Each chapter from God Don't Make No Trash is made up of small stories. See The Undoing as a complete chapter below. You can also check out this project's introduction or visit the stories page.

No immunity 💀

"I think growth covers up mistakes."

—Howard Schultz, former CEO of Starbucks

> the persuaders | sell you anything

A young man in his twenties bragged to me one day that he had special powers.

We were talking at a local Tulsa coffee shop where I worked in sobriety from alcohol.

He confidently claimed that advertising and marketing didn't affect him the way they did other people.

I looked at him stunned.

"Wait, huh? Really? The more you believe that, the easier it is to sell you anything."

Unfazed, he grinned and walked away. 

• next time "Starbucks and politicians live in our minds rent-free."
• listening New Order "Blue Monday"

No mercy 🔥

 > the persuaders | great plumes of hot gas

The Starbucks Corporation spent nearly $600 million dollars last year on marketing and advertising, according to disclosure statements for 2024.

At one time, the coffee titan boasted that it spent only a fraction on advertising compared to other Wall Street corporations. Those days are over.

Annual spending by Starbucks on ads and marketing surged by $200 million over a three-year period.

Starbucks already was capitalizing on the public's ignorance of the human mind.

To celebrate its 40th birthday, Starbucks offered a "free" online voucher.

As the famed psychologist Robert Cialdini tells it, the vouchers exploited three well-documented human tendencies:

• We feel compelled to return favors.
• When we do favors for other people, we like them more.
• An illusion of scarcity creates an illusion of urgency.

No corporation living at the mercy of shareholders would spend $600 million on anything without anticipating comfortable returns.

The world’s 100 biggest advertisers spent a combined $365 billion during 2023. That astonishing amount was a new record high, according to Ad Age.

Fortune 500 companies persuade us by understanding the human mind and our behaviors better than us. Just like political attack ads, corporate advertisers are after our feelings and emotions. 

They’re after our irrational, or unconscious, or intuitive minds, and it’s extraordinary difficult for us to disrupt them. 

Parents imagine they can somehow turn off and on profound media effects that billow in great plumes like hot gas through the air. 

But words and images can’t be snatched away from the intuitive, unconscious minds of America’s youth. 

Like an addiction, Starbucks and blow-dried TV politicians live in our minds rent-free while we cluelessly fantasize immunity to it all. 

Wait'll you see later in this project how much Nike spends on marketing and advertising. 

Wait'll you see what Nike calls that massive spending.

• next time Hype rules everything around me.
• listening Screamin' Jay Hawkins "I Put a Spell on You"

Hype is a dictator 🎉

> the persuaders | hype machine

How much hype in the air on any given day about any given thing is generated for the purposes of making money at the expense of your mind?

• next time "Want to touch the sky, kid?" 
• listening Fontaines D.C. "Televised Mind"

Buy the sky ☁️

"Reality is a cloud of possibility, not a point." 

—Psychologist Amos Tversky

> the persuaders | skytoucher

The human mind makes 35,000 decisions each day.

We can’t be consciously aware of them all. 

Mammoth corporate advertisers like Nike capitalize on this fact to sell a brand before selling a product.

With remarkable candor, Nike refers to its marketing and advertising as "demand creation." 

The company spent a jaw-dropping $4.3 billion on demand creation in 2024 alone. Nike's brand has been publicly valued at some $30 billion.

That's just the brand.

From an earnings statement Nike sent to shareholders:

>> "Our demand-creation expense consists of advertising and promotion costs, including costs of endorsement contracts, complimentary products, television, digital and print advertising, as well as media costs, brand events, and retail brand presentation."

So if you want to touch the sky, kid, you’ll have to buy the special uniform.

All the big-boy skytouchers are wearing it.

• next time "Still think you’re immune?"
• listening Pissed Jeans "It’s Your Knees"

Media effects 📡

"Crucial decisions are made – today as thousands of years ago – in terms of the intuitive guesses and preferences of a few men in positions of authority." 

—Psychologist Amos Tversky

> the persuaders | wiring

The human mind can make even doctors and business titans and world leaders into helpless fools and alcoholics.

Despite major discoveries from scientists about the human mind and how it works, people still often believe they are somehow individually immune to the things I've been describing in these bite-sized stories. 

They're somehow not vulnerable like everyone else to media effects and lapses in judgment and cognitive biases and the mind’s natural wiring.

Perhaps no one is more aware of our ignorance than the advertising industry.

 Why else would Wall Street corporations each spend millions and billions of dollars annually to promote brands and lifestyles that just happen to sell consumer products? $$$

Still think you’re immune? 

Politicians in 2024 were slated to spend more than ever on political campaign ads – an estimated $12.3 billion. 

Why spend so much if we’re all immune to ads and media effects? Wrote psychologist Daniel Kahneman in a bestselling 2011 book:

>> "A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact."

• next time "Someone’s buying."
• listening Crass "Banned from the Roxy"

Hurry sickness 🕔

"There is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather." 

—Forbes.com

> the persuaders | suspicious

Our mouths tell one story. Our behaviors tell another. 

A highly suspicious number of people who come into the local Tulsa coffee shops where I’ve worked claim to never go to Starbucks or use plastic coffee pods at home. 

The problem is that Starbucks is a $36 billion company. Someone's buying. 

Starbucks spends over half-a-billion dollars each year on marketing and advertising. 

It has 38,000 stores worldwide. 

Keurig Dr Pepper, a major producer of home coffee pods, earned $15 billion in 2023, meanwhile. 

Like I said, someone’s buying. We’re a nation in perpetual hurry. Starbucks is ruthlessly convenient in a country where consumers are slowly dying from hurry sickness (a real thing).

Our need to impress and avoid even mild embarrassment by denying a lurid affair with Starbucks is greater than our need to confess the truth. 

Sure, Americans and Tulsans like good coffee from local businesses. But Tulsa doesn’t have a reputation for celebrating local businesses the way other cities do.

Here in the great state of Oklahoma, we don’t like feeling overly fussy about anything we buy unless we're buying a truck or above-ground pool.  

Walmart and Buffalo Wild Wings and Starbucks are good enough for us. Jesus is our wellness. 

Besides, there’s a game on later, and Starbucks is just faster.

Those local places take forever.

• next time "I sometimes drink Keurig pods."
• listening American Football "Silhouettes"

Shattered 🏛️🗳️

"It's well known that the physical universe isn’t fair. Nevertheless, it’s difficult to decide which is more provoking: good people suffering or evil people prospering."

—Author Susan Cartwright

> the persuaders | campaign ads

Political campaigns in the United States were poised to spend over $12 billion on advertising in 2024 alone and shatter previous spending records. 

Such ads target our intuitive, unconscious minds with emotionally charged themes. 

"Even a single ad, if compelling enough, can set agendas," wrote a Harvard University politics and media professor in 2015.

Candidates and their teams of consultants are fully aware of our many documented human tendencies that we can’t consciously "see." 

These tendencies make us far more knowable, measurable, and predictable than we realize.

Human beings are good at acquiring information in our minds for later retrieval. But when retrieving it later, we’re often not able to remember where it came from. 

Was it an attack ad or CNN?

Campaigns exploit this human tendency by creating ads that resemble newscasts with fake reporters and anchors. 

Other research shows that campaign ads are stickier if the messaging is negative over positive. 

Mind experts say that’s due to humanity’s shared negativity bias.

Scientists say the human mind makes 35,000 decisions each day. 

It's impossible to be consciously aware of them all. 

What are these decisions saying without us consciously knowing it?

Hiding among those thousands of decisions are fallacies and illusions and cognitive errors and mental lapses. They can drag down and distort our judgments while we’re blind to what’s happening.

Detectives, parents, judges, baristas, doctors, presidents, and people who think they’re smarter than everyone else are just as vulnerable to cognitive errors and illusions and fallacies and negative attack ads as anyone else.

• next time Ask Amazon.
• listening Propagandhi "Today’s Empires, Tomorrow’s Ashes"

Big Coffee 🟢

"We have built an emotional connection with our customers."

—Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz

> the persuaders | virtue signals

The speed and convenience of Starbucks and plastic coffee pods are irresistible. 

Tens of billions of dollars raked in each year by Big Coffee prove it. 

People lie at the Tulsa coffee shops where I've worked in sobriety from alcohol. 

They claim to never go to Starbucks or use plastic coffee pods.

That means you’re lying to impress a preparer of coffee beverages in recovery from alcoholism who dropped out of high school and makes less per hour than a Starbucks barista.

My approach with these customers now is to just confess that I go to Starbucks sometimes and that I sometimes drink Keurig pods. 

If you try to shame me for it, I'll shame you back for not caring about the people who make your shoes and phone. 

We make promises and claims from our mouths that violently collide with our behaviors. How we behave over and over reveals the true extent to which human beings are observable and measurable and predictable.

If it was any other way, the respected statistician Nate Silver would not have been able to stun political watchers in 2008 by successfully predicting how 49 of the 50 states would vote during the U.S. presidential election of 2008.

Then Silver went on to correctly predict all 50 states in 2012. 

We’re not always so different. Ask Amazon. Or Google. 

Or consider the hundreds of millions of dollars spent each year by Big Coffee on marketing and advertising.

• next time Chapter end
• listening Jeff Buckley "Forget Her"

>> full series | alerts | playlist / social | tip jar

– 30 –