Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you should know from house stuff Works
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
Speaker 1: There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and we are here live
Speaker 1: at the beautiful Athenium Theater in Chicago. Ill no very nice,
Speaker 1: we should say the sold out Athenian Theater than to Chicago.
Speaker 1: We feel very loved here and big thanks to the Athenian.
Speaker 1: Guy has been awesome in a e g. The promoters, Uh,
Speaker 1: let's do this, buddy, Let's man, I'm sweating already. Good lord,
Speaker 1: what's wrong with It's a It's a hot show, hot
Speaker 1: hot show, right everybody, and it's me. Let's be honest,
Speaker 1: Well you're a hot hot pot castor did we say
Speaker 1: who is who? By the way, I think everyone knows
Speaker 1: you guys know right that that's Chuck and I'm there's
Speaker 1: a spelt handsome guy and there's a chubby bearded guy.
Speaker 1: We really like to keep ourselves on the opposite inspect.
Speaker 1: Jerry is not here. I'm sorry it's not here. That
Speaker 1: is so sweet of you guys. Every time we say
Speaker 1: Jerry's not here and cheers when she is here. I
Speaker 1: wish we could say why, but we'll announce it soon.
Speaker 1: She has some top secret business going on. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: not cryptic at all. Yes, she's leaving us for another podcast.
Speaker 1: She she's not allowed to leave. She would never leave it.
Speaker 1: We fired her, So that's not true either. So, um,
Speaker 1: you guys know how you have no idea what topic
Speaker 1: we're doing tonight? You're about to understand why, because we're
Speaker 1: doing public relations. And before you leave, a please hang
Speaker 1: on because actually, public relations is one of the most
Speaker 1: interesting topics we have ever ever encountered. It has it all.
Speaker 1: It has manipulative psychology, it has old tiny history, it
Speaker 1: has cool ads, it has like mind control. It's got
Speaker 1: it all. It has it all. Nazis like the thing
Speaker 1: is involved in public relations. And as a matter of fact,
Speaker 1: we're sitting right smack dab in the middle of the
Speaker 1: world that public relations built, and we should say, we
Speaker 1: should say, are there any PR professionals here tonight? Yes? Well,
Speaker 1: we want to apologize in advance. Everybody'd be nice to
Speaker 1: those guys. The bartman of the show. Sorry, sorry about that.
Speaker 1: Did everybody get drink? Everyone settled in? Any lord? Did
Speaker 1: they serve my lord here? What what is that? I
Speaker 1: told myself I had to mention, my lord, what is it? Mlord? Well,
Speaker 1: what is it? It's uh, it's a it's wormwood. Right,
Speaker 1: I was gonna guess wormwood. What is this stuff? It's
Speaker 1: it's made me psychic. Yeah, it's uh, it's it's it's
Speaker 1: from Chicago, I believe, right, or at least very big here,
Speaker 1: and it's it's the most disgusting thing you will ever
Speaker 1: have cross your tongue. But does it give you pretty buzzed?
Speaker 1: I don't know, because I've never had more than a sip,
Speaker 1: and then three days later, I'm still like brushing my
Speaker 1: teeth with steel wool trying to get the taste out
Speaker 1: of my mouth. Yeah, the aftertaste is pretty special. I
Speaker 1: got you? Are you guys? I'm alert right now? A
Speaker 1: couple of people are Huh, I've heard it's a hipster thing.
Speaker 1: Now I can buy it? Can you? Shot a M
Speaker 1: alert in a PBR and some steel wool, but only
Speaker 1: our teasonal steel wool. I'm sorry, artisanal steel wool. Wow?
Speaker 1: All right, so let's get this thing going. Uh it
Speaker 1: you go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics website like
Speaker 1: we do, just to read uh. You can look up
Speaker 1: pr specialists and has anyone heard are the recent one
Speaker 1: on publicists? This is tangential, but this is better because
Speaker 1: we like to save the good stuff for live. Uh.
Speaker 1: If you look up PR specialists you can find this definition.
Speaker 1: They are someone who creates and maintains a favorable public
Speaker 1: image for the organization they represent, designing media releases to
Speaker 1: shape public perception of the organization into increase awareness of
Speaker 1: his work and goals. Sounds very nice and innocuous, doesn't it.
Speaker 1: Chuck just started with a quote from the Bureau of
Speaker 1: It's not if you read any podcasting handbook, they specifically
Speaker 1: say not to start the show off like that. And
Speaker 1: you know, because you wrote it. Uh, it's self published.
Speaker 1: But still, I mean it's it's there. I think it's
Speaker 1: gaining some steam here doing fine. So it seems like
Speaker 1: a pretty straight ahead And if you hear publicist is
Speaker 1: pretty straight ahead. But the creator of PR there was
Speaker 1: literally one dude who created the job of public relations,
Speaker 1: uh specialist, and his name is Edward Burns. Anybody familiar
Speaker 1: I heard of that guy. A couple of people. That's
Speaker 1: good for the rest of you. Prepare to have your
Speaker 1: minds balloon. Yes, this guy is arguably tied for first
Speaker 1: second most evil person in the twentieth century, and that's
Speaker 1: really saying something because there was at least one really
Speaker 1: really evil dude in the twenties. I would go number
Speaker 1: two behind a certain German Man. There's the Nazis appearance.
Speaker 1: That's the parents one. By the way, Yeah, they're doing
Speaker 1: me like at least three Nazi references. Uh So he
Speaker 1: was voted by Life magazine is one of the one
Speaker 1: most influential people in the twentieth century. And we easily
Speaker 1: agreed that he's like a top tenner, right, we say
Speaker 1: bosh to Life's stupid rating system. Cars is better. I
Speaker 1: would say top six, top six, top six, most influential,
Speaker 1: maybe top three. Oh yeah, And and it's it's not
Speaker 1: just us like hating on Edward Burney's Are you guys
Speaker 1: familiar with The New York Times. It's a newspaper and
Speaker 1: they write obituaries Suntimes, I'll give you that, uh or
Speaker 1: Tribune alright? Which one? Did Ebert work for Tribune? Right? Times?
Speaker 1: The Times? Really? I thought it was a Tribune guy.
Speaker 1: It's okay, alright, dude, Sometimes I got it was the
Speaker 1: School the other newspaper where they rival newspapers. Oh really, man,
Speaker 1: I used to love that. You love this town? Man,
Speaker 1: have you seen have you seen that documentary? Man, we're
Speaker 1: already sidetracked about the Ebert document that God's so good
Speaker 1: and like, get the box of tissues ready when you
Speaker 1: watch it too, unless you have no heart, like we're
Speaker 1: Berne if you're dead inside. Yeah, So the The New
Speaker 1: York Times wrote an obituary. Eb Bernis lived to be
Speaker 1: a hundred and three. By the way, because the most
Speaker 1: evil ones do rr Burns, Dick Cheney, they all developed
Speaker 1: like a huge hump and like caw like fingers, you
Speaker 1: know that kind of thing. Ever Bernis was among them,
Speaker 1: lived to a hundred and three, and when he finally died,
Speaker 1: The New York Times wrote an obituary. And I think
Speaker 1: they try to be hard hitting yet polite. So this
Speaker 1: is the most polite that The New York Times could
Speaker 1: possibly be. They said that ever Bernis was quote either
Speaker 1: a benefactor of the human race or someone who had
Speaker 1: a lot to answer for they left off in hell
Speaker 1: at the I'm sure a relatives like that was nice. Yeah,
Speaker 1: at least he was in the Times. I guess so
Speaker 1: he because he lives so long His career literally spanned
Speaker 1: from World War One, not World War two, world War
Speaker 1: one to the beginning of the information age in the
Speaker 1: midnight nineties. So he had a lot of influence, to
Speaker 1: say the least. Yeah, man, I hope you do that
Speaker 1: like eight times tonight. So he's a very controversial guy.
Speaker 1: And what he did was he realized early on that
Speaker 1: he could lift weirdly enough, he could lift a lot
Speaker 1: of his practices from Sigmund Freud. Freud came along and
Speaker 1: he said, you know, there's this thing called the self,
Speaker 1: these unconscious desires and fears that all of us have.
Speaker 1: We don't know about them because they're unconscious and just
Speaker 1: it's a thing with every human being. And Berne said,
Speaker 1: you know what, I think I can use that to
Speaker 1: manipulate people into being interested in products. And uh, Sigmund
Speaker 1: Schlomo Freud, by the way, did anyone It's true he didn't.
Speaker 1: He didn't go by Shlomo. He was very much ashamed
Speaker 1: of his middle name. And so he he basically lifted
Speaker 1: this stuff, this fear and desire and praying on that
Speaker 1: because uh, he was his uncle. So Freud was Berni's uncle,
Speaker 1: and we call Freud uncle Shlomo for the rest of
Speaker 1: this podcast. If you get confused, just remember that Uncle
Speaker 1: Shlomo equals signal or greater than Sigmund Freud's. So so
Speaker 1: Uncle Shlomo was fairly innocent in this whole affair. Like
Speaker 1: basically as far as psychology goes, he just basically stumbled
Speaker 1: across the self this idea that we're all driven by
Speaker 1: selfish desires that were not aware of and that we
Speaker 1: all subscribe to a herd mentality, and that like, you
Speaker 1: guys all care what the group thinks more than anything else,
Speaker 1: and that's how you think, and same with us and anybody, right,
Speaker 1: And so this is what what Shlomo came up with,
Speaker 1: and it was a big deal. Like up to this point,
Speaker 1: like people didn't talk about their feelings, they didn't think
Speaker 1: about their feelings. They certainly didn't think that they were
Speaker 1: driven unconsciously like automatons, by these crazy desires. And the
Speaker 1: first thing Berni's thinks of is like that would be
Speaker 1: a great way to sell the people exactly. I think
Speaker 1: I can exploit that and sell more stuff. So if
Speaker 1: you think about like the advertising you see every day today,
Speaker 1: it's it's a different world than it was back then,
Speaker 1: Back in the day, um advertising was very straightforward and
Speaker 1: it literally just advertised how a product worked as it should,
Speaker 1: Like you would you would see an advertisement about a
Speaker 1: car like the new Forward runs like a cautioned run,
Speaker 1: and it looks like this and it gets you from
Speaker 1: point A to point B. Good night. That's all or
Speaker 1: the again more blender, it really blends. Well, that was advertising,
Speaker 1: Yeah it maybe maybe maybe in like the more expensive Edge,
Speaker 1: there'd be like a hand drawn finger pointing at you
Speaker 1: and it was a you in all caps with some
Speaker 1: exclamation points, thing like you buy this morphine because it
Speaker 1: will give you the buzz you're looking for, you know,
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. But it was based on this
Speaker 1: idea that you were a rational actor in charge of
Speaker 1: your own decisions, and that you would want to buy
Speaker 1: this if you if it was explained to you that
Speaker 1: the Ford was the best choice for you. It was
Speaker 1: treated you like a human being. In other words. When
Speaker 1: Freud came along and came up with the self and
Speaker 1: then Bernes figured out how to hijack it, all that
Speaker 1: went out the window and all of a sudden we
Speaker 1: were all kind of slaves to these selfish desires. Well, yeah, basic.
Speaker 1: I mean, think about the ads you see now. If
Speaker 1: you can find an ad that doesn't prey on some
Speaker 1: fear or desire, it's either, uh, you've had a rough day,
Speaker 1: indulge in that Ben and Jerry's chuck. Have you guys
Speaker 1: noticed that Ben and Jerry's ads now stay chuck at
Speaker 1: the end of all of them. They know their audience
Speaker 1: or or a fear um or you deserve like the
Speaker 1: sports car, like all these things that you know you
Speaker 1: deserve all this stuff old. Don't you want to stay
Speaker 1: relevant by the sports car? All of your friends are
Speaker 1: going to tour two goa and having fun. Why aren't you? Right?
Speaker 1: Would you like to stay relevant? We have a product
Speaker 1: for you that will help you feel young again. Or
Speaker 1: at the base of it all, use this mouth waw
Speaker 1: or you'll die alone? Right, which is kind of accurate
Speaker 1: as far as advertising goes. And back in Burnet's day,
Speaker 1: the reason they they had ads like that is because
Speaker 1: you literally use something until it was done Back then,
Speaker 1: like you drove your car until it quit running, or
Speaker 1: you had your blender until it quit blending. There was
Speaker 1: no such thing as buying the new version of the
Speaker 1: thing you already have. And I know, no one here
Speaker 1: has a phone in their pocket and another phone at
Speaker 1: home that still works, use the new model exactly. So
Speaker 1: that was a completely new thing to to buy something
Speaker 1: before it had worn out. After World War Two, manufacturing
Speaker 1: uh kind of dried up, and they were kind of worried.
Speaker 1: They're like, we've sold all of our stuff and everyone's
Speaker 1: got everything they need. So they were like, well, we
Speaker 1: need to think of new ways to sell things to people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we need we need to sell people stuff that they
Speaker 1: don't need exactly, And the best way to do that
Speaker 1: is to prime those on conscious desires, to prime those
Speaker 1: unconscious fears, and then in the next breath, stay and
Speaker 1: by the way, this product will fulfill all of your
Speaker 1: desires or will vanquish all of your fears. And people
Speaker 1: came to identify themselves with products uh and and all
Speaker 1: of that is frankly because of Bernet. So basically all
Speaker 1: of the weird, quiet maltreatment that every living person in
Speaker 1: the Western world undergoes on a daily basis can almost
Speaker 1: without hyperbole, be laid at the feet of Edward Bruney's
Speaker 1: you guys get this now, right. So he had a
Speaker 1: super long career, like we said, and he worked. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is just a smattering of people. He worked for, Uh,
Speaker 1: President Eisenhower. I think he worked for like five or
Speaker 1: six presidents. Do we have any Eisenhower fans in the
Speaker 1: crime you liar? Thomas Edison was a client, al right, right? Wow,
Speaker 1: that really is an Eisenhower fans. Henry Ford was a client.
Speaker 1: Samuel Samuel Goldwin of MGM was a client, eleanor Roosevelt.
Speaker 1: And those were just a few. And reportedly this is
Speaker 1: Nazi reference number two. Reportedly, Hitler wanted to hire Edward
Speaker 1: Burns to run his propaganda wing and he turned him down.
Speaker 1: And we can't find really good verification of that. So
Speaker 1: what we think, because we've studied Edward Burne's is that
Speaker 1: he actually took that up to tell people, like, you know,
Speaker 1: turned down Hitler to make himself look good. We uncovered
Speaker 1: some Edward Burne's b s He wanted me, but well,
Speaker 1: you know, I had some other clients. So whether that's
Speaker 1: true or not, there's actually if this floats your boat
Speaker 1: at all, Guys, if you leave this this place thinking
Speaker 1: like I really want to know more about us, go
Speaker 1: check out this really cool documentary called A Century of
Speaker 1: the Self, Right, fourth part BBC documentary. It delves into
Speaker 1: a lot of this stuff, um, and it keeps going
Speaker 1: even further beyond that. But one of the things that's
Speaker 1: featured in this documentary is newsreel footage of Joseph Gerb
Speaker 1: the Nazi propaganda minister, Nazi reference three, three of three.
Speaker 1: Is this it? Yep, you get no more Nazi reference guys.
Speaker 1: This is the end of the road with the Nazis.
Speaker 1: So Gebel's um is talking on film about how much
Speaker 1: he admires Edward Burney's and his writings and ideas and
Speaker 1: how it's directly influenced the Nazi propaganda machine. Again, Yes,
Speaker 1: do you like those gasps? Now do the thing? Yeah,
Speaker 1: there we go. Uh. He was the first person to
Speaker 1: use pulling, like to pull the public and tell the
Speaker 1: public what he you know, everyone should think about products.
Speaker 1: He was the first to use expert opinions, uh, like
Speaker 1: nine out of tend Dennis a blank. He was the
Speaker 1: first person to do that. He was the first person
Speaker 1: to use product placement in movies UH and TV and
Speaker 1: films and UH. He had a really great knack for
Speaker 1: getting lots of different people to write him big checks
Speaker 1: for the same work. Smart guy. He's very wealthy too,
Speaker 1: by the way, because of this. So for instance, he
Speaker 1: had at one point, Um William Randolph Hurst, the great
Speaker 1: uh publisher, newspaper and magazine publisher, came to Berne's and
Speaker 1: he said to Mr Burnet's fuel that was selling a
Speaker 1: lot of magazines too. Men. That's a that's a great nurse,
Speaker 1: by the way, but I think women would like to
Speaker 1: read magazines as well, So how can I sell magazines
Speaker 1: to women? Having too cloza And he just went weirdly
Speaker 1: British all of a sudden, so bad my impressions. I
Speaker 1: appreciate that. Uh. So he went to Berne, and Berne said,
Speaker 1: you know what, here's what we'll do. Let's start. Let's
Speaker 1: start putting ads in magazines that cater to women. Um,
Speaker 1: like like diamonds. Women love diamonds, right, so let's put
Speaker 1: diamond ads in your magazines. The diamond people were his clients.
Speaker 1: So he was like, I got two checks now, but
Speaker 1: why stop there? Yeah? I stopped there. Let me get um,
Speaker 1: let's let's put like a famous actress in there and
Speaker 1: these ads. No one had ever done that before. And
Speaker 1: let let's get like Clara Bow and let's put her
Speaker 1: in these diamonds in the magazine. Clara Beau was also
Speaker 1: a client, So he's getting three checks for the same
Speaker 1: stupid diamond ad to sell the same stupid women's magazine.
Speaker 1: And then women's magazines were a thing. I'm not saying
Speaker 1: that's bad. They're great. Yeah, this is this is not
Speaker 1: about women's magazines. That'd be weird. But before all of this,
Speaker 1: before he, uh, he gained his massive amount of wealth
Speaker 1: and influence, he was just a little bitty, regular baby.
Speaker 1: Because babies aren't evil. I think he might have been
Speaker 1: an evil baby. All babies are good. I don't know
Speaker 1: about this one, at least for a few weeks. Uh.
Speaker 1: He was just a little baby born in Vienna, Austria,
Speaker 1: in eight one of five children of Eli Bernis and
Speaker 1: Anna Freud Berne's and uh they were This had always
Speaker 1: melted my brain how it works out with the relationship
Speaker 1: with the sigmund I'm sorry, Shlomo SloMo, so I need
Speaker 1: you to explain because I can never get it right.
Speaker 1: So Berne's mother was Freud's sister and Bern's father was
Speaker 1: Freud's wife's brother. So it sounds gross, but idea what
Speaker 1: that means. There was just some siblings swapping going on,
Speaker 1: which is legal in all countries. It seems like incests,
Speaker 1: but it's really not. It's fine. They're just tighten and family,
Speaker 1: that's right. So by nineteen twelve he made contact with
Speaker 1: Uncle SloMo. Through the years, he visited Vienna and the
Speaker 1: he you know, he eventually moved to New York and
Speaker 1: then visited his uncle in the summers. But eventually, in
Speaker 1: nineteen twelve he graduated from Cornell University and he had
Speaker 1: his first um gig. It's a sort of influence what
Speaker 1: his career would be when this producer of a play
Speaker 1: came to him and he said, you know, I've got
Speaker 1: this play and you're a young, upstart person that thinks
Speaker 1: you know what you're doing. And I'm not selling many
Speaker 1: tickets and I could use your help. It's about this
Speaker 1: couple with syphilis. It's called Damaged Goods and no one's
Speaker 1: coming and I can't for life. And you figured out
Speaker 1: why people are lined up around the block at the
Speaker 1: Anthenium Theater. Chuck is totally serious about this. It might
Speaker 1: have played here. This place has been around for like
Speaker 1: since the early years. Yeah, no reactions over, no respects
Speaker 1: for anything. Maybe so he goes to Berne's and he said,
Speaker 1: I need some help selling tickets, and Burnet said, you
Speaker 1: know what we'll do. I have a little plan. Let's uh,
Speaker 1: let's make this not a dirty thing. Let's get out
Speaker 1: in front of this, because you know what, we should
Speaker 1: be talking about syphilis, because it's a problem. Everyone's got it.
Speaker 1: Everybody had syphilis at the time, and you're brave enough
Speaker 1: to do a play about it. So get out in
Speaker 1: front of it, and let's make this part of the
Speaker 1: national conversation. And he injured. Wasn't a huge play, let's
Speaker 1: get real, but he engineered a little campaign. In all
Speaker 1: of a sudden it started selling tickets. So he had
Speaker 1: his first little like a feather in his cap and
Speaker 1: all that sounds fine, sounds great. Like he was the
Speaker 1: first person to use let's get out in front of
Speaker 1: this as a phrase. Um or he uh, he started
Speaker 1: in national dialogue or whatever about syphilis, which is a
Speaker 1: good thing. And this is very Bernesian, right, So you
Speaker 1: think you're distracted over here by the good that it did,
Speaker 1: but really, if you look at it, he just did
Speaker 1: the whole thing totally cynically to sell tickets. Just play
Speaker 1: called damage goods, and that was very Bernie. So he
Speaker 1: wrote a book. His first book in nineteen was called
Speaker 1: Crystallizing Public Opinion. And he was really excited to send
Speaker 1: it to Uncle Schlomo because he had used his work
Speaker 1: to influence him. And he sent it to him, and uh,
Speaker 1: he didn't get like the most well, he got a
Speaker 1: very schlomo lean response. So do you guys know, SloMo
Speaker 1: he did in America. We should change that, no more Freudian.
Speaker 1: You have to add an extra l Well, Olean, try
Speaker 1: and say it without the extra. It's impossible. I'm not
Speaker 1: eve gonna try. So Shlomo writes him back and says, um,
Speaker 1: he says, I have received your book Ellipse, which it's
Speaker 1: not good in a letter as a truly American production.
Speaker 1: It interested me greatly when he went right. And everyone
Speaker 1: knows Freud was psychic, so when he did that, when
Speaker 1: when he wrote the letter, and then while Berne was
Speaker 1: reading it, he did it again because he knew he
Speaker 1: was reading it right then and it would really drive
Speaker 1: the point home. He was not satisfied with just an ellipse,
Speaker 1: No he was not, But that takes a lot of
Speaker 1: effort to actually write the lips dot dot dot yeah
Speaker 1: with a feather and I'll oh no, wait, I guess
Speaker 1: it pens at that point, so Freud was he's a
Speaker 1: look cool. No, no, they had pens. Okay, oh no,
Speaker 1: on the joke. I thought it was a great joke.
Speaker 1: I didn't realize it was a joke. So yes to everything. Okay, good?
Speaker 1: Uh so Uncle Shlomo wasn't super impressed, which, um it
Speaker 1: bothered uh young Edward a little bit, Young Eddie, and
Speaker 1: uh but it came back to roost a little bit
Speaker 1: when Shlomo came up on hard times because apparently he
Speaker 1: didn't make a windfall of cash. No, he did well
Speaker 1: at first, the Austrian economy fell apart and inflation went
Speaker 1: through the roof and his bank accounts went and he
Speaker 1: found himself broken, right, so he needed some dough and uh,
Speaker 1: little Eddie helped him out, and he said, you know what,
Speaker 1: let me let me publish. Help you get your works
Speaker 1: published in America, which again sounds nice, But Berne's retained
Speaker 1: the publishing rights in America, that's right, and didn't he
Speaker 1: He actually tried to get him to write articles for
Speaker 1: one of the new women's magazines, Cosmopolitan. Can you believe
Speaker 1: that like he Fred came back close to writing a
Speaker 1: column in Cosmo. No, seriously, how to satisfy your man
Speaker 1: in five easy steps. Number one, stroke his beard, smoke
Speaker 1: a cigar. Oh the cigars. Not always a cigar, No,
Speaker 1: especially not in Cosmo. Well, and actually, didn't someone give
Speaker 1: someone a box of cigars in this transaction? So when
Speaker 1: when Berne's sent Freud a box of cigars? Freud sent
Speaker 1: Berne is a book of his general Introductory Introductory Lectures,
Speaker 1: which is what inspired all this in Berne's he actually
Speaker 1: sent him a box of fars, not ironically, And can't
Speaker 1: you just see like just like hypnotizing himself, like shaking
Speaker 1: this box of cigars, just trying to convince himself a
Speaker 1: cigar is just a cigar. He was a sick Oh, yes,
Speaker 1: I can't put it in my mouth for some reason. Wow,
Speaker 1: all right, he writes a second book and at this
Speaker 1: point he's not even trying any where. He calls it propaganda.
Speaker 1: That was the name of his second book, which was
Speaker 1: the original name for pr literally, and he was like,
Speaker 1: you know what, maybe we should change that. So he
Speaker 1: invented the term propaganda. I'm sorry, p R. Because propaganda
Speaker 1: he thought kind of had a bad rap. And it
Speaker 1: had a bad rap because at number four the Nazis,
Speaker 1: I knew we could do it. So he said he
Speaker 1: was interviewed when he was a hundred and he said, uh,
Speaker 1: propaganda had a bad name, so I made up a
Speaker 1: new one, called it public relations his word. So you
Speaker 1: actually read propaganda, right, or a lot of it? I
Speaker 1: read a lot of it. It's not a long read,
Speaker 1: but it's what if I wrote a blurb for it,
Speaker 1: I would call it a brilliant comma despicable read because
Speaker 1: the title gives it all away. It's basically a handbook
Speaker 1: on how to manipulate people on a massive scale. And
Speaker 1: he I think he used the words like dope and
Speaker 1: stupid because one of the things that we're putting Burnet's down.
Speaker 1: He hated you guys. Yeah, he hated us. He hated
Speaker 1: all of us. He thought people were generally sheep, unreflective.
Speaker 1: He used the words stupid and dope a lot um
Speaker 1: And for example, in the book Propaganda, he mocks the
Speaker 1: spread of literacy and says that it just makes it
Speaker 1: easier for the average person to read an add Right,
Speaker 1: that's a jerk. Do it again. I've never had this
Speaker 1: much control over year. I know, I feel like I'm Marrianette.
Speaker 1: My fingernails hurt so bad. You're soaking too long. It's
Speaker 1: not the soaking part, it's the filing gouging. Did they
Speaker 1: ever say, like, sir, it looks like you to talk, Okay.
Speaker 1: So Berns had this uh this thing where basically he
Speaker 1: he he saw society as a very uh well and
Speaker 1: he was kind of right, this hierarchical view of society
Speaker 1: where he thought, there's a bunch of dummies out there
Speaker 1: and they need to select few to guide them in
Speaker 1: the right direction and to narrow the choices down because
Speaker 1: we're all just big dummies. We can't decide. If we
Speaker 1: have too many choices, that's no good. Yeah, more than
Speaker 1: more than two political parties? What shall I do? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Pretty much? And uh so he said, you know what
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm gonna use my uncle stuff. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: influence these people. I'm gonna narrow the choices down. Um,
Speaker 1: because we're all big dummies, and if you have a
Speaker 1: limited number of options, then you're more likely to choose
Speaker 1: one who was writing me a check. Right, And he
Speaker 1: actually used the phrase the hallucination of democracy, which he
Speaker 1: would describe what we're living in right now, this idea
Speaker 1: that all of us have some sort of say in
Speaker 1: this participatory government, but really there's an elite group that's
Speaker 1: actually running the show. So basically, and I'm one of them, right, well,
Speaker 1: we're both are oh no, no, not me, oh oh
Speaker 1: yeah yeah. So anyway, there's this idea that like any
Speaker 1: any crackpot theory you've ever heard, where there's people running
Speaker 1: the show, where there's an elite, shadowy group. This guy
Speaker 1: is writing the book on this, and he's saying like,
Speaker 1: not only is this real, here's how it's done, here's
Speaker 1: how to do it more effectively. And the idea was
Speaker 1: that there were people who were working behind the scenes.
Speaker 1: Because one of the really important things that Bernie's figured
Speaker 1: out was that no matter whether we're all stupid sheep
Speaker 1: who have a follow a herd mentality and don't think
Speaker 1: for ourselves and are driven by violent, selfish, sexual, repressed
Speaker 1: desires that were not even aware of, we don't like
Speaker 1: to be pushed around. So we don't like to get
Speaker 1: the idea that somebody's telling us what to do or
Speaker 1: that we're being manipulated. So all of this working behind
Speaker 1: the scenes. Has to happen behind the scenes. We can't
Speaker 1: know what's going on, so all of this stuff has
Speaker 1: to be happening at what you would call basically a
Speaker 1: very high level. Yeah, where even like say, the media
Speaker 1: is manipulated, they're not even on board at this point.
Speaker 1: And and again, I know we sound crazy, just hear us.
Speaker 1: How he was, he was not very well liked even
Speaker 1: within his own profession. He was he was sort of
Speaker 1: he was well liked socially because he lived in New
Speaker 1: York and he was super rich because he got all
Speaker 1: these people right in big fat checks, and um, he
Speaker 1: threw these big, lavish parties and was sort of a
Speaker 1: socialite because he loved making these contacts because then he
Speaker 1: could then manipulate them and use them later to his
Speaker 1: own end to get big fat checks written for him. Okay,
Speaker 1: but you're not into you even a minute. Uh So
Speaker 1: he would he threw these big parties, but even his
Speaker 1: own like, he created a profession and the people that
Speaker 1: benefited from having those jobs didn't even like him. But
Speaker 1: because he was such a blowhard, he was his own
Speaker 1: biggest pr guy. And uh here's a quote though from
Speaker 1: one of his um one of his clients that I think, Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is foreshadowing to is. A United Fruit executive said
Speaker 1: that everybody in the company hated him. We didn't trust him,
Speaker 1: we didn't like his politics, we didn't like his fees,
Speaker 1: but the sense was that we were definitely getting our
Speaker 1: money's worth. That's how he existed for so long. Yeah. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: he He was a master at what he did. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's the thing. It sounds so insulting, but he
Speaker 1: was right, which really just drives us crazy while we're
Speaker 1: researching them. We wanted him to fail at every effort,
Speaker 1: but all he did was succeed, and it was so maddening.
Speaker 1: So he was He was extremely good. He was the
Speaker 1: guy who created the um uh, basically exploiting what he
Speaker 1: called special pleaders, people that the rest of us trust
Speaker 1: their opinions, that kind of thing. He would go up
Speaker 1: and be like, how much will it cost for me
Speaker 1: to buy your opinion? And he would come up with
Speaker 1: things like, like you said, nine out of time dennists agree,
Speaker 1: or something called the calculated simulation of enthusiasm, what you
Speaker 1: might call like a flash mob today or grassroots kind
Speaker 1: of stuff that's actually astroturfing. That kind of stuff um.
Speaker 1: And he was just a just a master at this
Speaker 1: kind of thing. And the best way we figured out
Speaker 1: to get Burne's across is to kind of go through
Speaker 1: what we like to call Eddie Burne's greatest hits, UH
Speaker 1: colon prongs to success, because what we learned in researching
Speaker 1: this was he would not attack something with one idea.
Speaker 1: He wouldn't say that maybe we should do this, He'd say,
Speaker 1: let's do these five things or these two or three things,
Speaker 1: because met it from all these different angles behind the scenes,
Speaker 1: no one will ever know. And like he was really
Speaker 1: really good at his job. As evil as he was,
Speaker 1: he was a hard worker. So UH, cut number one
Speaker 1: on Eddie Burnet's all my best prongs to success uh
Speaker 1: is Vanita hairnets. Everyone here supports Vinita Hairnet's right, everyone.
Speaker 1: I thought I saw a few hairnets in the audience. No,
Speaker 1: no hairnets. World War One hairnets were a big thing
Speaker 1: for a little while. And after World War One, women
Speaker 1: started cutting their hair and a bob and they didn't
Speaker 1: need the hairnet anymore. And it was a big problem
Speaker 1: if you make hairnets, especially if you were a company
Speaker 1: called Nita, because they were the industry leader of hairnets. Right,
Speaker 1: And so they hire Eddie Burnet's and they're like, do something,
Speaker 1: you have to do something. We're losing so much money.
Speaker 1: And Bernie's is like, calm down, calm down. I got
Speaker 1: this and he went to work. What did you do?
Speaker 1: M s I went like this, Okay, So Bern's um,
Speaker 1: he applies his typical Bernesian stuff and he looks around.
Speaker 1: He says, who do people who wear hairnets? Listen to this?
Speaker 1: One's kind of a stretch, but he identified artists as
Speaker 1: the special pleaders in this case. Right, So we went
Speaker 1: to some leading artists and said, hey, don't you think
Speaker 1: hairnets make women look beautiful? And they're like, oh god, no,
Speaker 1: have you seen a woman in a hairnet? Are you
Speaker 1: out of your mind? And they did his patented make
Speaker 1: it rain thing. So he just like went like this
Speaker 1: with a bunch of cash, and an artist, top artist
Speaker 1: and artists said yes, as a matter of fact, they're awesome.
Speaker 1: It's probably clear. It's probably clear about yeah, her artists friend,
Speaker 1: so that's probably number one. So yes, so they get
Speaker 1: fashionable and these artists are saying now everywhere they go
Speaker 1: that hairnets give women a Greek cuffer look whatever. That
Speaker 1: stupid words. I'm sure Bernd is like, I can't believe
Speaker 1: that's what they said. But still so there's artists saying this,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, the media who um pay
Speaker 1: attention to the art beat are starting to hear all
Speaker 1: these artists talk about hairnets. And it's all because one
Speaker 1: or two top artists said it, and now all these
Speaker 1: other ones, following their herd mentality, are parroting the same thing.
Speaker 1: Then the media picks it up. That's pronged. Well, he's
Speaker 1: also got the media in his hip pocket, and he's
Speaker 1: he's calling people's end. Have you noticed everyone wearing these hairnets? Yeah,
Speaker 1: you might want to write a little story on it
Speaker 1: in Cosmopolitan, That's all I'm saying. So that's prong number one.
Speaker 1: Prong number two is he went to manufacturers and factories
Speaker 1: and said, it seems really dangerous to me that these
Speaker 1: women are working in your factories because they could be
Speaker 1: pulled into that lathe. And that's have you ever seen
Speaker 1: in that very very dangerous and a head pulled into
Speaker 1: a wood lathe is no good. So if you wear
Speaker 1: a hairnet, it solves all the problems. And so they
Speaker 1: got manufacturers and factories to say, you know what every
Speaker 1: when he needs to have a hairnet. All these women
Speaker 1: and I guess men with long hair, which there were
Speaker 1: probably like three guys. Maybe post World War two they
Speaker 1: had long I'm sorry, world War One even they had
Speaker 1: long hair. And uh, all of a sudden, he's got
Speaker 1: two prongs. Look good, be safe. Vanita hairnets sold a
Speaker 1: lot of hairnets, wrote a big giant check, right because women.
Speaker 1: All of a sudden, we're picking up the paper in
Speaker 1: the morning reading about how all these artists were talking
Speaker 1: about how great women look in hairnets, and then after
Speaker 1: work they were going to like the union meeting and
Speaker 1: hearing about how safe hairnets were, and they're thinking, maybe
Speaker 1: I should grows bob out and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: Vineta hairnets are back, baby, all because the Edward Burnet's
Speaker 1: it was just it was a big success. It wasn't
Speaker 1: his first, but it was a big one. Yeah, cut
Speaker 1: number two. Edward Burnet's all my best in nineteen. Let's
Speaker 1: get in the way back machine, all of us. We're
Speaker 1: in the way back machine. So the way back machine
Speaker 1: his imagining. I'm sorry you guys, surely you knew that, right.
Speaker 1: We actually have room to bring out a DeLorean behind us.
Speaker 1: We had the room, but not the money. So we're
Speaker 1: on the way back machine. We're traveling back to uh
Speaker 1: when it was a taboo for women to smoke in public.
Speaker 1: It was um you know, women would like, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of have to hide their cigarette smoking. At the time,
Speaker 1: it meant like if a woman, if she spoke, she poked,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. That's not me saying it
Speaker 1: like this is the social taboo. I'm just putting that
Speaker 1: was saying it that I didn't. I'm not saying that
Speaker 1: like you just said it. But that's he's quoting, but
Speaker 1: not quoting. I'm just trying to put it in easily
Speaker 1: approachable terms. But he's right, I kid, that was literally
Speaker 1: like if you've smoked and you were a woman out
Speaker 1: in pub, like you were sort of promiscuous. Maybe, So
Speaker 1: another way to put it's a much much better way
Speaker 1: to put it. So he was hired by the American
Speaker 1: Spacco Company by UM a man named George George Washington
Speaker 1: Hill of American Tobacco OK Falkhorn Lake. That was no Hurst,
Speaker 1: And he said, I'll say, I'll say Mr. Bonnets were
Speaker 1: selling on an awful lot of cigarettes to men, but
Speaker 1: I think we can kill roughly twice as many people
Speaker 1: if we sell them to women. I got these lucky
Speaker 1: strikes and then not flying off the shelf, So what
Speaker 1: can you do? So I gotta check? All right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's still young. It's funny because every time I go
Speaker 1: like this, I actually, in reality I have to go
Speaker 1: like that, so I feel like a jackass. Bernie's got
Speaker 1: on it, right. He was like, yes, this is b
Speaker 1: s that women can't smoke because of the social taboo,
Speaker 1: and that you can't sell twice as many cigarettes because
Speaker 1: of this stupid social taboo. So I'm gonna go break
Speaker 1: the social taboo. So Bernie's working behind the scenes. Uh,
Speaker 1: contacted a friend who was an editor at Vogue and said,
Speaker 1: give me a list of debutantes and this should be
Speaker 1: good looking, but not modelly looking, because I want what
Speaker 1: I'm about to hatch to seem very grassroots. Right. So
Speaker 1: he got his hands on this list, got these women together,
Speaker 1: um and said, hey, how would you like to singlehandedly
Speaker 1: advance women's rights? And these these girls were like, let's
Speaker 1: do it. Let's yes, I'm I'm ready, I've got I've
Speaker 1: I've burned my Vanita hairnet and I'm ready to go,
Speaker 1: and so he said, this is what we're gonna do.
Speaker 1: In New York, they have an Easter parade every year,
Speaker 1: still do, and this year on what April one, all
Speaker 1: you gals are going to be out there on Fifth
Speaker 1: Avenue and right in the middle of Easter Bred. You're
Speaker 1: all gonna light up at once and it'll be called
Speaker 1: we'll call it no, I don't know, just thinking off
Speaker 1: top of my head, the Torches of Freedom campaign, and
Speaker 1: it will you will put women on the map. And
Speaker 1: the women said, let's do this. Yeah he did. He did.
Speaker 1: He literally cast them from an agency and I think
Speaker 1: he said he wanted to like, not too good looking,
Speaker 1: because we don't want to give ourselves away, but I
Speaker 1: still want some good looking Broad's right. They can't be
Speaker 1: dogs or anything, you know what I mean. That was Bernie.
Speaker 1: That was Bernie saying that. That was Edward g. Robinson. Yeah, no, dogs,
Speaker 1: don't even think about it too pretty, not pretty enough?
Speaker 1: Just right, stop boyting my time. That's a lot of
Speaker 1: Evergy Robinson. So he can cocted this Torches of Freedom Bred.
Speaker 1: He he of course, like he always had the media
Speaker 1: in his hip pocket. He leaked it, said you know
Speaker 1: what I heard. I heard there's some women that are
Speaker 1: gonna like smoke in public. You know what that means?
Speaker 1: You're so lucky. This is an audio podcast. I learned
Speaker 1: that when I was like nine. That's literally the safest
Speaker 1: way to portray I don't know if that's necessarily true.
Speaker 1: You just took all the heat off of me, better
Speaker 1: than saying poke, you guys are gonna leave tonight and
Speaker 1: be like, Josh is great for that suck. Yeah, he's edgy.
Speaker 1: I didn't think he was that dirty. His beard makes
Speaker 1: him seem so al right, So that was prong one,
Speaker 1: and it was a huge hit. Yeah, the international press,
Speaker 1: they were like papers in Paris, France writing about these women.
Speaker 1: Well in France they all smoked all the time, probably
Speaker 1: not embarrassed. But international press picked this up and it
Speaker 1: was a it was a big thing all over the world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: these these women are smoking. And now in the press
Speaker 1: it's equated with women's rights. So yes, that came later,
Speaker 1: but yes, basically the same sentiment. Right, So this idea
Speaker 1: was now, if you oppose women smoking, you overtly opposed
Speaker 1: women's rights. The gauntlet had been laid down in secret
Speaker 1: by Edward Burnet's right. So, like Chuck says, that was
Speaker 1: just wronged. One prong too, was he was a research animal.
Speaker 1: He made us look like human garbage as far as
Speaker 1: research goes, right. This guy put everything he had into research,
Speaker 1: and he figured out that, um, there were a lot
Speaker 1: of problems men had with women smoking. And so we
Speaker 1: hired a nurse to go around the country to teach
Speaker 1: women to smoke better, because who else would you hire
Speaker 1: but a nurse. Yeah, well that's who people trust. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you're gonna learn about smoking, you're learning from a nurse, right,
Speaker 1: That's where everybody here learned to smoke. So her name
Speaker 1: was Florence Lindon. She was a former actress and nurse.
Speaker 1: And so she went around to like the Society of
Speaker 1: New York State Women and garden clubs and all these
Speaker 1: things to teach etiquette smoking to not annoy your husband's
Speaker 1: and they actually he actually did research and uh some
Speaker 1: polling to find out what really annoys you about when
Speaker 1: your wife or girlfriend smokes. And there are some real
Speaker 1: answers this is not made up, pet peeves. Number one
Speaker 1: is the messy way they opened the packages, which apparently
Speaker 1: it was like with their teeth. They're really bugs me.
Speaker 1: Number two was the affected mannerisms. How you smoke, it's
Speaker 1: all like a showy and stuff like this. Andrew Dice
Speaker 1: Clay Bernez invented that. He made Andrew Dice Clay's career
Speaker 1: Number three puffing like a steam engine. There's just too
Speaker 1: much smoke when you're smoking. Like hot boxing. Hot boxing
Speaker 1: is different. I went to college. Uh. Number four was
Speaker 1: lipstick smears. You smoke and you get like that lipstick
Speaker 1: I make you wear gets all over that cigarette filter.
Speaker 1: It was really annoying. I don't want to see it
Speaker 1: in the ashtray. No, no, it's not funny. So those
Speaker 1: were literally the feedback. They also actually because I figured
Speaker 1: they had to. They had to make it equal. So
Speaker 1: they had said, what annoys you women when you're men
Speaker 1: smoke and at the end of the serious be like
Speaker 1: oh yeah, yeah, yeah, wait, wait, hold on, sure, you
Speaker 1: gotta ask you two and they would find out yeah,
Speaker 1: and that was when you put your men put their
Speaker 1: cigarettes out on their dinner plate. It was number one.
Speaker 1: And number two was when they are just smoking and
Speaker 1: they just run it under the faucet and just drop
Speaker 1: it in the sink and leaf but but miss Linden
Speaker 1: equal opportunity, sexist. She taught every one that, um, if
Speaker 1: you are smoking in bed, you should use a closed ashtray,
Speaker 1: all of us. It's just smart. That's proble number two.
Speaker 1: Prong number three was uh. He did research again and
Speaker 1: found out did some surveys that women didn't like Lucky
Speaker 1: Strike green the color of the package. It just it
Speaker 1: wasn't the color of the day. It didn't match anything
Speaker 1: they wore, so they didn't want to carry around the cigarettes.
Speaker 1: So what did he do? He made green fashionable, Like
Speaker 1: basically single handedly, he threw green balls. He made sure
Speaker 1: that all the department stores had like green gowns in
Speaker 1: their windows. And now all of a sudden, Lucky Strike
Speaker 1: green was the color of the season thanks to n
Speaker 1: to sell cigarettes, and it was totally incompletely successful. Falk
Speaker 1: Horn Leghorn like went to sleep every night on a
Speaker 1: bed of money, and ever Berne's hump grew three times.
Speaker 1: All right, wrong, I'm sorry not to wrong. Another another
Speaker 1: cut from the album Bacon for Breakfast. Anyone here eat
Speaker 1: bacon this morning? You want to know something. Bacon was
Speaker 1: not a breakfast food until Edward Bernese came along. Serious.
Speaker 1: I know, right for bacon, I feel so bad for
Speaker 1: that part of the pig. We just ate it a
Speaker 1: lunch and dinner. Bernese came along because he was hired
Speaker 1: by the beach nut packing company who made bacon. And
Speaker 1: they said, we're just a lot of bacon for lunch
Speaker 1: and dinner. But no, yeah, it sure would be nice
Speaker 1: to sell it for breakfast. What can you do for me?
Speaker 1: I have a big giant check and it been And
Speaker 1: he said, let's see who do people listen to when
Speaker 1: they're thinking about their time. Doctors. Sure, if I write
Speaker 1: a big enough check, I could co opt the doctor.
Speaker 1: And he did. He found a doctor who wrote a
Speaker 1: study saying we should all start eating hearty breakfasts featuring
Speaker 1: bacon and and burns. Took the study and forward it
Speaker 1: to other doctors who were like, yeah, we subscribe to
Speaker 1: her mentality. Let's follow this guy's advice. They started. He's yeah,
Speaker 1: but he included a sample of bacon to sweeten beechnut bacon,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, doctors are like, by the way, yeah,
Speaker 1: you should be any more bacon for breakfast because breakfast
Speaker 1: at the time, like everyone seeing mad Man, It was
Speaker 1: like a piece of dry toast coffee and a cigarette
Speaker 1: that was breakfast. The big hearty breakfast didn't come along
Speaker 1: until Edward Burne made it so, and supposedly he invented
Speaker 1: the expression a meal that sticks to your ribs. Evil genius,
Speaker 1: evil genius. So bacon to clap for it. You're about
Speaker 1: to feel bad for clapping for Edward Burns because this
Speaker 1: is about where Bern's career takes a really dark turn,
Speaker 1: a dark and successful turn. So we should we go
Speaker 1: on the way back machine again? Yeah? This time? This time, everybody,
Speaker 1: we're going to Jamaica. Yeah, eighteen seventy, We're going way back. Yeah.
Speaker 1: There's a dude named Lorenzo dal Baker, and he was
Speaker 1: the skipper of a ship called the Telegraph, and he
Speaker 1: showed up in Jamaica one day because he wanted some rum,
Speaker 1: which is pretty smart to do when you're in Jamaica
Speaker 1: in eighteen seventy what else is there to do? And
Speaker 1: while he's sitting there at the bar drinking, some guy
Speaker 1: comes up and says, you want some bananas, I've got
Speaker 1: a bunch for twenty five cents. A bunch right, A
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty I think, is what he bought. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he said that that's a heck of a price for bananas,
Speaker 1: because I'm pretty drunk. Take a bunch of bananas. We
Speaker 1: don't have it. Like he was from Boston. He's like,
Speaker 1: we don't have a lot of bananas in Boston. I
Speaker 1: don't know if you know that. I bet I could
Speaker 1: sell these for a lot of dough And he did.
Speaker 1: In eighteen seventy he was selling, reselling these bananas for
Speaker 1: up to three dollars and twenty five cents a bunch.
Speaker 1: It's a lot of money. Back then, there's a lot.
Speaker 1: He bought like half of the US probably with this post.
Speaker 1: We we failed to go figure out how much that
Speaker 1: is and ten eight dollars, but it was a lot.
Speaker 1: Believe us, someone out there is checking there on that website.
Speaker 1: It's that guy. So it worked out really well for
Speaker 1: Lorenzo dal Baker, and by five he had eleven ships
Speaker 1: flying under the banner of the Boston Fruit Company. They
Speaker 1: would they were bringing in ten million bunches of bananas
Speaker 1: a year. At this point they became United Fruit and
Speaker 1: eventually became Taquida Banana, which we all enjoyed today. Right
Speaker 1: still today, there are a couple of os like, oh
Speaker 1: my god, not taquita. That's my favorite banana. I can't
Speaker 1: eat any of that other crap. It's kind of be taquita.
Speaker 1: It's the only banana. So everything's going very very well
Speaker 1: for United Fruit UM and by nineteen forty they basically
Speaker 1: owned a number of countries. In fact, the term Banana
Speaker 1: Republic came from this um, this idea that United Fruit
Speaker 1: ran the economy and essentially the government mint of countries
Speaker 1: in Latin America, including Guatemala. And by nineteen forty, a
Speaker 1: guy named Sam's Murray, who was known as Sam the
Speaker 1: Banana Man, was running United Fruit. The best we can
Speaker 1: figure is that he he had to have gotten that
Speaker 1: name after he worked there. I don't know that necessarily true.
Speaker 1: He like literally could have been born to become the
Speaker 1: head of the United Fruit. Like I think about it.
Speaker 1: If you were interviewing people, wouldn't you like give a
Speaker 1: second look to the guy named Sam the Banana Man company,
Speaker 1: Sam the Banana Man, Oh, I like, I gotta say, sir,
Speaker 1: you've got a leg up. So SAMSA. Murray became the
Speaker 1: head of United Fruit and they were selling tons of
Speaker 1: bananas at this point. But it wasn't enough. It's never enough,
Speaker 1: and so they controlled, like Josh had, much of Central
Speaker 1: America owned all their bananas, and they weren't getting a
Speaker 1: lot in return. Let's be honest, you know it works,
Speaker 1: and he said, Mr Berne would like to some more bananas.
Speaker 1: I'm Sam the banana man after are all. I can't
Speaker 1: lose that name. That would be embarrassing. So how can
Speaker 1: you help us? Bernice? Yeah, he said, Okay, I got it.
Speaker 1: I got it, I got it, I got it. Hold on,
Speaker 1: I'm still thinking. Do you see my prongs program? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Have you heard about my prongs? Uh? So Berne says,
Speaker 1: I think we should try to make bananas appear healthy.
Speaker 1: Maybe we'll sell them as like kind of a health food,
Speaker 1: which they're not at all. Actually, that's not true. Banana's
Speaker 1: completely healthy. No, that's not true. That's actually Bernie's at
Speaker 1: work right before. You're very eye. No, bananas are healthy.
Speaker 1: You're being coy, Bernice, he was. That was like the
Speaker 1: one honest thing he did. Actually, so, branana's aren't healthy.
Speaker 1: Look it up. That was wrong. One. I don't know
Speaker 1: if I can account that as a prong. That's a
Speaker 1: prong broaking something that's peyton the unhealthy and and saying
Speaker 1: it's healthy. That's a prong prong number two. He said,
Speaker 1: you know what we need to do. I'm gonna go
Speaker 1: on a banana assault in this country, full front old banana.
Speaker 1: I saw that movie, yeah, and the sequel it was
Speaker 1: it's very dirty. He said, let's get bananas. I want
Speaker 1: him in hotels. I want him in hotel lobbies. I
Speaker 1: want him in h Y M C A s. I
Speaker 1: want him on on trains. I want him in airports.
Speaker 1: I want him in why boy scout rooms all across
Speaker 1: the country. I want to wait, wait in a what room?
Speaker 1: In a boy scout room? You wrote this and it
Speaker 1: says boy scout and it doesn't say boy scout room anywhere.
Speaker 1: I think you're having a seizure or something. I want
Speaker 1: him in movie studios. I want him at Palm Beach.
Speaker 1: I want him at resorts. Bananas are everywhere, and people like,
Speaker 1: have you noticed there's bananas like all over the place. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like movie studios, like I should be eating a little bit. Well,
Speaker 1: I hear they're very healthy, so maybe you should eat
Speaker 1: a bunch of bananas right now. I'll watch That was wrong, man.
Speaker 1: I love Chicago. Yeah, for real. Detroit was just like,
Speaker 1: I don't get it. Well, now we can't release this show.
Speaker 1: We can we can edit that part Alright, guys, we'll
Speaker 1: lose all four hundred of our Detroit fans. So those
Speaker 1: wrong two prong to wrong three is he said, I
Speaker 1: think what we can do to sell more bananas. I
Speaker 1: think people had a connection to where bananas came from.
Speaker 1: They would be psyched about it, kind of like later
Speaker 1: with the Chakia banana lady. It's like, hey, that's kind
Speaker 1: of cool. Look at her, she's wearing bananas on her head. Right,
Speaker 1: she's a weirdo. So he set up one of his fronts,
Speaker 1: which he often did. Yeah, he would. He would pay
Speaker 1: professionals to put out an opinion that was prescribed by
Speaker 1: him that jibe with what he wanted to say. And
Speaker 1: in this case, it was called the the Middle America
Speaker 1: Information Bureau. She had nothing to do with the Midwest. Sorry,
Speaker 1: he was talking about Latin America. I don't know why
Speaker 1: he called it that, but he did. So. The Middle
Speaker 1: America Information Bureau was a a Chiquita been a Chiquita
Speaker 1: backed well, United Fruit backed think tank, and the whole
Speaker 1: thing that they did was put out press releases about
Speaker 1: how awesome Latin America was and how when you ate
Speaker 1: a banana on your lunch break, you could basically, now
Speaker 1: that you know about Latin America, take a little mini
Speaker 1: vacation to the tropics because you know about Latin America.
Speaker 1: Because the Middle America Information Bureau has been putting out
Speaker 1: press releases to the newspapers, which are now printing them
Speaker 1: because newspapers could not have cared less apparently at the time,
Speaker 1: so they would print banana related stuff. So this is great,
Speaker 1: This is working really well. The banana assault full frontal
Speaker 1: banana assault was working great. People are eating bananas and
Speaker 1: really being we're supporting this economy down there. We're like
Speaker 1: feeding families but eating their bananas. Not true because and
Speaker 1: have you seen the lady who wears other fruit? I
Speaker 1: love that lady. What was going on was there was
Speaker 1: a dictator in Guatemala, which is where they were getting
Speaker 1: a lot of bananas at the time, and a United
Speaker 1: Fruit ally named Jorge Ubiko, and uh he was I
Speaker 1: feel like you should say that in your Italian accent.
Speaker 1: For some reason, it doesn't make sense, but hey would
Speaker 1: know it would be cool. It doesn't work. Sorry everybody,
Speaker 1: Well that was Latin flavored at least, right, Oh yeah, no,
Speaker 1: that was good. But Italian man, I'm like a yo
Speaker 1: yo with you. So he was in the uh. Joge
Speaker 1: Ubico was clearly in the pocket of United Fruit because
Speaker 1: just getting kicked backs, and he was like, yeah, man,
Speaker 1: come to my country, give me some dough. Who cares
Speaker 1: about all the people. They're just beons own all our land,
Speaker 1: and just give me some dough. And he was basically, well,
Speaker 1: I'm not overthrown. He was taken out by popular vote.
Speaker 1: I think it was actually overthrown and then they held
Speaker 1: a popular Yeah, so he was like you're out of here,
Speaker 1: pal at gunpoint basically. But the guy who came in
Speaker 1: after him was elected democratically and one eighty five of
Speaker 1: the popular vote, which is I don't think it's probably
Speaker 1: ever happened legitimately in any kind of democratic election. He's
Speaker 1: a very beloved man named Juan Jose are Evoldo, right,
Speaker 1: and uh, he was a leftist. He definitely thought that.
Speaker 1: One of one of his principal ideas was that he
Speaker 1: wanted to be able to create internal competition to United
Speaker 1: Fruit among Guatemalan farmers. His idea was, this is our land,
Speaker 1: these are bananas, this is our population. We should be
Speaker 1: able to make money off of these bananas. Like United
Speaker 1: Fruit is so United Fruit, you can stay, but we're
Speaker 1: gonna treat our people better from now on, and we're
Speaker 1: gonna actually subtract some of your wealth by doing that.
Speaker 1: United Fruit didn't like that at all. No, they didn't.
Speaker 1: One of the first things he did was they you know,
Speaker 1: United Fruit owned all this land, this fallow land that
Speaker 1: wasn't even being used. And he said, you know what,
Speaker 1: you bought this land from us for three dollars an acre.
Speaker 1: I'd like to buy it back for the three dollars
Speaker 1: an acre. I see your tax return says three dollars
Speaker 1: an acre. So let's just do that the United Fruits.
Speaker 1: Actually it's more like seventy five dollars an acre now,
Speaker 1: just out of the blue. Yeah, so let's let's just
Speaker 1: up the price on you. But he was able to
Speaker 1: get a lot of the land back. He was able
Speaker 1: to build some roads through the country and actually provide
Speaker 1: competition to the United Fruit, which would become Chida, which
Speaker 1: was not a good thing. No, United Fruit was like,
Speaker 1: this is a really, really, really big deal. We've had
Speaker 1: total control over this country for half a century at least.
Speaker 1: And um, this guy comes long and now he's stealing
Speaker 1: our land that we stole. No, it's not okay, it's
Speaker 1: not all right. So they went to their friends at
Speaker 1: the CIA and Edward Burnets and said, guys, what can
Speaker 1: you do? And they talked to the right guy because
Speaker 1: Edward Burnet's said, let's just overthrow the government. And they did. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they literally overthrew the government. And he thought, the first
Speaker 1: thing we have to do is we have to get
Speaker 1: the American people behind this, because you just can't overthrow
Speaker 1: a government without the people being behind it. So let
Speaker 1: me think about this. Um, aren't there a lot of
Speaker 1: communists and Guatemala? Oh yeah, and wait, wait is in
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union communists? We hate those guys. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: Red Scare. And everyone's like, well, there really are no
Speaker 1: communists in Guatemala actually, and he said, well nobody knows that.
Speaker 1: So let's get all my friends in the magazine and
Speaker 1: put a newspaper business to write a story about the
Speaker 1: brewing crisis in Guatemala. Right. So, so they're right at
Speaker 1: our door, they're just below Mexico, right, Yeah, in Texas.
Speaker 1: Everybody Texas. So this Middle America information bureau goes from
Speaker 1: putting out press releases about how wonderful bananas are to
Speaker 1: the brewing Soviet crisis and Guatemala and the newspapers listened.
Speaker 1: They started reporting on this, and it became a really
Speaker 1: big deal that there was a Soviet threat in our
Speaker 1: backyard just below Texas. Again, and um, the American public
Speaker 1: got on board, basically. Yeah. So once he had the
Speaker 1: American public support, he got in touch with a former
Speaker 1: Lieutenant Colonel uh from the U. S Army living in exile,
Speaker 1: and said, why don't you get some CIA buddies together
Speaker 1: and let's cross the border from Honduras with a couple
Speaker 1: of hundred men that are well trained, and let's call
Speaker 1: it the Army of Liberation and let's overthrow the government.
Speaker 1: And that's what he did, plunging Guatemala into a decades
Speaker 1: long civil war, including genocide. Yeah, that's the appropriate response
Speaker 1: to that. So we said all this, and we said
Speaker 1: that we were still living right smack tab in the
Speaker 1: middle is hopefully all this seemed vaguely familiar to you, um,
Speaker 1: and recently, I think in two thousand and eight, all
Speaker 1: of this this idea um took on a new a
Speaker 1: new name and and new momentum. Have you guys ever
Speaker 1: heard of nudge politics anyone? People? So basically, nudge is
Speaker 1: this new thing. It's the new name for all of this.
Speaker 1: And it's the idea that people are stupid and that
Speaker 1: you have to have elite people figuring out what the
Speaker 1: best outcome is and then nudge people toward that outcome
Speaker 1: without people understanding that they're being nudged. Sounds familiar, Yes,
Speaker 1: it does. And as a matter of fact, this is
Speaker 1: really recently under a presidential um executive order become policy
Speaker 1: in the American government. And it seems kind of benign
Speaker 1: a lot of it, right, Like I think the U.
Speaker 1: S d A is using nudge to um. Like you'll
Speaker 1: get a prompt sometimes if you're printing and you're you're
Speaker 1: working at the U. S d A, and they'll say,
Speaker 1: don't forget to change your printer preferences to double sided,
Speaker 1: which everybody loves double side of printing. What's wrong with that? Nothing?
Speaker 1: But beyond this kind of benign idea, um that nudge
Speaker 1: or that that PR the idea of this hallucination of
Speaker 1: democracy is harmless, or we can be nudged in the
Speaker 1: right direction. Are two really important points, and one is
Speaker 1: that the people in charge know what the best outcome is,
Speaker 1: and the best outcome is often subjective, like we might
Speaker 1: not think that the best outcome is the same as
Speaker 1: the people who are deciding what the best outcome is.
Speaker 1: The second one is that the people who get to
Speaker 1: decide what the best outcome is has all of our
Speaker 1: best interests in heart. That's not necessarily true either, So
Speaker 1: you can easily go from two sided printing to know
Speaker 1: you need to decide that, um, the death penalty will
Speaker 1: never ever go away no matter what you think, or
Speaker 1: let's just make the the easiest thing, like you have
Speaker 1: to opt out of organ donation. We're not saying organ
Speaker 1: donation is bad, mind you. Yeah, we're not equating organ
Speaker 1: donation with death penalty right now, but things like out
Speaker 1: clauses like it's just included because it's the for the
Speaker 1: benefit of everybody. You can get a little slippery, you know,
Speaker 1: and a nudge becomes a little more like a shove
Speaker 1: when it's in the hands of the wrong person. You
Speaker 1: have to really be careful about. So that is well,
Speaker 1: here we go. Let's finish up with this, I'm not
Speaker 1: finish up. Here's more you would think after all of this,
Speaker 1: After Edward Burnet's uh sold us bacon as the healthy
Speaker 1: thing to eat for breakfast, and bananas is a healthy
Speaker 1: thing to eat all day long, and women should smoke cigarettes,
Speaker 1: and let's overthrow Guatemalada sell of fruit. He would have
Speaker 1: been in his hundreds on his deathbed and thought, you
Speaker 1: know what, I kind of regret some of the things
Speaker 1: I did in my career. Not true. He couldn't even
Speaker 1: look up. He was interviewed by a guy from the
Speaker 1: New York Times when he was one hundred years old,
Speaker 1: and he basically said, yeah, people are stupid dopes, and
Speaker 1: I stand by everything I did, and I had a
Speaker 1: pretty great career. As a matter of fact. His last
Speaker 1: words were, I tell them I said they were stupid.
Speaker 1: So that's Edward Burns. That's his career. And we're gonna
Speaker 1: finish out with a bit of a that we like
Speaker 1: to do a top ten list that is always only
Speaker 1: five or six because it's US. Some of the worst
Speaker 1: pr disasters in history, and we're gonna open up with
Speaker 1: one US Airways, not Delta. A few years ago, a
Speaker 1: young woman complained to uh, US Airways that her spring
Speaker 1: break was ruined, which, man, if you're in college, it's
Speaker 1: a big deal. You know you only have one spring
Speaker 1: break a year. Yeah, that's true. And they said, we
Speaker 1: don't like to hear this, Alex, please provide feedback to
Speaker 1: our customer relations team right here, and they left a
Speaker 1: link for all the world to click on, and that
Speaker 1: link went to a pornographic image of a woman with
Speaker 1: a model Boing seven forty seven. Uh and she was
Speaker 1: doing things with it. And that's a big plane. M
Speaker 1: Someone probably lost their job over that one. You got
Speaker 1: Philip Morris. So we love picking on smoking because it's
Speaker 1: so easy. Um that you guys are familiar with Philip Morris,
Speaker 1: the big smoking tobacco giant. Apparently in two thousand one,
Speaker 1: the Czech government came up with a study that found,
Speaker 1: surprisingly that smoking actually cost their economy money. And Philip
Speaker 1: Morris said, no, no, no, let us commission our own
Speaker 1: study and find out what the real deal is. And
Speaker 1: they found and announced publicly, check government, you're wrong. We
Speaker 1: found that smoking actually saves your economy up to thirty
Speaker 1: million dollars a year. And do you want to know how?
Speaker 1: By early smoking deaths all that money you guys would
Speaker 1: have spent on healthcare, pensions, housing, you didn't have to
Speaker 1: because those smokers died early. And they're like, this is
Speaker 1: a good study, look at this right, And Philip Morris
Speaker 1: was surprised by the blowback. They actually were like, we
Speaker 1: have other studies that we should probably cancel wind up
Speaker 1: in other countries because we thought this was going to
Speaker 1: be the thing that really drove home to everybody how
Speaker 1: great smoking is. I love that one alright. In two
Speaker 1: thousand to Abercrombie and Fitch, that's all you have to say.
Speaker 1: Shirtless dudes, that's all I think about. And ironically this
Speaker 1: is about T shirts. They had a line of T
Speaker 1: shirts uh that were racist in two thousand two, depicting
Speaker 1: Asian stereotypes. Um, well, what was one of the shirts?
Speaker 1: I'm sorry everybody, I'm sorry. Uh, Wong Brothers Laundry Service.
Speaker 1: Two Wongs can make it white and they stood behind it. There.
Speaker 1: Their quote for this campaign was I personally thought Asians
Speaker 1: would love this T shirt. That was their corporate communications
Speaker 1: people that came up with that. That was the company's
Speaker 1: response to the blowback and not to be outdone. One
Speaker 1: month later, thirty days later, they released their line of
Speaker 1: thongs for a ten to twelve year old girls, and
Speaker 1: their corporate communications response that that was, you know, the
Speaker 1: underwear for young girls was the intent was to be
Speaker 1: lighthearted and cute. Yeah right, everybody. Have you guys are
Speaker 1: Coca Cola? Do you guys have pepsi up here? Right? Well,
Speaker 1: we have coke down south and coke is huge and
Speaker 1: coke back and I think like the nineties the early nineties,
Speaker 1: UM Coke had this thing called the Magic Can campaign.
Speaker 1: Does anyone remember that? So, okay, you, sir, can go
Speaker 1: to sleep for the next two minutes. So the magic
Speaker 1: Can campaign was basically, you'd pick up a coke and
Speaker 1: you'd in it in a prize would shoot out towards
Speaker 1: your face. That's not even the bad party literally had
Speaker 1: a spring loaded mechanism that would shoot out. Like sometimes
Speaker 1: the prize was like a hundred bucks, which is awesome, great.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it was a dollar. So you would buy the
Speaker 1: coke you wanted and open it to get a dollar
Speaker 1: and then buy the coke you wanted, but have like
Speaker 1: thirty cents left over. Yeah, it's a net zero, I
Speaker 1: think at that's close. So Coke UM had this thing going.
Speaker 1: They were very excited. Everything was going great. But the
Speaker 1: problem was that people were opening these magic hands and
Speaker 1: being like, oh a dollar, great, thanks Coke, and then
Speaker 1: taking a sip and going right because the stuff inside
Speaker 1: tastes like poison? What is this tasted like chlorinated water?
Speaker 1: I better call my local poison tip line, and people did,
Speaker 1: and poison lines across the country started getting hot, like
Speaker 1: tips that you should not drink these magic can cokes,
Speaker 1: and it be came enough of a deal that Coke
Speaker 1: had to take out ads saying like, don't drink the
Speaker 1: stuff in the magic can, which is not what you
Speaker 1: want to do. If you're a beverage company, you can
Speaker 1: go home on YouTube and look up Coke Magic Hand
Speaker 1: and their commercials that say, you know the killed magic
Speaker 1: can that guy. If you open the coke and and
Speaker 1: something pops out, don't drink it because you won, but seriously,
Speaker 1: don't drink it. Did I mention not to drink it?
Speaker 1: So they genuinely had to take out ads saying this.
Speaker 1: That was bad enough, right, But then some people in
Speaker 1: the media started to think and went, Coke, why didn't
Speaker 1: you just put coke in the magic cans? You got
Speaker 1: a lot of coke. You're set up for coke and
Speaker 1: in it? Yeah, why chlorinated water. Coke released a response
Speaker 1: and they said, we didn't put coke in the magic
Speaker 1: cans because it would dissolve the prize Mecca. This million
Speaker 1: dollars rampaign done, million dollars. I love that one too. Heineken,
Speaker 1: So you guys are familiar with Heineken. Did you know
Speaker 1: they owned Strongbow Cider? Did you guys know that? Well?
Speaker 1: Strong Bow had a campaign where they wanted to honor
Speaker 1: the guy who founded the company and apparently found it
Speaker 1: in like the nineteenth centuries of Victorian dude. They could
Speaker 1: not find a picture of this man to save their lives.
Speaker 1: And you can't have a print ad campaign if you
Speaker 1: don't have a photo. What the heck are you gonna do?
Speaker 1: So they turned to a photo service like Getty Images
Speaker 1: or something like that, and they just randomly picked a
Speaker 1: great Victorian looking dude, most likely had the mustache, monocle,
Speaker 1: top hat, probably that kind of thing, and um, it
Speaker 1: would have worked in and just about any other situation.
Speaker 1: But they happened to pick the picture of a guy
Speaker 1: named Hugh Price Hughes. Yeah, he was a very famous
Speaker 1: Methodist minister, and he was actually famous for his work
Speaker 1: with recovering alcoholics. Out of all the people in the world,
Speaker 1: they picked an anti alcoholic campaigner for the face of
Speaker 1: strong Posts for their founder. All right, and finally before
Speaker 1: our Q and A, we're gonna finish with this because
Speaker 1: we we like to depress everybody at the our friend
Speaker 1: John Hodgment said, you know how to really go out
Speaker 1: with a bang, lift him up and drop him down
Speaker 1: at the end. So does anyone here remembered I spoke
Speaker 1: of Domino's pizza earlier. You remember the Noid Avoid the Nooid.
Speaker 1: You remember because it was successful for a while. The
Speaker 1: Noid the creepy uh bunny eared buck teeth thing in
Speaker 1: a onesie that represented annoyed. That's what it came from.
Speaker 1: That your pizza wasn't there. They created this fun character.
Speaker 1: It was neat and mean. Like clearly it was a
Speaker 1: huge hit. Because you guys still remember this. We remember
Speaker 1: the Noid and everything was going really great for the
Speaker 1: Noid and Dominoes in general. Everybody just talked about the
Speaker 1: noise around the water cooler, like husbands and wives with
Speaker 1: a pillow talk about the noise. Did you get that
Speaker 1: pizza real quick. Um. So everything was going very well.
Speaker 1: And then in our own Atlanta, Georgia, in January nine,
Speaker 1: a Domino's Pizza was stormed by a man wielding a
Speaker 1: three fifty seven magnum and he took the two employees
Speaker 1: working their hostage, and he engaged in a five hour
Speaker 1: standoff with police, and he very wisely ordered the two
Speaker 1: employees to make him pizzas the whole time, seriously. And
Speaker 1: he had a few other demands. He wanted a hundred
Speaker 1: thousand dollars sensible. He wanted to get away car with
Speaker 1: a full tank appeal sensible. He wanted a copy of
Speaker 1: The Widow's Son. It was a novel about freemasons he loved.
Speaker 1: That was his catcher in the rye, right, and it's
Speaker 1: it's a it's kind of a big giveaway, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he must have left his at home, right, I really
Speaker 1: need this. So he apparently wasn't paying attention because at
Speaker 1: one point the two employees were like, I think we
Speaker 1: can sneak out the back, and they did they left,
Speaker 1: and right when they did, he read The Widow, So
Speaker 1: I think he was He's like, this book is so good.
Speaker 1: And then the police were like swarm, swarm swarm. I
Speaker 1: don't think they say that, but they did swarms swarm, swarm,
Speaker 1: and it's a pretty good sign felt reference. Um, and
Speaker 1: this guy was taken peacefully. I think he fired around
Speaker 1: off or whatever, but he was taken, and he was
Speaker 1: taken before the court and he was sentenced to a
Speaker 1: term in a psychiatric facility. Why Why because his name
Speaker 1: was Kenneth Lamar, annoyed and chuck, I know, and he
Speaker 1: thought Dominoes, sorry, Domino's Pizza was specific eu tormenting him
Speaker 1: ad campaign because he was a paranoid getsprinic. Yeah, it's right, right,
Speaker 1: it gets gets so much for orse. So Domino's is
Speaker 1: facing a pr disaster. There's there was one headline the
Speaker 1: next day, Um, Domino's hostages couldn't avoid the noise this time.
Speaker 1: I know, those kiky newspaper writers, they thought they were
Speaker 1: so clever. So poor Mr Noid is like suffering in
Speaker 1: a mental facility in Georgia. And finally years later he's released.
Speaker 1: I think he moved to like Miami, and he couldn't
Speaker 1: shake this idea that Domino's had specifically targeted him with
Speaker 1: their avoid the Annoid campaign, and he committed suicide. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which is pretty perfect reaction, pretty awful, and Detroit they
Speaker 1: were like yeah, yeah, they were like, I guess you
Speaker 1: should have been born anoid. It's just fault. So it
Speaker 1: gets even worse. Actually, yeah, it gets worse than that,
Speaker 1: that's right. In two thousand eleven, just four short years ago,
Speaker 1: on the anniversary of Annoid, Domino's introduces a Facebook game
Speaker 1: called The Anid Super Pizza Shootout, and that is pr
Speaker 1: all right, thank you guys for coming out hanging out
Speaker 1: with us. Good nights, Chicago, thank you everybody. All awesome.
Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics, because
Speaker 1: it how stuff works. Dot com