Stuff You Should Know - Live in Chicago: How Public Relations Works

Episode Date: November 26, 2015

After a year of taking it on the road, Josh and Chuck are releasing their show on public relations. Learn all about the ways you're manipulated on a daily basis and the man who invented it in this fascinating live episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and we are here live at the beautiful

Athenian Theater in Chicago, Illinois. ["Aethenian Theater"] Very nice. We should say, this sold out Athenian Theater. Thank you, Chicago. We feel very loved here. And big thanks to the Athenian, you guys have been awesome, and AEG, the promoters.

Let's do this, buddy. Man, I'm sweating already. Good Lord, what's wrong with me? It's all right. It's a hot show. Hot, hot show. Right, everybody? And it's me. Let's be honest. Well, you're a hot, hot podcaster. Did we say who is who, by the way? Oh, I think everyone knows. You guys know, right, that that's Chuck and I'm Josh.

There's a spelt handsome guy and there's a chubby bearded guy. We really like to keep ourselves on opposite ends of the spectrum. Jerry is not here. I'm sorry. Jerry is not here. That is so sweet of you guys. I know. Every time we say Jerry is not here. And cheers when she is here.

I wish we could say why, but we'll announce it soon. She has some top secret business going on. Yeah, that's not cryptic at all. Yes. She's leaving us for another podcast. That's not true. That's not true. She's not allowed to leave. She would never leave us. We fired her. So that's not true either.

So you guys know how you have no idea what topic we're doing tonight. You're about to understand why. Because we're doing public relations. And before you leave, please hang on, because actually public relations is one of the most interesting topics we have ever, ever encountered. It has it all. It has manipulative psychology.

It has old timey history. It has cool ads. It has like mind control. It's got it all. It has it all. Nazis, like the CIA, like everything is involved in public relations. And as a matter of fact, we're sitting right smack dab in the middle of the world that public relations built.

And we should say, are there any PR professionals here tonight? Yes? Well, we want to apologize in advance. Everybody be nice to those guys. The Bartman of the show. That's right. Sorry. Sorry about that.

Everybody get a drink? Everyone settled in? Any malort? Did they serve malort here? Any what? What is that? I told myself I had to mention malort. What is it?

Malort? Well, what is it? It's wormwood, right? I was going to guess wormwood. What is this stuff? It's made me psychic. Yeah, it's from Chicago, I believe, right? Or at least very big here.

And it's the most disgusting thing you will ever have across your tongue. But does it get you pretty buzzed? I don't know, because I've never had more than a sip. And then three days later, I'm still brushing my teeth with steel wool trying to get the taste out of my mouth. Weird. Yeah, the aftertaste is pretty special. Hi, guys.

Are you guys on malort right now? A couple of people are, huh? I've heard it's a hipster thing now. I can buy that. Give me a shot of malort and a PBR. And some steel wool. Yeah. But only artisanal steel wool.

I'm sorry. Artisanal steel wool? Yeah. Wow. All right, so let's get this thing going. If you go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics website, like we do. Yep. Just a read.

You can look up PR specialists. And has anyone heard the recent one on publicists? This is tangential, but this is better. Because we like to save the good stuff for live. Right. If you look up PR specialists, you can find this definition. They are someone who creates and maintains a favorable public image for the organization they represent,

designing media releases to shape public perception of the organization and to increase awareness of its work and goals. Sounds very nice and innocuous, doesn't it? Chuck just started with a quote from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It's not, if you read any podcasting handbook, they specifically say not to start the show off like that. And you know because you wrote it. Yeah.

It's self-published, but still, I mean, it's there. I think it's gaining some steam. You're doing fine. So it seems like a pretty straight ahead job. And if you heard publicists, it's pretty straight ahead. But the creator of PR, there was literally one dude who created the job of public relations specialist. And his name is Edward Bernays.

Anybody familiar? I heard of that guy. A couple of people. That's good. For the rest of you, prepare to have your minds blown. Yes. This guy is arguably tied for first, second, most evil person in the 20th century. And that's really saying something because there was at least one really, really evil

dude in the 20th century. I would go number two behind a certain German man. There's the Nazi's appearance. That's appearance one, by the way. Yeah. They're going to be like at least three Nazi references. So he was voted by Life Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.

And we easily agree that he's like a top tenor. Right. We say Bosch to Life's stupid rating system. Right. Ours is better. I would say top six. Top six? Top six most influential.

Maybe top three. Ooh. Yeah. And, and, it's not just us like hating on Edward Bernays. Are you guys familiar with the New York Times? It's a newspaper. And they write obituaries. It's no Chicago Sun-Times.

No, it's not. I'll give you that. Or Tribune. All right. Which one did Ebert work for? Tribune, right? Times? The Times?

Really? I thought he was a Tribune guy. It's okay. All right, dude. Sometimes. I got it. Was Cisco or the other newspaper? Were they rival newspapers?

Oh, really? Man, I used to love that show. Love this town, man. Anyway. Have you seen the documentary? Man, we're already sidetracked. About the Ebert documentary. Yeah, the Roger Ebert one, have you guys seen that?

God, so good. And, like, get the box of tissues ready when you watch it, too. Unless you have no heart. Like Edward Bernays. If you're dead inside, yeah. So, the New York Times wrote an obituary. Edward Bernays lived to be 103, by the way. Because the most evil ones, too.

Mr. Burns, Dick Cheney. They all developed, like, a huge hump. And, like, claw-like fingers, you know. That kind of thing. Edward Bernays was among them, lived to 103. And when he finally died, the New York Times wrote an obituary. And I think they tried to be hard-hitting, yet polite. So, this is the most polite that the New York Times could possibly be.

They said that Edward Bernays was, quote, either a benefactor of the human race, or someone who had a lot to answer for. They left off in hell at the end. I'm sure his relatives were like, that was nice. Yeah, at least he was in the Times, I guess. So, he, because he lived so long, his career literally spanned from World War I,

not World War II, World War I to the beginning of the information age, in the mid-1990s. So, he had a lot of influence to say the least. Yeah. Man, I hope you do that, like, eight times tonight. So, he's a very controversial guy. And what he did was, he realized early on that he could lift,

weirdly enough, he could lift a lot of his practices from Sigmund Freud. Freud came along and he said, you know, there's this thing called the self, these unconscious desires and fears that all of us have. We don't know about them, because they're unconscious. And it's just a thing with every human being. And Bernays said, you know what,

I think I can use that to manipulate people into being interested in products, and Sigmund Schlomo, Freud, by the way. Yeah, did you know his middle name? It's true. He didn't go by Schlomo. He was very much ashamed of his middle name. And so, he basically lifted this stuff,

this fear and desire and praying on that, because he was his uncle. So, Freud was Bernays' uncle. And we call Freud Uncle Schlomo for the rest of this podcast. If you get confused, just remember that. Uncle Schlomo equals Sigmund, or greater than Sigmund Freud. So, Uncle Schlomo was fairly innocent in this whole affair.

Like, basically, as far as psychology goes, he just basically stumbled across the self, this idea that we're all driven by selfish desires that we're not aware of, and that we all subscribe to a herd mentality. And that, like, you guys all care what the group thinks more than anything else, and that's how you think. And same with us and anybody, right?

And so, this is what Schlomo came up with. And it was a big deal. Like, up to this point, people didn't talk about their feelings. They didn't think about their feelings. They certainly didn't think that they were driven unconsciously, like automatons, by these crazy desires. And the first thing Bernays thinks of is, like, that'd be a great way to sell to people.

I think I can exploit that. And sell more stuff. So, if you think about, like, the advertising you see every day today, it's a different world than it was back then. Back in the day, advertising was very straightforward, and it literally just advertised how a product worked as it should.

Like, you would see an advertisement about a car, like, the new Ford runs like a car should run. And it looks like this, and it gets you from point A to point B. Good night. That's all unique. Or the Kinmore Blender, it really blends well. That was advertising.

Yeah, and maybe, maybe, in, like, the more expensive ads, there'd be, like, a hand-drawn finger pointing at you. Sure. And it was a you in all caps with some exclamation points. Like, you buy this morphine, because it'll give you the buzz you're looking for, you know?

That kind of thing. But it was based on this idea that you were a rational actor in charge of your own decisions, and that you would want to buy this if it was explained to you that Ford was the best choice for you. It treated you like a human being, in other words.

When Freud came along and came up with the self, and then Bernays figured out how to hijack it, all that went out the window. And all of a sudden, we were all kind of slaves to these selfish desires. Well, yeah, base, I mean, think about the ads you see now. If you can find an ad that doesn't prey on some fear or desire, it's either you've had a rough day

indulging that Ben and Jerry's chuck. Yeah. Have you guys noticed that Ben and Jerry's ads now stay chucked at the end of all of them? They know their audience. Or a fear, or you deserve, like, the sports car, like all these things that, you know, you deserve all this stuff because you work hard.

You're getting old. Don't you want to stay relevant by the sports car? All of your friends are going to tour Tuga and having fun. Why aren't you? Right. Would you like to stay relevant? We have a product for you that will help you feel young again.

Right. Or at the base of it all, use this mouthwash or you'll die alone. Right. Which is kind of accurate as far as advertising goes. And back in Bernay's day, the reason they had ads like that is because you literally used something

until it was done back then. Like, you drove your car until it quit running or you had your blender until it quit blending. There was no such thing as buying the new version of the thing you already have. And I know no one here has a phone in their pocket and another phone at home. It still works.

It's gathering dust. It's not the new model. Exactly. So that was a completely new thing to buy something before it had worn out. After World War II, manufacturing kind of dried up and they were kind of worried. They were like, we've sold all of our stuff

and everyone's got everything they need. So they were like, well, we need to think of new ways to sell things to people. Yeah, we need to sell people stuff that they don't need. Exactly. And the best way to do that is to prime those unconscious desires, to prime those unconscious fears.

And then in the next breath, say, and by the way, this product will fulfill all of your desires or will vanquish all of your fears. And people came to identify themselves with products. And all of that is, frankly, because of Bernay. So basically, all of the weird, quiet maltreatment that every living person in the Western world undergoes on a daily basis

can almost without hyperbole be laid at the feet of Edward Bernays. That's right. He invented it. Did you guys get this now? Right. So he had a super long career, like we said. And he worked, I mean, this is just a smattering of people. He worked for President Eisenhower.

I think he worked for like five or six presidents. Do we have any Eisenhower fans in the crowd? You liar. Thomas Edison was a client. All right. Wow, that really is an Eisenhower fan. Henry Ford was a client. Samuel Goldwin of MGM was a client.

Eleanor Roosevelt. And those were just a few. And reportedly, this is Nazi reference number two, reportedly Hitler wanted to hire Edward Bernays to run his propaganda wing. And he turned him down. And we can't find really good verification of that. So what we think, because we studied Edward Bernays,

is that he actually cooked that up to tell people, like, you know, I turned down Hitler. To make himself look good. We uncovered some Edward Bernays BS. He wanted me, but, well, you know, I had some other clients. So whether that's true or not, there's actually, if this floats your boat at all, guys, if you leave this place thinking like,

I really want to know more about this, go check out this really cool documentary called A Century of the Self, right? Yes. It's a four-part BBC documentary. And it delves into a lot of this stuff. And it keeps going even further beyond that. But one of the things that's featured in this documentary

is newsreel footage of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister. Nazi reference three. Three of three. Is this it? Yep. You get no more Nazi references. Sorry, guys.

This is the end of the road with the Nazis. So Goebbels is talking on film about how much he admires Edward Bernays and his writings and ideas, and how it's directly influenced the Nazi propaganda machine. Again. Yes. I like those gasps.

No, do the thing. Yeah, there we go. He was the first person to use polling, like to poll the public and tell the public what he, you know, everyone should think about products. He was the first to use expert opinions, like nine out of ten dentists say blank. He was the first person to do that.

He was the first person to use product placement in movies and TV and films. And he had a really great knack for getting lots of different people to write him big checks for the same work. Smart guy. Yeah. He was very wealthy, too, by the way, because of this.

So for instance, he had, at one point, William Randolph Hearst, the great publisher, newspaper and magazine publisher, came to Bernays and he said, Mr. Bernays, I feel that we're selling a lot of magazines to men. That's a great Hearst, by the way. But I think women would like to read magazines as well.

So how can I sell magazines to women? I haven't a clue, sir. He just went weirdly British all of a sudden. So bad, my impressions. I think it's a great Hearst. I appreciate that. So he went to Bernays and Bernays said, you know what, here's what we'll do.

Let's start putting ads and magazines that cater to women. Like diamonds, women love diamonds, right? So let's put diamond ads in your magazines. The diamond people were his clients. So he was like, I got two checks now. But why stop there? Yeah, why stop there? Let me get, let's put like a famous actress in there

and these ads. No one had ever done that before. And let's get like Clara Bow and let's put her in these diamonds in the magazine. Clara Bow was also a client. So he's getting three checks for the same stupid diamond ad to sell the same stupid women's magazine. And then women's magazines were a thing.

I'm not saying that's bad. They're great. Yeah, this is not about women's magazines. That'd be weird. But before all of this, before he, he gained his massive amount of wealth and influence. He was just a little bitty, regular baby because babies aren't evil.

I think he might have been an evil baby now that you mentioned it. All babies are good. I don't know about this one. At least for a few weeks. He was just a little baby born in Vienna, Austria in 1891. One of five children of Eli Bernays and Anna Freud Bernays. And they were, this part always melts my brain how it works out with the relationship with Sigmund, I'm sorry, Schlomo.

Schlomo. So I need you to explain because I can never get it right. Okay, so Bernays' mother was Freud's sister and Bernays' father was Freud's wife's brother. So it sounds gross. They're minds are like, I have no idea what that means. There was just some sibling swapping going on, which is legal in all countries.

It seems like incest. But it's really not. It's fine. They were just tight-knit family. So by 1912, he made contact with Uncle Schlomo through the years. He visited Vienna and he eventually moved to New York and then visited his uncle in the summers. But eventually in 1912 he graduated from Cornell University

and he had his first gig to sort of influence what his career would be when this producer of a play came to him and he said, you know, I've got this play and you're a young upstart person that thinks you know what you're doing. I'm not selling many tickets and I could use your help. It's about this couple with syphilis. It's called Damage Goods.

Seriously. And no one's coming. And I can't for life let me figure out why people aren't lined up around the block at the Athenian Theater. Chuck is totally serious about this too. It might have played here. This place has been around for like,

since the early 1900s. 104 years. Yeah. No reaction whatsoever. No respect for anything at all. Like, had you said 105 maybe? Right. So he goes to Bernays and he said,

I need some help selling tickets. And Bernays said, you know what we'll do? I have a little plan. Let's make this not a dirty thing. Let's get out in front of this. Because you know what? We should be talking about syphilis because it's a problem.

Everyone's got it. Everybody had syphilis at the time. And you're brave enough to do a play about it. So get out in front of it and let's make this part of the national conversation. And he injured, it wasn't a huge play. Let's get real. But he engineered a little campaign.

And all of a sudden it started selling tickets. So he had his first little feather in his cap basically. And all that sounds fine. It sounds great. Like he was the first person to use, let's get out in front of this as a phrase. Or he started a national dialogue or whatever about syphilis,

which was a good thing. And this is very Bernaysian, right? So you think you're distracted over here by the good that it did. But really, if you look at it, he just did the whole thing totally cynically to sell tickets to his play called Damaged Goods. And that was very Bernays.

So he wrote a book, his first book in 1923. It was called Crystallizing Public Opinion. And he was really excited to send it to Uncle Shlomo because he had used his work to influence him. And he sent it to him. And he didn't get like the most, well, he got a very Shlomo-Lian response. So you guys know Shlomo hate in America.

We should change that. Freudian. No, Shlomo-Lian. You have to add an extra L. Shlomo-Lian. Yeah, Shlomo-Lian. Try and say it without the extra L. It's impossible.

I'm not even going to try. Right. So Shlomo writes him back and says, he says, I have received your book, Ellipse, which is not good in a letter. As a truly American production, it interested me greatly.

Right. And everyone knows Freud was psychic. So when he did that when he wrote the letter, and then while Bernays was reading it, he did it again because he knew he was reading it right then. And it would really drive the point home. He was not satisfied with just an Ellipse. No, he was not.

But that takes a lot of effort to actually write the Ellipse. Dot, dot, dot. Yeah. With a feather and all. Oh, no, wait. I guess he had pens at that point. So Freud was, he was a little cool. No?

No, they had pens. Okay. Oh, no on the joke? I thought it was a great joke. Great. I didn't realize it was a joke. So yes to everything? Okay, good.

So Uncle Shlomo wasn't super impressed, which it bothered young Edward a little bit, young Eddie. But it came back to Roost a little bit when Shlomo came upon hard times because apparently he didn't make a windfall of cash. No, he did. Well, at first. The Austrian economy fell apart and inflation went through the roof and his bank account went, whew, and he found himself broke.

Right. So he needed some dough and little Eddie helped him out and he said, you know what? Let me publish, help you get your works published in America. Which again, sounds nice. But Bernays retained the publishing rights in America. That's right. And didn't he, he actually tried to get him to write articles

for one of the new women's magazines, Cosmopolitan. Can you believe that? Like he, Freud came back close to writing a column in Cosmo. No, seriously. How to satisfy your man in five easy steps. Number one. Stroke his beard. Yeah.

Smoke a cigar. Oh, a cigar is not always a cigar. No, especially not in Cosmo. Well, it actually, didn't someone give someone a box of cigars in this transaction? So when, when Bernays sent Freud a box of cigars, Freud sent Bernays a book of his general introductory lectures, which is what inspired all of some Bernays.

He actually sent him a box of cigars, not ironically. Can you just see Freud like just, like hypnotizing himself, like shaking this box of cigars, just trying to convince himself a cigar is just a cigar. He was a sicko. Yet I can't put it in my mouth for some reason. Wow. All right.

1928, he writes a second book. And at this point he, he's not even trying anymore. He calls it propaganda. That was the name of his second book. Which was the original name for PR, literally. And he was like, you know what, maybe we should change that. So he invented the term propaganda, or I'm sorry, PR, because propaganda, he thought kind of had a bad rap.

And it had a bad rap? Because of Nazis. Because of number four, the Nazis. I knew we could do it. So he said, he was interviewed when he was a hundred. And he said propaganda had a bad name. So I made up a new one, called it public relations, his word. So you actually read propaganda, right?

Or a lot of it? I read a lot of it. It's not a long read, but it's what, if I wrote a blurb for it, I would call it a brilliant comma despicable read. Because the title gives it all away. It's basically a handbook on how to manipulate people on a massive scale. And he, I think he used the words like dope and stupid.

Oh yeah. Because one of the things like we're putting Bernice down, he hated you guys. Yeah. He hated us. He hated all of us. People were generally sheep, unreflective. He used the word stupid and dope a lot.

And for example, in the book propaganda, he mocks the spread of literacy and says that it just makes it easier for the average person to read and add. Right? That's a jerk. Do it again. I've never had this much control over you. I know.

I feel like a marionette. My fingernails hurt so bad. You're soaking too long. It's not the soaking part. It's the filing and gouging. Did they ever say like, sir, it looks like you just had a minute. No, they're not allowed to talk. Okay.

So Bernice had this thing where basically he saw society as a very, well, and he was kind of right, this hierarchical view of society, where he thought there's a bunch of dummies out there, and they need the select few to guide them in the right direction and to narrow the choices down because we're all just big dummies. We can't decide if we have too many choices. That's no good. Yeah, more than two political parties.

What shall I do? Yeah, pretty much. And so he said, you know what? I'm going to use my uncle's stuff. I'm going to influence these people. I'm going to narrow the choices down because we're all big dummies and if you have a limited number of options, then you're more likely to choose one who is writing me a check.

Right. And he actually used the phrase the hallucination of democracy, which he would describe what we're living in right now, this idea that all of us have some sort of say in this participatory government, but really there's an elite group that's actually running the show. So basically... And I'm one of them. Right, well, we're both are.

Oh, no, no, not me, Bernice. Oh, oh. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So anyway... There's this idea that like any crackpot theory you've ever heard where there's people running the show or there's an elite shadowy group,

this guy is writing the book on this and he's saying like, not only is this real, but here's how it's done. Here's how to do it more effectively. And the idea was that there were people who were working behind the scenes because one of the really important things that Bernice figured out was that no matter whether we're all stupid sheep who have a follow a herd mentality

and don't think for ourselves and are driven by violent selfish sexual repressed desires that we're not even aware of, we don't like to be pushed around. So we don't like to get the idea that somebody's telling us what to do or that we're being manipulated. So all of this working behind the scenes has to happen behind the scenes.

We can't know what's going on. So all of this stuff has to be happening at what you would call basically a very high level. Yeah. Where even like say the media is manipulated, they're not even on board at this point. And again, I know we sound crazy. Just hear us out.

He was not very well liked even within his own profession. He was well like socially because he lived in New York and he was super rich because he got all these people to write in big fat checks. And he threw these big lavish parties and was sort of a socialite because he loved making these contacts because then he could then manipulate them

and use them later to his own end to get big fat checks written for him. That's networking. But you're not into you. No. So he threw these big parties but even his own like he created a profession and the people that benefited

from having those jobs didn't even like him because he was such a blow heart. He was his own biggest PR guy. And here's a quote though from one of his one of his clients that I think, yeah, this is foreshadowing too, is a united fruit executive said that everybody in the company hated him.

We didn't trust him. We didn't like his politics. We didn't like his fees. But the sense was that we were definitely getting our money's worth. And that's how he existed for so long. Yeah, absolutely. He was a master at what he did. Yeah, and that's the thing, it sounds so insulting

but he was right which really just drives us crazy while we're researching them. We wanted him to fail at every effort but all he did was succeed. And it was so maddening. So he was extremely good. He was the guy who created the basically exploiting what he called special pleaders.

People that the rest of us trust, their opinions, that kind of thing. He would go up and be like, how much will it cost for me to buy your opinion? And he would come up with things like, like you said, nine out of ten dentists agree. Sure. Or something called the calculated simulation of enthusiasm.

What you might call like a flash mob today. Yeah. Or grass roots kind of stuff. It's actually astroturfing, that kind of stuff. And he was just a master at this kind of thing. And the best way we figured out to get Bernays across is to kind of go through what we like to call

Eddie Bernays' greatest hits. That's right. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there

when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

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because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step.

Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, ya everybody

about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Uh, Colin prongs to success.

Right. Because what we learned in researching this was he would not attack something with one idea. He wouldn't say, eh, maybe we should do this. He'd say, let's do these five things or these two or three things

and come at it from all these different angles behind the scenes, no one will ever know. Right, and like, he was really, really good at his job. Yeah. As evil as he was, he was a hard worker.

So, uh, cut number one on Eddie Bernays All My Best, prongs to success, uh, is Vinita Hair Nets. Everyone here supports Vinita Hair Nets, right? Right. Everyone,

I thought I saw a few Hair Nets in the audience. No? No Hair Nets. World War I, Hair Nets were a big thing for a little while and after World War I,

women started cutting their hair in a bob and they didn't need the Hair Nets anymore and it was a big problem if you make Hair Nets. Especially if you were a company called Vinita. Yeah. Because they were the industry leader of Hair Nets, right?

And so they hire Eddie Bernays and they're like, do something. You have to do something. We're losing so much money. And Bernays is like, calm down, calm down. I got this. And he went to work. What'd you do?

I missed that. I went like this. Okay. So Bernays, he applies his typical Bernaysian stuff and he looks around, he says, who do people

who wear Hair Nets listen to? This one's kind of a stretch, but he identified artists as the special pleaders in this case, right? So we went to some leading artists and said, hey, don't you think Hair Nets

make women look beautiful? And they're like, oh, God, no. Have you seen a woman in a Hair Nets? Are you out of your mind? And then Eddie Bernays did his patented make it rain thing. So he just went like this with a bunch of cash

and an artist, top artist. And the artist said, yes. As a matter of fact, they're awesome. It's probably Clara Bow, actually. Clara Bow, yeah. Her artist friend. So that's prong number one. So yes.

Make it fashionable. And these artists are saying, now everywhere they go, that Hair Nets give women a Greek quaffur look. Whatever that is. Stupid words. I'm sure Bernays is like, I can't believe that's what they said.

But still. So there's artists saying this. And now all of a sudden, the media who pay attention to the art beat are starting to hear all these artists talk about Hair Nets. And it's all because one or two top artists said it. And now all these other ones,

following their herd mentality, are parroting the same thing. Then the media picks it up. That's prong one. Well, he's also got the media in his hip pocket. And he's calling people and saying, have you noticed everyone wearing these Hair Nets? Yeah.

You might want to write a little story on it in Cosmopolitan. That's all I'm saying. So that's prong number one. Prong number two is he went to manufacturers and factories and said, it seems really dangerous to me that these women are working in your factories

because they could be pulled into that lathe. And that's, have you ever seen in that? Have you ever seen one of those pictures? It's very, very dangerous. And a head pulled into a wood lathe is no good. So if you wear a Hair Net, it solves all the problems. And so they got manufacturers and factories to say,

you know what? Everyone needs to have a Hair Net. All these women, and I guess men with long hair, which there were probably like three guys. Maybe three. Post World War II. Right.

They had long, I'm sorry, World War I even, they had long hair. And all of a sudden he's got two prongs. Look good, be safe. They need a Hair Nets. Sold a lot of Hair Nets. Wrote a big, giant check.

Right. Because women all of a sudden were picking up the paper in the morning reading about how all these artists were talking about how great women look in Hair Nets. And then after work, they were going to like the union meeting and hearing about how safe Hair Nets were.

And they're thinking, maybe I should grow this bob out. And all of a sudden, Vinita Hair Nets are back, baby. All because of Edward Bernays. It was a big success. It wasn't his first, but it was a big one.

Yeah. Cut number two, Edward Bernays, all my best. In 19th, let's get in the Way Back Machine. Oh, yeah. All of us. We're in the Way Back Machine. So the Way Back Machine is imagining.

Yeah. I'm sorry, you guys. I know. Surely you knew that, right? We actually have room to bring out a DeLorean behind us. We have the room, but not the money.

So we're on the Way Back Machine. We're traveling back to 1929 when it was a taboo for women to smoke in public. It was, you know, women would like, you know, kind of have to hide their cigarette smoking at the time. It meant, like, if a woman, if she smoked, she poked.

You know what I mean? That's not me saying it. Like, this is the social taboo. I'm just putting it in. No, that was you saying it. I didn't. I'm not saying that, like... You just said it.

But that's... He's quoting, but not quoting. I'm just trying to put it in easily approachable terms. But he's right. I kid, that was literally, like, if you smoked and you were a woman out in public, you were sort of promiscuous, maybe.

So... That's another way to put it. That's a much, much better way to put it. So he was hired by the American Tobacco Company by a man named George... George Washington Hill of American Tobacco. AKA Foghorn Lakehorn, apparently. That was no Hearst.

And he said, I'll say, I'll say... Mr. Bernays, we're selling on awful lot of cigarettes to men. But I think we can kill roughly twice as many people if we sell them to women. I got these lucky strikes,

and they're not flying off the shelf. So what can you do, sir? I gotta check. Right? Bernays goes... He's still young. It's funny, because every time I go like this, I actually, in reality, have to go like that.

So I feel like a jackass. No. Bernays got on it, right? He was like, yes, this is BS that women can't smoke because of the social taboo and that you can't sell twice as many cigarettes because of the stupid social taboo. So I'm gonna go break the social taboo.

So Bernays, working behind the scenes, contacted a friend who is an editor at Vogue and said, give me a list of deputants. And they should be good looking, but not modally looking, because I want what I'm about to hatch to seem very grassroots, right? So he got his hands on this list,

got these women together, and said, hey, how would you like to single-handedly advance women's rights? And these guys were like, let's do it. Let's, yes, I'm ready. I've got, I've burned my Vanita hair net and I'm ready to go. And so he said, this is what we're gonna do.

In New York, they have an Easter parade every year. Still do. And this year on, what, April 1st, 1929, all you gals are going to be out there on Fifth Avenue. And right in the middle of this Easter parade, you're all gonna light up at once. And it'll be called, we'll call it, no, I don't know, just thinking outside of my head,

the torches of freedom campaign. And it will, you will put women on the map. And the women said, let's do this. Yeah, he did, he did. He literally cast them from an agency. And I think he said he wanted like, not too good looking, because we don't want to give ourselves away.

But I still want some good looking broads, right? They can't be dogs or anything, you know what I mean? That was Bernice, that was Bernice saying that. That was Edward G. Robinson. See? Yeah, no dog, see? Don't even think about it. Too pretty, not pretty enough, just right.

Stop wasting my time. That was a lot of Edward G. Robinson. So, he concocted this torches of freedom parade. He, of course, like he always had the media in his hip pocket, he leaked it and said, you know what I heard? I heard there's some women that are gonna like, smoke in public. And you know what that means.

Right? Chuck! You are so lucky this is an audio podcast. I learned that when I was like nine. That's literally the safest way to portray that. I don't know if that's necessarily true. You just took all the heat off of me. Better than saying poke.

You guys are gonna leave tonight and be like, Josh is great for that Chuck. He's edgy. I didn't think he was that dirty. His beard makes him seem so approachable. All right, so that was prong one, and it was a huge hit. The international press, they were like, papers in Paris, France, writing about these women.

Well, in France, they all smoked all the time. They're probably not in Paris. But international press picked this up, and it was a big thing all over the world. Yeah, these women are smoking, and the press is equated with women's rights. You've come a long way, baby. Yes, that came later, but yes, basically the same sentiment.

So this idea was now, if you oppose women smoking, you overtly oppose women's rights. The gauntlet had been laid down in secret by Edward Bernays. Like Chuck says, that was just prong one. Prong two was, he was a research animal. He made us look like human garbage as far as research goes. This guy put everything he had into research, and he figured out that there were a lot of problems

men had with women smoking. And so he hired a nurse to go around the country to teach women to smoke better. Because who else would you hire but a nurse? Yeah, well, that's who people trust. I mean, if you're going to learn about smoking, you learn it from a nurse, right? Do it, right.

That's where everybody here learned to smoke. So her name was Florence Linden. She was a former actress and nurse. And so she went around to like the Society of New York State Women and Garden Clubs and all these things to teach etiquette smoking to not annoy your husbands. And actually, he actually did research and some polling to find out what really annoys you

about when your wife or girlfriend smokes. And there are some real answers. This is not made up. Pet peeves. Number one is the messy way they open the packages. Which apparently was like with their teeth or something. It really bugs me. Number two was the affected mannerisms, how you smoke.

It's all like showy and stuff. Like this. Andrew Disclay? Right. When Bernays invented that, he made Andrew Disclay's career. Number three, puffing like a steam engine. There's just too much smoke when you're smoking. Like hot boxing?

Yeah. Hot boxing is different. I went to college. Number four was lipstick smears. You smoke and you get like that lipstick I make you wear. Gets all over that cigarette filter. It's really annoying. I don't want to see it in the ashtray.

I know. It's not funny. So those were literally the feedback. They also actually, because I figured they had to make it equal. So they had said, what annoys you women when your men smoke? Right. At the end of the story, they'd be like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Hold on, man.

Sure. You got to ask you too. And they would find out. Yeah. And that was when you put your men put their cigarettes out on their dinner plate. It was number one. And number two was when they are just smoking and they just run it under the faucet and just drop it in the sink and leave.

But Miss Linden, equal opportunity sexist, she taught everyone that if you are smoking in bed, you should use a closed ashtray. Right. All of us. It's just smart. That's prong number two. Prong number three was he did research again and found out, did some surveys that women didn't like Lucky Strike Green, the color of the package.

It just, it wasn't the color of the day. It didn't match anything they wore. So they didn't want to carry around the cigarettes. So what did he do? He made green fashionable, like basically single handedly. He threw green balls. He made sure that all the department stores had green gowns in their windows. And now all of a sudden Lucky Strike Green was the color of the season thanks to Edward

Bernays' third prong to sell cigarettes. And it was totally and completely successful. Fog corn, light corn, like went to sleep every night on a bed of money. And Edward Bernays' hump grew three times. All right. Prong, oh, I'm sorry. Not a prong. Another cut from the album.

Bacon for breakfast. Anyone here eat bacon this morning? You want to know something? Bacon was not a breakfast food until Edward Bernays came along. Yeah. Serious. I know, right? Oh, poor bacon.

I feel so bad for that part of the pig. We just ate it at lunch and dinner. Bernays came along because he was hired by the beach nut packing company who made bacon. And they said, we're selling a lot of bacon for lunch and dinner. But no, no, no. Yeah, it should be nice to sell it for breakfast. What can you do for me? I have a big giant check and a pen.

And he said, let's see. Who do people listen to when they're thinking about their diet? Doctors? Sure. If I write a big enough check, I could co-op the doctor. And he did. He found a doctor who wrote a study saying we should all start eating hearty breakfasts featuring bacon.

And Bernays took the study and forward it to other doctors who were like, yeah, we subscribe to her mentality. Let's follow this guy's advice. They started. But he included a sample of bacon to sweeten the diet. Beach nut bacon. Right. And all of a sudden doctors are like, by the way, you should be eating more bacon for

breakfast. Breakfast at the time, like everyone's seen Mad Men. It was like a piece of dry toast, coffee, and a cigarette. That was breakfast. The big hearty breakfast didn't come along until Edward Bernays made it so. And supposedly he invented the expression, a meal that sticks to your ribs. Evil genius. Evil genius.

So bacon, do you clap for it? You're about to feel bad for clapping for Edward Bernays, because this is about where Bernays' career takes a really dark turn. A dark and successful turn. So we are, should we go on the way back machine again? Yeah. This time, everybody, we're going to Jamaica. 1870, we're going way back.

Yeah, there's a dude named Lorenzo Dow Baker, and he was the skipper of a ship called the Telegraph, and he showed up in Jamaica one day because he wanted some rum, which is pretty smart to do when you're in Jamaica in 1870. What else is there to do? And while he's sitting there at the bar drinking, some guy comes up and says, you want some bananas? We're going to take a bunch for 25 cents a bunch, right? Yeah.

160, I think, is what he bought. Yeah, he said, well, that's a heck of a price for bananas. I'm pretty drunk. We'll take a bunch of bananas. He was from Boston. He's like, we don't have a lot of bananas in Boston. I don't know if you know that. I bet I could sell these for a lot of dough.

And he did. In 1870, he was selling, reselling these bananas for up to $3.25 a bunch. Yeah. It's a lot of money back then. There's a lot. Half of the US probably with his proceeds. We failed to go figure out how much that is in today's dollars, but it was a lot, believe us.

Someone out there is checking there on that website. It's that guy. So it worked out really well for Lorenzo Dalbaker. And by 1885, he had 11 ships flying under the banner of the Boston Fruit Company. They were bringing in 10 million bunches of bananas a year at this point. They became United Fruit and eventually became Chiquita Banana, which we all enjoy today, right? Still today, don't you?

There were a couple of ooze. Oh my God. Not Chiquita. That's my favorite banana. I can't eat any of that other crap. It's got to be Chiquita. It's the only banana. So everything's going very, very well for United Fruit.

And by 1940, they basically owned a number of countries. In fact, the term Banana Republic came from this idea that United Fruit ran the economy and essentially the government of countries in Latin America, including Guatemala. And by 1940, a guy named Sam Zamuri, who was known as Sam the Banana Man, was running United Fruit. The best we can figure is that he had to have gotten that name after he worked there. I don't know if that's necessarily true. He literally could have been born to become the head of United Fruit.

Think about it. If you were interviewing people, wouldn't you give a second look to the guy named Sam the Banana Man? Yeah. Yeah, come on in. If you were a fruit company? Sam the Banana Man. Oh, I like that.

I got to say, sir, you've got to leg up. So Sam Zamuri became the head of United Fruit and they were selling tons of bananas at this point, but it wasn't enough. It's never enough. And so they controlled, like Josh said, much of Central America. Owned all their bananas, and they weren't getting a lot in return. Let's be honest. You know how it works.

And he said, Mr. Bernays, I'd like to sell more bananas. I'm Sam the Banana Man, after all. I can't lose that name. That would be embarrassing. So how can you help us? Bernays? Yeah. He said, okay, I got it.

I got it. I got it. Hold on. I'm still thinking. I see my prongs program. Yeah. Have you heard about my prongs? So Bernays says, I think we should try to make bananas appear healthy.

Maybe we'll sell them as like kind of a health food, which they're not at all, actually. That's not true. Bananas are completely healthy. No, that's not true. That's actually Bernays at work right before your very eyes. No. No. Bananas are healthy.

You're being coy. Bernays. That was like the one honest thing he did, actually. So bananas aren't healthy. Look it up. That was prong one. I don't know if I'm going to count that as a prong. That's a prong.

Okay. Taking something that's patently unhealthy and saying it's healthy. That's a prong. Prong number two, he said, you know what we need to do? I'm going to go on a banana assault in this country. Full frontal banana assault. I saw that movie and the sequel. It was very dirty.

He said, let's get bananas. I want them in hotels. I want them in hotel lobbies. I want them in YMCA's. I want them on trains. I want them in airports. I want them in Boy Scout rooms all across the country. I want them in...

In a what room? In a Boy Scout room? You wrote this and it says Boy Scout. It doesn't say Boy Scout room anywhere. I think you're having a seizure or something. I want them in movie studios. I want them at Palm Beach. I want them at resorts.

Bananas are everywhere and people are like, have you noticed? There's bananas like all over the place. Yeah. Like movie studios. I feel like I should be eating these a little bit. Right. A little bit. Well, I hear they're very healthy.

Right. So maybe you should eat a bunch of bananas right now. I'll watch. That was... Man. I love Chicago. Yeah, for real. Detroit was just like, I don't get it.

Well, now we can't release this show. We can edit that part out, right guys? We'll lose all 400 of our Detroit fans. So is Prong 2? Prong 2. Prong 3 is, he said, I think what we can do to sell more bananas. I think if people had a connection to where bananas came from, they would be psyched about it.

Kind of like later with the Chiquita Banana Lady, it's like, hey, that's kind of cool. Look at her. There's bananas on her head. She's a weirdo. So he set up one of his fronts, which he often did. Yeah, he would pay professionals to put out an opinion that was prescribed by him that jibed with what he wanted him to say.

And in this case, it was called the Middle America Information Bureau, which had nothing to do with the Midwest. Sorry. He was talking about Latin America. Don't know why he called it that, but he did. The Middle America Information Bureau was a Chiquita backed, well, United Fruit backed think tank. And the whole thing that they did was put out press releases

about how awesome Latin America was and how when you ate a banana on your lunch break, you could basically, now that you know about Latin America, take a little mini vacation to the tropics because you know about Latin America because the Middle America Information Bureau has been putting out press releases to the newspapers, which are now printing them because newspapers could not have

cared less apparently at the time. So they would print banana related stuff. So this is great. This is working really well. The banana assault, full frontal, banana assault, was working great. People are eating bananas and they're like, we're supporting this economy down there.

We're like feeding families by eating their bananas. Not true. Because... And have you seen the lady who wears all the fruit? Oh, I love that lady. What was going on was there was a dictator in Guatemala, which is where they were getting a lot of bananas at the time, and a United Fruit ally named Jorge Ubico.

And he was... I feel like you should say that in your Italian accent for some reason. It doesn't make sense, but... Jorge Ur... Ur... No. Urbico. Doesn't work. Sorry, everybody.

Well, that was Latin flavored at least. Right? Oh, yeah. No, that was good. But the Italian, it wouldn't fit. Man, I'm like a yo-yo with you. So he was in the... Jorge Ubico was clearly in the pocket of United Fruit, because he was getting kicked back,

and he was like, yeah, man, come to my country, give me some dough. Who cares about all the people? They're just peons. Own all our land, and just give me some dough. And he was basic... Well, not overthrown. He was taken out by popular vote.

I think it was actually overthrown, and then they held the popular election. Yeah, so he was like, you're out of here, pal. At gunpoint, basically. Okay. So the guy who came in after him was elected democratically and won 85% of the popular vote,

which is... I don't think this probably ever happened legitimately in any kind of democratic election. He was a very beloved man named Juan Jose Aravallo. Right? And he was a leftist. He definitely thought that one of his principal ideas was that he wanted to be able to create internal competition

for the United Fruit among Guatemalan farmers. His idea was, this is our land. These are our bananas. This is our population. We should be able to make money off of these bananas like United Fruit is. So, United Fruit, you can stay, but we're going to treat our people better from now on,

and we're going to actually subtract some of your wealth by doing that. United Fruit didn't like that at all. No, they didn't. One of the first things he did was, United Fruit owned all this land, this fallow land. It wasn't even being used. He said, you know what?

You bought this land from us for $3 an acre. I'd like to buy it back for the $3 an acre. I see your tax return says $3 an acre. So let's just do that. And United Fruit said, well, actually, it's more like $75 an acre now. Just out of the blue. Yeah.

So let's just up the price on you. But he was able to get a lot of the land back. He was able to build some roads through the country and actually provide competition to the United Fruit, which would become Chiquita, which was not a good thing. No, United Fruit was like, this is a really, really, really big deal. We've had total control over this country

for half a century at least. And this guy comes along and now he's stealing our land that we stole? No, that's not okay. It's not all right. So they went to their friends at the CIA and Edward Bernays and said, guys, what can you do? And they talked to the right guy,

because Edward Bernays said, let's just overthrow the government. And they did. Yeah. They literally overthrew the government. And he thought the first thing we have to do is we have to get the American people behind this because you just can't overthrow a government without the people being behind it.

So let me think about this. Aren't there a lot of communists in Guatemala? Oh, yeah. And wait, wait. Isn't the Soviet Union communist? We hate those guys. Yeah. The Red Scare.

And everyone's like, well, there really are no communists in Guatemala, actually. And he said, well, nobody knows that. So let's get all my friends in the magazine and put in newspaper business to write a story about the brewing crisis in Guatemala. Right. So they're right at our door.

They're just below Mexico. In our backyard. And that's just below Texas. Right. Yeah. In Texas, everybody. Texas. So this Middle America Information Bureau goes from

putting out press releases about how wonderful bananas are to the brewing Soviet crisis in Guatemala. And the newspapers listened. They started reporting on this. And it became a really big deal that there was a Soviet threat in our backyard. Just below Texas, again. And the American public got on board, basically.

Yeah. So once he had the American public support, he got in touch with a former Lieutenant Colonel from the U.S. Army living in exile and said, why don't you get some CIA buddies together? And let's cross the border from Honduras with a couple of hundred men that are well-trained. And let's call it the Army of Liberation.

And let's overthrow the government. And that's what he did, plunging Guatemala into a decades-long civil war, including genocide. All to sell bananas. Bananas. Yeah, that's the appropriate response to that. So we said all this, and we said that we are still living right smack dab in the middle.

Hopefully all this seemed vaguely familiar to you. And recently, I think in 2008, all of this idea took on a new name and new momentum. Have you guys ever heard of nudge politics? Anyone? No? So basically nudge is this new thing. It's the new name for all of this, and it's the idea that

people are stupid and that you have to have elite people figuring out what the best outcome is and then nudge people toward that outcome without people understanding that they're being nudged. Sounds familiar? Yes, it does. And as a matter of fact, this is recently under a presidential executive order become policy in the

American government. And it seems kind of benign, a lot of it, right? I think the USDA is using nudge to, you'll get a prompt sometimes if you're printing and you're working at the USDA, and they'll say, don't forget to change your printer preferences to double-sided, which everybody loves double-sided printing. What's wrong with that?

Nothing. But beyond this kind of benign idea that nudge or that PR, the idea of this hallucination of democracy is harmless or we can be nudged in the right direction, are two really important points. And one is that the people in charge know what the best outcome is, and the best outcome is often subjective. Sure.

Like, we might not think that the best outcome is the same as the people who are deciding what the best outcome is. The second one is that the people who get to decide what the best outcome is has all of our best interests in heart. That's not necessarily true either. So you can easily go from two-sided printing to, no,

you need to decide that the death penalty will never, ever go away no matter what you think. Right. Or let's just make the easiest thing. Like, you have to opt out of organ donation. We're not saying organ donation is bad, mind you. Yeah, we're not equating organ donation with death penalty or anything.

No. But things like opt out clauses, like, it's just included because it's, for the benefit of everybody, it can get a little slippery, you know. And a nudge becomes a little more like a shove when it's in the hands of the wrong person, which you have to really be careful about. Yeah.

So that is, well, here we go. Let's finish up with this. We're not finished up. Here's more. You would think after all of this. Are you guys confused? After Edward Bernays sold his bacon as the healthy thing to eat for breakfast, and bananas as a healthy

thing to eat all day long, and women should smoke cigarettes, and let's overthrow Guatemala to sell a fruit, he would have been in his hundreds on his deathbed and thought, you know what, I kind of regret some of the things I did in my career. Not true. No. He couldn't even look up.

Yeah. He was interviewed by a guy from the New York Times when he was 100 years old, and he basically said, yeah, people are stupid dokes, and I stand by everything I did, and I had a pretty great career. Yeah. As a matter of fact, his last words were, tell them I said they were stupid.

So that said, we're Bernays. That's his career, and we're going to finish out with a bit of a list that we like to do, a top 10 list that is always only five or six because it's us. Some of the worst PR disasters in history, and we're going to open up with one US Airways, not Delta. A few years ago, a young woman complained to US Airways that her spring break was ruined.

Which, man, if you're in college, that's a big deal, you know? You only have one spring break a year. Yeah, that's true. And they said, we don't like to hear this, Alex. Please provide feedback to our customer relations team right here, and they left a link for all the world to click on.

And that link went to a pornographic image of a woman with a model Boeing 747, and she was doing things with it. That's a big plane. Someone probably lost their job over that one. You got Phillip Morris? So we love picking on smoking because it's so easy. But you guys are familiar with Phillip Morris, the big

smoking tobacco giant. Apparently in 2001, the Czech government came up with a study that found, surprisingly, that smoking actually cost their economy money. And Phillip Morris said, no, no, no. Let us commission our own study and find out what the real deal is. And they found and announced publicly, Czech

government, you're wrong. We found that smoking actually saves your economy up to $30 million a year. And do you want to know how by early smoking deaths, all that money you guys would have spent on health care, pensions, housing, you didn't have to, because those smokers died early. And they're like, this is a good study.

Look at this. Right. And Phillip Morris was surprised by the blowback. They actually were like, we have other studies that we should probably cancel, wind up in other countries, because we thought this was going to be the thing that really drove home to everybody how great smoking is. I love that one.

All right. In 2002, Abercrombie and Fitch. That's all you have to say. Shirtless dudes. That's all I think about. And ironically, this is about t-shirts. They had a line of t-shirts that were racist in 2002, depicting Asian stereotypes.

Well, what was one of the shirts? I'm sorry, everybody. I'm sorry. Wong Brothers Laundry Service. Two wongs can make it white. And they stood behind it. Their quote for this campaign was, you personally thought Asians would love this t-shirt.

That was their corporate communications people. They came up with that. That was the company's response to the blowback. And not to be outdone, one month later, 30 days later, they released their line of thongs for 10 to 12-year-old girls. And their corporate communications response to that was, you know, the underwear for young girls was, the intent was to be lighthearted and cute.

Yeah. Right? Everybody, have you guys heard of Coca-Cola? You guys have Pepsi up here, right? Coke down south, and Coke is huge. Right. And Coke back in, I think like the 90s, the early 90s, Coke had this thing called the Magic Can campaign.

Does anyone remember that? So, okay, you, sir, can go to sleep for the next two minutes. So the Magic Can campaign was basically, you'd pick up a Coke and you'd open it and a prize would shoot out towards your face. Yeah. That's not even the bad part. It literally had a spring-loaded mechanism that would shoot out.

Like, sometimes the prize was like 100 bucks, which is awesome. Great. Sometimes it was a dollar. So you would buy the Coke you wanted and open it to get a dollar, and then buy the Coke you wanted. But I have like 30 cents left over. Yeah. It's a net zero, I think, at that point.

It's close. So Coke had this thing going. They were very excited. Everything was going great. But the problem was is that people were opening these Magic Cans and being like, oh, a dollar. Great. Thanks, Coke.

And then taking a sip and going. Right? Because the stuff inside tasted like poison. What is this? Tasted like chlorinated water. I better call my local poison tip line. And people did. And poison lines across the country started getting hot of like tips

that you should not drink these Magic Can Cokes. And it became enough of a deal that Coke had to take out ads saying, like, don't drink the stuff in the Magic Can, which is not what you want to do if you're a beverage company. Yeah. You can go home on YouTube and look up Coke Magic Can. And there are commercials that say, you know, the Coke Magic Can, that guy, if you open the Coke

and something pops out, don't drink it because you won. But seriously, don't drink it. Did I mention not to drink it? Right. So they genuinely had to take out ads saying this. That was bad enough, right? But then some people in the media started to think and went, hmm, hmm, hmm.

Coke, why didn't you just put Coke in the Magic Can? You got a lot of Coke. Yeah. You're set up for Coke. And surely. Put Coke in it. Yeah. Coke.

Why chlorinated water? Coke released a response and they said, well, you didn't put Coke in the Magic Can because it would dissolve the prize mechanisms. $100 million campaign done. $100 million. I love that one, too. That is a good one.

Heineken. So you guys are familiar with Heineken. Did you know they owned Strongbow Cider? Did you guys know that? Well, Strongbow had a campaign where they wanted to honor the guy who founded the company and apparently founded it in like the 19th century as a Victorian dude. They could not find a picture of this man to save their lives.

And you can't have a print and campaign. If you don't have a photo, what the heck are you going to do? So they turned to a photo service like Getty Images or something like that. And they just randomly picked a great Victorian looking dude. Most likely had the mustache, monocle, top hat probably, that kind of thing. And it would have worked in just about any other situation,

but they happened to pick the picture of a guy named Hugh Price Hughes. Yeah. He was a very famous Methodist minister, and he was actually famous for his work with recovering alcoholics. Out of all the people in the world, they picked an anti-alcoholic campaigner for the face of Strongbow Cider. To stand in for their founder. All right.

And finally, before our Q&A, we're going to finish with this. Because we like to depress everybody at the end. Yeah. Our friend John Hodgman said, you know how to really go out with a bang? Lift him up. And then drop him down. Drop him down at the end.

So does anyone here remember, I spoke of Domino's Pizza earlier. You remember the Noid? Avoid the Noid? Yeah. You remember because it was successful for a while. The Noid, the creepy bunny-eared buck-teeth thing in a onesie that represented a Noid, that's what it came from, that your pizza wasn't there.

It created this one character. All right. It was neat. And I mean, clearly, it was a huge hit because you guys still remember this. We remember the Noid, and everything was going really great for the Noid and Domino's in general. Everybody just talked about the Noid around the water cooler. Husbands and wives would have pillow talk about the Noid.

Did you get that pizza really quick last night? It was a big deal. Oh, yeah. It was great, man. Love the Noid. 25 minutes. Everything was going very well. And then in our own Atlanta, Georgia, in January 1989,

a Domino's pizza was stormed by a man wielding a.357 Magnum, and he took the two employees working their hostage. And he engaged in a five-hour standoff with police, and he very wisely ordered the two employees to make him pizzas the whole time, seriously. Sure. And he had a few other demands. He wanted $100,000.

Sensible. Yes. He wanted to get away car with a full tank of fuel. Sensible. Very sensible. He wanted a copy of The Widow's Son. Yeah. It was a novel about Freemasons.

That was his catcher in the rye. Right. And it's kind of a big giveaway, right? Yeah. He must have left his at home. Right. They don't really need this. Right.

So he apparently wasn't paying attention because at one point the two employees were like, I think we can sneak out of the back. And they did. They left. And right when they did, He was reading The Widow's Son. I think he was.

He's like, God, this book is so good. And then the police were like, swarm, swarm, swarm. I don't think they say that. No. But they did swarm, swarm, swarm. And that's a pretty good Seinfeld reference. And this guy was taken peacefully. I think he fired a round off or whatever,

but he was taken and he was taken before the court and he was sentenced to a term in a psychiatric facility. Why? Why? Because his name was Kenneth Lamar Noid. Yes. And Chuck. I know.

And he thought Domino's, sorry, Domino's pizza was specifically tormenting him. Why? With his ad campaign because he was a paranoid schizophrenic. Yeah. All is right. Right. It gets way, way worse.

It does get worse. It gets so much worse. So Domino's is facing a PR disaster. There is one headline the next day. Domino's hostages couldn't avoid the Noid this time. I know. Those cheeky newspaper writers, they thought they were so clever. So poor Mr. Noid is like suffering in a mental facility in Georgia.

And finally. On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best

decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the

nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you are. Listen to will never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass

on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Years later, he's released, I think he moved to like Miami, and in 1995, he couldn't shake this idea that Domino's had specifically targeted him with their avoid the noid campaign, and he committed suicide.

Yeah, which is pretty- Perfect reaction. Pretty awful. In Detroit, they were like, yeah? Yeah, they were like, ugh. I guess it shouldn't have been born noid. It's his fault. So, it gets even worse, actually.

Yeah. It gets worse than that. That's right. In 2011, just four short years ago, on the 25th anniversary of the noid, Domino's introduces a Facebook game called the Noid Super Pizza Shootout. And that is PR.

All right, guys. Thank you guys for coming out, hanging out with us. Good night, Chicago. Thank you, everybody. You all are awesome. For more on this and thousands of other stories, For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90's called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of

the cult classic show HeyDude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90's. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude the 90's called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.