Welcome to the Read Multiplex podcast. Today
we are looking at, well, a really profound, almost
unsettling realization about the world around
you. Yeah, it's one of those things that once
you see it, you really can't unsee it. Exactly.
We are diving into part 18 of Brian Remmel's
sweeping, masterful series on readmultiplex .com.
It's titled, You Have 5 ,000 Days to the End
of Work as We Know It, The Hidden Sacristy Architect.
Okay, let's unpack this. We really need to because
the scope here is massive. Right. We are going
to explore a hidden architecture that dictates
how you live. The core premise today is something
that affects you from the moment you wake up
to the way you look in the mirror to the specific
anxieties you feel when you walk down a grocery
store aisle. Those everyday moments. Yeah. That
fundamental consumer mindset we all walk around
with, that persistent whisper that you need to
buy something to feel whole or successful or
attractive. None of that was a natural human
evolution. It wasn't an accident of history.
No, not at all. It was carefully, scientifically,
and deliberately manufactured. Exactly. Manufactured.
And Brian's work provides a totally unique, frankly,
mind -bending way to understand our own insecurities.
We are going to unmask the architect of those
desires. What's fascinating here is how Brian
Ramal acts as an investigative historian in this
text. He's connecting these massive economic
shifts from the 1920s and post -World War II
America to a very hidden, almost... almost invisible
psychological blueprint he really pulls back
the curtain he does he takes us into the literal
boardroom meetings where our modern insecurities
were designed by hand but what makes this deep
dive so crucial is the duality of the timeline
right because we aren't just staying in the past
exactly brian takes this historical revelation
and projects it forward into our immediate future
Specifically, this impending age of abundance
that we are rapidly approaching over the next
5 ,000 days. So it's a look back, but also look
forward. Yeah. On one hand, we are looking backward
at a grand psychological manipulation. On the
other, we're looking forward to a world where
artificial intelligence, robotics and limitless
energy are going to completely shatter that exact
manipulation. We are standing on the precipice
between a fabricated past and a deeply liberated
future. That's a great way to put it. I want
you, the listener, to do something for a second.
I want you to imagine your deepest, quietest
insecurities. Think about that lingering guilt
you might feel when you sit on the couch and
feel like you, I don't know, aren't working hard
enough. Or the anxiety surrounding body image.
Right. Or those sudden overwhelming urges for
retail therapy when you are having a rough week.
What if I told you that you didn't invent those
feelings? That someone else put them there. Exactly.
What if I told you that a man named Ernest Dichter
literally designed those exact feelings in the
mid -20th century specifically to sell... It
sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it's just
documented history. It is. That is the journey
we are taking today. But to truly grasp the magnitude
of this psychological heist, we have to set the
stage. We need to go back to the actual birth
of the consumer. Because for most of human history,
that wasn't even a thing. Right. As Brian lays
out, that concept didn't even exist. Before World
War I, humans simply weren't viewed as consumers.
We were producers or we were citizens. Buying
things wasn't an identity. It's true. The shift
in identity from citizen to consumer is basically
the foundational block of modern society. In
the 1920s, we saw the aggressive rise of what
became known as the new economic gospel of consumption.
The new economic gospel. Just the name alone
tells you everything. Yeah, it became a religion.
After the First World War, America experienced
this massive wave of industrial capacity. Factories
were incredibly efficient. But! And here's the
catch. Efficiency creates a problem. Overproduction.
Exactly. If you make a million shoes, you need
people to buy a million shoes. So the messaging
from business leaders had to fundamentally change.
Buying goods was no longer just a simple transaction
for something you physically needed. It was suddenly
promoted as a patriotic duty. It's crazy to think
about buying a toaster as patriotic. But that's
how it was framed. And crucially, the 1920s introduced
the massive expansion of credit. Installment
plans became available for cars, radios, household
appliances. Suddenly you were encouraged to buy
things you didn't have the cash for right that
second. It's like we received a massive software
update for society. A software update. We went
from a save and build operating system where
virtue was found in thrift and producing value
to a spend and consume operating system where
virtue was found. in acquiring new things. Advertising
experienced an absolute boom during this time.
You even had consumer activism arising, ostensibly
educating people on spending wisely, but ultimately
just reinforcing the idea that their primary
role in the world was to spend. So by the end
of the 1920s, consumerism had shifted from an
elite novelty to a core aspect of American identity.
Now, the Great Depression and World War II put
a temporary, brutal halt to its momentum. But
the psychological seeds had been planted. And
the real explosion, as Brian highlights, happened
in the late 1940s. The post -WWII explosion.
You had all these wartime production factories
that were churning out tanks and airplanes, suddenly
transitioning to making consumer goods. They
had to build something. Yeah. Between 1945 and
1949, Americans were buying millions of refrigerators,
cars, and stoves. The GI Bill. And the new highway
systems fueled the explosive growth of the suburbs.
It created this astronomical demand for homes
and appliances. If we connect this to the bigger
picture, we really have to look at the collective
psychology of the populace at that exact moment.
You have an entire generation suffering from
a collective, unspoken PTSD. They had just been
through hell. Absolute hell. They survived the
grinding poverty of the Great Depression, followed
immediately by the horrors and the strict rationing
of a global war. Then suddenly the war is over.
The troops are home. Science and technology are
rapidly advancing, lifting a massive amount of
people into the middle class. They were getting
their very first taste of abundance. It must
have felt miraculous. It did. But Brian makes
a critical, vital distinction here in his text.
This was a false abundance. Wait, let me push
back on that for a second. Why call it a false
abundance? There was actual, tangible wealth
being created. People had houses, cars, indoor
plumbing, food security that their parents never
dreamed of. That sounds like real abundance to
me. The material goods were real, yes. The psychology
underpinning it was false. Okay, unpack that.
True abundance would have leveraged that amazing
technology to reduce human toil, granting people
more leisure time, more freedom, and less anxiety.
Like Keynes predicted? The 15 hour work week.
Exactly. But that's not what happened. Instead,
the public was emotionally and psychologically
manipulated to become relentless, anxious consumers.
The technology didn't free them. It just shifted
their labor into a new gear to afford an endlessly
moving goalpost of consumer goods. Wow. So society
could have taken a deeply liberating path with
that post -war wealth. Instead, it was hijacked.
The tragedy is that the manipulation worked flawlessly.
And before we pull back the curtain on the man
who built that hijack. mechanism, we really need
to locate ourselves within Brian Rommel's overarching
narrative. Yes, context is key here. Remember,
this deep dive is exploring part 18 of a massive
multi -part series on readmultiplex .com. For
you listening, whether you've been with us since
part one or are just jumping in now, these first
17 parts are critical because they arm us with
the vocabulary to understand the future. They
absolutely do. Brian structures this entire 5
,000 -day series as a monomythic arc, the classic
hero's journey. Parts one through four outline
the call to adventure. The wake -up call. Right.
This is the initial startling realization of
artificial intelligence's massive disruption
of labor and the true dawn of abundance. It also
covers the refusal of the call house society
naturally resists this terrifying change. Like
the player piano analogy Brian uses. Yes. The
disruption caused by the player piano in the
early 20th century is a perfect frame for how
we instinctively react to automation. We fight
it. Right. And then in parts five through seven,
the hero, which is you, the listener, crosses
the threshold into what Brian calls the interregnum.
The interregnum is crucial to understand. It's
the chaotic, terrifying transition period we
are entering right now. It's the gap between
the old economy dying and the new abundance economy
being born. It's the messy middle. Very messy.
In these parts, Brian dives deeply into the pain
of de -skilling. When we talk about de -skilling,
think about the anxiety a highly trained graphic
designer feels today watching an AI generate
a complex logo in three seconds. It's gut -wrenching.
It is. That loss of a premium on your hard...
skills leads to what brian describes as the dark
night of the soul it's the profound realization
that the old world the old ways of proving your
worth are fading away forever but then moving
into parts 8 through 14 the journey enters the
ordeal this is about saving your wisdom it's
the artisan's awakening finding your unique human
value exactly It's the realization that you can
actually reverse obsolescence. It's about how
to seize the sword and navigate that chaotic
interregnum. And most recently, in parts 15 through
17, we started on the road back. Brian illuminated
the IBM COBOL shock. We should briefly explain
the COBOL shock for clarity. COBOL is a decades
-old programming language that runs a massive
percentage of the global financial system. But
almost no one alive knows how to code in it anymore.
It's just aging out. Right. So the shop is the
sudden, desperate need to translate these ancient,
crumbling legacy systems into modern code. And
how AI has suddenly emerged as the bridge to
do exactly that, practically overnight. It's
a powerful metaphor for how rapidly AI can solve
deeply entrenched structural problems. problems.
And Brian paired that with a profound warning
about the universe 25 mouse utopia. Yes, the
John B. Calhoun experiment from the 1960s. Calhoun
built a literal physical utopia for mice. Endless
food, water, perfect climate, no predators. Sounds
great, right? You'd think so. But he found that
without challenges, without a struggle for survival,
the mouse society collapsed. They lost their
purpose. They descended into behavioral sinks,
hyper -social isolation. The beautiful ones.
The so -called beautiful ones who only groomed
themselves and refused to interact. And eventually
it led to catastrophic depopulation. Brian uses
Universe 25 to warn us about the dangerous pitfalls
of modern depopulation narratives. Because physical
abundance without human purpose is a trap. Exactly.
He emphasizes human agency. We are not passive
victims of abundance. We must be the actor agents
who shape it. So those 17 installments were a
rigorous training ground. They equipped you with
the armor needed for what comes next. And that
brings us to the discovery in the shadows, meaning
the architect of desire. This is where it gets
really cinematic. Brian's personal discovery
of this is a story in itself. Imagine a crisp
autumn day in the late 1980s. Brian is wandering
the quiet academic halls of the Hagley Museum
and Library in Wilmington, Delaware. Just doing
pure historical legwork. Right. He's chasing
whispers of corporate secrets, a rumor about
a mid -century psychoanalyst who engineered the
subconscious drivers of America. An archivist
leads him down into these dim climate control
vaults. The kind of place where history is actually
hiding. The air is thick with that distinct smell
of aged paper. And sitting there... are 126 unassuming
cardboard boxes. There are no glowing artifacts,
no gold -embossed covers, just plain boxes labeled
the Ernest Dichter Papers. Just sitting there
in the dark. Brian describes pulling out the
first folder, expecting dry sales figures and
market chairs. Instead, he uncovers yellowed
memos and transcribed interviews that outline
a terrifyingly systematic dissection of the human
psyche. So who is Ernest Dichter? Dichter was
a Viennese refugee with a Ph .D. in psychology.
He was deeply steeped in the psychoanalytic teachings
of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Stickle. The heavy
hitters of the subconscious. Exactly. He fled
Nazi Europe in the late 1930s and arrived in
America. When he looked at the booming post -World
War II American consumer market, he saw something
fundamentally flawed in how corporations were
trying to sell things. Because up until that
point, classical economics operated on a very
simple, logical assumption. that people are rational
actors. Right. It assumed that if a company makes
a refrigerator that is cheaper, colder, and uses
less electricity, a rational consumer will naturally
choose it over a worse one. And Dichter looked
at all these companies trying to sell products
based on logical utility, and he basically said,
you are completely wrong about human nature.
He turned the whole model upside down. He hypothesized
that human buying habits weren't driven by logic
or utility at all. They were driven by the exact
same dark, unconscious forces that drive human
neurosis. He believed we buy things to satisfy
the id. The Freudian id, the primitive, impulsive,
chaotic part of the human psyche that is boiling
over with suppressed sexual desires, hidden fears,
aggressive impulses, and deep -seated anxieties.
And it's important to note that Dichter wasn't
working entirely in a vacuum. Brian notes his
deep connection to his friend Edward Bernays.
Ah, yes. Brian refers to them as the two -headed
snake. The two -headed snake of modern manipulation.
Exactly. Bernays is a legendary, almost mythical
figure in public relations. He was Freud's nephew,
actually. Keep it a family. Bernays is infamous
for campaigns like convincing women in the 1920s
to smoke cigarettes in public. At the time, it
was a massive taboo. So how did he do it? Bernays
hired women to march in the Easter Sunday parade
smoking cigarettes, and he branded them freedom
torches. He bypassed all logic about health or
cost and tied a deadly addictive product directly
to a deeply emotional psychological desire for
emancipation and gender equality. It was a master
class in psychological manipulation. It really
was. And Ernest Dichter took this underlying
philosophy and decided to apply it to absolutely
everything in the American household. So in 1946,
Dichter founds the Institute for Motivational
Research. But here's the logistical problem.
If you want to tap into the id, you can't just
hand out a multiple choice survey at the mall.
No, people will lie. Right. If you ask people
on a piece of paper why they bought a car, they
will give you a logical, rational answer. It
gets good gas mileage. People don't tell the
truth on surveys, mostly because they don't consciously
know the truth themselves. They rationalize it
after the fact. So Dichter pioneers a completely
new methodology. He ditches the surveys and creates
what he called the depth interview. The depth
interview is the turning point in modern capitalism.
These were not quick questionnaires. These were
grueling therapeutic psychoanalytic probing sessions.
Like actual therapy. Yes. Dichter's interviewers
would sit with everyday consumers for hours in
living rooms or focus group facilities, acting
essentially as therapists. They would ask subjects
to describe a product as if it were a living,
breathing person. If this soap walked into a
room, what kind of person would it be? Exactly.
They would have subjects draw pictures or use
free association to reveal their subconscious
attachments. Brian notes that Dichter conducted
over 2 ,300 of these massive studies for major
corporations. He essentially turned the human
mind, with all its fragile insecurities, into
a hackable commodity. It represents a profound
shift in power. Before this era, control over
a populace was largely physical, economic, or
overtly political. Dichter's methods marked a
transition into subtle, invisible psychological
programming. It's invisible control. Corporations
were no longer just selling a product to meet
a pre -existing physical need. They were actively
manufacturing a psychological deficiency, an
anxiety or a guilt complex, and then seamlessly
selling the product as the only cure. Create
the disease, sell the cure. And nowhere is this
more evident and frankly more devastating than
in how these exact methods were weaponized against
women. It was highly targeted. I really want
to spend significant time here. We cannot gloss
over this because the case studies Brian Romo
pulls from those 126 boxes are the core evidence
of the manufactured mindset we're still living
with today. Let's start with the 1951 study on
synthetic laundry detergents. Products like Tide
and... ...were absolute scientific miracles for
the time. Before them, doing laundry was back
-breaking, multi -day physical labor. It was
exhausting work. Right. These synthetic detergents
cleaned faster, they were vastly more efficient,
and they saved hours of time. But when they hit
the shelves, housewives violently resisted buying
them. They stuck to their old, grueling methods.
The rational economic model completely failed
to explain it. The product was undeniably, objectively
better. So, the soap companies hired Dictor.
He brings women in for his depth interviews to
find out why they are rejecting a miracle. What
Dichter uncovered in those deeply probing interviews
is unsettling. He found that for generations,
a woman's entire self -worth in a traditional
household was intrinsically, structurally tied
to the physical exertion and the suffering of
her domestic work. Her suffering was her value.
Exactly. Her value to her husband, her family,
and her community was measured by how hard she
scrubbed the floors and the clothes. Therefore,
a product that suddenly made the work easy didn't
feel like a technological relief. It felt like
a moral failing. It felt like a sin. Yes. The
detergent subconsciously made these women feel
lazy, irrelevant, and inadequate as homemakers.
They were experiencing a profound, culturally
-induced epidemic of guilt simply for wanting
an easier life. Wait, let me just pause and play
devil's advocate for a second. Was Dichter actually
creating this insecurity or was he just acting
as a mirror? Wasn't he just finding the guilt
that society had already placed on these women
and pointing it out to the brands? That is the
exact defense the advertising industry has used
for decades. We just give people what they want.
But Brian's deep dive reveals that it wasn't
just mirroring. It was active weaponization.
He used it against them. Dichter didn't just
find the insecurity and say, hey, maybe society
should value women more. He advised companies
to frame their products in a way that actively
exploited and maintained that insecurity. Look
at his solution for the detergent. Right. What
did he tell them to do? He didn't tell the soap
companies to lower the price. He told them to
radically change the marketing. He advised them
to market the synthetic detergent not as a chemical
utility, but as magic. Magic. And by framing
the product as something magical, something almost
otherworldly. It granted the housewife moral
permission to use it. It absolved her. It bypassed
her guilt. It gave her an excuse to tell herself
and her peers, I'm not being lazy. I'm using
this incredible modern magic. Sales absolutely
soared. The brands won. But the psychological
cost to the consumer was massive. Huge cost.
It embedded a woman's self -value directly into
her consumption of a corporate product rather
than her inherent capability as a human being.
We see the exact same psychological mechanism
in the famous Betty Crocker cake mix story. Early
instant cake mixes were absolute marvels of mid
-century convenience. They were practically foolproof.
The box contained dehydrated flour, sugar, baking
powder, and powdered egg. You literally just
added water, stirred, and baked. It was completely
foolproof, and it completely flopped on the market.
Women refused to buy it. Again, logic fails.
Why wouldn't you want to save an hour of baking?
Dichter does his depth interviews. He discovers
that baking a cake wasn't about making food.
It was a profound subconscious symbol of nurturing
and maternal care. It was an act of love. By
making it require nothing of tap water, the instant
mix made women feel like frauds. It robbed them
of their creative, nurturing role in the family.
It was too easy. Therefore, it lacked love. So
Dichter comes up with a solution that is now
legendary in the advertising world. He tells
the manufacturer to remove the powdered egg from
the mix. He tells them to force the housewife
to add a fresh egg herself. Just one simple change.
But the psychology behind why the egg matters
is wild. Brian's text reveals that Dichter found
the egg carried massive subconscious weight.
To the Freudian mind, the egg symbolized fertility.
sexual activity, and subconsciously, the biological
act of giving birth to the cake. It sounds absurd
to our modern ears, but the psychological barrier
was real. The powdered egg made the cake feel
sterile and industrialized. Like a factory product.
By simply forcing the woman to crack a fresh
egg into the bowl, it restored her visceral,
biological sense of involvement. It restored
her domestic self -worth. She wasn't just pouring
factory powder into a pan. She was engaging in
the alchemy of creation. She was nurturing her
family. It is brilliant marketing, undeniably.
But when you realize it is built on exploiting
deep -seated cultural anxieties about maternal
adequacy, it's chilling. Very chilling. And he
didn't stop at cakes and soap. He went after
the entire pantry. Brian found reports showing
that Dichter actively gendered food itself. He
gendered food. He advised companies to promote
rice as feminine. It was soft, pliant, and nurturing.
Potatoes, on the other hand, were masculine,
hardy, strong, and substantial. Meat was marketed
as the ultimate embodiment of male strength and
dominance. Eggs and dairy were inherently tied
to female fertility and maternity. This wasn't
just about selling groceries. Think about the
cultural impact. This was about forcing people
to affirm rigid societal gender roles with literally
every bite of food they took. Every single meal.
It created an environment where a woman might
feel subconscious pressure to choose the feminine
rice to reinforce her eye daddy or feel obligated
to serve the masculine red meat to validate her
husband's masculinity. It turned the dinner table
into a theater of manufactured gender anxiety.
He hijacked the dinner table. And then he took
aim at body image. Let's look at the studies
he did for really foundation garments, girdles
and bras. Oh, boy. When Dichter probed women
about these restrictive garments, he didn't find
practical concerns about the durability of the
fabric or the fit. In those depth interviews,
he uncovered deep, agonizing fears of inadequacy.
He found a desperate desire for control over
their aging bodies and deeply suppressed erotic
impulses. So Dichter advised the company to completely
abandon marketing these undergarments as practical
clothing. Instead, they were to be marketed as
emotional talismans. Magic objects, essentially.
They were promised to be gateways to allure,
to empowerment, to confidence. He did the exact
same thing with the All Pure Wool campaign. Right.
Wool was generally seen as itchy, heavy, and
tied to outdated grandmotherly tradition. People
in the 1950s wanted the new, modern, easy -care
synthetic fabrics like nylon and polyester. Dichter's
solution was to rebrand wool by tapping into
the id. He advised marketing it as a highly sensual,
deeply feminine, almost erotic indulgence. It's
all about how it makes you feel. He linked the
act of buying and wearing wool to self -pampering,
to proving your identity as a refined, sensually
awakened woman. This raises an important question
for all of us today. When we look at the modern
struggles we see everywhere, body positivity
movements, rampant imposter syndrome, the endless
exhausting pursuit of external validation on
social media, how much of that is a direct echo,
a lingering ghost of these exact mid -century
advertising campaigns? It'll make you wonder.
These campaigns literally laid the concrete foundation
for the architecture of our modern insecurities.
That is such a powerful question. It really makes
you look at your own purchasing habits differently.
Are you buying that expensive skincare cream
because it works or because a 70 -year -old marketing
playbook taught you to fear aging as a loss of
your sensual validity? It's usually the latter.
And Dichter didn't stop with adults. He went
right into the nursery to plant these seeds early.
Brian's text highlights Dichter's work for Mattel.
specifically the redesign of the Barbie doll.
This one is fascinating. Before Barbie, young
girls almost exclusively played with baby dolls.
And the psychological purpose of a baby doll
is quite obvious. It was designed to prepare
a young girl for her inevitable culturally mandated
role as a mother. It fostered nurturing instincts
and domestic readiness. But when Dichter conducted
depth interviews with young girls, he uncovered
something entirely different. He found suppressed
desires for independence, a yearning for adulthood,
and a fascination with idealized glamour. So
Barbie was designed to tap directly into those
suppressed desires. With her adult form, her
long legs, her careers, and her glamorous accessories,
Barbie represented an escape from the domestic
confines that the baby dolls represented. It
gave girls a taste of autonomy. It was a double
-edged sword, right? A massive double -edged
sword. While it tapped into a genuine desire
for independence, embedded a highly specific,
largely unattainable standard of beauty and adult
glamour deep into the subconscious of generations
of young women. It set a new trap. Exactly. It
essentially replaced one set of domestic expectations
with a brand new set of physical and consumer
-driven expectations. To be independent, you
must also be flawlessly beautiful and own endless
accessories. Even in areas traditionally considered
absolute male domains, like the auto industry.
Dicker found a way to manipulate the female subconscious
to drive sales. Brian found Dicker's studies
for Chrysler and Plymouth. He knew who really
made the decisions. Dicker realized that even
if the man was the one signing the check at the
dealership, the wife was very often the emotional
gatekeeper of the purchase. If she wasn't on
board, the sale died. So he categorized the cars
psychologically to play on marital dynamics.
He framed convertibles as mistresses. They were
exciting, impulsive, slightly dangerous, and
youthful. And the other cars? Sedans, however,
were framed as wives. Reliable, secure, practical,
and heavily grounded. Think about the deeply
insidious nature of that framing. He was manipulating
the deepest most vulnerable dynamics of a marriage
to sell a hunk of steel. It's pretty ruthless.
He positioned the wife as the emotional authority
who had to navigate these bizarre psychological
waters. A man buying a convertible wasn't just
buying a fun car to drive on weekends. Subconsciously,
the marketing positioned it as him indulging
an impulsive, potentially unfaithful desire.
The marketing played right into that tension,
forcing the wife to either embrace the mistress
energy or demand the security of the wife's sedan.
And finally, consider what he did with Ivory
Soap. Yes, Ivory Soap. Dichter transformed a
simple, cheap bar of soap from a basic hygiene
utility into a profound emotional ritual. He
linked the act of bathing with ivory soap to
a self -caress, an act of purification. It was
framed as a Puritan -approved indulgence. It
had the subtle private eroticism, but it was
safely cloaked in the acceptable idea of purity
and cleanliness. Washing with ivory soap became
a way to physically and morally cleanse yourself,
washing away whatever daily guilts or frustrations
you had accumulated in your domestic duties.
It elevated soap into a symbol of a woman's moral
self -image. It is just incredible how deeply
he wove these manipulative narratives into the
most mundane, everyday objects. But as shocking
as all of this is, the cars, the cakes, the soap,
Brian Rummel uncovers something in those Hagley
vaults that takes this manipulation to a level
that is almost hard to comprehend. We need to
talk about the soap opera psyop. We absolutely
do. This is perhaps one of the most revealing
and deeply disturbing elements of the entire
deep dive. This is where the methodology moves
from manipulating the purchase of a specific
product to manipulating the actual emotional
baseline of millions of women's daily lives.
It's systemic manipulation. And Brian has a deeply
personal connection to this piece of history,
which makes it so much more visceral. In his
text, he shares a jaw -dropping anecdote from
his own father. Brian's dad worked in New York
City in the 1960s and 70s, running the in -house
cafeterias at CBS Studios. Right at the center
of the broadcast world. Over the years, his dad
told him a story about interacting with a specific
group of psychologists who were heavily paid
by the television networks to consult on the
sets of daytime soap operas. One of those consulting
psychologists was Ernest Dichter himself. Now,
these psychologists weren't just offering casual,
high -level advice about character arcs. Brian's
father noted that they consulted on the scripts
weeks in advance, and then they were physically
present on set during filming to mandate fine
touches. They were on set. Yes. They wanted to
ensure the precise psychological effects they
had designed were present in the lighting, the
dialogue, and the pacing of every single scene.
They had final authority over the emotional direction
of the broadcast. That's incredible. The stated
goal of these psychologists, as relayed directly
to Brian's father, is truly chilling. Here's
where it gets really interesting and honestly
incredibly dark. When Brian asked his dad what
their actual goal was, his dad told him it was
to make women hate their lives and to have an
empty pain that only products could fill. To
crave a life that would be anything but their
family and to encourage a need to get out, to
ultimately promote infidelity. I want you to
let that sink in for a moment. They were actively
weaponizing television scripts to deliberately
induce misery, inadequacy, and marital dissatisfaction
in the women watching. And when Brian, shocked,
asked his dad why a network would do such a horrible
thing to its own audience, the answer was purely
economic. Always follow the money. His dad said,
This empty feeling would be filled with instant
products to feel less guilt about the three hours
the shows took out of their days. It is a perfectly
engineered closed loop system of psychological
abuse and financial extraction. They manufacture
the emotional pain. They manufacture the guilt
of wasting three hours watching television instead
of cleaning. And then seamlessly during the commercial
breaks, they sell the very products, the instant
cake mixes, the magical synthetic detergents,
the purifying soaps that they themselves have
engineered to act as the psychological. cure
for that exact pain. It is a stunningly cynical
mechanism. They break the bone and then write
you the cast. And Brian's research in those Hagley
vaults completely backed up his father's story.
He found Dichter's early 1940s CBS audience research
reports. Dichter found that the appeal of soap
operas wasn't just the dramatic, twisty plots.
The core appeal was heavily rooted in featuring
strong, authoritarian heroines who stepped in
to resolve the messy, chaotic troubles of weaker
characters. And Dichter Richter actually drew
a historical parallel in his reports that terrified
the executives at CBS. He compared the psychological
dynamic of the strong soap opera heroine alleviating
the burdens of weaker characters to Adolf Hitler
alleviating the burdens of his followers in Nazi
Germany. Yes. Dicker, a man who fled the Nazis,
explicitly noted this dynamic. He wrote that
these television heroines provided emotional
relief to female listeners of weak character,
giving them a sense of lancarious empowerment
and authoritarianism. and comfort. Ryan notes
that Frank Stanton, the powerful director at
CBS, was terrified this fascist comparison would
leak to the press and offend their massive corporate
sponsors. But despite the fear, they kept doing
it. Because Dichter also framed the soap operas
as a form of social therapy, which sounds positive
until you hear the mechanics of it. Social therapy,
right. He theorized that by dramatizing internal
marital weaknesses on screen, things like poor
communication, financial stress, or emotional
distance, it allowed the real -life couples watching
to subconsciously project their own issues onto
the characters. A release valve. Yes. The viewers
could vicariously work through their marital
problems through the screen without ever having
to actually confront their own spouse or do the
hard work of real communication. Which sounds
helpful on the surface. Like, hey, we're saving
marriages. But why did Dictor and the networks
want to save the marriages? Right. What is the
motive? The motive was entirely ruthlessly commercial.
If the marriage breaks up, the household economy
shatters. The purchasing power of that family
unit is severely disrupted. A divorced woman
in the 1950s buys fewer appliances, fewer cars,
and fewer luxury goods. By using the soap opera
to artificially stabilize the marriage, they
ensured that the couple remained intact as a
stable, predictable, and continuous consumer
unit. The marriage was maintained not for love,
not for human flourishing, but for economic efficiency.
The women were kept perpetually dissatisfied
enough to keep buying the cures during the commercial
breaks, but pacified enough by the television
heroines to keep the household functioning and
the paychecks cashing. It is mind -blowing. It
reframes the entire cultural history of the 20th
century. Yeah. And it makes you realize that
when you feel the sudden, hollow urge to buy
something to cheer yourself up, you aren't acting
on a spontaneous desire. You're running a script
that was written for you decades ago by men in
boardrooms. But we can't just leave this in the
1950s and 60s. No, we definitely can't. Brian
makes it terrifyingly clear that the legacy of
Ernest Dichter didn't die when those cardboard
boxes were locked away in Delaware. It merely
evolved. It moved from the wood -paneled boardrooms
of Madison Avenue directly into the algorithms
that govern our lives today. I want you to look
at your phone. Think about your social media
feeds. Think about TikTok, Instagram, YouTube.
Brian Rommel points out that Dictor's mid -century
tactics are the absolute undeniable DNA of today's
digital world. That is a critical connection
to make. Because what is a social media algorithm,
really? It is a digitized, automated, continuously
running depth interview. Wow. Just as Dictor
sat down with housewives for hours to probe their
deepest insecurities, today's algorithms track
every micro hesitation. They track every millisecond
you linger on an image of a fitness model or
a luxury vacation. They track every scroll, every
clicked link, every late night impulse search.
They are mapping your id in real time. On a scale
Dictor couldn't have comprehended. And just like
Dictor, the tech companies use that map to serve
you highly targeted content designed to systematically
aggravate your specific insecurities and then
immediately serve you an ad for a product or
a service that promises to absolve that insecurity.
The mechanism hasn't changed an inch. It has
just become infinitely faster, infinitely more
pervasive and completely invisible. We are swimming
in a massive digital ocean of manufactured inadequacy.
And Brian highlights just how powerful people
recognized this methodology to be back in the
day, long before algorithms existed. In the mid
-1950s, during the absolute height of Cold War
paranoia, the FBI actually opened a massive file
on Ernest Dichter. The FBI got involved? Oh,
yeah. Federal agents heavily scrutinized his
Institute for Motivational Research. They were
initially worried he had communist sympathies,
but their deeper, more existential fear was that
his mind hacking techniques could be weaponized
by foreign adversaries. That makes total sense.
The FBI realized that if someone could seamlessly
rewire the desires, the fears and the anxieties
of the American public through media and advertising,
they could conquer the nation from the inside
out without firing a single shot. The irony there
is profound, and Brian captures it perfectly.
After a thorough investigation, the FBI cleared
Dichter. Because they concluded he wasn't a communist
threat aiming to destroy America, rather, they
deemed him the ultimate capitalist tool. The
government recognized that his psychological
engineering wasn't a threat to the economy. It
was the very engine of the modern consumer economy.
It proves the sheer, unadulterated power of his
methods. He had successfully, legally, turned
the American subconscious into a predictable,
manageable, and highly profitable commodity.
So what does this all mean for us today? We have
spent all this time looking at this incredibly
dark, manipulative history. It feels heavy. It
feels like we are permanently trapped in this
iron cage of manufactured desire. But this is
the Read Multiplex podcast, and Brian Rommel
is fundamentally charting a course for the future.
The tone of his text takes a massive, profound
shift right here. We move from the dark history
of the archives to a breathtakingly optimistic,
highly technical vision of what is coming next.
And it is coming fast. Brian reminds us that
we are approaching the age of abundance. The
interregnum, that chaotic transition period we
discussed earlier, spans from roughly 2025 to
2039. He says we have 5 ,000 days. The interregnum
is the bridge. And on the other side of that
5 ,000 -day bridge is an era fundamentally unlike
anything humanity has ever experienced. Brian
defines this coming age of abundance by the imminent
convergence of several exponential technologies.
Artificial intelligence, fusion energy, advanced
robotics, and biotechnology. We need to really
break down the mechanics of this because it sounds
like science fiction, but it is structural economics.
Yes, it's very real. When these technologies
fully mature and converge. The foundational economic
reality of all human history, which is scarcity,
is going to be nearly erased. The basic necessities
of human life, food, housing, energy, medical
care, and manufactured goods will become nearly
freely available. They will become entirely untethered
from human labor and traditional cost structures.
Let's really flesh that out for the listener
because it's hard to wrap your mind around. Think
about the magnitude of that. We have existed
for all of recorded human history in a state
of scarcity. Everything costs money because everything
requires human labor, which is finite. But imagine
a supply chain in the near future. A robotic
workforce guided by superintelligent AI mines
the raw ore. AI -driven logistics networks transport
it. Automated robotic foundries refine it into
steel, AI architects design a house, and a swarm
of construction robots build it. And the energy
required to power every single step of this process
comes from commercial nuclear fusion, which provides
virtually limitless clean energy at a cost approaching
zero. When you remove human labor and energy
costs from the equation, the cost of creating
a house or growing a tomato or manufacturing
a car plummets towards zero. Exactly. It completely
upends the economic model of the last 10 ,000
years. So the ultimate question, Brian asks,
the entire crux of this deep dive is this. What
happens to... And the answer is magnificent.
It shatters. Dichter's entire meticulously built
cage collapses under the immense weight of true
abundance. It has to collapse. His strategies
make absolutely no sense in an abundant world.
If you think about it, the only reason you need
to buy a wildly expensive luxury handbag to prove
your social status or buy a specific brand of
marketed soap to prove your moral purity is because
those items are scarce. They cost money, and
money requires your labor, your time, and your
sacrifice to earn. The purchase proves your sacrifice.
But when goods are essentially free and infinitely
available to everyone, they completely lose their
power as status symbols or emotional talismans.
You no longer need to buy things to prove your
worth to society or to ease your anxiety about
your place in the world because the act of acquisition
no longer signifies anything. Bryan highlights
the profound, deeply liberating shift this will
create, especially for women, who were the primary
targeted victims of Dichter's gendered psyops
for decades. In the Age of Abundance, women will
finally, permanently shed this heavy, guilt -ridden
consumer identity that was forced upon them in
the mid -20th century. When the societal pressure
to find fulfillment in domestic purchases or
unattainable marketed beauty standards dissolves,
because the economic engine that required that
pressure no longer exists, women will be free
to become pure creators, explorers, innovators,
and healers. We are going to see a complete societal
redefinition of the id for the past century corporations
have commodified our primal drives they took
our deep human need for love for security for
community and for identity and they packaged
it up and sold it back to us as cars clothes
and cake mix but in the age of abundance our
primal drives will no longer be profitable for
corporations to manipulate we won't need them
we will seek true fulfillment not in the aisles
of a store or the click of a digital shopping
cart but in intrinsic profoundly human pursuits.
We will reinvest all that wasted emotional energy
into our actual families, our deep relationships,
our local communities, our art, and our own personal
spiritual growth. The id will finally be liberated
from the marketplace. It is the grand unveiling.
Brian's synthesis of the hero's journey brings
us to this incredible, triumphant climax. The
discovery of those 126 boxes at the Hagley Museum
isn't just a grim, depressing warning about our
past. It is a literal, tangible roadmap to our
freedom. Brian writes beautifully that history
is an active crime scene. We've been walking
through this deep dive investigating the exact
crime of how our self -worth was stolen from
us. But as we step bravely into this coming abundance
over the next 5 ,000 days, we are the detectives
unredacting our true selves. We are looking at
the evidence left by Dichter and the advertisers
and saying, I see exactly what you did to me,
I see how you built the maze, and it doesn't
work on me anymore. It is the epic crescendo
of Brian's text. The illusion of the false abundance
era, the era of sprawling shopping malls, credit
card debt, and targeted algorithm ads, is rapidly
falling apart. The compulsion to accumulate,
to hoard physical things in a desperate attempt
to fill a manufactured psychological void, is
dissolving. We're stepping into a new era, not
as desperate, anxious consumers trying to devour
the world to feel whole, but as empowered, awakened
creators ready to shape it. We are reclaiming
our sovereignty. We are finally untethering our
self -worth from the puppeteers of the past.
This has been an absolutely phenomenal paradigm
-shifting exploration of Brian Rommel's work.
It changes the way you view history, the way
you view your phone, and the way you view your
own mind. But before we go, I want to leave you
with a final provocative thought. something to
chew on as you go about the rest of your day.
Tomorrow, or perhaps even later today, you're
going to be scrolling on your phone, or you're
going to be walking past a brightly lit store
window, and you're going to feel a sudden, inexplicable,
powerful urge to buy something. You will feel
a whisper in your mind telling you that this
specific object will make you feel complete,
or successful, or secure. When that happens,
I want you to pause. Stop writing your tracks.
Take a breath and ask yourself. Is this my genuine
human desire? Or is it the ghost of a 1950s psychoanalyst
named Ernest Dichter whispering in my ear from
beyond the grave? As we move rapidly into this
incredible age of abundance, the most rebellious,
powerful, and revolutionary thing you can possibly
do is realize you are already enough. Thank you
so much for joining us on the Read Multiplex
podcast. We cannot wait to have you with us for
our next deep dive into the future.