July 21, 2020 • 27 mins
Nowadays, Edward Bernays remains a relatively obscure historical figure. His legacy, however, is thriving around the globe, and his techniques are found in everything from the food we eat to the things we believe. But who was this man? How did he get his start, and how does his work affect you today? Join Ben and Matt for this classic episode on the man who made bacon a breakfast food, tied smoking to the suffrage movement, and even used advertising to convince Americans to support a coup.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff they Don't Want You to Know. Today,
we're doing something a little bit different. We're going to
talk about one of our favorite episodes ever and one
of our first. Dare I say, gentlemen, that this is
a classic of the highest order. Don't call it a comeback.
(00:20):
It's literally been here for many years, to the point
where you can't even get it on Apple podcasts anymore.
So if you haven't listened to this before, this is
your opportunity to hear it now, maybe for the first
time ever. And if you have heard it before, hey,
why not brush up a little bit on your burnet's
because the man is a legend and influential in so
many things that we encounter in our everyday lives. But
(00:42):
without spoiling too much, we now take you, in a
time traveling fashion, back to two thousand and thirteen. Oh,
what a glorious year. Uh, it's too It's to the
very first episode, as we said, of Stuff they Don't
Want You to Know. The podcast, the audio podcast where
(01:02):
Noel Brown is on the ones and twos and Ben
and Matt are on Mike. Oh, let's see what they
have to say from UFOs two Ghosts and Government cover ups.
History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back
now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello, everyone,
(01:26):
welcome to the first episode ever of Stuff they Don't
Want you to Know, the Audio Podcast. My name is
Matt Frederick. I'm the editor and producer on this show,
and my name is Ben Bolan. I am I guess
I just right do some research now. Uh. And you're
the face man, you're the voice in the face. You're
also on camera. I'm one tenth of the face that
(01:49):
you are, sir, but I like that position. I'm one
tenth to tell it you are. Yeah, there we go,
so yes, Matt, as you said, this is our first
audio podcast. This is a new thing for us because
a lot of the other How Stuff Works podcasts started
out audio and they went video. Yeah, we're reversing that process,
(02:10):
and hopefully it's going to be a highly lucrative process.
We're reverse engineering lucrative in terms of rewarding no, no,
no money, all of the money. We're gonna make so
much money with this audio podcast. It's crazy. People would
laugh if they saw how much money we don't make. Exactly,
That's how I explained it to people. But so we
wanted to kick off these audio podcasts by uh doing
(02:35):
something that's kind of show notes, right with that be
a way to look at Yeah, this is kind of
getting you guys to see the the behind the scenes
of what we do every week on our show. Yeah,
and in some of these episodes will be talking about
previous episodes we've done in our original series. Um. I
guess in the future we might talk about some other things,
(02:56):
topical events, updates on mysterious death just to be a
bit somber for a moment, Matt, it's frightening how many
mysterious deaths there are. Uh oh, certainly? Yeah, wow, yeah
you really did? You really turned a corner there? Huh Sorry, Okay,
I've been I've been reading some stuff lately that will
come up in another episode. But my friend I digress. Um,
(03:22):
can I tell you a story? Absolutely? Okay, It's it's short, everybody,
So this the whole podcast won't be a monologue, all right. So,
once upon a time, Ben Bullen, the the younger type
version of me, was a huge sucker for advertisements. Now
when I grew up my parents for a while, for
(03:44):
a period, refused to get cable on principle. So and
I'm gonna date myself here. We had, you know, one
of those rabbit ear antenna fuzzy screen thing, just because
I guess they didn't want me to watch a bunch
of television. So as soon as I was around television
and uh, with cable and stuff like that, I went
nuts for commercials. You know. I would see commercials for toys.
(04:08):
Of course, every kid falls for those, and I would
go nuts and bananas over that. Let's see commercials for
stuff that a six year old was not reasonably wants,
like a truck, like an actual truck, like a pickup truck. Yeah,
and I would go, you know, I should learn to
drive so I can buy one of those. And I'm six,
and then, uh, an ambitious young man. And to be candid,
(04:30):
a lot of it stuff I didn't understand, you know,
a lot. I'm I'm fair looking back, I'm fairly certain
that I saw a tampon commercial and didn't know what
they were selling, but liked the music and thought, yeah,
I should find out what that is. And and even now,
even now, I'm still um. When I'm driving somewhere or
(04:53):
I'm walking by and I hear the radio, I am
that one person out to tend We'll hear you know,
a burger king ad or something. When was the last
time I had a whopper? Forgetting you? Yeah, forgetting that.
I've never actually eaten a whopper in my life. Really, Yeah,
it's true. Yes, dude, scouts on her, I might have
to all right, I'm gonna have to get into you.
(05:13):
I'm gonna have to talk to your friends and figure
out if that's a true story. Because the whopper man,
you've got to have a whopper before called the n
essay they can verify my story. Well, for me, it
was the NERF NERF commercials, super soakers, anything like laser
tag commercials. All that kind of stuff got me. I
was such a little non military kid that the fantasy
(05:35):
of having a gun that I can shoot no matter
if it shoots foam or water, that was my big fantasy.
And those man it's got me hook line and sinker
and so. End of the story is still pucker about advertising,
both of us. But I think we're very much more
aware of it than we were advanced. Uh. We we
have done some cool experiments. This is something that's a
(05:57):
great experiment for every listener to try pick it a
pick a day, like a week from now, and say,
from the moment I wake up, I'm going to keep
count of every advertisement I see or here. That's going
to be a full day. It's it's so difficult to
do so, it's like trying to count the uses of
the word the in a in a paragraph. But why
(06:20):
has advertising become so ubiquitous? Why has it become so pervasive?
Why were we living in an age where everything can
be for sale? Well, first of all capitalism. But there's
one very important gentleman who hasn't influenced pretty much everyone
(06:41):
who has worked in the advertising industry since the nineteen twenties,
I believe, and his name is Edward Burns. I should
have said that more on ominous. Well here just try
it again. Edward Berne's dumb change that the sound. I
still like it? Yeah it was, it was good. We'll
(07:03):
keep that one. But but yes, Edward Burne. This is
an historical figure that you and I examined in our
three part series on Edward Burnets, known as the father
of public relations, nephew of Sigmund Freud, wrote a book
called Propaganda, which is probably one of the most influential
(07:25):
obscure books in modern history, you know. Yeah, it influenced
a lot of people, including some rather nefarious people like
who was that guy, Joseph Gebel's. Yes, yes, he also
a member of the Nazi Party. Joseph Garribele's followed the
work of Edward Bernese and used it to help some
(07:47):
social engineering, some marketing to win over the German public
during the Nazi regime's reign. Yeah, but not just Nazis.
His book, the book Propaganda, Really it delved into public
relations like we're talking about, and really advertising and how
to kind of manipulate not kind of how to manipulate
(08:08):
people into believing a certain thing, but manipulating opinion. Right, Yeah,
And in our episode we talked about some excellent examples
of this. Let's see, let's just toss out some examples. Bacon.
He made bacon part of breakfast. He did that by
didn't he He sent out a letter to I guess
physicians and inquired about, well, should should a person eat
(08:31):
a light breakfast or a hearty breakfast? I mean again,
I'm distilling that and most of these doctors and most
of these physicians said, yes, a hearty breakfast, you should
definitely eat that, and they actually cited eggs and bacon. Yeah,
And the way the questions were framed in this letter,
it was um any doctor worth their stethoscope would have
(08:55):
chosen the option be the healthy breakfast over whatever option
A was. Maybe it was like shards of glass and Nichols,
I don't know. But but the way he framed it
was so clever that all of a sudden he had
a group of medical professionals saying that you should have
a hearty breakfast, and then they jumped from there to
(09:18):
say that bacon was part of a hearty breakfast. But
the whole reason he got this gig was because pork
manufacturing and pork livestock companies. Yeah, the beech Nut Packaging
Company specifically, Yes, the beech Nut Packaging Company had a
bunch of what we would call American bacon, right, you
know it's not the bacon it flies and the rest
(09:39):
of the world. They had a bunch of this stuff
and they couldn't sell it, and so they can contracted
Edward Burnet's to help them sell it. So instead of
going with advertisements, he created an opinion that he could
market and made it made it an appeal to authorities
by having the doctors say it. And that's far from
the only thing stunt. So this idea fascinates me greatly,
(10:04):
the idea that I'm not going to sell my product
by advertising it in a traditional way. I'm going to
I'm gonna go around that advertising avenue and I'm gonna
make you believe, I'm gonna almost incept an opinion inside
of you that then will make you want to purchase
my product. Yeah. Absolutely, and I agree with that because
(10:27):
it's one of the turning points I think in the
history of advertising now. Of course, Edward Berness, even though
it's called the father of pr was not the only
person to do this stuff, but he was by far
and away the most successful on top of his class.
Another another example that we talked about in the videos
(10:50):
was the Lucky Strike campaign, the cigarettes campaign, which you
might remember if you haven't seen our episode already, you
might remember it from the Madmen pilot where they talk
about lucky strikes and how it's toasted spoiler alert, I guess,
and just that you know it's a show that's really
all about advertising. Madmen is and they chose in their
(11:10):
pilot episode to look at Lucky Strikes and to me
that it makes a lot of sense when we're talking
about this guy who is again the father of pr
and advertising. Right, so Bernes's figures out how to sell
how to sell cigarettes. The Lucky Strikes company asked him
to make Lucky Strikes cigarettes more marketable to women, right.
(11:33):
And he looks into it. And one of the first
things he finds, if I recall this correctly, is he
got to change the color, and the green color he
didn't like. And then they said, and and the women,
uh that he was asking about this, they didn't like
the color either, not at all. It's so Lucky Strikes
comes back to him and they say, uh, it's too
(11:53):
much money for us to change the color, so make
it work. And then this is brilliant. Uh. He links
it women's suffrage, and he has fashion designers, again appealing
to experts, declare that this particular shade of green, not
any green, the Lucky Strikes green in particular is the
color of the season, and they're throwing green galas. It's
(12:17):
crazy to me, that kind of thinking is so outside
of my thinking that it's hard for me to even understand.
I just yea, you know that that kind of for me,
it's manipulation. That's what rings in my ears want to
hear that kind of thing. But it's so smart, man,
You've got to I've got to kind of envy the
ability to do that. It's inception. I love that, you say,
(12:38):
and sept because he really did. And then of course
fast forward. We don't want to just rehash the whole episode.
Please do watch it. If please do watch the series.
If you haven't watched it yet, you know we've We've
actually got a playlist on our YouTube channel. If you
go there you can watch all the episodes. Yeah, and
that's YouTube dot com slash conspiracy stuff. We often return
(12:59):
to the idea of Edward Bernese because the techniques, um,
the inception, as you said that, which I'm going to
use for the rest of the uh, the inception and
inceptive techniques there are still in use in the modern day. Um,
perhaps more so now than ever. What's the there's a
(13:20):
new stations like now more than ever, we should make
that our thing. It's just that's all we'll say on
the business card. Now more than ever. Stuff they don't
want you to know now more than ever. But the
so the idea what another example of how these ideas
(13:41):
can be used. Um, we know that psychologically, as individuals,
a human mind tends to seek consensus. A human mind
tends to seek some sort of affiliation in a tribal
group and some sort of place of hour within that
hierarchy or placed in the right side of history. So
(14:04):
of course, of course we're hardwired to want to agree
with someone who's a doctor because they seem like they
are of some tribe that has this knowledge, and we
would like to be favorably associated as individuals on a
primal level, exactly know, the one of the worst feelings
as feeling as though you're you're dumb, comparable to or
(14:24):
inferior to, especially mentally at least that's in my life personally. Um,
And so I can completely see why that would be
just a human thing. And this is kind of a
this kind of a brain hack or a psychological hack
to to circumvent people's usual critical thinking skills this way,
(14:45):
and we see it. We see it today so often
on the Internet. People will say, well, I uh saw
this study that told me that avocados are actually the
lucid dreams of watermelons, And you go, oh, okay, and
study study becomes this buzzword, this magic base that people
(15:06):
just tapping conversations um to say whatever without maybe looking
at the methodology, looking at other studies that may have
found similar or dissimilar results, And sadly, or I guess
distressingly enough, it's it seems even more common to have
(15:26):
those sorts of appeals. And what I've liked about this episode,
the third part of the episode that we that we
did was I I really enjoyed at the end. Usually,
you know, we just give the facts and we say
this is what someone believes, is what someone else believes,
maybe it could be true. Here's some stuff we're against it.
(15:46):
But in that in that third episode, we actually stopped
with kind of a cautionary note, right, and we warned
people two, be very careful when you hear someone just
citing a vague study without citing anything else against it.
(16:06):
You know, that's that's a huge point, and that's why
we've started putting in our episodes the if you ever
see the little black bar that comes up and it
says search, and then I'll put the keywords in there,
and if you type those keywords into a search engine,
it will get you exactly the source that we looked at.
And because we like this, we like to even say this,
we question ourselves because we're we're going online and we're
(16:29):
talking to people or reading books and we're getting information
as well as we can. But we want you, whoever
you are, to go and research this stuff as well,
so that you can really see the sources. And we
also know something that I think is increasingly important. Watch
out for appeals to emotion, you know. And uh, in
(16:52):
our research on techniques descended from the original Burnese stuff,
we found that the same techniques used to convince people
to buy cigarettes or to buy bacon can also be
used to convince people that a war is necessary or
just or even made for a completely fabricated reason. And
(17:17):
this um that we specifically refer to some episodes that
occurred in the ninety nineties, I believe. But also, you know,
it's it's very easy to incite the mob appeal when
you when you again appeal to something that theoretically and
(17:38):
on principle, most people would be against, you know. And
it's strange because often, uh, there is a contingent of
people in the United States who would say that the
United States government is guilty of this, however, not that
it makes it any better or any worse. This is
a common game that can trees and and governments and
(18:02):
even corporations play with customers and citizens and um, just
regular regular Joe's like Matt and Ben. So when you
hear a lot of insightful stuff and people are telling
very emotionally reasoned things and not really citing something that
(18:24):
is concrete, quantifiable, falsifiable, even then you have to take
it with a grain of sand or a grain of salt,
either will barrow of s well. Yeah, so to that point,
we this is one of the things we talked about,
and I think it was the third episode, the Hill
and Nolton Strategies, and there the whole Nurse Naria Nariah thing. Um, yeah,
(18:47):
that's exactly what Ben is talking about. And it was
a corporation that was paying someone allegedly ten million dollars
to make up a story that was so if you
were against if you were against that story, just like
you said, Ben, you're a terrible person. Yeah, And the
story really did pull at emotional heart strings. This uh
(19:09):
Nurse Naraya was speaking two was at the U n
I honestly don't know Okay, yeah, we've got it in
the episode. But in her speech, which was disseminated widely
across the Western world and the lead up to um
the Gulf War, this nurse was saying that Saddam Hussein
(19:34):
Iraqi forces were doing something um ruthless, right, they were
taking babies, they were killing babies by taking them out
of incubators. And it started off being hundreds and hundreds
and hundreds. Turns out that probably never ever happened. And
(19:55):
the quote unquote nurse was not a nurse. She was
the daughter of an ambassador, right, which is still we
still have to tack and allegedly on that. I mean,
she was that actual person was definitely the daughter of
the ambassador. We have to attach that allegedly tag on there,
just because there wasn't much fallout from this from this
(20:18):
crazy um you know, at the risk of sounding callous,
it's kind of a viral marketing campaign for a war.
It really was, and we see the same thing in
other countries. One of the great things to do, excuse me,
one of the stabilizing things to do. If you are
the head of a country and the people are unhappy,
(20:39):
that people are rebelling, maybe their starvation, inflation, quality of
life goes down. Is that you find some cause that
everybody can get behind, whether it's the persecution of some
other minority, whether it's the idea that there is an
external threat that we all need to band together against
um or you can always just throw around that great
(21:01):
word freedom and or a democracy. Oh I wanted to
talk about that. Yeah, uh, it gets me. It gets
me when people say when people can say, well, the
facts may the facts may not match exactly what I'm saying,
or the facts may not be on my side now,
But I know in my heart. I hate it when
people say they know in their here you know, maybe
(21:24):
I'm I know in my heart that the Whopper is
actually a much better burger than you would like to think.
Maybe I should like at this point, will the Whopper
even match the hype? Oh no, not at all. We
should point out we're not being paid to mention whoppers. Sorry,
we can bleep it out and or so it's just
like the and then we'll bleep it. It'll be redacted.
(21:45):
But then by this point in the show people wonder
what we were talking. Oh that is good, Well, Matt,
I wanted to before we get out of here. I
wanted to ask you a couple of questions about were
Burns If that's okay, Yeah, absolutely, all right. So do
you think that Edward Burns should have made these discoveries
(22:11):
or made these techniques? Should he have made them? Well,
if Edward Burns hadn't made these discoveries, I'm fairly certain
someone would have just from the way psychology was moving
at the time. It's it's a hard question because in
my head, it fuels this massive consumerism where there's a
(22:33):
lot less production, creative production, and much more consuming from
a public standpoint, Yeah, I've heard that. I've heard that
argument before. I don't know if advertising can be can
be linked to that specifically, because advertising, you know, predates companies.
One of my favorite early examples of advertising was I
(22:56):
believe I can't remember his ancient Greece the beer commercial
ancient room. No prostitutes used to have arrows on their
sandals in in these Yeah, in in ancient Greece. And
I'll figure out the specifics on this so that when
people saw them walk by, they would be able to
follow the arrows to the brothels. That is true advertising,
(23:22):
I think, is um a natural mode it's sort of
an antenuated or focus method of communication. The idea that
we can hack things, um, or we can hack somebody's
perception of it, has been approached from a scientific perspective
quite recently in the story of human history. But people
(23:44):
have always been trying to sell things. What I what
I think might be more dangerous to that point, and
I do agree that it is becoming an increasingly consumer
based society rather than producer. I think the phrase that's
been used by I don't want to quote anybody, but
the phrases the feeders, the feeders, Yeah, for just the
(24:06):
standard public. Uh, but you know that's fine, we can
get into that later. That's terrible, man. But yeah, I
see that idea. But I think what's happening more is
not so much based on advertising as it is the
near continual sources of stimulation. It's it's strange. Um. I
(24:27):
was talking to someone gosh years back when we first
kind of started the show, and one of the things
they said to me was that in the pre digital age,
the control of information was sort of a a control
of omission. So if, for instance, we had if we
(24:47):
were um part of the government agencies obsessively monitoring Martin
Luther King Jr. Then we would just prevent that information
by coming out, by never just said, dominating the documents,
and by never snitching on each other. But now in
a world where there is this constant simulation, this digital age, um,
(25:10):
it seems that disguising the truth has turned into inundation
rather than omissions. So instead of worrying about keeping one
thing out, just put out five fake things and see
what happens. So, I know that sounds ridiculous um talk.
I know we're getting a little bit ahead of ourselves,
(25:31):
but that's something that I think Bernese would do. And
I am not inherently against advertising. I think people need
to be aware of it. I think you're absolutely right
Ben being aware of just being a conscious consumer, because
that's what we all are. Just be conscious about the
advertising that's hitting you and know that it is seeping
(25:54):
in there somewhere, no matter whether you're watching it, listening
to it, or both. And speaking of watching and listening,
thank you so much for listening to our first ever
audio podcasts of Stuff that want you to to know we
appreciate your patience. Is work the kinks out speak of
watching you can go straight to YouTube dot com slash
(26:16):
conspiracy Stuff to check out our episode of Edward Burns.
And if you guys and gals out there are listening
and you feel ambitious, then we would love to hear
you do this experiment with us. Pick a day in
the future, give yourself some time, you know, don't be
(26:36):
drunk at four in the morning, and say you're gonna
do it tomorrow. Give yourself a week, and then say
one day out of out of this week, I'm going
to count every single piece of advertising I see from
the moment I wake up to the moment I go
to sleep. I'd be I'd be very interested in seeing
that number, and I'll do it too. Yeah, I'm gonna
(26:57):
do it as well. Great, so we're agreed, and you
and tell us about the number that you've found. You
can also give us suggestions for an upcoming show. You
can do all of this by hitting us up on
our social media. Yes, you can find us on Twitter,
we're at conspiracy Stuff. You can find us on Facebook,
We're also conspiracy Stuff there, or you can send us
(27:17):
an email, a good old fashion email to conspiracy at
Discovery dot com. From more on this topic, another unexplained phenomenon.
Visit test tube dot com slash conspiracy Stuff. You can
also get in touch on Twitter at the handle at
conspiracy Stuff. Stuff they Don't Want You to Know is
(27:44):
a production of I Heart Radio
Welcome to Stuff they Don't Want You to Know. Today,
we're doing something a little bit different. We're going to
talk about one of our favorite episodes ever and one
of our first. Dare I say, gentlemen, that this is
a classic of the highest order. Don't call it a comeback.
(00:20):
It's literally been here for many years, to the point
where you can't even get it on Apple podcasts anymore.
So if you haven't listened to this before, this is
your opportunity to hear it now, maybe for the first
time ever. And if you have heard it before, hey,
why not brush up a little bit on your burnet's
because the man is a legend and influential in so
many things that we encounter in our everyday lives. But
(00:42):
without spoiling too much, we now take you, in a
time traveling fashion, back to two thousand and thirteen. Oh,
what a glorious year. Uh, it's too It's to the
very first episode, as we said, of Stuff they Don't
Want You to Know. The podcast, the audio podcast where
(01:02):
Noel Brown is on the ones and twos and Ben
and Matt are on Mike. Oh, let's see what they
have to say from UFOs two Ghosts and Government cover ups.
History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back
now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello, everyone,
(01:26):
welcome to the first episode ever of Stuff they Don't
Want you to Know, the Audio Podcast. My name is
Matt Frederick. I'm the editor and producer on this show,
and my name is Ben Bolan. I am I guess
I just right do some research now. Uh. And you're
the face man, you're the voice in the face. You're
also on camera. I'm one tenth of the face that
(01:49):
you are, sir, but I like that position. I'm one
tenth to tell it you are. Yeah, there we go,
so yes, Matt, as you said, this is our first
audio podcast. This is a new thing for us because
a lot of the other How Stuff Works podcasts started
out audio and they went video. Yeah, we're reversing that process,
(02:10):
and hopefully it's going to be a highly lucrative process.
We're reverse engineering lucrative in terms of rewarding no, no,
no money, all of the money. We're gonna make so
much money with this audio podcast. It's crazy. People would
laugh if they saw how much money we don't make. Exactly,
That's how I explained it to people. But so we
wanted to kick off these audio podcasts by uh doing
(02:35):
something that's kind of show notes, right with that be
a way to look at Yeah, this is kind of
getting you guys to see the the behind the scenes
of what we do every week on our show. Yeah,
and in some of these episodes will be talking about
previous episodes we've done in our original series. Um. I
guess in the future we might talk about some other things,
(02:56):
topical events, updates on mysterious death just to be a
bit somber for a moment, Matt, it's frightening how many
mysterious deaths there are. Uh oh, certainly? Yeah, wow, yeah
you really did? You really turned a corner there? Huh Sorry, Okay,
I've been I've been reading some stuff lately that will
come up in another episode. But my friend I digress. Um,
(03:22):
can I tell you a story? Absolutely? Okay, It's it's short, everybody,
So this the whole podcast won't be a monologue, all right. So,
once upon a time, Ben Bullen, the the younger type
version of me, was a huge sucker for advertisements. Now
when I grew up my parents for a while, for
(03:44):
a period, refused to get cable on principle. So and
I'm gonna date myself here. We had, you know, one
of those rabbit ear antenna fuzzy screen thing, just because
I guess they didn't want me to watch a bunch
of television. So as soon as I was around television
and uh, with cable and stuff like that, I went
nuts for commercials. You know. I would see commercials for toys.
(04:08):
Of course, every kid falls for those, and I would
go nuts and bananas over that. Let's see commercials for
stuff that a six year old was not reasonably wants,
like a truck, like an actual truck, like a pickup truck. Yeah,
and I would go, you know, I should learn to
drive so I can buy one of those. And I'm six,
and then, uh, an ambitious young man. And to be candid,
(04:30):
a lot of it stuff I didn't understand, you know,
a lot. I'm I'm fair looking back, I'm fairly certain
that I saw a tampon commercial and didn't know what
they were selling, but liked the music and thought, yeah,
I should find out what that is. And and even now,
even now, I'm still um. When I'm driving somewhere or
(04:53):
I'm walking by and I hear the radio, I am
that one person out to tend We'll hear you know,
a burger king ad or something. When was the last
time I had a whopper? Forgetting you? Yeah, forgetting that.
I've never actually eaten a whopper in my life. Really, Yeah,
it's true. Yes, dude, scouts on her, I might have
to all right, I'm gonna have to get into you.
(05:13):
I'm gonna have to talk to your friends and figure
out if that's a true story. Because the whopper man,
you've got to have a whopper before called the n
essay they can verify my story. Well, for me, it
was the NERF NERF commercials, super soakers, anything like laser
tag commercials. All that kind of stuff got me. I
was such a little non military kid that the fantasy
(05:35):
of having a gun that I can shoot no matter
if it shoots foam or water, that was my big fantasy.
And those man it's got me hook line and sinker
and so. End of the story is still pucker about advertising,
both of us. But I think we're very much more
aware of it than we were advanced. Uh. We we
have done some cool experiments. This is something that's a
(05:57):
great experiment for every listener to try pick it a
pick a day, like a week from now, and say,
from the moment I wake up, I'm going to keep
count of every advertisement I see or here. That's going
to be a full day. It's it's so difficult to
do so, it's like trying to count the uses of
the word the in a in a paragraph. But why
(06:20):
has advertising become so ubiquitous? Why has it become so pervasive?
Why were we living in an age where everything can
be for sale? Well, first of all capitalism. But there's
one very important gentleman who hasn't influenced pretty much everyone
(06:41):
who has worked in the advertising industry since the nineteen twenties,
I believe, and his name is Edward Burns. I should
have said that more on ominous. Well here just try
it again. Edward Berne's dumb change that the sound. I
still like it? Yeah it was, it was good. We'll
(07:03):
keep that one. But but yes, Edward Burne. This is
an historical figure that you and I examined in our
three part series on Edward Burnets, known as the father
of public relations, nephew of Sigmund Freud, wrote a book
called Propaganda, which is probably one of the most influential
(07:25):
obscure books in modern history, you know. Yeah, it influenced
a lot of people, including some rather nefarious people like
who was that guy, Joseph Gebel's. Yes, yes, he also
a member of the Nazi Party. Joseph Garribele's followed the
work of Edward Bernese and used it to help some
(07:47):
social engineering, some marketing to win over the German public
during the Nazi regime's reign. Yeah, but not just Nazis.
His book, the book Propaganda, Really it delved into public
relations like we're talking about, and really advertising and how
to kind of manipulate not kind of how to manipulate
(08:08):
people into believing a certain thing, but manipulating opinion. Right, Yeah,
And in our episode we talked about some excellent examples
of this. Let's see, let's just toss out some examples. Bacon.
He made bacon part of breakfast. He did that by
didn't he He sent out a letter to I guess
physicians and inquired about, well, should should a person eat
(08:31):
a light breakfast or a hearty breakfast? I mean again,
I'm distilling that and most of these doctors and most
of these physicians said, yes, a hearty breakfast, you should
definitely eat that, and they actually cited eggs and bacon. Yeah,
And the way the questions were framed in this letter,
it was um any doctor worth their stethoscope would have
(08:55):
chosen the option be the healthy breakfast over whatever option
A was. Maybe it was like shards of glass and Nichols,
I don't know. But but the way he framed it
was so clever that all of a sudden he had
a group of medical professionals saying that you should have
a hearty breakfast, and then they jumped from there to
(09:18):
say that bacon was part of a hearty breakfast. But
the whole reason he got this gig was because pork
manufacturing and pork livestock companies. Yeah, the beech Nut Packaging
Company specifically, Yes, the beech Nut Packaging Company had a
bunch of what we would call American bacon, right, you
know it's not the bacon it flies and the rest
(09:39):
of the world. They had a bunch of this stuff
and they couldn't sell it, and so they can contracted
Edward Burnet's to help them sell it. So instead of
going with advertisements, he created an opinion that he could
market and made it made it an appeal to authorities
by having the doctors say it. And that's far from
the only thing stunt. So this idea fascinates me greatly,
(10:04):
the idea that I'm not going to sell my product
by advertising it in a traditional way. I'm going to
I'm gonna go around that advertising avenue and I'm gonna
make you believe, I'm gonna almost incept an opinion inside
of you that then will make you want to purchase
my product. Yeah. Absolutely, and I agree with that because
(10:27):
it's one of the turning points I think in the
history of advertising now. Of course, Edward Berness, even though
it's called the father of pr was not the only
person to do this stuff, but he was by far
and away the most successful on top of his class.
Another another example that we talked about in the videos
(10:50):
was the Lucky Strike campaign, the cigarettes campaign, which you
might remember if you haven't seen our episode already, you
might remember it from the Madmen pilot where they talk
about lucky strikes and how it's toasted spoiler alert, I guess,
and just that you know it's a show that's really
all about advertising. Madmen is and they chose in their
(11:10):
pilot episode to look at Lucky Strikes and to me
that it makes a lot of sense when we're talking
about this guy who is again the father of pr
and advertising. Right, so Bernes's figures out how to sell
how to sell cigarettes. The Lucky Strikes company asked him
to make Lucky Strikes cigarettes more marketable to women, right.
(11:33):
And he looks into it. And one of the first
things he finds, if I recall this correctly, is he
got to change the color, and the green color he
didn't like. And then they said, and and the women,
uh that he was asking about this, they didn't like
the color either, not at all. It's so Lucky Strikes
comes back to him and they say, uh, it's too
(11:53):
much money for us to change the color, so make
it work. And then this is brilliant. Uh. He links
it women's suffrage, and he has fashion designers, again appealing
to experts, declare that this particular shade of green, not
any green, the Lucky Strikes green in particular is the
color of the season, and they're throwing green galas. It's
(12:17):
crazy to me, that kind of thinking is so outside
of my thinking that it's hard for me to even understand.
I just yea, you know that that kind of for me,
it's manipulation. That's what rings in my ears want to
hear that kind of thing. But it's so smart, man,
You've got to I've got to kind of envy the
ability to do that. It's inception. I love that, you say,
(12:38):
and sept because he really did. And then of course
fast forward. We don't want to just rehash the whole episode.
Please do watch it. If please do watch the series.
If you haven't watched it yet, you know we've We've
actually got a playlist on our YouTube channel. If you
go there you can watch all the episodes. Yeah, and
that's YouTube dot com slash conspiracy stuff. We often return
(12:59):
to the idea of Edward Bernese because the techniques, um,
the inception, as you said that, which I'm going to
use for the rest of the uh, the inception and
inceptive techniques there are still in use in the modern day. Um,
perhaps more so now than ever. What's the there's a
(13:20):
new stations like now more than ever, we should make
that our thing. It's just that's all we'll say on
the business card. Now more than ever. Stuff they don't
want you to know now more than ever. But the
so the idea what another example of how these ideas
(13:41):
can be used. Um, we know that psychologically, as individuals,
a human mind tends to seek consensus. A human mind
tends to seek some sort of affiliation in a tribal
group and some sort of place of hour within that
hierarchy or placed in the right side of history. So
(14:04):
of course, of course we're hardwired to want to agree
with someone who's a doctor because they seem like they
are of some tribe that has this knowledge, and we
would like to be favorably associated as individuals on a
primal level, exactly know, the one of the worst feelings
as feeling as though you're you're dumb, comparable to or
(14:24):
inferior to, especially mentally at least that's in my life personally. Um,
And so I can completely see why that would be
just a human thing. And this is kind of a
this kind of a brain hack or a psychological hack
to to circumvent people's usual critical thinking skills this way,
(14:45):
and we see it. We see it today so often
on the Internet. People will say, well, I uh saw
this study that told me that avocados are actually the
lucid dreams of watermelons, And you go, oh, okay, and
study study becomes this buzzword, this magic base that people
(15:06):
just tapping conversations um to say whatever without maybe looking
at the methodology, looking at other studies that may have
found similar or dissimilar results, And sadly, or I guess
distressingly enough, it's it seems even more common to have
(15:26):
those sorts of appeals. And what I've liked about this episode,
the third part of the episode that we that we
did was I I really enjoyed at the end. Usually,
you know, we just give the facts and we say
this is what someone believes, is what someone else believes,
maybe it could be true. Here's some stuff we're against it.
(15:46):
But in that in that third episode, we actually stopped
with kind of a cautionary note, right, and we warned
people two, be very careful when you hear someone just
citing a vague study without citing anything else against it.
(16:06):
You know, that's that's a huge point, and that's why
we've started putting in our episodes the if you ever
see the little black bar that comes up and it
says search, and then I'll put the keywords in there,
and if you type those keywords into a search engine,
it will get you exactly the source that we looked at.
And because we like this, we like to even say this,
we question ourselves because we're we're going online and we're
(16:29):
talking to people or reading books and we're getting information
as well as we can. But we want you, whoever
you are, to go and research this stuff as well,
so that you can really see the sources. And we
also know something that I think is increasingly important. Watch
out for appeals to emotion, you know. And uh, in
(16:52):
our research on techniques descended from the original Burnese stuff,
we found that the same techniques used to convince people
to buy cigarettes or to buy bacon can also be
used to convince people that a war is necessary or
just or even made for a completely fabricated reason. And
(17:17):
this um that we specifically refer to some episodes that
occurred in the ninety nineties, I believe. But also, you know,
it's it's very easy to incite the mob appeal when
you when you again appeal to something that theoretically and
(17:38):
on principle, most people would be against, you know. And
it's strange because often, uh, there is a contingent of
people in the United States who would say that the
United States government is guilty of this, however, not that
it makes it any better or any worse. This is
a common game that can trees and and governments and
(18:02):
even corporations play with customers and citizens and um, just
regular regular Joe's like Matt and Ben. So when you
hear a lot of insightful stuff and people are telling
very emotionally reasoned things and not really citing something that
(18:24):
is concrete, quantifiable, falsifiable, even then you have to take
it with a grain of sand or a grain of salt,
either will barrow of s well. Yeah, so to that point,
we this is one of the things we talked about,
and I think it was the third episode, the Hill
and Nolton Strategies, and there the whole Nurse Naria Nariah thing. Um, yeah,
(18:47):
that's exactly what Ben is talking about. And it was
a corporation that was paying someone allegedly ten million dollars
to make up a story that was so if you
were against if you were against that story, just like
you said, Ben, you're a terrible person. Yeah, And the
story really did pull at emotional heart strings. This uh
(19:09):
Nurse Naraya was speaking two was at the U n
I honestly don't know Okay, yeah, we've got it in
the episode. But in her speech, which was disseminated widely
across the Western world and the lead up to um
the Gulf War, this nurse was saying that Saddam Hussein
(19:34):
Iraqi forces were doing something um ruthless, right, they were
taking babies, they were killing babies by taking them out
of incubators. And it started off being hundreds and hundreds
and hundreds. Turns out that probably never ever happened. And
(19:55):
the quote unquote nurse was not a nurse. She was
the daughter of an ambassador, right, which is still we
still have to tack and allegedly on that. I mean,
she was that actual person was definitely the daughter of
the ambassador. We have to attach that allegedly tag on there,
just because there wasn't much fallout from this from this
(20:18):
crazy um you know, at the risk of sounding callous,
it's kind of a viral marketing campaign for a war.
It really was, and we see the same thing in
other countries. One of the great things to do, excuse me,
one of the stabilizing things to do. If you are
the head of a country and the people are unhappy,
(20:39):
that people are rebelling, maybe their starvation, inflation, quality of
life goes down. Is that you find some cause that
everybody can get behind, whether it's the persecution of some
other minority, whether it's the idea that there is an
external threat that we all need to band together against
um or you can always just throw around that great
(21:01):
word freedom and or a democracy. Oh I wanted to
talk about that. Yeah, uh, it gets me. It gets
me when people say when people can say, well, the
facts may the facts may not match exactly what I'm saying,
or the facts may not be on my side now,
But I know in my heart. I hate it when
people say they know in their here you know, maybe
(21:24):
I'm I know in my heart that the Whopper is
actually a much better burger than you would like to think.
Maybe I should like at this point, will the Whopper
even match the hype? Oh no, not at all. We
should point out we're not being paid to mention whoppers. Sorry,
we can bleep it out and or so it's just
like the and then we'll bleep it. It'll be redacted.
(21:45):
But then by this point in the show people wonder
what we were talking. Oh that is good, Well, Matt,
I wanted to before we get out of here. I
wanted to ask you a couple of questions about were
Burns If that's okay, Yeah, absolutely, all right. So do
you think that Edward Burns should have made these discoveries
(22:11):
or made these techniques? Should he have made them? Well,
if Edward Burns hadn't made these discoveries, I'm fairly certain
someone would have just from the way psychology was moving
at the time. It's it's a hard question because in
my head, it fuels this massive consumerism where there's a
(22:33):
lot less production, creative production, and much more consuming from
a public standpoint, Yeah, I've heard that. I've heard that
argument before. I don't know if advertising can be can
be linked to that specifically, because advertising, you know, predates companies.
One of my favorite early examples of advertising was I
(22:56):
believe I can't remember his ancient Greece the beer commercial
ancient room. No prostitutes used to have arrows on their
sandals in in these Yeah, in in ancient Greece. And
I'll figure out the specifics on this so that when
people saw them walk by, they would be able to
follow the arrows to the brothels. That is true advertising,
(23:22):
I think, is um a natural mode it's sort of
an antenuated or focus method of communication. The idea that
we can hack things, um, or we can hack somebody's
perception of it, has been approached from a scientific perspective
quite recently in the story of human history. But people
(23:44):
have always been trying to sell things. What I what
I think might be more dangerous to that point, and
I do agree that it is becoming an increasingly consumer
based society rather than producer. I think the phrase that's
been used by I don't want to quote anybody, but
the phrases the feeders, the feeders, Yeah, for just the
(24:06):
standard public. Uh, but you know that's fine, we can
get into that later. That's terrible, man. But yeah, I
see that idea. But I think what's happening more is
not so much based on advertising as it is the
near continual sources of stimulation. It's it's strange. Um. I
(24:27):
was talking to someone gosh years back when we first
kind of started the show, and one of the things
they said to me was that in the pre digital age,
the control of information was sort of a a control
of omission. So if, for instance, we had if we
(24:47):
were um part of the government agencies obsessively monitoring Martin
Luther King Jr. Then we would just prevent that information
by coming out, by never just said, dominating the documents,
and by never snitching on each other. But now in
a world where there is this constant simulation, this digital age, um,
(25:10):
it seems that disguising the truth has turned into inundation
rather than omissions. So instead of worrying about keeping one
thing out, just put out five fake things and see
what happens. So, I know that sounds ridiculous um talk.
I know we're getting a little bit ahead of ourselves,
(25:31):
but that's something that I think Bernese would do. And
I am not inherently against advertising. I think people need
to be aware of it. I think you're absolutely right
Ben being aware of just being a conscious consumer, because
that's what we all are. Just be conscious about the
advertising that's hitting you and know that it is seeping
(25:54):
in there somewhere, no matter whether you're watching it, listening
to it, or both. And speaking of watching and listening,
thank you so much for listening to our first ever
audio podcasts of Stuff that want you to to know we
appreciate your patience. Is work the kinks out speak of
watching you can go straight to YouTube dot com slash
(26:16):
conspiracy Stuff to check out our episode of Edward Burns.
And if you guys and gals out there are listening
and you feel ambitious, then we would love to hear
you do this experiment with us. Pick a day in
the future, give yourself some time, you know, don't be
(26:36):
drunk at four in the morning, and say you're gonna
do it tomorrow. Give yourself a week, and then say
one day out of out of this week, I'm going
to count every single piece of advertising I see from
the moment I wake up to the moment I go
to sleep. I'd be I'd be very interested in seeing
that number, and I'll do it too. Yeah, I'm gonna
(26:57):
do it as well. Great, so we're agreed, and you
and tell us about the number that you've found. You
can also give us suggestions for an upcoming show. You
can do all of this by hitting us up on
our social media. Yes, you can find us on Twitter,
we're at conspiracy Stuff. You can find us on Facebook,
We're also conspiracy Stuff there, or you can send us
(27:17):
an email, a good old fashion email to conspiracy at
Discovery dot com. From more on this topic, another unexplained phenomenon.
Visit test tube dot com slash conspiracy Stuff. You can
also get in touch on Twitter at the handle at
conspiracy Stuff. Stuff they Don't Want You to Know is
(27:44):
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