Speaker 1: Okay, picture this. You've got this massive army, right battle
hardened soldiers, one of the biggest in the world, and
they just stop fighting, put down their weapons, thousands of
them surrendering, and not a single shot fired. I mean,
what kind of force, what unseen thing could make that happen?
It sounds almost like a riddle or something.
Speaker 2: It really does, and it's a pretty chilling one actually,
because today that's exactly what we're diving into, this whole fascinating,
sometimes frankly unsettling history of how our behavior, our thoughts,
maybe even our emotions could be influenced without us even
realizing it consciously.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're going to unpack some pretty surprising stuff in
instances of this invisible persuasion. You could call it, everything
from like old school advertising tricks that seem almost funny
now to some really sophisticated military applications that well they'll
make you think yeah.
Speaker 2: White definitely. So our mission today really is to sift
through the history, the science, what research there is and
yet even actual patents, to try and understand the mechanics
behind this unseen influence.
Speaker 1: Right, we want you listening to come away from this
deep dive feeling really informed about this hidden aspect of things.
It's kind of a journey into the hidden levers of persuasion.
Speaker 2: I guess okay, So let's set the scene. Go back
to January twenty seventh, nineteen ninety one. We're in Basra, Iraq,
and Saddam Hussein is let's just say, he's not happy.
Speaker 1: He's furious understatement, probably right.
Speaker 2: His invasion of Kuwait six months before total disaster. Coalition
air attacks are relentless, Iraqi defenses are crumbling, his air
force is pretty much gone. His whole plan for this big,
costly ground war is just falling apart.
Speaker 1: But it's worse than that, isn't it.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, The thing that's really getting to him is
his soldiers. These are supposed to be battle tested troops,
among the world's best, and they're just surrendering in huge numbers,
giving up.
Speaker 1: That's got to be terrifying from a strategic standpoint. Your
best guy's just walking away.
Speaker 2: So what happens, Well, an intelligence report hits his desk.
It points to an FM transmitter just over the border
in Coffee Saudi Arabia. Now, at first, Hussein apparently just
dismisses it. You know, probably thinks it's propaganda, some Western trick.
Makes sense, but one of his officers tells him, no,
read the whole thing, because this report it's claiming that
this FM station is broadcasting get this subliminal messages, and
that these messages are causing his troops to surrender through
well they called it mind control.
Speaker 1: Wow, okay, subliminal mind control radio. That sounds out there.
Speaker 2: Totally, but the idea weird as it sounds. It sticks
despite initially brushing it off, Husain gives this like shocking order,
destroy that tower and do it in three days?
Speaker 1: Three days? What did his officers say?
Speaker 2: I pushed back hard said it was basically a suicide mission.
They had no air support. They didn't even know if
this mind control weapon was real or just you know,
some American bluff.
Speaker 1: Oh Husain didn't care.
Speaker 2: Nope, he was firm. Three days the tower had to go.
End of discussion.
Speaker 1: Okay, so now switch scenes. Imagine your marine corporal Jesse Colvin,
observation Post four coff g. It's maybe eight pm, quite night,
just wind radio crackle. He's scanning the horizon, not expecting
much trouble. I mean, the coalition owned the sky right.
Speaker 2: Totally it felt like total air supremacy.
Speaker 1: But then he hears this rumble, thinks it's thunder at first,
looks through his night vision gear and oh boy, Iraqi
tanks troops coming from the north.
Speaker 2: He yells into his radio, right contact contact enemy armor.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but the radio is dead, jammed nothing.
Speaker 2: Ninety minutes. That's how long it took for air support
to show up. By then, it was way too late.
The Iraqis had taken Kafechee.
Speaker 1: And their main goal wasn't even holding the city, was
it exactly?
Speaker 2: It became clear later their primary objective was destroying that
specific FM radio transmitter the marine's guarding it. Like Colvin,
they had absolutely no idea they were supposedly protecting some
kind of subliminal weapon.
Speaker 1: That is just what the sheer drama of it. Your
hackey intelligence genuinely believe this thing was real enough to
launch a major attack.
Speaker 2: It really sets the stage, doesn't it, This idea of
unseen influence becoming a literal military target. Was it real?
Could it actually make soldiers just give up?
Speaker 1: That's the million dollar question hanging there, and it kind
of leads us perfectly into exploring where else this idea
popped up maybe in less dramatic settings.
Speaker 2: Right, which takes us into the world of advertising and
consumer behavior, because hey, if you can influence soldiers, why
not shoppers.
Speaker 1: Okay, this story is a classic. Nineteen fifty seven New Jersey.
People are just going to the movies, right, normal night out,
but u for six weeks, totally unbeknownst to them, they
were part of this experiment.
Speaker 2: Yeah, invisible advertising they called it. Later. There was this
gadget hooked up to the projector and it flashed messages
things like eat more popcorn, drink Coca Cola, but incredibly fast,
like thirteen thousandth of the second whoa.
Speaker 1: Way too fast to see consciously exactly.
Speaker 2: The idea was it bypasses your conscious brain and goes
straight to the subconscious. And did it work apparently? Yeah,
Over forty five thousand people were exposed, no consent, nothing,
Popcorn sales shot of fifty eight percent. Coke seals got
a nice bump.
Speaker 1: To fifty eight percent just from flashing words people couldn't
even see, That's.
Speaker 2: What they claimed. And it wasn't just about selling snacks,
you know. It sort of revealed this disturbing possibility that
our choices even small ones could be hijacked without us knowing.
Speaker 1: I bet people were not happy when they found out.
Speaker 2: Oh, massive outrage. People called it obscene, brainwashing, total violation,
and pretty quickly, but then about a year subliminal ads
were banned in theaters, on radio TV.
Speaker 1: It really makes you think, though, Like you mentioned the
candy at the checkout earlier, I always grab something. Is
that me deciding or is it something else? We've all
done it, haven't we? That little impulse?
Speaker 2: By right? How many of our choices are actually nudged?
Speaker 1: So where's the line then, between say clever marketing like
the casino layouts you mentioned, or the candy placement which
feels a bit sneaky but maybe not like evil, and
those subliminal ads. Where do you draw that ethical line?
Speaker 2: That's the core question, isn't it. And look, the idea
that we're driven by hidden stuff wasn't brand new even
back then. You had Sigma Freud talking about the unconscious
mind way back right, and marketers picked up on it.
There was this guy, Ernest Dictor. He used Freudian ideas
like word association to figure out why people bought things,
not just what they bought, but the underlying motivation. Okay,
like what, well, you found out moms often bought candy
for their kids as like a reward for being good.
So what did he suggest? Put the candy right by
the cash register, easy access when mom's feeling rewarding. And
I mean, look where it still is today, still there.
Speaker 1: It's so simple but so effective. What about that Sonka
coffee example.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, classic Soncha used to run ads basically attacking
regular coffee. But you know, people like their coffee and
they felt kind of insulted.
Speaker 1: Yeah, don't mess with my coffee exactly.
Speaker 2: So Sonka switched tactics, new slogan. Now you can drink
all the coffee you want, drink five ten cups a day,
as many as you like, basically removing the guilt the
inhibition and boom sales went way up. It wasn't about
the coffee itself, it was about changing the feeling around
drinking it.
Speaker 1: Just flipping the script. Amazing.
Speaker 2: And then you've got Bill Friedman, the casino design guy.
Here's a former gambling addict, use his own experience. Think
about casinos. Once you're in, can you easily see an
exit or a clock or even look outside?
Speaker 1: No? Not really, that's all very enclosed, right.
Speaker 2: It messes with your sense of time, you lose track.
Then there's the constant noise that dinging and whirrying, even
if it's empty, keeps you sort of buzzed. Add free
booze to lower inhibitions.
Speaker 1: And good luck finding the bathroom without passing fifty more
slot machines.
Speaker 2: Precisely, no direct rats anywhere, especially not out. It's all
designed very intentionally to keep you there, keep you playing,
disrupt your normal decision making.
Speaker 1: Man, I'm going to be looking at supermarkets completely differently now.
It makes you wonder how many places are designed like that.
Speaker 2: It's definitely food for the thought.
Speaker 1: So, okay, we've seen how subtle cues can shape buying habits.
But what happens when someone sets out to deliberately engineer
not just what we buy, but what we think our
whole worldview? That feels like the next level.
Speaker 2: And that's exactly where Edward Brenees comes in. You really
can't talk about this topic without talking about.
Speaker 1: Brenees, Freud's nephew, right.
Speaker 2: The very same He was a pioneer in pere public relations,
though honestly a lot of what he did walks a
very fine line with propaganda. He coined this term engineering
of consent.
Speaker 1: Engineering consent sounds a bit ominous, it.
Speaker 2: Kind of is. Yeah. He believed that if you understood
the collective unconscious, the hidden desires and fears the masses,
you could basically sculpt public opinion, make people want things
or believe things without them even realizing they were being persuaded.
It wasn't just influence, it was constructing reality.
Speaker 1: Okay, give me an example. How did he do it?
Speaker 2: His first really big one nineteen twenty nine New York
City Easter Parade, Fifth Avenue. Huge crowds outwalks. This group
of young women, stylish debutants basically and the publicly light
up cigarettes.
Speaker 1: Which is a huge deal back then, right, women didn't
smoke in.
Speaker 2: Public, absolute scandalous. But Burne's, who was working for the
American Tobacco Company, had orchestrated the whole thing. He didn't
just have them smoke, He framed it. He got the
press to call the cigarettes torches of freedom, linking smoking
to women's liberation, independence, equality.
Speaker 1: Wow, torches of freedom. That's quite a spin.
Speaker 2: And it worked like ganbusters. Demand for cigarettes among women
just skyrocketed. They saw smoking as this symbol of being
modern and independent, and they had zero idea. It was
all a manufactured stunt by Burnees.
Speaker 1: That's incredible. He literally manufactured a cultural shift for profit.
Did he do other things like that?
Speaker 2: Oh? Yeah, get this, He changed American breakfast permanently brekfast. Wow. Well,
back in the early twenties, most Americans ate light breakfasts, toast,
maybe some juice, coffee. So Burnees gets hired by the
beachnut packing company. They want to sell more bacon. Okay,
So Brenez puts out this survey, claims he asked five
thousand doctors if a heavy breakfast was better than a
light one. And guess what. Suddenly newspapers everywhere are reporting
that supposedly three out of four doctors recommend a hearty breakfast.
And what's the picture of a hearty breakfast?
Speaker 1: They used, let me guess, bacon and eggs.
Speaker 2: Bingo, bacon and eggs. Now. Was there any real science,
any actual study, Nope, pure propaganda. If a doctor said
maybe bacon wasn't the healthiest choice, Brenese just didn't include
their opinions.
Speaker 1: Unbelievable, and people bought.
Speaker 2: It, hook line and sinker bacon sales exploded, and even today,
what's the quid essential American breakfast bacon and eggs. Seventy
percent of bacon is still eating at breakfast, all thanks
to Brene's basically inventing the tradition.
Speaker 1: That's staggering the power one person had to just reshape.
Speaker 2: Culture like that, it really is. He proved he could
sway a whole country change habits, and that kind of success, well,
it attracted even bigger clients with much higher stakes.
Speaker 1: Okay, this sounds like it's going somewhere dark.
Speaker 2: It does because his next major client didn't just want
him to sell bacon. They wanted him to help overthrow
a foreign government for the CIA.
Speaker 1: WHOA, okay, how did that happen?
Speaker 2: Guatemala nineteen fifty one? If they liked to President Jacobyl Arbins,
he's popular pushing for social reforms. One big thing he
does is pass Along fifty two. It says large landowners
have to give up their unused land to poor farmers.
They'd get compensation, but still sounds reasonable enough. Well not
if you're the United Fruit Company. They were the biggest landowner,
biggest employer in Guatemala by far. They refused and they
hired Burne's.
Speaker 1: Uh oh, so what did Burnees do?
Speaker 2: He weaponized the Cold War. He just blanketed the American media, newspapers,
magazine's radio with stories painting President Arbans as a dangerous communist,
a Soviet puppet right on America's doorstep.
Speaker 1: Was he actually a communist?
Speaker 2: Most historians say no. He had some communists in his government,
but he wasn't one himself. It was mostly a calculated
smear campaign by Burne's playing on those intense anti communist
fears in the US.
Speaker 1: At the time, and this media campaign it worked.
Speaker 2: It created massive public fear in the States, which gave
the CIA the political cover they needed for Operation PB success.
In nineteen fifty four, They funded and trained a rebel
force basically mercenaries who went in and overthrew Arbus.
Speaker 1: Just like that, based on Brene's pr campaign.
Speaker 2: It was a key part of it, and the aftermath
it was horrific. For the next forty years, Guatemala descended
into civil war, brutal repression, death squads, massacres, just unbelievable
terror and instability. Yeah estimates are around two hundred thousand
people dead or disappeared. Another two hundred thousand fled the country,
a million displaced, and the UN Truth Commission later found
that ninety three percent of the human rights violations were
committed by the state forces, many trained by the CIA,
all stemming in part from a PR campaign to protective
fruit company's profits.
Speaker 1: And you mentioned there were connections people in high place.
Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely, it's crucial. Key figures involved in the US
decision making. The US Ambassador to the UN, Henry Cabot Lodge,
his brother John Lodge, Assistant Secretary of State, the Secretary
of State himself, John Foster Dulles, and his brother's CIA director, Allendahls.
They all had direct or indirect financial interests in the
United Freud Company.
Speaker 1: Wow, so it wasn't just abstract policy. There was personal
financial motive tangled up in this devastating intervention fueled by
Burnet's propaganda.
Speaker 2: It's a really stark example of how he moved from
selling products to manipulating international politics with just catastrophic human consequences.
Speaker 1: It really blurs that line between PR and propaganda into nothing,
doesn't It Just pure ruthless manipulation In this this kind
of thinking, influencing behavior, controlling outcomes. It leads us inevitably
towards the military. Again, doesn't it to actually weaponizing the
unseen exactly.
Speaker 2: Psychological operations or PsiOps have always been part of warfare,
trying to influence the enemy's morale their decisions using information
instead of just bullets, leaflets, radio broadcasts, that.
Speaker 1: Kind of centered stuff.
Speaker 2: But they wanted more in Vietnam. Yeah, leaflets weren't always
cutting it against the Viet Cong. The army wanted something louder,
more direct.
Speaker 1: And to the squawk box.
Speaker 2: Got it deployed around sixty seven to sixty eight. Basically,
these were massive, custom built speakers mounted on trucks, armor vehicles,
even helicopters, and they could blast this ear splitting shriek
one hundred and twenty decibels from like two and a
half miles away.
Speaker 1: One hundred and twenty decibel that's incredibly loud, like physically painful, right.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, anything over eighty five daty bee can cause
hearing damage. This was designed to overwhelm Viet Cong soldiers.
Caught in the beam would suffer intense pain, nausea, definitely
permanent hearing loss, confusion, sheer distress.
Speaker 1: Did it work in terms of stopping them?
Speaker 2: The estimates are it led to about thirty thousand surrenders.
So effective in a brutal way, but it had one
big drawback.
Speaker 1: You could hear it coming a mile away, exactly.
Speaker 2: It wasn't subtle. The military wanted something the enemy detect
couldn't see, couldn't hear. Sound waves weren't the answer, but
maybe electromagnetic waves could be.
Speaker 1: Okay, now we're getting into the really weird science part.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is where it starts to feel like sci fi,
but it's based on real research. Nineteen sixty one, this biophysicist,
Alan Frey makes this accidental discovery. He finds that specific
frequencies of microwaves think of them like very specific radio
channels between twenty and three thousand megahertz could cause people
to hear sounds, clicks, buzzes, knocking sounds, but hear them
inside their own.
Speaker 1: Heads, inside their heads, not through their ears.
Speaker 2: Nope, even in sound proof shielded rooms. It became known
as the Fray effect. He could essentially beam sounds directly
into someone's brain. Ye, no implants, no speakers needed.
Speaker 1: Okay, that is mind blowing. What did they do with
that discovery.
Speaker 2: Well, the possibilities were kind of endless and frankly pretty disturbing.
Scientists used it to train animals, but then the CIA
got interested. They started asking Frey, could this technology effect, say,
a human heart rate? Could you maybe induce a heart
attack remotely?
Speaker 1: Seriously they asked that.
Speaker 2: According to Frey, yes, he did experiments on frog hearts
found he could speed them up just with remote radiation. Meanwhile,
Soviet researchers were doing hundreds of experiments by nineteen seventy
two looking at how microwaves affected human behavior. They found
both lethal and non lethal effects. Apparently they were also
accidentally cooking their subjects with micro thermal effects, cooking them.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, that's horrifying, it is.
Speaker 2: But the research didn't stop. There's this guy, JF. Schappitz,
described as a trusted black ops scientist for the Department
of Defense. He took phrase work further. He figured out
how to use low power microwaves to broadcast actual commands
words into subject's minds.
Speaker 1: Now they would hear voices, they.
Speaker 2: Would hear words yeah inside their head. And then he
went even further. He started programming subconscious.
Speaker 1: Actions, programming actions like what.
Speaker 2: There's this one documented experiment. A subject is in the
lab being exposed to this microwave Radiationuddenly he gets up,
leaves the lab, goes out, comes back a bit later
with canna soda. When asked why, he just says, I
felt thirsty. Schappitz claimed he had beamed the subconscious suggestion
of thirst into the guy's mind, like microwave hypnosis.
Speaker 1: That is deeply creepy hypnosis via radio waves.
Speaker 2: But you know, regular hypnosis doesn't work on everybody. The
military wanted something more reliable, more universal. So four years later,
nineteen eighty, another DoD scientist, doctor Elden Bird, starts looking
at even shorter frequencies. He wanted to weaponize brain waves themselves.
Speaker 1: Weaponize brain waves. How does that even work?
Speaker 2: Well? Our brains run on electrical signals, right, These create patterns, rhythms.
Those are brain waves. You have different ones for different states.
Beta waves when you're alert and problem solving, Alpha when
you're relaxed, Theta when your drowsy, you're lightly sleeping, Delta
in deep sleep.
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, I've heard of those.
Speaker 2: So Bird figured out how to sync up external electromagnetic
waves with these internal brainwave patterns, like tuning a radio
time the brain's channel. By doing that, he could subtly
influence the brain's chemistry, trigger the release of certain chemicals
that regulate behavior.
Speaker 1: And what could he do with that?
Speaker 2: In animal tests? He could induce a state of stupor
or make them feel sick like they have the flu,
cause nausea. He called it kind of a stun gun effect,
but invisible.
Speaker 1: So he could make someone feel sick or daze just
by beaming something at them.
Speaker 2: That was the potentially. Yeah, his project got officially shut down,
but Bird himself suspected it just went deeper into black ops.
Speaker 1: And was he right?
Speaker 2: Seems likely because a nineteen eighty two US Air Force
report explicitly warned this is a quote that impressed electromagnetic
fields are capable of directing behavior. It even mentioned that
just one hundred millionams directed through the heart could kill
someone chilling. And then the Air Force hired another scientist,
doctor Ross eighty, to basically reaponize Bird's research. Eighty first
used implants, but then managed to do it remotely. He
apparently built up this whole library of frequency specific electromagnetic
signals to specific mental states, physical effects, emotions.
Speaker 1: A library of emotions.
Speaker 2: Essentially, Yeah, he could reportedly mapulate animal behavior and emotions
almost at will. And he even managed to induce sleep
in human subjects phato waves just by surrounding their head
with an electromagnetic field tuned to that specific frequency.
Speaker 1: Wow. So they went from beaming clicks to words to
actual emotional states and sleep. The escalation is incredible.
Speaker 2: It represents this huge leap, doesn't it from influencing conscious
perception to directly manipulating the brain's fundamental operating system.
Speaker 1: It really does. It feels like we've crossed some major
threshold there, and it begs the question did this technology
ever get fully developed packaged?
Speaker 2: Well, this is where it gets really interesting and maybe
a little controversial, because there is, in fact a US
patent for a device that sounds remarkably like what we've
been discussing. A patent for real YEP Patent number five million,
one hundred and fifty nine thousand, seven hundred and three
issued to a company called Silent Sounds in operated. It's
for a silent subliminal presentation system.
Speaker 1: Okay, break that down. What does it supposedly do?
Speaker 2: The full schematics are classified by the government, but the
patent description outlines a system that can map the brain's
electrical activity corresponding to specific emotions, like it finds the
unique signature for fear or hopelessness or calm. Okay, then
it can amplify or even clone that specific brain wave pattern.
And here's the kicker, Using something called silent sound spread
spectrum technology, they call it SSS or SQUAD. It embeds
that cloned emotional frequency inaudibly onto a regular audio broadcast
like a radio station or a TV signal.
Speaker 1: Wait inaudibly, so you wouldn't hear it.
Speaker 2: Completely inaudible and undetectable by your conscious mind. It just
hitches a ride on the normal sound waves. The idea
is this silent signal synchronizes with your brain waves and
triggers the target emotion.
Speaker 1: So you could be listening to music on the radio
and without knowing it, also be receiving a signal designed
to make you feel despair or fear.
Speaker 2: That's the capability described in the patent. Now, the patent
itself insists it's not designed as a weapon, but you
can see how easily it could be, right, especially being
subliminal and undetectable.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, that sounds incredibly powerful and frankly terrifying. Has anyone
ever claimed it was actually used.
Speaker 2: This is where we connect back to the very beginning
of our conversation, because in nineteen ninety six, the president
of Silent Sounds, Inc. The company holding the patent, apparently
let slip in a public statement he boasted that their
system quote was used throughout Operation Desert Storm quite successfully.
Speaker 1: Desert Storm so back in I Rock nineteen ninety one.
Speaker 2: Exactly, which implies that the US military did have a
form of subliminal mind control technology and deployed it during
that conflict.
Speaker 1: So the story about COFFG, the FM transmitter.
Speaker 2: It suddenly clicks into place, doesn't it. If this technology
existed and was used, then the secret weapon in COFFG
likely wasn't just broadcasting normal radio. It was embedding a
silent SSSS signal. And what emotion would be most useful
to induce in enemy.
Speaker 1: Soldiers hopelessness, despair, something to make them lose the will
to fight.
Speaker 2: Precisely, which would explain those mass surrenders that so baffled
Saddam Hussein. His soldiers weren't cowardly, their brains were potentially
being subtly nudged towards giving up, and that Iraqi attack
on Kafchi wasn't just hitting a radio tower, It was
a mission to destroy this invisible weapon.
Speaker 1: It pieces together in a really chilling way. But what's
the official line on this? Does the government admit any
of it? Oh?
Speaker 2: Absolutely not Officially, US government and military officials deny flat
out that any such system exists or was ever used.
They dismiss it all as science fiction, conspiracy theory.
Speaker 1: But the patent exists, the company president said, it.
Speaker 2: Was used exactly. And then there are other coincidences, yeah,
or maybe not coincidences. For instance, just one day after
the Gulf War cease fire in March nineteen ninety one,
this huge popular uprising against Saddam Hussein breaks out in Bosra,
spreads across southern Iraq.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I remember hearing about that. It was rutally crushed,
wasn't it horrifically?
Speaker 2: Maybe one hundred thousand iraqis killed. But what encouraged that revolt?
A key factor was a radio station called the Voice
of Free Iraq, broadcasting messages urging people to rise up.
And guess who was running that radio station? Let me
guess the CIA, operated by the CIA, broadcasting from a
small fown in Saudi Arabia. Now were they just using
persuasive words, or were they perhaps also employing other methods
using that same SSS technology tested in Kovci.
Speaker 1: Maybe so KAFG might have been a test run for
a larger psychological operation during the uprising. That's a provocative thought.
Speaker 2: It raises questions, doesn't it. Was it all just coincidence
or was this subliminal technology deployed more widely than just
that one incident? And then you had one more piece.
The very next year, nineteen ninety two, construction begins on
the HARP facility up in Fairbanks, Alaska.
Speaker 1: HARP. I've heard of that controversial project.
Speaker 2: Built by DARPA, the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency. It's
essentially a massive, high powered array of antime is designed
to send powerful electromagnetic pulses up into the ionosphere, the
upper layer of the atmosphere, pulses that can potentially be
bounced back down to affect communications whether or maybe something
else anywhere in the world.
Speaker 1: So you have the development of brain wave manipulation tech,
a patent for deploying it silently claims it was used
in more suspicious events surrounding its alleged use, and then
the construction of a giant global electromagnetic transmitter. It certainly
makes you think, doesn't it.
Speaker 2: It encourages critical thinking for sure. You look at the
pattern the research goals, the patented technology, the reported outcomes,
the denials, the timing of related projects. It paints a
pretty compelling, if disturbing picture.
Speaker 1: Wow. Okay, so we've really covered some ground today. We
started with like sneaky popcorn ads in the fifties, right, it.
Speaker 2: Seemed almost quaint in retrospect.
Speaker 1: Then moved through the deliberate engineering of public opinion by
guys like Burnet's changing how people ate breakfast or viewed smoking.
Speaker 2: Shaping culture itself.
Speaker 1: And then plunged into the really heavy stuff, the sunning weapons,
the microwave hearing effect, weaponizing brain waves, inducing emotions, right.
Speaker 2: Up to patented technology allegedly used in actual warfare to
induce hopelessness.
Speaker 1: Yeah. This whole idea of invisible influence, it's not just
fringe theory, is it. There's a surprisingly deep history, documented research,
actual patents, attempts to control, persuade, compel people without them
even knowing.
Speaker 2: It seems that way, and it leaves us with some
pretty big questions, especially now in this world just drowning
in information, with technology getting more sophisticated every single day,
If the human mind really can be influenced below the
level of awareness, what does that mean?
Speaker 1: What does it mean for like our sense of free will?
Are my thoughts always my own?
Speaker 2: Exactly? And how much more vigilant do we need to be?
How do we even tell the difference between normal persuasion,
maybe clever marketing, and this kind of hidden manipulation. After
hearing all this today was the one thing that really
stands out to you. What are you going to be
thinking about