Speaker 1: Oh, welcome once again to Behind the Bastards, the only
Speaker 1: podcast where the host regularly says that his show is
Speaker 1: cash money. Um, I'm I'm Robert Evans, here to talk
Speaker 1: with you about bad people. Sophie Lichtman seems very unhappy,
Speaker 1: which is not cash I just have extreme secondhand embarrassment.
Speaker 1: Well that's too bad, Sophie, because I'm bringing it back,
Speaker 1: bringing back the phrase. As you know, everything you do
Speaker 1: reflects on me for some god forsakend reason, that is
Speaker 1: not very cash money. I think it's extremely cash money
Speaker 1: off me. But here to be the tie breaking vote
Speaker 1: is James Stout. Now, James, you're British, so so the
Speaker 1: phrase cash money may not mean much to you in
Speaker 1: in your language, I would say it's drawings of an
Speaker 1: elderly man who's never worked today in his life. Yeah
Speaker 1: it is now is now? Cash money has very little
Speaker 1: value when it's tied to the life expectancy of an
Speaker 1: inbred old person with sausage fingers. I thought a bunch
Speaker 1: of different ways of describing the new bills with with
Speaker 1: King Charles on them. Um, part of me wanted to
Speaker 1: make a reference to the weird sex that got linked
Speaker 1: to him. In Camilla. Oh, I made I made an
Speaker 1: ethical decision that even the King of England deserves to
Speaker 1: have his sex be private. I just like, don't need
Speaker 1: nobody needs, okay, just but you don't want to think
Speaker 1: about him sneaking outside and what was it like getting
Speaker 1: his pajamas dirty and having his valet clean them. Yeah?
Speaker 1: That and his he's got some he's got a very
Speaker 1: specific kinks. Okay, yeah, yeah that's what as well as
Speaker 1: William Yeah, kinky little as this kink murdering his first wife.
Speaker 1: You know it's it's it's a tampon thing. Um yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: not expected. Yeah, we we know far too much about
Speaker 1: what Charles has been sending, um my heartbreaking amount. I
Speaker 1: would say, don't don't google it, Loo, I'm telling you
Speaker 1: the truth, but don't google this yar laptop anyway. So
Speaker 1: I just broke my promise right there not to not
Speaker 1: to laugh at the King of England's sexual escapades. James,
Speaker 1: how do you feel about cigarettes? Oh? I think the
Speaker 1: idea wasn't expecting that I kind of ambiguous. I guess,
Speaker 1: uh yeah. A lot of a lot of bad things
Speaker 1: happened because people like to smoke cigarettes. A lot of
Speaker 1: people like to get really really up in other people's
Speaker 1: business about smoking cigarettes. So it's it's a difficult one.
Speaker 1: I I have the same difficulty because on one hand,
Speaker 1: I'm kind of constitutionally anti prohibition, Like I don't think
Speaker 1: things should be illegal or illegal. I don't think the
Speaker 1: government should stop people from doing stuff just because it's
Speaker 1: bad for their health. Um. And I also see cultural
Speaker 1: value to an extent in cigarettes. I've had some memorable
Speaker 1: there's I tend to I tend to believe that every
Speaker 1: single drug, even the ones that we call bad drugs,
Speaker 1: has an ideal use case where it is is a
Speaker 1: societal good for the drug to be available, And for cigarettes,
Speaker 1: that good is when someone has just tried to kill you.
Speaker 1: There's a there's nothing like a cigarette someone's just trying
Speaker 1: to kill her, hurt you, which is why they're so
Speaker 1: value outside of British nightclub Yeah, exactly, thet You never
Speaker 1: know when a bottle is coming for your temple there yet,
Speaker 1: Yeah that's it. Um, you know, I I but I
Speaker 1: get it, like it's one of those things. The there
Speaker 1: was a need for a period of time where we
Speaker 1: attacked and demonized, particularly the tobacco industry because they lied
Speaker 1: to everybody about the health risks of cigarettes in a
Speaker 1: way that that caused that cause more lives maybe than
Speaker 1: all of the wars in the last centuries. It's kind
Speaker 1: of an unbelievable body count. Um. That said, I think
Speaker 1: today people throw down too much against smokers, and and
Speaker 1: maybe there's maybe maybe we shouldn't be quite so shitty
Speaker 1: to people who just happened to smoke cigarettes. But what
Speaker 1: I wanted to talk about this week is fucking the
Speaker 1: history of cigarettes. Because as I dug into this, I
Speaker 1: was initially planning just to do an episode on big
Speaker 1: tobacco and how they hid the health harms of cigarettes,
Speaker 1: and we will do those episodes. We're gonna talk about that,
Speaker 1: some of these we will do dedicated episodes on those.
Speaker 1: But as I got into the research, I was continually
Speaker 1: amazed by the extent to which cigarettes are responsible for
Speaker 1: most of like the things that we consider the modern world,
Speaker 1: like like the cigarettes, the in order to get people
Speaker 1: to smoke, the tobacco industry had to invent modern civilizations. Um.
Speaker 1: And that's that's a fascinating story and I just want
Speaker 1: to talk talk about it. Is one of those we're
Speaker 1: getting behind a bastard at this point. You know, when
Speaker 1: we're talking about the eighteen hundreds up through like the
Speaker 1: middle of the twentieth century, you're not a bad person
Speaker 1: for necessarily for trying to get people to smoke, because
Speaker 1: if it's nineteen o five, number one, cigarettes not a
Speaker 1: massive risk above like walking outside your door. But also
Speaker 1: you just don't have good data. So yeah, the ambient
Speaker 1: level of smoking is pretty high, just some existing in
Speaker 1: any other just from being around. We'll talk about that
Speaker 1: a bit, but first we have to do some prehistory. Now,
Speaker 1: we don't know exactly when the first human beings started
Speaker 1: smoking or otherwise ingesting tobacco for the first time, because
Speaker 1: there's a good chance the earliest tobacco users were not
Speaker 1: smoking it. Um. But we're broadly speaking, I mean, and
Speaker 1: there's debate about this too, but archaeologists can confirm that
Speaker 1: by at latest the first century BC, the Maya people
Speaker 1: of Central America were using tobacco as a part of
Speaker 1: their religious rituals um and they were both smoking it
Speaker 1: and like inhaling it uh in kind of a similar
Speaker 1: way to snuff. Right, you can snort tobacco if it's
Speaker 1: ground ground. Finally enough, they probably also chewed it. Uh,
Speaker 1: there were a couple of different devices they had for
Speaker 1: smoking it, and we don't we we will never know
Speaker 1: which was like the first, right, like we just know
Speaker 1: which ones we kind of have written records of earliest.
Speaker 1: But a lot of those written records come from Europeans,
Speaker 1: so obviously that's a long time after they would have
Speaker 1: started using them. Um. But and it and again there's
Speaker 1: even some debate as to like, well, we're the Maya,
Speaker 1: the first people who were cultivating tobacco, and probably the
Speaker 1: answer to that is no. But we certainly know the Maya.
Speaker 1: We're cultivating tobacco in the first century BC, and it's
Speaker 1: spread from Central America to the Mississippi Valley and beyond
Speaker 1: and was quickly adopted by neighboring people's from like four
Speaker 1: hundred to seven hundred a d is when you see
Speaker 1: most most of this spread, and it makes it all
Speaker 1: the way out to the fucking Caribbean. Oh yeah, that's
Speaker 1: where Columbus rant into it at first. Right, that is
Speaker 1: exactly the thing that happens in this episode of James
Speaker 1: Christopher Goddamn Columbus becomes the first European to encounter tobacco,
Speaker 1: which was being smoked by the natives of Hispaniola which
Speaker 1: is modern day Haiti and the Dominican Republic via a
Speaker 1: weird two pronged nose pipe. So they would they would
Speaker 1: smoke it, but they would like inhale it through this
Speaker 1: pipe that like smoke all kind of situation. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: looks a little bit. It looks a little bit like
Speaker 1: a canula. Okay, yeah, like a nasal canula. I made
Speaker 1: from my book A Brief History of Vice. I recreated
Speaker 1: these pipes as best I could. I would up actually
Speaker 1: using the stock of dried like the dried stock of
Speaker 1: marijuana plants, because it's hollow, and so I just had
Speaker 1: to kind of find why bends that were the right shape. Um,
Speaker 1: that's obviously. I don't think what they would have used.
Speaker 1: I don't know what they plant they would have used
Speaker 1: for it. But you do get pretty fucked up when
Speaker 1: you smoke raw nicotina rustica through directly into your mucus membrane. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can see that one being pretty rough on the
Speaker 1: old excited sis. I would not, It's it's one of
Speaker 1: those things you have to divorce kind of if you're
Speaker 1: thinking about tobacco in this period from modern day because
Speaker 1: it's not number one, most people smoking it. This is
Speaker 1: not a habitual thing for them. It's a ritual thing
Speaker 1: for them. Right. There are people, certainly by the time
Speaker 1: Columbus it's Hispaniola, who seem to just do it recreationally.
Speaker 1: But for the most part, most people's encounters with tobacco
Speaker 1: is probably in like a very um kind of fairly
Speaker 1: strict ritual sense. Uh. And and also it's pretty uncommon
Speaker 1: to have like a habit. Even the people who would
Speaker 1: be heavy smokers, I doubt are smoking more than the
Speaker 1: equivalent of a couple of cigarettes in a day, um,
Speaker 1: in part because it's kind of hard to when you're
Speaker 1: smoking them. But right, Yeah, there's a lot of work
Speaker 1: that imagine goes into producing a nose cigarette, from growing
Speaker 1: the tobacco, drying get out, and yeah, that's a lot
Speaker 1: of work. And you also you can't smoke just when
Speaker 1: you when you want to fix because you don't have lighters,
Speaker 1: you don't have matches, right like fire Obviously, the people
Speaker 1: who are living, you know, in these places are a
Speaker 1: lot better at starting fires than most people in the
Speaker 1: modern world are. But it's still not nearly as easy, right, Like,
Speaker 1: you're not gonna just make a fire because you want
Speaker 1: like a fucking smoke in the like, yeah, get a
Speaker 1: piece of wood out. So again, smoking even when it's
Speaker 1: not like for a religious purpose, it's probably broadly like Okay,
Speaker 1: it's meal time and we'll smoke after the meal, right,
Speaker 1: or like smoke before because we've we've got the fire going,
Speaker 1: or it's nighttime, we're cooling down, we've got the fire going.
Speaker 1: You know, now we can smoke tonight. Um. Like, generally,
Speaker 1: that's probably how it would have gone when Columbus winds up,
Speaker 1: you know, meeting these people in Foo and watching them smoke.
Speaker 1: They actually hand him tobacco and he doesn't know what
Speaker 1: to do with it until he watches them smoke it, um,
Speaker 1: and he sees he encounters a couple of different methods.
Speaker 1: He sees the nose pipes. He also sees people wrapping
Speaker 1: tobacco leaves with corn husks, which is probably the first
Speaker 1: cigarettes in this Yeah. Uh, it's also worth knowing that
Speaker 1: over in Cuba people would wrap their tobacco in tobacco leaves,
Speaker 1: so they were again like hundreds and hundreds of years
Speaker 1: ago smoking cigars and cube. That actually goes back really
Speaker 1: fucking far, probably more than a thousand years, people have
Speaker 1: been smoking something broadly similar to a cigar in in
Speaker 1: that that's pretty cool. It is kind of neat, right,
Speaker 1: I enjoy Yeah, Yeah, there are many things that we consume,
Speaker 1: I guess, you know, sometimes we freeze vegetables and stuff,
Speaker 1: but it's not much that we consume that people consumed
Speaker 1: a thousand years ago and made in a pretty similar fashion. Right,
Speaker 1: Like I've been to a Cuban cigar factory. Is still
Speaker 1: like rolled by hand. We're gonna talk about that a
Speaker 1: lot in these episodes, but yeah, they they obviously different
Speaker 1: techniques have become popular over time, and you get better
Speaker 1: at it the way you get in anything. I'm sure
Speaker 1: modern cigars are much tighter and you know, together better
Speaker 1: than cigars in two did. But broadly speaking, like part
Speaker 1: I mean, like I'm a car smoker, I tend to
Speaker 1: think Cuban cigars are are the best, Uh, I like
Speaker 1: to Yeah. Throughout the tragic that the cultural inheritance of
Speaker 1: that today, it's like guys who think that they shooting
Speaker 1: the entire Republican Party. Yes, yeah, like Ben Shapiro and
Speaker 1: friends pretending to perform masculinity and then like going off
Speaker 1: to coff and be sick. Yeah, I mean it's it's
Speaker 1: a bummer they are. You know, I'm not a I
Speaker 1: tend to like I've tried to read a cigar aficionado
Speaker 1: magazine once and it had too many It had too
Speaker 1: many made up words. They use words, and it's not
Speaker 1: like like liquor, you know, number one liquor actually does
Speaker 1: like oh, sometimes you get a bourbon and like, oh
Speaker 1: this this almost tastes more like a coffee, or there's
Speaker 1: like this, this one's sweeter. It's got this like rich
Speaker 1: body fucking like cigars are are smoother or not. But like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I'll read them. They'll be like oh
Speaker 1: and when you on the on the retro hail, you
Speaker 1: get this like taste of orange and juniper, and I'm like, no,
Speaker 1: you fucking don't. There's no juniper and this sucking cigar.
Speaker 1: What is wrong with you? People? Go to hell tobacco.
Speaker 1: It's unreal. The most pretentious thing that you can that
Speaker 1: you can do is be a cigar efficient unreal. Just
Speaker 1: just smoke, just kill yourself slowly. It's fine. Um anyway,
Speaker 1: that's kind of cute cool that Cubans have been making
Speaker 1: cigars for hundreds and hundreds of years. Uh, Now there
Speaker 1: were Like, as I said, the way that people most
Speaker 1: often used tobacco in the Americas was in religious rights.
Speaker 1: And when I'm taught, they're not just like smoking to
Speaker 1: get that kind of little buzz you get from tobacco.
Speaker 1: The way in which most of these indigenous groups would
Speaker 1: have used tobacco was as a psychotropic right, like they
Speaker 1: are like basically tripping on this stuff. Okay, tobacco can
Speaker 1: be can cause hallucinations and high enough doses. Um, it's
Speaker 1: a it's a powerful mind altering drug when you are
Speaker 1: taking like massive quantities and were Number One, the tobacco
Speaker 1: they're smoking is different than the tobacco that we cultivate.
Speaker 1: It's a lot stronger, and the way they're doing it
Speaker 1: is different. So one of the most common ways that
Speaker 1: people would take tobacco in a ritual setting is the
Speaker 1: chief or kind of religious And there's a bunch of
Speaker 1: different terms for local sort of religious and political leaders
Speaker 1: and whatnot. But that dude would inhale a bunch of
Speaker 1: smokes straight up raw from like a burning like hunk
Speaker 1: of tobacco, and then he would basically shotgun it into
Speaker 1: the mouths of the people participating in it. Um And
Speaker 1: obviously you're getting a lot of smoke that way, like
Speaker 1: you're gonna get pretty messed up. But um, and it's again,
Speaker 1: you know, it's as silly as this is probably not
Speaker 1: all that bad for you when you consider everything people
Speaker 1: are doing in a thousand a d or whatever. Right, Like,
Speaker 1: if you if a couple of times a year you're
Speaker 1: you're shot getting some tobacco, that's not gonna be Yeah,
Speaker 1: your life expectancy isn't long enough for that to be
Speaker 1: the thing that kills you in most cases, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: one of the other thousand things it's going to kill
Speaker 1: you that we've a limit. Yeah, And it's also worth
Speaker 1: noting that there were a number of health uses of tobacco.
Speaker 1: It was probably the first effective um insect repellent. One
Speaker 1: of those combinations of it was to just rub it
Speaker 1: all over your skin, because tobacco is coated in an
Speaker 1: oil like that is. Bugs don't it kills bugs like
Speaker 1: they don't They don't like um No, I mean, obviously
Speaker 1: there are specific bugs that do feed on tobacco, but
Speaker 1: for the most part, it keeps insects away. So people
Speaker 1: would rub it on themselves, um that, or they would
Speaker 1: also bathe in the smoke before like going in and
Speaker 1: hunting in the bush and stuff, in order to keep
Speaker 1: bugs off of them. It could work as a tranquilizer.
Speaker 1: It was used to help put people to sleep. Uh
Speaker 1: One of the things that I tried for my book
Speaker 1: was mixing it with urine and garlic in order to
Speaker 1: create uh an a medic and like a constipation remedy.
Speaker 1: And it does work for that. I don't recommend following
Speaker 1: that up, but it does. It does do what it
Speaker 1: says it. So there were a number of uses for
Speaker 1: Native Americans of tobacco that absolutely work in a medical contact.
Speaker 1: There were also some that did not. For example, it
Speaker 1: was often given to people as a treatment for asthma.
Speaker 1: Tobacco does not help with asthma. Yeah, yeah, I think
Speaker 1: helping you don't. But also yeah, that's sort of thing
Speaker 1: that went away, like it just you know, that's we're
Speaker 1: not like that historically separated from people smoking to clear
Speaker 1: the lungs, right exactly. And it's also some of the time,
Speaker 1: a lot of the times when these indigenous people would
Speaker 1: have been taking tobacco to clear up their asthma, it
Speaker 1: might not have been smoked as often as it was,
Speaker 1: like taken as a t um and this can also
Speaker 1: be toxic. People die. One of the things like ayahuasca
Speaker 1: ceremonies are very famous in the West. Now, one of
Speaker 1: the things that some groups do in their ceremonies is
Speaker 1: they precede the ayahuasca with the tobacco t And there's
Speaker 1: a couple of cases of people dying in ayahuasca ceremonies. Now,
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's because the t is just
Speaker 1: always dangerous or because these specific folks that we're doing it,
Speaker 1: we're kind of like grifters and didn't know what they
Speaker 1: were doing and weren't actually doing at the true aditional way.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure if that that information exists properly, but
Speaker 1: this is another way people would take it as a
Speaker 1: t which don't don't take tobacco. It's actually pretty easy
Speaker 1: to kill yourself by ingesting tobacco. Please don't do that.
Speaker 1: I know every now and again, like a pet will
Speaker 1: eat a bunch of cigarettes. Yea, kill the ship out
Speaker 1: of you. It's extremely deadly tobacco um. But you know,
Speaker 1: interesting plant. So the Portuguese were the first Europeans to
Speaker 1: begin cultivating tobacco for export to Europe. In fifteen sixty four,
Speaker 1: a Royal Navy captain brought the leaf to Ingleland, and
Speaker 1: despite early opposition from people who considered a filthy, foul
Speaker 1: drug for foreigners, it took off their like wildfire. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I just loved it. Like an immediate British or English
Speaker 1: response was just like start was then a phobia here,
Speaker 1: and then move along from there and work out well,
Speaker 1: drugs could have kind of picture part of all of
Speaker 1: our lives and in Europe. In the UK, the story
Speaker 1: with tobacco was similar to the story with coffee, and
Speaker 1: that a bunch of like weirdo Christians are like, this
Speaker 1: is a heathen drug, we shouldn't do it. And then
Speaker 1: some king will like pick up a cigarette or drink
Speaker 1: some coffee and be like, hell, yeah, this ship is
Speaker 1: actually pretty dope. You know what. I think We're fine
Speaker 1: with tobacco. Yeah. Yeah. In coffee's case, it was literally
Speaker 1: the Pope being like, oh, this stuff rules, you know what,
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna baptize it. I'm just gonna baptize coffee
Speaker 1: now Christians can have it. And then God changed his
Speaker 1: mind just like that. Yeah, omnipp being omnipotent, being amazing stuff.
Speaker 1: It would be. I would give a lot of kudos
Speaker 1: to the Pope if he just baptized marijuana so that
Speaker 1: Catholics could sue the federal government restricting it. Just imagining
Speaker 1: came doing fentanyl, like the Pope bless us to protect
Speaker 1: the kids. Yeah, he's dropped it in the fund says
Speaker 1: this ship's red. Two babies are going to have a
Speaker 1: rough one. Now put some final in the baptismal font Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're gonna want to give them some narcn They're not
Speaker 1: going to have a good time. That's what we call
Speaker 1: na because that was a That was a church joke
Speaker 1: for you you kids anyway, Uh yeah, you know. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the English start smoking tobacco. Uh. It gets cultivated
Speaker 1: in the Jamestown settlement in the seventeenth century, and by
Speaker 1: the seventeen thirties, the English colonies in Virginia had tobacco
Speaker 1: factories that were manufacturing significant quantities of the stuff, mostly
Speaker 1: is snuff, which was either inhaled or shoot. That is
Speaker 1: the predominant way to consume tobacco in the kind of
Speaker 1: the early period of colonization of the America's um was
Speaker 1: it like because you see pictures of them sometimes and
Speaker 1: they got the old timey pipe right, like the long
Speaker 1: pipe with a little ball. Ye yeah, is that like
Speaker 1: a class thing? Is that like I can afford to
Speaker 1: have a pipe in your con some of its class
Speaker 1: cigars are generally like more expensive. Um, snuff is very cheap.
Speaker 1: The other thing though, is that again not easy to
Speaker 1: get access to stuff to light a pipe or to
Speaker 1: light a cigar. So if you're smoking a pipe or cigar,
Speaker 1: you're probably in your home right, so you know, the
Speaker 1: beginning of the day or the end of the day,
Speaker 1: or maybe in like the midday for a meal, you
Speaker 1: could have a smoke. But it's not convenient. You can't
Speaker 1: just light a pipe when you're out in the field
Speaker 1: because like you don't just have a thing that's on
Speaker 1: fire with you at all times. Um. But you can
Speaker 1: take snuff any time a day. And it's addictive, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: extremely and it's and it's and it's incredibly addictive. Uh
Speaker 1: So all of the colonizing powers competed for a share
Speaker 1: of the emerging global tobacco market. And again it's incredibly addictive.
Speaker 1: So there's enough interest very quickly to spur rapid innovation
Speaker 1: in the field. In eighteen forty three, a French company
Speaker 1: given a monopoly over tobacco by King Louis the fourteenth
Speaker 1: starts manufacturing the very first close to modern cigarettes. Now
Speaker 1: people had been smoking again when Columbus lends up, they
Speaker 1: see people like wrapping ship and corn cobs. Those are
Speaker 1: like for for a couple of centuries, that's how you
Speaker 1: smoke a cigarette. You get a corn cob. Sometimes you
Speaker 1: get like old paper, like newspaper, like just kind of
Speaker 1: whatever papery thing. You can fill it with tobacco and
Speaker 1: smoke it, you know. And then the friendship in goal
Speaker 1: was and have never changed, the friendship and goats, which
Speaker 1: are which are still the worst cigarettes on the market.
Speaker 1: They're still smoking something close to modern cigarettes today. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was Those were the most common cigarettes we smoked
Speaker 1: in Syria, and it was like the goal was that
Speaker 1: you couldn't sell in France because the tobacco was still low.
Speaker 1: Great yeah, God, what a horrible cigarette. Yeah, but it's
Speaker 1: just yeah, it's yeah everywhere. I just have a lot
Speaker 1: of memories of like bike racing in France and having
Speaker 1: to go in to sign on to these races, and
Speaker 1: like you walk in and you just like it's like
Speaker 1: like they used to do in nightclubs with the smoke machine.
Speaker 1: You know, just like yeah, yeah, like you are also
Speaker 1: enough to experience like smoking inside in which isn't a
Speaker 1: thing anymore. And you go and you come out, you're like,
Speaker 1: thought that was good for me. And then you see
Speaker 1: the guy who has never going to kick your ass
Speaker 1: in the race, or it's after the race and the
Speaker 1: guy has just won the race is having a fucking cigarette,
Speaker 1: and like, just remember being one of the most COMMI experiences. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he said to the pharmaceutical industry is what he is. Look, kids,
Speaker 1: if you want to know what it's like to walk
Speaker 1: around in a world where people smoke indoors constantly and
Speaker 1: in all places, there's an option. Fly to Serbia. Belgrade.
Speaker 1: Will Belgrade will teach you what the seventies was like
Speaker 1: more ways one yeah and I in a number of ways.
Speaker 1: You'll learn about the seventies in Belgrade. Bang in hack Man.
Speaker 1: The track suits there are unreal. There's coming back. That's
Speaker 1: there's a cycle again. When we're talking about what actually
Speaker 1: is like a culturally beautiful use for cigarettes. Squatting in
Speaker 1: a field with your buddies in a track suit and smoke. God,
Speaker 1: it's incredible cultured experience burning through a pack of knockoff
Speaker 1: Marlborough's that have two extra ease in them. It doesn't
Speaker 1: have the L's. You know what? You know? Who else
Speaker 1: sells discount cigarettes? Is it Sophie? Sophie does Sophie. If
Speaker 1: you meet Sophie behind the main gym building after lunch
Speaker 1: or after classes, let out, She's always got a couple
Speaker 1: of extra packs on hand and she'll sell you. Lucy's
Speaker 1: what what great? Am I in? What school? Why am
Speaker 1: I out of school? What normal age? I don't like
Speaker 1: the association? And yeah, she's still going there every day. Well,
Speaker 1: that we don't have we can't fund our podcasts for
Speaker 1: some reason, also reflects on you. But here we are, Sophie.
Speaker 1: Let's let's let's be honest with ourselves. If if I
Speaker 1: were to get caught selling loose cigarettes to children behind
Speaker 1: a high school, they would only increase my popularity, not uncancellable.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to get I'm trying to get him off
Speaker 1: the Jewels anti vaping action. I've got a Joe Camel
Speaker 1: tattoo on my chest. Oh my god, let's let's look
Speaker 1: let's just God, yeah, I'm gonna spend this whole episode
Speaker 1: trying not to say what is a homophobic slur in
Speaker 1: this country. By the way, we're back and James is
Speaker 1: discussing how difficult it is to talk about cigarettes as
Speaker 1: a British person without saying something that's offensive. Ye, that's right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a word that we use in Britain to cigarettes.
Speaker 1: So American people used to be horrible to gay people
Speaker 1: and I'm not going to use it, but it's very
Speaker 1: difficult for me, so it is now it doesn't not.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think the slur comes from the harmless
Speaker 1: term which also if you read jaire or token, you
Speaker 1: will see that word used constantly in its original meaning.
Speaker 1: It is a little bit out off running sometimes. But
Speaker 1: then the people I grew up well, exactinly when my
Speaker 1: grandmother lived right in rural Devon, was very like people
Speaker 1: still use Steve Aldai. Yeah, but yeah, that that word
Speaker 1: would be used to describe like a small it's a
Speaker 1: type of food, right, there's a food that use that word,
Speaker 1: but also like a small bundle of hay, it's a
Speaker 1: bundle of sticks or whatever, any package, and I think
Speaker 1: you can call it your Amazon word. Yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's anyway, whatever's language, it's it's amazing. So uh yeah,
Speaker 1: all yeah. So in the fourteenth or Louis, the fourteen
Speaker 1: gives the first French company and monopoly over tobacco production
Speaker 1: and they start manufacturing cigarettes, which all have to be
Speaker 1: handled at this point. But this is the first time
Speaker 1: that like a company is selling people cigarettes pretty much
Speaker 1: the first time that a company is selling like a
Speaker 1: large company is trying to make cigarettes into like a
Speaker 1: major business. Prior to this, if you bought cigarettes, most
Speaker 1: people who smoked cigarettes were like poor people, and you
Speaker 1: would just you would have a bag of tobacco and
Speaker 1: you'd wrap it and ship right um. Or you know,
Speaker 1: rolling papers even aren't aren't a thing that you could
Speaker 1: just go out and get. The other way you would
Speaker 1: get it as you would go to a tobaccoist who
Speaker 1: has someone rolled them and you would buy them. Um.
Speaker 1: Cigarettes were generally, because of this, the least favorite method
Speaker 1: of tobacco consumption. They were seen as the thing that
Speaker 1: like homeless people smoked because the most common way to
Speaker 1: smoke cigarettes was to like go outside of a place
Speaker 1: where people with more money had been hanging out like
Speaker 1: a bar and pick up the cigarette the cigar butts
Speaker 1: and like then roll them into a cigarette. Really came
Speaker 1: about that? Man? Is the worst smoke I can imagine. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that is bleak. Yeah, but my god, that guy. The
Speaker 1: only person today who could smoke on the level of
Speaker 1: a smoker back then would be maybe Rudy Giuliani. Um,
Speaker 1: you gotta give him. He's one of these weirdos. So cigars,
Speaker 1: you don't inhale a cigar unless your specific kind of
Speaker 1: cigar smoker who believes that everyone else is wrong by
Speaker 1: not inhaling their cigars. I forget what they call themselves,
Speaker 1: but Rudy is one of them. He's an inhaler. He
Speaker 1: takes it all in. Baby. I think cancer is just
Speaker 1: repudiated by him. He's that's gonna be bad for the
Speaker 1: cancer brand. Man. Yeah, I don't want to give mixed
Speaker 1: up with Giuliani. So cigarettes start to get popular with
Speaker 1: Europeans during our right after the Crimean War, when soldiers
Speaker 1: you know who returned because the Crimean War is a
Speaker 1: lot of it's in area is kind of a butting
Speaker 1: in around Turkey. Um, and so they encountered Turkish cigarettes
Speaker 1: and the Turks have been smoking cigarettes and making cigarettes
Speaker 1: for for a bit longer um, and they decided they
Speaker 1: like the Turkish tobacco is good, and it's milder than
Speaker 1: the stuff that they had had had access to. In
Speaker 1: eighteen fifty six, one veteran of the war opens London's
Speaker 1: first cigarette factory, which is called Sweet Threes. He has
Speaker 1: joined a few years later by another English entrepreneur who
Speaker 1: creates the second major cigarette factory in London. And this
Speaker 1: guy's name is Philip Morris. So yeah, that's where that
Speaker 1: comes good. Yeah, yeah, there he is, Philip. Yeah, a
Speaker 1: man with a body count that would rival fucking Hitler.
Speaker 1: Uh So, at this point, all cigarettes are still rolled
Speaker 1: by hand. Most are still sold by small retailers. But
Speaker 1: then the Civil War happens in the United States, and
Speaker 1: right after the Civil War things start to change. And
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote now from a write up in the
Speaker 1: Journal of Antiques. Seeing an opportunity in the invert market
Speaker 1: for cigarettes, tobacco man F. S. Kenney began cigarette production
Speaker 1: in New York City as well as a factory in Richmond, Virginia,
Speaker 1: turning out brands with names like Full Dress, Sweet Caporal, Kenney,
Speaker 1: Straight Cut and Sportsman's Corporal using similar blends. Kenny's chief
Speaker 1: competitor in the New York market was Goodwin and Company,
Speaker 1: which sold nationally advertised cigarettes with folksy sounding brand names
Speaker 1: such as Old Judge, Canvas Black, and Welcome. Firms became
Speaker 1: known as the Big Six of the cigarette industry by
Speaker 1: the eighteen seventies as they gained control of of national sales.
Speaker 1: There were, of course, hundreds of smaller cigarette firms operating
Speaker 1: out of back room shops in most major northern cities,
Speaker 1: but their distribution capabilities were usually very limited. I love
Speaker 1: old cigarette brand names. I would. I would smoke Old Judge.
Speaker 1: I think I'd have been an Old Judge man. Well,
Speaker 1: there was one that was particularly great old It was
Speaker 1: for them called old Black. Uh No, there's Old Judge
Speaker 1: Canvas back and while back Okay, I thought it was
Speaker 1: canvas black, like would due to the old lungs. Yeah, Welcome,
Speaker 1: I think I just make a Welcome cigarette from the Welcome. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you get one on your pillow when you go into
Speaker 1: a hotel room. That's a kind of vibe that has.
Speaker 1: It reminds me that that old Bill Hicks Bet when
Speaker 1: he's like, I love that they put the warning labels
Speaker 1: on the cigarettes. Let's me know which ones to avoid.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna buy the lung cancer cigarettes low birth weight,
Speaker 1: so they'll give me one of the Uh. So, tobacco
Speaker 1: obviously is bad for you. It caused problems for people
Speaker 1: because it's never good for you to smoke, or especially
Speaker 1: on a regular basis is. People are increasingly doing in
Speaker 1: this period, but the harms are still minimal and they're
Speaker 1: pretty much impossible to see on a wide basis. Right,
Speaker 1: very few people are able to smoke regularly throughout their
Speaker 1: day for one thing, for another thing. You know, there's
Speaker 1: there's not good matches the ones that people do have
Speaker 1: matches in this period, but they're phosphorus based and they're
Speaker 1: incredibly dangerous. It's like carrying a flash bang in your pocket.
Speaker 1: I've seen no issue with that. I think that's amazing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a good idea. Yeah, I just want to whip
Speaker 1: off a rather phosphorus. Great. Is it like literally like
Speaker 1: like white phosphorus, like um, I mean, I don't don't
Speaker 1: know if it's like white phosphorus, but yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it's it's like a phosphorus like you grind up a
Speaker 1: bunch of phosphorus and then you strike it. I think, um,
Speaker 1: someone like falling over and then yeah, generly, and of
Speaker 1: course your beard oil and hair oil is all alcohol
Speaker 1: and petroleum based. Your shirt has been washed in here,
Speaker 1: gats the lape just catch immediately on fire. Yeah, cigarettes
Speaker 1: will kill you, but not in the way you're expecting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is the period in which like spontaneous human combustion
Speaker 1: starts to be a thing. And it's because everything is
Speaker 1: flammable and everyone's carrying around fire bombs in their pockets. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But yeah, again, as much as we joke about it, heart,
Speaker 1: it's if you were to tell someone's cigarettes are bad, Like,
Speaker 1: that's pretty obvious if you're hanging out with someone today
Speaker 1: who was a smoke poker, because smoker's cough, right, and like,
Speaker 1: you know, you joke about it if you're a smoker,
Speaker 1: like you know it's killing me whatever smoked my cigarette.
Speaker 1: It's not hard to be like put two and two together, like,
Speaker 1: oh this is bad for me. It wouldn't have been
Speaker 1: as obvious back then. For one thing, yeah, smoker's cough,
Speaker 1: but also you know who else coughs is people who
Speaker 1: live in dense cities where the main method of transportation
Speaker 1: is horses. And so there are okay, so New York City.
Speaker 1: The most famous style of houses in New York City.
Speaker 1: They have these big tall porches right that are like
Speaker 1: four or five or six feet off the ground. Those
Speaker 1: big porches that New York and other East Coast cities
Speaker 1: have exist because there would be so much ship in
Speaker 1: the main streets that when it rained there would be
Speaker 1: rivers of feces and rotting carcasses of animals rush, and
Speaker 1: you didn't want it to get near your like your house.
Speaker 1: So you can just sit there and if somebody, if
Speaker 1: people are walking around coughing and looking sick, your first
Speaker 1: guest isn't gonna be it's probably the cigarettes. What a
Speaker 1: place really was a nightmare to be alive. Jesus CHRISTI,
Speaker 1: it's it's striking. But you don't have to make it
Speaker 1: very long to produce a bunch of kids and then
Speaker 1: leave them fatherless. As true as you. Let's just throw
Speaker 1: your corpse in the ship river and the cycle continues.
Speaker 1: It's a Cigarettes in the eighteen seventies were still a
Speaker 1: novelty to most smokers. Less than two percent of people
Speaker 1: who smoked used cigarettes. Again, the most common method of
Speaker 1: tobacco consumption is not even smoking at all, but it
Speaker 1: was chewing what was called plug tobacco. And it was
Speaker 1: into this world and this market that a man named
Speaker 1: James Buchanan Duke stepped in the nineteen or in the
Speaker 1: eighteen eighties. Duke had been born on December eighteen fifty
Speaker 1: six near Durham, North Carolina, and his father was the
Speaker 1: owner of a small tobacco company which was eventually named W.
Speaker 1: Duke and Sons Company or W. Duke, Sons and Company.
Speaker 1: Duke watched in eighteen seventy three, is a powerful depression
Speaker 1: hit the United States and temporarily cigarettes swelled and popularity
Speaker 1: because the urban poor could afford cigarettes, right. Um, So
Speaker 1: that was you know, when they started to take off.
Speaker 1: And he he looks at this, being an intelligent capitalist,
Speaker 1: He's like, we're probably going to continue to have horrible
Speaker 1: economic crashes because it seems like the system is designed
Speaker 1: to do this every like five to ten years. So
Speaker 1: I bet cigarettes have a have a bright future ahead
Speaker 1: of them. I can find a way to make them cheaper. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: people started specting them more in times of depressions. They
Speaker 1: didn't have food and they wanted to not be hungry.
Speaker 1: They wanted to not be hungry. It's also just like,
Speaker 1: one of the few things you can afford, period if
Speaker 1: you're poor is a cigarette, because they're they're cheap, they're
Speaker 1: cheaper than food, and a lot of cases they're certainly
Speaker 1: the cheapest method of getting tobacco. They're cheaper than drinking.
Speaker 1: It's just like it's a little comfort that you can
Speaker 1: have if you're a fucking tramp living on the street
Speaker 1: the eighteen seventies, because there's there's not a whole lot
Speaker 1: of other things for you. But but the cigarette is there.
Speaker 1: The working man's friend, isn't it. It is the working man.
Speaker 1: Look again, if you're on the street in the eighteen seventies,
Speaker 1: that held the risks of a cigarette or the least
Speaker 1: of your concerns. You might get concussed by floating. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's the ship rivers. The main problem you've got a
Speaker 1: deal with, drowning in a river of whole ship. Yeah,
Speaker 1: i'd be smoking whatever. Of course, of course, if they
Speaker 1: invented crack would be on that too. Yeah, you want
Speaker 1: to get out of that situation as quickly as possible. Yeah, absolutely, yeah,
Speaker 1: so absolutely so. Duke At this point in time, his
Speaker 1: brothers and his father were like locked into this vicious
Speaker 1: competition with Bull Durham Tobacco, which was run by a
Speaker 1: guy named W. T. Blackwall and was like the big
Speaker 1: tobacco producer of the day. Duke saw this as a
Speaker 1: pointless fight because they're fighting over plug tobacco. He knew
Speaker 1: that the future of the industry he was not in
Speaker 1: plug tobacco. It was in producing something convenient and cheap
Speaker 1: for urban poor people. In eighteen eighty two, his company
Speaker 1: had just ten cigarette rollers on the line, and so
Speaker 1: these are individual people. Cigarettes are made like cigars, by
Speaker 1: random by just like people who know how to do it.
Speaker 1: The first thing he did was add fifty more rollers,
Speaker 1: which still put him well behind the Allen and Ginter
Speaker 1: factory up in Richmond, which employed four hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: female cigarette rollers. But when a New York City cigarette
Speaker 1: factory went on strike, Duke convinced a hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: five of their workers to move down to Durham in
Speaker 1: eighteen eighty three, offering to pay their moving expenses and
Speaker 1: giving them the highest wages in the industry. This was
Speaker 1: a good deal for these people for a while, but
Speaker 1: If you know anything about capitalists, you know Duke has
Speaker 1: no desire to create well paid jobs for laborers. These
Speaker 1: people are a stop gap. He's thinking like Uber here, right,
Speaker 1: I want to corner the market and then find a
Speaker 1: way to get the human beings out of it, to
Speaker 1: replace them with machines. Um, now he's not. Uh, it
Speaker 1: works a lot better for cigarettes than it does for Uber.
Speaker 1: Turns out this is actually a pretty reasonable business plan
Speaker 1: for cigarettes. Both of them will kill you, but it's
Speaker 1: a self driving cars and a cigarettes. Again, self driving
Speaker 1: castle do it fast and yeah, the cigarettes will do
Speaker 1: it a little more ethically though, so he was in.
Speaker 1: His goal was again he wanted to make He wants
Speaker 1: to make the most profitable tobacco company in the world,
Speaker 1: and the way to do that is to rap fun
Speaker 1: your laborers. Uh. For now though he needed them, and
Speaker 1: by eighteen eighty five he had about seven hand rollers
Speaker 1: in two factories. Most of these are again at young women.
Speaker 1: This is reasonably well paying work for young women. Um.
Speaker 1: He's got a you know, quality control team that checks
Speaker 1: the work. So they're they're trying to put out like
Speaker 1: as uniform a product as possible. But that's not really easy.
Speaker 1: To do. And everyone in the industry making cigarettes knows
Speaker 1: it's kind of slowly expanding, and they know that we
Speaker 1: can make these a lot cheaper and a lot more
Speaker 1: profitable for us if we can replace the human beings
Speaker 1: with machine rollers. So a couple of companies actually put
Speaker 1: out a bounty in order to produce a machine roller.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna quote what comes next from that, right
Speaker 1: up from the Journal of Antiques. A young man named
Speaker 1: James Bosnac approached Duke with a cigarette making machine he
Speaker 1: had invented. The young inventor had previously gone to the
Speaker 1: now Big four companies, but had been turned down because
Speaker 1: his machine was prone to break downs, plus there was
Speaker 1: a belief that consumers would never accept a machine made cigarette.
Speaker 1: Duke put top Mechanics to work, hiring out the bugs
Speaker 1: in the Bonzac machine, and signed a deal with the inventor.
Speaker 1: During his first year of production, using his team of
Speaker 1: important hand rollers, Duke turned out nine point eight million cigarettes.
Speaker 1: In contrast, using the Bondsack machines enabled him to produce
Speaker 1: seven hundred and forty four million cigarettes. So eighteen eighty
Speaker 1: one nine point eight million cigarettes. He gets the Bondsack
Speaker 1: machine seven hundred and forty four million. That is a
Speaker 1: sign a significant increase in production. Right there is turning
Speaker 1: point that's gonna change a few things. So he's making
Speaker 1: a lot of cigarettes now, which is great. He's able
Speaker 1: to make them half as expensive as they were before. Um,
Speaker 1: and he's able to, like number one, sell them for
Speaker 1: cheaper and also make a lot more profit for per cigarette.
Speaker 1: But there's a problem, which is that only about two
Speaker 1: percent of Americans who smoke smoke cigarettes. And so the
Speaker 1: fact that he's making seven hundred thirty million more cigarettes
Speaker 1: per year means that he's got a lot of cigarettes
Speaker 1: he can't sell because there's just not that many smokers
Speaker 1: out there. Um. So this is a this is a
Speaker 1: problem for old Duke. Uh. And Duke realizes that, like,
Speaker 1: if he's going to make this thing profitable, what he's
Speaker 1: going to have to do is create demand for cigarettes.
Speaker 1: He's going to have to convince Americans that they actually
Speaker 1: want not just to smoke cigarettes, but to smoke a
Speaker 1: shipload of them. Because one of the things that becomes
Speaker 1: clear is like, well, we went from nine point eight
Speaker 1: million is seven four million for nothing. We can make
Speaker 1: billions of these years. Wouldn't be a problem at all.
Speaker 1: We just need that many smokers to exist. So that's
Speaker 1: a difficult task, right. Old Duke is going to need
Speaker 1: to actually like create a hunger for billions of cigarettes
Speaker 1: in the world in order to make this payoff. And
Speaker 1: that's exactly what he does next. Um great, Yeah, so
Speaker 1: wonderful world of tobacco marketing. Yes, Uh, it's that. That's
Speaker 1: that's what we're that's what we're building towards here. Um. So,
Speaker 1: one of the things that happens when Duke starts manufacturing
Speaker 1: his cigarettes is that suddenly no corporation can afford to
Speaker 1: sell cigarettes without rolling them on a BONDSAC machine. It
Speaker 1: just is so much more efficient. And because Duke could
Speaker 1: helped fix the bonds Act machines, he owns part of
Speaker 1: the pattern effectively. So one of the ways he's making
Speaker 1: money is that everyone who's making cigarettes is giving money
Speaker 1: to Duke. Um. He Also one of the things he
Speaker 1: does that's smart is in order to kind of everyone's worried, Okay,
Speaker 1: are people not gonna want to smoke cigarettes that are
Speaker 1: rolled by machine? Uh, Duke starts bragging that his cigare
Speaker 1: retz and machine rolled. He puts it on the packages
Speaker 1: as like a way of like, just what if we
Speaker 1: just try to convince people that machine rolled is better
Speaker 1: than a hand rolled. It's it's cleaner, it's more hygienic,
Speaker 1: it's more modern. Right, oh, which is technically true? The
Speaker 1: next I want to quote from a book called The
Speaker 1: Cigarette Century by Alan Brandt. By eighteen eighty four, while
Speaker 1: his competitors were still hesitating, Duke had installed to Bonsac
Speaker 1: machines in his Darrham factory. A year later, after experimenting
Speaker 1: to improve the machines performance, Duke signed a secret contract
Speaker 1: in which he agreed that he would produce all his
Speaker 1: cigarettes with the Bonzact machine. In return, Bonzac reduced Duke's
Speaker 1: royalties to twenty cents per thousand. Duke and Bonzac soon
Speaker 1: reached a further agreement guaranteeing Duke a discount on royalties
Speaker 1: against all other manufacturers. Also, Duke shrewdly hired one of
Speaker 1: Bonzac's disgruntled mechanics, William Thomas O'Brien, to operate his machines,
Speaker 1: assuring fewer breakdowns than his competition. By June six, O'Brien
Speaker 1: was meticulously maintaining ten machines. Duke placed a heavy emphasis
Speaker 1: on efficiency and continuous production. The lessons he learned in
Speaker 1: developing the mass production of cigarettes he would sooner apply
Speaker 1: more broadly to industrial organization. By becoming bonds Acts premier customer,
Speaker 1: Duke secured essential control over its technology and turned Bonds
Speaker 1: Acts patent into a powerful competitive advantage. It was increasingly
Speaker 1: common for inventors to relinquish their patents to corporations. Duke
Speaker 1: understood the control of the Bonds Act patent through his
Speaker 1: secret discounted licensing agreement was a critical lever in dominating
Speaker 1: the cigarette trade. His deal with Bonds Act reflected an
Speaker 1: important change in the character of the patent system from
Speaker 1: a legal mechanism protecting independent inventors to one that would
Speaker 1: protect large and powerful corporations. Duke is, what he's done
Speaker 1: here is invent the modern usage of patents like corporations
Speaker 1: for corporate advantage. Right, Like, everyone who is who, like
Speaker 1: every business leader who follows in any kind of industry
Speaker 1: is going to copy him. Yeah, man, that might be
Speaker 1: one of the things that's killed more people that cigarettes, right, Like, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: because a lot of medical patents and stuff that works
Speaker 1: on the same fucking idea, you know. Yeah, nearly every
Speaker 1: nearly every drug is patented, and of course he's not
Speaker 1: trying to do anything evil with it. He just wants
Speaker 1: everyone to smoke cigarettes um perfectly, perfectly, morally, uncomplicated, rightly.
Speaker 1: I just we talked about it on the episode of
Speaker 1: It Could Happen Here on Monday. But U c l
Speaker 1: A Is pursuing an IP case in India about a
Speaker 1: a prostate cancer drug cardig standy Um, which they're trying
Speaker 1: to stop a generic production at cheaper generic production of them.
Speaker 1: Just imagining the old handshake me between U c l
Speaker 1: A And Duke care and giving people series coming together
Speaker 1: on that's beautiful. So the Bondsac machine quickly replaced human
Speaker 1: rollers who left the cigarette industry to roll cigars, which
Speaker 1: is the only form of tobacco that's going to prove
Speaker 1: immune to the corporate age that Duke is ushering in.
Speaker 1: Through the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties, cigarettes smoking increased
Speaker 1: and the size of a pack doubled from ten to twenty,
Speaker 1: taking advantage of how easy it was to smoke now.
Speaker 1: The first proper match books, invented in the early twentieth
Speaker 1: century helped or adoption, but by nineteen hundreds still less
Speaker 1: than two percent of tobacco consumers are smoking cigarettes. Now,
Speaker 1: Duke knows that his dream of selling cigarettes to the
Speaker 1: world is not going to work if he can't convince
Speaker 1: Americans that they wanted to smoke and they wanted to
Speaker 1: smoke as a habit. So he set out to do
Speaker 1: something no one had ever really done before, which was
Speaker 1: create a market for a product using advertising. Obviously, merchants
Speaker 1: since Timeme Memorial had advertised their wares and attempted to
Speaker 1: set themselves apart from the competition. But what Duke is
Speaker 1: doing is new. Duke is trying to convince people they
Speaker 1: want to do something they haven't done that that's not
Speaker 1: really been a thing in capitalism up to this point. Um,
Speaker 1: It's one thing to be like, Hey, I'm Samuel Colt.
Speaker 1: I've invented a better handgun like you want. If you
Speaker 1: want a handgun, you want a handgun. My job with
Speaker 1: my marketing is is to convince you mind's the best, right,
Speaker 1: But you're not. You're not convincing people well now I
Speaker 1: need a gun, right, like they decided they need a
Speaker 1: gun because it's the fucking eighteen eighties or what uh
Speaker 1: fucking Duke is like these people are fine without cigarettes.
Speaker 1: That's this isn't a problem. There's not a need that
Speaker 1: I'm trying to serve here. I have to create it
Speaker 1: um and one of the first plays he's going to do.
Speaker 1: This is really quite innovative and it ends in a
Speaker 1: surprising place. So in the late eighteen eighties, French tradesmen
Speaker 1: had set to making stiff, colorful cards to advertise their businesses.
Speaker 1: These cards often often featured illustrations of women generally wearing
Speaker 1: very little clothing, or sports heroes or like historical landmarks
Speaker 1: to make them collectible and thus give individual people a
Speaker 1: reason to keep a business card in their possession. Now
Speaker 1: we don't know where Duke first heard about this phenomenon,
Speaker 1: but starting in the eighteen eighties he had a print
Speaker 1: shop installed in his Durham factory that can make color prints.
Speaker 1: At first, he printed out the standard advertisements and coupons
Speaker 1: that most businessmen used, but soon he hit upon an
Speaker 1: idea and I'm gonna quote from Duke University here, with
Speaker 1: each pack of cigarettes, a small cardboard insert was added
Speaker 1: to stiff in the box. Duke employed a little imagination
Speaker 1: turn these simple workhorses into a powerful marketing tool. By
Speaker 1: printing the brand name of the cigarettes along with the
Speaker 1: picture that was part of a larger series and which
Speaker 1: was meant to be collected. Series of birds, flags, civil
Speaker 1: war generals and baseball players were employed frequently with historical
Speaker 1: or educational information on them. Photographs of actresses women placed
Speaker 1: in a variety of poses and often we're rather revealing
Speaker 1: costumes for the time were also used on the insert
Speaker 1: cards and exceeded all expectations and their popularity on the public.
Speaker 1: So a lot of these trading cards, and these are
Speaker 1: the first trading cards, are outright pornographic, at least by
Speaker 1: nineteenth century standards, and there are outcries against the practice
Speaker 1: because the people who want them the most are are
Speaker 1: young boys. Are kids, right, Kids start smoking to collect
Speaker 1: trading cards. That's what juveniles how juvenile smoking starts at
Speaker 1: the United Um. They want to collect baseball cards and
Speaker 1: to do so they have to buy packs of cigarettes.
Speaker 1: And this this works like gang. It increases cigarette sales massively.
Speaker 1: It's a really successful ad campaign, but it also leads
Speaker 1: to a wave of young cigarette addicts who are also
Speaker 1: getting into porn, which is difficult for people to accept.
Speaker 1: Busy bodies of the day to accept. One of those
Speaker 1: busy bodies included Duke's father, who wrote this letter to
Speaker 1: his son in eighteen ninety four. My dear son, I
Speaker 1: have received the enclosed letter from the Reverend from the
Speaker 1: Reverend John C. Hocut, and am much impressed with the
Speaker 1: wisdom of his argument against circulating lascivious photographs with cigarettes,
Speaker 1: and have made up my mind to bring the matter
Speaker 1: to your attention and the interest of morality, and in
Speaker 1: the hope that you can invent a proper substitute for
Speaker 1: these pictures, which which will answer your requirements as an
Speaker 1: advertisement as well as an inducement to purchase. His views
Speaker 1: are so thoroughly and plainly stated that I do not
Speaker 1: know how I can add anything except to state that
Speaker 1: they accord with my own and that I have always
Speaker 1: looked upon the distribution of this character of advertisement is
Speaker 1: wrong and its pernicious effects upon young men and womanhood,
Speaker 1: and therefore has not jingled with my religious impulses. Outside
Speaker 1: of the fact that we owe Christianity all the assistance
Speaker 1: we can lend it in any form which is paramount
Speaker 1: to the other consideration. I am fully convinced that this
Speaker 1: mode of advertising will be used and greatly strengthened the
Speaker 1: arguments against will be used, and will gratefully strengthen the
Speaker 1: arguments against cigarettes and the legislative holes of the States.
Speaker 1: I hope you will consider this carefully and appreciate my
Speaker 1: side of the question. It would please me very much
Speaker 1: to know that a change has been made. Duke does
Speaker 1: not make a change. He is fined with it um
Speaker 1: So Duke is obviously not going to turn his back
Speaker 1: on all of this money because of simple morality. Instead,
Speaker 1: he publishes advertising that encourages kids to complete sets of
Speaker 1: trading cards, and he expands his advertising budget to keep
Speaker 1: a steady stream of new collectibles going out with his cigarettes.
Speaker 1: It was a stunning success, and, as Alan Brandt notes, quote,
Speaker 1: this commodity connected collecting was a lasting innovation that continues
Speaker 1: today with baseball cards and Pokemon. Duke had discovered important
Speaker 1: incentives for smoking in the cultural rit rules of youth.
Speaker 1: We owe pokemon to cigarettes. That's a redible Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm just imagine buying a pack of mulgraves to see
Speaker 1: him like a scourish, a shiny char milion or something. Honestly,
Speaker 1: what about our culture wouldn't be better if, like, in
Speaker 1: order to get a magic the gathering deck, you had
Speaker 1: to smoke three entire cartons of pall moss. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: love that. It's just It's like the happy meal of cigarettes.
Speaker 1: It's great, it's perfect. Just me. It like some nerdy
Speaker 1: sixteen year old like lying on his side like puking
Speaker 1: as he smokes his fiftieth cigarette of the day. I
Speaker 1: need a lightning bolt card trying to evolve his Peaka
Speaker 1: you get dyes of smoking inhalation trying to get a bulbasore.
Speaker 1: I choose you lung cancer. Now you know what else
Speaker 1: will give you lung cancer? James? Is it the cigarettes?
Speaker 1: And Sophie saying to childre behind the it is. It
Speaker 1: is the cigarettes that Sophie's sells to children behind the
Speaker 1: school are very likely to cause cancer. But you know
Speaker 1: that's the way it works. Okay, Ah, God, aren't we
Speaker 1: living well today? What a beautiful world we have in
Speaker 1: this America that I love? How are you all, Sophie?
Speaker 1: I'm just thoroughly disappointed in your actions? What else is new? Well, Sophie,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm not disappointed by is the innovative
Speaker 1: thought leaders in big tobacco building the modern world and
Speaker 1: inventing pokemon. So Duke understood and Sting satively, the children
Speaker 1: were the future of cigarettes. Established tobacco consumers had already
Speaker 1: had their preferences like set for plug tobacco or snuff,
Speaker 1: or for pipe tobacco or cigars, and these methods involved
Speaker 1: less consumption or at least pickier consumers. Cigarettes smoked quickly
Speaker 1: and more conveniently than other tobacco products, and they caused
Speaker 1: less mess. There were also more addictive which allowed for
Speaker 1: a quick and repeatable high anytime. Again, most people were
Speaker 1: chewing tobacco prior to this, so if people start smoking
Speaker 1: instead of chewing, suddenly you don't have buckets of spit
Speaker 1: all over the place. Again, probably a net positive. Um.
Speaker 1: Now that said, you also have like more people smoking
Speaker 1: in public places, which is a negative. But anyway. The
Speaker 1: New York Times publish as an article at the time
Speaker 1: that complains about Duke's attempt to entice boys to excessive
Speaker 1: cigarette smoking, and notes every possible device has been employed
Speaker 1: to interest the juvenile mind, notably the lithograph album Youngsters
Speaker 1: seeking These picture books climbing for the reward of self
Speaker 1: inflicted injury. Many a boy under twelve years is sting
Speaker 1: for the entire collection, which necessitates the consumption of nearly
Speaker 1: twelve thousand cigarettes. You're like trying to collect these picture
Speaker 1: books and smoking twelve thous cigarettes. That is how you
Speaker 1: catch your mole. Oh that is a rough music set
Speaker 1: of cigarettes. Yeah, that's a cigarettes that wow, Yeah that
Speaker 1: is that is an outrageous quantity of cigarettes. Um. Duken
Speaker 1: just hit a hop on a baller way to move cigarettes.
Speaker 1: He'd effectively invented the concept of collectible products as advertisements.
Speaker 1: He starts doing like sweep steaks right where you collect,
Speaker 1: you know, different things that are on the boxes to
Speaker 1: turn them in if to see if you can win
Speaker 1: like a prize, and it's he also just like gives stuff.
Speaker 1: So basically everything from how McDonald's happy Meals and like
Speaker 1: Funko pops to every product sweepstakes you've ever seen are
Speaker 1: all descendants of what Duke is inventing in this period,
Speaker 1: which is just like different way is to get cigarettes
Speaker 1: and kids mouths. Um, we like all the entire toolbox
Speaker 1: of capitalism is being created. It's being created to push
Speaker 1: cigarettes to children. Duke changed his company's name to American Tobacco,
Speaker 1: which reflected his ambition to be the alpha and omega
Speaker 1: of tobacco sales and production in the United States. He
Speaker 1: poured unheard of amounts of money into his ad budget,
Speaker 1: soon spending nearly a quarter of the money he made
Speaker 1: on sales on ads. His competitors were forced to pour
Speaker 1: similar amounts of cash into their own efforts, igniting the
Speaker 1: first National billboard War and leading to a massive surge
Speaker 1: in the amount of visual advertising in the United States.
Speaker 1: This is what starts to fill the country side up
Speaker 1: with ads with like billboards and other kinds of big
Speaker 1: public ads. Is Duke spending all this money on cigarette ads? Wow?
Speaker 1: So he inadverts? Gave us the monkey Wrench Gang. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so he has. He has in the space of what
Speaker 1: we've talked about so far, given us like modern patent
Speaker 1: law and all of the people that get killed as
Speaker 1: a result of my medical device patents. He's given us
Speaker 1: trading cards. He's given us like sweepstakes and like toy collecting. Uh.
Speaker 1: And he's given us uh fucking billboards and the monkey
Speaker 1: Rinch Gang. So that's that's a lot for one guy
Speaker 1: to make it real makes back now one of the
Speaker 1: things that this does, he's made it impossible very close
Speaker 1: to impossible for new companies to get into the cigarette business.
Speaker 1: Number one, you have to be able to buy a
Speaker 1: cigarette machine to be profitable, and that costs money. Number two,
Speaker 1: you have to have a shipload of cash to make ads.
Speaker 1: So just like some young like upstart who wants to
Speaker 1: sell cigarettes to people, isn't gonna be able to get
Speaker 1: into the business unless they're backed by some serious moneyed interests,
Speaker 1: because it's just too expensive to get into it. From
Speaker 1: the late eighteen eighties, Duke sent out regular feelers to
Speaker 1: his competitors asking if they'd be open to a buy out.
Speaker 1: Most of them turned him down, but as the eighteen
Speaker 1: hundreds drew to a close, the fortunes of Duke and
Speaker 1: his competitors, The fortunes that Duke and his competitors were
Speaker 1: throwing into ads had them all looking for a better way.
Speaker 1: They're just spending too much damn money competing with each other.
Speaker 1: In January of eighteen ninety, Duke strong armed his fellow
Speaker 1: tobacco lords to join a consortium, the American Tobacco Company,
Speaker 1: which would seek to monopolize not just tobacco sold in
Speaker 1: the United States, but produced as well. Overnight, the American
Speaker 1: Tobacco Company was responsible for of all cigarettes sales in
Speaker 1: the United States. Duke had formed a monopoly, getting his
Speaker 1: competitors to agree to fix prices and wages in order
Speaker 1: to save money on advertising and production and to avoid
Speaker 1: the struggles for dominance that had devoured their money in
Speaker 1: recent years. This was a winning strategy, and as Duke
Speaker 1: took total control over the tobacco market, prices fell for consumers,
Speaker 1: but this also meant a lot less money for farmers,
Speaker 1: and the Trust brought it into competitive bidding for tobacco harvests,
Speaker 1: as Alan Brandt makes clear, and a single minded quest
Speaker 1: to control the future of tobacco, Duke helped invent the
Speaker 1: modern concept of Omega Corporation, blazing a trail that would
Speaker 1: be followed by every ambitious capitalist to come quote. Together,
Speaker 1: these three departments Audit, which over saw accounting and cost control,
Speaker 1: leaf and retail markets, assured the movement of cured tobacco
Speaker 1: from warehouse to factory to sales. Individuals with specific expertise
Speaker 1: head at each department. The Audit department, for example, introduced
Speaker 1: innovative accounting procedures that would later be utilized by many
Speaker 1: other industries. The successive Duke's enterprise, which became a model
Speaker 1: for other industries, rested on salaried executives who could assure
Speaker 1: the efficient functioning of their aspect of the business, as
Speaker 1: well as tight coordination with other departments and activities. In short,
Speaker 1: he invented the middle manager. Just another wonderful contribution to society.
Speaker 1: He's really just humming along here creating the modern world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's taking him off now. One of the things that
Speaker 1: you know when you invent the middle manager, one of
Speaker 1: the things that you've done is you've created the concept
Speaker 1: that's going to make up most of the ranks of
Speaker 1: the emerging middle class. Right what what are a lot
Speaker 1: of people in the middle class, their fucking middle managers, right, um,
Speaker 1: which is also a lot of the people who are
Speaker 1: going to be tobacco consumers. Right. He's helping to create
Speaker 1: the basis of consumer culture here as he builds effectively
Speaker 1: helps to like build the idea of a kind of
Speaker 1: new class structure in a lot of ways. Obviously, like
Speaker 1: middle management had existed before, but not in the kind
Speaker 1: of quantity that it had because prior to Duke, you've
Speaker 1: got a lot of tobacco being made and sold and
Speaker 1: you've got a different sort of tobacco companies, middle managers.
Speaker 1: But the companies are all much smaller, and it's like
Speaker 1: this company we handle production. This company like we we
Speaker 1: handle like we get the tobacco from the farmers and
Speaker 1: we process it. You know, we're the people who roll
Speaker 1: it and sell it directly to the consumers. He's rolling
Speaker 1: all of this into one giant venture, and instead of
Speaker 1: the constituent parts being made up of small business owners,
Speaker 1: the constituent parts are are managed by middle managers who
Speaker 1: are operating like rungs inside of this larger corporate structure.
Speaker 1: That's not he's not the first guy to do this,
Speaker 1: but he's the first guy to do this and be
Speaker 1: this successful with it. Yeah. It so it's a convertically
Speaker 1: integrated supplied Jane right, exactly exactly. Uh so that's pretty cool. Um.
Speaker 1: Everywhere he cut out independent manufacturers and free agents, small reseilers,
Speaker 1: and rollers. The entire tobacco market went from an artisanal
Speaker 1: industry with strong unions to a vast factory for the
Speaker 1: production of identical machine rolled cigarettes. The only piece of
Speaker 1: the tobacco business that successfully resisted and that maintained its
Speaker 1: high level of unionization were cigars, which, for whatever reason
Speaker 1: are kind of immune to modernity. Yeah, he deemed me.
Speaker 1: I've just realized that this guy is like Jeff Bezos's,
Speaker 1: he's the Bezos of cigarettes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, which Jeff Bezos,
Speaker 1: I'm sure we'd love to be the Besis and cigarettes,
Speaker 1: along with being Bezos almost everything out. So it's a
Speaker 1: great thing to be the Bezos of um. So kudos
Speaker 1: to cigars for being respect Yeah, respect to the cigar
Speaker 1: industry for fighting back against this um. But obviously Duke
Speaker 1: barely notices that, like he's you know, losing out on
Speaker 1: this chunk of the business. Uh. He tells his board that, quote,
Speaker 1: the world is now our market for our product. And
Speaker 1: in nineteen o two he sets upon the goal of
Speaker 1: getting the world to start adopting cigarettes. He signs a
Speaker 1: deal with his largest foreign rival, the UK's Imperial Tobacco,
Speaker 1: and they form the British American Tobacco Corporation. Of course,
Speaker 1: that's when the British one's called yes, and they do.
Speaker 1: They're doing a tobacco imperialism, right. They're going out with
Speaker 1: the goal of convincing people, nations who had never smoked
Speaker 1: to smoke now and Jordan Goodman, the author of Tobacco
Speaker 1: and History, notes to him, every cigarette was the same.
Speaker 1: All of the globalization that we are now familiar with
Speaker 1: through McDonald's and Starbucks, all of that was preceded by
Speaker 1: Duke and the cigarette. So not only is he getting
Speaker 1: people hooked on cigarettes, he's getting them hooked on the
Speaker 1: idea of this is a product that comes under a
Speaker 1: specific brand, and everyone in the world consumes the same
Speaker 1: product the same way. Right that you know, you may
Speaker 1: you may be if your cigarette smoker in Turkey in
Speaker 1: the early cigarette smoker in France, as cigarette smoker in
Speaker 1: the United dates, you are smoking something that was rolled
Speaker 1: down the street from you at a shop, right, and
Speaker 1: probably tobacco that was grown fairly close to you. There's
Speaker 1: a little bit of movement around then around the world,
Speaker 1: but generally speaking you're consuming a local product because everything
Speaker 1: is pretty local. He has invented the idea that no, no, no,
Speaker 1: if you're going to be into cigarettes, you're gonna smoke
Speaker 1: this specific kind of cigarette and everyone on Earth does
Speaker 1: it the same way. Wow. Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. It's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's now more or less invented like the global commodity right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is like it's it's one of the very first yeah,
Speaker 1: um and probably the first, I think the first that's
Speaker 1: like an individual consumer good, right, because this is starting
Speaker 1: to happen with like steel and with fuel and stuff. Right.
Speaker 1: But you as an individual are like going down to
Speaker 1: the store to pick up you know, some fucking patrole eum,
Speaker 1: some cold generally, but you're gonna go down and get
Speaker 1: a cigarette that's made by the British American company every day,
Speaker 1: whether you live in fucking Tokyo or or tim Buck two. Um.
Speaker 1: It hasn't spread quite that far yet, but that this
Speaker 1: is what's going to happen. Right. By nineteen o four,
Speaker 1: cigarettes had finally cracked five percent of the American market
Speaker 1: for tobacco products. That seems small, but that means it's
Speaker 1: more than doubled in a couple of years. Duke saw
Speaker 1: them as the smart, smart product to push, but he'd
Speaker 1: spent several years cornering the markets on plug and pipe
Speaker 1: tobacco too, so they're selling everything. It's also worth noting
Speaker 1: that like Duke is a cigar man himself, he does
Speaker 1: not understand why people like cigarettes. He does not like cigarettes.
Speaker 1: He just is betting that they're going to be a
Speaker 1: big deal, right, perfect. Um, So the you know, before
Speaker 1: he can kind of take this idea further though, the
Speaker 1: United States Congress starts looking into his tobacco trust, which is,
Speaker 1: you know, what he's made with American tobacco. He's formed
Speaker 1: a monopoly, and they decide it's in violation of the
Speaker 1: Sherman Anti Trust Act, which had also been created in
Speaker 1: eight Now, it took the government a while to actually
Speaker 1: get to American tobacco, and by the time it starts
Speaker 1: looking into things, American tobacco controls not just of the
Speaker 1: cigarette trade, but seventy five of old tobacco sold in
Speaker 1: the United States. Du could even recently started buying up
Speaker 1: companies who were producing liquorice paste to make sweeter flavored cigarettes.
Speaker 1: So he's again a fucking trailblazer. Yeah, yeah, no, trail
Speaker 1: in a great direction. Necessarily maybe not in the best direction.
Speaker 1: But you can't you can't deny the man knows what
Speaker 1: he's doing. This is a dude who loves to make
Speaker 1: How rich was this guy? I mean, it doesn't try
Speaker 1: because if you if you actually translate it, it's just
Speaker 1: gonna wind up being in the tens of millions, which
Speaker 1: makes it like, effectively he's a billionaire in his stay right,
Speaker 1: like for everything that matters, you know, he has he
Speaker 1: has infinity dollars. You do have to think of how
Speaker 1: different would the world be if we've just given him
Speaker 1: Twitter and he could have done an Elon Musk and
Speaker 1: stole the war in Ukraine instead of inventing new ways
Speaker 1: to give kids. This new cigarette's gonna work as a
Speaker 1: boat briefly. So this puts Duke about twenty years ahead
Speaker 1: of the invention of the first menthal cigarettes. And we're
Speaker 1: not going to talk a lot about this, but I
Speaker 1: have to let you know that mental cigarettes are invented
Speaker 1: by a man named Lloyd spud Hughes. Very funny, very
Speaker 1: funny name. Um. So Duke is like a generation ahead
Speaker 1: of the competition. But that's not enough to protect him
Speaker 1: from the Department of Justice, which, and this is weird,
Speaker 1: used to actually punish corporations for monopolistic behavior. This was
Speaker 1: the thing you could get in trouble for. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Rubber coming out and supporting the DJ Yeah, they well
Speaker 1: they don't do a good job of this, so I'm
Speaker 1: not supportive, but it is more than they try to
Speaker 1: do today, I'm more familiar with the not doing a
Speaker 1: good job part. Yeah. Well, so during this period, the
Speaker 1: d o J is going after the three largest businesses
Speaker 1: in the United States for monopolistic behavior. And the three
Speaker 1: largest businesses in the United States are Standard Oil, U
Speaker 1: S Steel, and American Tobacco. Again, to understand the scale
Speaker 1: of this, the thing that he has built is as
Speaker 1: big as the oil and gas industry, right, like it's
Speaker 1: the steel industry. It's in that ballpark. Yeah, impressively, not great. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So Teddy Roosevelt, the trustbuster, forces the d o J
Speaker 1: uh to go after Duke. Yeah, that's what that's what
Speaker 1: he's doing. He's busting trees. Well, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: funny coming out of your mouth. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: things that we have to dislike Teddy Roosevelt for, but
Speaker 1: one thing the man legitimately hated was monopolies, and he
Speaker 1: goes after them. There were there were a lot of
Speaker 1: more problematic things than Teddy Roosevelt hated, but in this case,
Speaker 1: he's broadly speaking, doing the right thing. Uh. And and
Speaker 1: the d o J is like, yeah, you've you've made
Speaker 1: a monopoly. This is not legal and you have to
Speaker 1: dismantle American Tobacco. Now, this is impossible because Duke is
Speaker 1: vertically into graded it to such a degree that everyone
Speaker 1: is reliant upon the same supply and distribution change. You
Speaker 1: can't actually split the companies back up the way they've
Speaker 1: been fifteen years before. So the d o J, not
Speaker 1: wanting to destroy one of the three largest businesses in
Speaker 1: the US, exempts a bunch of their sub businesses and
Speaker 1: their international partnerships and like, allows them to maintain certain
Speaker 1: supply chains and whatnot. Uh. And obviously while this is
Speaker 1: going on, American Tobacco appeals. The Supreme Court rules against
Speaker 1: them in nineteen eleven, and eventually they do split the
Speaker 1: trust up into five companies that are technically independent competing businesses.
Speaker 1: But as the Cigarette Century makes clear, after all the
Speaker 1: Duke had done to weave the companies together, they can't
Speaker 1: actually be cut apart. Quote. The settlement was meant to
Speaker 1: a share competition among the five newly constituted companies. Each
Speaker 1: received factories, distribution and storage facilities, and name brands, But
Speaker 1: given the size and complexity of the business, there existed
Speaker 1: in superable obstacles to the creation of perfect competitive conditions.
Speaker 1: No matter the industry was restructured, there simply was no
Speaker 1: going back. So Duke continues to run this chunk of
Speaker 1: American tobacco. Uh, it remains in his control. British American
Speaker 1: tobacco is what remains in his control. Uh, and his
Speaker 1: fellow owners, even though they're all competing, continue to collude
Speaker 1: to fix prices in order to maximize profits. So he's
Speaker 1: it's not as bad, but they've gone from a monopoly
Speaker 1: to an oligopoly. Right, that's that's that's what the d
Speaker 1: o J succeeds in actually doing. Great job. And since
Speaker 1: his he's kind of peaked as a cigarette man, Duke
Speaker 1: moves over to the power industry. He establishes a power
Speaker 1: company that provides Yeah, he builds, his company builds the
Speaker 1: electrical grid for North and South Carolina. Just stop, he cannot.
Speaker 1: He he does. When he gets old and is about
Speaker 1: to die, he gives most of his fortune tens of
Speaker 1: millions of dollars to Trinity College and Durham which is
Speaker 1: renamed Duke University in his honor. And that's and that's
Speaker 1: where we get Duke University. Yeah, didn't they're coming yet,
Speaker 1: great man. They have a good public health school. Now yes, yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: well they honestly a lot of the best information about
Speaker 1: the cigarette industry and all of the fund up ship
Speaker 1: it did comes from Duke University. They have great resources
Speaker 1: for understanding tobacco an fritasity. Yeah, so, I mean to
Speaker 1: to the university's credit, they don't like shy away from
Speaker 1: the But also what look, Duke is immoral because he's
Speaker 1: a capitalist and he is profiting off of people's surplus
Speaker 1: labor in in a number of ways that are unethical.
Speaker 1: There's nothing wrong with him selling cigarettes at this point
Speaker 1: because he has no he dies in nineteen there is
Speaker 1: no nothing that even approaches a medical consensus about cigarettes
Speaker 1: and cancer. At this point. You can't blame it on him, right,
Speaker 1: He's doing horrific ship, and there will people who work
Speaker 1: for him, I'm sure, absolutely, like destroying unions and whatnot,
Speaker 1: and and and there's like a bunch that's unethical. But
Speaker 1: the fact that he's selling cigarettes is not something that
Speaker 1: I would put on his soul because you know, there's
Speaker 1: no no way for him to have known that were harmful,
Speaker 1: you know. Um. In nineteen nineteen, a US surgical student
Speaker 1: named Alton Oschner was called along with several of his
Speaker 1: peers to observe the autopsy of a lung cancer victim.
Speaker 1: His teacher was excited to have an example of the
Speaker 1: rare illness in their operating theater. He wanted Alton and
Speaker 1: his fellow students to see the autopsy because he believed
Speaker 1: they would not get a second chance to do so.
Speaker 1: You guys gotta check this out. You never got to
Speaker 1: see another lung cancer. Nobody gets this ship less than
Speaker 1: the Thirty years later, lung cancer would be the number
Speaker 1: one cause of death in the United States. As Robert
Speaker 1: Proctor of Stanford University told one interviewer, the cigarette is
Speaker 1: the deadliest artifact in the history of human civilization. It
Speaker 1: killed about a hundred million people in the twentieth century twice.
Speaker 1: And honestly, he's probably low balling it. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's before you look at Yeah, this sort of
Speaker 1: downstream things. Jesus Christ, that is that is quite an adult. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we can Luke University. We can argue about fascism and
Speaker 1: communism and the things the great leap forward in the
Speaker 1: SINGLESM what what killed the most people? But man, nobody's
Speaker 1: nobody's touching the cigarettes. Numbers it's right, the cigarettes out
Speaker 1: here dropping three pointers every shot. It's the goat of
Speaker 1: killing people. I'm eagerly awaiting Michael Tracy to like go
Speaker 1: recuperate the cigarettes's reputation on Twitter or something. Yeah, so, James,
Speaker 1: you got anything you want to plug before we roll out? Afar?
Speaker 1: I do another podcast, you do too, sometimes it could
Speaker 1: happen here to listen to him. It's about how things
Speaker 1: are falling apart and people are putting them back together.
Speaker 1: It's a good podcast. It is a good podcast. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I would say it's one of the only two podcasts
Speaker 1: that should be legal. Yeah, yeah, fair enough. And if
Speaker 1: we're doing basically what he did with cigarettes, but to podcasts,
Speaker 1: and very slowly we're we're stealing all the microphones and
Speaker 1: giving everyone cants and I mean hopefully going to kill
Speaker 1: a hundred million people of course of the century. It's
Speaker 1: it's that's not yeah, and see you've plad your goals.
Speaker 1: Yeah we do. We do have a live show if
Speaker 1: you survive that long. Yeah, it's but I think it's
Speaker 1: over twenty six in October. Yeah, that's it. We sit
Speaker 1: and everything. Um so check that ship out, motherfucker. Um
Speaker 1: buy tickets to the live show, and uh, look great.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to tell you you should smoke cigarettes,
Speaker 1: but have you ever tried okay, smooth, flavorful taste of
Speaker 1: a camel. It's like driving through the desert in early November,
Speaker 1: you know, when you've just got that your dry. We're
Speaker 1: just taking in a Marlborough red. Oh god, the flavor country.
Speaker 1: That's what people are missing today, Sophie. Do you know
Speaker 1: how few Gin's ears have been the flavor country. That's
Speaker 1: their heritage, Sophie, that's their heritage. Stop it alright. This
Speaker 1: is not cash money. Pick up, pick up some cigarettes, kids.
Speaker 1: It very much has cash money. Behind the Bastards is
Speaker 1: a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool
Speaker 1: Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com,
Speaker 1: or check us out on the I Heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.