Mind Control, Part 1

oh no, there's more, There's so much more. Well, it is a somewhat mind bending topic, quite quite epic and scope it turns out. But so to set the scene for what we're going to talk about today, I want to have a little, a little mind experiment. All right, Okay, think of yourself easy. I know it's easy for you on that, but who I mean, think about what you think When you think of yourself. There's sort of like

a thing you have in your mind. It's your personality, your traits, the things that the ways you would describe yourself in your Okay Cupid profile. If you're being honest, I guess and if I'm no longer afraid of my wife. Okay um, But there's sort of a problem with playing this game because we like to think of ourselves as sort of dependable and unchanging, like we are who we are, and we think each of our personalities is sort of

one fixed, eternal feature of the universe. There's there's Jonathan, and he's who Jonathan is. But deep down we sort of all know it's not really like that, right, I mean, human thought and behavior is sometimes disturbingly malleable. Yeah, So to some extent, we can change what kinds of people we are. You can form new habits and break old ones, and experiences you know, can change the way you would

react in any given situation. We can take steps to change ourselves, and it's easy to see how since we can change ourselves, we could probably also take steps to

change other people or have other people change us. Exactly right, And so, like most other measurable phenomena in the world, deliberate methods of changing human thought and behavior are things that can be studied scientifically, and right now we might not know a whole lot about this field, but we will probably know more and more as time goes on. So that brings me to today's topic, mind control. Yeah,

will it be a thing in the future? Is now how reliable will the science of controlling human thought and behavior become? Is this a thing that's good or bad for humanity? I mean, obviously the sort of implication is that it's bad. But what what are all the ways we could look at it? Um? And how's it going

to play out? Yeah? And this is something that I really enjoy reading about in science fiction because obviously, you know, so many novels that warn us against this kind of stuff, right, and a lot of them are that really good dystopian sort of novel that's just so much fun to read. Yeah. Well, right, because that's the ultimate type of oppression that's imagined in in these dystopian futures. Right, It's not just that you are sort of physically constrained and imprisoned and threatened. It's

that your very sense of self is through. Yeah, it's the state. The state changes who you are, right, Right, It's it's that you're physically constrained and you're happy about it. Yeah, And you don't know not to be happy about it, or why you would ever be unhappy about it. Yeah, So says some examples as obviously anyone who has delved into science fiction would be aware of these, but Orwell's

is a great example. Oh yeah, yeah, And this is said in a society that is so steeped in propaganda that that its citizens are trained in the art of double things, holding two contradictory thoughts at the same time, also double belie and believing them both. And double think actually has a couple of different um um uses in the book. But for example, you might be told, uh that, let's say that war means peace. Let's that's a simple example.

And in the classic sense of double thing, not only would you think that war means peace, but that eventually the concept of war would completely change, so that when you think the word war, you're thinking what of the concept piece that that takes on the brand new meaning, and that it becomes the reality from that point for word. So really it's about how this uh, this this despotic government really is defining reality and enforcing that reality among citizens.

And if you don't play along, you get in trouble. And most people play along because you know, that's that's what they're told to do. They're they're kind of you know, they're kind of just just cogs and a wheel at

that point. And in fact there's also a UM and a manufactured disparity between the highest of the highs and the lowest of the lows, where they're very small percentage of people are very very small percentage of people in the upper class, a slightly larger but still pretty small percentage of people in the middle class, and then everyone else and the main characters in UM sort of the the the upper class in a sense like kind of the in the middle class slash upper class area UM.

And things do not go well for him. But then we also have Anthony Burgess's clockwork R. Right, So there you've got this kind of sense of at least seemingly benevolent mind control. Right. It's implemented as a crime reduction initiative. Essentially, they take a young man who is by all accounts not a nice guy, so he is truly reprehensible. Yeah, but they do some techniques on him. I think it's

a combination of of drugs and then behavioral conditioning. It's a version therapy to force him to have a very

visceral negative reaction to any form of violence. Yeah, Essentially, all the things that he absolutely adored when he was on his own, uh, and could be the free, willing sociopath that he was have now turned into triggers to make him feel feel violently ill, even so, going so far as the music that he used to love, which is actually that's kind of the breaking point for him is not so much the violence as his inability to choose to be violent, but the music has been taken

from him as well. And Uh, what's interesting to me about this book is that the American version, for the longest time, left off the final chapter um chapter one, so it into a chapter twenty where the main character, Alex regains his ability to make choices to be a terrible, terrible person. And so it's kind of left up to the reader to one wonder whether or not it was better to remove his ability to choose to be evil, thus,

you know, kind of removing part of his humanity. Uh. And no, or and that way he could not commit wrong, Or was it better to allow him the ability to commit wrong, knowing that that was a potential outcome. Uh? Yeah, that that old question of whether without the capacity to to do evil, anyone can ever truly be good? Yeah, And so chapter one negates that question. Chapter twenty one, Alex grow was up and essentially Burgess at this point was kind of like, you know, people grow out of it.

You know, you can be a sociopathic teenager, but eventually you mature and then you realize, oh, I was kind of a jerk, and so I don't know if you grow out of just driving around murdering people. That's what that's what chapter one says. Well, that's that's why I kind of prefer chapter the one that does not have chapter twenty one in it um And because of that reason, and uh so then we've got Altis Huxley's Brave New World.

And the reason I group these three togethers all three deal with a world in which the government is trying to impose a particular order in the world. And in this case, you've got a government that I'm actually an entire society that's evolved to the point where everything is

predetermined for everybody. So as soon as as you have a fertilized egg, then genetic test determined where that fertilized egg is going to end up within that society, whether it will be a uh in their cast system, whether it will be in the upper casts or lower casts. Lower casts are actually genetically and chemically altered so that they have a limit to the amount of intelligence that they can have. Their their physical capabilities are limited as well,

and so it's a very restrictive world. And uh and again we the the character's journey is one of discovery about how the world that they didn't know was oppressive, how oppressive it actually was. Yeah. So yeah, the main characters in Brave New World that they might live a very sort of like placid and comfortable existence in a way, but that it could be seen as without having the true vitality of life. And they sort of discover the romantic worldview, right right, the passion of being able to

completely mess yourself up. Yeah. Yeah, but of course we don't have systems like this in the real world. I mean, you might get some people out there saying, like, no, man, we're living in nineteen eight four. Come on, open your eyes, people. Well, we don't really have like like full mind control methods bearing down on us, especially not ones that are deliberately

controlled and studied. We we have culture, and one could in fact look at culture as an elaborate mind control method, but it's something that arose naturally out of you know, just human behavior over hundreds of years, not not a deliberate and scientifically informed attempt to control how people in various regions of the world would think. That's what our

vampire overlords want you to think. Well, there's also, of course, the the the attempts to manipulate that culture, to actually leverage elements of that culture in order to get public

opinion thinking one thing or an other. So it's it's while it's true that the uh, the cultural element is is certainly more prevalent than any kind of science fiction attempt to control people on individual basis, that cultural element is something that not only are we aware of, but we try to exploit and by we I mean various

various humans, not just not not just me. Now, there are whole fields of study outside of Jonathan Strickland that are devoted to figuring out, you know, how to influence actions and decisions, either to to make the stuff that we have more efficient for us to use, or to you know, profit businesses that want to sell us stuff yep, or profit governments that want to sell us ideas well.

Exactly right. I think that's one of the reasons that if you're looking at the most old fashioned forms of mind control and sort of the science of influencing behavior and thought and emotion and opinion, one of the first places to look is advertising and propaganda. And really the two are so hand in hand related, I mean in many many ways. So propaganda will will start with that, and that's defined as usually biased or misleading information used

to sway public opinion on a matter. It's not necessarily misleading, like could it be propaganda if it if it doesn't say any facts that aren't true, it could certainly be propaganda by presenting true facts but not presenting all the facts, I mean propaganda misleading It can't You could argue it's misleading, yes, And you could argue also that biased doesn't necessarily mean nefarious, but it does mean that there is. You don't use propaganda for an unbiased reason. That the bias is why

the propaganda exists in the first place. Right, you're selling an idea, and in order to do that, that means that you have a side already. Right, You're not like war might or might not be good. You decide that's not propaganda or least not effective propaganda. Wouldn't that be great if that was like how all the campaign commercials worked as it was, like, you know, here are some candidates, I don't know, make up your own mind now I

want apparently beautiful. It could be great to have a parallel universe where everything, like everything when it comes to public relations and and propaganda and all that sort of stuff is just incredibly unbiased and mediocre. Just see how far that world gets along at any rate. Uh, this,

this idea has been around for a while, guys. It's not the word propaganda really got got going in the early twentieth century, but the concept of using this means of communicating to a people that have a common base of knowledge and a common set of interests dates back to ancient times. Yeah. Well, I mean, look at any ancient Mesopotamian carving or something you know, like or depicting like one of the rulers of ancient Egypt or something

like that. It's propaganda. It's there to show you how powerful and glorious this leader is, sure and not necessarily there to give you an accurate recounting of the facts of history. Well, and to be fair, also, you know you're not going to find this on a lot of civilizations that didn't have that common set of knowledge. If the peoples were scattered so much, then it just the communication to the people was something that was necessary for

propaganda to work. Right, Well, you don't need propaganda if you don't have a centralized body of government. That's that's true. But you also don't need propaganda if I mean, you can't have propaganda if you can't directly, in some way communicate with your people. So ancient Greece is a great example. The Athenians were subjected to propaganda and things like theatrical productions or religious festivities. Also even just athletic games, the

things like the Olympics could become propaganda for Greece. But beyond the ancient world, you know, we get into kind of a more oh, I don't know, deliberate a aproach to propaganda then simply hey, we're great, and those other guys over the hill over there, they're not so great. You get to the time of Philip the second of Spain and Queen Elizabeth of England. They had a little

propaganda war about thing called the Spanish Armada. Spain was like, look how awesome our armada is, and never actually said by the way, we were completely defeated in that totally, you know they were. They never acknowledged it in Spain at the time anyway, whereas in England, in fact, I think it was Sir Walter Raleigh who later on wrote that he was disgusted by how Spain had presented the Spanish Armada to the Spanish population as if the defeat

and had never happened. Whereas I'm thinking, like, you know, come on, Queen Elizabeth, she was pretty savvy on the ways of communicating to the English public as well, so gone the other way, I'm pretty sure the England would be like, oh, we totally whatever, he has a little tiff, would you? Would you argue that at some point like like Shakespeare was a propagandist, you know, he certainly was in a way because the reason he wrote the Scottish play was we're not in theater you can you can say,

all right, all right? When he wrote the Thane of Cawdor's play, um, when he wrote Macbeth, he he made sure to do a couple of things. First of all, that's when James the First was now King of England. He wanted to make his line look good. Yeah, So in the line of King's presentation in Macbeth. The Last King was thought, at least in scholarship, to have held up a mirror and pointed it toward King James, to suggest that James himself is the descendant on this line

that ends up taking over for Macbeth. Also, the play was very short compared to most of Shakespeare's plays, partly, at least according to scholarship, due to the fact Shakespeare had heard that James the First had a short attention span, and also it had which isn't it which James the First was really interested in? So in many ways it was probably or I can't tell if you're kidding, Is this a known thing? James the First was into witches. He was into which is probably the wrong way of

putting it. He was very much against them, fascinated by them. Perhaps you could say terrified. Perhaps it's another way. I mean, of course, this is a very early part of James the First reign. And he wasn't into witches like I'm into, which now he was. He wasn't watching the craft at two am every night. Okay, it's not like you, Joe, Okay, sorry, man,

I almost thought that James and I had something going there. Yeah. Well, so when we think of propaganda these days, obviously our our opinions are very much influenced by what that meant in the first half of the twentieth century. World War

one and two in Europe. Yeah, great in Britain in particular, forged to the modern idea of propaganda during the early months of the Great War as it was called then, or World War One as we know, the war to end all wars accepted totally didn't accept it, did not at all. Yeah. The Uh, the British government first cut off Germany's oceanic communication cables, meaning that they would lag behind in in getting news and and to press and

supporters over in the United States, which was huge. Um. And then in September of nineteen fourteen, remember that war had only broken out in July of that year. Uh, the British government set up Wellington House, which was the secret organization that called upon journalists to write things that were sympathetic to the British cause and also published its own newspapers, eventually in eleven different languages, with a circulation of like five hundred thousand copies per issue. Crazy amounts

of stuff being put out there. The Chinese language version is credited by some historians as influencing public thought enough that that China was able to declare war against Germany and not have a revolt on its hands. And the general idea of Wellington House was was to create publications that seemed like they were grassroots not governmental, um Like they were published by local commercial publishers instead of government owned presses, and and the materials were circulated not by

government officials but by like local opinion makers. Yeah, we see this come up again and again, not just in in government propaganda, but in other means of trying to sway public opinion. And one of the big ones is let's try and make sure it looks like it's coming from quote unquote real people and not not a voice of authority. That way, it doesn't seem authoritarian. It seems like a genuine ups you know, upwelling support for whatever

idea it happens to be. It's like, why, you know, an advertiser might want to give some of their stuff to a celebrity to where instead of like having a spokesperson say you should wear our product, Yeah, if you give, if you give Michael Jordan's your shoes. Then suddenly kids like the shoes. Well, it looks like he's just authentically enjoying these shoes, which maybe he is. Maybe he's holding the shoes up to his face and going, I really

enjoy these. Yeah, you know, but that certainly is exploiting something that they perceived about the way we form opinions like that, that they picked up on the fact that people are less likely to have their mind influenced by something that they recognize as coming from a government source. Right, And and you would still get information from government sources as well, and like posters, things and songs, all this kind of stuff that would be either uh sponsored by

the government or promoted through the government. And that wasn't just in the u. K. Over in the United States. On we had our own version of the Wellington House. On April thirteen, nineteen seventeen, President Woodrow Wilson formed the Committee on Public Information. That sounds so innocuous and boring. Its to be like it sounds like it it almost is like two steps away from one of the departments in Yeah, it really does. The Committee on Public Information

that would be called like the Committee for Public Truth. Yeah, which I said two steps away right. Uh. So he put George Creel in charge. And Creel was a journalist. Some called him a muckreaker. Um, he was also a proponent of free speech. He said, you know, free speech was really important, and obviously censorship from public uh sources like government sources was completely wrong, and he did he

disagreed with it. However, since he was then put in charge of this department, it became kind of his job to at least filter stuff, if not outright censor it. In effect, there were quite a few times where they would tell people like, you should really not publish this story.

It would look bad, and they were trying to drum up the government was trying to drum up support from the American public to get involved in World War One, which was not a popular idea at the time, to send people overseas to fight someone else's war, which would become another issue went during World War Two. So part of it was this idea of let's publish the stories that are going to help support public opinion to get involved and downplay the ones that would not support it.

And one of the things that came out about this is kind of the idea that we see over and over again with propaganda, which is, if you can control the flow of information to a people so that they only get one side of the story, then obviously it's going to be easier for you to sway a public opinion in support of that. If they're not, if not getting the full story, then any decision they make is

going to be based upon a limited set of information. Sure, that's ostensibly why countries like like China don't allow full access to the Internet, or North Korea, which is probably I would say North Korea has got this down pat with with as far as propaganda goes. Yeah, But one thing we can say about propaganda in this period, and even a lot of propaganda today, is that a lot of it is still not what I would call necessarily

scientifically informed. It's in a lot of cases, I don't think that they researched, like what would be the most effective way to get people to think the way I want them to think that they just kind of intuitively sense, like you don't want people hearing bad things about the leadership. What's funny is that a lot of research actually has gone into this, although from sources that would seem unusual. For example, one of the people who was working at the cp I was a guy by the name of

Edward Burnet's. Yeah he was. He was really good people thinking what he wanted them to think. Well, I guess we should transition then to talking a little bit about Edward Burnet's and maybe the the overlap between propaganda and advertising, how how that creates this mass mind control effect. Yeah, so he was not just someone who worked in propaganda. He worked in public relations. You could argue that it's advertising,

but really it was pr He his job. He saw it as he would be hired by companies to help them do whatever they did more effectively by convincing the public that whatever that company did was awesome. Sure. Sure, he was born, let us say, in Vienna, in although his family did move to the United States when he was just a baby. I think he was like one year old. And his uncle, interestingly enough, was one Sigmund Freud. Yeah, it's not that interesting an uncle. I saw where you

were going a mile away and I approved, sir. Yes. So Freud obviously very influential to to Berne's. Bernice's was Depending upon whom you read, Some people say, well, he was a genius because he was able to study psychology and sociology and then incorporate those ideas directly into a practical approach. When it came to pr other people said, no, he was more of a guy who could just cut and paste cool ideas that a lot of other people would come up with and just put them together in

a new format that was really effective. So again, in my mind, that's still genius either way. He was real effective. Yeah. So here's some stories about ways he was able to change public opinion. And the first one is probably the most famous that he's associated with, which was getting women to smoke uh in public, specifically Lucky Strike Cigarettes. So Lucky Strike Cigarettes had hired him saying, we want to sell more cigarettes, and he was looking around at the

potential markets, and one large untapped market was females. And it's because well, a couple of reasons. One the biggest one is the social stigma that was against women smoking in public. It was considered vulgar. Sure, sure, And and this I we should put in was in the nineteen twenties. Yeah, yeah, And uh. There's also, by the way, a series of stuff they don't want you to Know videos that explains all of the things that Bernet's got up to, which

I highly recommend you check out. But the the the other issue, slightly more um frivolous, I would say, is that the color green, which is what the Lucky Strikes packaging was, it was the dark green color that it was not seen as fashionable, and therefore women were less likely to purchase them even if they did. I'll see that smoking in public Wasn't this this stigmatized activity. I don't quite get that there was a time when just green was out. Yeah, he just was not. It was

not a thing. So he did, he did. His His attack was multi pronged. One of those was to get people to change their opinion about the color green, and so he started to He started to uh chat with some of his buddies who were fashion designers, people like people who were designing fashions in France and convincing them to add green into the fashion lines for the following season. So the Parisian fashions that were coming out were incorporating this color of green. So suddenly green was seen as

a very fashionable color. But that still doesn't he still doesn't still doesn't address the other problem right about women's sing. But luckily there was this whole women's suffragate movement. There was the whole women's live thing you know that needed to that was picking up steam, and he thought, Hey, I'm going to leverage this, this movement to work to

my benefit. He ended up convincing several women who were involved in the women's liberation movement to organize a march while smoking lucky Strikes cigarettes as a way of saying they were they were. Um, there was like kind of an empowerment uh symbol, right, the idea that the women were the equals to men, that they could do the same things men could do, including smoking in public. Yes, do what you want to get cancer, whatever you want.

And they were even calling them torches for freedom, that's what the cigarettes were being referred to as. And this domination really helped swing things so that women were buying cigarettes and smoking in public. And you could argue that in part it helped change some public perception of women. But and it got him smoking. So it's not like it's it's not like it's a win win all around. Um.

But that's not the only thing he's responsible for. Like there are other big, big things, like big cultural level things. Are you saying Berne's is the reason that bacon isn't a sometimes food. Berne's is the reason that He's I'm not saying he's the reason that bacon has now become an all the time's food. That really has to do with Brooklyn, New York. No, it has to do with bumper stickers and stupidity. It started with hipsters and ended up kind of boiling out from there, So I'm going

to the source there. But yeah, no, Bernie's. Bernie's was he was hired by a company that, among other things, produced bacon, and they wanted to be able to sell more bacon, so he ended up writing as as the stuff they don't want you to know, episode says a carefully worded letter to about five thousand doctors asking what would be more healthy for people, a hearty breakfast or a light breakfast. As far as I know, he didn't

actually use the word bacon in either of those. Then then he said, um where he launched a public relations campaigns in four thousand five posicians agree that a breakfast hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs is best for you, and ended up and creating this market for bacon to become a breakfast food in the United States. The reason that we eat bacon for breakfast here in the US is Edward Berney's. That's it. So the things he was that he started to do have become essentially the the

like to do list for PR firms these days. So he actually sort of had a something approaching a more scientific methodology for figuring out how to change people's minds about I don't know what you eat for breakfast or when you should smoke cigarette. He was he was looking at things that tended that would tend to influence people and then try to leverage those so for things like an expert opinion that would be something that could end

up influencing someone. So he would look for experts or spokespeople who would end up lending legitimates legitimacy to whatever claims he was making. Right, I'm sure you've seen those old commercials that some of them are on YouTube now with more doctors smoke camels Healthier for your Love. It just makes me think that that Burnet's would have like run circles around Don Draper. I mean, it's just like there was there would be no hope for Draper against Burns. Yeah, yeah,

and it was. It was really so brilliant because he wasn't really marketing particular branded products or even particular brands. He was marketing opinions and feelings and urges and concepts. Yeah, and he was creating word of mouth campaigns, which again goes back to what we were saying before with governments about the legitimacy seems to come from the fact that it's it's a grassroots approach as opposed to something that's

top down. If it looks like it's bottom up, people tend to think, oh, well this, uh, this, this is something that people really do care about, something I should care about one way or the other. It's I think the same reason you see so many companies today trying to get like hashtags going on Twitter like get people to participate, and why that's so often is just a miserable,

embarrassing failure. Yeah, it's so crude. Uh if if you're lifting it up next to next to what Bernese was doing, because if you say to someone, hey, be interested in our product with this keyword, then you're you're ruining the

entire experiment. Yeah, yeah, you're showing your hands. It's it's very rare when a brand can go out there and and start using a hashtag effectively, it does happen, but it's far more common that we see these things rise up because maybe there are a couple of notable personalities who use it and then it spreads from there. Occasionally, it's an event that happens and then something that is uh directly tied to that event becomes like the zeitgeist

for whatever that is. Um. Anyway, getting back to Burne's he actually wrote a book about his methodology. He called it Crystallizing Public Opinion, and um, it was reprinted back in I think, but he comes across as a little uh condescending, essentially saying that the public are dumb and they need to be led. I mean, really, it is very much in that are pretty dumb. What do we need to? Yeah, And I feel like if I were standing next to Edward Burnet's I would be like, man,

I'm a more on crap. I don't know that i'd feel dumb, but I would certainly be like, I'm not I'm not even baking anymore. I haven't even baken in a long time anyway, But that's not the point. So uh, Apart from that one day. But that was a slip. So then there was also the the another book he wrote called Propaganda, in which he made the case for the manipulation of public opinion as a necessary component of democracy.

Of democracy, but you can't have democracy unless you first tell the people what they need to vote on and why they need to vote that way, I'm oversimplifying. No, no no, no, but I mean, but I totally believe that that's okay, that's a thing. Well, you can look at it in a certain kind of way by saying, uh, a democracy, if it is working properly, is only as good as its people. And if you have people in a properly functioning democracy who widely hold very bad opinions, then you're

going to end up with very bad government. Yeah, it's it's definitely a tricksy subject. Yes, but Bernet's was not the only person who is working in in this kind of sticky ideological matter around those times. Um, I wanted to talk for a moment about Diamond. I know, because you love talking about I do. I do. If you have either watched brain stuff or listened to stuff they don't want you to Nose podcast, then you may have

heard me talk about diamonds before. But but basically so diamonds are the engagement ring stone of choice because of a marketing campaign created by de Beers, which is that cartel. If you so choose, you could say vertical diamond mining, slash accrediting slash distribution corporation. You can say monopoly, you could say monopoly. Any of those words are probably valid. Uh. Around around the nineteen thirties, the demand for diamonds was falling.

They were seen as a luxury that the average person didn't need, and they were no longer a true rarity since the discovery of really huge deposits of them in South Africa. UH. Only about ten percent of engagement rings

around that time. Moore Diamonds and so Beers, which had all of these diamonds, was like, hey, n w A or ad agency, can you launch us a multimedia campaign that will push diamonds onto the fingers of some of brides in the United States By the two thousand's, that's actually probably not what they said, but that's what ended up happening. Um the uh uh. And we are not

the only country where that occurred. You know. Back in the early days, there were fashion columns that were written by an agency representative that we're not reported as being written by an agency representative, that we're pushing diamonds. They had these these loner programs to get jewelry onto the rich and the famous for big socialite events where these photographs would be published in newspapers or uh, you know, whenever Marilyn and Row was wearing diamonds in a movie,

they were probably loaned to her from de Beers. M Simultaneously, they started educating the public to increase the demand for more expensive diamonds. Those four cs are completely a de Beers and w Air collaboration. Um. Simultaneously, they were also propagating the idea that diamonds should never be resold. Thus they were maintaining the demand for new diamonds. Um. It's completely insidious. And if you would like to hear a

very long history on that, well done, very long. I mean it's long enough, it's long enough to cover the territory. It's you can check out stuff they don't want you to to nose. A podcast episode from February seventeen of this year being it's a good podcast, uh looking ahead because now we've you know, obviously World War two propaganda

was huge. And obviously we live in an era of advertising today where we are constantly surrounded by ads, whether it's in billboards or in video or an audio, or on our clothing or yeah, there's it's it's everywhere, to the point where actually their entire people whose whose jobs depend upon How can we get over advertising blindness where people have developed an immunity to certain types of advertising They just don't even it doesn't even register with them anymore. Uh,

Looking ahead, like what's the future of propaganda? I found an interesting interview with a guy named Sean Gorley who did a TED talk back in two thousand nine, and his sense talked about this couple of times. Um, he's a data analysis expert, and it was talking about in the future, we'll see governments participate in propaganda through social

media conversations, which makes perfect sense. We're just talking about how the approach of you know, making this a grassroots kind of approach benefits the adoption of certain ideas and whether you're trying to sell, you know, a line of clothing or sell the idea of a big political policy. Oh well, it totally makes sense. I mean you will see politicians that, for example, have a Twitter account or a Facebook account. I mean pretty much all of them do now, at least in the United States that I'm

whereof it. It's rare that you encounter a politician who doesn't have those things, um. And then they have followers, of course, who are people who they can count on to be ideologically and perhaps even just culturally or socially uh in line with them, and then they can selectively report the things they want to report on their feed on Facebook and say like, hey, here's a news item that's flattering to me and the things I support, and then they know that their followers will share that with

their friends and comment on it positively. It's a very uh, it's a very productive venue, we might say, right. And it gets even creepier than that, because gord Lee's point was that we can use data analysis to identify trends before they really take off. So let's say, for example that Lauren, you're a politician, and let's say that the data analysis has shown that there is an uh a growing but not huge public opinion that is counter to your strategies, it's counter to your philosophy. What am I

going to do about it? And through it that analysis you discover the best ways to create counter stories, to insert them into the conversation and thus head this off

before it becomes a big trend. So it's the same idea as creating counterintelligence or counterpropaganda that has dated back ever since we started talking about propaganda, but doing so on a on a scale that's much more um precise in the sense that you are you're detecting these things before they even become noticeable on a wide scale basis.

So you're actually talking about using big data to examine things like public opinion and be able to try and influence it before it becomes like a conscious part of

the public conversation. Yeah, and because so much of our activity takes place on platforms that are largely public, not all of us do obviously, but if you happen to have a publicly readable Twitter feed or a publicly readable Facebook page or some other social platform, then that information can be gleaned by a device that really like a web crawler that's looking for keywords to start doing things like data analysis to see what kind of opinions are

coming up and how best to either either encourage those opinions or suppress them. You know, another thing, I can see very much is personalized propaganda like so like personalized advertising exactly. Yeah, I mean yeah, much the same way that the ads you get on Facebook or determined by what some kind of algorithm has figured out you might

be interested in. Boy, are they way off too. They can probably also figure I've gotten some really I've gotten some bizarre ones that I've gotten some very sharp ones as well. Yeah, but I'm sure that they will be able to also figure out, Hey, you know, we can do some tests and figure out that people who have these same seven interests that you do are much more strongly affected by X type of propaganda than by Y approach. Sure, yeah, it can be, you know, especially like they look at activity.

Let's take Facebook, for example, the things that you've hit like versus the things that you you know, you might have looked at but you didn't really Then that could end up giving more information. I mean, there's a lot of data there. I mean, just assuming that someone Let's

just take Facebook itself for example. Let's say that Facebook actually looks at how long things typically stay in your view when you are active on Facebook, which they do They know which which stories you are looking at versus which ones you're just scrolling past. They know how to serve that stuff up to you, and they know how

long you're looking at your ex's profile they do. They know what there you've clicked through news articles, clicked through to news articles, I should say, And so this kind of stuff can shape how they present information to you. Everything from just making Facebook more effective, which you could argue is, oh, well, that's okay, because we want whatever we're using to be the best experience possible to presenting the kinds of stuff you are most likely to act

upon in an advertising capacity. So the ways that Facebook would make money, you know, the the fact that you would be more likely to click on this stuff that, which, depending on your point of view, either benefits everyone or is super creepy, right, because it either means that you are going to not waste your time on stuff that doesn't matter to you and maybe you'll discover things that actually do matter to you. But on the other hand,

it's like, well, Facebook's telling me what I should like. Now. Ideally, I know that I'm always going to be encountering propaganda, advertising, etcetera. I'm never going to avoid that, and it's not like that's going to go away. I don't think we're going to have a future where magically everyone says, you know what, I'm not going to try to get people to do the things I would like them to do. That's just

that's not going to happen. So not unless you go, you know, totally off the grid, right yeah, yeah, if I end up getting a log cabin someplace and just cut ties with everybody, which I don't think I could do. I'm not good at chopping wood. So the the key here is that you want to get as much access to as many different sources of information as possible, knowing that everyone has their agenda, even if it's something like their agenda is to try and create an unbiased objective approach.

We're humans, so sometimes that just doesn't happen, and not even on a conscious basis, But our ability to access as many different sources of information as possible at least gives us the opportunity to have as close to an

objective view as possible. So that that's something that some of us have the luxury of because we live in a place where we can have understricted access to formation, and we furthermore have the type of lifestyle that allows us to spend time perusing that sort of information exactly.

So we're doubly privileged in that sense. But then you also have to take into account that human beings can be really lazy, and since we're lazy, then it means that we also have a responsibility to overcome that laziness and seek this stuff out because it's it's it's just as possible to have a society a culture that has free access to all this stuff at least on you know, on one level, like a hypothetical level, but through practice, no one bothers to do it, and so you end

up you don't have to worry about them accessing multiple sources of information. You can send out whatever messages you want. So, um, just something to keep in mind. I think I think most of our listeners are probably the type who goes seeking information from as many sources as possible just to you know, get a really good view of what's happening. It doesn't mean that you agree with all of them or any of them. Even I would be disturbed if

you agreed with information from all of your sources. Yeah, that would be back to double think again. Yeah, but I think we're we're pretty much wrapping it up for this first part here, but you should definitely tune in next time because next time we're going to get into the crazy territory of persuasive technology, moral enhancement. When is it maybe right to use mind control? What color makes you do things? Yes, all of that and more in

our next episode. And yeah, it's some really interesting stuff that I did not know before I started researching for for these episodes about what specifically people are doing to use these are modern technologies to propagate propaganda. Yeah, and to just in some cases just try to make the world a better place, but that kind of that kind of approaches. Who's idea of better? Yeah? Yeah, you know not all not all pigs are equal? Wait what I guess all pigs are cool, but some are more equal

than others. Which there you know, different orwell same idea? Sure? Yeah, why that wasn't What about bacon? Okay I'm getting confused? Or well, if you want to get in touch with this, you can s where I was gonna go. Yeah, you can let us know. You can say us an email. Our address is fw thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or drop us a line on Facebook, on Twitter, or on Google Plus. A Twitter and Google Plus. We are f w Thinking. Just search fw thinking on Facebook we'll

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