$1,500 for the insight. $25,000 to sell it. The crowd paid billions thinking it was their idea
Bookmark this BBC documentary - the first time someone turned a cognitive bias into a business model, repackaged it as liberation, and sold it back to the crowd. 1929. The part that breaks you is
they never changed the product. They changed what the crowd believed about themselves
New York. Easter Sunday. Edward Bernays paid women to light cigarettes on Fifth Avenue and call them "Torches of Freedom." He didn't pick them randomly - he called the editor of Vogue first
The idea came from a $1,500 consultation with psychoanalyst A.A. Brill. Brill told him cigarettes were a symbol of male power. Women wanted equality. Give them the symbol, and they'll buy the product. Bernays wrote it up, charged American Tobacco $25,000, and staged the parade
Next morning every newspaper in America ran the photo. Sales to women doubled within a year
Bernays never believed in the product. He believed in the gap between what people wanted to feel and what they actually were. Find that gap. Name it something flattering. The crowd does the rest
This is the oldest bias on Polymarket. The crowd isn't buying probabilities - they're buying who they want to be. A YES on a longshot feels like conviction. It's identity. Bernays figured this out 94 years before the first trade was placed
All 5 biases are still running. I broke down exactly how in my article ↓
in the 1970s, a mysterious brazilian artist released 2 psychedelic-folk albums during brazil’s military dictatorship. they were commercial failures and he completely disappeared without a trace after. his music was rediscovered in 2016 in a $1 bin at a rio de janeiro record store
POMPEO🤡: You don't let a radical regime close off the global economy by firing Shaheed missiles.
Stephen Walt: You do know, Mike, that we started the war.
POMPEO🤡: No, no, no.
Stephen Walt: They weren't firing those missiles until Israel and the United States attacked Iran.
crazy how this still holds... more applicable & more relevant today than ever:
"first you got to get mad... you got to say I'm a human being gd, my life has value!!!"