
on how to manipulate people on a massive scale. And
he I think he used the words like dope and
stupid because one of the things that we're putting Burnet's down.

(24:58):
He hated you guys. Yeah, he hated us. He hated
all of us. He thought people were generally sheep, unreflective.
He used the words stupid and dope a lot um
And for example, in the book Propaganda, he mocks the
spread of literacy and says that it just makes it
easier for the average person to read an add Right,

(25:20):
that's a jerk. Do it again. I've never had this
much control over year. I know, I feel like I'm Marrianette.
My fingernails hurt so bad. You're soaking too long. It's
not the soaking part, it's the filing gouging. Did they

(25:43):
ever say, like, sir, it looks like you to talk, Okay.
So Berns had this uh this thing where basically he
he he saw society as a very uh well and
he was kind of right, this hierarchical view of society
where he thought, there's a bunch of dummies out there
and they need to select few to guide them in

(26:07):
the right direction and to narrow the choices down because
we're all just big dummies. We can't decide. If we
have too many choices, that's no good. Yeah, more than
more than two political parties? What shall I do? Yeah?
Pretty much? And uh so he said, you know what
I'm gonna I'm gonna use my uncle stuff. I'm gonna
influence these people. I'm gonna narrow the choices down. Um,

(26:27):
because we're all big dummies, and if you have a
limited number of options, then you're more likely to choose
one who was writing me a check. Right, And he
actually used the phrase the hallucination of democracy, which he
would describe what we're living in right now, this idea
that all of us have some sort of say in
this participatory government, but really there's an elite group that's

(26:51):
actually running the show. So basically, and I'm one of them, right, well,
we're both are oh no, no, not me, oh oh
yeah yeah. So anyway, there's this idea that like any

(27:15):
any crackpot theory you've ever heard, where there's people running
the show, where there's an elite, shadowy group. This guy
is writing the book on this, and he's saying like,
not only is this real, here's how it's done, here's
how to do it more effectively. And the idea was
that there were people who were working behind the scenes.
Because one of the really important things that Bernie's figured

(27:36):
out was that no matter whether we're all stupid sheep
who have a follow a herd mentality and don't think
for ourselves and are driven by violent, selfish, sexual, repressed
desires that were not even aware of, we don't like
to be pushed around. So we don't like to get
the idea that somebody's telling us what to do or
that we're being manipulated. So all of this working behind

(27:59):
the scenes. Has to happen behind the scenes. We can't
know what's going on, so all of this stuff has
to be happening at what you would call basically a
very high level. Yeah, where even like say, the media
is manipulated, they're not even on board at this point.
And and again, I know we sound crazy, just hear us.
How he was, he was not very well liked even

(28:22):
within his own profession. He was he was sort of
he was well liked socially because he lived in New
York and he was super rich because he got all
these people right in big fat checks, and um, he
threw these big, lavish parties and was sort of a
socialite because he loved making these contacts because then he
could then manipulate them and use them later to his
own end to get big fat checks written for him. Okay,

(28:46):
but you're not into you even a minute. Uh So
he would he threw these big parties, but even his
own like, he created a profession and the people that
benefited from having those jobs didn't even like him. But
because he was such a blowhard, he was his own
biggest pr guy. And uh here's a quote though from
one of his um one of his clients that I think, Yeah,

(29:10):
this is foreshadowing to is. A United Fruit executive said
that everybody in the company hated him. We didn't trust him,
we didn't like his politics, we didn't like his fees,
but the sense was that we were definitely getting our
money's worth. That's how he existed for so long. Yeah. Absolutely,
he He was a master at what he did. Yeah,
and that's the thing. It sounds so insulting, but he
was right, which really just drives us crazy while we're

(29:32):
researching them. We wanted him to fail at every effort,
but all he did was succeed, and it was so maddening.
So he was He was extremely good. He was the
guy who created the um uh, basically exploiting what he
called special pleaders, people that the rest of us trust
their opinions, that kind of thing. He would go up
and be like, how much will it cost for me

(29:53):
to buy your opinion? And he would come up with
things like, like you said, nine out of time dennists agree,
or something called the calculated simulation of enthusiasm, what you
might call like a flash mob today or grassroots kind
of stuff that's actually astroturfing. That kind of stuff um.
And he was just a just a master at this

(30:14):
kind of thing. And the best way we figured out
to get Burne's across is to kind of go through
what we like to call Eddie Burne's greatest hits, UH

(30:46):
colon prongs to success, because what we learned in researching
this was he would not attack something with one idea.
He wouldn't say that maybe we should do this, He'd say,
let's do these five things or these two or three things,
because met it from all these different angles behind the scenes,
no one will ever know. And like he was really
really good at his job. As evil as he was,

(31:08):
he was a hard worker. So UH, cut number one
on Eddie Burnet's all my best prongs to success uh
is Vanita hairnets. Everyone here supports Vinita Hairnet's right, everyone.
I thought I saw a few hairnets in the audience. No,

(31:28):
no hairnets. World War One hairnets were a big thing
for a little while. And after World War One, women
started cutting their hair and a bob and they didn't
need the hairnet anymore. And it was a big problem
if you make hairnets, especially if you were a company
called Nita, because they were the industry leader of hairnets. Right,

(31:49):
And so they hire Eddie Burnet's and they're like, do something,
you have to do something. We're losing so much money.
And Bernie's is like, calm down, calm down. I got
this and he went to work. What did you do?
M s I went like this, Okay, So Bern's um,
he applies his typical Bernesian stuff and he looks around.

(32:11):
He says, who do people who wear hairnets? Listen to this?
One's kind of a stretch, but he identified artists as
the special pleaders in this case. Right, So we went
to some leading artists and said, hey, don't you think
hairnets make women look beautiful? And they're like, oh god, no,
have you seen a woman in a hairnet? Are you
out of your mind? And they did his patented make

(32:36):
it rain thing. So he just like went like this
with a bunch of cash, and an artist, top artist
and artists said yes, as a matter of fact, they're awesome.
It's probably clear. It's probably clear about yeah, her artists friend,
so that's probably number one. So yes, so they get
fashionable and these artists are saying now everywhere they go
that hairnets give women a Greek cuffer look whatever. That

(33:00):
stupid words. I'm sure Bernd is like, I can't believe
that's what they said. But still so there's artists saying this,
and all of a sudden, the media who um pay
attention to the art beat are starting to hear all
these artists talk about hairnets. And it's all because one
or two top artists said it, and now all these
other ones, following their herd mentality, are parroting the same thing.

(33:23):
Then the media picks it up. That's pronged. Well, he's
also got the media in his hip pocket, and he's
he's calling people's end. Have you noticed everyone wearing these hairnets? Yeah,
you might want to write a little story on it
in Cosmopolitan, That's all I'm saying. So that's prong number one.
Prong number two is he went to manufacturers and factories
and said, it seems really dangerous to me that these
women are working in your factories because they could be

(33:44):
pulled into that lathe. And that's have you ever seen
in that very very dangerous and a head pulled into
a wood lathe is no good. So if you wear
a hairnet, it solves all the problems. And so they
got manufacturers and factories to say, you know what every
when he needs to have a hairnet. All these women
and I guess men with long hair, which there were

(34:04):
probably like three guys. Maybe post World War two they
had long I'm sorry, world War One even they had
long hair. And uh, all of a sudden, he's got
two prongs. Look good, be safe. Vanita hairnets sold a
lot of hairnets, wrote a big giant check, right because women.
All of a sudden, we're picking up the paper in
the morning reading about how all these artists were talking

(34:24):
about how great women look in hairnets, and then after
work they were going to like the union meeting and
hearing about how safe hairnets were, and they're thinking, maybe
I should grows bob out and all of a sudden,
Vineta hairnets are back, baby, all because the Edward Burnet's
it was just it was a big success. It wasn't
his first, but it was a big one. Yeah, cut

(34:46):
number two. Edward Burnet's all my best in nineteen. Let's
get in the way back machine, all of us. We're
in the way back machine. So the way back machine
his imagining. I'm sorry you guys, surely you knew that, right.

(35:08):
We actually have room to bring out a DeLorean behind us.
We had the room, but not the money. So we're
on the way back machine. We're traveling back to uh
when it was a taboo for women to smoke in public.
It was um you know, women would like, you know,
kind of have to hide their cigarette smoking. At the time,

(35:29):
it meant like if a woman, if she spoke, she poked,
you know what I mean. That's not me saying it
like this is the social taboo. I'm just putting that
was saying it that I didn't. I'm not saying that
like you just said it. But that's he's quoting, but

(35:50):
not quoting. I'm just trying to put it in easily
approachable terms. But he's right, I kid, that was literally
like if you've smoked and you were a woman out
in pub, like you were sort of promiscuous. Maybe, So
another way to put it's a much much better way
to put it. So he was hired by the American

(36:12):
Spacco Company by UM a man named George George Washington
Hill of American Tobacco OK Falkhorn Lake. That was no Hurst,
And he said, I'll say, I'll say Mr. Bonnets were
selling on an awful lot of cigarettes to men, but

(36:33):
I think we can kill roughly twice as many people
if we sell them to women. I got these lucky
strikes and then not flying off the shelf, So what
can you do? So I gotta check? All right, Yeah,
he's still young. It's funny because every time I go

(36:55):
like this, I actually, in reality I have to go
like that, so I feel like a jackass. Bernie's got
on it, right. He was like, yes, this is b
s that women can't smoke because of the social taboo,
and that you can't sell twice as many cigarettes because
of this stupid social taboo. So I'm gonna go break

(37:15):
the social taboo. So Bernie's working behind the scenes. Uh,
contacted a friend who was an editor at Vogue and said,
give me a list of debutantes and this should be
good looking, but not modelly looking, because I want what
I'm about to hatch to seem very grassroots. Right. So
he got his hands on this list, got these women together,

(37:35):
um and said, hey, how would you like to singlehandedly
advance women's rights? And these these girls were like, let's
do it. Let's yes, I'm I'm ready, I've got I've
I've burned my Vanita hairnet and I'm ready to go,
and so he said, this is what we're gonna do.
In New York, they have an Easter parade every year,

(37:58):
still do, and this year on what April one, all
you gals are going to be out there on Fifth
Avenue and right in the middle of Easter Bred. You're
all gonna light up at once and it'll be called
we'll call it no, I don't know, just thinking off
top of my head, the Torches of Freedom campaign, and
it will you will put women on the map. And

(38:20):
the women said, let's do this. Yeah he did. He did.
He literally cast them from an agency and I think
he said he wanted to like, not too good looking,
because we don't want to give ourselves away, but I
still want some good looking Broad's right. They can't be
dogs or anything, you know what I mean. That was Bernie.
That was Bernie saying that. That was Edward g. Robinson. Yeah, no, dogs,

(38:42):
don't even think about it too pretty, not pretty enough?
Just right, stop boyting my time. That's a lot of
Evergy Robinson. So he can cocted this Torches of Freedom Bred.
He he of course, like he always had the media
in his hip pocket. He leaked it, said you know
what I heard. I heard there's some women that are
gonna like smoke in public. You know what that means?

(39:13):
You're so lucky. This is an audio podcast. I learned
that when I was like nine. That's literally the safest
way to portray I don't know if that's necessarily true.
You just took all the heat off of me, better
than saying poke, you guys are gonna leave tonight and
be like, Josh is great for that suck. Yeah, he's edgy.

(39:35):
I didn't think he was that dirty. His beard makes
him seem so al right, So that was prong one,
and it was a huge hit. Yeah, the international press,
they were like papers in Paris, France writing about these women.
Well in France they all smoked all the time, probably
not embarrassed. But international press picked this up and it

(39:55):
was a it was a big thing all over the world. Yeah,
these these women are smoking. And now in the press
it's equated with women's rights. So yes, that came later,
but yes, basically the same sentiment. Right, So this idea
was now, if you oppose women smoking, you overtly opposed
women's rights. The gauntlet had been laid down in secret

(40:17):
by Edward Burnet's right. So, like Chuck says, that was
just wronged. One prong too, was he was a research animal.
He made us look like human garbage as far as
research goes, right. This guy put everything he had into research,
and he figured out that, um, there were a lot
of problems men had with women smoking. And so we

(40:39):
hired a nurse to go around the country to teach
women to smoke better, because who else would you hire
but a nurse. Yeah, well that's who people trust. I mean,
if you're gonna learn about smoking, you're learning from a nurse, right,
That's where everybody here learned to smoke. So her name
was Florence Lindon. She was a former actress and nurse.
And so she went around to like the Society of

(41:00):
New York State Women and garden clubs and all these
things to teach etiquette smoking to not annoy your husband's
and they actually he actually did research and uh some
polling to find out what really annoys you about when
your wife or girlfriend smokes. And there are some real
answers this is not made up, pet peeves. Number one

(41:24):
is the messy way they opened the packages, which apparently
it was like with their teeth. They're really bugs me.
Number two was the affected mannerisms. How you smoke, it's
all like a showy and stuff like this. Andrew Dice

(41:47):
Clay Bernez invented that. He made Andrew Dice Clay's career
Number three puffing like a steam engine. There's just too
much smoke when you're smoking. Like hot boxing. Hot boxing
is different. I went to college. Uh. Number four was

(42:13):
lipstick smears. You smoke and you get like that lipstick
I make you wear gets all over that cigarette filter.
It was really annoying. I don't want to see it
in the ashtray. No, no, it's not funny. So those
were literally the feedback. They also actually because I figured
they had to. They had to make it equal. So
they had said, what annoys you women when you're men

(42:33):
smoke and at the end of the serious be like
oh yeah, yeah, yeah, wait, wait, hold on, sure, you
gotta ask you two and they would find out yeah,
and that was when you put your men put their
cigarettes out on their dinner plate. It was number one.
And number two was when they are just smoking and
they just run it under the faucet and just drop
it in the sink and leaf but but miss Linden

(42:57):
equal opportunity, sexist. She taught every one that, um, if
you are smoking in bed, you should use a closed ashtray,
all of us. It's just smart. That's proble number two.
Prong number three was uh. He did research again and
found out did some surveys that women didn't like Lucky

(43:18):
Strike green the color of the package. It just it
wasn't the color of the day. It didn't match anything
they wore, so they didn't want to carry around the cigarettes.
So what did he do? He made green fashionable, Like
basically single handedly, he threw green balls. He made sure
that all the department stores had like green gowns in
their windows. And now all of a sudden, Lucky Strike

(43:39):
green was the color of the season thanks to n
to sell cigarettes, and it was totally incompletely successful. Falk
Horn Leghorn like went to sleep every night on a
bed of money, and ever Berne's hump grew three times.
All right, wrong, I'm sorry not to wrong. Another another

(44:02):
cut from the album Bacon for Breakfast. Anyone here eat
bacon this morning? You want to know something. Bacon was
not a breakfast food until Edward Bernese came along. Serious.
I know, right for bacon, I feel so bad for
that part of the pig. We just ate it a

(44:22):
lunch and dinner. Bernese came along because he was hired
by the beach nut packing company who made bacon. And
they said, we're just a lot of bacon for lunch
and dinner. But no, yeah, it sure would be nice
to sell it for breakfast. What can you do for me?
I have a big giant check and it been And
he said, let's see who do people listen to when

(44:44):
they're thinking about their time. Doctors. Sure, if I write
a big enough check, I could co opt the doctor.
And he did. He found a doctor who wrote a
study saying we should all start eating hearty breakfasts featuring
bacon and and burns. Took the study and forward it
to other doctors who were like, yeah, we subscribe to

(45:05):
her mentality. Let's follow this guy's advice. They started. He's yeah,
but he included a sample of bacon to sweeten beechnut bacon,
and all of a sudden, doctors are like, by the way, yeah,
you should be any more bacon for breakfast because breakfast

(45:26):
at the time, like everyone seeing mad Man, It was
like a piece of dry toast coffee and a cigarette
that was breakfast. The big hearty breakfast didn't come along
until Edward Burne made it so, and supposedly he invented
the expression a meal that sticks to your ribs. Evil genius,
evil genius. So bacon to clap for it. You're about

(45:46):
to feel bad for clapping for Edward Burns because this
is about where Bern's career takes a really dark turn,
a dark and successful turn. So we should we go
on the way back machine again? Yeah? This time? This time, everybody,
we're going to Jamaica. Yeah, eighteen seventy, We're going way back. Yeah.

(46:08):
There's a dude named Lorenzo dal Baker, and he was
the skipper of a ship called the Telegraph, and he
showed up in Jamaica one day because he wanted some rum,
which is pretty smart to do when you're in Jamaica
in eighteen seventy what else is there to do? And
while he's sitting there at the bar drinking, some guy
comes up and says, you want some bananas, I've got

(46:29):
a bunch for twenty five cents. A bunch right, A
hundred and sixty I think, is what he bought. Yeah,
he said that that's a heck of a price for bananas,
because I'm pretty drunk. Take a bunch of bananas. We
don't have it. Like he was from Boston. He's like,
we don't have a lot of bananas in Boston. I
don't know if you know that. I bet I could
sell these for a lot of dough And he did.
In eighteen seventy he was selling, reselling these bananas for

(46:52):
up to three dollars and twenty five cents a bunch.
It's a lot of money. Back then, there's a lot.
He bought like half of the US probably with this post.
We we failed to go figure out how much that
is and ten eight dollars, but it was a lot.
Believe us, someone out there is checking there on that website.
It's that guy. So it worked out really well for

(47:13):
Lorenzo dal Baker, and by five he had eleven ships
flying under the banner of the Boston Fruit Company. They
would they were bringing in ten million bunches of bananas
a year. At this point they became United Fruit and
eventually became Taquida Banana, which we all enjoyed today. Right
still today, there are a couple of os like, oh

(47:34):
my god, not taquita. That's my favorite banana. I can't
eat any of that other crap. It's kind of be taquita.
It's the only banana. So everything's going very very well
for United Fruit UM and by nineteen forty they basically
owned a number of countries. In fact, the term Banana
Republic came from this um, this idea that United Fruit

(47:57):
ran the economy and essentially the government mint of countries
in Latin America, including Guatemala. And by nineteen forty, a
guy named Sam's Murray, who was known as Sam the
Banana Man, was running United Fruit. The best we can
figure is that he he had to have gotten that
name after he worked there. I don't know that necessarily true.

(48:18):
He like literally could have been born to become the
head of the United Fruit. Like I think about it.
If you were interviewing people, wouldn't you like give a
second look to the guy named Sam the Banana Man company,
Sam the Banana Man, Oh, I like, I gotta say, sir,
you've got a leg up. So SAMSA. Murray became the

(48:40):
head of United Fruit and they were selling tons of
bananas at this point. But it wasn't enough. It's never enough,
and so they controlled, like Josh had, much of Central
America owned all their bananas, and they weren't getting a
lot in return. Let's be honest, you know it works,
and he said, Mr Berne would like to some more bananas.
I'm Sam the banana man after are all. I can't

(49:01):
lose that name. That would be embarrassing. So how can
you help us? Bernice? Yeah, he said, Okay, I got it.
I got it, I got it, I got it. Hold on,
I'm still thinking. Do you see my prongs program? Yeah?
Have you heard about my prongs? Uh? So Berne says,

(49:21):
I think we should try to make bananas appear healthy.
Maybe we'll sell them as like kind of a health food,
which they're not at all. Actually, that's not true. Banana's
completely healthy. No, that's not true. That's actually Bernie's at
work right before. You're very eye. No, bananas are healthy.
You're being coy, Bernice, he was. That was like the

(49:45):
one honest thing he did. Actually, so, branana's aren't healthy.
Look it up. That was wrong. One. I don't know
if I can account that as a prong. That's a
prong broaking something that's peyton the unhealthy and and saying
it's healthy. That's a prong prong number two. He said,
you know what we need to do. I'm gonna go

(50:07):
on a banana assault in this country, full front old banana.
I saw that movie, yeah, and the sequel it was
it's very dirty. He said, let's get bananas. I want
him in hotels. I want him in hotel lobbies. I

(50:28):
want him in h Y M C A s. I
want him on on trains. I want him in airports.
I want him in why boy scout rooms all across
the country. I want to wait, wait in a what room?
In a boy scout room? You wrote this and it
says boy scout and it doesn't say boy scout room anywhere.

(50:51):
I think you're having a seizure or something. I want
him in movie studios. I want him at Palm Beach.
I want him at resorts. Bananas are everywhere, and people like,
have you noticed there's bananas like all over the place. Yeah,
like movie studios, like I should be eating a little bit. Well,
I hear they're very healthy, so maybe you should eat

(51:12):
a bunch of bananas right now. I'll watch That was wrong, man.
I love Chicago. Yeah, for real. Detroit was just like,
I don't get it. Well, now we can't release this show.

(51:37):
We can we can edit that part Alright, guys, we'll
lose all four hundred of our Detroit fans. So those
wrong two prong to wrong three is he said, I
think what we can do to sell more bananas. I
think people had a connection to where bananas came from.
They would be psyched about it, kind of like later

(51:58):
with the Chakia banana lady. It's like, hey, that's kind
of cool. Look at her, she's wearing bananas on her head. Right,
she's a weirdo. So he set up one of his fronts,
which he often did. Yeah, he would. He would pay
professionals to put out an opinion that was prescribed by
him that jibe with what he wanted to say. And
in this case, it was called the the Middle America

(52:21):
Information Bureau. She had nothing to do with the Midwest. Sorry,
he was talking about Latin America. I don't know why
he called it that, but he did. So. The Middle
America Information Bureau was a a Chiquita been a Chiquita
backed well, United Fruit backed think tank, and the whole
thing that they did was put out press releases about
how awesome Latin America was and how when you ate

(52:43):
a banana on your lunch break, you could basically, now
that you know about Latin America, take a little mini
vacation to the tropics because you know about Latin America.
Because the Middle America Information Bureau has been putting out
press releases to the newspapers, which are now printing them
because newspapers could not have cared less apparently at the time,
so they would print banana related stuff. So this is great,

(53:07):
This is working really well. The banana assault full frontal
banana assault was working great. People are eating bananas and
really being we're supporting this economy down there. We're like
feeding families but eating their bananas. Not true because and
have you seen the lady who wears other fruit? I
love that lady. What was going on was there was
a dictator in Guatemala, which is where they were getting

(53:28):
a lot of bananas at the time, and a United
Fruit ally named Jorge Ubiko, and uh he was I
feel like you should say that in your Italian accent.
For some reason, it doesn't make sense, but hey would
know it would be cool. It doesn't work. Sorry everybody,
Well that was Latin flavored at least, right, Oh yeah, no,

(53:48):
that was good. But Italian man, I'm like a yo
yo with you. So he was in the uh. Joge
Ubico was clearly in the pocket of United Fruit because
just getting kicked backs, and he was like, yeah, man,
come to my country, give me some dough. Who cares
about all the people. They're just beons own all our land,
and just give me some dough. And he was basically, well,

(54:10):
I'm not overthrown. He was taken out by popular vote.
I think it was actually overthrown and then they held
a popular Yeah, so he was like you're out of here,
pal at gunpoint basically. But the guy who came in
after him was elected democratically and one eighty five of
the popular vote, which is I don't think it's probably

(54:31):
ever happened legitimately in any kind of democratic election. He's
a very beloved man named Juan Jose are Evoldo, right,
and uh, he was a leftist. He definitely thought that.
One of one of his principal ideas was that he
wanted to be able to create internal competition to United
Fruit among Guatemalan farmers. His idea was, this is our land,

(54:55):
these are bananas, this is our population. We should be
able to make money off of these bananas. Like United
Fruit is so United Fruit, you can stay, but we're
gonna treat our people better from now on, and we're
gonna actually subtract some of your wealth by doing that.
United Fruit didn't like that at all. No, they didn't.
One of the first things he did was they you know,

(55:15):
United Fruit owned all this land, this fallow land that
wasn't even being used. And he said, you know what,
you bought this land from us for three dollars an acre.
I'd like to buy it back for the three dollars
an acre. I see your tax return says three dollars
an acre. So let's just do that the United Fruits.
Actually it's more like seventy five dollars an acre now,
just out of the blue. Yeah, so let's let's just

(55:36):
up the price on you. But he was able to
get a lot of the land back. He was able
to build some roads through the country and actually provide
competition to the United Fruit, which would become Chida, which
was not a good thing. No, United Fruit was like,
this is a really, really, really big deal. We've had
total control over this country for half a century at least.

(55:58):
And um, this guy comes long and now he's stealing
our land that we stole. No, it's not okay, it's
not all right. So they went to their friends at
the CIA and Edward Burnets and said, guys, what can
you do? And they talked to the right guy because
Edward Burnet's said, let's just overthrow the government. And they did. Yeah,

(56:25):
they literally overthrew the government. And he thought, the first
thing we have to do is we have to get
the American people behind this, because you just can't overthrow
a government without the people being behind it. So let
me think about this. Um, aren't there a lot of
communists and Guatemala? Oh yeah, and wait, wait is in
the Soviet Union communists? We hate those guys. Yeah, the
Red Scare. And everyone's like, well, there really are no

(56:48):
communists in Guatemala actually, and he said, well nobody knows that.
So let's get all my friends in the magazine and
put a newspaper business to write a story about the
brewing crisis in Guatemala. Right. So, so they're right at
our door, they're just below Mexico, right, Yeah, in Texas.
Everybody Texas. So this Middle America information bureau goes from

(57:12):
putting out press releases about how wonderful bananas are to
the brewing Soviet crisis and Guatemala and the newspapers listened.
They started reporting on this, and it became a really
big deal that there was a Soviet threat in our
backyard just below Texas. Again, and um, the American public

(57:34):
got on board, basically. Yeah. So once he had the
American public support, he got in touch with a former
Lieutenant Colonel uh from the U. S Army living in exile,
and said, why don't you get some CIA buddies together
and let's cross the border from Honduras with a couple
of hundred men that are well trained, and let's call
it the Army of Liberation and let's overthrow the government.

(57:56):
And that's what he did, plunging Guatemala into a decades
long civil war, including genocide. Yeah, that's the appropriate response
to that. So we said all this, and we said
that we were still living right smack tab in the
middle is hopefully all this seemed vaguely familiar to you, um,

(58:17):
and recently, I think in two thousand and eight, all
of this this idea um took on a new a
new name and and new momentum. Have you guys ever
heard of nudge politics anyone? People? So basically, nudge is
this new thing. It's the new name for all of this.
And it's the idea that people are stupid and that

(58:40):
you have to have elite people figuring out what the
best outcome is and then nudge people toward that outcome
without people understanding that they're being nudged. Sounds familiar, Yes,
it does. And as a matter of fact, this is
really recently under a presidential um executive order become policy
in the American government. And it seems kind of benign

(59:03):
a lot of it, right, Like I think the U.
S d A is using nudge to um. Like you'll
get a prompt sometimes if you're printing and you're you're
working at the U. S d A, and they'll say,
don't forget to change your printer preferences to double sided,
which everybody loves double side of printing. What's wrong with that? Nothing?
But beyond this kind of benign idea, um that nudge

(59:26):
or that that PR the idea of this hallucination of
democracy is harmless, or we can be nudged in the
right direction. Are two really important points, and one is
that the people in charge know what the best outcome is,
and the best outcome is often subjective, like we might
not think that the best outcome is the same as

(59:47):
the people who are deciding what the best outcome is.
The second one is that the people who get to
decide what the best outcome is has all of our
best interests in heart. That's not necessarily true either, So
you can easily go from two sided printing to know
you need to decide that, um, the death penalty will
never ever go away no matter what you think, or

(01:00:09):
let's just make the the easiest thing, like you have
to opt out of organ donation. We're not saying organ
donation is bad, mind you. Yeah, we're not equating organ
donation with death penalty right now, but things like out
clauses like it's just included because it's the for the
benefit of everybody. You can get a little slippery, you know,
and a nudge becomes a little more like a shove
when it's in the hands of the wrong person. You

(01:00:31):
have to really be careful about. So that is well,
here we go. Let's finish up with this, I'm not
finish up. Here's more you would think after all of this,
After Edward Burnet's uh sold us bacon as the healthy
thing to eat for breakfast, and bananas is a healthy

(01:00:51):
thing to eat all day long, and women should smoke cigarettes,
and let's overthrow Guatemalada sell of fruit. He would have
been in his hundreds on his deathbed and thought, you
know what, I kind of regret some of the things
I did in my career. Not true. He couldn't even
look up. He was interviewed by a guy from the

(01:01:14):
New York Times when he was one hundred years old,
and he basically said, yeah, people are stupid dopes, and
I stand by everything I did, and I had a
pretty great career. As a matter of fact. His last
words were, I tell them I said they were stupid.

(01:01:53):
So that's Edward Burns. That's his career. And we're gonna
finish out with a bit of a that we like
to do a top ten list that is always only
five or six because it's US. Some of the worst
pr disasters in history, and we're gonna open up with
one US Airways, not Delta. A few years ago, a

(01:02:19):
young woman complained to uh, US Airways that her spring
break was ruined, which, man, if you're in college, it's
a big deal. You know you only have one spring
break a year. Yeah, that's true. And they said, we
don't like to hear this, Alex, please provide feedback to

(01:02:39):
our customer relations team right here, and they left a
link for all the world to click on, and that
link went to a pornographic image of a woman with
a model Boing seven forty seven. Uh and she was
doing things with it. And that's a big plane. M

(01:03:03):
Someone probably lost their job over that one. You got
Philip Morris. So we love picking on smoking because it's
so easy. Um that you guys are familiar with Philip Morris,
the big smoking tobacco giant. Apparently in two thousand one,
the Czech government came up with a study that found,

(01:03:24):
surprisingly that smoking actually cost their economy money. And Philip
Morris said, no, no, no, let us commission our own
study and find out what the real deal is. And
they found and announced publicly, check government, you're wrong. We
found that smoking actually saves your economy up to thirty

(01:03:46):
million dollars a year. And do you want to know how?
By early smoking deaths all that money you guys would
have spent on healthcare, pensions, housing, you didn't have to
because those smokers died early. And they're like, this is
a good study, look at this right, And Philip Morris

(01:04:06):
was surprised by the blowback. They actually were like, we
have other studies that we should probably cancel wind up
in other countries because we thought this was going to
be the thing that really drove home to everybody how
great smoking is. I love that one alright. In two
thousand to Abercrombie and Fitch, that's all you have to say.

(01:04:32):
Shirtless dudes, that's all I think about. And ironically this
is about T shirts. They had a line of T
shirts uh that were racist in two thousand two, depicting
Asian stereotypes. Um, well, what was one of the shirts?
I'm sorry everybody, I'm sorry. Uh, Wong Brothers Laundry Service.

(01:04:56):
Two Wongs can make it white and they stood behind it. There.
Their quote for this campaign was I personally thought Asians
would love this T shirt. That was their corporate communications
people that came up with that. That was the company's
response to the blowback and not to be outdone. One
month later, thirty days later, they released their line of

(01:05:19):
thongs for a ten to twelve year old girls, and
their corporate communications response that that was, you know, the
underwear for young girls was the intent was to be
lighthearted and cute. Yeah right, everybody. Have you guys are
Coca Cola? Do you guys have pepsi up here? Right? Well,

(01:05:40):
we have coke down south and coke is huge and
coke back and I think like the nineties the early nineties,
UM Coke had this thing called the Magic Can campaign.
Does anyone remember that? So, okay, you, sir, can go
to sleep for the next two minutes. So the magic
Can campaign was basically, you'd pick up a coke and
you'd in it in a prize would shoot out towards

(01:06:02):
your face. That's not even the bad party literally had
a spring loaded mechanism that would shoot out. Like sometimes
the prize was like a hundred bucks, which is awesome, great.
Sometimes it was a dollar. So you would buy the
coke you wanted and open it to get a dollar
and then buy the coke you wanted, but have like
thirty cents left over. Yeah, it's a net zero, I

(01:06:24):
think at that's close. So Coke UM had this thing going.
They were very excited. Everything was going great. But the
problem was that people were opening these magic hands and
being like, oh a dollar, great, thanks Coke, and then
taking a sip and going right because the stuff inside
tastes like poison? What is this tasted like chlorinated water?

(01:06:47):
I better call my local poison tip line, and people did,
and poison lines across the country started getting hot, like
tips that you should not drink these magic can cokes,
and it be came enough of a deal that Coke
had to take out ads saying like, don't drink the
stuff in the magic can, which is not what you

(01:07:09):
want to do. If you're a beverage company, you can
go home on YouTube and look up Coke Magic Hand
and their commercials that say, you know the killed magic
can that guy. If you open the coke and and
something pops out, don't drink it because you won, but seriously,
don't drink it. Did I mention not to drink it?

(01:07:31):
So they genuinely had to take out ads saying this.
That was bad enough, right, But then some people in
the media started to think and went, Coke, why didn't
you just put coke in the magic cans? You got
a lot of coke. You're set up for coke and
in it? Yeah, why chlorinated water. Coke released a response

(01:07:55):
and they said, we didn't put coke in the magic
cans because it would dissolve the prize Mecca. This million
dollars rampaign done, million dollars. I love that one too. Heineken,
So you guys are familiar with Heineken. Did you know
they owned Strongbow Cider? Did you guys know that? Well?

(01:08:18):
Strong Bow had a campaign where they wanted to honor
the guy who founded the company and apparently found it
in like the nineteenth centuries of Victorian dude. They could
not find a picture of this man to save their lives.
And you can't have a print ad campaign if you
don't have a photo. What the heck are you gonna do?
So they turned to a photo service like Getty Images
or something like that, and they just randomly picked a

(01:08:41):
great Victorian looking dude, most likely had the mustache, monocle,
top hat, probably that kind of thing, and um, it
would have worked in and just about any other situation.
But they happened to pick the picture of a guy
named Hugh Price Hughes. Yeah, he was a very famous

(01:09:02):
Methodist minister, and he was actually famous for his work
with recovering alcoholics. Out of all the people in the world,
they picked an anti alcoholic campaigner for the face of
strong Posts for their founder. All right, and finally before

(01:09:22):
our Q and A, we're gonna finish with this because
we we like to depress everybody at the our friend
John Hodgment said, you know how to really go out
with a bang, lift him up and drop him down
at the end. So does anyone here remembered I spoke
of Domino's pizza earlier. You remember the Noid Avoid the Nooid.

(01:09:43):
You remember because it was successful for a while. The
Noid the creepy uh bunny eared buck teeth thing in
a onesie that represented annoyed. That's what it came from.
That your pizza wasn't there. They created this fun character.
It was neat and mean. Like clearly it was a
huge hit. Because you guys still remember this. We remember

(01:10:04):
the Noid and everything was going really great for the
Noid and Dominoes in general. Everybody just talked about the
noise around the water cooler, like husbands and wives with
a pillow talk about the noise. Did you get that
pizza real quick. Um. So everything was going very well.
And then in our own Atlanta, Georgia, in January nine,

(01:10:27):
a Domino's Pizza was stormed by a man wielding a
three fifty seven magnum and he took the two employees
working their hostage, and he engaged in a five hour
standoff with police, and he very wisely ordered the two
employees to make him pizzas the whole time, seriously. And
he had a few other demands. He wanted a hundred
thousand dollars sensible. He wanted to get away car with

(01:10:50):
a full tank appeal sensible. He wanted a copy of
The Widow's Son. It was a novel about freemasons he loved.
That was his catcher in the rye, right, and it's
it's a it's kind of a big giveaway, right, Yeah,
he must have left his at home, right, I really
need this. So he apparently wasn't paying attention because at

(01:11:14):
one point the two employees were like, I think we
can sneak out the back, and they did they left,
and right when they did, he read The Widow, So
I think he was He's like, this book is so good.
And then the police were like swarm, swarm swarm. I
don't think they say that, but they did swarms swarm, swarm,
and it's a pretty good sign felt reference. Um, and

(01:11:35):
this guy was taken peacefully. I think he fired around
off or whatever, but he was taken, and he was
taken before the court and he was sentenced to a
term in a psychiatric facility. Why Why because his name
was Kenneth Lamar, annoyed and chuck, I know, and he

(01:11:55):
thought Dominoes, sorry, Domino's Pizza was specific eu tormenting him
ad campaign because he was a paranoid getsprinic. Yeah, it's right, right,
it gets gets so much for orse. So Domino's is
facing a pr disaster. There's there was one headline the

(01:12:19):
next day, Um, Domino's hostages couldn't avoid the noise this time.
I know, those kiky newspaper writers, they thought they were
so clever. So poor Mr Noid is like suffering in
a mental facility in Georgia. And finally years later he's released.
I think he moved to like Miami, and he couldn't

(01:12:40):
shake this idea that Domino's had specifically targeted him with
their avoid the Annoid campaign, and he committed suicide. Yeah,
which is pretty perfect reaction, pretty awful, and Detroit they
were like yeah, yeah, they were like, I guess you
should have been born anoid. It's just fault. So it

(01:13:03):
gets even worse. Actually, yeah, it gets worse than that,
that's right. In two thousand eleven, just four short years ago,
on the anniversary of Annoid, Domino's introduces a Facebook game
called The Anid Super Pizza Shootout, and that is pr

(01:13:32):
all right, thank you guys for coming out hanging out
with us. Good nights, Chicago, thank you everybody. All awesome.
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