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

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/a7cbf2ffcac510a1

Edward Bernays almost single handedly fashioned the craft that has come to be called public relations.
He is widely recognized as the man who fathered the
The science of spin.
Bernays was the man who got women to smoke cigarettes.
And who put bacon and eggs on the breakfast table.
Books in bookshelves.
And Calvin Coolidge back in the White House.
Although most Americans had never heard of Edward Bernays, he non the less had a profound impact.
On everything from the products they purchased to the places they visited to the foods they ate for breakfast.
In doing so
Bernays demonstrated to an entire generation of PR men and women that
The enormous power
That lay within their grasp.
If housewives could be guided in their selection of soap.
So could husbands in their choice of a car.
And voters
In their selection of candidates and candidates
in their political posturing.
Indeed,
The very substance of American thought.
Was mere clay.
To be molded.
by the savvy public relations practitioner.
The techniques he developed fast became staples of political campaigns and image making in general.
That is why it's essential.
To understand
Edward Bernace.
This book uses Berney's life as a prism to understand the evolution of the craft of public relations and how it came to play such a critical
and sometimes insidious role in American life.
He made that exploration possible.
And actually encouraged it.
By leaving to the Library of Congress.
more than eight hundred boxes of personal and professional papers that detailed cases he'd worked on and tactics and strategies that he employed
over a career.
That's spanned.
Eight.
Decades.
Burnet saved every scrap of paper he sent out.
or took in and provided them to be made public after his death.
In doing so
He lets us see just how policies were made and how in many cases
They were founded on deception.
This volume seeks to unmask the man himself.
Bernays was able to accomplish
All he did in part because of dogged determination to
Combined with an inventiveness.
That set him apart from his contemporaries.
And make his ideas as relevant in the Nineteen Nineties.
when there's a hundred and twenty five t
PR practitioners in America.
As they were.
In the nineteen twenties.
When he
And a handful of others.
Got things going.
His spirit
Was electric.
And his enthusiasm was so infectious.
That many who had heard a single speech had
Decades before, or studied with him for one semester.
Could recite
His every phrase
Years later.
Bernays was also a bundle of contradictions.
He rode Roughshod.
Over his young staffers
Even as he preached the virtues of tolerance and democracy.
He promoted cigarettes.
Which he suspected were deadly.
At the same time.
He was promoting national health insurance.
He espoused women's rights, but often treated his female employees and his wife.
Like indentured servants.
And he continually capitalized
On the fact that he had outlived all of his contemporaries.
He died in nineteen ninety five, but
At age one hundred and three.
To advance his contention.
That he
More than they're.

The prince of publicity.
Although he was a small man
His claims
Were as huge as his dreams.
It was those claims.
That first drew me to Bernace.
My suspicion that he was a fascinating character.
Possibly an epic one.
Grew during my year.
As a fellow at Harvard.
When I got to know his daughter Anne and her husband.
I met Bernays only once.
A year before he died.
When he was a very
Very old man.
He was sitting in the library of his home.
And he told one story after another in rote fashion.
As if they had been pre recorded.
And then
He told him again.
That was an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk to you about today, which is The Father of Spin, Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations, and it was written by Larry Ty.
I wanted to read this book now because last week on episode two fifty five when I was studying the life of Samsamurry.
In the book The Fish That Eat the Whale, Bernese is a character that pops up later in Sam Zamur's career. Zamury actually hires
Bernays.
when he's the president of the whale, which is the United Fruit.
And Bernay's job was to get the US government involved.
And the CIA specifically.
So they could overthrow
the what turned out to be a hostile government.
of Guatemala.
That was threatening to take away
uh assets of the United Fruit Company.
And so in that book, The Fish That Ate the Whale, they also talked about how Bernays used this idea over and over again.
He used indirection, unconventional thinking.
And his main thesis is hey you need to tie your private
Interest to a public cause for companies as a way to help them sell more products.
And one example that jumped out to me is he was hired by a bunch of publishers
think this is in the nineteen forties, nineteen fifties, they were concerned
about a drop in book sales. And so his point was like you don't run ads saying hey buy more books.
The indirect route is a lot more effective. If you want to sell more books, you convince
to real estate developers building houses and apartments.
to have built in bookshelfs and his point was if where there is bookshelfs
There will be books.
So I wanna start right where he graduates college.
He has a very complicated relationship with his father.
Uh, even though they lived and and Eddie up in New York City, his father had the idea that hey, farmers are the future of America.
You should be a farmer. So he makes his son go to
Cornell University College of Agriculture and Edded it.
He says later in the book he didn't even like to be outside. He thought the sun was poisonous.
And that fresh air was unwholesome.
And that should give you a hint that we're dealing with an odd character here.
His life story is gonna have a lot of bizarre things and I'll get there later on. And I'll also tell you why
It'll be obvious when I get to the end.
why I feel even though he got to the top of his profession.
His life to me, the reading of his biography is really a cautionary tale. It's really important to use it as a hey, maybe like an anti-model. But I want to jump into right away.
Like why you wanna study Bernese and it has to do with his unconventional thinking and the fact that g going through this experience re realizing, hey, this is these are the things I don't want to be.
And so it says Eddie rendered his verdict on his higher education. My three and a half years at the Cornell University College of Agriculture gave me little stimulation and less learning.
As he stopped to reflect, however, he realized that he had learned more than he thought.
And it's by not fitting in with the rest of his classmates and their path, like the path they're choosing in life, that he realizes is a benefit to unconventional thinking. Knowing he didn't fit in with the conventional thinking on campus got him accustomed to thinking unconventionally, to operate at the edge and push the boundaries, which became his trademark.
Over a career.
That lasted more than eighty years.
And he summarizes this point in his life perfectly. Perhaps Cornell was the right place for me after all.
I was looking for something that was not there.
And I found something better.
So he realizes hey, if I'm not gonna be a farmer
I gotta find a job. He's gonna test out a few jobs.
before he lands in public relations almost by accident, I would say. So this is just some examples of these things that he's trying. He's a young man, early twenties at this point. He accepted a professor's offer to write for the
the national nursery
Journal.
From there he tried out filling out bills of lading at the New York City's produce exchange. That's where his father worked.
Uh he didn't like that either. Then he tried decoding cables concerning grade trades.
For the Louis Dreyfus and Company.
A job that proved even more tedious than his previous ones.
So up until this point in his life, all he knows is what he doesn't want to do.
And he winds up uh getting an offer from a friend. So years before
Him and this guy Fred, they were co editors of a school paper.
In high school. And Fred's father
had owned two monthly journals. It's the Medical Review of Reviews.
And the dietetic and hygienic gazette.
And so Fred asked, Eddie, how would you like to help me run the review and the gazette?
So Eddie's gonna be a partner in this business and this is where he accidentally
stumbles into
the very beginning of a career in public relations, Eddie accepted the offer on the spot and began work the next morning.
Neither he nor Fred knew much about medicine or nutrition, and neither had any real experience in publishing.
But both were ambitious and enterprising, which was all most entrepreneurs of that era began with.
And both are willing to do everything.
From writing and editing to promotion and office errands.
And with the Medical Review Journal, this is a description of what they were doing. They publish expert opinions on health controversies. Now, this is where it gets a little confusing.
They are going to promote a public health controversy that's gonna turn into
A play that is they're going to help sell tickets for.
So this is a brief overview of that and then I'm gonna give you I'm gonna break down exactly how he did it.
So he says their real break came two months after they joined forces, when a doctor submitted a glowing review
Of damaged goods.
Which was this work by a French playwright.
The play was about a man with syphilis.
It was taboo back then to openly discuss sexually transmitted diseases, so their point was
How can we get this play in shown in New York City a few years before the city had shut down a play featuring George George Bernard Shaw.
'Cause there's a play about prostitution.
And so they're like, hey, it's very unlikely.
that we're gonna be able to play this in New York because the city's not likely to prove a play that features like essentially is about a sexually transmitted disease being syphilis and the treatment of that disease and how it affects like a person's life.
And the reason this is important to talk about is because this is where Eddie derives the insight. He's like, Hey
We're not trying to sell a play about syphilis.
That's our private interest because we want to put on the play, we think the writing is good.
uh we obviously want to make money through selling tickets, that is a losing proposition. But if we can tie our private interests to a public
cause, in this case, a public health issue. We're gonna refrain this as a public health issue.
Then all we have to do is make the public health issue a success and draw wide attention.
And our private interests will be raised along with it.
The ticket sales essentially will take care of themselves.
And the reason this is able to work is because Eddie shares a a mindset
with a lot of the other uh entrepreneurs like history scores entrepreneurs that you and I have studied where they view problems not as problems but as opportunities. Problems are just opportunities and workflows.
And so it says Eddie took these hurdles as challenges.
Anything could be accomplished, he believed, if people could be made to see what look like an an obstacle as an opportunity.
The key with damaged goods to play, he realized, was to transform the controversy into a cause.
Ан рекрут бакерс у аррій публі рол модуль.
So I'm gonna tell you more on exactly how he did this in a few minutes.
But first I I have to talk to you about
His relationship with his uncle Sigmund Freud.
And the reason I think it's important to talk about this now because a main innovation or idea that Eddie used
Is he was w might be the first person to apply
Psychology.
to the emerging field of public relations.
And so his father
And Freud.
We're friends.
They wind up having a falling out later on. But
Ford married his this is g sorry, let me use words here so I don't get confusing. So I don't confuse you.
Eli is Eddie's father, okay? Eli and Freud are friends. Eli marri's younger sister. Freud marries Eddie.
Eli's younger sister.
So think about this.
Eddie's mother is Freud's sister.
And his father's sister was Freud's wife.
So this is the result. This gave Eddie an intimate connection to the father of psychoanalysis, a connection he capitalized on every chance he got, my guess from reading the book.
I think he wrote about Freud like
forty or fifty times. He wrote Eddie towards the end of his life wrote like this nine hundred page autobiography.
And he mentioned they they pointed out that he mentioned Freud.
Like ten times as l much as he mentioned his own kids.
And so throughout Eddie's life he's constantly visiting Freud in Europe. He's writing to him.
And so they're they're talking now. It says uh Freud was a famous uncle fifty seven years old, and talking to his unknown nephew.
of twenty two years old.
Eddie was more taken than ever with Freud's novel theories on how unconscious drives dating back to child childhood make people act the way they do.
Ен еді вас конвінц.
That understanding the instincts and symbols that motivate an individual could help him shape the behavior of the masses.
Eddie's approach was straightforward. Take techniques that had worked with damaged goods, as he would do over and over again, push them several steps further. Eddie called this hitching private interests.

And this is the result of his campaign with damaged goods. There was a greater demand for tickets than the house could fill.
And so this is a summary of what he did. Number one, he's hired to promote a product.
Number two, he does not he uses indirection, he does not promote that product.
Directly. He attaches that product that he's been hired to promote.
To a cause that gives the consumption of that product.
A deeper meaning.
Number three.
He uses the cause to get small newspapers.

J says hey I made a new product.
Right about it.
Newspaper like no.
But if you say hey this is a cause.
There's a play being put on and the reason behind the play is because it's gonna teach about
uh the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases.
And you know, remove this prudish he he called it like prudishness, I think is how he described damaged goods, the fact that they wouldn't allow
plays about prostitution or sexually transmitted diseases. And he's like, we're not it's not a play about sexually transmitted diseases. It's about a public health crisis and how we cure sexually transmitted diseases.
And so then you use the cause, you go to a small newspaper, they'll write about that, and then use use the media of a smaller newspaper or media publication, and that will get you larger media to promote the cause, which in turn is really
Promoting your private interest.
And we'll go into more detail how he does this later on, but that basic blueprint is exactly what he did for Sam Zamuri and United Fruit.
He's like listen, if you say
You have uh where this you know super rich global corporation and this small country is taking you know a hundred thousand of our acres.
No one really cares. That's like your problem.
But
If you know, hey, the cold war is going on.
Americans are really scared about the spread of communism, especially in our hemisphere. If we can make it seem like the Guatemalans are really communists in disguise.
And we get that th this idea into press, the people reading the press will be the CIA, the State Department, presidents, et cetera, et cetera.
Then we attach our private interest, which is hey, we want our land, as much land as possible back from Guatemala so we can sell bananas and make more money, to the public cause of, oh my God.
The communism is spreading in our
uh hemisphere we must do something.
So that is what I mean about indirection.
So he has so much success promoting a play.
He winds up getting hired to do the same thing for ballet. And then we're gonna see
There's a lot to like about his approach to his craft. He was definitely a workaholic. He got to the top of his field. He was extremely thorough. And so there's a bunch of these ideas I think you and I can use in our work that I'm gonna pull up po uh pull up constantly throughout uh going through the book.
And then I'll get to the point where I think he was like obviously a very flawed person and and kind of these like a cautionary tale that we should avoid. But one thing he did, and then we see over and over and over again, and I have to point this out. I know I repeat it a lot, repetition is persuasive. I'm repeating it for myself as much as I am for you.
It's the fact that David Og V's idea that the good ones no more appears over and over again in the history of entrepreneurship. We see Eddie using that in the very early days of his career. Let me read this first and then I'll tie it back to what Og V's Og V's fantastic advice.
So says uh Eddie began by acknowledging that he was as ignorant about ballet as as the public he sought to enlighten.
Then he set out towards self enlightenment.
That meant digging up all the information he could from the library.
Secondhand bookstores and the Metropolitan Opera Company, which was sponsoring the Ballet Tour.
It also meant eliciting bits of dance wisdom.
from the arts editor of Literary Digest.
And from
Uh the budding ballerina, Natasha Rombova.
And that is nearly to the T
The advice that David Ogie gave, he'd already built this fantastic uh career, one of the most successful advertising agencies in history.
And he's giving advice. Uh I I read this book, it's Ogre V and Advertising. It's found under uh episode number eighty two, if you want to go back and listen to it. Highly recommend buying that book. I'll eventually reread it in the future. It's so fantastic.
But he's he's giving advice to young people in his agency and he's like, Listen, d d this is just good advice for life.
You can be the best informed. Doesn't mean you have to be the smartest. Eddie's not the smartest. Like I don't know anything about ballet, but I can collect information. And if I just collect more information and put that information to my brain, then I'll know more than most people do.
And so all can be says set yourself to becoming the best informed person in the agency on the account to which you're assigned. If, for example, it's a gasoline account.
Read books on oil geology and the production of petroleum products. Read the trade journals in the field. Spend Saturday mornings in service stations talking to motorists. Visit your clients' refineries and research laboratories, and at the end of your first year, you will know more about oil the oil business than your boss.
And that is exactly what Eddie's doing in the story at the ballet.
We're gonna see on the next page, again, the No I left myself more than any other single note in this book is Eddie's all in direction and unconventional thinking. This is how he's gonna wind up making this ballerina famous overnight.
And then he teaches himself a lesson in the process. Eddie Stintson journalism had shown him where he could cut corners. Would a reader recognize that the ballet's press person, which is Eddie, had written the Vanity Fair story about the ballet?
Perhaps. So no problem. He would shuffle the letters of his name around and become
Abron Edwards.
And I want to pause there before I finish this paragraph. That's something he uses over and over again. He realizes that it's part of human nature. Humans love.
if other humans will do their work for them.
So he's constantly producing content for other media companies.
Newspapers, magazines, he's like, Here, you don't you you have a space to fill, just use this or rewrite this. And they're all like essentially thinly disguised ads for whatever he's whatever he's been hired to promote. And this is more indirection. The ladies' home journal magazine wouldn't run promotional photographs
For fears it r its readers might be offended by skirts that didn't reach below the knees. So think about what a ballet uh ballerina wears, right?
And so Eddie's like okay, cool, no problem.
He engaged a pair of painters to add length to the ballerina skirts, and the pictures then ran in a two page color spread.
That річ milns.
of unknowing subscribers.
He's also a master of getting attention.
by s doing pictures or writing that surprised you. It jumped out.
So he's like, listen, we it's not good enough just to take pictures of the ballerinas. Let's take the ballerina to the Bronx Zoo. We're gonna put a giant harmless snake wrapped around her body. And so for the promotion photos, we're not gonna just show her dancing. We're gonna show her.
What does the Bronx Zoo have anything to do with ballet? Nothing.
It's just the fact that's like if you're s flipping through a magazine or a newspaper, you see a ballerina, you're like, Oh, that might be interesting. You see a ballerina with a giant python wrapped around her, like what is happening here?
And his idea wind up working perfectly. Newspapers ran that story with the picture on page one. This is the lesson that he's teaching himself. Remember, he's very young. He's like twenty-two, twenty-three.
It was somewhere in there.
At the point he's doing all this.
Uh, and this is what Eddie said. When I saw how easy it was for the ballerina to become a national celebrity, I recognized how necessary it was to look behind a person's fame.
to ascertain whether the basis was real or fictitious.
He is writing these words.
A hundred years ago. Think about the age of social media. How many people are just famous for being famous.
And this is his punchline. Public visibility.
Had little to do
with real value.
That was true back then. It is even more true.
Today.
He continues without the snake or some equivalent
She might have had to wait years.
For national recognition.
The snake.
took up the long lag time.
So he goes from promoting plays to promoting ballet. Now he's gonna promote singers.
And he's gonna all the stuff he's learned. So he takes what he learned from promoting the play.
uh added th those lessons to promote the ballet.
learn more lessons while doing that, then he's gonna roll those lessons forward through his entire his entire life, but he's gonna use it for the singer real quick.
And he's eventually going to use this
for corporate America.
'Cause he's gonna have, you know, uh s he's gonna have accounts at almost all the largest companies of his day.
So says Eddie was also fascinated by the public's adoration of Caruso. This is this European singer.
And in a lesson he learned while working with the ballet
Uh he would that he would apply later in a and on behalf of corporate moguls and American presidents, he realized that such impressions could easily be fashioned or reshaped.
So I'll pause there just to explain what's going on.
And I think this is most obvious in our own lives.
Uh when you think about
In in with musicians, right? How many times that you a musician you never even heard of
All of a sudden it's just everywhere.
It almost appears like overnight.
this c person goes from a complete unknown and the music industry makes sure that they're
Widely available.
Their music's widely available, their face.
Their name is widely available.
I just saw an example of this before I read the book. I watched I saw the new Elvis movie.
And uh same thing. He was like a seventeen or eight I didn't know this before the movie. He was like a seventeen or eighteen year old kid before his first hit, completely unknown. And then within almost I think it was like twelve months.
He becomes maybe the famous singer in America.
And so what Eddie's realizing here, because this is I think two or three decades before Elvis got famous.
Is oh
America like people will accept if if they if they think other people are interested in this singer
And
They hear the music, they see the advertisements, they see his face, everything else. They'll just accept like okay.
Everybody else says this this is you know the the the new thing.
uh the person we should be paying attention to. So I'll just go along with that.
And so it says uh he realized that such impressions could be easily fashioned or reshaped. This is what he said about that. The overwhelming majority of the people who reacted so spontaneously to Caruso
Had never heard of him before.
The public's ability to create its own heroes
From wisps of impressions and its own imagination, and to build them almost into flesh and blood gods.
fascinated me Eddie said. Now think about the reaction that a super famous
singer or musician. Again, a movie star, I guess could be another example of that. The reaction you see people have.
It's almost like they're flesh and blood gods.
And so Eddie says, he goes, Of course I knew the ancient Greeks and others, uh early civilized peoples had done this, but now it was happening before my eyes.
In contemporary America.
And this is where Eddie realizes, Hey, if I can make a singer famous overnight
Right.
The real money
is helping businesses make their product famous overnight.
And the income that he's gonna help generate for the American Tobacco Company is unbelievable. And again, how fast.
This can happen if you have PR
this massive public relations push on your side. So I want to go in. I'm gonna spend a lot of time here. There's a bunch of things about his personality I'm gonna get into.
But two of his projects, the two main projects I'm gonna focus on is the the h the essentially like a the history of marketing cigarettes.
So his work for the American Tobacco Company and then what he does for Zamuria, which I we'll get to later. So says US tobacco tycoon scored nearly as stunning a triumph
as did the US troops during World War One.
When America joined the war, so think, you know, nineteen fifteen, nineteen sixteen we're talking about, maybe nineteen eighteen, when America joined the war, cigarettes were considered unsavory. I did not know that.
Most men of the of that day preferred smoking cigars, pipes, or chewing tobacco.
But cigarettes proved more convenient in the trenches in World War Two.
And so the US government began putting cigarettes in soldiers' r rations, with the result
That many of these soldiers changed their smoking habits when they came back home.
And now it talks about the not only are they see soldiers that but the American public see soldiers smoking cigarettes as opposed to chewing to to chewing tobacco or doing pipes or whatever.
And it's also it's it's like uh it's associating with hey, we just won this war where warriors warriors sing or warriors smoke cigarettes.
And so it says cigarettes were manly things now.
This was the stuff of warriors.
and their use among men's sword.
So did the profits of the company making them.
All of which convinced cigarette makers that the time was ripe to open a second market.
This time they would target females.
So the previous decade before Bernays is gonna be hired by American Tobacco Company, they have this massive increase in the amount of sales, right? So that's the decade. Now we're in nineteen twenty-eight, and this is where Bernays is gonna get involved. Bernays began working for George Washington Hill, who was the head of the American Tobacco Company.
Hill, Bernese recalled later, became obsessed by the prospect of winning over the large potential female market.
For his brand
called Lucky Strike and he was the going to be the first company, the first tobacco company to target a new market. That is what Hill's idea was. And he's gonna hire Bernays and a bunch of other PR guys, and he's also gonna hire Albert Lasker.
who you and I talked about on episode two oh six in that fantastic biography of Albert Lasker called The Man Who Sold America.
And so Bernays is talking about this conversation that he had with Hill, and this is what Hill said to him. He said to me one day, it'll be like opening a new gold mine right in my front yard.
So let's get into how Bernese did this. It's important for you to know.
that when he any time she d any time he does anything, when he's promoting something, he never
Never, never, never.
has just one plan of attack.
It is always many, many attack vectors.
relentlessly.
And so they're gonna start out first by saying, Okay
We're gonna convince women.
To have a cigarette for dessert.
А за хе слим.
And so how do you do that? You go to
Where these women, what are they consuming? The newspapers, the magazines, the radio shows, and you influence them.
That way. So it says for news editors, it meant testimonials like the one oh, and then he he always does this thing where he he sets up front groups.
You know, it's not it's never gonna come from the company.
It's always, you know, the American Association of X, sir.
You know, the mothers are united against why. It's that he always has front groups. He never isn't you're never gonna know
that it's the company behind.
Again, they say indirection. Really I thought about it as like misdirection.
So this is an example for news uh editors and testimonials like one from the former chief of the British Association of Medical Officers of Health.
With a warning.
Essentially like a press release, right? With a warning that sweets would cause toot decay.
And advis and advising that the correct way to finish a meal is with fruit.
Coffee and a cigarette.
So he also used experts and they a lot of these experts are just taking money and they'll essentially say whatever you want them to say, unfortunately.
Uh hotels were urged to add cigarettes to their dessert list.
While B while Bernese's office widely distributed a series of menus that were prepared by an editor of House and Garden magazine.
That were designed
This is what they tell the reader. Now keep in mind.
To save you from the dangers of overeating.
There, Bernays again is always hiding and couching his true intentions. He wants to sell more cigarettes. He's not gonna say buy more cigarettes. He's gonna say, Hey, if you smoke cigarettes, if you take a cigarette for dessert
Instead of eating candy, it's a good way to stay slim.
So now we're having
Editors.
of a very popular magazine read primarily by his target audience, which is women. And we're gonna say, hey, this article
Again.
The headline is we're gonna save you from the dangers of overeating. That's not what they're doing.
I'm selling you more cigarettes. For lunch and dinner they suggested a sensible mix of veget vegetables, meats, and carbohydrates, followed by the advice to reach for a cigarette instead of dessert.
Then we see he uses that bookshelves. If there's where there's bookshelves, there will be books. Well, he uses that same idea here. He proposed that homemakers hire kitchen cabinet makers.
To provide special spaces to hold cigarettes, the same as they did for flour and sugar.
And then he urged container makers to provide labels for labeled tins.
For smokes, just as they did for tea and coffee. So this is what I mean. He never has just one plane of attack. It's always many, many attack vectors, and he does this relentlessly.
This is the result of campaign number one. Seldom, if ever, had a publicity campaign been carried out.
On so many fronts.
And seldom, if ever, again, will those responsible make public the details of their orchestrations the way Bernays did when he left to the Library of Congress twenty four boxes of records.
Pertaining to the American Tobacco Company.
And so that's how we know all this is going on because they say, Hey, this is what we tell the company, right? We see all these records, this is what we we're t tell the public. This is our action and I'll get to these other public relations campaigns that he does for cigarettes as well. This is just campaign number one.
But essentially saying, Hey, this is what we're telling people and this is why
what our actual intention is. Again, it's all hidden
the thing to know about this, this first campaign is number one, this PR campaign printed money.
And number two, he did not believe.
In what he was selling. So Hill was super sig excited, the guy running the American Tobacco Company.
He's writing this letter to Bernese.
And he's saying, Hey, this is working fabulously our revenues this year.
Worth thirty two million.
So that is in nineteen twenty eight.
That is the equivalent of a half a billion, more than a half a billion dollars in revenue today.
One company.
Five hundred million dollars in revenue selling cigarettes.
And this is our first example of where Bernays is gonna serve as like an anti model, in my opinion, to you and I.
It's just easier if you sell something that you believe in. I was just rereading highlights for Shoe Dog when I read uh Phil Knight's biography.
In the early days of Nike, he could not understand why he was so successful at selling sneakers. He had tried to sell mutual funds and encyclopedias.
He's like, I was terrible.
I was a terrible salesperson, you realize, oh belief. Belief is irresistible. I believed in my product. I thought I genuinely believed.
that if everybody got out and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place. And so he's like I'm not selling anything, I'm I'm I'm
I'm not selling a product, I'm selling
My belief system.
And we see that Bernays never did this.
Because we I think about what he's doing at this point. No no no.
All this media, this mass media target everybody's like do not
Eat desserts. It's gonna make you fat. It's unhealthy. Grab a cigarette.
Those are healthy. It makes you slim.
Well, okay, Bernays himself never smoked, and the man who helped persuade tens of thousands of Americans to give up sweets in favor of cigarettes admitted later he did not like the taste of tobacco, and I prefer chocolate.
So the next year they're like, Okay, this is fantastic.
But Hill is this formidable individual. He's not one to rest on his laurels. So he this is nineteen twenty nine now.
He summons Bernays and he says, Hey
How do we get women to smoke on the street?
They're smoking indoors, but damn it.
If they spend half the time outdoors and we can get'em to smoke outdoors, we're damn near double our female market.
I want you to do something, I want you to act.
Bernays understood that they were up against a social taboo that cast doubt on the character of women who smoked. So again.
Another example. Same idea, different example.
Tying a private interest. I want to sell more cigarettes.
to a public cause
The equality of sexes.
And so Bernese's idea is like hey
Why don't we organize a parade of prominent women
That would light up cigarettes cigarettes, and we're not gonna call them cigarettes, we're gonna call them torches of freedom. I'm not making this up.
This is in the book.
Think about how gullible people can be, right? This uh goes back to this this maxim that I've talked to you about over and over again.
The mind is a powerful place and what you feed it can affect you in a powerful way.
You gotta be very careful.
about who and what you give your attention to.
to people reading these useless magazines
are gonna hear an ad disguised an ad that's disguised
Saying hey
You know what?
It's wrong that that men can smoke in public, but women can't. They're not really cigarettes, they're torches of freedom. Let's set up the parade. We're all gonna get together, us feminists, and we're gonna march down the road.
And
They're like okay, I'll do that too, and now realizing that they're serving the interest of not themselves, they're serving the interest
of this gigantic
corporation that's printing money that is going to profit off of this.
Why not organize a parade of prominent women lighting their torches of freedom? You gotta be kidding me.
And do it on Easter Sunday on Fift Avenue.
So what does he do? He goes and talks to his friend that works at Vogue.
And they say, Hey, give me this list of like thirty influential young women.
And
It is it gonna work if uh the letter comes from a man or comes from American tobacco? No, of course not. So he has his his secretary.
Who hides the fact of what she is doing.
So his secretary he sends a telegram signed by his secretary Bertha Hunt.
And it this is what it says in the interest of equality of the sexes and to fight another sex taboo.
I and other young women will light another torture freedom by smoking cigarettes while strawing down on Fifth Avenue on Easter Sunday. We are doing this to combat the silly prejudice that the cigarette is suitable for the home, but never for the sidewalk. And so this is where I have really have like a I like a lot of uh the advertising people that I have to study. Like Ogie is a personal hero of mine.
and has become a personal hero of mine just because of all read about him. I find him extremely likable.
But
His whole thing is like educating them why the product is beneficial to them. What the what was happening in this book, I like
As much as as much as I admire Ogy
I dislike
The individual person that Bernays was because that is a lie.
We are doing this to combat the silly prejudice that the cigarette is suitable for the home. No, you're not.
That is not your main goal.
Your main goals.
get you to sell to to buy more cigarettes and we're going to confuse and manipulate you to do so.
That is completely different than like Ogee writing a ten thousand word ad.
uh after doing months and months of research for Rolls Royce and telling car enthusiasts why Rolls Royce is better, giving them information about how it's handmade, about the engineering, about the fact that you're going seventy miles an hour and the loudest thing is the clock inside. That is a skill set that's interesting, that is beneficial, right? This is not this.
And we know this because he turned over his own documents to the library of congress. The mind is a powerful place, and what you feed it can affect you in a powerful way. There this is what they're saying internally. The script.
The script for the parade. Think about that's crazy that they use that terminology.
It's like you think one thing I'm putting on a movie.
The script for the parade was outlined in revealing detail in a memo from Bernet's office. The object of the event would be to generate stories for the first time. Remember.
He can't go to newspaper saying, Hey, can you write about buying more cigarettes?
But he can go to the newspapers like, Hey, did you know there's this parade?
And it's in the the the the reason for the parade is to have the quality of sexist and they're not smoking cigarettes. Oh yeah, you know I work for American Tobacco. They're smoking torches of freedom.
And he knew this. So he's like, Listen, if we just do this event
We don't have to pay for advertising. They're giving us this promotion for free.
This is why he was so effective.
He got to the top of his profession, which is extremely rare for anybody to, right? The object of the event would be to generate stories that for the first time women have smoked openly on the street.
These stories will take care of themselves. He knew what he was doing.
These stories will take care of themselves as legitimate news.
If the staging is done right and they set it up.
They set up who's gonna go. They set up what the people look like. They set up the parade route. They set up oh
Uh we like the newspapers are gonna be there, but let's hire our own photographer in case their photographers get bad.
Images.
And they set up like a like you ever been to like Disney World or or anything like that, where it's like, hey, take a picture here. You know, it's the same kind of psychology. It's like, oh, this just happens to be a beautiful place.
Okay, I didn't think about taking a picture of her of my family, but I'll do that.
And then you take a picture and in the background you have the Disney Castle, you have whatever, it's and then you post it to social media, it's like oh
I just did the same thing.
Uh, these things will take care of themselves as legitimate legitimate news as the staging is rightly done. Undoubtedly, after stories and pictures have appeared, there will be protests from non smokers. This is still Brene's talking.
He knew exactly what he was doing.
We're fighting a taboo. We're saying, you know, m society's saying it's not appropriate at this time for women to smoke outside. Well, if we smoke outside
We won't even have to tell these people. They're gonna do it automatically.
They're gonna be so outraged.
that they're gonna be like, Okay, now we have a counter protest. No, this is immoral, et cetera, you know, you could say w for whatever reason and then what's happened? What happens? Their their outrage brings more attention
to our to what we're creating.
And the more people that see what we're creating, the more people will eventually buy cigarettes and that's beneficial for our client. This is crazy.
Undoubtedly after the stories and pictures have appeared, there will be protests from non smokers. These should be watched for and then answered in the same papers.
So that cycle of this this you know, how if you could
Put money.
on how much it would cost to get this attention if you paid
They just ran ads.
millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars he's getting for
His client for free.
They keep going. What kind of marchers would be best?
And this is what they decided. Actresses should definitely be out. On the other hand, if young women who stand for feminism
Someone from the women's party say, so this this feminist organization at the time
could be secured, the fact that the movement would be advertised to would not be bad. So again
Now he's aligning interest.
He's like, Okay.
We want to uh rebrand cigarettes as torches for freedom.
You're into
Uh, like y you're a feminist organization. This is right in line with what your interest as well. Can you
maybe a ten this this march.
And then the newspapers are gonna pick up that not only you're tending the march, but that
A bunch of women's uh women from the women's party are there. So that's good for your organization as well. He's aligning interests. That's essentially what he's doing here, right?
Uh, the fact that the movement would be advertised too would not be bad.
They should these women should be good looking, but they should not be too modely, and it just goes on and on and on about the again, he is relentless. That is a positive part.
about'em and that we could apply obviously to to our craft. It's just like
This just relentlessness and this this eye for detail.
And you know, I'm gonna sit in a room
And I'm not gonna think about five different ideas. I'm gonna think about a hundred and fifty.
And I might try half of them.
And if I try seventy five of them and maybe only five hit, or maybe one hits.
That's enough.
And so he's constantly attacking.
From every single possible angle.
that you could think of. That is why he was a workaholic. That's why later in the book
His wife, you know, is not too happy with him, his kids.
Who the author knows.
I I'm not gonna say they hate'em, but
They definitely thought he was a terrible father.
And part of that is because he did not care.
About
Anything.
But his work.
And so this events happened. I have a couple highlights over the next few pages that give you an indication of how successful it was. The newspapers loved it.
Uh the uproar he touched off proved enlightening to Bernese. Age old customs I learned could be broken down by a dramatic appeal disseminated by the network of media, he wrote.
He almost always so this is what I meant about
Indirection, yes, in some cases. But really I would c I would
I think this is misdirection.
He almost always concealed the fact that the American tobacco was behind
His initiatives.
The outcome was one that most publicity men can only dream about an irresistible script for a stunt.
Flawlessly executed.
Covered in nearly every paper in America.
With no one.
Detecting the fingerprints of either Bernays
Are his tobacco company client, and the only again, the only reason we know this, the only reason it was ever.
Uncovered.
It's because he never threw away any piece of correspondence.
And he donated all his correspondence over his eighty year career to the library of Congress.
Then we're also gonna see that Bernays was not the only one engaged in indirection and misdirection. His boss, the person that hired him.
He so this is gonna be wild.
Hill.
the so that's the the guy running American tobacco company Brnaze the guy that hired Brnaze hill was formidable and ruthless and open to new ideas.
This reminded me of Rockefeller buying companies.
Through front businesses. I just covered this most recently on 254, which was this very old biography of Rockefeller that I had never even discovered uh heard of before.
Until I read the bibliography.
in the back of Titan. So in case you haven't listened to that, that's two fifty four for that biography.
And then I just re read Titan and that was two forty eight. If you've listened to that or if you've read those books, you already know w what's about to happen here. So
Bernese is gonna be t contacted by this guy and hired.
Not realizing
That he is hired by Hill.
So David this guy named David Schultz
is the owner of cigar store chain called to called Breneys to contract his services. Brnaes were told to name his price for handling an unspecified project. So this is bef the events that happened before what I we you and I were just talking about, okay?
So says hey, we're gonna hire you, name your price, okay? There's only one catch. You cannot advise any tobacco interest but ours.
Bernays agreed, severing his ties,
with Ligot. So this is he was essentially what he's doing. He was working for one of Hill's competitors. And Hill's like I don't like that.
I'm gonna I gotta find a way
For that to not happen.
Uh, so it says he winds up, Okay, you're gonna pay me, you know, fifty percent more
I will sign on with you. They also make sure the contact contract is twice as long. So he's gonna pay him more and he's gonna tie'em up longer, okay?
It was another nine months before Bernays learned that Schult had been fronting for Hill.
You've been on the American tobacco payroll for nine months, Bernays recalls Hill Crowing.
You were working for Liggett and Myers, weren't you?
And we got you from them, didn't we?
And you didn't know anything about it.
And that is why Lucky Strike is on top.
Hill also failed to mention that he had hired Bernay's competitor.
Ivy Lee
Years before.
Neither
Of the public relations pioneers, so neither Bernays nor Lee knew the other was working for American tobacco.
Hill eventually told Bernays.
Why he had done this.
If I have both of you.
My competitors can't get either of you.
And so we go back to this.
Yeah, this campaign in nineteen twenty eight.

Hey, smoking cigarettes uh for dessert keeps you slim, nineteen twenty nine.
Now it's this female empowerment.
Torture freedom.
Well nineteen thirty. In nineteen thirty
Hill's salary and bonuses.
Total two point
Five million dollars.
What does that mean in today's money? That means Hill was making over forty million dollars a year.
And then before we wrap up this section.
The author compares and contrast
the similarities between Bernays and Hill. The two were a lot alike. Bernays was thirty six when he went to work for American.
Hill was just seven years older.
Both had an abiding faith in American capitalism and the rewards it could offer both of them.
Both had demanding fathers before whom they were determined to prove themselves. So I'll talk a little bit about that, but that was definitely and I'm always interested in in this relationship because it it comes up so much, for some reason there is I mean I I shouldn't even say for some reason, but
The effect that
your mother or your father can have on you is obviously quite extreme.
Um and so there is some kind of like
No, I will show you, you know, I can be successful. In the case of Hill, his father was the president of American Tobacco before Hill was. So he's like, I I'll show you that I can not only do what you did, but take it further.
And Bernese's father
He was like poor, then rich, and then kinda poor again.
But they had just just bizarre relationship. There's like a lot of I would say
Bernays was closer to his uncle.
Uh his father also dies young as well. I think he he dies. I think I I might have a highline on this.
I think he dies maybe like sixty one or sixty three, something like that.
But this the reason I'm bringing the backstory because it's like this sentence.
Now that I re I've read the book and th th the what I'm mentioning uh it's talked about a that came that comes after this.
the idea that both of them had demanding fathers before whom they were determined to prove themselves. So like th you might
want insight into like the inner drive like why am I doing what I'm doing.
Both sensed that they were at the cutting edge of an evolving profession and both were anxious to test the limits.
And then Brene says like you know
Hill.
He was open to new ideas and they the reason that he had a lot of success is because he was
actively trying to do things his competitors weren't, even if they it sounded like unlikely to to make sense or to like how does the combination of public relations and psychoanalysis and psychology
lead to selling more cigarettes. Essentially like w my interpretation of the the paragraph I'm about to read you. I doubt whether a series business committee today would permit me to retain a psychoanalyst to evaluate billboards and parade women on Fifth Avenue lighting cigarettes as a symbolic torches
of freedom.
Brene's reflected these ideas are would be regarded as far out, remote, or risky. And so his point is like he was like, Listen, I hired you.
You figure it out.
And
You don't need like I'm not going to
Micromanage you.
And so I want to go deeper on this idea of Bernet's use of indirection and the roundabout.
Publicity men traditionally sold their services based on their ability to chart the straightest course to their clients objective.
Bernays's approach was considerably more circuitous
And infinitely more effective.
And so the author gives us a couple of examples of Bernet's doing exactly that.
Uh, he used this strategy in 1930 when he went to work for Simon and Schuster and other major book publishers. Where there are bookshelves, he reasoned, there will be books. So he got respected figures to endorse the importance of books to civilization, and then persuaded architects, contractors, and decorators to put up shelves on which to store their precious volumes.
Which is why so many homes of that era
have built in bookshelves.
Bernays also helped shape the world of medicine. Shortly after he signed on with the Multiple Sclerosis Society, he pointed out that that the name of the illness was more than a mouthful.
Was more a mouthful than most Americans could digest. He urged pruning it back.
And just using MS.
Which the society did.
Helping transform an um transform an obscure ailment
Into a favorite cause.
His tactics differed.
Depending on what project he's working on. But his philosophy in each case was the same. Hired to sell a product or service, he instead sold whole new waves of behaving.
Which appeared obscure.
But over time reached huge rewards for its clients. There's more than this. This is gonna remind me, if you've listened to
a bunch of these uh founders episodes and you've already you you might be familiar with this back on number founders number seventy
I read The Dao of Capital by Mark Spicksnagel. That entire book.
is about the roundabout.
indirection sec
The these words appear over and over again in that book.
Uh it's episode number seventy, if you haven't listened to it. Brene's preferred the phrase
Appeals of indirection plotting a path to a client's goal that seemed roundabout.
But ultimately removed.
underlying as well as immediate impediments.
And this gives us insight into his personality and why his approach to work
perfectly fitted the person he was.
He consciously defied convention. He was convinced that ordinary rules did not apply to him.
And he repeatedly proved that he could reshape reality.
His process was part P T Barnum and part J P Morgan.
Blended in a way
That was uniquely
Eddie Bernays.
And this is a summary of this entire section. The formula was simple. Bernage generated events.
The events generated news.
And the news generated a demand.
for whatever he happened to be selling. That is a great description of the roundabout.
Now sometimes this roundabout this indirection went too far.
His longest client, longest running client was Procter Campbell.
Uh, one of the s he worked with them for over thirty years.
One of their products that he promoted was Ivory Soap.
And so not only would he try to promote your product, but he would attack your competitors.
And so when another company comes out with instead of having ivory soap
they called their soap the swan. So that was the the the product name of a competing soap
And look what the
I wrote this dude is wild. That's my note. That's my note'cause listen to what his idea was. So okay, well you're gonna name

Oh my goodness. You're gonna name your product the Swan? Okay, that's fine.
This was Burnet's plan to counterattack.
P and G's Arch rival.
The way to sink the swan, Bernes argued, was to get reporters to write stories saying that swans were vicious creatures that attacked children.
P and G executives did not buy that tactic. So that is
Th I've only given you examples of where his these ideas that worked. But the like you're just a wild person.
Like I would never think that I don't know maybe w that thought would come to your mind.
But if I was given the job it's like okay
I gotta promote
Your soap.
And I gotta somehow take down your competitor and their com your competitor's name of the product is Swan.
I wouldn't think hey let's plant let's plant fake stories in newspapers.
Where
Swans are d d are actually vicious creatures and you have to be careful'cause they attack your children.
That is wild.
And then I wanna move ahead to one of Bernie's most
uh frequent criticism.
criticisms was the fact that he was a relentless self promoter.
And that he would like embellish and exaggerate
And really as they were talking about this and using several examples, uh what struck me is like oh
This guy's personality is actually perfectly suited.
For the business.
that he chose and he'll tell you why
at the end of what I'm about to reach you, he tells you exactly why he did this. He's like, No, th they're wrong and this is why
Uh, Bernese's stories almost always began with a factual account and then were puffed up
As he recounted his own own role or insisted that whatever happened was the first of his kind. So he loved adjectives. This is the best ever.
Like he even when he's like ninety five years old, like this is the best soup I've ever had in my life.
Uh this is the the the most beautiful tree that that uh in the world. Like everything was a superlative.
Uh I never doubted his stories, I just doubted their magnitude. It was tough to get mad at Bernays, though, because he was such a good storyteller and he brought such energy to each tale.
So why did he embellish?
He was a public relations pioneer and had a great career. Why not leave it at that instead of making exaggerated claims?
And then the author tells us why. Leaving it at that, however, would have denied who Eddie truly was. He was the consummate PR man.
And what he did for his clients, which was meticulously massage the facts and then filter them through letters speeches and front groups until even he could not say for sure what was truth and what was spin. He did the same thing for h himself himself and his career. And that's how he got a lot of clients too.
Ballyhooing
Like that for a living and believing in it so ardently, he found it tough to turn off the rhetoric.
Even when it came to telling his own story.
And he's also saying if you don't do this, he writes his autobiography. I think he's in his eighties.
I think I'm pretty sure he's in his eighties when he's writing this, but he's like if you don't do this, you're actually making a gigantic mistake. You're not doing your job to the best of your ability if you're an entrepreneur and wanting to promote your own business. He also conceded in his autobiography and again and again in conversations that in an era of mass communications. So think about like now we live in an even more pronounced era of mass communications than he did, right?
І на ера в маскумунікація моде і привіт верті.
And a public
Fault.
That is a that's a hell of a line.
In the in an era of mass communications, modesty is a private virtue.
And a public
Fault.
So not only was he interested in promoting and helping his clients, but he wanted to be thought of
as like the a pioneer or a founder of the industry.
And he does something that's really smart. Like you have to tell your own story relentlessly.
We've seen this in the past episodes.
Churchill did this, Winston Churchill did this, Julius Caesar did this, Teddy Roosevelt did this, and Bernays does as well. He wrote and wrote and wrote and documented all of his ideas and put them out for public consumption.
At an unbelievable pace. He understood that his theories had to be known if they were to change people's thinking and behavior. He wrote or edited 15 books.
Three hundred articles and more than a hundred and twenty five letters to the editor.
All at the same time he was representing hundreds of clients. He had a lot to say about his fledgling profession.
About its strategies.
And the philosophy behind it.
And he made sure that it was all there in black and white.
to the point where it was difficult for people not to notice.
And I just want to give you some examples for some of his writing.
It says uh not all of his writing was high minded.
Often he zeroed in on practical issues sharing sharing lessons that he had learned during his many years on the job. He broke his advice down into easy to swallow maxims, many of which have become part of the American lexicon. So I have
There's a bunch that appear on a couple of pages and really
A lot of this is just good advice. He had a theory on stubbornness.
There's gonna be quotes from from Bernes. It is sometimes possible to change the attitudes of millions.
But impossible to change the attitude of one man.
This is Brnaet's on how to justify high fees.
The man or the corporation is much more likely
to do what you suggest if you charge a high fee.
Then if you charge very little.
The idea that you should be pricing your services
He repeats that over and over again until he dies.
There's this crazy story that happens later
Where uh he's uh car essentially carrying on this affair.
with this forty fees like a hundred ninety five years old.
He's hi this woman who's forty five was hired to like live in his house and take care of him. They wind up having like the this like
almost like pseudo marriage and like sexual affair.
And then the his daughters think that she's like brainwashing him and taking all his money.
And so anyways the court system, like a judge and an arbitrar arbitrator, I forgot the word there, have to get involved.
And one of the last thing he says to that attorney is like, Oh, you need to charge more, they'll respect you. Like if you just charge more and they'll think automatically just by having a high price, essentially.
they'll think you're you're higher qualities. What are you saying there? So
uh the man of the corporation is much more likely to do what you suggest if you charge a high fee than if you charge very little, on why thank you notes are still a good idea. The fact that most people no longer write them is all the more reason to write them, he said.
Doing so makes you special and makes the recipient remember you.
Uh, this is his advice for on the best way to win someone over. Remember, this is all coming from his writing. So his output was just incredible.
It's easier to gain acceptance for your viewpoint.
By quoting respected authorities.
Outlining the reasons for your outlook.
And referring to tradition.
than by telling someone that he's wrong.
This is great advice.

Analyze the field.
Narrow your choice to one or two firms.
Draft a bluprint for increasing their business.
Present the plan to a top executive
And write enough letters.
To make that person remember you.
But not enough to make him want to forget you.
Ask for the salary that you think you're worth.
And remember.
You're not just looking for a job, you're looking for a career.
Uh the best way to write a press release, according to Bernays.
Each sentence
should have no more than sixteen words and just one idea.
The best place to find things is the public library.
The best defense against propaganda?
More propaganda.
So now we get to the cautionary tale, the anti model.
And this is just on his failing as a father.
And as a husband, and really what it what's bizarre is it says multiple times in the book, like he didn't really have any friends. And he kept having like falling out with people
He was just there's a deeply flawed
He's very an a a very
Th the weird thing I'm trying to to explain to you is that
He can be somebody you want to study.
somebody got to the top of his profession, somebody that was
Unbelievably creative.
In his approach to his craft.
And yet failed in almost every other aspect of a human being.
A father
Husband.
Friend.
Winds up.
Blowing through this gigantic fortune.
Uh, you don't want it like you want to get to the end of your life.
And you know, having to get a reverse mortgage on your house, like blowing through
untold millions of dollars'cause you're bad with money,'cause you're obsessed with
Not what you think of yourself, but what other people think of you.
Th these are like the cautionary tale.
aspect to reading this book where it's like uh uh
Nope.
There's no way.
Then when I get to my end of my life or if after I pass
I want the people that knew me best to write about me like this. No way.
Absolutely not.
Uh the father of public relations may have been a powerhouse at the office.
But at the house that he shared with his wife and two daughters, Eddie was regarded as something less than the perfect parent.
Part of the problem was that he simply wasn't around much. When he was at home, his behavior could be infuriating.
Especially troubling to his daughters was the way that Eddie his wife.
And so he's got two daughters, one's named after his wife, Doris, and uh his other daughter Anne.
This is also gonna get confusing because he insisted that his parents kids
Call them by his name and not father.
So his daughters call him Eddie.
He felt that raising his children
Was their mother's responsibility.
The word workaholic so now this is his daughter talking again. The word workaholic was invented for him.
I hate that word, says Anne.
I don't think he was meant to be a father, really.
And so then it goes into like okay, well
You know, his whole thing is like I'm gonna adapt my uncle Sigmund Freud's
theories and it's like all the stuff happens to you in childhood that you may not even understand and it affects your behavior for the rest of your life.
And so they could make the connection here where it's like, Well, you know, he grew up in a very unhappy home, had a real troubled relationship with his father.
Uh so says Eddie might have said the same about his own father, Eli.
Uh, Eli was a moody and strident man who had to work uh endless hours to get ahead as a new arrival in America in the eighteen nineties. He wasn't home much, and when he was, his children often cowered before his temperamental outbursts.
As a child, Eddie told himself and others that
that he would never marry and have children
Or repeat the mistakes of his father so
This is a very common response to an unhappy home.
And it's the wrong one.
Just like in founding a company.
Uh the right person makes all the difference.
When I got to this point and I read that, he's like, Oh, okay, he told himself and others that he would never marry, never have children. I said the exact same thing.
And now I'm married with children.
And you realize oh it's not the the institution of family or or having children or being married, it's the person.
the right person makes all the difference.
And then what I also think is helpful is like thinking, okay, I didn't like what this person, like maybe your parents did to you.
But as I got older, I was like, Okay, well imagine like growing up in the environment they grew up in. And so that's what the author does here. It's like okay, well Eli, you know, was
kinda bad, had terrible relationships with his
Kids.
And Eddie instead of fixing this obviously that's Eddie's mistake, instead of fixing it, he he carried it on.
But like go back, like what was Eli's relationship with his father?
It says Eli didn't have the luxury of musing about his future when he was young. His father died of a heart attack.
And Elon was a and excuse me, and E and Eli
at nineteen had to sacrifice his dream of college and become the family provider.
So just to be clear here, it's like okay.
Eddie didn't like the relationship he had with Eli.
Eli didn't even really have a relationship with his father.
And so this broken cycle just continues down each generation.
Until somebody at some point stands up is like all right, the line that's it. This line's done. Like this stops now.
And then Eddie f constantly felt that like you know, I have there's no there it's this guy's impossible to please.
Like I'm not good enough. And that may have obviously pushed him to have this insane drive and work all the time, which then
unfortunately carries on like uh you know his his daughters are now adults when this book is being written and they're looking back and like this is not you know this is not the childhood I I wanted. Eddie may have loved his father deeply, but he was determined not to fall in his footsteps. That he could not articulate that and that he was forced to dwell in the shadow of his father's disapproval
wrankled throughout his life and made him feel that whatever heights he reached were never quite enough.
And what bothered his daughters as well was the fact that they thought he treated his
Their mother very poorly.
He would there's more detail in the book, but it would say, Hey, you know, he'd preach he's a feminist and he'd say all these things these things that were very unusual for a man to say at the time.
But he only did that in public and only did that to serve like
To whether to get clients or something like that. But at home they're like he wasn't like that at all.
And then he also made the mistake of like carrying on affairs right in front of his
Kids.
Uh, there was more than that. Eddie flirted with women at work and at parties, arousing suspicion in his daughters and others that he was doing more than flirting.
And then we see the quiet suffering that
He ha he made his wife endure because
Listen to the advice that she gives her daughter.
Both of these pieces of advice that she gives her daughter when she's about to be married is are wild. It like think of when I read this to you, think about the part what the person had to go through.
For them to g this is their child who they love more than anybody else in the world.
What did this person have to go through to say something like this? This could explain why, as Anne recalls, when I got married, my mother said
I want you to remember something, Anne.
When you get in a fight with your husband
He is always right.
Another piece of advice she gave Anne.
Remember Anne.
Men always sleep with their secretaries.
And what Anne realized is by getting constantly beat down by a very domineering person that it affected

Self esteem.
I think at some point she wanted to leave him, but she felt she couldn't get another man.
And so publicly he's saying, Hey
Me and my wife are twenty four seven partners because we're partners at home. She's partners in the public relations firm. He was the front face, but she gave him a lot of ideas and she worked not only she had to raise the kids, but she worked full time helping him build his business, right?
And so this is another I just wrote good advice on this paragraph'cause this is this is well, let me just read to you.
A family friend tells a similar tale. I asked Doris, his wife, if she ever thought of leaving him. She said one time she did, shortly after their marriage. She came home and she saw something she didn't want to see, and she promptly left.
Eddie came after her.
And that was the end of that. So we can read between the lines. He she caught him.
in bed with another woman, right?
Uh, Doris was surely thinking of her own life and her children when in her later years
She approached Mary Ann.
Pyrice.
At a party
that the young PR woman who was Mary Ann was hosting.
Sh uh now this is what Mary Ann's saying that Eddie's wife said to her.
Much older, her kids are already uh grown at this point, okay?
She was very taken with our daughter, who was just two or three at a time at this time.
Mary Ann Recalls.
Afterward she said to me.
Бі сер кіп е баланс.
Where that little girl is concerned.
Be sure
На то let her get lost in your busy life.
And then Mary then said, I have thought about that over and over again. That's too important, only to say one time.
Afterward she said to me, Be certain to keep a balance
Where that little girl is concerned.
Be sure.
Not to let her get lost in your busy
Life.
And so we see massive failures in his family life.
We see that he also did this with friends and relatives.
And I'm gonna give you a couple examples on these two pages and the the the note I left my hair myself simple. This is not the way to live life.
Uh, Weiner experienced firsthand his uncle's unyielding side when after serving in World War two, he turned down Eddie's offer to return to the firm.
Eddie's response
was to end all contact with his nefu for the for nearly forty years
Refusing even to acknowledge him when he bumped into him.
At the train station.
He did the same to Content when he resigned after three years.
Eddie told me if I left he would never talk to me again.
And he never did.
The break was even more jarring with Edmund Whitman who
Uh, who is the publicity chief at the United Fruit Company and one of Eddie's closest friends. Now think about what I'm about to read to you, what kind of messed up individual you have to be to do something that he's about to do here, okay?
He's he's
This is like his liaison.
This guy actually works for United Fruit Company. Eddie's company is hired h hired for United Fruit Company. He's having to deal and work with Whitman all the time.
do their work, they develop this really close relationship. This is an example of that.
Uh, women had to pass on word that after years of faithful service, Eddie was being terminated by the fruit company's new boss. This is the guy that took over after Zamuri, okay?
Eddie never spoke to Ed Whitman again. Why does that matter?
That hurt w
Uh Whitman a lot.
Whitman thought that he and that he had a special relationship with Eddie.
Eddie's daughter recalls.
Then when Eddie would come home from the office, he'd be on the phone for at least an hour.
Every single
Night.
with Ed Whitman.
They spent vacations together.
For years.
This was his very, very, very d I'm not
repeating myself, this is ri literally written in the in the book, right?
Three varies.
This was his very, very, very closest friend.
But after that falling out.
Eddie acted.
As if he had never
Existed.
Okay, so I want to go back into his work and I wanna go into
What caused me to discover Bernas and begin with and that's what he did for United Fruit.
And Sam Murray.
And this is where he is integral in doing a coup.
uh in instigating a coup.
in Guatemala.
All of this was done for an undeclared war waged on behalf of United Fruit, one of America's richest companies.
A war fought and quiet alliance with the US government
On foreign soil.
Against the elected government of Guatemala.
A war.
That in the mid nineteen fifties when the Cold War seemed ready to boil over.
was seen by those waging it.
А за крусай токіп Москау.
From gaining a beachhead.
One thousand miles south of New Orleans. So again.
That's another example of hey I'm gonna tie this
My private interest to a public cause.
If I say hey
You know, Guatemala government taking uh some of our land.
That's bad for our banana business. No one cares, right?
We saw this in the Zamuri book because
He's talking to Secretary of State Knox.
He's like, Hey y if you do this deal, this is happening twenty years earlier from where we are in this story.
And he's like, If you do this deal, I'm out of business and Knox is like I don't care about your banana business.
So it says upon Berney's death, the Library of Congress made public fifty three boxes of his papers concerning United Fruit.
those documents paint in vivid detail his behind the scenes maneuvering and show how in nineteen fifty four
He helped topple Guatemala's regime.
The papers also offer insights into the foreign policy of the u of US corporations.
And the US diplomatic corps.
And they make clear how the United States viewed its Latin neighbors.
As ripe
for economic exploration
And political manipulation.
So this is some of the work that Bernese did for United Fruit. By nineteen forty nine, Zimmer had built United Fruit into one of America's biggest and best run companies with fifty-four million dollars in earnings and an empire of railroads and ships, a reputation for fair treatment of its eighty three thousand workers in the tropics. But Zamuri was always looking
Uh for ways to sell more fruit.
That is why he hired Bernays as his public relations counsel.
Bernays showed him that one way to boost sales was to link bananas to good health.
Uh he knew that doctor Sidney Haas, which is a New York pediatrician.
had proved years before
That bananas had helped cure celiac disease, which is a chronic digestive disorder. The public relations man decided to use a celebration.
of the doctor's fiftieth anniversary as a doctor
to get out the word
That bananas helped digestion. So again, indirect
I'm not doing an ad for bananas.
I'm doing an ad to celebrate this legendary doctor's fifty years of service, and somewhere in that
Somewhere in that story will be
A hidden ad.
For my client's product.
He printed a hundred thousand copies of a book.
on the topic and mailed them to editors, librarians, dietitians, home economists,
pediatricians and doctors specializing in digestive troubles.
And he got United Fruit to sponsor the doctor's research.
But of course that's n that information's not gonna be public.
Bernays also link bananas to national defense.
A connection less obtuse than it seems because United Fruit's great white fleet. So those are the boats I think they said, if I'm not mistaken, at that time United Fruit had the largest private navy in the world.
A lot of those uh were used during uh World War Two.
Maybe even World War One. Definitely World War Two. I don't remember if they had'em back in World War One as well.
But they were used for
Uh
It's carrying soldiers and supplies and the war effort. So it's like hey, look, United Fruit is helping out our war effort.
And just so happens this company's helping our war effort.
They sell bananas, maybe you should eat some.
And this is the punchline that I've repeated over and over again. It amounted to couching his clients' private interests behind America's public interests.
going back to more attack vector. So we see ex what he's doing s for bananas, he did for cigarettes many years earlier, right? It's just this this relentless and constant
ways of attacking this issue from multiple different uh vantages. Never knows which one's gonna take off the most, but he's just constantly he's relentless about it. And I know you said that word a lot, but that's really the the way I think about it.
On top of that, he campaigned to get bananas into hotels, railroad dining cars.
airplanes and to feed them to professional and college football teams.
He donated them to the YMCA and the YWCA.
Uh members.
Gave them to the boy scouts and girl scouts and students of all ages, and to secure a place for them in movie studio cafeterias and at top of the line resorts in places like Palm Beach, Florida and Sun Valley.
And so now we jump into Guatemala. They had already taken, I think, like a hundred thousand acres, something like that, or two hundred and ten thousand acres, and now they want to take another hundred and seventy seven thousand acres.
that would be that would mean that the company would lose four thousand acres. We know that a very powerful, not only individual, but a very powerful multinational corporation. It's not going to let anybody
They're willing to resort to violence, as we've seen over and over again in history of entrepreneurship.
And so this is what's gonna happen here. Bernard's warned that Guatemala was ripe for revolution and that the communists were gaining increasing influence over Guatemala's leaders.
He counseled the company to scream so loud that the United States would step in to check this threat.
So near
To its border.
The company then launched a media blitz to induce the president and the state department to
To issue a policy pronouncement.
Comparable to the Monroe Doctrine.
Concerning
Expropriation.
essentially saying, Hey, we're not gonna tolerate any other foreign government taking property
Of an American business or American or anything that's that's tied to American interests. In fact, he began planning such a blitz blitz months before.
He had picked out ten widely circulated magazines and said each should be persuaded to run a slightly different story.
On the brewing Guatemalan crisis.
This is what Bernays wrote. In certain cases these stories would be written by the staff men of the magazines, Berneze said. And uh in other cases the magazine might ask us to supply the story.
This worked wonderfully. Ar articles began appearing in the New York Times, the New York Herald.
uh the Atlantic, Time, Newsweek, and other publications all discussing the growing influence
Of Guatemala's communists.
And it's another example that people love having other people do their work for them.
He was also aware of the cloud
That the New York Times carried with the public and the press, and he prodded the paper to publish more stories favorable to his client.
He accomplished this by skillfully exploiting the
His ties to the publisher.
Arthur Schulzberger.
He had tried to influence the assignment of the reporters at the New York Times.
Ensuring that they were sympathetic to his cause.
And complaining when they weren't and then he'd go about and make relationships with these reporters.
And it says a surprising number of respected reporters seem not to know or care
About the orchestration.
Are about the fact that Bernays worked for a firm with huge economic interests at stake.
What mattered

We fill with facts.
That they could quickly transform into stories. So he's like, Hey, I'll do the research for you.
I've spent all this time.
Here's the document. You can then take information in the document.
rewrite it into a story makes your job easier.
He uses that tactic.
over and over again throughout his entire career.
He's like journalist.
Writers, media representatives, news anchors.
You have something very valuable that I want, which is the attention of the public. If I can make your job easier, I am more likely to get some of that attention.
For my private interest.
And he didn't stop just writing stories or providing information. He takes them on a bunch of journalists
Down to Guatemala.
The trip is paid for.
By the United Fruit Company.
So it says in nineteen fifty two he took a group of journalists on a two week tour of the region.
With him were publishers of Newsweek, the Cincinnati Inquirer.
Uh time.
The foreign editor of Scripps Howard.
Uh, Miami Herald, San Francisco Chronicle, I don't need to read all these to you, but you get the idea. That trip and others like it were under the company's careful guidance and of course at company expense. The trips were ostensibly to gather information.
But what the press would hear and see was carefully staged. There's that word.
Now think about the s the staging of that
uh Torches of Freedom parade that we covered earlier, right? Same things happening here, but this time it's not trying to get women to smoke in public.
or walk down smoke uh walk down fifth Avenue on Easter Sunday.
smoking torches of freedom. He's getting journalists to see things in Guatemala that he wants them to see because he knows they'll go back
And write about it.
What they saw was carefully staged and regulated by the host. The plan represented a serious attempt
to compromise objectivity.
The results of his trips to the tropic were beyond dispute.
More and more stories sounding an alarm.
about the dangers in that are happening in Guatemala.
Uh, this is how you're gonna tie Guatemala to communism during the Cold War.
Bernet's hired a scholar from Harvard's Russian research center. Remember, we're in a cold war worried about
Communism spreading everywhere. So let's take the guy that's at
America's maybe most prestigious university.
He's studying Russia. Let's get him to do some analysis that's favorable to us.
We hired him to do an analysis that would enable us to show
There are parallel thoughts.
In the thinking of Guatemalan communist лідерs.
And the thinking of Marxists
Soviet leaders. This is the result. This guy produced a twenty five page content analysis that reviewed nearly seventeen thousand words spoken by Guatemala leaders.
And compared them to statements of Soviet leaders, concluding that there was substantial overlap on matters like how the United States was perceived. In the Guatemalan speeches, the report said every item mentioned.
It's almost verbatim.
uh in its almost verbatim form is frequently found
In Soviet propaganda messages. So now this gets reported, right? He hires this guy.
Then you're reading think about it, you're reading the New York Times.
you're saying, okay, this is a you know uh a trusted news source to me. Then I'm reading a article about what's going on in Guatemala
And guess what? They have this guy that's he's like an expert. He's from Harvard.
And he just did this analysis and he knows all about the Russian Soviet com communist propaganda. And he's saying, Hey, we're seeing the same stuff down there.
That is why hiding this and this indirection is just so effective.
By what he was doing.
And as a result, the Eisenhower administration stepped up the pressure.
On R. Benz, which is the Guatemalan president at the time, he responded by hardening his stance. A few months later, the president that is backed secretly by the CIA, the San Animar Moss.
Uh, Armaz was an army officer living in exile. He crossed the border from Honduras with two hundred men, recruited and trained by the CIA.
A band Berney's referred to as an army of liberation.
This invasion support, it was supported by a CIA air attack.
And quickly achieved its goal.
А фікс летал Гватамала.
And then Armas was named president a week later.
And so even after he parts ways with United Fruit, he continues working.
He never retires.
He's still working and giving speeches when he's over a hundred years old.
Uh the the book ends with a just bizarre
Story.
And this paragraph is like a summary of what's going on. It started at Steamy Day in June nineteen eighty eight when Joan swept into Eddie's life. She brought with her not only delicious parties and a final go around at sex, but also an alleged abduction and accusations of elder abuse and thievery.
All of which was electrifying for someone with any sense of adventure.
Like a last ride on a roller coaster.
It was also a bit unnerving.
For someone that was nayti six years old.
Jonathan.
Was half of Еді's age.
So Joan is initially hired to live in Eddie's house to help take care of an old man. He's still touring the country.
He tours the country.
So I think he's a hundred or one hundred and one.
Giving speeches about public relations.
Going to parties.
But as he ages.
His short term memory really degrades. Like he can tell you stories that happened fifty years ago and repeat it just as it happened yesterday.
But as his short term memory degrades
Joan.
starts taking advantage of him.
Trying to sell his possession possessions, taking a bunch of money from him.
Trying to poison the way he thinks about his two adult daughters. His wife had been dead for ten or fifteen years up until this point.
Eventually the daughters
try to get the court involved, they're saying, Hey, she's abducting her husband or shooting our father.
They even accused Joan of kidnapping.
Eddie.
And all sides have different stories, so when they get in front of a judge, he can't even figure it out.
So he appoints a lawyer.

That informs his judgment about what needs to take place here.
And this lawyer's report is why I said that there's a sad ending to Eddie's life.
And I really view his life as a cautionary tale.
Although he may have liked Joan, he insisted he never considered marrying her.
She's half my age.
Whose idea was this?
She was a good worker and ran the house and the employees.
He was equally resistant to turning over his finances to his daughters.
Independent is an important aspect of life, he said.
I don't wanna be in a position where I say, Mommy, can I buy an ice cream? I don't have a dime.
People should not confound age with stupidity.
I still earned fees.
Until I was ninety five.
So it says the attorney's hundred and three page report.

Uh, but she ended her report by outlining her vision of what happened during the soap opera like years near the end of Eddie's life.
There may have been a dependency and a manipulation in Eddie and Joan's relationship, she suggested.
But it went both ways.
He enjoyed being with articulate
And intelligent people.
And Joan maintained a speech interview and travel schedule.
while his his speech interview and travel schedule while ensuring that his health was not jeopardized by the by this lifestyle.
She wanted to preserve the image of the man who made such an important contribution to our society.
In return, Joan was introduced to highly sophisticated group of people who
and a lifestyle
That she probably never would have encountered.
were not for Ed Eddie Bernays.
He was her teacher, and she learned quickly.
Joan positioned herself for a future
In the public relations field.
Despite Eddie's denial, the attorney concludes that there was an intimate relationship that it de that had developed.
And that Joan thought she was more like Eddie's wife.
And Eddie thought of her as a very important member of the household.
Like a family member, but still an employee.
on other crucial issues
The attorney sided with Eddie's daughters.
She said that Joan made statements to Eddie Bernays.
and others in an attempt to create a mistrust of his daughters
And cause a divided front.
of us against them.
The attorney said that Eddie's daughters were the appropriate people to manage Eddie's money
A choice that was later confirmed.
By the judge.
By the time that decision was made, however, the
Eddie had already spent
Most of his money.
While he was earning a fortune, he also spent a fortune, then outlined some of the things that he was spending money on.
It this goes back to when his wife was alive.
they would rent uh instead of having a house, uh sometimes they'd rent an entire floor on a hotel in in Manhattan.
Uh all the summer. Then he'd he'd move constantly around Manhattan. He also had
A bunch of summer homes and expensive furnishings. He had limousines, chauffeurs, and servants.
If he had bought his real estate rather than rent it in those early years, he might have cashed in
On the soaring valuations of Manhattan real estate. And if he had taken more investment advice from his Robber Baron clients, he might have gotten richer without having to work so hard.
The result was that after he died in nineteen ninety five.
After the house was sold.
And after taxes, lawyers, and other debts were paid.
There was about six hundred thousand dollars to divide between his daughters Anne and Doris.
Far from the fortune.
The public and most of his friends assumed that he had
His children remain mystified.
as to how Eddaged to die
With so few assets.
Doris recalls.
Sometimes later in life, Eddie told me
That he hadn't spent his money wisely.
It is the only time.
He ever told me.
That he regretted.
Anything.
And that is where I'll leave it for the full story.
recommend reading the book. If you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes to your podcast player, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. You can also see all the books in reverse chronological order.
at Amazon.com for slash shop forward slash founders podcast
And if you buy this book or any of the other books on the list, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. That is two hundred
And fifty six
Books down.
One thousand ago.
And I'll talk to you again soon.