Founders - #256 Edward L. Bernays (Public Relations, Advertising, & Persuasion)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Edward Bernays almost single-handedly fashioned the craft that has come to be called public relations. He is widely recognized as the man who fathered the science of spin. Bernays was the man who got women to smoke cigarettes and who put bacon and eggs on the breakfast table, books in bookshelves, and Calvin Coolidge back in the White House. Although most Americans had never heard of Edward Bernays, he nonetheless had a profound impact on everything from the products they purchased to the places they visited to the foods they ate for breakfast. In doing so, Bernays demonstrated to an entire generation of PR men and women the enormous power that lay within their grasp. If housewives could be guided in their selection of soap,

Starting point is 00:00:46 so could husbands in their choice of a car and voters in their selection of candidates and candidates in their political posturing. Indeed, the very substance of American thought was mere clay to be molded by the savvy public relations practitioner. The techniques he developed fast became staples of political campaigns and image-making in general. That is why it's essential to understand Edward Bernays. This book uses Bernays' life as a prism to understand the evolution of the craft of public relations and how it came to play such a critical and sometimes insidious role in American life.

Starting point is 00:01:27 He made that exploration possible and actually encouraged it by leaving to the Library of Congress more than 800 boxes of personal and professional papers that detailed cases he'd worked on and tactics and strategies that he'd employed over a career that spanned eight decades. Bernays saved every scrap of paper he sent out or took in and provided them to be made public after his death. In doing so, he lets us see just how policies were made and how in many cases they were founded on deception. This volume seeks to unmask the man himself. Bernays was able to accomplish all he did in part because of dogged determination combined with an inventiveness that set him apart from his contemporaries and make his ideas as relevant in the 1990s when there's 125,000 PR practitioners in America as they were in the 1920s when he and

Starting point is 00:02:29 a handful of others got things going. His spirit was electric and his enthusiasm was so infectious that many who had heard a single speech decades before or studied with him for one semester, could recite his every phrase years later. Bernays was also a bundle of contradictions. He rode roughshod over his young staffers, even as he preached the virtues of tolerance and democracy. He promoted cigarettes, which he suspected were deadly, at the same time he was promoting national health insurance. He espoused women's rights,

Starting point is 00:03:06 but often treated his female employees and his wife like indentured servants. And he continually capitalized on the fact that he had outlived all of his contemporaries. He died in 1995 at age 103. To advance his contention that he, more than they, deserved to be called the Prince of Publicity. Although he was a small man, his claims were as huge as his dreams. It was those claims that first drew me to Bernays. My suspicion that he was a fascinating character, possibly an epic one, grew during my year as a fellow at Harvard, when I got to know his daughter

Starting point is 00:03:45 Anne and her husband. I met Bernays only once, a year before he died, when he was a very, very old man. He was sitting in the library of his home, and he told one story after another in rote fashion, as if they had been pre-recorded. And then, he told them again. That was an excerpt from the book that we talked to you about today, which is The Father of Spin, Edward L. Bernays,

Starting point is 00:04:09 and the Birth of Public Relations. And it was written by Larry Tai. I wanted to read this book now because last week on episode 255, when I was studying the life of Sam Zamuri in the book, The Fish That Ate the Whale, Bernays is a character that pops up later in Sam Zamuri's career.

Starting point is 00:04:23 Zamuri actually hires Bernays when he's the president of the whale, which is the United Fruit. And Bernays' job was to get the U.S. government involved and the CIA specifically so they could overthrow what turned out to be a hostile government of Guatemala that was threatening to take away assets of the United Fruit Company. And so in that book, The Fish That Ate the Whale, they also talked about how Bernays used this idea over and over again. He used indirection, unconventional thinking, and his main thesis is, hey, you need to tie your private interest to a public cause for companies as a way to help them sell more products. And one example that jumped out to me is he was hired by a bunch of publishers. I think this is in the 1940s, 1950s. They were concerned about a drop in book sales. And so his

Starting point is 00:05:09 point was like, you don't run ads saying, hey, buy more books. The indirect route is a lot more effective. If you want to sell more books, you convince real estate developers building houses and apartments to have built in bookshelves. And his point was, if where there is bookshelves, there will be books. So I want to start right where he graduates college. He has a very complicated relationship with his father. Even though they lived and Eddie grew up in New York City, his father had the idea that, hey, farmers are the future of America. You should be a farmer. So he makes his son go to Cornell University College of Agriculture. And Eddie hated it. He says later in the book, he didn't even like to be outside. He thought the sun was poisonous and that fresh

Starting point is 00:05:50 air was unwholesome. And that should give you a hint that we're dealing with an odd character here. His life story is going to have a lot of bizarre things, and I'll get there later on. And I'll also tell you why it'll be obvious when I get to the end, why I feel even though he got to the top of his profession, his life to me, the reading of his biography is really a cautionary tale. It's really important to use it as a, hey, maybe like an anti-model. But I want to jump into right away, like why you want to study Bernays. And it has to do with his unconventional thinking and the fact that going through this experience, realizing, hey, this is these are the things I don't want to be. And so it says Eddie rendered his verdict on his higher education. My three and a half years at the Cornell University College of Agriculture gave me little stimulation and

Starting point is 00:06:28 less learning. As he stopped to reflect, however, he realized that he had learned more than he thought. And it's by not fitting in with the rest of his classmates and their path, like the path they're choosing in life, that he realizes there's a benefit to unconventional thinking. Knowing he didn't fit in with the conventional thinking on campus got him accustomed to thinking unconventionally, to operate at the edge and push the boundaries, which became his trademark over a career that lasted more than 80 years. And he summarizes this point in his life perfectly. Perhaps Cornell was the right place for me after all. I was looking for something that was not there and I found something better. So he realizes, hey, if I'm not going to be a farmer, I got to find a job. He's going to test out a few jobs before he lands in public relations, almost by accident, I would say.

Starting point is 00:07:12 So this is just some examples of these things that he's trying. He's a young man, early 20s at this point. He accepted a professor's offer to write for the National Nursery Journal. He didn't like that. From there, he tried out filling out bills of lading at the New York City's Produce Exchange. That's where his father worked. He didn't like that. From there, he tried out filling out bills of lading at the New York City's produce exchange. That's where his father worked. He didn't like that either. Then he tried decoding cables concerning grade trades for the Louis Dreyfus and Company, a job that proved even more tedious than his previous ones. So up until this point in his life, all he

Starting point is 00:07:40 knows is what he doesn't want to do. And he winds up getting an offer from a friend. So years before him and this guy, Fred, they were co-editors of a school paper in high school. And Fred's father had owned two monthly journals. It's the Medical Review of Reviews and the Dietetic and Hygienic Gazette. And so Fred asked Eddie, how would you like to help me run the review and the gazette? So Eddie's going to be a partner in this business. And this is where he accidentally stumbles into the very beginning of a career in public relations. Eddie accepted the offer on the spot and began work the next morning. Neither he nor Fred knew much about medicine or nutrition and neither had any real experience in publishing.

Starting point is 00:08:19 But both were ambitious and enterprising, which was all most entrepreneurs of that era began with. And both were willing to do everything from writing and editing to promotion and office errands. And with the Medical Review Journal, this is a description of what they were doing. They published expert opinions on health controversies. Now, this is where it gets a little confusing. They are going to promote a public health controversy that's going to turn into a play that they're going to help sell tickets for. So this is a brief overview of that. And then I'm going to give you I'm going to break down exactly how he did it. So he says their real break came two months after they joined forces when a doctor submitted a glowing review of damaged goods, which was this work by a French playwright.

Starting point is 00:08:58 The play was about a man with syphilis. It was taboo back then to openly discuss sexually transmitted diseases. So their point was, how can we get this play shown in New York City a few years before the city had shut down a play featuring

Starting point is 00:09:12 George Bernard Shaw because it was a play about prostitution. And so they're like, hey, it's very unlikely that we're going to be able to play this in New York because the city's not likely

Starting point is 00:09:21 to approve a play that features, essentially is about a sexually transmitted disease being syphilis and the treatment play that features like essentially is about a sexually transmitted disease being syphilis and the treatment of that disease and how it affects like a person's life. And the reason this is important to talk about is because this is where Eddie derives the insight. It's like, hey, we're not trying to sell a play about syphilis. That's our private interest because we want to put on the play. We think the writing is good.

Starting point is 00:09:41 We obviously want to make money through selling tickets. That is a losing proposition. But if we can tie our private interest to a public cause, in this case, a public health issue, we're going to reframe this as a public health issue. Then all we have to do is make the public health issue a success and draw wide attention and our private interest will be raised along with it. The ticket sales essentially will take care of themselves. And the reason this is able to work is because Eddie shares a mindset with a lot of the other entrepreneurs like history skaters, entrepreneurs that you and I have studied, where they view problems not as problems, but as opportunities. Problems are just opportunities and work clothes. And so it says

Starting point is 00:10:17 Eddie took these hurdles as challenges. Anything could be accomplished, he believed, if people could be made to see what looked like an obstacle as an opportunity. The key with damaged goods, the play, he realized, was to transform the controversy into a cause and recruit backers who already were public role models. So I'm going to tell you more on exactly how he did this in a few minutes. But first, I have to talk to you about his relationship with his uncle, Sigmund Freud. And the reason I think it's important to talk about this now, because a main innovation or idea that Eddie used, is he might be the first person to apply psychology to the emerging field of public relations. And so his father and Freud were friends. They wound up having a falling out later on.

Starting point is 00:11:01 But Freud married his... Let me use words here so I don't get confusing, so I don't confuse you. Eli is Eddie's father, okay? Eli and Freud are friends. Eli marries Freud's younger sister. Freud marries Eli's younger sister. So think about this. Eddie's mother is Freud's sister, and his father's sister was Freud's wife.

Starting point is 00:11:22 So this is the result. This gave Eddie an intimate connection to the father of psychoanalysis, a connection he capitalized on every chance he got. My guess from reading the book is that this is the person he most admired. I think he wrote about Freud like 40 or 50 times. He wrote, Eddie, towards the end of his life, wrote like this 900-page autobiography. And he mentioned, they pointed out that he mentioned Freud like 10 times as much as he mentioned his own kids. And so throughout Eddie's life, he's constantly visiting Freud in Europe. He's writing to him.

Starting point is 00:11:50 And so they're talking now. It says Freud was a famous uncle of 57 years old and talking to his unknown nephew of 22 years old. Eddie was more taken than ever with Freud's novel theories on how unconscious drives, dating back to childhood, make people act the way they do. And Eddie was convinced that understanding the instincts and symbols that motivate an individual could help him shape the behavior of the masses. Eddie's approach was straightforward. Take techniques that had worked with damaged goods, as he would do over and over again, push them several steps further. Eddie called this hitching private interests to public ones, And this is the result of his campaign with damaged goods. There was a greater

Starting point is 00:12:29 demand for tickets than the house could fill. And so this is a summary of what he did. Number one, he's hired to promote a product. Number two, he does not. He uses indirection. He does not promote that product directly. He attaches that product that he's been hired to promote to a cause that gives the consumption of that product a deeper meaning. Number three, he uses the cause to get small newspapers to write about the product. Right. So if he goes and just says, hey, I made a new product, write about it. Newspapers are like, no. But if you say, hey, this is a cause, there's a play being put on. And the reason behind the play is because it's going to teach about the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases and you know remove this prudish he called it like prudishness i think is how he described damaged goods the fact that they wouldn't allow plays

Starting point is 00:13:14 about prostitution or sexually transmitted diseases and he's like we're not it's not a play about sexually transmitted diseases it's about a public health crisis and how we cure sexually transmitted diseases and so then you use the cause, you go to a small newspaper, they'll write about that and then use the media of a smaller newspaper or media publication. And that will get you larger media to promote the cause, which in turn is really promoting your private interests. And we'll go into more detail how he does this later on. But that basic blueprint is exactly what he did for Samson Murray and United Fruit. He's like, listen, if you say you have where this super rich global corporation and this small country is taking, you know, 100,000 of our acres, no one really cares.

Starting point is 00:13:52 That's like your problem. But if you know, hey, the Cold War is going on. Americans are really scared about the spread of communism, especially in our hemisphere. If we can make it seem like the Guatemalans are really communists in disguise and we get this idea into press, the people reading the press will be the CIA, the State Department, presidents, etc., etc. Then we attach our private interests, which is, hey, we want our land, as much land as possible, back from Guatemala so we can sell bananas and make more money to the public cause of, oh, my God, the communism is spreading in our hemisphere. We must do something. So that is what i mean about indirection so he has so much success promoting a play he winds up getting hired to do the same

Starting point is 00:14:30 thing for ballet and then we're going to see there's a lot to like about his approach to his craft he was definitely a workaholic he got to the top of his field he was extremely thorough and so there's a bunch of these ideas i think you and i can use in our work i'm going to pull up pull up constantly throughout uh going through the book. And then I'll get to the point where I think he was like, obviously a very flawed person and kind of these like a cautionary tale that we should avoid.

Starting point is 00:14:50 But one thing he did, and then we see over and over and over again, and I have to point this out. I know I repeat it a lot. Repetition is persuasive. I'm repeating it for myself as much as I am for you. It's the fact that David Ogilvie's idea

Starting point is 00:15:01 that the good ones know more appears over and over again in the history of entrepreneurship. We see Eddie using that in the very early days of his career. Let me read this first, and then I'll tie it back to Ogilvie's fantastic advice. So it says, Eddie began by acknowledging that he was as ignorant about ballet as the public he sought to enlighten.

Starting point is 00:15:17 Then he set out towards self-enlightenment. That meant digging up all the information he could from the library, secondhand bookstores, and the Metropolitan Opera Company, which was sponsoring the ballet tour. It also meant eliciting bits of dance wisdom from the arts editor of Literary Digest and from the budding ballerina Natasha Rambova. And that is nearly to the T, the advice that David Ogilvie gave. He'd already built this fantastic career, one of the most successful advertising agencies in history. And he's giving advice. I read this book.

Starting point is 00:15:47 It's Olga Vian Advertising. It's found in episode number 82. If you want to go back and listen to it, highly recommend buying that book. I'll eventually reread it in the future. It's so fantastic. But he's giving advice to young people in his agency. And he's like, listen, this is just good advice for life. You can be the best informed.

Starting point is 00:16:03 Doesn't mean you have to be the smartest. Eddie's not the smartest. Like, I don't know anything about ballet, but I can collect information. And if I just collect more information and put that information to my brain, then I'll know more than most people do. And so Ogilvy says, set yourself to becoming the best informed person in the agency on the account to which you're assigned. If, for example, it's a gasoline account, read books on oil geology and the production of petroleum products. Read the trade journals in the field. Spend Saturday mornings in service stations talking to motorists.

Starting point is 00:16:29 Visit your clients' refineries and research laboratories. And at the end of your first year, you will know more about the oil business than your boss. And that is exactly what Eddie's doing in the story with the ballet. We're going to see on the next page, again, the Noah Leif myself more than any other single note in this book is Eddie's all indirection and unconventional thinking. This is how he's going to wind up making this ballerina famous overnight. And then he teaches himself a lesson in the process.

Starting point is 00:16:53 Eddie's stints in journalism had shown him where he could cut corners. Would a reader recognize that the ballet's press person, which is Eddie, had written the Vanity Fair story about the ballet? Perhaps. So no problem. He would shuffle the letters of his name around and become Abram Edwards. And I want to pause there before I finish this paragraph. That's something he uses over and over again.

Starting point is 00:17:12 He realizes that as part of human nature, humans love if other humans will do their work for them. So he's constantly producing content for other media companies, newspapers, magazines. He's like, here, you have a space to fill? Just use this or rewrite this. And they're all like essentially thinly disguised ads for whatever he's been hired to promote.

Starting point is 00:17:31 And this is more indirection. The Ladies Home Journal magazine wouldn't run promotional photographs for fear its readers might be offended by skirts that didn't reach below the knees. So think about what a ballet ballerina wears, right? And so Eddie's like, okay, cool, no problem. He engaged a pair of painters to add length to the ballerina's skirts,

Starting point is 00:17:51 and the pictures then ran in a two-page color spread that reached millions of unknowing subscribers. He was also a master of getting attention by doing pictures or writing that surprised you. It jumped out. So he's like, listen, it's not good enough just to take pictures of the ballerinas. Let's take the ballerina to the Bronx Zoo. We're going to put a giant harmless snake wrapped around her body. And so for the promotion photos, we're not going to just show her dancing. We're going to show her. What does the Bronx Zoo have anything to do with ballet? Nothing. It's just the fact that it's like if you're flipping through a magazine or a newspaper, you see a ballina you're like oh that might be interesting you see a ballerina

Starting point is 00:18:27 with a giant python wrapped around her like what is happening here and his idea wound up working perfectly newspapers ran that story with the picture on page one this is the lesson that he's teaching himself he remember he's very young he's like 22 23 there's somewhere in there at the point he's doing all this uh and this is what eddie said When I saw how easy it was for the ballerina to become a national celebrity, I recognized how necessary it was to look behind a person's fame to ascertain whether the basis was real or fictitious. He is writing these words a hundred years ago. Think about the age of social media, how many people are just famous for being famous.

Starting point is 00:19:00 And this is his punchline. Public visibility had little to do with real value. That was true back then. It is even more true today. He continues, without the snake or some equivalent, she might have had to wait years for national recognition. The snake took up the long lag time. So he goes from promoting plays to promoting ballet. Now he's going to promote singers and he's going to all the stuff he's learned. So he takes what he goes from promoting plays to promoting ballet. Now he's going to promote singers and he's going to all the stuff he's learned. So he takes what he learned from promoting the play, added those lessons to promote the ballet,

Starting point is 00:19:31 learn more lessons while doing that. Then he's going to roll those lessons forward through his entire, his entire life, but he's going to use it for the singer real quick. And he's eventually going to use this for corporate America. Cause he's going to have, you know, he's going to have accounts with almost all the largest companies of his day.

Starting point is 00:19:46 So it says Eddie was also fascinated by the public's adoration of Caruso. This is this European singer. And in a lesson he learned while working with the ballet that he would apply later on behalf of corporate moguls and American presidents, he realized that such impressions could easily be fashioned or reshaped. So I'll pause there, just explain what's going on. And I think this is most obvious in our own lives when you think about, with musicians, right?

Starting point is 00:20:12 How many times that a musician you never even heard of, all of a sudden, is just everywhere. It almost appears like overnight, this person goes from a complete unknown and the music industry makes sure that they're widely available, their music's widely available, their their face their name is widely available i just saw an example of this before i read the book i watched i saw the new elvis movie and same thing he was like a 17 or

Starting point is 00:20:35 i didn't know this before the movie he was like a 17 or 18 year old kid before his first hit completely unknown and then within almost i think it was like 12 months he becomes maybe the famous singer in America. And so what Eddie's realizing here, because this is, I think, two or three decades before Elvis got famous, is, oh, America, like people will accept if they think other people are interested in this singer and they hear the music, they see the advertisements, they see his face, everything else. They'll just accept like, OK, everybody else says this. This is, you know, the new thing, the person we should be paying attention to so i'll just go along with that and so it says uh he realized that such impressions could be easily fashioned or reshaped this is what he said about that the overwhelming majority of the people who reacted

Starting point is 00:21:17 so spontaneously to caruso had never heard of him before the public's ability to create its own heroes from wisps of impressions and its own imagination and to build them almost into flesh and blood gods fascinated me, Eddie said. Now think about the reaction that a super famous singer or musician, again a movie star I guess could be another example of that, the reaction you see people have. It's almost like they're flesh and blood gods. And so Eddie says, he goes, of course, I knew the ancient Greeks and others, early civilized peoples had done this, but now it was happening before my eyes in contemporary America. And this is where Eddie realizes, hey, if I can make a singer famous overnight, right, the real money is helping

Starting point is 00:22:02 businesses make their product famous overnight. And the income that he's going to help generate for the American tobacco company is unbelievable. And again, how fast this can happen if you have PR, this massive public relations push on your side. So I want to go and I'm going to spend a lot of time here. There's a bunch of things about his personality I'm going to get into. But two of his projects of two main projects I'm going going to focus on is essentially the history of marketing cigarettes. So his work for the American Tobacco Company and then what he does for Zemuri, which we'll get to later. So it says, U.S. tobacco tycoon scored nearly as stunning a triumph as did the U.S. troops during World War I. When America joined the war, so think, you know, 1915, 1916, we're talking about maybe 1918. When America joined the

Starting point is 00:22:44 war, cigarettes were considered unsavory. I did not know that. Most men of that day preferred smoking cigars, pipes, or chewing tobacco. But cigarettes proved more convenient in the trenches in World War II. And so the U.S. government began putting cigarettes in soldiers' rations with the result that many of these soldiers changed their smoking habits when they came back home. And now it talks about the not only they see soldiers, the American public see soldiers smoking cigarettes as opposed to chewing tobacco or doing pipes or whatever.

Starting point is 00:23:13 And it's also like it's associating with, hey, we just won this war where warriors, warriors sing or warriors smoke cigarettes. And so it says cigarettes were manly things. Now, this was the stuff of warriors and their use among men soared so did the profits of the company making them all of which convinced cigarette makers that the time was ripe to open a second market this time they would target females so the previous decade before bernays is going to be hired by american tobacco company they had this massive increase in the amount of sales right right? So that's the decade. Now we're in 1928, and this is where

Starting point is 00:23:48 Bernays is going to get involved. Bernays began working for George Washington Hill, who was the head of the American Tobacco Company. Hill, Bernays recalled later, became obsessed by the prospect of winning over the large potential female market for his brand called Lucky Strike. And he was going to be the first company, the first tobacco company to target a new market. That was what Hill's idea was. And he's going to hire Bernays and a bunch of other PR guys. And he's also going to hire Albert Lasker, who you and I talked about on episode 206 in that fantastic biography of Albert Lasker called The Man Who Sold America. And so Bernays is talking about this conversation that he had with Hill. And this is what Hill said to him. He said to me one day, it'll be like opening a new gold mine right in my front yard.

Starting point is 00:24:28 So let's get into how Bernays did this. It's important for you to know that when he anytime anytime he does anything, when he's promoting something, he never, never, never, never has just one plan of attack. It is always many, many attack vectors relentlessly. And so they're going to start out first by saying, OK, we're going to convince women to have a cigarette for dessert as a healthy way to stay slim. And so how do you do that? You go to where these women, what are they consuming? The newspapers, the magazines, the radio shows, and you influence them that way. So it says for news editors, it meant testimonials like the one. Oh, and then he always does this thing where he sets up front groups. You know, it's not it's never going to

Starting point is 00:25:08 come from the company. It's always, you know, the American Association of X or, you know, the mothers are united against Y. It's that he always has front groups. He never you're never going to know that it's the company behind. Again, they say indirection. Really, I thought about it as like misdirection. So this is an example for news editors and testimonials like one from the former chief of the British Association of Medical Officers of Health with a warning, essentially like a press release, right? With a warning that sweets would cause tooth decay and advising that the correct way to finish a meal is with fruit, coffee, and a cigarette. So he also used experts. And a lot of these experts are just taking money and they'll essentially say whatever you want them to say, unfortunately. Hotels were urged to add cigarettes to their dessert list. While Bernays' office widely distributed a series of menus that were prepared by an editor of House and Garden magazine

Starting point is 00:25:59 that were designed, this is what they tell the reader, now keep in mind, to save you from the dangers of overeating. There, Bernays, again, is always hiding and couching his true intentions. He wants to sell more cigarettes. He's not going to say buy more cigarettes. He's going to say, hey, if you smoke cigarettes, if you take a cigarette for dessert instead of eating candy, it's a good way to stay slim. So now we're having editors of a very popular magazine read primarily by his target audience, which is women. And we're going to say, hey, this article, again, the headline is we're going to save you from the dangers of overeating.

Starting point is 00:26:31 That's not what they're doing. I'm selling you more cigarettes. For lunch and dinner, they suggested a sensible mix of vegetables, meats, and carbohydrates, followed by the advice to reach for a cigarette instead of dessert. Now we see he uses that bookshelves. If there's where there's bookshelves, there will dessert. Now we see he uses that bookshelves. If there's where there's bookshelves, there will be books. Well, he uses that same idea here. He proposed that homemakers hire kitchen cabinet makers to provide special spaces to hold cigarettes,

Starting point is 00:26:56 the same as they did for flour and sugar. And then he urged container makers to provide labels for labeled tins for smokes, just as they did for tea and coffee. So this is what I mean. He never has just one plan of attack. It's always many, many attack vectors. And he does this relentlessly. This is the result of campaign number one. Seldom, if ever, had a publicity campaign been carried out on so many fronts and seldom, if ever again, will those responsible make public the details of their orchestrations the way Bernays did when he left to the Library of Congress 24 boxes of records pertaining to the American Tobacco Company? And so that's how we know all this is going on, because they say, hey, this is what we tell the company.

Starting point is 00:27:35 Right. We see all these records. This is what we were going to tell the public. This is our action. And I'll get to these other public relations campaigns that he does for cigarettes as well. This is just campaign number one. But essentially saying, hey, this is what we're telling people. And this is why what our actual intention is. Again, it's all hidden. The thing to know about this, this first campaign is number one, this PR campaign printed money. And number two, he did not believe in what he was selling. So Hill was super excited. The guy running the American Tobacco Company, he's writing this letter to Bernays and he's saying, hey, this is working fabulously. Our revenues this year were $32 million.

Starting point is 00:28:09 So that is in 1928. That is the equivalent of a half a billion, more than a half a billion dollars in revenue today. One company, $500 million in revenue selling cigarettes. And this is our first example of where Bernays is going to serve as like an anti-model, in my opinion, to you and I. It's just easier if you sell something that you believe in. I was just rereading highlights for Shoe Dog when I read Phil Knight's biography. In the early days of Nike, he could not understand why he was so successful at selling sneakers. He had tried to sell mutual funds and encyclopedias, and he's like, I was terrible.

Starting point is 00:28:41 I was a terrible salesperson. He realized, oh, belief. Belief is irresistible. I believed in my product. I thought I genuinely believed that if everybody got out and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place. And so he's like, I'm not selling anything. I'm not selling a product. I'm selling my belief system.

Starting point is 00:28:56 And we see that Bernays never did this. Because think about what he's doing at this point. He's like, no, no, no. All this media, this mass media targeted everybody. He's like, do not eat desserts. It's going to make you fat. It's unhealthy. Grab a cigarette. Those are healthy. It makes you slim. OK, Bernays himself never smoked. And the man who helped persuade tens of thousands of Americans to give up sweets in favor of cigarettes admitted later he did not like the taste of tobacco. And I prefer chocolate. So the next year they're like, OK, this is fantastic.

Starting point is 00:29:22 But Hill is this formidable individual. He's not one to rest on his laurels so he this is 1929 now he summons bernays and he says hey how do we get women to smoke on the street they're smoking indoors but damn it if they spend half the time outdoors and we can get them to smoke outdoors we're damn near double our female market i want you to do something i want you to act b Bernays understood that they were up against a social taboo that cast doubt on the character of women who smoked. So again, another example, same idea, different example, tying a private interest. I want to sell more cigarettes to a public cause, the equality of sexes. And so Bernays' idea is like, hey, why don't we organize a parade of prominent women that would light up cigarettes, and we're not going to call them cigarettes. We're going to call them torches of freedom.

Starting point is 00:30:08 I'm not making this up. This is in the book. Think about how gullible people can be, right? This goes back to this maxim that I've talked to you about over and over again. The mind is a powerful place and what you feed it can affect you in a powerful way. You've got to be very careful about who and what you give your attention to. The people reading these useless magazines are going to hear an ad disguised, an ad that's disguised, saying, hey, you know what? It's wrong that men can smoke in public, but women can't. They're not really cigarettes.

Starting point is 00:30:36 They're torches of freedom. Let's set up the parade. We're all going to get together, us feminists, and we're going to march down the road. And they're like, OK, I'll do that, too. And not realizing that they're serving the interests of not themselves. They're serving the interest of this gigantic corporation that's printing money that is going to profit off of this. Why not organize a parade of prominent women lighting their torches of freedom? You've got to be kidding me. And do it on Easter Sunday on Fifth Avenue. So what does he do? He goes and talks to his friend that works at Vogue and they say, hey, give me this list of like 30 influential young women. And is it going to work

Starting point is 00:31:09 if the letter comes from a man or comes from American Tobacco? No, of course not. So he has his secretary who hides the fact of what she is doing. So his secretary, he sends a telegram signed by his secretary, Bertha Hunt. And this is what it says. In the interest of equality of the sexes and to fight another sex taboo, i and other young women will light another torture freedom by smoking cigarettes while strolling down on fifth avenue on easter sunday we are doing this to combat the silly prejudice that the cigarette is suitable for the home but never for the sidewalk and so this is where i really have like a i like a lot of uh the advertising people that i have studied like ogilvy is a personal hero of mine and has become a personal hero of mine just because I've read about him.

Starting point is 00:31:47 I find him extremely likable. But his whole thing is like educating them why the product is beneficial to them. What was happening in this book, as much as I admire Ogilvy, I dislike the individual person that Bernays was because that is a lie. We are doing this to combat the silly prejudice that the cigarette is suitable for the home. No, you're not. That is not your main goal. Your main goal is get you to sell, to buy more cigarettes, and we're going to confuse and manipulate you to do so. That is completely different than like Ogilvy writing a 10,000 word ad after doing months and months of research for Rolls Royce

Starting point is 00:32:25 and telling car enthusiasts why Rolls Royce is better, giving them information about how it's handmade, about the engineering, about the fact that you're on 70 miles an hour and the loudest thing is the clock inside. That is a skill set. That's interesting. That is beneficial, right? This is not this. And we know this because he turned over his own documents to the Library of Congress.

Starting point is 00:32:43 The mind is a powerful place and what you feed it can affect you in a powerful way there this is what they're saying internally the script the script for the parade think about that's crazy that they use that terminology it's like you think one thing i'm putting on a movie the script for the parade was outlined in revealing detail and a memo from bernie's office the object of the event would be to generate stories for the first time remember he, he can't go to a newspaper saying, hey, can you write about buying more cigarettes? But he can go to the newspapers like, hey, did you know there's this parade? And it's in the reason for the parade is to have the equality of sexist and they're not smoking cigarettes. Oh, yeah, you know, I work for American Tobacco. They're smoking torches of freedom. And he knew this. So he's like, listen, if we just do this event, we don't have to pay for advertising. They're giving us this promotion for free. This is why he was so effective. He got to the top of his profession, which is extremely rare for anybody to write. The object of the event would be to generate stories that for the first time, women have smoked openly on the street. These stories will take care of themselves. He knew

Starting point is 00:33:41 what he was doing. These stories will take care of themselves as legitimate news if the staging is done right and they set it up they set up who's going to go they set up what the people look like they set up the parade route they set up oh uh we like the newspapers are going to be there but let's hire our own photographer in case their photographers get bad images and they set up like uh they give her been like disney world or anything like that where it's like hey take a picture here know, it's the same kind of psychology. It's like, oh, this just happens to be a beautiful place. Okay, I didn't think about taking a picture of my family, but I'll do that. And then you take a picture, and in the background you have the Disney castle, you have whatever, and then you post it to social media.

Starting point is 00:34:14 It's like, oh, I just did the same thing. These things will take care of themselves as legitimate news if the staging is rightly done. Undoubtedly, after stories and pictures have appeared, there will be protests from non-smokers. This is still Bernays talking. He knew exactly what he's doing. So, OK, we're fighting a taboo. We're saying, you know, society saying it's not appropriate at this time for women to smoke outside. Well, if we smoke outside, we won't even have to tell these people. They're going to do it automatically. They're going to be so outraged that they're going to be like, OK, now we have a counter protest. No, this is immoral, et cetera. You know, you could say

Starting point is 00:34:43 for whatever reason. And then what's happened? What happens? Their their outrage brings more attention to our to what we're creating. And the more people to see what we're creating, the more people eventually buy cigarettes. And that's beneficial for our client. This is crazy. Undoubtedly, after the stories and pictures have appeared, there will be protests from nonsmokers. These should be watched for and then answered in the same papers. So that cycle of this, this, you know, if you could put money on how much it would cost to get this attention, if you paid, like just rent ads, millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars,

Starting point is 00:35:14 he's getting for his client for free. They keep going. What kind of march marchers would be best? And this is what they decided. Actresses should definitely be out. On the other hand, if young women who stand for feminism, someone from the Women's Party, say, so this feminist organization at the time, could be secured, the fact that the movement would be advertised to would not be bad. So, again, now he's aligning interests. He's like, OK, we want to rebrand Cigarettes as Torches for Freedom. You're into like you're a feminist organization. This is right in line with what your interest as well. Can you maybe attend this this march? And then the newspapers are going to pick up that not only attending the march, but that a bunch of women's women from the women's party are there. So that's good for your organization as well. He's a lining interest. That's essentially what he's doing here. Right.

Starting point is 00:36:07 The fact that the movement would be advertised to would not be bad. These women should be good looking, but they should not be too model-y. And it just goes on and on and on about the, again, he is relentless. That is a positive part about him that we could apply obviously to our craft is just like this, just relentlessness and this, this eye for detail. And, you know, I'm going to sit in a room and I'm not going to think about five different ideas. I'm going to think about 150 and I might try half of them. And if I try 75 of them and maybe only five hit or maybe one hits, that's enough. And so he's constantly attacking

Starting point is 00:36:33 from every single possible angle that you could think of. That is why he was a workaholic. That's why later in the book, his wife is not too happy with him. His kids, who the author knows, I'm not going to say they hate him, but they definitely thought he was a terrible father. And part of that is because he did not care about anything but his work.

Starting point is 00:36:54 And so this event happens. I have a couple highlights over the next few pages that give you an indication of how successful it was. The newspapers loved it. The uproar he touched off proved enlightening to Bernays. Age-old customs, I learned, could be broken down by a dramatic appeal disseminated by the network of media, he wrote. He almost always, so this is what I meant about indirection, yes, in some cases, but really I would, I think this is misdirection. He almost always concealed the fact that the American tobacco was behind his initiatives. The outcome was one that

Starting point is 00:37:25 most publicity men can only dream about, an irresistible script for a stunt, flawlessly executed, covered in nearly every paper in America, with no one detecting the fingerprints of either Bernays or his tobacco company client. And again, the only reason we know this, the only reason it was ever uncovered is because he never threw away any piece of correspondence and he donated all his correspondence over his 80-year career to the Library of Congress. Then we're also going to see that Bernays was not the only one engaged in indirection and misdirection. His boss, the person that hired him. So this is going to be wild. Hill, so that's the guy running American Tobacco Company, Bernays, the guy that hired Bernays. Hill was formidable

Starting point is 00:38:09 and ruthless and open to new ideas. This reminded me of Rockefeller buying companies through front businesses. I just covered this most recently on 254, which was this very old biography of Rockefeller that I had never even discovered, heard of before until I read the bibliography in the back of Titan. So in case you haven't listened to that, that's 254 for that biography. And then I just reread Titan and that was 248. If you listen to that, or if you read those books, you already know what's about to happen here. So Bernays is going to be contacted by this guy and hired, not realizing that he is hired by Hill. So David, this guy named David Schult, is the owner of a cigar store chain, called Bernays to contract his services.

Starting point is 00:38:49 Bernays was told to name his price for handling an unspecified project. So this is the events that happened before what you and I were just talking about, okay? So it says, hey, we're going to hire you, name your price, okay? There's only one catch. You cannot advise any tobacco interests but ours.

Starting point is 00:39:04 Bernays agreed, severing his ties with Liggett. So this was, he was essentially what he's doing. He was working for one of Hill's competitors and Hill's like, I don't like that. I'm got, I got to find a way for that to not happen. Uh, so it says he wind up, okay, you're going to pay me, you know, 50% more. I will sign on with you. They also make sure the contract is twice as long. So he's going to pay him more and he's going to tie him up longer. Okay. It was another nine months before Bernays learned that Schultz had been fronting for Hill. You've been on the American tobacco payroll for nine months, Bernays recalls Hill crowing. You were working for Liggett and Myers, weren't you? And we got you from them, didn't we? And you didn't know anything about it. And that is why Lucky Strike is on top. Hill also failed to mention that he

Starting point is 00:39:50 had hired Bernays' competitor, Ivy Lee, years before. Neither of the public relations pioneers, so neither Bernays nor Lee, knew the other was working for American Tobacco. Hill eventually told Bernays why he had done this. If I have both of you, my competitors can't get either of you. And so we go back to this. He had this campaign in 1928 to make it, hey, smoking cigarettes for dessert keeps you slim. 1929. Now it's this female empowerment, torture freedom. Well, 1930. In 1930, Hill's salary and bonuses totaled $2.5 million. What does that mean in today's money? That means Hill was making over $40 million a year. And then before we wrap up this section, the author compares and contrast the similarities

Starting point is 00:40:40 between Bernays and Hill. The two were a lot alike. Bernays was 36 when he went to work for American. Hill was just seven years older. Both had an abiding faith in American capitalism and the rewards it could offer both of them. Both had demanding fathers before whom they were determined to prove themselves. So I'll talk a little bit about that, but that was definitely, and I'm always interested in this relationship because it comes up so much for some reason. There is, I mean, I shouldn't even say for some reason but the effect that your mother or your father can have on you is obviously quite extreme and so there is some kind of like no I will show you you know I could be successful in the case of Hill his father was the president of American Tobacco before Hill was so he's like I'll show you that I can not only do what you did but

Starting point is 00:41:23 take it further and Bernays his father he was, then rich, and then kind of poor again. But they had just this bizarre relationship. There's like a lot of, I would say Bernays was closer to his uncle. His father also dies young as well. I think he dies, I think I might have a highlight on this. I think he dies maybe like 61 or 63, something like that. But the reason I'm giving you the backstory because it's like this sentence, now that I've read the book and what I'm mentioning is talked about that comes after this, the idea that both of them had demanding fathers before whom they were determined to prove themselves. So you might want insight into the inner drive. Like, why am I doing what I'm doing?

Starting point is 00:42:03 Both sense that they were at the cutting edge of an evolving profession and both were anxious to test the limits. And then Brene says, you know, Hill, he was open to new ideas. And the reason that he had a lot of success is because he was actively trying to do things his competitors weren't, even if it sounded like unlikely to make sense or to, like how does the combination of public relations and psychoanalysis and psychology lead to selling more cigarettes? Essentially, my interpretation of the paragraph I'm about to read you. I doubt whether a serious business committee today would permit me to retain a psychoanalyst to evaluate billboards and parade women on Fifth Avenue lighting cigarettes as a symbolic torches of freedom.

Starting point is 00:42:42 Bernays reflected these ideas would be regarded as far out, remote, or risky. And so his point is like, he was like, listen, I hired you, you figure it out, and you don't need, like, I'm not going to micromanage you. And so I want to go deeper on this idea of Bernays' use of indirection and the roundabout. Publicity men traditionally sold their services based on their ability to chart the straightest course to their client's objective. Bernays' approach was considerably more circuitous and infinitely more effective. And so the author gives us a couple of examples of Bernays doing exactly that.

Starting point is 00:43:14 He used this strategy in 1930 when he went to work for Simon & Schuster and other major book publishers. Where there are bookshelves, he reasoned, there will be books. So he got respected figures to endorse the importance of books to civilization and then persuaded architects, contractors, and decorators to put up shelves on which to store their precious volumes, which is why so many homes of that era have built-in bookshelves. Bernays also helped shape the world of medicine. Shortly after he signed on with the Multiple Sclerosis Society,

Starting point is 00:43:43 he pointed out that the name of the illness was more than a mouthful, was more a mouthful than most Americans could digest. He urged pruning it back and just using MS, which the society did, helping transform an obscure ailment into a favorite cause. His tactics differed depending on what project he's working on, but his philosophy in each case was the same. Hired to sell a product or service, he instead sold whole new waves of behaving, which appeared obscure, but over time reached huge rewards for his clients. There's more on this. This is going to remind me, if you've listened to a bunch of these Founders episodes, and you might be familiar with this. Back on Founders number 70,

Starting point is 00:44:31 I read The Dow of Capital by Mark Spitznagel. That entire book is about the roundabout, indirection, circuitous. These words appear over and over again in that book. It's episode number 70 if you haven't listened to it. Bernays preferred the phrase appeals of indirection, plotting a path to a client's goal that seemed roundabout, but ultimately removed underlying as well as immediate impediments. And this gives us insight into his personality and why his approach to work perfectly fitted the person he was. He consciously defied convention. He was convinced that ordinary rules did not apply to him, and he repeatedly proved that he could reshape reality. His process was part P.T. Barnum and part J.P. Morgan, blended in a way that was uniquely Eddie Bernays. And this is a summary of this entire section. The formula was simple. Bernays generated events, the events generated news, and the news generated a demand

Starting point is 00:45:26 for whatever he happened to be selling. That is a great description of the roundabout. Now, sometime this roundabout, this indirection went too far. His longest client, longest running client was Procter & Gamble. He worked with them for over 30 years. One of their products that he promoted was ivory soap. And so not only would he try to promote your product, but he would attack your competitors. And so when another company comes out with, instead of having ivory soap, they called their soap the swan. So that was the product name of a competing soap. And look what I wrote. This dude is wild. That's my note. That's my note, because this is what his idea was. Okay, well, you're going to name...

Starting point is 00:46:07 Oh my goodness. You're going to name your product the swan? Okay, that's fine. This was Bernays' plan to counterattack P&G's arch rival. The way to sink the swan, Bernays argued, was to get reporters to write stories saying that swans were vicious creatures that attack children. P&G executives did not buy that tactic. So that is, I've only given you examples of where his, these ideas that worked, but the, like, you're just a wild person. Like I would never think

Starting point is 00:46:36 that, I don't know, maybe that thought would come to your mind, but if I was given the job as like, I got to promote your soap and I got to somehow take down your competitor and your competitor's name of the product is swan. I wouldn't think, hey, let's plant fake stories in newspapers where swans are actually vicious creatures and you have to be careful because they attack your children. That is wild. And then I want to move ahead to one of Bernays' most frequent criticisms was the fact that he was a relentless self-promoter and that he would embellish and exaggerate. And really, as they were talking about this and using several examples, what struck me is like, oh, this guy's personality is actually perfectly suited for the business that he chose. And he'll tell you why at the end of what about the retail he tells you exactly why

Starting point is 00:47:25 he did this he's like no they're wrong and this is why uh bernays's stories almost always began with a factual account and then were puffed up as he recounted his own own role or insisted that whatever happened was the first of his kind so he loved adjectives this is the best ever like even when he's like 95 years old this is the best soup ever had in my life uh this is the the the most beautiful tree that that in the world. Like everything was superlative. I never doubted his stories. I just doubted their magnitude.

Starting point is 00:47:50 It was tough to get mad at Bernays, though, because he was such a good storyteller and he brought such energy to each tale. So why did he embellish? He was a public relations pioneer and had a great career. Why not leave it at that instead of making exaggerated claims? And the author tells us why. Leaving it at that, however, would have denied who Eddie truly was. He was the consummate PR man. And what he did for his clients, which was meticulously massage the facts and then filter them through letters, speeches and front groups until even he could not say for sure what was truth and what was spin. He did the same thing for himself and his career. And that's how he got

Starting point is 00:48:23 a lot of clients to ballyhooing like that for a living and believing in it so ardently, he found it tough to turn off the rhetoric, even when it came to telling his own story. And he's also saying, if you don't do this, he writes his autobiography. I think he's in his 80s. I think I'm pretty sure he's in his 80s when he's writing this. But he's like, if you don't do this, you're actually making a gigantic mistake. You're not doing your job to the best of your ability if you're an entrepreneur and wanting to promote your own business. He also conceded in his autobiography and again and again in conversations that in an era of mass communications, so think about like now we live in an even more pronounced era of mass communications than he did, right? In an era of

Starting point is 00:49:00 mass communications, modesty is a private virtue and a public fault. That's a hell of a line. In an era of mass communications, modesty is a private virtue and a public fault. So not only was he interested in promoting and helping his clients, but he wanted to be thought of as a pioneer or a founder of the industry. And he does something that's really smart. Like you have to tell your own story relentlessly. We've seen this in the past episodes. Churchill did this. Winston Churchill did this. Julius Caesar did this.

Starting point is 00:49:32 Teddy Roosevelt did this. And Bernays does as well. He wrote and wrote and wrote and documented all of his ideas and put them out for public consumption at an unbelievable pace. He understood that his theories had to be known if they were to change people's thinking and behavior. He wrote or edited 15 books, 300 articles, and more than 125 letters to the editor.

Starting point is 00:49:52 All at the same time, he was representing hundreds of clients. He had a lot to say about his fledgling profession, about its strategies, and the philosophy behind it. And he made sure that it was all there in black and white to the point where it was difficult for people not to notice. And I just want to give you some examples for some of his writing. It says not all of his writing was high minded. Often he zeroed in on practical issues, sharing lessons that he had learned during his many years on the job. He broke his advice down

Starting point is 00:50:20 into easy to swallow maxims, many of which have become part of the American lexicon. So I have, there's a bunch that appear on a couple of pages and really a lot of this is just good advice. He had a theory on stubbornness. There's going to be quotes from, from Bernays. It is sometimes possible to change the attitudes of millions, but impossible to change the attitude of one man. This is Bernays on how to justify high fees. The man or the corporation is much more likely to do what you suggest if you charge a high fee than if you charge very little. The idea that you should be pricing your services. He repeats that over and over again until he dies. essentially carrying on this affair with this 40 he's like 95 years old he's this woman who's 45 was hired to like live in his house and take care of him they wind up having like the this like almost like pseudo marriage and like sexual affair and then his daughters think that she's like brainwashing him and taking all his money and so anyways the court system like a judge and

Starting point is 00:51:21 an arbiter arbitrator i forgot word there, have to get involved. And one of the last thing he says to that attorney is like, oh, you need to charge more. They'll respect you. Like if you just charge more and they'll think automatically just by having a high price, essentially, they'll think you're higher qualities. What are you saying there? So the man of the corporation is much more likely to do what you suggest if you charge a high fee than if you charge very little. On why thank you notes are still a good idea, the fact that most people no longer write them is all the more reason to write them, he said. Doing so makes you special and makes the recipient remember you. This is his advice on the best way to win someone over.

Starting point is 00:51:53 Remember, this is all coming from his writing. So his output was just incredible. It's easier to gain acceptance for your viewpoint by quoting respected authorities, outlining the reasons for your outlook, and referring to tradition than by telling someone that he's wrong. This is great advice on how to get a job. Analyze the field, narrow your choice to one or two firms, draft a blueprint for increasing their business, present the plan to a top executive, and write enough letters to make that person remember you,

Starting point is 00:52:24 but not enough to make him want to forget you. Ask for the salary that you think you're worth, and remember, you're not just looking for a job, you're looking for a career. The best way to write a press release, according to Bernays, each sentence should have no more than 16 words and just one idea. The best place to find things is the public library the best defense against propaganda more propaganda so now we get to the cautionary tale the anti-model and this is just on his failing as a father and as a husband and really what's bizarre is it says multiple times in the book like he didn't really have any friends

Starting point is 00:53:04 and he kept having like falling out with people. He was just there's a deeply flawed. He's very a very the weird thing I'm trying to to explain to you is that he can be somebody you want to study. Somebody got to the top of his profession, somebody that was unbelievably creative in his approach to his craft and yet failed in almost every other aspect of a human being a father husband friend winds up blowing through this gigantic fortune uh you don't want it like you want to get to the end of your life and you know having to get a reverse mortgage on your house like blowing through untold millions of dollars because you're bad with money because you're obsessed with not what you think of yourself but what other people think of you these are like the cautionary tale aspect to reading this book where it's like, uh-uh,

Starting point is 00:53:50 nope, there's no way that when I get to my end of my life or if after I pass, I want the people that knew me best to write about me like this. No way. Absolutely not. The father of public relations may have been a powerhouse at the office, but at the house that he shared with his wife and two daughters, Eddie was regarded as something less than the perfect parent. Part of the problem was that he simply wasn't around much. When he was at home, his behavior could be infuriating, especially troubling to his daughters was the way that Eddie treated his wife. And so he's got two daughters, one's named after his wife, Doris, and his other daughter, Anne. And this is what they said about him. He defined himself entirely by his work.

Starting point is 00:54:27 It was partly that Eddie came to fatherhood in an era where few fathers actively participated in raising their kids. This is also gonna get confusing because he insisted that his kids call them by his name and not father. So his daughters call him Eddie. He felt that raising his children was their mother's responsibility.

Starting point is 00:54:43 The word workaholic, so now this is his daughter talking again, the word workaholic was invented for him. I hate that word, says Anne. I don't think he was meant to be a father, really. And so then it goes into like, okay, well, you know, his whole thing is like, I'm going to adapt my uncle's Sigmund Freud's theories. And it's like, all this stuff happens to you in childhood

Starting point is 00:55:01 that you may not even understand. And it affects your behavior for the rest of your life. And so they could make the connection here where it's like, well, you know, he grew up in a very unhappy home. He had a real troubled relationship with his father. So it says Eddie might've said the same about his own father, Eli. Eli was a moody and strident man who had to work endless hours to get ahead as a new arrival in America in the 1890s. He wasn't home much.

Starting point is 00:55:22 And when he was, his children often cowered before his temperamental outbursts. As a child, Eddie told himself and others that he would never marry and have children or repeat the mistakes of his father. So this is a very common response to an unhappy home. And it's the wrong one. Just like in founding a company, the right person makes all the difference. When I got to this point and I read that, he's like, oh, OK, he told himself and others that he would never marry, never have children. I said the exact same thing. And now I'm married with children. And you realize, oh, it's not the institution of family or having children or being married. It's the person, the right person makes all the difference.

Starting point is 00:56:00 And then what I also think is helpful is like thinking, OK, I didn't like what this person, like maybe your parents did to you. But as I got older, I was like, OK, well, imagine like growing up in the environment they grew up in. And so that's what the author does here. It's like, OK, well, Eli, you know, was kind of bad, had terrible relationships with his kids. And Eddie, instead of fixing this, obviously, that's Eddie's mistake. Instead of fixing it, he carried it on. But like, go back. Like, what was Eli's relationship with his father? It says Eli didn't have the luxury of musing about his future when he was young his father died of a heart attack and Elon was at and Eli at 19 had to sacrifice his dream of college and become the family provider so just to be clear here it's like okay Eddie didn't like the relationship he had with Eli Eli didn't even

Starting point is 00:56:41 really have a relationship with his father and so this broken cycle just continues down each generation until somebody at some point stands up. It's like, all right, the line, that's it. This line's done. Like this stops now. And then Eddie constantly felt that, like, you know, I have there's no this guy's impossible to please. Like I'm not good enough. And that may have obviously pushed him to have this insane drive and work all the time, which then unfortunately carries on. His daughters are now adults when this book is being written, and they're looking back, and this is not the childhood I wanted. Eddie may have loved his father deeply,

Starting point is 00:57:14 but he was determined not to fall on his footsteps, that he could not articulate that, and that he was forced to dwell in the shadow of his father's disapproval rankled throughout his life and made him feel that whatever heights he reached were never quite enough. And what bothered his daughters as well was the fact that they thought he treated his, their mother very poorly. He would, there's more detail in the book, but it would say, hey, you know, he'd preach, he's a feminist, and he'd say all these things, these things that were very unusual for a man to say at the time, but he only did that in public,

Starting point is 00:57:42 and he only did that to serve, like. Whether to get clients or something like that. But at home. Like he wasn't like that at all. And then he also made the mistake of like. Carrying on affairs right in front of his kids. There was more than that. Eddie flirted with women at work and at parties. Arousing suspicion in his daughters and others.

Starting point is 00:57:59 That he was doing more than flirting. And then we see the quiet suffering that. He had. He made his wife endure because listen to the advice that she gives her daughter. Both of these pieces of advice that she gives her daughter when she's about to be married is wild. Like think of when I read this, you think about the part what the person had to go through for them to get. This is their child who they love more than anybody else in the world. What did this person have to go through to say something like this?

Starting point is 00:58:25 This could explain why, as Anne recalls, when I got married, my mother said, I want you to remember something, Anne. When you get in a fight with your husband, he is always right. Another piece of advice she gave Anne. Remember, Anne, men always sleep with their secretaries. And what Anne realized is by getting constantly beat down by a very domineering person, that it affected her mother's self-esteem.

Starting point is 00:58:48 I think at some point she wanted to leave him, but she felt she couldn't get another man. And so publicly he's saying, hey, me and my wife are 24-7 partners because we're partners at home. She's partners in the public relations firm. He was the front face, but she gave him a lot of ideas and she worked. Not only did she have to raise the kids, but worked full-time helping him build his business right and so this is another i just wrote good advice on this paragraph this is this is well let me just read to you a family friend tells a similar tale i asked doris his wife if she ever thought of leaving him she said one time she did shortly after their marriage she came home and she saw something she didn't want to see

Starting point is 00:59:22 and she promptly left eddie came after her and that was the end of that. So we can read between the lines. She caught him in bed with another woman, right? Doris was surely thinking of her own life and her children when in her later years, she approached Marianne Pyreis at a party that the young PR woman, who was Marianne, was hosting. Now, this is what Marianne's saying that Eddie's wife said to her. Much older. Her kids are already grown at this point.

Starting point is 00:59:48 Okay. She was very taken with our daughter who was just two or three at this time. Marianne recalls. Afterwards she said to me. Be certain to keep a balance where that little girl is concerned. Be sure not to let her get lost in your busy life. And then Marianne said. I've thought about that over and over again. That's too important. Only say one time. Afterwards, she said to me, be certain to keep a balance where that little girl is concerned. Be sure not to let her get

Starting point is 01:00:18 lost in your busy life. And so we see massive failures in his family life. We see that he also did this with friends and relatives. And I'm going to give you a couple examples on these two pages. And the note I left myself is simple. This is not the way to the firm. Eddie's response was to end all contact with his nephew for nearly 40 years, refusing even to acknowledge him when he bumped into him at the train station. He did the same to content when he resigned after three years. Eddie told me if I left, he would never talk to me again, and he never did. The break was even more jarring with Edmund Whitman, who was the publicity chief at the United Fruit Company and one of Eddie's closest friends. Now think about what I'm about to read to you. What kind of messed up individual you have to be

Starting point is 01:01:14 to do something that he's about to do here, okay? This is like his liaison. This guy actually works for United Fruit Company. Eddie's company is hired for United Fruit Company. He's having to deal and work with Whitman all the time. Through their work, they developed this really close relationship. This is an example of that. Whitman had to pass on word that after years of faithful service,

Starting point is 01:01:33 Eddie was being terminated by the fruit company's new boss. This is the guy that took over after Zemuri, okay? Eddie never spoke to Ed Whitman again. Why does that matter? That hurt Whitman a lot. Whitman thought that he had a special relationship with Eddie. Eddie's daughter recalls that when Eddie would come home from the office, he'd be on the phone for at least an hour every single night with Ed Whitman. They spent vacations together for years. This was his very, very, very, I'm not repeating myself. This is literally written in the book, right?

Starting point is 01:02:07 Three verys. This was his very, very, very closest friend. But after that falling out, Eddie acted as if he had never existed. Okay, so I want to go back into his work. And I want to go into what caused me to discover Bernays to begin with. And that's what he did for United Fruit and Sam's Murray. And this is where he is integral in doing a coup and instigating a coup in Guatemala. All of this was done for an undeclared war waged on behalf of United Fruit, one of America's richest

Starting point is 01:02:36 companies, a war fought in quiet alliance with the U.S. government on foreign soil against the elected government of Guatemala. A war that in the mid 1950s, when the Cold War seemed ready to boil over, was seen by those waging it as a crusade to keep Moscow from gaining a beachhead 1,000 miles south of New Orleans. So again, that's another example of, hey, I'm going to tie this, my private interest to a public cause. If I say, hey, you know, Guatemala government taking some of our land, that's bad for our banana business. No one cares, right? We saw this in the Zemuri book because he's talking to Secretary of State Knox. He's like,

Starting point is 01:03:14 hey, if you do this deal, this is happening 20 years earlier from where we are in this story. And he's like, if you do this deal, I'm out of business. And Knox is like, I don't care about your banana business. So it says upon Bernays death, the Library of Congress made public 53 boxes of his papers concerning United Fruit. Those documents paint in vivid detail his behind the scenes maneuvering and show how in 1954 he helped topple Guatemala's regime. The papers also offer insights into the foreign policy of U.S. corporations and the U.S. diplomatic corps, and they made clear how the United States viewed its Latin neighbors as ripe for economic exploitation and political manipulation. So this is some of the work that Bernays did for United Fruit. By 1949, Zamuri had built United Fruit into one of America's biggest and best-run companies, with $54 million in earnings and an

Starting point is 01:04:02 empire of railroads and ships, a reputation for fair treatment of its 83,000 workers in the tropics. But Zemuri was always looking for ways to sell more fruit. That is why he hired Bernays as his public relations counsel. Bernays showed him that one way to boost sales was to link bananas to good health. He knew that Dr. Sidney Haas, which was a New York pediatrician, had proved years before that bananas had helped cure celiac disease, which is a chronic digestive disorder. The public relations man decided to use a celebration of the doctor's 50th anniversary as a doctor to get out the word that bananas helped digestion. So again, indirect, I'm not doing an ad for bananas. I'm doing an ad to celebrate

Starting point is 01:04:47 this legendary doctor's 50 years of service. And somewhere in that, somewhere in that story will be a hidden ad for my client's product. He printed 100,000 copies of a book on the topic and mailed them to editors, librarians, dieticians, home economists, pediatricians, and doctors specializing in digestive troubles. And he got United Fruit to sponsor the doctor's research. But of course,

Starting point is 01:05:12 that information is not going to be public. Bernays also linked bananas to national defense, a connection less obtuse than it seems because United Fruit's great white fleet. So those are the boats, I think they said, if I'm not mistaken, at that time, United Fruit had the largest private navy in the world. A lot of those were used during World War II, maybe even World War I. Definitely World War II. I don't remember if they had them back in World War I as well. But they were used for carrying soldiers and supplies and the war effort.

Starting point is 01:05:41 So it's like, hey, look, United Fruit is helping out our war effort. And just so happens this company is helping our war effort. They sell bananas. Maybe you should eat some. And this is the punchline that I've repeated over and over again. It amounted to couching his client's private interests behind America's public interests, going back to more attack factors. So we see what he's doing for bananas. He did for cigarettes many years earlier, right? This is this relentless and constant ways of attacking this issue from multiple different advantages. Never knows which one's going to take off the most, but he just constantly he's relentless about it. And I know you said that word a lot, but that's really the way I think about it.

Starting point is 01:06:14 On top of that, he campaigned to get bananas into hotels, railroad dining cars, airplanes and to feed them to professional and college football teams. He donated them to the YMCA and the YWCA members, gave them to the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and students of all ages, and to secure a place for them in movie studio cafeterias and at top-of-the-line resorts in places like Palm Beach, Florida, and Sun Valley. And so now we jump into Guatemala. They'd already taken, I think, 100,000 acres, something like that, or 210,000 acres. And now they want to take another 177,000 acres. That would be that would mean that the company would lose 4000 acres. We know that a very powerful, not only individual, but a very powerful multinational corporation is not going to let anybody. They're willing to resort to violence, as we've seen over and over again in history of entrepreneurship.

Starting point is 01:07:01 And so this is what's going to happen here. Bernays warned that Guatemala was ripe for revolution and that the communists were gaining increasing influence over Guatemala's leaders. He counseled the company to scream so loud that the United States would step in to check this threat so near to its border. The company then launched a media blitz to induce the president and the State Department to issue a policy pronouncement comparable to the Monroe Doctrine concerning expropriation. Essentially saying, hey, we're not going to tolerate any other foreign government taking property of an American business or anything that's tied to American interests. In fact, he began planning such a blitz months before.

Starting point is 01:07:40 He had picked out 10 wildly circulated magazines and said each should be persuaded to run a slightly different story on the brewing Guatemalan crisis. This is what Bernays wrote. In certain cases, these stories would be written by the staff men of the magazines, Bernays said. In other cases, the magazine might ask us to supply the story. This worked wonderfully. Articles began appearing in the New York Times, the New York Herald, the Atlantic Monthly, Time, Newsweek, and other publications, all discussing the growing influence of Guatemala's communists. And it's another example that people love having other people do their work for them. He was also aware of the clout that the New York Times carried with the public and the press, and he prodded the paper to publish more stories favorable to his client. He accomplished this by skillfully exploiting his ties to the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger.

Starting point is 01:08:31 He had tried to influence the assignment of the reporters at the New York Times, ensuring that they were sympathetic to his cause and complaining when they weren't. And then he'd go about and make relationships with these reporters. And it says a surprising number of respected reporters seem not to know or care about the orchestration or about the fact that Bernays worked for a firm with huge economic interests at stake. What mattered was that his releases that he's sending them were filled with facts that they could quickly transform into stories. So he's like, hey, I'll do the research for you. I've spent all this time.

Starting point is 01:09:05 Here's the document. You can then take information in the document, rewrite it into a story, makes your job easier. He uses that tactic over and over again throughout his entire career. He's like journalists, writers, media representatives, news anchors. You have something very valuable that I want,

Starting point is 01:09:21 which is the attention of the public. If I can make your job easier, I am more likely to get some of that attention for my private interests. And he didn't stop at just writing stories or providing information. He takes them on a bunch of journalists down to Guatemala. The trip is paid for by the United Fruit Company. So it says in 1952, he took a group of journalists on a two-week tour of the region. With him were publishers of Newsweek, the Cincinnati Inquirer, Time, the foreign editor of Scripps Howard, Miami Herald, San Francisco Chronicle. I don't need to read all these to you, but you get the idea. That trip and others like it were under the company's careful guidance and, of course, at company expense.

Starting point is 01:09:59 The trips were ostensibly to gather information, but what the press would hear and see was carefully staged. There's that word. ostensibly to gather information, but what the press would hear and see was carefully staged. There's that word. Now think about the staging of that, uh, torches of freedom parade that we covered earlier, right? Same things happening here, but this time it's not trying to get women to smoke in public or walk down smoke, uh, walk down fifth Avenue on Easter Sunday, smoking torches of freedom. He's getting journalists to see things in Guatemala that he wants them to see because he knows they'll go back and write about it. What they saw was carefully staged and regulated by the host. The plan represented a serious attempt to compromise objectivity.

Starting point is 01:10:34 The results of his trips to the tropics were beyond dispute. More and more stories sounding an alarm about the dangers that are happening in Guatemala. This is how you're going to tie Guatemala to communism during the Cold War. Bernays hired a scholar from Harvard's Russian Research Center. Remember, we're in a Cold War, worried about communism spreading everywhere. So let's take the guy that's at America's maybe most prestigious university. He's studying Russia. Let's get him to do some analysis that's favorable to us. We hired him to do an analysis that would enable us to show there are parallel thoughts in the thinking of Guatemalan communist leaders and the thinking of Marxist Soviet leaders.

Starting point is 01:11:11 This is the result. This guy produced a 25-page content analysis that reviewed nearly 17,000 words spoken by Guatemala leaders and compared them to statements of Soviet leaders, concluding that there was substantial overlap on matters like how the United States was perceived. In the Guatemalan speeches, the report said every item mentioned in its almost verbatim form is frequently found in Soviet propaganda messages. So now this gets reported, right? He hires this guy. Then you're reading, think about it, you're reading the New York Times. You're saying, okay, this is a trusted news source to me. Then I'm reading an article about it, you're reading the New York Times. You're saying, OK, this is a, you know, a trusted news source to me. Then I'm reading an article about what's going on in Guatemala.

Starting point is 01:11:48 And guess what? They have this guy that's, he's like an expert. He's from Harvard. And he just did this analysis and he knows all about the Russian, Soviet communist propaganda. And he's saying, hey, we're seeing the same stuff down there. That is why hiding this and this indirection is just so effective at what he was doing. And as a result,

Starting point is 01:12:05 the Eisenhower administration stepped up the pressure on Arbenz, which is the Guatemalan president at the time. He responded by hardening his stance. A few months later, the president that is backed secretly by the CIA, this guy named Armas. Armas was an army officer living in exile. He crossed the border from Honduras with 200 men recruited and trained by the CIA, a band Bernays referred to as an army of liberation. This invasion was supported by a CIA air attack and quickly achieved its goal. A few weeks later, they took control of Guatemala, and then Armas was named president a week later. And so even after he parts ways with United Fruit, he continues working. He never retires. He's still working and giving speeches when he's over 100 years old.

Starting point is 01:12:52 The book ends with a just bizarre story. And this paragraph is like a summary of what's going on. It started at steamy day in June 1988 when Joan swept into Eddie's life. she brought with her not only delicious parties and a final go-around at sex, but also an alleged abduction and accusations of elder abuse and thievery, all of which was electrifying for someone with Eddie's sense of adventure, like a last ride on a roller coaster. It was also a bit unnerving for someone that was 96 years old. Joan was half of Eddie's age. So Joan is initially hired to live in Eddie's house to help take care of an old man. He's still touring the country. He tours the country.

Starting point is 01:13:34 So I think he's 100 or 101 giving speeches about public relations, going to parties. But as he ages, his short-term memory really degrades. Like he can tell you stories that happened 50 years ago and repeat it just as it happened yesterday. But as his short-term memory degrades, Joan starts taking advantage of him, trying to sell his possessions, taking a bunch of money from him, trying to poison the way he thinks about his two adult daughters. His wife had been dead for 10 or 15 years up until this point. Eventually, the daughters try to get the court involved. They're saying, hey, she's abducting our husband, or excuse me, our father. They even accused Joan of kidnapping Eddie. And all sides have different stories. So when they get in front of a judge, he can't even figure it out. So he appoints a lawyer to look into this and to prepare a report that informs his judgment about what

Starting point is 01:14:23 needs to take place here. And this lawyer's report is why I said that there's a sad ending to Eddie's life. And I really view his life as a cautionary tale. Although he may have liked Joan, he insisted he never considered marrying her. She's half my age. Whose idea was this? She was a good worker and ran the house and the employees. He was equally resistant to turning over his finances to his daughters. Independence is an important aspect of life, he said. I don equally resistant to turning over his finances to his daughters. Independence is an important aspect of life, he said. I don't want to be in a position where I say, mommy, can I buy an ice cream? I don't have a dime. People should not confound age with stupidity. I still earned fees until I was 95. So it says the attorney's 103 page report was never made public, but she ended her report by outlining her vision of what happened during the soap opera like years near the end of Eddie's life. and Joan maintained a speech interview and travel schedule while his speech interview and travel

Starting point is 01:15:26 schedule while ensuring that his health was not jeopardized by this lifestyle. She wanted to preserve the image of the man who made such an important contribution to our society. In return, Joan was introduced to highly sophisticated group of people and a lifestyle that she probably never would have encountered were it not for Eddie Bernays. He was her teacher and she learned quickly. Joan positioned herself for a future in the public relations field. Despite Eddie's denial, the attorney concluded that there was an intimate relationship that had developed and that Joan thought she was more like Eddie's wife and Eddie thought of her as a very important member of the household,

Starting point is 01:16:06 like a family member but still an employee. On other crucial issues, the attorney sided with Eddie's daughters. She said that Joan made statements to Eddie Bernays and others in an attempt to create a mistrust of his daughters and cause a divided front of us against them. The attorney said that Eddie's daughters were the appropriate people to manage Eddie's money, a choice that was later confirmed by the judge. By the time that decision was made, however, Eddie had already spent most of his money. While

Starting point is 01:16:37 he was earning a fortune, he also spent a fortune. Then it outlined some of the things that he was spending money on. This goes back to when his wife was alive. Instead of having a house, sometimes they'd rent an entire floor on a hotel in Manhattan all the summer. Then he'd move constantly around Manhattan. He also had a bunch of summer homes and expensive furnishings. He had limousines, chauffeurs, and servants. If he had bought his real estate rather than rented in those early years, he might have cashed in on the soaring valuations of Manhattan real estate. And if he had taken more investment advice from his robber baron clients, he might have gotten richer without having to work so hard. The result was that after he died in 1995, after the house was sold, and after taxes, lawyers, and other debts were paid, there was about $600,000 to divide between his daughters,

Starting point is 01:17:25 Anne and Doris. Far from the fortune the public and most of his friends assumed that he had, his children remained mystified as to how Eddie managed to die with so few assets. Doris recalls, sometimes later in life, Eddie told me that he hadn't spent his money wisely. It is the only time he ever told me that he hadn't spent his money wisely. It is the only time he ever told me that he regretted anything. And that is where I'll leave it for the full story. Recommend reading the book. If you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes of your podcast player, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. You can also see all the books in reverse chronological order at amazon.com forward slash shop forward slash founders podcast. And if you buy this book

Starting point is 01:18:05 or any of the other books on the list, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. That is 256 books down, 1,000 to go. And I'll talk to you again soon.

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Founders - #256 Edward L. Bernays (Public Relations, Advertising, & Persuasion)

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