People frequently hold very strong opinions on how things are different now than in the past, but finding apples to apples comparisons is not always easy. Here, the scion of the Candid Camera TV prank show dynasty reflects on some changes since he last filmed in the early 2000s and some continuities since his father, Allen Funt, started the show in 1948.

Curses, Fooled Again!

By PETER FUNT SEPT. 26, 2014 I SPENT the summer producing new “Candid Camera” shows, and among the many things I observed after a 10-year hiatus was that people are more easily fooled than ever. That may seem counterintuitive, but I’m certain it’s true. Much has to do with multitasking. When my dad, Allen Funt, introduced the show over six decades ago, he had to work at distracting people. Nowadays they do it to themselves. Many people we now encounter are fiddling with cellphones and other devices, tackling routine activities with less-than-full focus. That makes them easier targets for our little experiments, but also more vulnerable to personal mishaps and genuine scams.

I was driving across a college campus this week just as the night school students were getting out of long evening classes (during which they presumably had been abstaining from texting). I had to slow my car down to walking speed to avoid accidents because the majority of pedestrians were drifting about heads down with their eyes on their glowing screens held at waist level.

Here’s an idea for a Silicon Valley start-up: an app that will freeze your smartphone screen with “LOOK UP” if you are about to get hit by a car.

I worried briefly that people are now so tech-savvy that some of our props and fake setups wouldn’t be believed. Instead, we found that the omnipresence of technology has reached a point where people will now accept almost anything. We showed customers at a salon an “un-tanning machine” that ostensibly sucked off dark pigment in seconds. We told residents in a Denver suburb that they would be getting mail delivery via drone. We gave patients at a dentist’s office an iPad and said they’d now have to conduct their own “online dental exam.” In each case, just about everyone bought in. At the dental office, several people were even prepared to give themselves a shot of Novocain before we intervened. … Much hasn’t changed over the years. For example, I expected to encounter more profanity in everyday conversation, but it’s really not there.

I suspect this kind of mistake is broadly true in that a single phase change — for example, my guess is that the use of profanity in conversations with friendly strangers went from virtually zero to a moderate amount over a fairly short period of ten or twenty years, centering around, perhaps, the year 1973 — is remembered less often as a one-time shift and as more an on-going trend. “Things have gotten worse” and “things are getting worse” can actually be quite different observations, but many people lump them together because, very few people have a strong chronological sense of the past.

A general cognitive fuzziness about the past dates is essential to much of The Narrative we are fed daily about race and feminism. We are told that, say, the reason the highest paid “female” CEO in America is my old UCLA MBA classmate Martin (now Martine) Rothblatt is because until very recently, perhaps last week (who can remember?), women were told never to go into the business world. Well, no, that change had happened well before Rothblatt and I took a marketing strategies course in 1981. Rothblatt is the highest paid “woman” CEO today because, when I knew him, he was immensely intelligent and was brimming with intensely masculine ambition and arrogance. He struck most of his classmates as a huge prick. (Of course, in the current mindset, this would be attributed to his being oppressed by society into covering up the little girl that he really always actually was on the inside, even though neither his brother nor his mother believe that, and he doesn’t even really claim it to be true, and now he’s pretty much lost interest in the whole transgender thing and has moved on to trying to attain technological immortality for himself.)

But who can remember dates in the past? Some people can. When commenter Albertosaurus / Pat is recounting his hilariously long list of jobs he’s mastered and then gotten bored with, he always puts the reason for why there was funding for his job in the context of some belief of that historical moment.

It was in another MBA marketing class in the winter of 1981 that I first noticed that I could put dates to all sorts of events of recent years in a way that some of my fellow students found irritating but most found pleasantly astonishing. The course consisted of Harvard Business School case studies from the 1960s and 1970s of business projects, such as Hanes’ introduction of L’Eggs pantyhose in plastic eggs in 1969. When called upon, I gave a little disquisition on changing fashions in skirt lengths from 1964-1974 and how that played into the success of this famous product launch. The woman marketing professor who taught the course was much amused by this bizarre scene of a 22-year-old straight guy who had a chronological history of women’s fashions in his head.

The professor soon just made it a regular feature of each class to call on me to put the case study in historical context: “Well, clearly a lot has changed in the Nigerian beer market since this case study was written in 1968, but the dominant development paradigm of that era was “import substitution,” and what more obvious local industry than setting up a brewery, whose output is heavy and hard to transport relative to its value, or at least was back then before the containerization revolution had hit full stride?”