Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Edward Bernays: The Founding Father of Lies

Episode Date: July 25, 2019

In part two, Robert is joined again by Jamie Loftus to continue discussing Edward Bernays, a pioneer in public relations, propaganda and lying. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's eating my bags of dicks? I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards, the show where I talk about terrible people and try new intros. This one was inspired by something Sophie said minutes before I started this episode. When Jamie Loftus expressed a concern that someone would hear her chewing and would attack her for it on the internet. And Sophie said that person could eat a bag of dicks, which is why the show opened that way.

I like the context. Robert, you're so good at providing historical context for everything, including things that just happened. It's necessary. Everyone needs to understand why I say the things that I say and why I open this show with what's eating my bags of dicks. I understand why people are bothered by an occasional eating sound on mic, but I encourage everyone to remember that this is entertainment that is free. If you don't like it, you can simply go pay for something. Or eat a bag of dicks, according to Sophie. Or eat a bag of dicks. Eat a bag of dicks, and then other people will hear you chewing. I am doing my best, though. I do have a lot of sympathy for people who, for whatever reason, can't stand the sound of other people chewing, because it bugs me sometimes with certain people. I can't stand the sound of other people eating cereal. It drives me fucking nuts.

Other foods I don't have an issue with, but cereal is not something you can control, and so I don't judge people for having issues with it. I'm sympathetic to the flight, but it is an occasional part of life. It is an occasional part of life. People eat food, and that's just the world in which we live. And one day, robots will do all of our eating for us, but that day is not today. No, no. Let's start talking about Eddie Bernays again. So at the start of our last episode, I made the case that Edward Bernays deserves to be considered one of America's founding fathers. He invented the tactics of publicity stunts and PR Flaks masquerading as journalists that so dominate our national discourse today. You can look at that Vogue article about Osma al-Assad, which we discussed in the Bashar al-Assad episode.

It's just one of many descendants of Eddie Bernays' tactics. He got women smoking, he helped make thin be Vogue, he invented faux socially conscious ad tactics that cloak capitalism and robes of charity. And perhaps more than anything else, he invented bacon as a staple of the American breakfast. Wow. Yes, yes. I don't know. What do you call the kind of person who will not shut up about bacon besides obnoxious? Baconators. Every time, because I love bacon.

That's great. Who doesn't love bacon? Even if you think it's unethical to eat, you agree that it smells and tastes incredible. I love bacon, but I dislike when people, I feel like it is a talking point for MRAs. Like anytime an MRA comes up, they're like, oh, like, Jamie, mom, just suck. She doesn't even like, like, beer babes and bacon. Like, I've been, people have invoked the three B's at me before. There's just, it is a weird talking point, and I would like to hold Edward Bernays personally responsible for it. Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things where, like, the story of how bacon became what it is right now, which is, like, this internet famous, like, everybody does these, oh, look at this thing that's made, I made a burger patty entirely out of woven bacon or whatever. Like, all of these, like bacon.

Yeah, yeah, like, that's a tactic to get people, because people were eating less bacon, so they were like, how do we make bacon cool? It was weirdly, like, incorporated into, like, the quote-unquote, like, random culture of the mid-2000s. I feel like everyone would- Because it's kind of a funny word, yeah. Everyone with, like, an invader-zim sleeve of tattoos talks about bacon too much. I'm willing to make that generalization. And that's, if you're, like, a company that produces a product and you can have it be that kind of popular where, like, people are making random internet jokes just because the word bacon is funny. And then it, you know, and then they eat more bacon, because, like, it's one of those things.

It works, because as I was researching how Eddie Bernays made bacon go viral in America, I craved bacon, and I bought a whole fucking pile of bacon and ate it, because I desperately wanted to eat bacon after reading everything that, like, had been- You see a bunch of, and it's the same thing, like, you see a bunch of bacon memes on Twitter, and it's like, these are dumb, and, like, I understand how stupid they are, but bacon is delicious, and now I'm going to go eat some. It does help when the product is fun to consume. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it really does. Now, in the mid-1920s, Beechnut Packing Company, who was one of America's major bacon producers, had noticed their sales were starting to plummet. This may have had something to do with the thinness craze that Eddie Bernays had actually helped to spark.

Whatever the cause, Americans were eating lighter breakfasts, and going without bacon more mornings than not. So, Beechnut Packing Company hired Bernays to turn shit around. Now, Jamie, the average, standard, Adman move might have been to attack the competition and try to steal market share from other bacon companies. But Bernays knew there was no point in doing that. Beechnut stood to make way more money by just changing America's breakfast habits to include too much bacon. He instituted this change the same way he got America to smoke, by finding doctors and bribing them to lie to the country. Going to quote from an Inc.com article here. Bernays contacted a doctor he knew, and he also had substantial financial ties to his agency, and commissioned a study on the health effects of bacon.

When the physician came back with was that bacon was, in fact, the perfect breakfast food, and that it replaces the energy you lose during sleep. I fucking, I love 20s, like, bad medical advice reasoning. Cigarettes fill your cue zone. Bacon replaces your sleep energy. Just like inventing things that don't actually exist. Well, yeah, of course you're going to have less energy after sleeping, so you need bacon. Sleeping is exhausting. That also contradicts the very concept of sleep. Yeah, it's amazing. It's incredible.

Once assured of these results, Bernays asked the doctor to communicate his findings to the medical community, which he did by distributing them to a list of 5,000 MDs across the country. Within no time, doctors from coast to coast were recommending that their patients eat bacon for breakfast, and the eating habits of a nation were transformed. So, there we go. Thanks, Eddie. Honestly, I mean, that is, I think, one of the more positive things that he did for the world. I mean, it's never good to lie about something being healthy that's not healthy, but that certainly wasn't his idea. What? Yes, it was. His idea to say that a healthy, I feel like that's been happening since before Edward Bernays, like, lying about something being healthy? No, I mean, not just lying about something being healthy, finding a doctor to cook up a fake study about something being healthy to make that go viral so that people would start eating all of the bacon in the world.

Right. Like, you can tie so much of, like, our modern health bullshit to Edward Bernays getting a doctor to be like, bacon replenishes your energy. And now it's like, it's come down to be like, no, kale juice is like, you know, got to fight cancer and stuff, but at all, it's descended from the same tactic that he pioneered that shit. Like, Dr. Oz wouldn't be possible without Edward Bernays. Yeah, because before, like, yeah, you'd have lies where people would be like, this morphine cough syrup is good for your kid. But after medicine started to really become a thing and, like, antibiotics were real and, like, it was clear that, like, doctors were more legitimate than they'd been in the old saw bones days. Right. Bernays was the first guy to be like, okay, well, I've got to kick this up a notch. I can't just lie about something being healthy. I got to bribe doctors to lie about something being healthy.

And that's how we're going to fucking get this shit on the road. And it worked. And it worked. Yeah. I'm not too mad about it. It's a bad practice, but I like bacon at breakfast. So do I. It's delicious. And he was objectively right that it's a fantastic breakfast food. Right. Like, I'd be remiss if I didn't talk a little bit about the health consequences of all of this bacon consumption on the American people.

So I found an article. Is it not good for you, Robert? Yeah. Oh, no. I found an article on The Guardian about an announcement made by the World Health Organization based on the conclusions of 22 cancer experts in 10 countries reviewing more than 400 studies on the health impact of processed meats like bacon. Quote, the WHO advised that consuming 50 grams of processed meat a day equivalent to just a couple rashes of bacon or one hot dog would raise the risk of getting bowel cancer by 18% over a lifetime. Eating larger amounts raises your risk more. Learning that your own risk of cancers increased from something like 5% to something like 6% may not be frightening enough to put you off bacon sandwiches forever.

But learning that consumption of processed meat causes an additional 34,000 worldwide cancer deaths a year is much more chilling. Wow. If we're calculating the death toll of Eddie Bernays on top of that 200 million dead cigarette ladies, we got another 34,000 a year from bacon. From the bacon edge, Lord. Wow. Wow. That's brutal. Okay.

That is brutal. Now, I'm a fair man, Jamie. Like with tobacco, I don't think we can blame Bernays for purposefully harming here because back in the 20s, whiskey was still medicine and while he knew that his medical expert was a paid lying shill to get people to eat more bacon, he did not know that bacon was going to give our grandparents bowel cancer. So you can blame him somewhat for that because he knew he was lying for money, but it's not like with cigarettes where he knew he was getting people to give themselves cancer. He had, yeah, like where he had the research and had a counterargument prepared. Yeah. Okay. I mean, I'm almost like willing to defend him for this.

So just like, yeah, it's not good to have like a snake oil doctor cop for your product, but if the product ain't delicious. Damn, if it isn't good. Yeah. You know. Now, over the course of the roaring 20s, Bernays gradually refined his strategy. Create newsworthy stories by any means necessary and use that to generate demand for the product he was representing. He eventually turned it into something like a science. By 1931, Bernays was raking in more than $60,000 a year in profits, which equates to more than $900,000 a year in modern dollars.

By 1935, he was earning five times that much. But Edward Bernays was not just content being good at his job and making money. He wanted to be seen as an intellectual titan, a serious scholar of mass consciousness. So he started writing books. Propaganda in 1928, which was about, well, you know, propaganda. Yeah. This quote from the book is telling about how Bernays' ideology developed. Quote,

He writes this considering himself a good guy, which is amazing because like, this is almost exactly what Alex Jones believes about the world. He just thinks it's a different group of people. And Bernays is like, no, this is what we're doing. It is so funny, like how books of this era that it's just like, you sound like a villain. But he is the good guy of the time. He sees himself as the good guy for sure. And Bernays considered himself a liberal, but he was also a very elitist liberal.

So not a populist, not a socialist, certainly. He was one of those people who feared and reviled the masses. Much of his work and the cynicism behind it came from his strongly held belief that the masses were fundamentally dumb and dangerous. They had to be led and molded by men like him who could channel their unconscious desires in productive, or at least profitable, directions. Cool. So not an ego issue with him at all. Not at all. No, not an ego issue thinking that he knows what's good for the world better than the people of the world.

Not at all. Everyone is trash but me, and I'm going to kill them with cigarettes. Exactly. Eddie Bernays. Eddie Bernays. That's a fucking epitaph. Someone find his gravestone and carve that in there. Everyone is trash but me, so I'm going to get them hooked on cigarettes.

Amazing. In 1933, yeah, sorry. Who's the jewel equivalent of Eddie Bernays today? I'm just one. I mean, he's out. Oh, the guy who runs jewel, maybe? Yeah. Who runs jewel?

All right. I'm going to investigate. Anyways, continue. In 1933, he published what would become his most influential work, crystallizing public opinion. His focus in this book was on what he called the engineering of consent. A phrase as horrifying as it is. Bad does not sound bad. Yeah.

It sounds horrible, right? Like, that's bad. Oh, that sounds like some Tucker Max shit. Yeah, that sounds like a little Tucker Maxie. Yeah. God, okay. What is that? What does he say?

The goal of engineering consent, he says, is to provide leaders with the ability to, quote, control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it. Oh, like consent. Like, yeah, yeah. I just have to remind everyone at no point did Bernays consider himself a bad guy. He's saying this shit and he thinks like, but I'm in the right here. Well, it's like, can you hear this stuff? It's no wonder that however many years in the future, his daughter's like, no, he wasn't

that great. Like, he was, he was kind of a piece of shit. Yeah. Good on her. His daughter seemed kind of consistent about that. Yeah. You don't use the phrase piece of shit, but they're very critical. Well, the fact that he's able to be like, I'm a feminist.

I did kill like a million ladies, but I killed all of the women who were alive in my day. Other than that, I was very progressive. Yeah. Yeah. Now, obviously, while Bernays considered himself a good guy, he was very popular among bad guys. And starting in the 1920s, he accrued a new and increasingly influential fan, a fellow you might have heard about by the name of Joseph Goebbels. Now, yeah, there we go.

Jay Goebbels. There it is. Okay. Even though Bernays himself was Jewish, Goebbels loved him. He kept a copy of crystallizing public opinion in a place of honor in his office and utilized all of Bernays' well-worn techniques to create a cult of personality around Adolf Hitler. According to an article on Bernays in The Conversation, quote, Bernays learned that the Nazis were using his work in 1933 from a foreign correspondent for Hearst newspapers.

He later recounted in his 1965 autobiography, they were using my books as the basis for an active campaign against the Jews of Germany. This shocked me, but I knew that any human activity could be used for social purposes or misused for antisocial ones. This observation, yeah. What's that, Jamie? The use of the phrase antisocial purposes to describe the Holocaust is very diplomatic. It's also interesting because it's exactly the terminology Nazis used.

They called people like homosexuals, people like trans folks, and Jewish people themselves asocial, that was one of the terms they used to talk about the people who they later exterminated. Interesting to me. Now, this observation led Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter to warn Franklin Roosevelt against allowing Bernays to play a leadership role in World War II, describing him and his colleagues as professional poisoners of the public mind, exploiters of foolishness, fanaticism, and self-interest, which is very true. Yeah, that's a lot more direct.

Yeah, which is why Bernays does not get to have as much fun in World War II as he had in World War I, so real tragedy there. Now, it's shocking to me that Bernays was surprised to see his tactics used for evil. He had not confined himself to the political realm. In 1924, he'd helped popularize President Calvin Coolidge by creating the nonpartisan committee for Calvin Coolidge, and basically hiring famous people to come to the White House and chill out with the president. Coolidge had a reputation for being cold and utterly ahumorous, so Bernays made sure there

were headlines about Al Jolson, the most popular comedian of the day, making him laugh. Three weeks after this article ran, Coolidge won reelection. So he made Coolidge seem cool. Wow. Man, it's kind of horrible that sometimes when I hear news from this era, I'm like, well, maybe people just shouldn't have been so fucking stupid. It is, though, it's the same thing as Donald Trump showing up on Jimmy Kimmel's show, or not Jimmy Kimmel, what's his fucking name?

Jimmy Fallon, the evil one. Jimmy Fallon's show and having his hair tousled. That's true. It's the same thing. It's like, this guy has a bad reputation, put him with a famous popular comedian, and that'll make him look nice. But most people, yeah, that'll make him seem at least human. Yeah, exactly.

It's exactly what worked on Coolidge, and it worked with Donald Trump. You're right. Life is hell. Yeah, life is hell. Brené has also worked with Herbert Hoover. He advised the president's administration as it fought to sell the nation on Hoover's disastrously incompetent policies aimed at mitigating the Great Depression. Brené's influence on Hoover is obvious in this line from a speech Hoover gave to a group

of advertising executives. You have taken over the job of creating desire and have transformed people into constantly moving happiness machines. Machines which have become the key to economic progress. Constantly moving it. How do you not know you're evil if you're calling people happiness machines? Constantly moving happiness machines sounds like a shitty REM song. No, it sounds like a great REM album.

1997's constantly moving happiness machines. Yeah, that is basically an REM album right there. It was a shiny happy people. Yeah, sounds just weird and arrogant enough to be an REM album. Constantly moving happiness machines. That is so uncanny valley. It's fucking wild. Yeah, fucking Herbert Hoover says that the guy who sees the Great Depression and is like,

clearly this solution to this is more capitalism. We just didn't go far enough. Yeah, it was a commitment issue. It was fully commitment issue. Yeah, it was a commitment issue. Yeah. All right. Yeah.

So this is a dissadvised Herbert Hoover's campaign and its attempt to defeat the rise of Democratic candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt. According to the father of spin, quote, first he would enlist his cadre of disinterested experts from business, labor and academia. Only this time he was out to win over the entire nation, which meant signing up as many as 25,000 group leaders to his nonpartisan fact finding committee for Hoover. They would get out the word that the economy was about to turn around and they would help puncture the inferior personality of Roosevelt. Another is that the Democratic candidate was not the progressive people thought he was and that he has been subject to Tammany and political Jabari. Dividing the opposition was the key to conquering it, Bernays believed. In this case, that meant persuading the 15 million Americans who had voted four years before for Democrat Alfred Smith to switch to Hoover, write in Smith's name or simply stay home on Election Day.

One publicity campaign would spotlight leading Democrats who thought it had been a mistake to nominate Roosevelt instead of Smith. Another would show Hoover to be a courageous humane leader who brought the nation peace if not prosperity. Bernays also made clear as he had in his corporate campaigns that the best way to win over the public was by appealing to instinct rather than reason. Always keep in mind the tendency of human beings to symbolize their leaders as Achilles' heel proof, his strategy paper advised. Also that the inferiority complex of individuals will respond to feelings superior to a fool, create issues that appeal to pugnacious instincts of human beings. I recognize all this as the exact same strategy that worked in 2016. I was just saying this is all feeling very familiar. Convince leftists to stay home, convince them that the person, the other Democrat who lost the nomination,

that they should write in that person's name instead and get them to want to fight in order to like focus on the instincts that make them angry rather than in the stuff that brings them together. It's the same strategy that worked in 2016. But, crucially, thankfully, it didn't work in this campaign, which is why the United States did not turn into a fascist hell state like Germany and why the Nazis lost World War II. So, thankfully, FDR was just too fucking good at running a political campaign to lose to this, but it worked a century, almost a century later. I'm having so many thoughts and I'm going to say none of them allowed at this time. Well, oh boy.

You know, it'll clear your mind's palette, Jamie. Robert, I just really need some capitalist messaging to get me through the next couple of minutes, honestly. A couple of products, a service or three, and then we'll be on the fucking road to Happy Town. That is the exact baking palette cleanser I'm seeking. All right. Palettes, which are a type of product? What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism.

I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic, and occasionally ridiculous, deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing.

And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! I hope you all enjoyed those ads for Raytheon, which is the finest provider of missile guidance equipment. I'm going to use the discount code. It's funny, we're joking about Raytheon a bunch, but I grew up in Plano, Texas, where they're headquartered. My scout master as a kid, the guy who taught me how to start a fire and survive in the wilderness, did something for Raytheon. All he could say about his job is that he worked for Raytheon.

And he was the kind of guy who, whatever he did, the way that he relaxed every year was by spending a month alone in the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Any person who needs to take a very specific, alone, dark vacation annually is not doing something good for a living. He would sometimes go with a friend, and one year that friend broke his leg, so he had to use a flare to get the guy helicoptered out, and then he continued alone for weeks after that. Whatever he did at work, that's what he needed in order to get straight again afterwards. And he would return from this feeling cleansed and ready to fuck shit up for another 11 months. I mean, it's one of those things. I don't know what the fuck he was doing. I'm sure it's horrible. He also taught me everything I know about woodcrafting, and I'll always be grateful for that. He was an incredible woodsman. Another complicated man.

A complicated man. The older I've gotten and the more I've learned about Raytheon, the more I've started to be like, oh my god, what the fuck were you doing? I'm thrilled to be descended from a long line of weed smoking remedial algebra teachers. It's a very uncomplicated existence. People who never hurt nobody. They never hurt nobody, and they certainly never taught nobody anything about algebra. So, when we last left off, Edward Bernays had invented Donald Trump's 2016 election strategy. That is so fucked up. It's fucking wild. That hurt my heart to hear his fucking out loud.

Yeah. Now, obviously, his attempts to stop FDR from winning the election did not work. They weren't even close. Hoover got one of the most resounding defeats in the history of American politics. He also sounded like a tone deaf weirdo. Yeah, he was a tone deaf weirdo. He was a terrible president. He was a terrible, terrible president, one of the worst we ever had. But Eddie's tactics for engineering consent worked more often than they didn't. Bernays knew that well, and as a clearly intelligent man, he should have known that writing out a how-to guide for manipulating mass consciousness could be used by Nazis just as well as it could be used by people who wanted to sell cigarettes.

But Bernays wanted to be regarded as a great and serious thinker, and the only way to do that was to publish a book and make sure everyone knew how smart he was. What Bernays did with crystallizing public opinion was the propaganda equivalent of figuring out how to build an atom bomb with household materials and then just throwing the instructions up on Reddit. It's like, yeah, it's like when they taught you how to make a bomb inside of Fight Club. Like, why? Why do you do that? Why put that in the thing? Where's the need? Now, the grossest part of this story is that many of the ideas Bernays wrote about in crystallizing public opinion weren't even his own ideas originally. Years before, an academic named Walter Lippmann had published a book called Public Opinion. According to an article I found in the International Journal of Communication, quote, What Bernays represents is a friendly reading of public opinion in his own quickly crafted sequel to Lippmann's book. Crystallizing public opinion is actually a calculated reversal of Lippmann's argument. Lippmann was a vehement critic of propaganda who condemned the manufacture of consent by public relations when that field was still in its infancy.

Crystallizing public opinion inverts and subverts Lippmann's radical critique into an apology for PR. So this guy Lippmann, who's a serious scholar, represents what people like Bernays are doing, like recognizes it, sees it as horrifying and writes a book outlining why what they're doing is dangerous. And then Bernays basically flips that around into, oh, this guy wrote out really well what we're doing. I'll just turn it into a how to guide to make it easier for other people to do it. He just strips it down and is like, but no, he does explain how to do it. Let's just take out the parts where we talk about why it's culturally damaging. Well, he says this is a nightmare. Like, no, but he did tell us how to build the bomb. He just deleted all the stories about people dying with bombs. Yeah, about the consequences of bomb use. Okay. So once Bernays's book was out and into the hands of men like Joseph Goebbels, Bernays finally started to get what he wanted. Respect. New York University let him teach the very first PR course in academic history.

While Lippmann was and remains respected in the industry, Bernays' ideas took a much deeper hold. And unfortunately, those ideas included stereotypes are awesome, actually. I'm going to quote again from that International Journal of Communication article, quote, Lippmann was consistently critical of the manipulation of public opinion by wartime propaganda and the transfer of propaganda techniques to peacetime endeavors. Conversely, Bernays contends that propaganda has positive social value in creating unified purpose in wartime and agreement on industrial purposes in peacetime. Bernays regards stereotypes as, quote, a great aid to the public relations council in his work, because they can be grasped by the average mind, even though he acknowledges they are not necessarily truthful pictures of what they are supposed to portray. No matter, according to Bernays, PR practitioners can use stereotypes to reach a public and then add their own ideas to fortify their position and give it greater carrying power. PR can also create new stereotypes to advance client's interests. He does, however, acknowledge that stereotypes have one disadvantage. Demagogues can use them to take advantage of the public.

The only disadvantage of stereotypes. Yeah, that's as long as he said it. Well, I mean, this is, at least we're getting into the cartoon villain territory that I've come to expect with this program, because I was feeling too challenged at the beginning. I'm like, oh no, he descends into egotistical madness. Okay. Yeah, he's literally saying like, well, stereotypes can be used to create fascism and they're also usually lies, but they help you sell shit. Usually come from people who have no negative stereotypes about themselves. Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, I mean, but it doesn't because Bernays, this is actually another interesting thing about it.

Bernays was Jewish by like birth, but he was an atheist and he was like angry that people considered him Jewish because he just didn't want to be identified as religious at all. But like, you'd think he would understand how dangerous stereotypes can be. It sounds like he always understands that, but just would, but needs the respect and like the whatever glory can come with being the father of spin more than he cares about anyone. It seems like, I mean, I understand like it based on the kind of like figure he's trying to be, I understand why he would divorce himself from any identity at all. Because, yeah, but what a, what a cool, you know, I'm just like stuffing my face with bake and I'm stressed. Oh, I'm going to eat so much bacon after this fucking episode. He's still winning. He can't stop winning.

He's still winning. Yeah. Edward Bernays spent his life taking advantage of the public after World War Two. That meant fighting the Cold War in the name of capitalism. He convinced President Eisenhower that the right reaction to the threat of the Soviet Union was to urge Americans towards an irrational fear of communism in order to drive spending. Eisenhower's first political campaign directly tied consumer culture to patriotism. He did that too. Oh yeah, culminating in his you auto buy slogan.

Rotto is in car. Eisenhower was telling Americans it was their patriotic duty to buy more things. That's how you beat the commies is by embracing consumerism. Yeah. Well, now. Raytheon. Yeah. Yeah.

Raytheon. Like Raytheon. Like the wonderful people at Raytheon. Like Raytheon. Yeah. Now the bulk of his anti-communist work, of Bernays' anti-communist work would however be done in the name of a corporation, not the United States government. And that corporation was the United Fruit Company. Now United Fruit, now Chiquita, owned a huge chunk of Guatemala in the late 40s and early 50s.

They had secured the Central American Empire by basically bribing and cutting wildly beneficial deals with the corrupt government in the area. This allowed them to grow and export bananas at very low costs, but it also completely screwed over the local workers and ensured they made virtually no money from the trade. And that the nation of Guatemala itself did not benefit in any meaningful way from United Fruit's booming sales. Okay. The whole state of affairs owed an awful lot to Edward Bernays. For one thing, he helped make bananas popular in America. United Fruit hired him in the late 40s with a mandate to add the fruit to America's diet. Bernays achieved this goal by using his usual tactics.

He found a doctor who said bananas were good for people and then engineered a spate of news stories around the country about the amazing health benefits of bananas. Classic Bernays. Which is, you know, not a bad thing. Bananas are great for you. Great thing to eat bananas. I mean, his approach is so unwavering, whether he's like, yeah, bananas, cigarettes, like red scare, kind of all the same. Yeah. Find someone with a fancy title to lie to America.

Yeah. Yeah. Which is still works today. I think there's still like whole TV channels like dedicated to that. Yeah. Yeah. All right. I mean, fucking Dr. Phil.

Like if it was just Phil, nobody would give a shit. So as time went on, Edward Bernays made visit actual visits to Guatemala. It became clear to him how bad conditions actually were for most Guatemalans. Under years of corrupt rule, Guatemala's leaders exempted the United Fruit Company from most internal taxes. They let it import goods duty free. They gave it control of the nation's only Atlantic seaport and almost all of its railroads. They capped workers' salaries at no more than 50 cents a day. Since United Fruit was the country's largest employer and landowner, this effectively locked the entire nation into perpetual serfdom to an American fruit company.

Now, Edward Bernays was above all else the kind of guy who did need to see himself as a hero. And this was more than he could bear. According to the father of spin, quote, when he returned from a month long company sponsored trip to Guatemala and Honduras in September, 1947, Bernays wrote his fruit company clients a long memo warning them about low worker morale and substandard living conditions. Goodwill of all groups towards fruit company is poor, he said. Ignorance, conscious and unconscious distortion by politicos in power or seeking power by fellow travelers and communist influences all contribute their part. Guatemala is in a state of transition. All these situations complicate the issue and make the company vulnerable unless certain things happen.

He advised United Fruit to basically share just a tiny, tiny, tiny bit of the wealth they were making in order to alleviate conditions on the ground and reduce unrest. Being a gigantic capitalist behemoth helmed entirely by racists to believe brown people were subhuman, United Fruit was unwilling to do this. Bernays later wrote, The people in the tropics were remote from Boston. They produced their banana quotas and that was what counted. Fruit company executives in the tropics were tough characters who had come up through the ranks. They were action-oriented men.

What I proposed must have seemed like molly-cottling. I got no reaction to my voluminous report. Now, based on his own code of ethics, which he'd outlined in his 1928 book Propaganda, Bernays should have quit. He'd written that a good PR man, quote, refuses a client whom he believes dishonest, a product which he believes to be fraudulent, or a cause which he believes to be antisocial. But like, look at his resume. Look at his fucking resume. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And Bernays clearly believed that United Fruit's behavior was antisocial, but he also knew that they were paying him $100,000 a year. So he continued to work for them and as left-wing movements rose in the country and agitated for taking back some of Guatemala's natural resources from United Fruit, Bernays advised his employers on how to fight back. In 1952, he wrote, This whole matter of effective counter-communist propaganda is not one of improvising. It could only be fought by the same scientific approach that is applied, let us say, to a problem of fighting a certain plant disease through a scientific method of approach. Now, the disease in Guatemala, from the perspective of United Fruit and Edward Bernays, was a fellow named Jacobo Arbez. Now, Arbez was not a communist, but he was a socialist.

And in 1951, he'd been elected president of Guatemala. His big campaign issue was land reform. And upon taking office, he'd launched Degree 900, a program that confiscated 400,000 acres of unused United Fruit land and redistributed it to poor Guatemalan farmers. Oh, cool. Yeah, it seems like a great idea. In 1951, only about 10% of Guatemalan land was actually available for purchase for the 90% of its people who might want to own it. United Fruit had bought up everything else. And in their tax filings, they'd reported on the land as being almost valueless, essentially barren, in order to pay less money in taxes.

So when Arbez seized their land, he only paid them back the incredibly low value that they'd assessed for its value. Now, this would seem like karmic justice if everything I'm about to talk about hadn't happened next. So, yeah, yeah, it's really kind of like United Fruit's like, oh, no, this land's almost worthless, so they don't have to pay much in taxes on it. And then when Arbez buys it back, he's like, well, okay, then I'll pay you the worthless price for the land. Right. Yeah, yeah. Was he not able to dunk on him? Yeah.

I was like, one of the only things that this shitty man hadn't done was ruin a country that wasn't his own. But I see he got around to that as well. He got around to that shit real quick. He's been also oppressing people internationally. Great. Now, United Fruit went to the Eisenhower administration and wind that the seizure of their land was a clear example of evil communism sneaking into Latin America. They warned the president that it wouldn't stop at just returning Guatemala's land to its people. United Fruit's inconvenience would be the first domino to fall, eventually taking all of America, freedom, and capitalism with it.

Now, that's a rather hard line of bullshit to sell. Thankfully, United Fruit had the greatest salesman on the planet. The year before the government had started its land expropriation program, Bernays had actually suggested United Fruit launch a media campaign to, quote, induce the president and state department to issue a policy pronouncement comparable to the Monroe Doctrine concerning expropriation. His idea was to convince Americans, specifically Americans in power, that the Arbezz administration's totally just land reform was the same as, say, Joseph Stalin murdering 5 million Ukrainian peasants through starvation genocide. He planned to start by picking 10 popular magazines, including Reader's Digest and The Saturday Evening Post, and convincing their editors to run similar stories about the crisis in Guatemala.

Quote from Bernays. In certain cases, stories would be written by staffmen. In certain other cases, the magazine might ask us to supply the story, and we, in turn, would engage a most suitable writer to handle the matter. So, yeah. So just not a lot of fact-tracking going on at this time? No. He's providing the facts to the journalists. Another thing that still happens. Another thing that has not stopped happening.

Uh, yeah, yep, yep, cool. Once Guatemala land expropriation really got started in earnest, United Fruit greenlit Bernays' campaign, and he engineered a whole spate of stories aimed at making Yacobo Arbezz look like a Mayan Mao. This culminated in a two-week tour of Guatemala in which Bernays led several journalists through the country in 1952. Here's the father of Spen. Quote, With him were the publishers of Newsweek, the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Nashville Banner, and the New Orleans Item, a contributing editor from Time, the foreign editor of Scripps Howard, and high-ranking officials from the United Press, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Miami Herald, and the Christian Science Monitor. Bernays insisted in his memoirs that the journalists were free to go where they wanted, talk to whoever they wanted, and report their findings freely, and he reacted angrily to suggestions in later years that the trip was manipulative.

But Thomas McCann, who in the 1950s was a young public relations official with United Fruit, wrote in his memoirs that the trip and others like it were, under the company's careful guidance, and of course, at company expense. The trips were ostensibly to gather information, but what the press would hear and see was carefully staged and regulated by the host. The plan represented a serious attempt to compromise objectivity. Moreover, it was a compromise implicit in the invitation, only underscored by Bernays and the company's repeated claims to the contrary. So that's cool. So he's just generating a bunch of bullshit that buy people that he can then... I mean, it's just like a different version of what he did with the doctors, but more involved of like, oh, well, journalists are credible,

so let me find someone who will lend their name to a whole pile of bullshit that's too much for people to read on their own, and they'll just be like, all right, works for me. Yeah, he knew what sort of newspapers everyone in the White House was reading, and he made sure that they all published stories about how communism was overtaking Guatemala. Right. Simple as that. Oh. Great.

Okay, cool. Well, I fucking hate this guy. You know what? I don't fucking hate Jamie. What, Robert? The wonderful products and services that support our program. I'm honest. I can't wait to hear about more of them.

I hope it's a Chiquita banana ad. Oh, man. I hope it's an ad... Chiquita bananas is evil. I hope it's an ad for the new Chiquita wire-guided bananas, which are, of course, manufactured in part by Raytheon Guidance Chips. Yeah, I hope that it's a Chiquita banana Amazon Prime crossover. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's get all of the big companies working together to drone-strike bananas into the mouths of hungry people.

I love it. Oh, man. Products! What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French.

In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic... ...and occasionally ridiculous... ...deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing.

And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back, and we're talking about Eddie B. Eddie B, I mean, can he get worse? Yes, spoiler alert, in like a minute and a half, we'll be talking about genocide. God, why did he live so long? Why did he live so long? If only he had smoked, the whole banana thing wouldn't have happened.

Now, Trudeform, Edward Bernays, also commissioned scholarly studies in order to lend extra legitimacy to United Fruit. He commissioned a 25-page content analysis of 17,000 words spoken by Guatemala's new left-wing leaders, and then compared them to statements from Soviet leaders. The conclusion of the report was obvious. The Arbez administration were hardline commies. Quote, every item mentioned in almost verbatim form is frequently found in Soviet propaganda messages. I love some good, false equivalents. It's like half of the shitty memes on the internet that reply guys get into your mentions, and they're like, well, you said this, and this fucking murderer also said this word. So, you're a murderer, dude. Fun, fun, fun, fun. They're the same guys who will tell you it's not valid to point out when somebody literally repeats Nazi propaganda verbatim.

It's quite amazing. Like, the thing that they're calling communism here, I want to point out, like, Arbez was a socialist, was not a communist, was a guy who, like, his most radical stance was like, no, the old, incredibly corrupt leaders of our country sold all of our nation's national resources to a fruit company for pennies on the dollar so that they could get rich, and it's locked our nation into a form of slavery, and we're just not going to let that happen. We're not going to get to own the whole country because you bought it from a corrupt asshole 20 years ago. Like, fuck that shit. Like, that's what he's saying. Like, that's what he's saying. Yeah, and he's not even kicking United Fruit out.

He's taking the land that they hadn't developed at all that they were just holding on to in case and saying, no, we're going to give this to people. Right. Like, the company could have still made a shitload of money. Like, and it's one of those things, communism got a major hold in the country after everything that we're about to talk to happened because when these moderate reformers came along, we fought them tooth and nail and treated them like they were Joseph fucking Stalin reincarnated. Like, it's very frustrating. That's what the paper said, Robert. So,

So, Bernays is propaganda and United Fruits lobbying did its work. He managed to get his work all these articles and studies into the hands of top men in the White House and in the National Security apparatus. The CIA began to train an arm and insurgent movement, the Liberation Army under a piece of shit named Carlos Castillo Armus. Armus was a military officer living in exile. He and his 200 CIA picked guerrillas entered Guatemala on June 18, 1954 with CIA air support. Bernays ensured coverage of the coup and called them an army of liberation. Armus forces took over Guatemala within a week and he was quickly named president. Shockingly, the CIA backed military dictator did not have the best interests of the Guatemalan people at heart. Armus's first act. Yeah, I know. Really surprising. Stop it. His first act was to return all the land taken from United Fruit back to the company. He told Vice President Nixon, tell me what you want me to do and I will do it. Many Guatemalans were, of course, unhappy with the state of affairs. And by the 1960s, the situation had degraded into a brutal internecine conflict. The banana wars had begun. According to the council on hemispheric relations.

It's a shitty war, dude. Yeah, it's true. It's true. I guess that's not really the focus of the problem. I mean, it's just accurate. These are a war started over fucking bananas. Fucking bananas. The civil war between the newly formed leftist guerrillas and the government lasted for over 30 years, costing approximately 200,000 lives, mostly people of Mayan descent. When the US assisted in modernizing the government troops in 1965, kidnappings and assassinations significantly increased in a systematic manner. The war's victims included farm workers, student activists, Catholic priests and labor leaders who were part of a nonviolent social movement. The war was devastating. More people were killed in this conflict than in any Latin American war. The valiant efforts of the Guatemalan Historical Clarification Commission, which the government initiated at the end of the war, identified genocide in the Mayan communities.

This is atrocious and horrible. I mean, a little beside the point, but how have I never heard about this before? This is like a part of history. You should have. Yeah. It seems like if you're going to talk about, this is one of the things that frustrates me a lot, people will bring up the huge death count of communist regimes around the world. Totally valid. Absolutely worth talking about the tens of millions who died under the Mao and the millions who died under Stalin. But then they pretend like there's no death toll for capitalism. They ignore the 20 or 30 million who died in India as a result of the East India Corporation's reform of the land. They allure the hundreds of thousands of people who died in Latin America and are still dying as a result of all the, like, it's because history education in the United States is criminally incompetent at a systemic level. Well, and it's just, yeah, it has to ignore the evils of capitalism or young people might start asking questions. Yeah. And I, you know, one other fucking thing we have to blame for, we have Bernays to blame for is Shea Guevara T-shirts.

Because, yeah, one observer of Jacobo Arbeza's overthrow was a young Argentinian traveler named Shea Guevara. He told his mother that the armist coup was the moment, quote, that I left the path of reason. As New York Times writer Daniel Kurtz fell in wrote in his 2008 article, Big Fruit, so too did Latin America. That day marked a turning point, the end of a hopeful age of reform in the beginning of a bloody age of revolution and reaction. Over the next four decades, hundreds of thousands of people were killed in guerrilla attacks, government crackdowns, and civil wars across Latin America. This is fucking cool. This is fucking horrible. This, I can't even, this like, the cigarettes I can wrap my head around, the bacon, fine. This is just, I mean, this is next level. This is just like propaganda warfare.

Well, yeah, it's a fucking nightmare. And you mentioned not having heard about any of this before. I mean, I guess that's pretty common among our listeners. The reason I had is that when I was in my early 20s, a group of friends and I lived in Guatemala for several wonderful months. And it's, I fucking love Guatemala. It's unbelievably beautiful, like maybe the prettiest place I've ever been. It's certainly like up there on that list of just like lands that take your breath away. But it was impossible to not notice all the scars of like decades of civil war. There would be times where we would like be driving through a field and you'd notice that it was like it was covered in grass. But the texture of the land was like the surface of the moon.

And it was because so much mortar fire had filled it with craters that had then gotten grown over with grass. There'd be thousands of craters or you'd drive past old buildings covered in heavy machine gunfire like holes from machine gun rounds. Or you'd be walking down the street in Antigua and you would see 15 or 20 old men missing arms and legs like lying on the side of a building begging for money. All clearly with like war injuries and stuff on them. And so I started like reading like what the fuck happened here. And that's where I didn't really learn about Bernays at that point, but I learned about United Fruit and the fucking banana wars. I mean, the fact that you had to physically be there to even learn that this had happened like speaks volumes. Yeah, yeah.

And it might like my study of that started when I was in these little Mayan villages around Lago Atitlan. And people would explain to me why the because you see soldiers all over the place in Guatemala because it's one of those countries where they don't have laws like we do. Like the military doesn't do like law work in the United States. Like they don't keep the peace. That's for police to do Guatemala doesn't have laws like that. So you see soldiers a lot on the street and stuff. But once we got to these little Mayan villages, there would be no soldiers. And I started asking the people I met like why that was.

And they're like, oh, we don't let the military in here because of the genocide they committed, you know, back in like the couple of decades ago. Right. So. Reasonable. Yeah. Reasonable. Extremely reasonable. That's very reasonable.

And I mean, I like joking and shit are on like, how could how could people not like realize that things are going to kill them. And but it's like, and then there's, you know, I and probably most people in this country have this huge blind spot that is just like intentional erasure to make it easier to, you know, be okay with how we how we live. Well, yep. Oh, God, Robert, you're really you're really killing me with this one. This is. Yeah, it's a bad one. It's fucking bad. Okay, well, Edward Bernays reading more about this. Wow. Edward Bernays died a millionaire on March 9 1995.

He was 104 fucking years old. He left behind a world scarred by the wars he helped to incite. There were other Latin American wars, by the way, that he got involved with like this is just as much as I had time to write about. The first one went so well for him. It went so great. And a world utterly dominated by the propagandistic techniques that he pioneered, perhaps the most insidious piece of his legacy is the possibly fatal damage done to the field of journalism. When Bernays started manipulating the media PR was a new field and the handful of extant PR flax were massively outnumbered by reporters and journalists. By 2019, that situation had completely reversed itself. There are currently six PR people for every journalist in the United States, like the alleys full of.

Yeah, they make a lot more money, which is why if you look into past Pulitzer Prize winners, an awful lot of them go into PR, because it's like, and it's like, I can't even blame them. It's like, okay, you worked your ass off, making fucking nothing. And you, you told, you know, an incredibly important story and got recognized. Now it's time to ensure that you can retire someday. Man, having ethics means that you're going to, you know, be seen a lot of group on doctors. Yeah. On the upside, Jamie, Edward Bernays also advised the Multiple Sclerosis Foundation to call themselves the MS Foundation because it was better branding. Like, you know, it equals out. You cause a war, you help the MS Foundation make more money. I can't believe you called him a feminist icon in the last episode. How dare you, and then, and then you throw the banana wars at the last second. How dare you? I know. Well, you can be a feminist icon and also help spark a brutal genocidal civil war in Guatemala.

But you can't be a feminist icon and kill every woman you know with cigarettes. You can't. Well, he didn't know not his, not his wife because he got her to stop smoking. Oh God. Yeah. I hate all women, women except my wife. Yeah. So argument. Uh, Bernie. Bernie, Bernie, Bernie Bernays. Eddie B. Oh God. All villains live forever. Well, all villains live forever. Yeah.

Hold cube head. So that was, there's no more, there's no more, or is there more? Nope. That's the fucking tale of Eddie Bernays. That's as much of it as I'm going to tell. There's a lot more. The book The Father of Spin is a fine book if you want to learn more about the guy. But I feel like this is enough to know about Edward Bernays. Yeah. Yeah. I certainly learned, I certainly learned a lot and now I understand why his daughters hate him so much. E-bizzle. Yeah. Yes. E-bizzle. Yeah. All cube head himself. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. All cube head.

So Jamie, you got any plugables to plug? Oh God. Um, yeah, not that there's any points. Get in the P zone. Uh, yes. You can listen to the Bechtelcast, uh, my name is Caitlin Durante's podcast every Thursday at Bechtelcast. You can follow me on Twitter at JamieLoftisHelp. I'll be at Edinburgh Fringe Festival August if you want to come see a show. You can do that. So Fringe Out with your hinge out? Fringe Out with your hinge out. My show, it's my, it's my Elizabeth Holmes show basically.

I mean, actually you could do a really good comparison to hang out with your wang out there using a local British Isles synonym for pubic hair. Dish. Yeah, that people will hinge out with your minge out. Your minge? Yeah. Never say that again, Robert. Never say minge. That's a slang term in the place you're going to be going.

God, why are you going to be so cute about all this, uh, man? Well, you know what, you know what fanny means up there too, right? But, right? No, it means vagina. In the Isles, it means vagina. Fanny is slang for vagina in the British Isles. So this is very important for you to know. You are in danger if you don't understand. Physically ill, yeah. So I, I mean, not that I've ever said fanny, but if you said sit on it, people would be confused. Very, very, sit on your fanny means a very different thing in the British Isles than it does in America. Yeah, way kinder. Okay.

Yeah. Okay. Well, good. Thank you for these travel tips. I do need them. Yeah. Yeah. Also, blood pudding, surprisingly tasty. Really fucking good. Okay. Like everybody, everybody talks shit about the British. I think they have the second best breakfast food I've ever encountered. They're not better at breakfast than the Irish, but they're very good. In my opinion. I'm a big fan, so enjoy yourselves. I don't know anything about Scottish food. That scares me. So.

I have no idea. Yeah. I'll just have to find out when I get there. Yeah. Drink a lot of Talisker though. I do, I do recommend that. All right. Well, Jamie Loftus, French festival. Watch her be the champion queen of comedy that we all know her to be. Cheer her on in her journey through Scotland and listeners online. If you know of other slang terms that she should know before she goes there, hit us up on Twitter and warn her. I don't, yeah, I don't want to get killed for saying the wrong thing. Yeah. That happens a lot. The British are a violent people. They're a violent, and I'm, and I'm getting them just pre-Brexit, so it's going to be a stressful time.

Oh yeah. Everyone's going to be swinging tallywhackers. That seems like a British slang for a weapon. Sounds like something. Sounds like something. Well, I'm Robert Evans. This is behind the bastards has been behind the bastards. It's not anymore because it's over. You can find me on Twitter at I write okay. You can find this show on Twitter and Instagram and at bastards pod. You can buy t-shirts on T public by looking for behind the bastards on T public. And that's it. That's the fucking episode. Thanks for having me Robert. I feel awful as you.

That's the goal with every episode of behind the bastards is to leave you feeling worse than you did before. Mission accomplished. Products. They usually don't end by shouting products, but I did. Why? Why? I'm just thinking of them always. There will be an ad after this. You know that, Sophie. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.