My First Million - The 7 Human Hijacks - Covert Marketing Methods the Brain Can't Resist

Episode Date: October 31, 2023

Episode 514: Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) invites Craig Clemens (https://twitter.com/craigclemens) to drop a knowledge bomb based on 15 years and a billion dollars worth of marketing insights. If you want to hear Craig’s backstory check out episode 95 (https://tinyurl.com/jwbb88sd). Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to our YouTube channel here. Want MFM Merch? Check out our store here. Want to see the best clips from MFM? Subscribe to our clips channel here. — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com/ Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Try Shepherd Out - https://www.supportshepherd.com/ • Shaan's Personal Assistant System - http://shaanpuri.com/remoteassistant • Power Writing Course - https://maven.com/generalist/writing • Small Boy Newsletter - https://smallboy.co/ • Daily Newsletter - https://www.shaanpuri.com/ — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (4:00) The Illusion of Choice (7:00) Pepsodent: Make it about them (12:00) Otis: A Powerful Demonstration (24:00) Lucky Strike Cigarettes: Help them rebel (35:00) Great American Breakfast: Unquestionable proof (43:00) NIKE: Sell the dream (49:00) Social campaigns: Verbal Kill Shots (56:00) Probiotics: Creating a category (1:04:00) Recap: 7 Human Hijacks — Links: • Golden Hippo - https://www.goldenhippo.com/ • Craig’s first MFM episode - https://tinyurl.com/jwbb88sd • Pepsodent - https://www.pepsodent.com/  • Otis - https://www.otis.com/ • Lucky Strike - https://www.luckystrike.com/ • Vibram - https://www.vibram.com/ Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. — Other episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto • #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

All right, I'm not jealous of many people on earth, but I think I'm jealous of Craig Clements. Because not only is he built a successful billion dollar company with no outside investors, but he has made hit after hit after hit. And I asked him to come on the podcast. He thought it was just going to be a normal episode. But then when we started talking, I realized that I wanted him to give me a master class. And when he's given it to me, he's giving it to you, which is to teach us the seven ways that he as a marketer has sold over a billion dollars of products online.

he calls these the seven human hijacks. And he goes through example after example of how great products and things that we take for granted, like brushing your teeth or how people eat bacon for breakfast. Those weren't things people did back in the day. It was guys like hip marketers that use specific tactics in order to make those a thing. And if you're an entrepreneur who wants to be successful, you need to be good at marketing. You've got to be able to sell your product and is very rare to be able to sit with somebody like Craig, who's actually one of the best to ever do it and ask him, how did you do it?

I feel lucky he's doing this. He doesn't have to tell us these secrets. Like, you know, I think he's at that sweet spot where he's been running his company for 15 years. He was doing this for a long time. He's, you know, the company's super successful. I don't feel like he has to guard those secrets anymore. So I told him to give him to us. And I don't know about you, but I've had professors in school who have took marketing classes, but those were not people who have actually been in the game, done it. People who have actually created categories, They sold hundreds of millions of dollars of single products that a year ago nobody had never heard of.

And so Craig tells the story of how others did it. And at the end, he tells a story about how he helped create the probiotics category. If you ever had probiotics, you can thank Craig because he was the one who created that category and made it mainstream. So enjoy this marketing masterclass on the seven human hijacks, how marketers have hijacked your brain with Craig Clements. What's up? Dude, I have this theory now of guests who come on the,

podcast, the more their video setup looks like they were either taken hostage or are like, you know, in some motel somewhere, the better the guest is. We had Bologian and he was like, white wall, nothing in the room. And he was just like, you know, at the time he didn't have his video setup. Like, you know, he was out, not on his home video setup. And like the higher your IQ, the worst your video setup. And the opposite is true, unfortunately for me, which is the more HD and beautiful your video set up, the less interesting things you usually have to say. Yes, yes. And the cool thing is you're like the real-life badman.

You're an ad guy and a copywriter who translated those skills into a billion dollars of sales, which is why when you were coming on this time, we started talking and we kind of realized that you have a master class in you. So normally we hang out. We just shoot the shit about business ideas. But occasionally we just drop a knowledge bomb. And the knowledge bomb is what we call a master class, which is just let somebody do their thing for 30 minutes.

And the cool thing about this is you said you had given a, a talk internally to your team, to your company to pump them up. And it sounded so dope that I just said, can you just please do that on the pod? And you agreed. And so my friend, the floor is going to be yours. I'm here when you need me. I might chime in here and there, but I'm really going to let you cook during this and let Craig Clemmas do this masterclass. So take it away. So, Sean, did you brush your teeth this morning? Did you take an elevator or are you wearing sneaks right now? Any, Any yes. One of three ain't bad.

One of three ain't bad. One of three ain't bad. Okay. Well, marketers created all of that. Marketers created so much of our daily behavior that people that I tell these stories, dude, don't even want to accept it. And, you know, it's okay, though. I mean, that's, that's the case for everyone.

You're not alone. So do you know who this guy is on the left here? I do not, but he looks very sophisticated. Who is that? This is a smart motherfucker. This is Sigmund Freud. Oh. And this gentleman on the right, do you know who that is?

I'm guessing you don't. I do not. Okay. Well, this guy has changed your life. This guy is a man named Edward Bernays. He's often called the father of public relations. And he is actually Sigmund Freud's nephew. So I don't know.

What exactly kind of shirt your word over there, Sean, or if you put some style into it. But this guy has his hands and so much stuff that he literally created consumerism. So quick example, before Bernays, people would buy clothes. Unless you were in like the upper classes, people would buy clothes to go to work. He's the one who got together with a bunch of other people. And they were like, wait a second, these work clothes. people aren't buying enough of them. If people use clothing for expression, then people would buy more clothes.

And he got the expression vibe to go all the way down the line from anyone who could afford clothing, to be buying more clothing and then buying more things when they came into season and this and that. Now it's people who don't have the means that buy more clothing they can afford, right? Well, let me just get into some of the examples here and that he'll see that this guy was operating on a level that is unfathomable. So in this presentation, I'm going to share with you what I've discovered, studying and creating marketing campaigns that have caused world change. And I call them the seven human hijacks, because when you use these seven things,

you are hijacking the limbic system of the brain. And a human cannot help themselves but to pay attention. and either respond or at least log what you're going to do or say into their brain and maybe they respond the next time. But these seven hijacks, I'm going to share each of them after I share these marketing campaigns that you're going to see how they repeat. And not every campaign uses all seven, but you'll see that some of them are extremely powerful. And then when you put them all together, that's when you can really do this type of thing yourself.

So if you're watching this right now and you're excited about you possibly changing the world forever, this is the recipe. Let's go. Okay, one of the most interesting marketing campaigns of all time was created by a guide in Claude Hopkins. So Claude Hopkins was approached by a toothpaste company called Pepsident. And they said, Claude, we want to sell more of our toothpaste. And he looked at the lay of the land and he realized there was a problem. He said, said to Pepsidnet, he said, look, only 5% of people brush their teeth on a daily basis. So why are you even in this business that not a lot of people are taking part? Do you believe that? In 1920s, 95% of the women that you kiss are going to have terrible breath. No one brushed their teeth back then. And so Claude tells the founders of Pepsiden, he's like, look, if you guys really want to sell some toothpaste, you're going to have to get people brushing their teeth.

And so he created this masterful ad campaign that built Pepsid into the dominating toothpaste brand for decades. And this is the ad. The ad says the film that discolors the whitest teeth. And then he has you do a demonstration. So do this with me, Sean. Take the tip of your tongue. Put it over the fronts. Put it over this gold fronts you got under there.

Okay. Do you feel that film there on your team? Yeah, I kind of do. Okay. So the ad goes on to say that brushing with Pepsident is going to remove that film. And behind that film is a movie star smile. And it's so genius, right? Because everybody wants that movie star smile.

Everybody has that film, whether you just brush your teeth five minutes ago or not. Then you feel that and you're like, oh, shoot, I got this film, you know. And then it talks about how Pepsidant. is the way to get rid of that film. So the result of this ad, within a decade, 85% of Americans in brush her teeth on a daily basis. And Pepsidant is still around today. They ran this ad campaign for, I don't know, 50 years, something like that. And I'll tell you something interesting is about 10 years in, there was other companies trying to compete with Pepsidant, and they were using a similar ad campaign. You know, it's very common to steal an ad campaign.

but they couldn't get the repeat orders and they did a focus group and they found out that people love pepsidant because it had this like minty flavor that made their mouth tingle after they brushed with it and then the toothpaste companies the other ones started knocking that off

and when people felt the tingle then they would stick with other companies otherwise they'd try the other one they wouldn't feel the tingle and they'd be like oh it's not actually working you know so they'd go right back to pepsidant so they owned it for like 10 years and then it got actually competitive because then people were not only stealing their ads they were stealing uh you know their their secret of the tingle so

the human hijacks that claude hopkins used one he sold the dream of the movie star smile and you're going to see this theme reoccurring throughout this presentation uh second he created a powerful demonstration that anyone could do and that's just rubbing your tongue over the the front of your teeth. And then the next thing he did is he made it about them. He made it about the potential user. And this is a big thing that a lot of companies mess up is they just talk about their own product and, you know, why they're so excited about it. But they don't talk about why it's going to be exciting for the user. And Claude did a really great job of that sharing how it's going to give them that movie star smile. So that's like the, there's this diagram that I love that's like

I call it the Mario marketing. I don't know who originally created this. I saw it from that company Buffer, but I don't know if they created it originally. But it's Little Mario, you know, Mario when he's small, then it's the Fireflower.

And then when Mario gets the Fireflower, he's able to shoot fireballs out of it, you know, out of his hands. He's running around. He's huge. He could shoot fireballs. And basically it says, don't sell this,

the Fireflower, which is your product, sell this, which is the customer going from Little Mario to being Big Mario who could shoot fireballs. Right? And it's like, that's what you want to sell is how the user will be more badass rather than all the features and facets about your product. Yes, exactly.

So think about benefits. What's the benefit? What's in it for them? You know, these people are busy. Right now, Sean, I think people see something like 4,000 ads a day. And they did a study and it showed that the human brain has the same intelligence span as a goldfish. It's like less than, you know, the ability of a goldfish to pay attention. So how do you grab their attention?

Well, you have to talk about something that's exciting to them, something that keeps them up at night or something that they, you know, have a deep dream, hope, and desire for. So I want to get back to that demonstration. Where did Claude get the idea for this demonstration? So 1854, there's a guy named Otis. and Otis gets into the elevator business, and he didn't invent the elevator, but he came up with a braking system for the elevator.

So back then, people were afraid to use elevators because every once in a while, just like today you hear about a car accident, you'd hear about an elevator accident where people get on and the elevator falls down, right? So Otis creates this great braking system. First year out, he only sells three elevators. The next year out, he sells seven elevators.

Like, no one cares, you know, He doesn't have the ability to get the word out. And then he meets this guy named P.T. Barnum. And so everyone probably now knows P.T. Barnum, one of the greatest marketing and showmen of all time. And P.T. Barnum says, this is what we're going to do. We're going to go to the Crystal Palace in New York City, which was this big exhibition hall. And we're going to do a grand demonstration. So Otis gets up there on this elevator shaft.

and he has his assistant get up there with an axe. And so he's standing out of the elevator goes up the shaft just like it normally would at a building. And he's like, cut the cord, Jim, here. He goes, boom, but he cuts the first cord. The elevator drops, like, just a little bit. And then there's one more cord hanging and everyone's looking out. They're like, oh, shit, what's he going to do?

You know, this is the card. And then, boom, it puts actually the second cord. And the elevator, only two feet. and stops. And he's like, all safe here, gentlemen. All safe. And those are like famous words that were published in the newspaper. All safe here.

And it showed that Otis had invented a breaking system for elevators of work. So over the next decade, he sold 2,000 elevators. He got all the greatest commissions. He did the Elefell Tower, the Empire State Building. And even today, if you look at your elevator, I've found about half of the elevators I get into have this little Otis logo. Otis is still crushing. All my zippers, all my zippers say YKK and all my elevator say Otis.

That's the only two things I know. Yeah. So that's the power of a great demonstration. So what did Otis do? The powerful demonstration stands in people's minds. And he also made it an event, you know? So what's great about an event? event. Well, one, people are going to show up and two, it's going to get covered by the newspaper.

But if you think about it on a more primal level, have you ever heard the phrase, Sean, nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd? No, but I like that. One of my favorite sayings, and it just shows that humans cannot resist an event, you know, if you're walking down the street and then you see like a big crowd of people, and something's going on over there and there's a band or whatever, it's like you've got to see what what's going on. It's just natural. And so if you make your advertising an event, then people cannot not pay attention to it. And then he also showed unquestionable proof using that demonstration and putting his own body on an elevator. He didn't use a dummy. He didn't

use a monkey himself was on that elevator while his assistant was was cutting the cords. And so that's the type of unquestionable proof that lead people to go ahead and take an action to buy without questioning it. And of course he made it about them. He didn't get up there and show his fancy braking system or how it worked. He addressed the fear in everyone's mind that was about the safety of getting on an elevator. And he did it with the powerful demonstration. So let me show you something. Hold on.

All right. Do you know this brand, mini katana? Have you seen them, Craig? I have not. All right. So I am about to, YouTube, don't be alarmed. This is, inside here is a giant sword. And this company, so this brand, they sell these, it's called mini katana, but it's actually humongous.

So they sell these swords. Now, the problem with selling swords is that Google and Facebook don't let you do it. You can't advertise weapons. So how does it? an e-commerce brand work when you can't advertise weapons. Well, what they did was they hired like 20 YouTubers and TikTokers, and they would have them do what you just described, the powerful demonstration. So they would take this, they would take this sword and they would, instead of saying,

you know, why you need a sword, because most people don't need a sword, let's be honest, instead of talking about how long it is or how sharp it is or whatever, they would show that the sword could cut through a bullet that was fired at them. So this video starts with a guy's holding the sword. and there's a bullet aimed at him, and he's going to try to split it in half. And then when he does it, it's a powerful presentation about how badass these swords are.

And all of their marketing, they'll take a steak. You just see a steak plop down on a cutting board, and then a giant sword cutting through it, which is completely unnecessary, but it is a powerful demonstration. And, you know, I remember seeing those TED talks where guys take a glass and they, you know,

it's like, here's dirty water. Would you drink this water? It's like, no way. And then they put it into their filter and their bottle filter and then they start to drink it. And I don't know who it was as well as Bill Gates or somebody. Yeah. And it chugs this. You know in the water first, right?

For real. Yeah, exactly. They make it disgusting. And then the whole crowd is gasping. And like they could tell you how the filter works or they could show you that they're willing to drink the water through this filter that was like disgusting water. And I still remember that was like 20 years ago. I still remember that video because it's just high. You're right.

It hijacked my brain. Yeah. The knife company, their genius. Any knife infomercial will do this, but they'll be taking a knife and cutting a penny, you know, or like effortlessly slicing tomatoes through the air. And you know who was the king of this with Dr. Oz?

Dr. Oz, what did he do? Every episode of the Dr. Oz show is a marketing master class. He advertised. Oh, shit. I'm sleeping on Dr. Oz. Yeah, he advertised these nutrients. And I don't know if he had some type of deal with manufacturers or something like that.

But he would advertise like, like resveritral or like garcinia cambosia berries, which were like weight loss. But he wouldn't ever advertise a specific brand. He would just talk about Garcinia Cambosia. If you look, one of the reasons it's hard to advertise supplements online is because Dr. Oz would go and talk about Garcinia Cambosia or whatever berry. And then all these scammers would create websites selling Garcinia Cambodia on auto ship that you could never get out.

You know, you'd sign up on the website, the company would disappear. But that thing would be docking your credit curve for years later. You know, no less than whatever. So Dr. Oz, one of the ones I remember is he'd go on there and he'd say, this is your body and these balloons on it. And then you'd have like a mannequin with balloons on it.

These balloons are the fat cells. Oh, wow. Garsinia, Cambosia is a miracle berry. that works for any body type. And then he'd take out a pin. He'd be like, this is the berry. Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. That's what Garcinia cambosia does to the fat cells in your body.

I didn't even crazy, man. Like a billion dollars of Garcinia Cambodian we stole over the next few months, mostly to these scammy auto billing marketers. It was why. And he did this with like five, different berries over time. And eventually he got pulled into Congress to testify at all this shit.

And like, no way. He was while. He rolled with it because he was getting all these allegations that he was starting him. On one episode, he goes, he gets a camera crew behind him.

And he goes down to one of the companies that's selling the Garcinia, Cambosia. And he knocks on the door and he's got the camera behind him. The founder comes out. He's like, hey, I didn't give your permission to use my name and likeness to sell your Garcinia cambosia.

And like, your auto billing customers and this and that, you know, and he was like pretending that he was the, the good, guy, but I don't know, man. I don't know if like big Farscadia was lining his pockets or something before it happened. But like, this was so many berries and for so many years, it's crazy, man. It was like billions of dollars of fraud happened because of his show. You know, what I love about

this is a lot of the audience who listens to this and a lot of the people I know who are entrepreneurial or technical type engineering type people, often so rational and logical and like sort of analytical about the way that they want to about the way they see the world. And so the idea that, hey, we're going to do this event with the, the axe swinging at the rope or, you know, we're going to blow up these balloons and they'll be like, well, that's not what the fat cell looks like. That's way too big. That's not to scale. You know, like, you have to almost, you have to use the other part of your brain if you're going to do this. You have to make something powerful, visual, dramatic. And those are not skills that typically you're kind of,

operational or technical person is used to flexing. And so what I love about this is these examples that give you inspiration to be able to like go use that other part of your brain. You know, if you look at these, we got the hijacks up here, right, from Otis Elevator. All of these apply to what I just said about Dr. Oz. The event is that it's a TV show. You know, so that makes an event already. The demonstration, the unquestionable proof is him.

He's a doctor saying that this is going to work for you. And then making it about them. he says this is the miracle weight loss cure for all body types. Like those are almost his exact words. And by the way, you know, who else does this amazingly well? Elon. Elon, who's the, you know, the scientist, the hardcore engineer. You know what he's brilliant at?

Just yesterday the news was they're hyping cyber truck right now. And did you see that news that came out, which was that they unloaded a full magazine of some assault rifle at the door. And so there's a bunch of holes in the door. Like, you could see where the bullet hit the door. but didn't go through. And so he's driving that car around and leaked that kind of the tweet rumor that, hey, they tested it this way.

And he did this at their on stage event too, but it fucked up. Like he tried to take a sledgehammer and show how indestructible this was. He swung the sledgehammer. And then they like broke through the window. And he's like, oh, shit, that wasn't supposed to happen. Like this was supposed to be bulletproof. But he was trying to do that. He was trying to, you know, P.T. Barnum, you know, their cyber truck, which is,

which is really, really cool to see. Yeah. You know what was another incredible success that I think was complete bullshit? Was the power balance bracelet? Do you remember those? It was like- Dude, I was thinking about when you did the tongue on the teeth, that's the first thing I thought of. Where people you say, hey, hold out your arms.

Yeah. And now watch how easy, go on one foot, watch how easily I could tip you over. And then you put this bracelet on. And now you can't be able of which way you press on the arm. Totally, totally. I was a doctor recently and he was doing that with me. And I was like, oh, God. Am I getting steamed by this chiropractor?

But yeah, I think power balance actually got popped for that as they deserved. But that was a very effective technique, even though it was, you know, unethical in that case. Yeah. Okay, let's get into some. So those last two are for good, right? We want people to brush your teeth. We want elevators to be safe. Now let's talk about some evil campaigns.

All right. Well, okay, 1930s, all the men had come back from the war, you know, and they gave him free cigarettes. So, like, so many men were hooked on smoking that there was no room for growth. So the cigarette company has come to Eddie Bernays, Lucky Strike in particular, as who came to him. And they're like, hey, we need more customers. He's like, well, you already got all the men. But at that time, Sean, it was illegal for a woman to smoke in public. It was literally fucking illegal.

And there was like cafes in New York City where, you know, there's, there's stories of, of like high society women getting asked to leave. And then women that could afford it would have like special smoking rooms in their homes that would, you know, that really liked it because they weren't allowed to do it in public. Oh, and I should add something too. Women didn't really want to smoke for the most part. You know, they weren't really pushing back against it. Yes, it was illegal, but it was also considered a ladylike. It was a man thing, you know. So he says to Lucky Strike, he's like, look, you know, you got to get the women smoking. So what was going on at the time was the women's rights movement, you know, so women were out in the streets marching

about, you know, wanting the right to vote. And, and Berners capitalized on that. So the big social event of the day, kind of like the Oscars of today, was the Easter parade, which would go down Fifth Avenue and all the reporters would be standing on the sidelines. And so Bernays organized a float. And he called up all of the socialites and debutants like the Paris Hilton's and Kim Kardashian's of the day. And he got them all to go on this float. And they're cruising down Fifth Avenue. The parade's happening. And you know, when they get to the corner where all the reporters were, the women go into their stocking. They put. pull out cigarettes, put them in their mouths and light them up.

So imagine, you know, Paris and Chloe and all the Kardashians and even all the Jenners on one float, they all just start blazing up, right? And the recording's like, what is going on here? This is obscene, you know, women aren't supposed to do this. Bernays and his crew went around to the reporters and they said, oh, no, no, no. They're not smoking. they are declaring their rights with these torches of freedom. Oh, wow.

And so the newspapers ran with that. They're like, you know, women present torches of freedom to show that they are equal with men and they can smoke too. And so turned it into a movement. And if you think about smoking to this day, if you think about a woman who smokes, I think of a bit older than you, Sean, but I think of like Cape Moss and like the, you know, sexy model smoking.

Now it might be considered gross for a woman to smoke again, you know, or anyone to smoke. I don't really know what the kids these days are thinking. But yeah, you know, you think of like some like badass, badass woman. And you remember that old movies with Audrey Hepburn, you know, that famous scene.

I think it's Breakfast in Tiffany's where she's puffing that long cigarette, you know. So, yeah, completely changed a world there. That's amazing. I had never heard that story, but I love that. That's like a combination of you got the event, you have kind of news jacking, which was jumping on to an existing trend, but then also just the copywriting of the words there of, you know, these aren't cigarettes.

These are torches of freedom. That's really, really powerful. Yeah, the plants. If you like that plant strategy, Ryan Holliday wrote a great book called, Trust Me, I'm lying. And he talks about all these phrases that he planted it. in the heads of these reporters when he was promoting things like

Tucker Max books and, you know, wild stuff back. So there's a new lesson in here, new hijacked, so to speak, and that is help them rebel or feel superior. So people have this tendency in them, they want to go against the grain.

They want to show that they are not one of the sheep. You know, they want to show that they are not going to bow down to the mainstream pressure or society. standards, things like that, you know? And this is a really powerful concept that you're going to see appear throughout some of the other demonstrations here. But that's what Bernays allowed them to do is to rebel and maybe even feel superior to the rest because they're leading the

charge. Right. Okay, keep going. By the way, I'm loving this. So keep going. All right. So Brnay's had a problem. Lucky Strike did this big campaign to get women to start smoking and they did start smoking, but they didn't smoke Lucky Strikes. Because if you remember, boop, boop, boop, see the Lucky Strike package there, Sean? What color is the main color?

It's green. Well, green was a very undesirable color back in those days. It was considered an ugly color. And so Bernays got all these women smoking, but Lucky's like, what the fuck? Berners? They're not smoking lucky strikes. So he has to come up with something new.

So he goes back to his debutantes and socialites. And as they say here, women of prominence. And they create the first ever gala green ball at the Waldorf Hotel in New York City. And the magazines started following around the Kardashians of the day to see what type of outfits they were going to wear that were styled and green. And women started bringing green decor into their homes. and it just became a big thing and the gala happens and the women are photographed

and their exotic greed outfits and it became the most fashionable color within one year going from the ugliest color of the most fashionable color and Lucky Strike without even trying became the number one selling brand of cigarettes for women because they subconsciously wanted

that green box. Holy shit. Wow. Is one of the hijacks by the way using people of prominence or you don't include that in the hijacks? Unquestionable proof. That falls under unquestionable proof. It's a great question.

But yes, when we humans see someone, as they just said in the New York Times article, someone of prominence doing something, we automatically assume it's been vetted. We automatically assume it's okay and we automatically add something in us that makes us want to do that. Maybe it's from when we were all in tribes

and you know, if the chief is doing something, then you do it too? Who knows? But that's unquestionable proof, you know? And so, you know, he made an event where this unquestionable proof happened. And also, there was this force that, that they wanted to rebel against. You know, these celebrities are like, oh, I'm cool enough where I can wear green and it'll look good, you know? You know, I heard this other other thing, Sean, today. So how old are you? Are you public with your age? Yeah, yeah, I'm 35. 35. Okay, I'm 44. So when you think of emojis, what do you think about?

When I think of emojis? Yeah, like, who do you think uses emojis? I would have said, like, teenagers, teens and tweens. But then I see people in India, like my aunt and my aunts and my aunts are crazy about emojis. Yes. I would have thought the same. So my buddy is a dad that two teenagers. He said they will not use emojis because they think emojis are something adults use.

They do not want to be. associate with the adults. So kids these days, they don't use emojis. They'll just use like different text characters and things like that. So you've probably seen these little like one to two or sorry, two to three character terms that they use like TBH or like, you know, it stands for to be honest or FR, which means like for real. You know, they use those type of things to separate themselves from the adults. You know, people want to push back. It's a natural human instinct. Yeah. When Snapchat came out was getting really popular.

One of the things that I remember in Silicon Valley, all the product genius blogger guys were like, yeah, it's, you know, what Snapchat should do is make it easier to use because look at this. at the time, like, you know, to use those face filters. You had to like, there was no button on the screen. You had to just hold down on your face for three seconds, like a magic trick, like a secret door that you didn't know, that nobody else knew about. Or even just in signing up, there was like all these like funky ways to do it.

And, and then the people, I think one of the guys at Snapchat came out. was like, look, it's intentional. We want, you know, you baby proof medicine. We're boomer proofing this app. Like, the way that this is going to become really popular amongst young people is that we don't make it easy for older people to get in and figure out how this whole thing works. And we want to make it easy for one friend to tell another the secret on how to do something

so that they feel like they're in on it with them. And it's like a word of mouth virality of how do you do that? Exactly. It's like, once your parents and your grandma got on Facebook, it wasn't cool anymore. You know? Right. And then everyone went to Instagram. And now, you know, Uncle Bob's on Instagram and it's just like, lose to the type, you know,

so everyone goes over to TikTok, right? And we'll see if something comes next. You know, I think the moms are, well, moms are definitely a big group on TikTok now. I don't know if like, I don't know, are you on TikTok? I'm not. I have like a strong. Yeah, I got to admit. I love TikTok even though, you know, it's my lucky strike.

I know I probably shouldn't be smoking that TikTok every night, but I do. Well, you know, TikTok is crack. It is digital crack. Very well-designed digital crack. So don't blame yourself. People say that. But like when I think when they say that, they mean avoid it. And I'm like, wait, cracks.

Like, isn't crack supposed to be like the greatest experience when people do it? And then I open up TikTok and I start swiping. Yeah. Well, you know, actually speaking of drugs, funny enough, but there's another rebellion I'm saying in in my community against alcohol right now. And I remember in my 20s that it was all about the alcohol. You know, if you didn't show up, if you should have a problem. party empty-handed, you know, it's like not cool. I've gone to parties now with a bottle and they'd be like,

oh, this is a non-alcoholic party. Can you go put that back in your car? It's like this miserable pushback, you know. I hope you brought some ketamine. Yeah, exactly. Okay. Last campaign I'm going to share with you about Eddie Bernays is the Great American Breakfast. So, early in the, you know, 19th century, 20th century breakfast was like some coffee and maybe a roll or some oatmeal or something like that, right? No one actually had like an actual hearty breakfast. And beech nut bacon comes to bird a day and they're like, hey, we want to sell more bacon. He's like, well, people are eating bacon usually for dinner. Sometimes for lunch, there's another meal here we can take advantage of. So Bernays goes to his on-staff doctor, or actually, no, it was a beach that's on-staffed doctor, and he says, hey, doc, would you agree that a hearty breakfast containing bacon would be the best way to start your day?

And the doctor is like, oh, of course I agree with you. Do you think some of your doctor friends would agree? So he has him write 5,000 letters to doctors across the nation. I think bacon is the healthiest breakfast and people should be eating a heartier breakfast. Do you agree? 4,500 doctors wrote back and they're like, yes, I agree. That makes perfect sense. They didn't turn this into an ad campaign, but what they did do is they shared that result with all of the newspapers.

And so newspapers started publishing headlines. Doctors agree a hearty breakfast containing bacon is the best way to store energy to last throughout your work day. And, but that's how people started eating, eating bacon for breakfast. And, you know, all the, all the bacon companies started going crazy because it became a breakfast thing. Wow. So what are we doing here?

We're selling the dream, you know, of a breakfast that's going to give you more energy to get throughout your day, you know, so that's making it about them as well. The unquestionable proof, 4,500 doctors can't be wrong, right? And then there's even a little bit of, uh, uh, uh, feeling superior here because if your buddy is over there eating a roll, you're like, hey, Sean, got something to tell you about that roll, man. It's not as hardy. Is this your bacon?

Right. So it taps into all these same psychological hijacks. You keep seeing them over and over. Okay, so let's take a step back now a couple decades to the 1910s. Orange juice. Now, I grew up in the 80s, and my mom had to, drink orange juice every day for vitamin C. Was this a thing, Sean, when you were a kid?

Totally. Totally. Orange juice is good. When I was a kid, orange juice is good for you. It's vitamin C, which is, you know,

good for your immunity. This is what I was told and, uh, drink a lot of sugar because of that. Yeah. So orange juice actually has a same amount of sugar as a Coca-Cola. So orange juice is, you know,

it's glucose or something. I don't know. Maybe it's a different kind of sugar, but it ain't good for you. So this was all the, the result of a marketing, man named Albert Lasker, who was probably the man responsible for more consumer change in the early 1900s than anyone. Claude Hopkins, Pepsinet. Clawed actually worked with Albert.

He was his top copywriter. And prior to Claude coming on board, Albert was contacted by the California Growers Association. They're like, Albert, we get so many oranges here in California. We're having to cut down trees because they overproduced and that we need to get rid of them it brings the bugs and all that stuff. You know, how can we sell more oranges? And he looked at the lay of land and all these orange growers were competing against each other, trying to say, like, we have the best orange, we have the best orange or whatever. He goes, okay, first of all, you guys are all teaming up.

And so he teamed all up together and he put them under one brand name. And he called it SunKist, which I think is a pretty genius name. Yes. And then as he's meeting with him, he notices that what the growers would do for their kids as a special treat is they take that orange and they, they'd squeeze it into a cup and they'd give their kids little, little shots of the juice. He's like,

ah, wait a second, how many oranges did it take to make that juice? And they're like, oh, you know, three or four or whatever. So you thought,

what if we could make that mainstream? Because the juice tasted really good. And so he had a, uh, engineer invent this device that you could, you know, cheap plastic device that you can put an orange on. And then he created this campaign,

talking about how oranges have all these vitamins in them and will help you get more of your nutrients from food tying orange juice to meals. So you think about, oh, well, I want to get the nutrients from this food, so I'm going to drink orange juice with it. And then you have this campaign where you buy a box of oranges and you send in your proof of purchase and they send you this juicer thing.

So it was like you get something for free and created orange juice. And so what does he do? He's selling the dream of getting the more nutrients. from your food. The unquestionable proof, you know, if you go to actually read that ad, there was like, you know, doctors recommend and things like that. He made it about them because it's showing them that they can get some benefit here. And then there's a new I-Jack that's appearing for the first time. Actually, maybe, I mean, I guess it would apply to toothpaste, but change daily behavior. If you can change someone's daily behavior, you can create something big.

So two modern examples of this, bulletproof coffee. Are you familiar with bulletproof coffee? I'm just familiar with it from the surface level, but yeah, tell me, tell me about it. You know what, do you know what it is? It's like the butter coffee or the oil coffee, MCT oil coffee, is that what it is? So you walk into any Starbucks in the country. They don't serve bulletproof coffee, but they know what it is. Everyone knows what it is.

And the genius that Dave Asprey had was he changed the behavior of these people that, we're already doing something. He kind of like intercepted their coffee. It's an additive to your coffee rather than a new, new behavior. So now he's changing the existing behavior. Yes, changing the existing behavior. And so there's a book called The Miracle Morning and it talks about the power of journaling every day. So you buy this book called The Miracle Morning and then you do this specific journal every day, right, long after you read the book.

And I met the author of that Hal Elrod. And he told me something that stuck with me I thought was fascinating. He said, when it was last time you recommended a book? And I was like, well, I just read this book on Genghis Khan. You know, I've been telling all my friends about it or whatever. He was like, when were you telling them about it? I was like, well, I was telling them about it when I was reading it. He said, okay, well, most people recommend books during the time they're reading that book.

And then they go and they read the next book. Right now I'm reading Elon's biography. It's great. That's why I just told you about that, Sean. I'm literally in the middle of it. You know, I can tell you what book I read last month or last year. People talk about the things they're doing now. So if you change their daily behavior like Hal did with getting people to journal in the

morning, they talk about it all the time. So that book has sold hundreds of thousands of copies or maybe even millions by now, because this is 10 years ago when he told me this, because people are doing this behavior every day. And so they're talking about it every day. They're like, oh, what did you do today? Oh, I just did my morning miracle journaling. Like, oh, what's that?

You know, so long after the book is through it. So if you change the daily behavior, it has a viral effect that is untouchable by anything else. Love that. Okay. So let's get to some more modern examples. The 1970s. Sean, do you know who this guy is? No, some runner.

I don't know who it is. Okay. So this guy's before our time, but a gentleman's name, Steve Prefontein. And Prefontein was best comparison. I can think of is like the Michael Phelps of his time. You know, no one was really thinking about swimming until Michael Phelps came around who was such a dominant athlete from the USA, you know, so everyone wanted to get behind him. So Prefontein was that guy for running and Prefontein had all these great quotes like Maham at L.A. Ali, he's like, you know, yeah, someone can beat me, but if you're

going to beat me, you're going to have to bleed, you know. And he was like, you know, if you don't run until you feel like you're going to, you're going to die, you're not honoring your gift, you know. So he had all these great quotes. He was a great media figure. He won every college record from like 500 meter up to 2,000 meter. Prefontein was the man. And Nike was just coming up. They'd actually just started like going from being at a distributor making their own shoe.

And fortunately, Prefontein was in Oregon. So were they. And they got him to wear their shoes. And it was a big thing because the unquestionable proof now, you've got prefontaine Prefontein, the top runner in the country, wearing Nike shoes. Tragically, Prefontein passed in a car accident before he could go and honor his Olympic glory. But before he did that, he really put Nike on the map because, you know, running was his thing, running what's the one accessory that you need, shoes.

And so this was such a big deal that it actually changed the entire industry. So prior to Prefontein, Prefontein was around in like the 70s, right? If you read Phil Knight's book, he talks about if you went jogging in like the 40s, 50s or 60s, people were like throwing bottles at you from your car because they're just like mad. They're like, what is this idiot doing? You know, he's in the road or whatever. And it was just like really hated upon. And Prefontaine comes along and running actually becomes cool again.

And so Nike got to ride that tailwind. And then what also happened is back then people were wearing shoes that were like, you know, kind of like the loafer or work shoe or whatever, like pretty basic shoes. And people wanted to rebel against that, rebel against the shoes that their dad was wearing. And so they started wearing these athletic shoes, these running shoes, as a part of their daily attire to make a statement that like, I'm rebelling and I'm superior. and it changed the entire shoe market. Now athletic shoes are probably the best-selling shoe,

and only a tiny percent of them are worn for athletic activities. And then it all started in the 70s with Prefontein. And then, of course, Nike had the amazing campaign with Jordan, which was more unquestionable proof, you know, making them feel superior because they got the best basketball shoe and sell the dream that they're going to be able to fly like Mike. So that was a world-changing. campaign that not a lot of people think about when they put on their kicks every morning,

you know? You know, one of those that I feel like is happening right now in a small way. So you remember like, I don't know, 10 years ago or something like that, those vibram five-finger shoes were like getting popular. Do you remember those? Yeah. So like, you would see one and you'd be like, what is this person wearing a foot glove? Like, what is this thing?

And then they would immediately go into the spiel about why this is better for you and like how they do whatever. And I think this is like, I've seen this a lot now. there's a popular YouTuber or Instagram guy called Knees Over Toes Guy. And he's basically like, it's like a rebellion. He's like, have any of you ever been told when you're working out? Like, don't let your knee go over your toe when you're squatting because it's bad form. He's like, bullshit.

Like, I had all these knee surgeries. Nobody could tell me how to fix it. I fixed it myself because I started training that way specifically. So it's like a rebellion against the fitness industry. Then he's like a rebellion against Nike because now Nike's the big bad, like the incumbent. And so he's like, Nike shoes, those are like wearing high heels. You know, you shouldn't have these like huge healed shoes.

You should have low drop, flat shoes, basically. And so he came out with his own shoe, but also there's just like a bunch of these brands now that are kind of like flat, more like you're walking barefoot shoes. Like you're walking on the ground. And it's funny that like now Nike is the big kind of status quo that they want to rebel against and point out why you shouldn't be wearing Nike shoes. of this other reason. 5,000 doctors agree that the Nike, you know, cushion is actually bad for you. So, yeah. So, you know, a big one was MacBook launched this ad that was called 1984 and it aired during the Super Bowl.

And it was a big rebellion against IBM. Everyone was using these IBMs and MacBook came out and they're like, where the new thing, you know? And I think I got the idea from this Volkswagen ad right here. So Volkswagen, when they came out, I think it was in the 60s, all those cars, cars were huge. You know, if you think of like the 67 Chevys, you know, these huge cars that you couldn't get into a parking spot and had all this extra stuff on them that you didn't need, they came out with this think small campaign that absolutely crushed it. And it was like the hipster statement at the time was to drive a VW bug, you know, and made one of the best selling cars. There's another ad that just came out from someone who's a master of this. that's Trump. So this is another video that I would suggest you play if you can because it's really fascinating and they show Hillary talking about how the Trump people have to be deprogram. Who you seen this ad? It just came out like two days ago. No, I haven't seen it. So what is it?

With Trump taking a commanding lead and Bidenomics hurting American families, genius Hillary Clinton has come up with a way for Biden to win. There needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members. Formal deprogramming of the cult members. Deep programming, deep programming of the cult members. A brilliant plan. And here's what that would look like. Pay attention.

Joe Biden will defeat him. Biden has done an amazing job. Amazing job. But there's one small problem. The basket of deplorables. Horrible. Working Americans aren't idiots, and they know who's on their side.

To American workers watching their take home pay shrink and watching inflation destroy their family and their lives, to all of you, I have your back. I'm Donald J. Trump, and I approve this message. That's so well done. I mean, love Maritam. The man is a master. marketer and he just rallies his base to rebel against, you know, the, the, um,

incumbents. What's the word? The, the elites, the kind of the status quo. Yeah. Do you think, uh, like in this case, do you think Trump has input on any of that or this is just they hire some ad agency that does these things? Like, is he the master marketer or he has to be hiring master marketers? I mean, I mean, he makes the sound bites, you know.

That sound bite, I think, was live from a speech that they plugged that. At least it looks like it was. And, you know, a lot of times these speech writers, they think about that. So there's a famous speech, Obama did, yes, we can. Do you remember that speech? Yep, yep. Of course. That was a huge one.

When the speech writer first presented Obama with, yes, we can, Obama didn't like it. He didn't want to give that speech. He thought it was too basic. like, I don't want to repeat the same thing over and over. You know, the audience deserves something more intelligent. And they had to convince him to do this, yes, we can speech.

Presented as a rally cry and finally, like, okay, fine. You know, it goes out and gives a speech. And that's soundbite, man. I think it was, uh, will I am, turn that into that music video that went crazy, you know? Right. It's just, uh, a really powerful soundbite. And, and I find it

the best politician, end of speaking in sound bites. Yeah, which is what makes Trump so effective at what he's doing. The blogger Scott Adams, if anybody wants to get a go deeper on this, the blogger Scott Adams, who created Dilbert, when Trump was running in 2016 and nobody thought he would win. Scott Adams was one of the first people I saw that came out and was like, oh, not only can he win, he will win in a landslide, which is what happened. And he explained, he goes, Trump has verbal kill shots.

You know, he has these phrases that he'll say about opponents where he'll be like low energy, Jeb Bush. And then you can never look at Jeb again and see anything but low energy. And Jeb's so offended by it that he feeds energy into that. Like, you know, he starts to be flustered by it. And then he starts to try to up his energy and then Trump will pat him on the head. Be like, well, at least you're trying to try now, Jeb. Yeah, that's good.

You're trying to pick up your energy. I like that. And he would just destroy candidates with like, you know, crooked Hillary. you know, he would just brand people in a one-shot kill with these phrases. And even the one you, that video you just showed, the kind of I have your back. Like, you know, he's very, very good at just repeating simple messages and branding himself one way and positioning himself against the others the other way. All right.

So the 80s, here's a force for good. So did you know, Sean, the phrase. have one for the road. Do you know where that came from? No, but now that I think about it, it's kind of a fucked up phrase, huh? So I would think that the worst use of that phrase would be go and have one and then go drive,

but it actually meant take a beer in your car and drink it while you're driving away from wherever you're going, right? So drunk driving was out of control and a campaign was created, friends don't let friends drive drunk. And it had three things to do. Drive your friend home,

have your friend sleep over, or call a cab, you know. And this cut drunk driving in half. It was something like a 40 to 50% drunk driving decrease when this started going around. That's like,

Craig, if I say the phrase, this is your brain on drugs, what do you think of? Yeah, you think of that, fried egg, a powerful demonstration, right? An egg hitting a frying pan, sizzling.

Like, yeah, that was how long ago? That was, like, it had to have been, I was a kid. Like, I was, that was 20 plus years ago, and it still has hijacked my brain where if I, if I see an egg, I think about drugs, or if I hear this is your brain on drugs, I hear the egg, right? Like, that, that is so powerful how that worked. These powerful demonstrations are unforgettable. You'll never look at a sword and not think about the sword slicing through the bullet.

Yeah. There's something about it. that it really sticks in the human mind. Maybe it's a way we are taught how to learn, you know. I have a daughter now, and she's learning physics, not the way I think of physics, and it's not something I thought, but, you know, you have kids too. You see how they learn the way blocks fit together and gravity and all of this. You know, it teaches you a lot about how the human brain learns.

And if you think about what these demonstrations are, they're really physics demonstrations. So it's like, that's how we've been learning since AIDS, zero, you know? And we need that foundational physics to survive. And you really notice it in babies. Like, they need to know that if they're crawling and there's something here, that it's going to hurt if they hit it. Like, it's so basic. But the kids don't know that they actually have to learn that, you know? And you think about, I always always like, why don't we remember anything before we're five years old? And I think it's because the brain is optimizing to learn physics. I think the physics are just so important that you just like we don't need memory right now.

Physics are like fundamentals. But if you don't know physics, you're going to fucking die. Like just, you know, walking down the street, right? Right. So it's all physics. I think these are like new physics lessons that we find really fascinating. Um, you know what else people are really interested in is these, uh, they call them ASMR videos. Oh, 100%. The dude, stooping things that are happening. We do this as an ad for my ecom brand. So I was watching TikToks and there's these TikToks that are these soothing ASMR things. The ones that I was watching were like a bottle. There's a bottle filled with sand or marbles.

So I think it was marbles. And they would roll the glass bottle down a set of cement stairs. So you hear like the clink rolling like a glass bottle rolling sound. Then you hear the clink as it hits the stair. And then by the second or third stair, it cracks. And then you hear marbles bouncing like in synchronicity like down the stairs. And for some reason, these videos always have like 10 million. 10 million views on them just because they're like oddly satisfying to watch and people just love that combination of the visual plus the sound and so we took that and we remix that with our product basically we we've integrated it in with our product so that the video starts with that rolling thing and then we just sort of hijack the video and show our product upon the smash and way more people watch that than if we just start with our product even though it's a complete bait and switch that's interesting yeah I mean if you go off to someone on the street and be like hey

do you love physics? Do you want to study physics? Like, no, but that's actually not the truth. Humans love physics. We all love physics. We're obsessed with physics. And it starts at age zero. Interesting. So yeah, so this had to prevent drunk driving did the, you know, all these same things. And it worked.

So, okay, so here's a modern story. So 2010, when we were starting Golden Hippo, So my brother comes to me and he says, hey, have you, you heard of probiotics. And I hadn't. And I was like, what are those? And he says, well, you know, you got all these bacteria in you. And I was like, okay, what do you mean? He's like, you know, your microbiome.

I'm like, what's that? You know, he goes on to tell me that, you know, you take these probiotics, which are good beneficial bacteria, it's supposed to do something, right? So I take them. And I started having a lot more regular poops. I don't know who, what I was eaten before, but they started working. And I was like, why, why is this affecting me? I'm a pretty healthy guy.

I'm a pretty good shape. This is actually helping me out. And I started looking into it. And I realized that all of these foods I was eating that I thought were healthy because they said low fat or whatever on them had sugars or artificial sweeteners or things like that pumped into them from the food companies. And they were on the labels under different names. So you don't know what they are, you know. like sucralose or right

you know agave nectar things like that you know like you you would say zero sugars on the label but the ingredients would have these substitutes yeah yeah but it's got agave it's got corn syrup it's got like natural fruit juices you know all those things are sugars and so

I started digging into this and there was some shady stuff man there was some some experiments done where like like, you know, the sugar companies would, would pay a farmer to, you know, food is very expensive for livestock. And farmers always dreamed that they could give their livestock sugar instead of food. And they'd be able to use that as a nutrient so they could stop this big food expense. And like, they do that.

And they'd try it. And then they'd try to, okay, well, let's take the food and let's add sugar and see what happens. And then the cows would still die. And then they bury the studies, right? And the artificial sweetener things were even worse. So there was a company, G.D. Searle, that invented artificial sweetener called Aspartame, it's now known as Nutrisweet.

What a lot of people don't know is when they, he came up with his artificial sweetener, they knew it would be a billion-dollar product because the sweetener market had already been built out. They started testing it on lab animals and that lab animals were growing tumors. And the scientists got popped to the first time ever, the government filed criminal charges against a food company for falsifying studies because the scientists were cutting the tumors out of the animals and sewing them back up and saying, oh, no tumors here.

And they got caught doing that. Wow. And so I found out about all this and I was just like completely mystified. And so I wrote this presentation about this and I talked about probiotics and how a way to combat the artificial Swedeners. and sugars that are being pumped into your foods, that it'd be impossible for you to discover them all, you know, is to add good bacteria

because those, you know, the bad bacteria growth that happens because of all this consumption that makes the bad bacteria get really frothy, need to be offset by good bacteria. And so I put this video together, and it went absolutely bananas. So it was seen by probably, you know, 100 million people.

It's hard to track. But the last we checked, there was over 100 million. And this is in a period of about four months. Joe Rogan tweeted it out. And someone wrote, they're like, hey, Joe, do you realize this is actually an advertisement for a probiotic? And he wrote back, oh, yeah, you know, I didn't see that until the end. I tweeted out before I got to the end of the video.

But you should see it to watch it or something like that. You know? And it created the biggest probiotic brand. in the world at the time. And it was because of this educational component showing people that your food supplies messed up and you have something called a microbiome that's getting affected by your food supply. And one way to aid that is with probiotics. And so if you look at the Google trends, which we didn't have in the 20s, you know, I'm sure if we could do this for Google, For the 20s, like, you know, cigarettes, right?

You see a big spike after the Easter Day parade, right? Or VW bug, you'd see the big spike after the Think Small campaign. Well, we have this now. So if you look at probiotics, you know, probiotics, we're gaining some steam here. And here's where our ad comes online is key biotics, was our brand. So look at the general spike in probiotics. Okay, so what happened there? Well, you can see basically the day we get kicked off of Google.

And it goes down. And you see the trend line goes down too. But then you see it goes back up again. And, you know, this is what we lost our next probiotic, grand perfect biotics. You know, did okay. It wasn't the huge bangor of success that that key biotics was. But fear not.

met a guy named Dr. Gundry in 2016. We lost a brand with him. And look at these spike lights. Look at the probiotic spike lines compared with the term Gundry. And the reason people were

synchronized. Some days is when the campaigns would be running really strong. You know, the video is running a lot. That's where the searches would go crazy. And that was because Dr. Gundry is out there

with our education educational presentations talking about the microbiome and talking about probiotics and prebiotics and really just educating the world on this stuff and You know we didn't bring probiotics to America or or anything like that But I like to think we were probably a company that taught more people than anyone about the microbiome and now You know the probiotic trends you know keeps keeps going and I think it just keeps going up into the right if you if you find the current data you know and by now the market has changed. You know, I talked about, I did a Twitter thread, a way of the back, where I talked about the three stages of a product market.

So there's clueless, which is when you need to create the marketing wave, because your market knows nothing about the product, right? So back then, when I started, no one knew anything about probiotics. So if I just said, like, hey, here's probiotics, try them out. No one would have cared. But I started with something they did care about was like, is your digestion messed up? Are you having irregularity at the bathroom?

Well, here's the reason why. And then the next stage of the market is curious where someone's probably heard the term probiotics and you can jump in. And so while my ads in 2013, 2014 were starting with digestive health, I had an ad in 2018, I believe it was. And the headline was,

doctor says throw your probiotics in the trash. And enough people knew about probiotics by then, they were like, oh, that's, wait, wait, error, these are good for you, you know? Right. And then you click on in it, and it goes on to talk about, oh, most probiotics don't have enough strains of potency, and also, you know, prebiotics are important and this and that, you know. So that's just knowing the market where it was and where you need to jump in.

And then the next level, the market is saturation. And that's kind of where the probiotics market is now. I'm not watching new probiotics. every time I go to conference someone comes up to me like I'm launching a probiotic I mean good luck you know it's pretty commoditized by now

but there's still some that have broken through with strong campaigns amazing and so these are the seven hijacks I'll read them out here so number one make it about them so that's make it about the customer and the benefits that they're going to get number two make it an event

that's the you know nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd then number three is a powerful demonstration so that's the PT Baranum That's the elevator with the axe. That's the sword cutting through the bullet. That's the drinking dirty water.

Show unquestionable proof. So that's using experts like doctors or influencers. Plus, you know, like you said, he was willing to be in the elevator while the thing was cut. You know, that's a demonstration of proof. Five, change a daily behavior. And I think this was changed an existing daily behavior. Is that right? Or is it change any daily behavior?

I mean, it could be either, you know? Okay. So. And so this is like bulletproof getting you to add something into your coffee, something you were already doing or like breakfast, having a hearty breakfast as the start of your day versus, you know, just a coffee in a bread roll. Yeah. So we hijacked, Dave, hijacked to the daily behavior.

And what we did with probiotics is we change the daily behavior. We encourage them to take something every day. So then six is sell the dream. that's the movie star smile that's underneath that film. If only you would start brushing your teeth or this is Craig pooping regularly because he now takes, you know, probiotics, prebiotics. That's the dream. And the number seven is help them be a rebel or feel superior. And so that's, you know, be able to stick a middle finger to the man, whoever the man is, whether it's Nike or it's, you know, women not having equal rights or whatever.

give them the tools and the badge to feel like they're superior in a rebellion, a part of a rebellion. That's right. Amazing. Well said. Well said. You're a fine student. Yeah. Well, this is, I mean, the stuff that's in here is, I guess like this is rare in two ways. Number one, I took marketing classes in college and I had marketing professors. None of my marketing professors had ever done what you did. They never created a category. They never did a billion dollars in sales. They never sat there and crafted, you know, even this presentation. When we talked three days ago, it was going to be like, marketing throughout the decades. And you were like, no, that's not going to be the title. I got to think of something good. You come back with seven

human hijacks, how marketers have hijacked your brain. And I'm like, oh, God, just seeing you go from two days ago with no title or a shitty working title to like a really strong title is seeing somebody in action or hearing what you did with the probiotics market. So number one, the opportunity to have a teacher who's actually a master of the game is so rare. So obviously I'm sitting up in my seat. I'm paying attention. Number two, any one of these, like I'm thinking, as you were talking, my brain was like having almost a hard time listening because I'm firing ideas for any of my companies on like,

oh, a powerful demonstration. How could we show this in a way that's exaggerated and would almost be kind of shocking. It's drama to what we're doing versus just saying the feature or saying it's good. Like, now, how could we, like, do a powerful demonstration that would give people unquestionable proof, right? So I couldn't even, like, stop my brain from moving while I'm doing this. Now, that's, I don't know, that's the entrepreneur in me, but I think there's a lot of people who are listening that are like that. That, like, if you paid attention to this, even one of these hijacks could, like, literally, like, change the trajectory of your company. So anyways, I appreciate you putting this together.

This is kind of a, this is amazing to me. I don't know how other people are going to feel about this, but, like, as is the only student in the room, right now, I was, you know, I'm pumped about this. This is, this is great. I appreciate the kind words. And, you know, as they say, if you could change the life of just one person, right, then your job is complete. So I'll take it. All right. Well, you did it. This has been a masterclass, uh, for sure. So thanks for, thanks for watching. That's the pod. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off on a road. Let's travel. Never looking back.