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

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  All right. I'm not jealous of many people on earth. I think I'm jealous of Craig Clements because not only has he built a successful billion dollar company with no outside investors, but he has made hit after hit after hit. And I asked him to come on the podcast. He thought it was just going to be a normal episode, but then when we started talking, I realized that I wanted him to give me a masterclass. When he's giving it to me, he's giving it to you, which is to teach us the seven ways that he, as a marketer, has sold over a billion dollars of products online. He calls these the seven human hijacks. And he goes through example after example of how great products and things that we take for granted, like brushing your teeth or how people eat bacon for breakfast. Those weren't things people did back in the day. It was guys like him, marketers,

• 0:43Shaan Puri?

  that use specific tactics in order to make those a thing. And if you're an entrepreneur who's, uh, you know, wants to be successful, you need to be good at marketing. You gotta be able to sell your product and it's very rare to be able to sit with somebody like Craig, who's actually one of the best to ever do it and ask him, how did you do it? I feel lucky he's doing this. He doesn't have to tell us these secrets like, you know, I think he's at that sweet spot where he's been running his company for 15 years. He's been doing this for a long time. He's you know, the company's super successful. I don't feel like he has to like guard those secrets anymore. So I told him to give them to us. And I don't know about you, but I've had professors in school that took marketing classes, but those were not people who have actually been in the game, done it. People have actually created categories, sold hundreds of millions of dollars of single products

• 1:27Shaan Puri?

  that a year ago, nobody had ever heard of. And so Craig tells the story of how others did it. And at the end, he tells the story about how he helped create the probiotics category. If you ever had probiotics, you can thank Craig because he was the one who created that category and made it mainstream. So enjoy this marketing masterclass on the seven human hijacks. How marketers have hijacked your brain with Craig Clements.

• 1:54Shaan Puri?

  What's up, dude? You, I have this theory now of guests who come on the podcast, the more their video setup looks like they were either taken hostage or are like, you know, in some motel somewhere, the better the guest is. We had Balaji on and he was like, white wall, nothing in the room. And he was just like, you know, at the time, he didn't have his like videos set up, like, you know, he was not on his home video setup. And like, the higher your IQ, the worse your video setup. And the opposite is true, unfortunately for me, which is the more HD and beautiful your video setup, the less interesting things you usually have to say.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 2:29Shaan Puri?

  And the cool thing is you're like the real life bad men. You're an ad guy and a copywriter who translated those skills into a billion dollars of sales, which is why when you were coming on this time, we started talking and we kind of realized that you have a masterclass in you. So normally we hang out, we just shoot the shit about business ideas, but occasionally we just drop a knowledge bomb. And the knowledge bomb is what we call a masterclass, which is just let somebody do their thing for 30 minutes. And the cool thing about this is you said you had given a talk internally to your team, to your company to pump them up. And it sounded so dope that I just said, can you just please do that on the pod? And you, you agreed. And so my friend, the floor is going to be yours. I'm here when you need me. I might chime in

• 3:11Shaan Puri?

  here and there, but I'm really going to let you cook during this and let Craig Clemens do this masterclass. So take it away.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  So Sean, did you brush your teeth this morning? Did you take an elevator? Or are you wearing sneaks right now? Any, any?

• 3:26Shaan Puri?

  One of three ain't bad. One of three ain't bad.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  One of three ain't bad. Okay. Well marketers created all of that. Marketers created so much of our daily behavior that people that I tell these stories to don't even want to accept it. And you know, it's, it's okay though. I mean, that's, that's, uh, that's the case for everyone. You're not alone. So do you know who this guy is on the left here? I do not, but he looks very sophisticated. Who is that? This is a, this is a smart motherfucker. This is Sigmund Freud. Oh. And this gentleman on the right, do you know who that is? I'm guessing you don't. I do not.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, this guy has changed your life. This guy is a man named Edward Bernays. He's often called the father of public relations. And he is actually Sigmund Freud's nephew. So I don't know, uh, what exactly kind of, kind of shirt you're wearing over there, Sean, or if you, uh, put some, some style into it, but this guy has his, his hands in so much stuff that he, he literally created consumerism. So quick example, before Bernays, people would buy clothes, uh, as you know, unless you were in like the, the upper classes, people would buy clothes to go to work.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  He's the one who got together with a bunch of other people and they were like, wait a second, these work clothes, people aren't buying enough of them. If people use clothing for expression, then people would buy more clothes and he got the expression, uh, vibe to go all the way down the line from anyone who could afford clothing to be buying more clothing and then buying more things when they came into season and this and that. Now it's people who don't have the means that buy, buy, buy more clothing they could, they can afford, right? Well, let me just get into some of the, the examples here and then you'll see that this guy was operating on a level that, uh, is, is unfathomable. So in this presentation, I'm going to share with you what I've discovered studying and

• 5:33Speaker 01

  creating marketing campaigns that have caused world change. And I call them the seven human hijacks because when you use these seven things, you are hijacking the limbic system of the brain and a, a human cannot help themselves but to pay attention and.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  Either respond, or at least log what you're going to do or say into their brain, and maybe they respond the next time. But the seven hijacks, I'm gonna share each of them after I show these marketing campaigns, and you're gonna see how they repeat. And not every campaign uses all seven, but you'll see that some of them are extremely powerful. And then when you put them all together, that's when you can really do this type of thing yourself. So if you're watching this right now, and you're excited about you possibly changing the world forever, this is the recipe. Let's go. Okay, one of the most interesting marketing campaigns of all time was created by a guy named Claude Hopkins.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  So Claude Hopkins was approached by a toothpaste company called Pepsodent, and they said, Claude, we want to sell more of our toothpaste. And he looked at the lay of the land, and he realized there was a problem. He said to Pepsodent, he said, "Look, only 5% of people brush their teeth on a daily basis. So why are you even in this business that not a lot of people are taking part in?" Can you believe that, Sean? 1920s. 95% of the women that you kiss are gonna have terrible breath. No one brushed their teeth back then. And so Claude tells the founders of Pepsodent, he's like, "Look, if you guys really want to sell some toothpaste, you're gonna have to get people brushing their teeth."

• 7:23Speaker 01

  And so he created this masterful ad campaign that built Pepsodent into the dominating toothpaste brand for decades. And this is the ad. The ad says, "The film that discolors the whitest teeth." And then he has you do a demonstration. So do this with me, Sean. Take the tip of your tongue, put it over the fronts, put it over those gold fronts you got under there. Mm-hmm. Okay, do you feel that film there on your teeth? Yeah, I kinda do. Okay. So the ad goes on to say that brushing with Pepsodent is gonna remove that film, and behind that film is a movie star smile.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  And it's so genius, right? Because everybody wants that movie star smile. Everybody has that film, whether you just brushed your teeth five minutes ago or not. Then you feel that, you're like, oh, shoot, I got this film, you know? And then it talks about how Pepsodent is the way to get rid of that film. So the result of this ad, within a decade, eighty-five percent of Americans then brush their teeth on a daily basis. And Pepsodent is still around today. They ran this ad campaign for, I don't know, fifty years, something like that. And I'll tell you something interesting is about ten years in, there was other companies trying to compete with Pepsodent. And they were using a similar ad campaign, you know, it's very common to steal an ad campaign. But they couldn't get the repeat orders.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  And they did a focus group. And they found out that people love Pepsodent because it had this like minty flavor that made their mouth tingle after they brushed with it. And then the toothpaste companies, the other ones started knocking that off. And when people felt the tingle, then they would stick with the other companies. Otherwise, they'd try the other one, they would feel, wouldn't feel the tingle, and they'd be like, oh, it's not actually working, you know? So they'd go right back to Pepsodent. So they owned it for like ten years, and then it got actually competitive. Because then people were not only stealing their ads, they were stealing, you know, their secret of the tingle. So one of the human hijacks that Claude Hopkins used. One, he sold the dream of the movie star smile.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  And you're going to see this theme reoccurring throughout this presentation. Uh, second, he created a powerful demonstration that anyone could do. And that's just rubbing your tongue over the front of your teeth. And then the next thing he did is he made it about them, he made it about the potential user. And this is a big thing that a lot of companies mess up, is they just talk about their own product and, you know, why they're so excited about it, but they don't talk about why it's going to be exciting for the user. And Claude did a really great job of that, sharing how it's going to give them that movie star smile.

• 10:11Shaan Puri?

  So that's like the, there's this diagram that I love. That's like, I call it the Mario marketing. I don't know who originally created this. I saw it from that company Buffer, but I don't know if they created it originally. But it's little Mario, you know, Mario when he's small, then it's the fire flower. And then when Mario gets the fire flower, he's able to shoot fireballs out of it, you know, out of his hands. He's running around, he's huge, he could shoot fireballs. And basically it says, uh, don't sell this, the fire flower, which is your product. Sell this, which is the customer going from little Mario to being big Mario who can shoot fireballs, right? And it's like, that's what you want to sell is how the user will be more badass rather than all the features and facets about your product.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. So think about benefits. What's the benefit? What's in it for them? You know, these people are busy. Right now, Sean, I think people see something like 4,000 ads a day. And they did a study and it showed that the human brain has the, um, uh, same intelligence span as a goldfish. It's like less than, you know, uh, uh, the ability of a goldfish to pay attention. So how do you grab their attention? Well, you have to talk about something that's exciting to them, something that keeps them up at night or something that they, you know, have a deep dream, hope and desire for. So I want to get back to that demonstration. Where did Claude get the idea for this demonstration?

• 11:35Speaker 01

  So 1854, there's a guy named Otis and Otis gets into the elevator business. And he didn't invent the elevator, but he came up with a, a braking system for the elevator. So back then people were afraid to use elevators because every once in a while, just like today, you hear about a car accident. You'd hear about an elevator accident where, you know, people get on and the elevator falls down, right? So Otis creates this great braking system. First year out, he only sells three elevators. The next year out, he sells seven elevators, like no one cares, you know? He isn't, doesn't, uh, have the ability to get the word out. And then he meets this guy named P T Barnum.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  And so everyone probably now knows P T Barnum, one of the the greatest marketing and showmen of all time. And P T Barnum says, this is what we're gonna do. We're gonna go to the Crystal Palace in New York City, which was this big exhibition hall, and we're gonna do a grand demonstration. So Otis gets up there on this elevator shaft and he has his assistant get up there with an axe. And so he's standing on it. The elevator goes up the shaft, just like it normally would in a building. And he's like, cut the cord, Jimmy. He goes boom, but he cuts the first cord. The elevator drops like just a little bit. And then there's one more cord hanging and everyone's looking out. They're like, oh shit, what's he gonna do?

• 13:02Speaker 01

  You know, this is the cord. And then boom, it puts actually the second cord and the elevator, only two feet and stops.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  And he's like, all safe here, gentlemen, all safe. And those are like the famous words that were published in the newspaper, all safe here. And it showed that Otis had invented a braking system for elevators of work. So over the next decade, he sold 2,000 elevators. He got all the greatest commissions. He did the the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building. And even today, if you look at your elevator, I've found about half of the elevators I get into have this little Otis logo. Otis is still crushing all my zippers.

• 13:48Shaan Puri?

  All my zippers say YKK and all my elevators say Otis. That's all. Those are the only two things I know.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, uh, so that's the power of a great demonstration. So what did what did Otis do? The the powerful demonstration stands in people's minds and he also made it an event, you know? So what's great about an event? Well,

• 14:11Speaker 01

  one, people are gonna show up and two, it's gonna get covered by the newspaper. But if you think about it on a more primal level, have you ever heard the phrase, Sean, nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd?

• 14:23Shaan Puri?

  No, but I like that.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  One of my favorite, favorite sayings, and it, it just shows that humans cannot resist an event, you know? If you're walking down the street and then you see like a big crowd of people and something's going on over there, and there's a band or whatever, it's like you gotta see what, what's going on. It's just, just natural. And so if you make your advertising an event, then people cannot not pay attention to it. And then he also showed unquestionable proof using that demonstration and putting his own body on the elevator. He didn't use a dummy, he didn't use a monkey. Himself was on that elevator while his assistant was, was cutting the cords.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  And so that's the type of unquestionable proof that lead people to go ahead and take, take a, uh, action abey without questioning it. And of course he made it about them. He didn't get up there and show his fancy braking system or how it worked, you know? He addressed the fear in everyone's mind. It was about the safety of, of getting on an elevator. And he did it with the powerful demonstration, so.

• 15:29Shaan Puri?

  Let me show you, uh, let me show you something, hold on.

• 15:41Shaan Puri?

  All right, do you know this brand Mini Katana? Have you seen them, Craig?

• 15:46Speaker 01

  I have not.

• 15:48Shaan Puri?

  All right, so I am about to, uh, YouTube, don't be alarmed. This is, inside here is a giant sword. And, um, this company, so this brand, they sell these, it's called Mini Katana, but it's actually humongous. So they sell these swords. Now, the problem with selling swords is that Google and Facebook don't let you do it. You can't advertise weapons. So how does an ecommerce brand work when you can't advertise weapons? Well, what they did was they started, they hired like 20 YouTubers and TikTokers, and they would have them do what you just described, the powerful demonstration. So they would take this. They would take this sword and they would, instead of saying, you know, why you need a sword? Because most people don't need a sword, let's be honest.

• 16:31Shaan Puri?

  Instead of talking about how long it is, or how sharp it is, or whatever, they would show that the sword could cut through a bullet that was fired at them. So this video starts with a guy's holding the sword and there's a bullet aimed at him and he's gonna try to split it in half. And then when he does it, it's a powerful presentation about like how badass these swords are. And they, all of their marketing, they'll take a steak, you just see a steak plop down on a cutting board and then a giant sword cutting through it, which is completely unnecessary, but it is a powerful demonstration. And, you know, I remember seeing those TED Talks where guys take a glass and they, you know, it's like, here's dirty water, would you drink this water? It's like, no way. And then they put it into their filter and like with their bottle filter and then they start to drink it.

• 17:16Shaan Puri?

  And I don't know who this was, Bill Gates or somebody.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  And sometimes they pour in the water first, right? For real.

• 17:20Shaan Puri?

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

• 17:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, the knife company, they're genius. Any knife infomercial will do this, where they'll be taking a knife and cutting a penny, you know, or like effortlessly slicing tomatoes through the air. And you know who was the king of this was Dr. Oz.

• 17:53Shaan Puri?

  Dr. Oz, what did he do?

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Every episode of the Dr. Oz Show is a marketing masterclass.

• 18:00Shaan Puri?

  Oh shit, I'm sleeping on Dr. Oz.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, he advertised these nutrients and I don't know if he had some type of deal with manufacturers or something like that, but he would advertise like, like Resveratrol or like Garsinia cambogia berries, which were like weight loss, but he wouldn't ever advertise a specific brand. He would just talk about Garsinia cambogia. If you look, one of the reasons it's hard to advertise supplements online is because Dr. Oz would go and talk about Garsinia cambogia or whatever berry. And then all these scammers would create websites selling Garsinia cambogia on auto ship that you could never get out. You know, you'd sign up on the website and somebody would disappear, but that thing would be docking your credit card for years later, you know?

• 18:46Speaker 01

  So Dr. Oz, one of the ones I remember is he'd go on there and he'd say, This is your body and these balloons on it. And then he'd have like a mannequin with with balloons on it. These balloons are the fat cells.

• 19:04Shaan Puri?

  Oh, wow.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  Garsinia cambogia is a miracle berry that works for any body type. And then he'd take out a pin. He'd be like, this is the berry. Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. That's what Garsinia cambogia does to the fat cells in your body. And he'd be crazy, man, like a billion dollars of Garsinia cambogia we'd sold over the next few months. Mostly to these scammy auto billing marketers. It was it was wild. And he did this with like five different berries over time. And eventually he got pulled into Congress to testify at all this shit and like.

• 19:44Shaan Puri?

  No way.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  It was wild. He rolled with it because he was getting all these allegations that he was starting them. On one episode, he goes, uh, he gets a camera crew behind him and he goes down to one of the companies that's selling the Garsinia cambogia. And he knocks on the door and he's got the camera behind him. The founder comes out. He's like, hey, I didn't give you permission to use my name and likeness to sell your Garsinia cambogia. And like your auto billing customers and this and that, you know, and he was like pretending that he was the the good guy. But I don't know, man. I don't know if like Garsinia was lining his pockets or something before it happened, but like did this with so many berries and for so many years, uh, it it it's crazy, man. It was like billions of dollars of fraud happened because it because of his show.

• 20:24Shaan Puri?

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

• 21:08Shaan Puri?

  operational or technical person is used to flexing. And so what I love about this is these examples that give you inspiration to be able to like, go use that other part of your brain.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  You know, if you look at these, we got the hijacks up here, right, from Otis Elevator? All of these apply to what I just said about Dogg Ross. The event is that it's a TV show. You know, so that makes an event already. The demonstration, the unquestionable proof is him. He's a doctor saying that this is gonna work for you. And then making it about them. He says, this is the miracle weight loss cure for all body types. Like, those are almost his exact words.

• 21:42Shaan Puri?

  And by the way, you know, who else does this amazingly well? Elon. Elon, who's the, you know, the scientist, the hardcore engineer. You know what he's brilliant at? Just yesterday, the news was, um, there's the, they're getting their hyping Cybertruck right now. And you, you, did you see that news that came out, which was that they unloaded a full magazine of some assault rifle at the door? And so there's a bunch of holes in the door, like, you could see where the bullet hit the door, but didn't go through. And so he's driving that car around and leaked that kind of the tweet rumor that, hey, they tested it this way. And he did this at their onstage event, too, but it fucked up. Like, he tried to take a sledgehammer and show how indestructible this was. He swung the sledgehammer and then they like broke through the window. And he's like, oh, shit, that wasn't supposed to happen.

• 22:25Shaan Puri?

  Like, this is supposed to be bulletproof. But, um, he was trying to do that. He was trying to, you know, P T Barnum, uh, you know, their Cybertruck, which is, which is really, really cool to see.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know what was another incredible success that I think was complete bullshit? Was the, the power balance bracelet? Do you remember those? It was like

• 22:45Shaan Puri?

  Dude, I was thinking about that. When you did the, the tongue on the teeth, that's the first thing I thought of. Where people used to say, hey, hold out your arms.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:52Shaan Puri?

  And now watch how easy, I go on one foot, watch how easily I could tip you over. And then you put this bracelet on and now you can't.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Angle which way you press in the arm.

• 23:02Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 23:02Speaker 01

  Totally, totally. Chiropractor recently and he was doing that with me and I was like, oh, God. Am I getting eaten by this chiropractor? But yeah, I think power balance actually got popped for that as they deserve.

• 23:16Shaan Puri?

  But that was, that was a very effective technique, even though it was, you know, unethical in that case.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay, let's get into some, uh, so those are, those are last two are for good, right? We want people to brush their teeth. We want elevators to be safe. Uh, now let's talk about some evil campaigns.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  Well, okay, 1930s, all the, the men had come back from the war, you know, and they gave them free cigarettes. So like, so many men were hooked on smoking that there was no room for growth. So the cigarette company has come to Eddie Bernay's, uh, Lucky Strike in particular is who, who came to him and they're like, hey, we need more customers. He's like, well, you already got all the men, but at that time, Sean, it was illegal for a woman to smoke in public. It was literally fucking illegal. And there was like cafes in New York City where, you know, there's, there's stories of, of like high society women getting asked to leave.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  And then women that could afford it would have like special smoking rooms in their homes that would, you know, that, that really liked it because they weren't allowed to do it in public. Oh, and I should add something too. Women didn't really want to smoke, uh, for the most part. You know, they, they weren't really pushing back against it. Yes, it was illegal, but it was also considered a ladylike. It was a, it was a man thing, you know? So he says to Lucky Strike, he's like, look, you know, you gotta, you gotta get the women smoking. So what was going on at the time was the women's rights movement, you know? So women were out in the streets marching about, you know, wanting the right to vote and, and Bernay's capitalized on that. So the big social event of the day, kind of like the Oscars of today,

• 24:55Speaker 01

  was the Easter parade, which would go down Fifth Avenue and all the reporters would be standing on the sidelines. And so Bernay's organized a float and he called up all of the, the socialites and debutantes, like the Paris Hiltons and Kim Kardashians of the day. And he got them all to go on this float and they're cruising down Fifth Avenue, the parades happen and you know, when they get to the corner where all the reporters were, the women. Do you go into their stocking, they pull out cigarettes, put them in their mouths and light them up. So imagine, you know, Harris and Chloe and all the Kardashians and even

• 25:38Speaker 01

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

• 26:02Shaan Puri?

  Oh, wow.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  And so the newspapers ran with that. They're like, you know, women present torches of freedom to show that they are equal with men and they can smoke too. And so turned it into a movement. And if you think about smoking to this day, if you think about a woman's, a woman who smokes, I think of a bit older than you, Sean, but I think of like Kate Moss and like the, you know, sexy model smoking. Now it might be considered gross for a woman to smoke again, you know, or anyone to smoke. I don't really know what the kids these days are thinking. But yeah, we, you know, you think of like some like badass badass woman and you remember that old movies with Audrey Hepburn? You know, that famous scene, I think it's Breakfast at Tiffany's where she's puffing

• 26:48Speaker 01

  that long cigarette, you know? So, yeah, completely changed the world there.

• 26:54Shaan Puri?

  That's amazing. I had never heard that story, but I love that. That's like a combination of you got the event, you have a kind of news jacking, which was jumping on to an existing trend, but then also the, the just the copyrighting of the words, the words there of, you know, these aren't cigarettes, these are torches of freedom. That's really, really powerful.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, the plants. If you like that plant strategy, Ryan Holiday wrote a great book called Trust Me, I'm Lying. And he talks about all these phrases that he planted in the heads of these reporters when he was promoting things like Tucker Max books and, you know, wild stuff back then. So there's a new lesson in here, a new hijack, so to speak, and that is help them rebel or feel superior. So people have this tendency in them. They want to go against the grain. They want to show that they are not one of the sheep, you know, they want to show that they are not going to bow down to the mainstream pressure or society standards, things like that, you know?

• 27:58Speaker 01

  And this is a really powerful concept that you're going to see appear throughout some of the other demonstrations here, but that's, that's what Bernay's allowed them to do is to rebel and maybe even feel superior to the rest because they're, they're leading the charge. Right. Okay, keep going. By the way, I'm loving this, so keep going. All right, so Bernay's had a problem.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Lucky Strike did this big campaign to get women to start smoking and they did start smoking, but they didn't smoke Lucky Strikes. Because if you remember, boop, boop, boop, see the Lucky Strike package there, Sean? What color is the main color? It's green. Well, green was a very undesirable color back in those days. It was considered an ugly color. And so Bernay's got all these women smoking, but Lucky's like, what the fuck, Bernay's? They're not smoking Lucky Strikes. So he has to come up with something new. So he goes back to his, his debutantes and socialites, and as they say here, women of prominence. And they create the first ever gala green ball at the Waldorf Hotel in New York City.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  And the magazines started following around the Kardashians of the day to see what type of outfits they were going to wear that were styled in green and women started bringing green decor into their homes and it just became a big thing and the gala happens and the women are photographed in their exotic green outfits and it, it became the most fashionable color within one year, going from the ugliest color to the most fashionable color. And Lucky Strike, without even trying, became the number one selling brand of cigarettes for women because they subconsciously wanted that green box. Holy shit. Wow.

• 29:47Shaan Puri?

  Is one of the hijacks, by the way, using people of prominence? Or you didn't, you don't include that in the hijacks?

• 29:52Speaker 01

  Unquestionable proof. That falls under unquestionable proof. It's a great question. But yes, when we humans see someone, as they just said in the New York Times article, someone of prominence doing something, we automatically assume it's been vetted. We automatically assume it's okay and we automatically have something in us that makes us want to do that. Maybe it's from when we were all in tribe and you know, if the chief is doing something, then you do it too? Who knows? But that's unquestionable proof, you know? And so, you know, he made an event where this unquestionable proof happened. And also, there was this force that they wanted to rebel against.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  You know, these celebrities are like, oh, I'm cool enough where I can wear green and it'll look good. You know? You know, I heard this other thing, Sean, today. So, how old are you? Are you public with your age?

• 30:46Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, 35.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  35, okay, I'm 44. So, when you think of emojis, what do you think about?

• 30:52Shaan Puri?

  When I think of emojis?

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, like who do you think uses emojis?

• 30:56Shaan Puri?

  I would have said like teenagers, teens and tweens. But I think, but then I see people in India, like my auntie, my aunts and my aunts are crazy about emojis.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Yes. I would have thought the same. So, my buddy is a dad of two teenagers. He said they will not use emojis because they think emojis are something adults use.

• 31:18Speaker 01

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

• 31:46Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, when when Snapchat came out was getting really popular. One of the things that I remember in Silicon Valley, all the like product genius blogger guys were like, yeah, it's, you know, what what Snapchat should do is make it easier to use because look at this like. At the time, like, you know, to use those face filters, you had to like, there was no button on the screen. You had to just hold down on your face for three seconds like a magic trick. Like a like a secret door that you didn't know that nobody else knew about. Or even just in signing up, there was like all these like funky ways to do it. And and then the people, I think one of the guys at Snapchat came out was like, look, it's intentional that we want, you know, you know, you baby proof medicine.

• 32:23Shaan Puri?

  We're we're boomer proofing this app like the way that this is going to become really popular amongst young people is that we don't make it easy for older people to get in and figure out how this whole thing works. And we want to make it easy for one friend to tell another the secret on how to do something. So that they feel like they're in on it with with them. And it's like a word of mouth virality of how do you do that?

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's like, once your parents or your grandma got on Facebook, it wasn't cool anymore. You know?

• 32:48Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  And then everyone went to Instagram. And now, you know, Uncle Bob's on Instagram and it's just like losing losing type, you know, so everyone goes over to TikTok, right? And we'll see if something comes next, you know, I think the the moms are, well, moms are definitely a big group on TikTok now.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  I don't know if like, I don't know. Are you on TikTok? I'm not. I I have like a strong.

• 33:10Shaan Puri?

  I gotta admit, I I love TikTok, even though, you know, it's my lucky strike. I know, I know, I probably shouldn't be be smoking that TikTok every night, but I do.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Well, you know, TikTok is crack. It is digital crack. Very well designed digital crack. So don't blame yourself.

• 33:24Shaan Puri?

  People say that, but like when I think when they say that they mean avoid it. And I'm like, wait, cracks like, isn't crack supposed to be like the greatest experience when people do it? And then I open up TikTok and I start swiping.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you know, actually, speaking of drugs, funny enough, there's another rebellion I'm seeing in in my community against alcohol right now. And and I remember. In my twenties, it was all about the alcohol, you know, if you didn't show up, uh, if you should have a party empty handed, you know, it's like, not cool. I've gone to parties now with a bottle and they'd be like, oh, this is a non-alcoholic party. Can you go put that wagon in your car? It's like this pushback, you know? Well, I hope you brought some ketamine.

• 34:05Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  Okay. I'll last campaign I'm going to share with you about Eddie Bernay's is the Great American Breakfast. So, early in the, you know, 19th century, 20th century, breakfast was like some coffee and maybe a roll or some oatmeal or something like that, right? No one actually had like a actual hearty breakfast. And beach nut bacon comes to Bernay and they're like, hey, we want to sell more bacon. He's like, well, people are eating bacon usually for dinner, sometimes for lunch. There's another meal here we can take advantage of. So Bernay's goes to his, his on-staff doctor,

• 34:53Speaker 01

  or actually no, it was, it was, it was beach nuts on-staff doctor. And he says, hey, doc, would you agree that a hearty breakfast containing bacon would be the best way to start your day? And the doctor's like, oh, of course I agree with you. Do you think some of your doctor friends would agree? So he has him write 5,000 letters to doctors across the nation. Saying, I think bacon is the healthiest breakfast and people should be eating a heartier breakfast. Do you agree? 4,500 doctors wrote back and they're like, yes, I agree. That makes perfect sense. They didn't turn this into an ad campaign, but what they did do is they shared that result with all of the newspapers. And so newspapers started publishing headlines.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  Doctors agree, a hearty breakfast containing bacon is the best way to store energy to last throughout your workday. And, but that's how people started eating, eating bacon for breakfast and, you know, all the, all the bacon companies started going crazy because it became a breakfast thing.

• 35:57Shaan Puri?

  Wow.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  So what are we doing here? There's, we're selling the dream, you know, of a, of a breakfast that's going to give you more energy to get throughout your day. You know, so that's making it about them as well. The unquestionable proof, 4,500 doctors can't be wrong, right?

• 36:13Speaker 01

  And then there's even a little bit of a feeling superior here because if your buddy is over there eating a roll, you're like, hey, Sean, got something to tell you about that roll, man. It's not as hearty.

• 36:26Shaan Puri?

  Is this your bacon?

• 36:28Speaker 01

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

• 36:49Shaan Puri?

  Totally, totally. Orange juice is, when I was a kid, orange juice is good for you. It's vitamin C, which is, you know, good for your immunity. This is what I was told and drank a lot of sugar because of that.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. So orange juice actually has the same amount of sugar as a Coca-Cola. So orange juice, you know, it's, it's glucose or something. I don't know. Maybe it's a different kind of sugar, but it ain't good for you. So this was all the, the result of a, a marketing man named Albert Lasker, who was probably the, the man responsible for more consumer change in the early 1900s than anyone. Claude Hopkins, Pepsi and, Claude actually worked with Albert. He was his top copywriter. And prior to Claude coming on board, Albert was contacted by the California Growers Association. They're like, Albert, we got so many oranges here in California. We're having to cut down trees because they overproduce and then we need to get rid of them.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  And it brings the bugs and all that stuff. You know, how can we sell more oranges? And he looked at the lay of land and all these orange growers were competing against each other, trying to say like, we have the best orange, we have the best orange or whatever. He goes, okay, first of all, you guys are all teaming up. And so he teamed all together and he put them under one brand name and he called it Sunkist, which I think is a pretty genius name.

• 38:05Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  And then as he's, he's meeting with them, he notices that what the, the growers would do for their kids as a, as a, as a special treat is they'd take that orange and they, they'd squeeze it into a cup and they'd give their kids little, little shots of the juice. He's like, ah, wait a second. How many oranges did it take to make that juice? And they're like, oh, you know, three or four or whatever. So he thought, what if we could make that mainstream? Cause the juice tasted really good. And so. He had a engineer invent this device that you could, you know, cheap plastic device that you can put an orange on. And then he created this campaign talking about how oranges have all these vitamins in them and, you know, will help you get more of your nutrients from food,

• 38:53Speaker 01

  tying orange juice to meals. So you think about, oh, I want to get the nutrients in this food. So I'm going to drink orange juice with it. And then he had this campaign where you buy a box of oranges and you send in your, your proof of purchase and they send you this juicer thing. So it was like you get something for free and created orange juice. And so what does he do? He's selling the dream of getting the more nutrients from your food. The unquestionable proof, you know, if you, if you go and actually read that ad, there was like, you know, doctors recommend and things like that. Um, he made it about them because it's showing them that they can get some benefit here. And then here's a new hijack that's appearing for the first time. Um, actually, maybe, I mean, I guess it would apply to toothpaste, but, uh, change daily

• 39:37Speaker 01

  behavior. If you can change someone's daily behavior, you can create something big. So two modern examples of this bulletproof coffee. Are you familiar with bulletproof coffee? Uh, I'm just familiar with it from the surface level, but yeah, tell me, tell me. You know, do you know what it is? Uh, it's like the butter coffee or the oil coffee, MCT oil coffee. Is that what it is? So you walk into any Starbucks in the country. They don't serve bulletproof coffee, but they know what it is. Everyone knows what it is. And the genius that, that Dave Asprey had was he changed the behavior of these, of people that were already doing something. He kind of like, like intercepted their coffee. It's an additive to your coffee rather than a new, new behavior.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  So, so now he's, he's changing the existing behavior. Yes. Changing the existing behavior. And so there's a, there's a book called The Miracle Morning and it talks, uh, talks about the power of journaling every day. So you buy this book called The Miracle Morning and then you do this specific journal every day, right? Long after you read the book. And I met the author of that, Hal Elrod, and he told me something that, that stuck with me. I thought was fascinating.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  He said, when was the last time you recommended a book? And I was like, well, I was just read this book on Genghis Khan. You know, I've been telling all my friends about it or whatever. He's like, when were you telling them about it? I was like, well, I was telling them about it when I was reading it. He said, okay, well, most people recommend books during the time they're reading that book. And then they go and they read the next book. Right now I'm reading Elon's biography. It's great. That's why I just told you about that, Sean. I'm literally in the middle of it. You know, I can tell you what book I read last month or last year. People talk about the things they're doing now. So if you change their daily behavior, like Hal did with getting people to journal in the morning, they, they talk about it all the time. So that book has sold hundreds of thousands of copies or maybe even millions by now. Um, cause this is 10 years ago, he told me this.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Because people are doing this behavior every day. And so they're talking about it every day. They're like, oh, what'd you do today? Oh, I just did my morning miracle journaling. Like, oh, what's that? You know, so long after the book is through. So if you change daily behavior, it has a viral effect that is untouchable by anything else.

• 41:52Shaan Puri?

  Love that.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  Okay. So let's get to some more modern examples. The 1970s, Sean, do you know who this guy is?

• 41:59Shaan Puri?

  Um, no, some, some runner. I don't know who it is.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  Okay. So this, this guy's before our time, but a gentleman's name, Steve Prefontaine. And Prefontaine was, uh, best comparison I can think of is like the Michael Phelps of his time. You know, no one was really thinking about swimming until Michael Phelps came around. It was such a dominant athlete from the USA, you know? So everyone wanted to get behind him. So Prefontaine was that guy for running and Prefontaine had all these great quotes like Muhammad Ali. He's like, you know, yeah, someone can beat me, but if you're going to beat me, you're going to have to bleed. You know? And he's like, if you don't run until you're, until you feel like you're going to, you're going to die, you're not honoring your gift, you know? So he had all these great quotes. He was a great media figure.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  He won every college record from like 500 meter up to 2000 meter. Prefontaine was the man and Nike was just coming up. They'd actually just started like making their, going from being a distributor, making their own shoe. And fortunately Prefontaine was in Oregon, so were they. And they got him to, to wear their shoes. And it was a big thing because.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  The unquestionable proof now, you've got Prefontaine, the top runner in the country, wearing Nike shoes. Tragically, Prefontaine passed in a car accident before he could go and honor his Olympic glory. But before he did that, he really put Nike on the map because, you know, running was his thing. Running, what's the one accessory that you need? Shoes. And so this was such a big deal that it actually changed the entire industry. So prior to Prefontaine, Prefontaine was around in like the 70s, right? If you read Phil Knight's book, he talks about,

• 43:46Speaker 01

  if you went jogging in like the 40s, 50s, or 60s, people were like throwing bottles at you from your car because they're just like mad. They're like, what is this idiot doing? You know, he's in the road or whatever. And it was just like really hated upon. And Prefontaine comes along and running actually becomes cool again. And so Nike got to ride that that tailwind. And then what also happened is back then, people were wearing shoes that were like, you know, kind of like the loafer or work shoe or whatever, like pretty basic shoes. And people wanted to rebel against that, rebel against the shoes that their dad was wearing. And so

• 44:30Speaker 01

  they started wearing these athletic shoes, these running shoes, as a part of their daily attire to make a statement that like, I'm rebelling and I'm superior. And it changed the entire shoe market. Now athletic shoes are probably the best selling shoe. And only a tiny percent of them are worn for athletic activities. And then all started in the in the 70s with with Prefontaine. And then of course Nike had the amazing campaign with Jordan, which was more unquestionable proof, you know, making them feel superior because they got the best basketball shoe and sell the dream that they're going to be able to fly like Mike. So that was a world changing campaign that not a lot of people think about when they've put on their kicks every morning, you know?

• 45:13Shaan Puri?

  You know, one of those that I feel like is happening right now in a small way. So you remember like, I don't know, 10 years ago or something like that, those Vibram five finger shoes were like getting popular. Do you remember those?

• 45:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:26Shaan Puri?

  So like you would see one and you'd be like, what is this person wearing a foot glove? Like, what is this thing? And then they would immediately go into the spiel about why this is better for you and like how they do whatever. And I think this is like, I've seen this a lot now. There's a popular YouTuber or Instagram guy called knees over toes guy. And he's basically like, it's like a rebellion. He's like, have any of you ever been told when you're working out, like, don't let your knee go over your toe when you're squatting because it's bad form? He's like, bullshit. Like, I had all these knee surgeries. Nobody could tell me how to fix it. I fixed it myself because I started training that way specifically. So it's like a rebellion against the fitness industry. Then he's like a rebellion against Nike because now Nike's the big bad, like the incumbent. And so he's like, Nike shoes, those are like wearing high heels.

• 46:09Shaan Puri?

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

• 46:43Speaker 01

  So, yeah, so, uh, you know, a big one was, uh, MacBook launched this ad that was called 1984 and it aired during the Super Bowl. And it, uh, was a big rebellion against IBM. Everyone was using these IBMs and MacBook came out and they're like, we're the new thing, you know? And I think they got the idea from this Volkswagen ad right here. So Volkswagen, when they came out, I think it was, uh, in the sixties, all those cars were huge. You know, if you think of like the 67 Chevys, you know, these huge cars that you couldn't get into a parking spot and had all this extra stuff on them that you didn't need. They came out with this think small campaign. That absolutely crushed it. And it was like the hipster statement at the time was to

• 47:27Speaker 01

  to drive a VW bug, you know, and made one of the best selling cars. There's another ad that just came out from someone who is a master of this and that's Trump. So this is another video that that I would suggest you play if you can because it's really fascinating. And they show Hillary talking about how the Trump people have to be deprogrammed. Have you seen this ad? It just came out like two days ago. No, I haven't seen it. So what is it?

• 47:56Speaker 02

  With Trump taking a commanding lead and Bidenomics hurting American families. Genius Hillary Clinton has come up with a way for Biden to win.

• 48:07Speaker 03

  There needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members. Formal deprogramming of the cult members. Deprogramming, deprogramming, deprogramming of the cult members.

• 48:18Speaker 02

  A brilliant plan. And here's what that would look like.

• 48:23Speaker 03

  Pay attention. Joe Biden will defeat him.

• 48:35Speaker 03

  Biden has done an amazing job, amazing job.

• 48:39Speaker 02

  But there's one small problem.

• 48:41Speaker 03

  The basket of deplorables.

• 48:46Speaker 02

  Working Americans aren't idiots. And they know who's on their side.

• 48:52Speaker 04

  To American workers watching their take home pay shrink and watching inflation destroy their family and their lives. To all of you, I have your back.

• 49:09Speaker 02

  I'm Donald J. Trump and I approve this message.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  Wow. That's so well done. I mean, love him or hate him, the man is a master marketer. And he just rallies his base to rebel against, you know, the

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Incumbents, what's the word, the?

• 49:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, the elites, the kind of the status quo, yeah. Do you think, like in this case, do you think Trump has input on any of that? Or this is just they hire some ad agency that does these things? Like, is he the master marketer?

• 49:42Speaker 01

  It has to be.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  I mean, he, he, he makes the soundbites, you know? That soundbite, I think, was live from a speech that they plugged in. At least it looks like it was.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  And, you know, a lot of times these speechwriters, they think about that. So there's a famous, uh, um, speech Obama did, yes, we can. Do you remember that speech?

• 50:07Shaan Puri?

  Yep, yep, of course, that was a huge one.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  When the, when the speechwriter first presented Obama with, yes, we can. Obama didn't like it. He didn't want to give that speech. He thought it was too basic. He's like, I don't want to repeat the same thing over and over. You know, the, the audience deserves something more intelligent. And they had to convince him to do this, yes, we can speech presented as a rally cry. And finally, like, okay, fine, you know, goes out and gives a speech. And that's soundbite, man. I think it was, uh, Will.i.am turned that into that music video that went crazy, you know?

• 50:42Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  It, it's just, uh, a really powerful soundbite. And, and I find that the best politicians end up speaking in soundbites.

• 50:51Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, which is what makes Trump so effective at what he's doing. The blogger Scott Adams, if anybody wants to get to go deeper on this, the blogger Scott Adams, who created Dilbert, he, when Trump was running in 2016 and nobody thought he would win, Scott Adams was one of the first people I saw that came out and was like, oh, not only can he win, he will win in a landslide, which is what exactly, which is what happened. And he explained, he goes, Trump has verbal kill shots. You know, he has these phrases that he'll say about opponents where he'll be like, um, low energy Jeb Bush. And then you can never look at Jeb again and see anything but low energy. And Jeb's so offended by it that he feeds the energy into that, uh, like, you know,

• 51:33Shaan Puri?

  he starts to be flustered by it and then he starts to try to up his energy and then Trump will On the head be like, well, at least you're trying now Jeb. Yeah, that's good. You're trying to pick up your energy. I like that. And he would just destroy candidates with like, you know, crooked Hillary. Um, you know, and he would just, just brand people in a one-shot kill with, with, with these phrases. And even the one you, that video you just showed, the kind of, I have your back. Like, you know, he, he's very, very good at just repeating simple messages and branding himself one way and positioning himself against the others the other way.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  All right. So

• 52:10Speaker 01

  the eighties, here's a force for good. So did you know, Sean, the phrase, uh, have one for the road? Do you know where that came from?

• 52:21Shaan Puri?

  No, but now that I think about it, it's kind of a fucked up phrase, huh?

• 52:26Speaker 01

  So I would think that the, the worst use of that phrase would be go and have one and then go drive. But it actually meant take a beer in your car and drink it while you're driving away from wherever you're going. Right? So drunk driving was out of control and a camp, uh, uh, campaign was created. Friends don't let friends drive drunk. And it had three things to do. Drive your friend home, have your friend sleepover or call a cab. You know, and this cut drunk driving in half. It, it, it was something like a 40 to 50% uh, drunk driving decrease when this started going around.

• 53:06Shaan Puri?

  That's like, Craig, if I say the phrase, this is your brain on drugs. What do you think of?

• 53:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. You think of that fried egg, a powerful demonstration, right?

• 53:14Shaan Puri?

  An egg hitting a frying pan sizzling like, and that was how long ago? That was like, it had to have been, I was a kid. Like I was, that was 20 plus years ago and it still has hijacked my brain where if I, if I see an egg, I think about drugs or if I hear this is your brain on drugs, I hear the egg, right? Like, uh, that, that is so powerful how that worked.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  These powerful demonstrations are unforgettable. You'll never look at a sword and not think about the sword slicing through the bullet.

• 53:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  There's something about it that it really sticks in, in the human mind. Maybe it's a way we are taught how to learn, you know? Uh, I have a, I have a daughter now and she's learning physics. Not the way I think of physics, and it's not something I thought, but you know, you have kids too. You see how they learn the way blocks fit together and gravity and all of this, you know? It teaches you a lot about how the human brain learns. And if you think about what these demonstrations are, they're really physics demonstrations. So it's like, that's how we've been learning since age zero. You know? And, and we need that foundational physics to survive. You really notice it in babies, like they need to know that i- if they're crawling and there's something here, that it's gonna hurt if they hit it.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  Like, it's so basic, but the kids don't know that they actually have to learn that. You know? And you think about, I, I always was like, why don't we remember anything before we're five years old? And I think it's because the brain is optimizing to learn physics. They think the physics are just so important that you just like.

• 54:44Shaan Puri?

  We don't need memory right now.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  The physics are like fundamentals, man. If you don't know physics, you're gonna fucking die. Like, just, you know, walking down the street, right? So it's all physics. You know, I think these are like new physics lessons that, that we find really fascinating. Um, you know what else people are really interested in is these, uh, they call them ASMR videos?

• 55:04Shaan Puri?

  Oh, 100%.

• 55:05Speaker 01

  Like soothing things that are happening.

• 55:08Shaan Puri?

  We did this as an ad for my e-comm brand. So I was watching TikToks and there's these TikToks that are these soothing ASMR things. The ones that I was watching were like a bottle, there, there's a bottle filled with sands or mar- sand or marbles. So I think it was marbles. And they would, they would roll the glass bottle down a set of cement stairs. So you hear like the clink, rolling, like a glass bottle rolling sound, then you hear the clink as it hits the stair. And then by the second or third stair, it cracks and then you hear marbles bouncing like in synchronicity, like down the stairs. And for some reason, these, these videos always have like 10 million, 10 million views on them just because they're like oddly satisfying to watch. And people just love that combination of, of the visual plus the sound. And so we took that and we remixed that with our product, basically.

• 55:52Shaan Puri?

  We, we, we've integrated it in with our product so that the video starts with that rolling thing. And then we just sort of hijacked the video and show our product upon the smash. And way more people watch that than if we just start with our product, even though it's a complete bait and switch.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  That's interesting. Yeah, I mean, if you go up to someone on the street and be like, hey, do you love physics? Do you want to study physics? Like, no, but that's actually not the truth. Humans love physics. We all love physics. We're obsessed with physics. And it starts at zero. Interesting. So, yeah, so this, this, uh, how to prevent drunk driving did the, you know, all these, these same things. And it worked. So, okay, so here's a, a, a modern story. So, 2010, when we were, were starting Golden Hippo.

• 56:39Speaker 01

  My brother comes to me and he says, hey, have you, you heard of probiotics? And, and I hadn't. And I was like, what are those? And he says, well, you know, you got all these bacteria in you. And I was like, okay, what do you mean? He's like, you know, your microbiome. I'm like, what's that? You know, he goes on to tell me that, you know, you, you take these probiotics, which are good beneficial bacteria, it's supposed to do something, right? So I take them. And I started having a lot more regular poops. I don't know who, what I was eating before, but they started working. And I was like, why, why is this affecting me? I'm a pretty healthy guy. I'm in pretty good shape. Um, this is, this is actually helping me out. And I started looking into it. And I realized that all of these foods I was eating that I thought were healthy, because they said, uh, low fat or whatever on them,

• 57:24Speaker 01

  had sugars or artificial sweeteners or things like that pumped into them from the food companies. And they were, uh, on the na, on the labels under different names. So you don't know what they are, you know? Like sucralose or, um,

• 57:39Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  You know, agave nectar, things like that, you know? Like, uh, you, you would think-

• 57:45Shaan Puri?

  And it could say zero sugars on the label, but the ingredients would have these substitutes. Yeah.

• 57:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's got agave, it's got corn syrup, it's got like, you know, natural fruit juices, you know? All those things are, are sugars. And so I started digging into this and there was some shady stuff, man. There was some, some experiments done where like, like, you know, the sugar companies would, would pay a farmer to,

• 58:11Speaker 01

  you know, li- food is very expensive for livestock and, and farmers always dreamed that they could give their livestock sugar instead of food. And they, they'd be able to use that as a nutrient so they could stop this big food expense. And like, they do that and they try it and the cows would all die, you know? And then they tried it. Okay. Well, let's take the food and let's add sugar and see what happens. And then the cows would still die. And then they bury the studies, right? And then the, the artificial sweetener things were even worse. So there was a company, uh, G D Searle that invented, uh, artificial sweetener called Aspartame. It's now known as Nutrasweet. What a lot of people don't know is when they, he came up with this artificial sweetener, they knew it'd be a billion dollar product. Um, because the sweetener market had already been built out.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  They started testing it on lab animals and the lab animals were growing tumors. And the scientists got popped for the first time ever that, um, the government filed criminal charges against a food company for falsifying studies. Cause the scientists were cutting the tumors out of the animals and sewing them back up and saying, oh, no tumors here. And they got caught doing that. Wow. And so I found out about all this and I was just like completely mystified. And so I wrote this presentation about this and I talked about probiotics and how a way to combat the artificial sweeteners and sugars that are being pumped into your foods that it'd be impossible for you to, uh, discover them all.

• 59:39Speaker 01

  You know, is to add good bacteria because those, um, you know, the, the bad bacteria growth that, that happens because of all this consumption that makes the bad bacteria get really frothy, um, need to be offset by good bacteria. And so I put this video together and It went absolutely bananas. So it was seen by probably, you know, 100 million people. It's hard to track, but the last we checked, there was over 100 million. And this is in a period of about four months. Joe Rogan tweeted it out and someone wrote, they're like, hey, Joe, do you realize this is actually an advertisement for a probiotic? And he wrote back, oh, yeah, you know, I didn't see that till the end.

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

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

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  Or VW Bug, you'd see the big spike after the Think Small campaign. But we have this now. So if you look at probiotics, you know, probiotics were gaining some steam here. And here's where our ad comes online is Key Biotics was our brand. So look at the general spike in probiotics. Okay, so what happened there? Well, you can see basically the day we get kicked off of Google and it goes down. And you see the trend line goes down too. But then you see it goes back up again. And, you know, this is what we lost our next probiotic brand, Perfect Biotics. You know, did okay.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  It wasn't the huge banger of success that Key Biotics was. But fear not.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  Met a guy named Dr. Gundry in 2016. We left the brand with him. And look at, look at these spike lines. Look at the probiotic spike lines compared with, with the term Gundry. And the reason people were speaking more Gundry at some days is when the campaigns would be running really strong, you know, read the, the videos running, running a lot. That's where the, the searches would go crazy. And that was because Dr. Gundry is out there with, with our educational presentations, talking about the microbiome and talking about probiotics and prebiotics. And really just educating the world on this stuff. And, you know, we didn't bring probiotics to America or, or anything like that.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  Uh, but I like to think we were probably a company that taught more people than anyone about the microbiome. And now, you know, the probiotic trends, uh, you know, keeps, keeps going. And I think it just keeps going, uh, up and to the right. If you, if you find the, the current data, you know, and by now the, uh, market has changed, you know, I, I talked about, uh, I did a Twitter thread a ways back where I talked about the three stages of a product market. So there's clueless, which is when you need to create, uh, the, the, the marketing wave. Cause your, your market knows nothing about the, the product, right? So back then, when I started, no one knew anything about probiotics. So if I just said like, hey, here's probiotics, try them out.

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  No one would have cared, but I started with something they did care about was, was like, hey, is your digestion messed up? Are you having irregularity at the bathroom? Well, here's the reason why. And then the next stage of the market is, um, is curious where someone's probably heard the term probiotics. And, and you can jump in. And so while my ads in 2013, 2014 were starting with digestive health. I had an ad in 2018, I believe it was. And the headline was, doctor says throw your probiotics in the trash.

• 1:03:57Shaan Puri?

  And enough people knew about probiotics by then, they were like, oh, that's wait, wait, I heard these are good for you.

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:04:02Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  And then you click on it and then it goes on to talk about how most probiotics don't have enough strains of potency. And also, you know, prebiotics are important and this and that, you know? So that's just knowing the market where it was and where you need to jump in. And then the next level of market is saturation. And that's kind of where the probiotics market is now. I'm not watching new probiotics. You know, every time I go to a conference, someone comes up to me, they're like, I am launching a probiotic. I mean, good luck. She, you know, it's, it's pretty commoditized by now, but there's still some that have broken through with, with strong campaigns.

• 1:04:34Shaan Puri?

  Amazing. And so see, these are the seven hijacks. I'll read them out here. So number one, make it about them. So that's make it about the customer and the benefits that they're going to get. Number two, make it an event. That's the, um, you know, nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd. Then number three is a powerful demonstration. So that's the P T Barnum, that's the elevator. With the axe, that's the sword cutting through the bullet. Um, that's the drinking dirty water.

• 1:05:01Shaan Puri?

  Show unquestionable proof. So that's using experts like doctors or influencers plus,

• 1:05:08Shaan Puri?

  you know, like you said, he was willing to be in the elevator while the thing was cut. You know, that's a demonstration of proof. Five, change a daily behavior. And I think this was change in existing daily behavior.

• 1:05:20Shaan Puri?

  Is that right? Or is it change any daily behavior?

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  I mean, it could, it could be either, you know?

• 1:05:25Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:05:26Shaan Puri?

  So this is like bulletproof, getting you to add something into your coffee, something you were already doing or like breakfast. Having a hearty breakfast as the start of your day versus, you know, just a coffee in a, in a bread roll.

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. So he hijacked, Dave hijacked to the daily behavior. And what we did with probiotics is we changed the daily behavior. We, uh, encouraged them to take something every day.

• 1:05:49Shaan Puri?

  So then six is sell the dream. That's the, the movie star smile. That's underneath that film. If only you would start brushing your teeth or this is, uh, Craig pooping regularly because he's now takes, uh, you know, probiotics, prebiotics. That's the dream. And then number seven is help them, um, be a rebel or feel superior. And so that's, you know, be able to, to stick a middle finger to the man, whoever the man is, whether it's Nike or it's, uh, you know, the women not having equal rights or whatever, um, give them the tools and the badge to, to feel like they're superior and, uh, in a rebellion, a part of a rebellion.

• 1:06:25Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:06:27Shaan Puri?

  Amazing.

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  Well said. Well said. You're you're a

• 1:06:30Shaan Puri?

  I'm a good student.

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:33Shaan Puri?

  Well, this is, I mean, the stuff that's in here is, um, I guess like this is rare in two ways. Number one, I took marketing classes in college and I had marketing professors. None of my marketing professors have ever done what you did. They never created a category. They never did a billion dollars in sales. They never sat there and crafted, um, you know, even this presentation. When we talked three days ago, it was going to be like, marketing throughout the decades. No, and you were like, no, that's not going to be the title. I gotta think of something good. You come back with seven, seven human hijacks. How marketers have hijacked your brain. And I'm like, oh God, just seeing you go from two days ago with no title or a shitty working title to like a really strong title is seeing somebody in action or hearing you, what you did with the, the probiotics market.

• 1:07:15Shaan Puri?

  So number one, the opportunity to have a teacher who's actually a master of the game is so rare. So obviously I'm sitting up in my seat, I'm paying attention. Number two, any one of these, like I'm thinking, as you were talking, my brain was like having almost a hard time listening because I'm firing ideas for any of my companies. I'm like, oh, a powerful demonstration. How could we show this in a way that's exaggerated and would, would, would almost be kind of shocking or add some drama to what we're doing versus just saying the feature or saying it's good. Like, now, how could we like do, do a powerful demonstration that would give people unquestionable proof, right? So I couldn't even like stop my brain from moving while I'm doing this. Now that's, I don't know, that's the entrepreneur in me, but I think there's a lot of people who

• 1:07:58Shaan Puri?

  are listening that are like that, that like, if you paid attention to this, even one of these hijacks could like literally like change the trajectory of your company. So anyways, I appreciate you putting this together. This is kind of a, this is amazing to me. Um, I don't know how other people are going to feel about this, but like as, as the only student in the room right now, I was, uh, you know, I, I pumped about this. This is, this is great.

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  Well, I appreciate the kind words and, you know, they said, as they say, if you could change the life of just one person, right, then your job is complete. Well, I'll take it.

• 1:08:29Shaan Puri?

  All right. Well, you did it.

• 1:08:31Shaan Puri?

  This has been a masterclass, uh, for sure. So thanks for, thanks everyone for watching. That's the pod.