Russell Brunson

Everything changed because Bernays realized that consent machine worked in peacetime too.

And then Bernays went on to perfect it.

He learned from his uncle Sigmund Freud, yes, the Sigmund Freud, that human beings aren't driven by logic.

We're driven by our unconscious desires and fears.

And if you can tap into those fears, you can move entire populations

Not by convincing them, but by engineering the emotional environment so that they arrive at the conclusion that you want and they believe they got there themselves.

And he proved this over and over again.

He got women to smoke cigarettes by calling them torches of freedom.

He changed what America eats for breakfast by convincing doctors that bacon and eggs was a medical recommendation.

And in 1954, he helped the CIA to overthrow a democratically elected government in Guatemala.

And the Guatemala coup, this is where it gets really relevant to what's happening right now, because Bernays was hired by the United Fruit Company.

Guatemala had elected a president named Arbenz, who wanted to take back the land that the United Fruit Company controlled.

It was popular, the people wanted it, but the United Fruit wanted him gone.

So what did Bernays do?

He didn't lobby Congress.

He didn't make a business argument.

He manufactured a communist threat.

He convinced the American press and the American public that Guatemala, this tiny country, was becoming a Soviet outpost in America's backyard.

He reframed a corporate land dispute as a matter of national security.

He engineered the consent of the American people for a CIA coup, and it worked.