Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert here, just introducing we've got another rerun.
Speaker 2: This is the first time we've done two weeks in
Speaker 2: a row. Normally we just do one week at the
Speaker 2: end of the year. But all of the other shows
Speaker 2: on our network and most of the other shows that
Speaker 2: I know in podcasting take off two weeks. And Sophie
Speaker 2: was like, hey, Robert, why don't you actually take off
Speaker 2: two weeks instead of cramming during your vacation to write
Speaker 2: another podcast so that we don't fall behind. And I
Speaker 2: was like, you know what, Sophie, that's a pretty good idea.
Speaker 2: So anyway, that's what we're doing. Enjoy this episode on
Speaker 2: how cigarettes invented Everything. Oh, welcome once again to Behind
Speaker 2: the Bastards, the only podcast where the host regularly says
Speaker 2: that his show is cash money. I'm I'm Robert Evans
Speaker 2: here to talk with you about bad people. Sophie Lichtman
Speaker 2: seems very unhappy, which is not.
Speaker 1: I just have extreme secondhand embarrassment.
Speaker 2: Well that's too bad, Sophie, because I'm bringing it back, bringing.
Speaker 3: Back the phrase, as you know, everything you do reflects
Speaker 3: on me for some god forsaken reason. I know, I know,
Speaker 3: and that is not very cash money of you, Robert.
Speaker 2: I think it's extremely cash money of me. But here
Speaker 2: to be the tie breaking vote is James Stout. Now, James,
Speaker 2: you're British, so so the phrase cash money may not
Speaker 2: mean much to you in your language. I would say
Speaker 2: it's drawings of an elderly man who's never worked today
Speaker 2: in his life.
Speaker 4: Yeah it is now is now.
Speaker 5: Cash money has very little value when it's tied to
Speaker 5: the life expectancy of an inbred old person with sausage fingers.
Speaker 2: I thought a bunch of different ways of describing the
Speaker 2: new bills with King Charles on them. Part of me
Speaker 2: wanted to make a reference to the weird sexts that
Speaker 2: got leaked of him and Camillah I made. I made
Speaker 2: an ethical decision that even the King of England deserves
Speaker 2: to have his set be private.
Speaker 1: I just like, don't need nobody.
Speaker 5: Needed, Okay, just you don't want to think about him
Speaker 5: sneaking outside and what was it like getting his pajamas
Speaker 5: dirty and having his valet clean them.
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: That and his he's got some he's got a very
Speaker 2: specific kink okay, yeah, yeah, as well as William Yeah, okay, little.
Speaker 1: Is this kink murdering his first wife.
Speaker 2: No, it's it's it's a tampon thing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, not expected.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we we know far too much about what Charles
Speaker 2: has been sending my heart breaking him out. I would say,
Speaker 2: don't don't google it. Look, I'm telling you the truth,
Speaker 2: but don't google this. Okay, hey, my heart anyway, So
Speaker 2: I just broke my promise right there not to not
Speaker 2: to laugh at the King of England's sexual escapades. James,
Speaker 2: how do you feel about cigarettes? Oh?
Speaker 4: I think I wasn't expecting that kind of ambiguous. I guess.
Speaker 5: Yeah, a lot of the bad things happened because people
Speaker 5: like to smoke cigarettes. A lot of people like to
Speaker 5: get really really up in other people's business about smoking cigarettes.
Speaker 4: It's a difficult one.
Speaker 2: I I have the same difficulty because on one hand,
Speaker 2: I'm kind of constitutionally anti prohibition, Like I don't think
Speaker 2: things should be illegal or illegal. I don't think the
Speaker 2: government should stop people from doing stuff just because it's
Speaker 2: bad for their health. And I also see cultural value
Speaker 2: to an extent in cigarettes. I've had some memorable there's
Speaker 2: I tend to believe that every single drug, even the
Speaker 2: one that we call bad drugs, has an ideal use
Speaker 2: case where it is is a societal good for the
Speaker 2: drug to be available, and for cigarettes, that good is
Speaker 2: when someone has just tried to kill you. There's a
Speaker 2: there's nothing like a cigarette someone tried to kill or hurt.
Speaker 4: You, which is why they're so valued about outside of
Speaker 4: British nightclub Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: You never know when a bottle's coming for your fucking
Speaker 2: temple there, you don't. Yeah, that's it, you know, I
Speaker 2: I but I get it, like it's one of those things.
Speaker 2: The there was a need for a period of time
Speaker 2: where we attacked and demonized, particularly the tobacco industry, because
Speaker 2: they lied to everybody about the health risks of cigarettes
Speaker 2: in a way that that caused that cost more lives
Speaker 2: maybe than all of the wars in the last century.
Speaker 2: It's kind of an unbelievable body count. That said, I
Speaker 2: think today people throw down too much against smokers, and
Speaker 2: maybe there's maybe maybe we shouldn't be quite so s
Speaker 2: to people who just happen to smoke cigarettes. But what
Speaker 2: I wanted to talk about this week is fucking the
Speaker 2: history of cigarettes, because as I dug into this, I
Speaker 2: was initially planning just to do an episode on Big
Speaker 2: tobacco and how they hid the health harms of cigarettes,
Speaker 2: and we will do those episodes. We're going to talk
Speaker 2: about that. Some of these we will do dedicated episodes
Speaker 2: on those. But as I got into the research, I
Speaker 2: was continually amazed by the extent to which cigarettes are
Speaker 2: responsible for most of like the things that we consider
Speaker 2: the modern world. It's like the cigarettes in order to
Speaker 2: get people to smoke, the tobacco industry had to invent
Speaker 2: modern civilizations. And that's that's a fascinating story and I
Speaker 2: just want to talk about it. It's one of those
Speaker 2: we're getting behind a bastard at this point, you know,
Speaker 2: when we're talking about the eighteen hundreds up through like
Speaker 2: the middle of the twentieth century. You're not a bad
Speaker 2: person for necessarily for trying to get people to smoke,
Speaker 2: because if it's nineteen oh five, number one, cigarettes not
Speaker 2: a massive risk above like walking outside your door, you know.
Speaker 2: But also you just don't have good data.
Speaker 5: So yeah, the ambient level of smoking is pretty high
Speaker 5: just from existing in any urban.
Speaker 2: Ama, just from being around. We'll talk about that a bit,
Speaker 2: but first we have to do some prehistory. Now, we
Speaker 2: don't know exactly when the first human beings started smoking
Speaker 2: or otherwise ingesting tobacco for the first time, because there's
Speaker 2: a good chance the earliest tobacco users were not smoking it.
Speaker 2: But we're broadly speaking, I mean, and there's debate about
Speaker 2: this too, but archaeologists can confirm that by at latest
Speaker 2: the first century BC, the Maya people of Central America
Speaker 2: were using tobacco as a part of their religious rituals,
Speaker 2: and they were both smoking it and like inhaling it
Speaker 2: in kind of a similar way to snuff. Right, you
Speaker 2: can snort tobacco if it's ground. Finally enough, they probably
Speaker 2: also chewed it. There were a couple of different devices
Speaker 2: they had for smoking it. Next, we will never know
Speaker 2: which was like the first, right, like we just know
Speaker 2: which ones. We kind of have written records of early yes,
Speaker 2: but a lot of those written records come from Europeans,
Speaker 2: so obviously that's a long time after they would have
Speaker 2: started using them. But and again there's even some debate
Speaker 2: as to like, well, we're the Maya the first people
Speaker 2: who are cultivating tobacco, and probably the answer to that
Speaker 2: is no, But we certainly know the Maya we're cultivating
Speaker 2: tobacco in the first century BC, and It spread from
Speaker 2: Central America to the Mississippi Valley and beyond and was
Speaker 2: quickly adopted by neighboring peoples from like four hundred to
Speaker 2: seven hundred a d is when you see most of
Speaker 2: this spread, and it makes it all the way out
Speaker 2: to the fucking Caribbean.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, that's where Columbus runs into it at first, right.
Speaker 2: That is exactly the next thing that happens in this
Speaker 2: episode of James Christopher Goddamn. Columbus becomes the first European
Speaker 2: to encounter tobacco, which was being smoked by the natives
Speaker 2: of Hispaniola which is modern day Haiti and the Dominican Republic,
Speaker 2: via a weird two pronged nosepipe. So they would smoke it,
Speaker 2: but they would like inhale it through this pipe that like.
Speaker 4: No snokel kind of situation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it looks a little bit. It looks a little
Speaker 2: bit like a canula. Okay, yeah, like a nasal canula.
Speaker 4: Interesting.
Speaker 2: I made for my book A Brief History of Vice.
Speaker 2: I recreated these pipes as best I could. I wound
Speaker 2: up actually using the stock of dry like the dried
Speaker 2: stock of marijuana plants, because it's hollow and so I
Speaker 2: just had to kind of find wybins that were the
Speaker 2: right shape. That's obviously. I don't think what they would
Speaker 2: have used. I don't know what they plant they would
Speaker 2: have used for it, But you do get pretty fucked
Speaker 2: up when you smoke raw nicotine rustica through directly into
Speaker 2: your mucous membrane.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I can see that one being pretty rough on
Speaker 5: the old excituses as well.
Speaker 2: I would not. It's one of those things you have
Speaker 2: to divorce kind of you're thinking about tobacco in this
Speaker 2: period from modern day because it's not number one, most
Speaker 2: people smoking it. This is not an habitual thing for them.
Speaker 2: It's a ritual thing for them.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: There are people, certainly by the time Columbus as Hispaniola,
Speaker 2: who seem to just do it recreationally. But for the
Speaker 2: most part, most people's encounters with tobacco is probably in
Speaker 2: like a very kind of fairly strict ritual sense.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 2: And also it's pretty uncommon to have like a habit.
Speaker 2: Even the people who would be heavy smokers, I doubt
Speaker 2: are smoking more than the equivalent of a couple of
Speaker 2: cigarettes in a day, in part because it's kind of
Speaker 2: hard to when you're smoking at them but yes, right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there's a lot of work that I imagine goes
Speaker 5: into producing a nose cigarette, from growing the tobacco.
Speaker 4: Dry and get out and yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a lot of work. And you also, you
Speaker 2: can't smoke just when you when you want to fix
Speaker 2: because you don't have lighters, you don't have matches, right
Speaker 2: like fire. Obviously, the people who are living, you know,
Speaker 2: in these places are a lot better at starting fires
Speaker 2: than most people in the modern world are, but it's
Speaker 2: still not nearly as easy, right, Like you're not going
Speaker 2: to just make a fire because you want like a
Speaker 2: fucking smoke in the.
Speaker 5: Like yeah fire, drill out, get a piece of word out,
Speaker 5: rub it up.
Speaker 4: At the idea.
Speaker 2: So again, smoking, even when it's not like for a
Speaker 2: religious purpose, it's probably broadly like okay, it's meal time
Speaker 2: and we'll smoke after the meal, right, or like we'll
Speaker 2: smoke before them because we've we've got the fire going,
Speaker 2: or it's nighttime, we're cooling down, we've got the fire going,
Speaker 2: you know, now we can smoke tonight, Like generally, that's
Speaker 2: probably how it would have gone when Columbus winds up,
Speaker 2: you know, meeting these people in fourteen ninety two and
Speaker 2: watching them smoke. They actually hand him tobacco and he
Speaker 2: doesn't know what to do with it until he watches
Speaker 2: them smoke it, and he sees he encounters a couple
Speaker 2: of different methods. He sees the nose pipes. He also
Speaker 2: sees people wrapping tobacco leaves with corn husks, which is
Speaker 2: probably the first cigarettes and hills.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, It's also worth noting that over in Cuba people
Speaker 2: would wrap their tobacco in tobacco leafs, so they were
Speaker 2: again like hundreds and hundreds of years ago, smoking cigars
Speaker 2: and cubea. That actually goes back really fucking far. It
Speaker 2: probably more than a thousand years people have been smoking
Speaker 2: something broadly similar to a cigar in that.
Speaker 4: That's pretty cool.
Speaker 2: It is kind of neat, right, I enjoy it.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5: There are many things that we consume, I guess, you know,
Speaker 5: sometimes we eat freese, vegetables and stuff, but it's not
Speaker 5: much that we consume that people consumed a thousand years ago,
Speaker 5: and it made in a pretty similar fashion. Right, Like
Speaker 5: I've been to a Cuban cigar factory. Lisi is still
Speaker 5: like rolled by hand.
Speaker 2: We're going to talk about that a lot in these episodes,
Speaker 2: but yeah, they they obviously different techniques have become popular
Speaker 2: over time, and you get better at it the way
Speaker 2: you get it anything. I'm sure modern cigars are much
Speaker 2: tighter and you know, together better than cigars in fourteen
Speaker 2: ninety two did. But broadly speaking, like part I mean,
Speaker 2: like I'm a cigar smoker, I tend to think Cuban
Speaker 2: cigars are the best.
Speaker 5: I like to yeah, throughout the tragic that the cultural
Speaker 5: inheritance of that today it's like guys who think that
Speaker 5: they should enjoy a cigar.
Speaker 4: The entire Republican party.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, like Ben Shapiro and friends pretending to perform
Speaker 5: masculinity and then like going off to coffin be sick.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it's it's a bummer they are. You know,
Speaker 2: I'm not a I tend to like I've tried to
Speaker 2: read a cigar afishing out on magazine once and it
Speaker 2: had too many It had too many made up words.
Speaker 2: They use words, and it's not like like liquor, you
Speaker 2: know Number one liquor actually does like oh, sometimes you
Speaker 2: get a bourbon, I'm like, oh this this almost tastes
Speaker 2: more like a coffee, or there's like this this one's
Speaker 2: sweeter and it's got this like rich body fucking like
Speaker 2: cigars are smooth or not, but like I don't know,
Speaker 2: I'll read them. They'll be like, oh and when you
Speaker 2: on the on the retro hail, you get this like
Speaker 2: taste of orange and juniper, And I'm like, no, you
Speaker 2: fucking don't. There's no juniper in this fucking cigar. What
Speaker 2: is wrong with you? People? Go to hell consumption, It's unreal.
Speaker 2: The most pretentious thing that you can that you can
Speaker 2: do is be a cigar efficient on cigar. Yeah, unreal.
Speaker 2: Just smoke, Just kill yourself slowly. It's fine anyway. That's
Speaker 2: kind of cute. Cool that Cubans have been making cigars
Speaker 2: for hundreds and hundreds of years now. There were like,
Speaker 2: as I said, the way that people most often use
Speaker 2: tobacco in the Americas was in religious rights. And when
Speaker 2: I'm taught, they're not just like smoking to get that
Speaker 2: kind of little buzz you get from tobacco. The way
Speaker 2: in which most of these indigenous groups would have used
Speaker 2: tobacco was as a psychotropic right, like they are like
Speaker 2: basically tripping on this stuff. Oh wow, Okay, Tobacco can
Speaker 2: can cause hallucinations. And high enough doses. It's a it's
Speaker 2: a powerful mind altering drug when you are taking like
Speaker 2: massive quantities. Yeah, and they were number one. The tobacco
Speaker 2: they're smoking is different than the tobacco that we cultivate.
Speaker 2: It's a lot stronger, and the way they're doing it
Speaker 2: is different. So one of the most common ways that
Speaker 2: people would take tobacco in a ritual setting is the
Speaker 2: chief or kind of religious there's a bunch of different
Speaker 2: terms for local sort of religious and political leaders and whatnot.
Speaker 2: But that dude would inhale a bunch of smoke straight
Speaker 2: up raw from like a burning like hunk of tobacco,
Speaker 2: and then he would basically shotgun it into the mouths
Speaker 2: of the people participating in it. And obviously you're getting
Speaker 2: a lot of smoke that way, like you're gonna get
Speaker 2: pretty messy up. But and it's again, you know, it's
Speaker 2: as silly as this is probably not all that bad
Speaker 2: for you when you consider everything people are doing in
Speaker 2: a thousand a d or whatever. Right, Like, if you
Speaker 2: if a couple of times a year you're shot gunning
Speaker 2: some tobacco, that's not going to be what kills you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, your life expectancy isn't long enough.
Speaker 5: For that to be the thing that kills you in
Speaker 5: most cases, right, Yeah, yeah, one of the other thousand
Speaker 5: things that's going to kill you that we've eliminated now
Speaker 5: is going to kill you.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And it's also worth noting that there were a
Speaker 2: number of health uses of tobacco. It was probably the
Speaker 2: first effective insect repellent. One of those combinations of it
Speaker 2: was to just rub it all over your skin because
Speaker 2: tobacco's coated in an oil like that is. Bugs don't
Speaker 2: it kills bugs like? They don't, They don't like I mean,
Speaker 2: obviously there are specific bugs that do feed on tobacco,
Speaker 2: but for the most part, it keeps insects away. So
Speaker 2: people would ub it on themselves that or they would
Speaker 2: also bathe in the smoke before like going in and
Speaker 2: hunting in the bush and stuff, in order to keep
Speaker 2: bugs off of them. It could work as a tranquilizer.
Speaker 2: It was used to help put people to sleep. One
Speaker 2: of the things that I tried for my book was
Speaker 2: mixing it with urine and garlic in order to create
Speaker 2: an emetic and like a constipation remedy, and it does
Speaker 2: work for that. I don't recommend following that up, but
Speaker 2: it does do what it says it was also so
Speaker 2: there were a number of uses for Native Americans of
Speaker 2: tobacco that absolutely work in a medical context. There were
Speaker 2: also some that did not. For example, it was often
Speaker 2: given to people as a treatment for asthma. Tobacco does
Speaker 2: not help with asthma.
Speaker 7: Yeah you don't, but yeah, that's not a thing that
Speaker 7: when like it's just you know, that's where not like
Speaker 7: that historically separated from people smoking to clear the lungs.
Speaker 2: Right exactly. And it's also some of the time, a
Speaker 2: lot of the times when these indigenous people would have
Speaker 2: been taking tobacco to clear up their asthma, it might
Speaker 2: not have been smoked as often as it was like
Speaker 2: taken as a tea. And this can also be toxic.
Speaker 2: People die. One of the things like ayahuasca ceremonies are
Speaker 2: very famous in the West. Now, one of the things
Speaker 2: that some groups do in their ceremonies is they precede
Speaker 2: the ayahuasca with the tobacco tea. And there's a couple
Speaker 2: of cases of people dying in ayahuasca ceremonies. Now, I
Speaker 2: don't know if that's because the tea is just always
Speaker 2: dangerous or because these specific folks that were doing it
Speaker 2: were kind of like grifters and didn't know what they
Speaker 2: were doing, weren't actually doing it the traditional way. I'm
Speaker 2: not sure if that information exists properly, but this is
Speaker 2: another way people would take it as a tea, which
Speaker 2: don't don't take tobacco. It's actually pretty easy to kill
Speaker 2: yourself by ingesting tobacco. Please don't do that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I know every now and again, like a pet
Speaker 5: will eat a bunch of cigarettes.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and and kill.
Speaker 2: The shit out of you. It's extremely deadly tobacco. But
Speaker 2: you know, interesting plant. So the Portuguese were the first
Speaker 2: Europeans to begin cultivating tobacco for export to Europe. In
Speaker 2: fifteen sixty four, a Royal Navy captain brought the leaf
Speaker 2: to Ingoland, and despite early opposition from people who considered
Speaker 2: it a filthy, foul drug for foreigners, it took off
Speaker 2: their like wildfire.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I just love that. Like the immediate British or
Speaker 4: English response.
Speaker 5: Was just like to start was then a phobia and
Speaker 5: then move along from there and work out of this
Speaker 5: what drug is going to have become a pitcher part
Speaker 5: of all of our lives?
Speaker 2: And in Europe. In the UK, the story with tobacco
Speaker 2: was similar to the story with coffee, and that a
Speaker 2: bunch of like weirdo Christians are like, this is a
Speaker 2: heathen drug, we shouldn't do it. And then some king
Speaker 2: will like pick up a cigarette or drink some coffee
Speaker 2: and be like, oh, yeah, this shit's actually pretty dope.
Speaker 2: You know what, I think. We're fine with tobacco.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: In coffee's case was literally Pope being like, oh, this
Speaker 2: stuff rules, you know what. I'm just gonna baptize it.
Speaker 2: Just gonna baptize coffee now Christians can have it.
Speaker 5: And then God changed his mind just like that. Yeah,
Speaker 5: omnip being amazing stuff.
Speaker 2: It would be I would give a lot of kudos
Speaker 2: to the Pope if he just baptized marijuana so that
Speaker 2: Catholics could sue the federal government for restricting it.
Speaker 4: Just imagining him doing fentanyl, like.
Speaker 2: The Pope bless ues fitnyl to protect the kids.
Speaker 4: Yuck, he's dropped it in the.
Speaker 2: Fund to God says, this ship's red. You baby is
Speaker 2: going to have a rough one. Now put some fitanyl
Speaker 2: in the baptismal fought. Yeah, no, you're gonna want to
Speaker 2: give them some narcan, they're not gonna have a good time.
Speaker 8: Yeah, that's what we call it the narth acts because
Speaker 8: that was a that was a church joke for you
Speaker 8: you kids anyway, Uh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: So the English start smoking tobacco. Uh it gets cold
Speaker 2: ctivated in the Jamestown settlement in the seventeenth century, and
Speaker 2: by the seventeen thirties, the English colonies in the Virginia
Speaker 2: had tobacco factories that were manufacturing significant quantities of the stuff,
Speaker 2: mostly as snuff, which was either inhaled or shoot. That
Speaker 2: is the predominant way to consume tobacco in the kind
Speaker 2: of the early period of colonization of the Americas.
Speaker 5: Was it like because you see pictures of them sometimes
Speaker 5: and they got the old timey pipe, right, the long
Speaker 5: pipe with a little bowlp yep.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Is that like a class thing?
Speaker 5: Is that like I can afford to have a pipe
Speaker 5: in your conus?
Speaker 2: Some of its class cigars are generally like more expensive.
Speaker 2: Snuff is very cheap. The other thing though, is that
Speaker 2: again not easy to get access to stuff to light
Speaker 2: a pipe or to light a cigar. So if you're
Speaker 2: smoking a pipe or a cigar, you're probably in your
Speaker 2: home right, so you know, the beginning of the day
Speaker 2: or the end of the day, or maybe in like
Speaker 2: the midday or for a meal, you could have a smoke,
Speaker 2: but it's not convenient. You can't just light a pipe
Speaker 2: when you're out in the field because like you don't
Speaker 2: just have a thing that's on fire with you at
Speaker 2: all times. But you can take snuff anytime of day.
Speaker 5: Man, it's addictive, yeah, yeah, extremely, and it's incredibly addictive.
Speaker 2: So all of the colonizing powers competed for a share
Speaker 2: of the emerging global tobacco market. And again it's incredibly addictive,
Speaker 2: so there's enough interest very quickly to spur rapid innovation
Speaker 2: in the field. In eighteen forty three, a French company,
Speaker 2: given a monopoly over tobacco by King Louis the fourteenth,
Speaker 2: starts manufacturing the very first close to modern cigarettes. Now
Speaker 2: people have been smoking again, when Columbus lends up, they
Speaker 2: see people like wrapping shit in corn cobs. Those are
Speaker 2: like for a couple of centuries, that's how you smoke
Speaker 2: a cigarette. You get a corn cob. Sometimes you get
Speaker 2: like old paper, like newspaper, like just kind of whatever
Speaker 2: papery thing you can fill it with tobacco and smoke it,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it's the frenchship ankle was and have never.
Speaker 2: Changed, the French gotts, which are which are still the
Speaker 2: worst cigarettes on the market.
Speaker 4: They're still smoking something close to modern cigarettes today.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was. Those were the most common cigarettes we
Speaker 2: smoked in Syria. And it was like the galas that
Speaker 2: you couldn't sell in France because the tobacco was too
Speaker 2: low grade. Yeah, God, what a horrible cigarette. Yeah, well
Speaker 2: it's yeah, it's yeah everywhere. I just have a lot
Speaker 2: of memories of like bike racing in France and having
Speaker 2: to go in to sign on to these races, and
Speaker 2: like you walk in and you just like it's like
Speaker 2: like they used to do in nightclubs with the smoke machine,
Speaker 2: you know, just like yeah, yeah, yeah, Like you are
Speaker 2: also enough to experience like smoking inside in bars, which
Speaker 2: isn't a thing anymore.
Speaker 5: And you go and you come out and you're like
Speaker 5: that was good for me. And then you see the
Speaker 5: guy who is never going to kick your ass in
Speaker 5: the race, or it's after the race and the guy
Speaker 5: who's just won the race is having a fucking cigarette,
Speaker 5: and just remember being one of the most experiences. Yeah,
Speaker 5: he's here to the pharmaceutical industry, is what he is.
Speaker 2: Look, kids, if you want to know what it's like
Speaker 2: to walk around in a world where people smoke indoors
Speaker 2: constantly and in all places, there's an option. Fly to Serbia.
Speaker 2: Belgrade will Belgrade will teach you what the seventies was like.
Speaker 4: Waste one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in a number of ways you'll learn about the seventies.
Speaker 5: In Belgrade, banging hackcuts, go to bell Man.
Speaker 2: Oh, the tracksuits there are unreal.
Speaker 4: That's coming back.
Speaker 2: There's a cycle again when we're talking about what actually
Speaker 2: is like a culturally beautiful use for cigarettes. Squatting in
Speaker 2: a field with your buddies in a tracksuit and smoking.
Speaker 4: God, it's incredible culture experience.
Speaker 2: Burning through a pack of a knockoff Marlboroughs that have
Speaker 2: two extra ease in them.
Speaker 5: It doesn't have the l it's just a you know what.
Speaker 2: You know who else sells discount cigarettes?
Speaker 4: Is it? Sophie? Is that what Sophie does? Sophie.
Speaker 2: If you meet Sophie behind the main gym building after
Speaker 2: lunch or after classes, let out, She's always got a
Speaker 2: couple of extra packs on hand and she'll sell you.
Speaker 1: Lucy's what what grade am I in? What school? Why
Speaker 1: am I out of school?
Speaker 2: Normal age?
Speaker 1: I don't like the association, and.
Speaker 4: Yeah, she's still going there every day.
Speaker 2: Well, that we don't have, we can't fund our podcast.
Speaker 1: For some reason, also reflects on you, so we.
Speaker 2: Ask you to stop. But here we are, Sophie. Let's
Speaker 2: let let's be honest with ourselves. If I were to
Speaker 2: get caught selling loose cigarettes to children behind a high school,
Speaker 2: it would only increase my popularity.
Speaker 4: Do not take.
Speaker 2: Un I'm trying to get I'm trying to get them
Speaker 2: off the Jewels anti action. I've got a Joe Camel
Speaker 2: tattoo on my chest.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, let's.
Speaker 9: Let's just add.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm going to spend this whole episode trying not
Speaker 5: to say what is a homophobic slur in this country?
Speaker 6: By the way, we're back and James is discussing how
Speaker 6: difficult it is to talk about cigarettes as a British
Speaker 6: person without saying something that's offensive.
Speaker 4: That's right. Yeah, there's a word that we use in Britain. Cigarettes.
Speaker 5: So American people used to be horrible to gay people
Speaker 5: and I'm not going to use it. It's very difficult
Speaker 5: for me.
Speaker 2: So it is now it doesn't not. I mean, I
Speaker 2: think the slur comes from the harmless term, which also
Speaker 2: if you read JR or token, you will see that
Speaker 2: word used constantly in its original meaning.
Speaker 4: It is a little bit off footing sometimes.
Speaker 5: But then the people I grew up well Exatinly where
Speaker 5: my grandmother lived, right in rural Devon was very like
Speaker 5: people still use the valdai.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but yeah, that that word.
Speaker 5: Would be used to describe like a small it's a
Speaker 5: type of food, right, there's a food that uses that word,
Speaker 5: but also like a small bundle of.
Speaker 2: Hay, a bundle of sticks or whatever.
Speaker 5: Yeah, any package, and I think get one.
Speaker 4: You can call it your Amazon word.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's it's anyway whatever language. So it's amazing,
Speaker 2: so uh yeah all yeah. So in the fourteenth or Louis,
Speaker 2: the fourteenth gives the first French company a monopoly over
Speaker 2: tobacco production and they start manufacturing cigarettes, which all have
Speaker 2: to be handled at this point. But this is the
Speaker 2: first time that like a company is selling people cigarettes
Speaker 2: pretty much the first time that a company is selling
Speaker 2: like a large company is trying to make cigarettes into
Speaker 2: like a major business. Prior to this, if you bought cigarettes,
Speaker 2: most people who smoked cigarettes were like poor people, and
Speaker 2: you would just you would have a bag of tobacco
Speaker 2: and you'd wrap it and shit right, or you know,
Speaker 2: rolling papers even aren't aren't a thing that you could
Speaker 2: just go out and get. The other way you would
Speaker 2: get it is you would go to a tobacconist who
Speaker 2: has someone roll them and you would buy them. Cigarettes
Speaker 2: were generally, because of this, the least favorite method of
Speaker 2: tobacco consumption. They were seen as the thing that like
Speaker 2: homeless people smoked, because the most common way to smoke
Speaker 2: cigarettes was to like go outside of a place where
Speaker 2: people with more money had been hanging out, like a bar,
Speaker 2: and pick up the cigarette, the cigar butts and like
Speaker 2: then roll them into a cigarette read.
Speaker 4: And it came out.
Speaker 6: Then, man, it is the worst smoke I can imagine.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that is bleak.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, but my god, that guy. The only person
Speaker 2: today who could smoke on the level of a smoker
Speaker 2: back then would be maybe Rudy Giuliani. You gotta give him,
Speaker 2: he's one of these weirdos. Cigars. You don't inhale a
Speaker 2: cigar unless your specific kind of cigar smoker who believes
Speaker 2: that everyone else is wrong by not inhaling their cigars.
Speaker 2: I forget what they call themselves, but Rudy is one
Speaker 2: of them. He's an inhaler. He takes it all in. Baby.
Speaker 2: I think cancer is just repudiated by him. He's refused.
Speaker 2: That's gonna be bad for the cancer brand.
Speaker 1: Man.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't want to get.
Speaker 2: Mixed up with Juliani. So cigarettes start to get popular
Speaker 2: with Europeans during hour right after the Crimean War when
Speaker 2: soldiers you know who, returned, because the Crimean War is
Speaker 2: a lot of it's in areas kind of a budding
Speaker 2: in around Turkey, and so they encounter Turkish cigarettes. And
Speaker 2: the Turks have been smoking cigarettes and making cigarettes for
Speaker 2: a bit longer, and they decide they like the Turkish
Speaker 2: tobacco is good and it's milder than the stuff that
Speaker 2: they had add had access to. In eighteen fifty six,
Speaker 2: one veteran of the war opens London's first cigarette factory,
Speaker 2: which is called Sweet Threes. He has joined a few
Speaker 2: years later by another English entrepreneur who creates the second
Speaker 2: major cigarette factory in London. And this guy's name is
Speaker 2: Philip Morris. Oh wow, so yeah, that's where that comes from.
Speaker 5: It yeah he is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there he is old Philip Boris. Yeah, a man
Speaker 2: with a body count that would rival fucking Hitler. So
Speaker 2: at this point, all cigarettes are still rolled by hand.
Speaker 2: Most are still sold by small retailers. But then the
Speaker 2: Civil War happens in the United States, and right after
Speaker 2: the Civil War things start to change. And I'm going
Speaker 2: to quote now from a write up in the Journal
Speaker 2: of Antiques. Seeing an opportunity in the emerging market for cigarettes,
Speaker 2: tobacco man F. S. Kenny began cigarette production in New
Speaker 2: York City, as well as a factory in Richmond, Virginia,
Speaker 2: turning out brands with names like Full Dress, Sweet Caporal, Kenny,
Speaker 2: Straight Cut, and Sportsman's Corporeal. Using similar blinds. Kenny's chief
Speaker 2: competitor in the New York market was Good Winning Company,
Speaker 2: which sold nationally advertised cigarettes with folksy sounding brand names
Speaker 2: such as Old Judge, Canvas Black, and Welcome. Firms became
Speaker 2: known as the Big Six of the cigarette industry by
Speaker 2: the eighteen seventies, as they gained control of seventy five
Speaker 2: percent of national sales. There were, of course, hundreds of
Speaker 2: smaller cigarette firms operating out of backroom shops in most
Speaker 2: major northern cities, but their distribution capabilities were usually very limited.
Speaker 2: I love old cigarette brand names. I would I would
Speaker 2: smoke Old Judge. I think i'd have been an old
Speaker 2: Judge man. Well, yeah, there was one that was particularly
Speaker 2: great old. It was one of them called old Black.
Speaker 2: Uh no, there's Old Judge canvas back and.
Speaker 5: Well, okay, I thought it was canvas black, like what
Speaker 5: it would do due to the old lungs. For the yeah, welcome,
Speaker 5: I think I just make a welcome cigarettember welcome. Yeah,
Speaker 5: you get one on your pillow when you go into
Speaker 5: a hotel room. That's the kind of vibe that has.
Speaker 2: Yeah. It reminds me that that old Bill Hicks bet
Speaker 2: when he's like, I'm love that they've put the warning
Speaker 2: labels on the cigarettes. Lets me know which ones to
Speaker 2: a void. I'm not gonna buy the lung cancer cigarettes
Speaker 2: low birth weights though. Give me one of that. So
Speaker 2: tobacco obviously is bad for you. It caused problems for
Speaker 2: people because it's never good for you to smoke, or
Speaker 2: especially on a regular basis, as people are increasingly doing
Speaker 2: in this period. But the harms are still minimal and
Speaker 2: they're pretty much impossible to see on a wide basis. Right,
Speaker 2: very few people are able to smoke regularly throughout their
Speaker 2: day for one thing. For another thing. You know, there's
Speaker 2: there's not good matches the ones that people do have
Speaker 2: matches in this period, but they're phosphorus based and they're
Speaker 2: incredibly dangerous. It's like carrying a flash bang in your pocket.
Speaker 2: I've seen no issue with that. I think that's amazing. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's a good idea. Yeah, I just want to whip
Speaker 2: off a rot of phosphorus.
Speaker 4: Great. Is it like literally like like white phosphorus, Like.
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't know if it's like white phosphorus,
Speaker 2: but yeah, I mean it's it's like a phosphorus, like
Speaker 2: you grind up a bunch of foss f us and
Speaker 2: then you strike it.
Speaker 8: I think, amazing, falling over and then yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And of course your beard oil and hair oil is
Speaker 2: all alcohol and petroleum based. Your shirt has been washed
Speaker 2: in pure ghastly, so you just gotch immediately on fire.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, cigarettes will kill you, but not in the
Speaker 4: way you're expecting.
Speaker 2: Yeah. This is the period in which like spontaneous human
Speaker 2: combustion starts to be a thing. And it's because everything
Speaker 2: is flammable and everybody's carrying around fire bombs in their pockets. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but yeah, again, as as much as we joke about it, heart,
Speaker 2: it's if you were to tell someone's cigarettes are bad,
Speaker 2: Like that's pretty obvious if you're hanging out with someone
Speaker 2: today who was a smoker, because smoker's cough, right, and like,
Speaker 2: you know, you joke about it if you're a smoker, like, yeah,
Speaker 2: you know it's killing me whatever smoking cigarette, it's not
Speaker 2: hard to be like put two and two together, like, oh,
Speaker 2: this is bad for me. It wouldn't have been as
Speaker 2: obvious back then. For one thing, yeah, smoker's cough. But
Speaker 2: also you know who else coughs is people who live
Speaker 2: in dense cities where the main method of transportation is horses.
Speaker 2: And so there are okay, so New York City. The
Speaker 2: most famous style of houses in New York City, they
Speaker 2: have these big tall porches, right that are like four
Speaker 2: or five or six feet off the ground. Those big
Speaker 2: porches that New York and other East Coast cities have
Speaker 2: exist because there would be so much shit in the
Speaker 2: main streets that when it rained, there would be rivers
Speaker 2: of feces and rotting carcasses of animals rush, and you
Speaker 2: didn't want it to get near lake your house.
Speaker 4: So you could just sit there and watch the sling by.
Speaker 2: If somebody, if people are walking around coughing and looking sick,
Speaker 2: your first guest isn't going to be it's probably the cigarettes.
Speaker 4: A lot of place.
Speaker 2: It really was a nightmare to be alive.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Jesus Christ, I'm surprised of the species we made
Speaker 5: it cost that.
Speaker 2: It's it's striking, But you don't have to make it
Speaker 2: very long to produce a bunch of kids and then
Speaker 2: leave them fatherless.
Speaker 4: That's true. As you floaged off down the.
Speaker 2: Let's just throw your cup corpse in the shit river
Speaker 2: and the cycle continues.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a circle of life.
Speaker 2: Cigarettes in the eighteen seventies were still a novelty to
Speaker 2: most smokers. Less than two percent of people who smoked
Speaker 2: used cigarettes. Again, the most common method of tobacco consumption
Speaker 2: is not even smoking at all, but it was chewing
Speaker 2: what was called plug tobacco, and it was into this
Speaker 2: world and this market. Then a man named James Buchanan
Speaker 2: Duke stepped in the nineteen or in the eighteen eighties.
Speaker 2: Duke had been born on December twenty third, eighteen fifty
Speaker 2: six near Durham, North Carolina, and his father was the
Speaker 2: owner of a small tobacco company, which was eventually named W.
Speaker 2: Duke and Sons Company or W. Duke Sons in Company.
Speaker 2: Duke watched in eighteen seventy three as a powerful depression
Speaker 2: hit the United States and temporarily cigarettes swelled in popularity
Speaker 2: because the urban poor could afford cigarettes, right, So that
Speaker 2: was you know, when they started to take off, and
Speaker 2: he looks at the being an intelligent capitalist, He's like,
Speaker 2: we're probably going to continue to have horrible economic crashes
Speaker 2: because it seems like the system is designed to do
Speaker 2: this every like five to ten years. So I bet
Speaker 2: cigarettes have a bright future ahead of them if I
Speaker 2: can find a way an amazing cheaper Yeah.
Speaker 5: People start expecting them more in times of depression because
Speaker 5: they they didn't have food and they wanted to not
Speaker 5: be hungry.
Speaker 2: They wanted to not be hungry. It's also just like
Speaker 2: one of the few things you can afford, period, if
Speaker 2: you're poor is a cigarette. Because they're they're cheap, They're
Speaker 2: cheaper than food in a lot of cases, they're certainly
Speaker 2: the cheapest method of getting tobacco. They're cheaper than drinking.
Speaker 2: It's just like it's a little comfort that you can
Speaker 2: have if you're a fucking tramp living on the street
Speaker 2: in the eighteen seventies, because there's there's not a whole
Speaker 2: lot of other things for you, but the cigarette is there.
Speaker 4: Wait, the working man's friend, isn't it.
Speaker 2: It is the working man. Look again, if you're on
Speaker 2: the street in the eighteen seventies, they are risks of
Speaker 2: a cigarette, or the least of certain you might.
Speaker 4: Get concussed by floating to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's the shit rivers, the main problem you've got
Speaker 2: to deal with.
Speaker 4: He's drowning in a river of wholeseshit.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'd be smoking whatever. Of course, of course they
Speaker 5: invented crack beyond that too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you want to get out of that situation as
Speaker 2: quickly as possible.
Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely, Yeah, so a godsent.
Speaker 2: Absolutely so. Duke at this point in time, his brothers
Speaker 2: and his father were like locked into this vicious competition
Speaker 2: with Bull Durham Tobacco, which was run by a guy
Speaker 2: named W. T. Blackwell and was like the big tobacco
Speaker 2: producer of the day. Duke saw this as a pointless
Speaker 2: fight because they're fighting over plug tobacco. He knew that
Speaker 2: the future of the industry was not in plug tobacco,
Speaker 2: it was producing something convenient and cheap for urban poor people.
Speaker 2: In eighteen eighty two, his company had just ten cigarette
Speaker 2: rollers on the line, and so these are individual people.
Speaker 2: Cigarettes are made like cigars, by random by just like
Speaker 2: people who know how to do it. The first thing
Speaker 2: he did was add fifty more rollers, which still put
Speaker 2: him well behind the Allen and Ginter factory up in Richmond,
Speaker 2: which employed four hundred and fifty female cigarette rollers. But
Speaker 2: when a New York City cigarette factory went on strike,
Speaker 2: Duke convinced one hundred and twenty five of their workers
Speaker 2: to move down to Durham in eighteen eighty three, offering
Speaker 2: to pay their moving expenses and giving them the highest
Speaker 2: wages in the industry. This was a good deal for
Speaker 2: these people for a while. But if you know anything
Speaker 2: about capitalists, you know Duke has no desire to create
Speaker 2: well paid jobs for laborers. These people are a stopgap.
Speaker 2: He's thinking like uber here, right, I want to corner
Speaker 2: the market and then find a way to get the
Speaker 2: human beings out of it, to replace them with machines.
Speaker 4: No, he's not saying he's working freebit it.
Speaker 2: Works a lot better for cigarettes than it does for Uber.
Speaker 2: Turns out this is actually a pretty reasonable business plan
Speaker 2: for cigarettes.
Speaker 5: Both of them will kill you, but it's a self
Speaker 5: driving cause, and a cigarettes get his self driving cass
Speaker 5: will do it fasten.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the cigarettes will do it a little more ethically.
Speaker 2: Though he was in the his goal was again he
Speaker 2: wanted to make He wants to make the most profitable
Speaker 2: tobacco company in the world, and the way to do
Speaker 2: that is to rat fuck your laborers. For now though
Speaker 2: he needed them, and by eighteen eighty five he had
Speaker 2: about seven hundred hand rollers in two factories. Most of
Speaker 2: these are again a young women. This is reasonably well
Speaker 2: paying work for young women. He's got a quality control
Speaker 2: team that checks the work. So they're trying to put
Speaker 2: out like as uniform a product as possible. But that's
Speaker 2: not really easy to do. And everyone in the industry
Speaker 2: making cigarettes knows it's kind of slowly expanding, and they
Speaker 2: know that we can make these a lot cheaper and
Speaker 2: a lot more profitable for us if we can replace
Speaker 2: the human beings with machine rollers. So a couple of
Speaker 2: companies actually put out a bounty in order to produce
Speaker 2: a machine roller. And I'm going to quote what comes
Speaker 2: next from that write up from the Journal of Antiques.
Speaker 2: A young man named James Bosnak approached Duke with a
Speaker 2: cigarette making machine he had invented. The young inventor had
Speaker 2: previously gone to the now Big four companies, but had
Speaker 2: been turned down because his machine was prone to break down,
Speaker 2: plus there was a belief that consumers would never accept
Speaker 2: a machine made cigarette. Duke put top mechanics to work,
Speaker 2: iiring out the bugs in the Bonzack machine, and signed
Speaker 2: a deal with the inventor. During his first year of production,
Speaker 2: using his team of important hand rollers, Duke turned out
Speaker 2: nine point eight million cigarettes. In contrast, using the Bonsack
Speaker 2: machines enabled him to produce seven hundred and forty four
Speaker 2: million cigarettes in eighteen eighty eight. So eighteen eighty one,
Speaker 2: nine point eight million cigarettes, he gets the Bonsack machine
Speaker 2: seven hundred and forty four million. That is a snick
Speaker 2: at significant increase in production.
Speaker 5: That right there as a turning point. Huh, that's going
Speaker 5: to change a few things.
Speaker 2: So he's making a lot of cigarettes now, which is great.
Speaker 2: He's able to make them half as expensive as they
Speaker 2: were before, and he's able to, like number one, sell
Speaker 2: them for cheaper and also make a lot more profit
Speaker 2: for per cigarette. But there's problem, which is that only
Speaker 2: about two percent of Americans who smoke smokes itigarettes, and
Speaker 2: so the fact that he's making seven hundred and thirty
Speaker 2: million more cigarettes per year means that he's got a
Speaker 2: lot of cigarettes he can't sell because there's just not
Speaker 2: that many smokers out there. So this is a this
Speaker 2: is a problem for Old Duke, and Duke realizes that, like,
Speaker 2: if he's going to make this thing profitable, what he's
Speaker 2: going to have to do is create demand for cigarettes.
Speaker 2: He's going to have to convince Americans that they actually
Speaker 2: want not just to smoke cigarettes, but to smoke a
Speaker 2: shitload of them. Because one of the things that becomes
Speaker 2: clear is like, well, we went from nine point eight
Speaker 2: million is seven hundred and forty four million for nothing.
Speaker 2: We could make billions of these year. This wouldn't be
Speaker 2: a problem at all. We just need that many smokers
Speaker 2: to exist. So that's a difficult task, right, Old Duke
Speaker 2: is going to need to actually like create a hunger
Speaker 2: for billions of cigarettes in the world in order to
Speaker 2: make this payoff. And that's exactly what he does next.
Speaker 5: Great, yeah, so wonderful world of tobacco marketing.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's that's what we're that's what we're building towards here.
Speaker 2: So one of the things that happens when Duke starts
Speaker 2: manufacturing his cigarettes is that suddenly no corporation can afford
Speaker 2: to sell cigarettes without rolling them on a Bonzac machine.
Speaker 2: It just is so much more efficient. And because Duke
Speaker 2: hand helped fix the Bonzac machines, he owns part of
Speaker 2: the patent effectively, So one of the ways he's making
Speaker 2: money is that everyone who's making cigarettes is giving money
Speaker 2: to Duke. He Also, one of the things he does
Speaker 2: that's smart is in order to kind of everyone's worried, Okay,
Speaker 2: are people not gonna want to smoke cigarettes that are
Speaker 2: rolled by machine? Duke starts bragging that his cigarettes or
Speaker 2: machine rolled. He puts it on the packages as like
Speaker 2: a way of like, just what if we just trying
Speaker 2: to convince people that machine rolled is better than handwriting.
Speaker 2: It's cleaner, it's more hygienic, it's more modern, right, all
Speaker 2: of which is technically true. The next I want to
Speaker 2: quote from a book called The Cigarette Century by Alan Brandt.
Speaker 2: By eighteen eighty four, while his competitors were still hesitating,
Speaker 2: Duke had installed two Bonzack machines in his Durrow factory.
Speaker 2: A year later, after experimenting to improve the machine's performance,
Speaker 2: Duke signed a secret contract in which he agreed that
Speaker 2: he would produce all his cigarettes with the Bonzac machine.
Speaker 2: In return, Bonzac reduced Duke's royalties to twenty cents per thousand.
Speaker 2: Duke and Bonzac soon reached a further agreement guaranteeing Duke
Speaker 2: of twenty five percent discount on royalties against all other manufacturers. Also,
Speaker 2: Duke shrewdly hired one of Bonzac's disgruntled mechanics, William Thomas O'Brien,
Speaker 2: to operate his machines, assuring fewer breakdowns than his competition.
Speaker 2: By June eighteen eighty six, O'Brien was meticulously maintaining ten machines.
Speaker 2: Duke placed a heavy emphasis on efficiency and continuous production.
Speaker 2: The lessons he learned to developing the mass production of
Speaker 2: cigarettes he would soon apply more broadly to industrial organization.
Speaker 2: By becoming Bonzak's premier customer, Duke secured essential control over
Speaker 2: its technology and turned Bonzac's patent into a powerful competitive advantage.
Speaker 2: It was increasingly common for inventors to relinquish their patents
Speaker 2: to corporations. Duke understood the control of the bonsacked patent
Speaker 2: through his secret discounted licensing agreement was a critical lever
Speaker 2: in dominating the cigarette trade. His deal with Bonzac reflected
Speaker 2: an important change in the character of the patent system
Speaker 2: from a legal mechanism protecting independent inventors to one that
Speaker 2: would protect large and powerful corporations. Duke is, what he's
Speaker 2: done here is in the modern usage of patents corporations
Speaker 2: for corporate advantage. Right, Like, everyone who is who, like
Speaker 2: every business leader who follows in any kind of industry
Speaker 2: is going to copy.
Speaker 4: Yes, yeah, man, that might be one of the things
Speaker 4: that's killed more people than.
Speaker 2: Cigarettes, right Like, yeah, yeah, because a lot of medical
Speaker 2: patents and stuff that works on the same fucking idea,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, nearly every nearly every drug is patented.
Speaker 2: And of course he's not trying to do anything evil
Speaker 2: with it. He just wants everyone to smoke cigarettes, perfectly, perfectly, morally, uncomplicated, ironically.
Speaker 5: I just we talked about it on the episode of
Speaker 5: It Could Happen Here on Monday. But UCLA is pursuing
Speaker 5: an IP case in India about a prostate counter drug
Speaker 5: called egg Standy, which they're trying to stop a generic production,
Speaker 5: a cheaper generic production of But I'm just imagining the
Speaker 5: old handshake mean between CLA and Duke here and giving
Speaker 5: people king service. The thing.
Speaker 4: Coming together.
Speaker 2: That's beautiful. So the Bonzac machine quickly replaced human rollers
Speaker 2: who left the cigarette industry to roll cigars, which is
Speaker 2: the only form of tobacco that's going to prove immune
Speaker 2: to the corporate age that Duke is ushering in. Through
Speaker 2: the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties, cigarette smoking increased, and
Speaker 2: the size of a pack doubled from ten to twenty,
Speaker 2: taking advantage of how easy it was to smoke.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 2: The first proper matchbooks, invented in the early twentieth century
Speaker 2: helped spur adoption, but by nineteen hundred, still less than
Speaker 2: two percent of tobacco consumers are smoking cigarettes. Now, Duke
Speaker 2: knows that his dream of selling cigarettes to the world
Speaker 2: is not going to work if he can't convince Americans
Speaker 2: that they wanted to smoke, and that they wanted to
Speaker 2: smoke as a habit. So he set out to do
Speaker 2: something no one had ever really done before, which was
Speaker 2: create a market for a product using advertising. Obviously, merchants
Speaker 2: since time immemorial had advertised their wares and attempted to
Speaker 2: set themselves apart from the competition. But what Duke is
Speaker 2: doing is new. Duke is trying to convince people they
Speaker 2: want to do something they haven't done that that's not
Speaker 2: really been a thing in capitalism up to this point.
Speaker 2: It's one thing to be like, hey, I'm Samuel Colt.
Speaker 2: I've invented a better handgun like you want. If you
Speaker 2: want a handgun, you want a handgun. My job with
Speaker 2: my marketing is is to convince you mind's the best, right,
Speaker 2: But you're not convincing people well now I need a gun, right,
Speaker 2: like they decide they need a gun because it's the
Speaker 2: fucking eighteen eighties or what fucking Duke is like. These
Speaker 2: people are fine without cigarettes. That's this isn't a problem.
Speaker 2: There's not a need that I'm trying to serve here.
Speaker 2: I have to create it. And one of the first
Speaker 2: plays he's going to do this is really quite innovative
Speaker 2: and it ends in a surprising place. So in the
Speaker 2: late eighteen eighties, for much tradesmen had set to making stiff,
Speaker 2: colorful cards to advertise their businesses. These cards often featured
Speaker 2: illustrations of women generally wearing very little clothing, or sports heroes,
Speaker 2: or like historical landmarks to make them collectible and thus
Speaker 2: give individual people a reason to keep a business card
Speaker 2: in their possession. Now we don't know where Duke first
Speaker 2: heard about this phenomenon, but starting in the eighteen eighties,
Speaker 2: he had a print shop installed in his Durham factory
Speaker 2: that could make color prints. At first, he printed out
Speaker 2: the standard advertisements and coupons that most businessmen used, but
Speaker 2: soon he hit upon an idea and I'm going to
Speaker 2: quote from Duke University here, with each pack of cigarettes,
Speaker 2: a small cardboard insert was added to stiff in the box.
Speaker 2: Duke employed a little imagination and turned these simple workhourses
Speaker 2: into a powerful marketing tool by printing the brand name
Speaker 2: of the cigarettes along with a picture that was part
Speaker 2: of a larger series in which was meant to be collected.
Speaker 2: Series of birds, flags, civil war generals, and baseball players
Speaker 2: were employed frequently with historical or educational information on them.
Speaker 2: Photographs of actresses, women placed in a variety of poses,
Speaker 2: and often rather revealing costumes for the time were also
Speaker 2: used on the insert cards and exceeded all expectations and
Speaker 2: their popularity along the public. So a lot of these
Speaker 2: trading cards, and these are the first trading cards, are
Speaker 2: outright pornographic, at least by nineteenth century standards, and there
Speaker 2: are outcries against the practice because the people who want
Speaker 2: them the most are young boys. Are kids, right, kids
Speaker 2: start smoking to collect trading cards. That's what how juvenile
Speaker 2: smoking starts at the United States. Great They want the
Speaker 2: collect baseball cards and to do so they have to
Speaker 2: buy packs of cigarettes. And this works like gang. It
Speaker 2: increases cigarette sales massively. It's a really successful ad campaign.
Speaker 2: But it also leads to a wave of young cigarette
Speaker 2: addicts who are also getting into porn, which is difficult
Speaker 2: for people to accept. Busy bodies of the day to accept.
Speaker 2: One of those busy bodies included Duke's father, who wrote
Speaker 2: this letter to his son in eighteen ninety four. My
Speaker 2: dear son, I have received the enclosed letter from the
Speaker 2: Reverend from the Reverend John C. Hokott, and am much
Speaker 2: impressed with the wisdom of his argument against circulating lascivious
Speaker 2: photographs with cigarettes, and have made up my mind to
Speaker 2: bring the matter to your attention and the interest of morality,
Speaker 2: and in the hope that you can invent a proper
Speaker 2: substitute for these pictures which will answer your requirements as
Speaker 2: an advertisement as well as an inducement to purchase. His
Speaker 2: views are so thoroughly and plainly stated that I do
Speaker 2: not know how I can add anything except to state
Speaker 2: that they accord with my own, and that I have
Speaker 2: always looked upon the distribution of this character of advertisement
Speaker 2: is wrong in its pernicious effects upon young men and womenhood,
Speaker 2: and therefore has not jingled with my religious impulses, outside
Speaker 2: of the fact that we owe Christianity all the assistance
Speaker 2: we can lend it in any form which is paramount
Speaker 2: to any other consideration. I am fully convinced that this
Speaker 2: mode of advertising will be used and greatly strengthened the
Speaker 2: arguments against will be used, and will greatly strengthen the
Speaker 2: arguments against cigarettes and the legislative halls of the States.
Speaker 2: I hope you will consider this carefully and appreciate my
Speaker 2: side of the question. It would please me very much
Speaker 2: to know that a change has been made. Duke does
Speaker 2: not make a change he is fined with it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so Duke is obviously not going to turn his back
Speaker 2: on all of this money because of simple morality. Instead,
Speaker 2: he publishes advertising that encourages kids to complete sets of
Speaker 2: trading cards, and he expands his advertising budget to keep
Speaker 2: a steady stream of new collectibles going out with his cigarettes.
Speaker 2: It was a stunning success, and, as Alan Brandt notes, quote,
Speaker 2: this commodity connected collecting was a lasting innovation that continues
Speaker 2: today with baseball cards and Pokemon. Duke had discovered important
Speaker 2: incentives for smoking in the cultural rituals of youth. We
Speaker 2: owe pokemon to cigarettes. Amazing, that's incredible.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, wow, I'm just imagine buying a pack of
Speaker 5: mulbras to see him like a scourge, a shiny Cha
Speaker 5: median or something.
Speaker 2: Honestly, what about our culture wouldn't be better if, like,
Speaker 2: in order to get a magic the Gathering Deck, you
Speaker 2: had to smoke three entire cartons of Paul Moss.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I love that. It's just it's like the happy
Speaker 4: meal of cigarettes. It's great. It's perfect.
Speaker 2: To match it like some nerdy sixteen year old like
Speaker 2: lying on his side, like puking as he smokes his
Speaker 2: fiftieth cigarette of the day. I need a lightning bolt card.
Speaker 5: He's trying to evolve his peak atue good dies of
Speaker 5: smoking inhalation, trying to get a bulbo sore.
Speaker 4: I choose you lung cancer.
Speaker 2: Now you know what else will give you lung cancer? James?
Speaker 4: Is it the cigarettes that Sophie's saying to children behind
Speaker 4: the it is?
Speaker 2: It is the cigarettes that Sophie's sells to children behind
Speaker 2: the school are very likely to cause cancer. But uh,
Speaker 2: you know that's the way it works, Okay.
Speaker 4: So.
Speaker 2: Ah, God, aren't we living well today? What a beautiful
Speaker 2: world we have in this America that I love? How
Speaker 2: are you all, Sophie?
Speaker 1: I'm just thoroughly disappointed in your actions? What else is new?
Speaker 2: Well, Sophie, you know what I'm not disappointed by is
Speaker 2: the innovative thought leaders in big tobacco building the modern
Speaker 2: world and inventing pokemon. So Duke understood instinctively that children
Speaker 2: were the future of cigarettes. Established tobacco consumers had already
Speaker 2: had their preferences like set for plug tobacco or snuff,
Speaker 2: or for pipe tobacco or cigars, and these methods involved
Speaker 2: less consumption or at least pickier consumers. Cigarettes smoked quickly
Speaker 2: and more conveniently than other tobacco products, and they caused
Speaker 2: less mess. They were also more addictive, which allowed for
Speaker 2: a quick and repeatable high any time. Again, most people
Speaker 2: were chewing tobacco prior to this, So if people start
Speaker 2: smoking instead of chewing, suddenly you don't have buckets of
Speaker 2: spit all over the place. Again, probably a net positive.
Speaker 2: Now that said, you also have like more people smoking
Speaker 2: in public places, which is a negative. But anyway. The
Speaker 2: New York Times publishes an article at the time that
Speaker 2: complains about Duke's attempt to entice boys to excessive cigarette smoking,
Speaker 2: and notes every possible device has been employed to interest
Speaker 2: the juvenile mind, notably the lithograph album. Youngsters seeking these
Speaker 2: picture books clamoring for the reward of self inflicted injury.
Speaker 2: Many a boy under twelve years is striving for the
Speaker 2: entire collection, which necessitates the consumption of nearly twelve thousand cigarettes.
Speaker 2: They're like trying to collect these picture books and smoking
Speaker 2: twelve thousand cigarettes.
Speaker 4: That is how you got your mole. Oh if that
Speaker 4: is a rough a music.
Speaker 2: That is an setting amount of cigarettes.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's a lot of cigarettes.
Speaker 2: Wow, Yeah, that is that is an outrageous quantity of cigarettes.
Speaker 2: Duke can just hit upon a baller way to move cigarettes.
Speaker 2: He'd effectively invented the concept of collectible products as advertisements.
Speaker 2: He starts doing like sweepstakes right where you collect you know,
Speaker 2: different things that are on the boxes to turn them
Speaker 2: in to see if you can win like a prize.
Speaker 4: And it's yeah.
Speaker 2: He also just like gives stuff. So basically everything from
Speaker 2: how McDonald's happy Meals and like Funko pops to every
Speaker 2: product sweep steaks you've ever seen are all descendants of
Speaker 2: what Duke is inventing in this period, which is just
Speaker 2: like different ways to get cigarettes in kids' mouths. We
Speaker 2: like all the entire toolbox of capitalism is being created.
Speaker 2: It's being created to push cigarettes to children. Duke changed
Speaker 2: his company's name to American Tobacco, which reflected his ambition
Speaker 2: to be the alpha and omega of tobacco sales and
Speaker 2: production in the United States. He poured unheard of amounts
Speaker 2: of money into his ad budget, soon spending nearly a
Speaker 2: quarter of the money he made on sales on ads.
Speaker 2: His competitors were forced to pour similar amounts of cash
Speaker 2: into their own efforts igniting the first national billboard War
Speaker 2: and leading to a massive surge in the amount of
Speaker 2: visual advertising in the United States. This is what starts
Speaker 2: to fill the country side up with ads with like
Speaker 2: billboards and other kinds of big public ads. Is Duke
Speaker 2: spending all this money on cigarette ads?
Speaker 4: Wow? So in ad gave us the monkey wrench Gang?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so he is. He has, in the space of
Speaker 2: what we've talked about so far, given us like modern
Speaker 2: patent law and all of the people that get killed
Speaker 2: as a result of medical device patents. He's given us
Speaker 2: trading cards, He's given us like sweepstakes and like toy collecting,
Speaker 2: and he's given us fucking billboards and the monkey Wrinch Gang.
Speaker 2: So that's that's a lot for one guy. Yeah, real
Speaker 2: mikes bag. Now, one of the things that this does,
Speaker 2: he's made it impossible, very close to impossible, for new
Speaker 2: companies to get into the cigarette business. Number One, you
Speaker 2: have to be able to buy a cigarette machine to
Speaker 2: be profitable, and that costs money. Number Two, you have
Speaker 2: to have a shitload of cash to make ads. So
Speaker 2: just like some young upstart who wants to sell cigarettes
Speaker 2: to people isn't going to be able to get into
Speaker 2: the business unless they're backed by some serious moneyed interests,
Speaker 2: because it's just too expensive to get into it. From
Speaker 2: the late eighteen eighties, Duke sent out regular feelers to
Speaker 2: his competitors asking if they'd be open to a buyout.
Speaker 2: Most of them turned him down, but as the eighteen
Speaker 2: hundreds drew to a close, the fortunes of Duke and
Speaker 2: his competitors, the fortunes that Duke and his competitors were
Speaker 2: throwing into ads had them all looking for a better way.
Speaker 2: They're just spending too much damn money competing with each other.
Speaker 2: In January of eighteen ninety, Duke strong armed his fellow
Speaker 2: tobacco lords to join a consortium, the American Tobacco Company,
Speaker 2: which would seek to monopolize not just tobacco sold in
Speaker 2: the United States, but produced as well. Overnight, the American
Speaker 2: Tobacco Company was responsible for ninety percent of all cigarette
Speaker 2: sales in the United States. Duke had formed a monopoly,
Speaker 2: getting his competitors to agree to fixed prices and wages
Speaker 2: in order to save money on advertising and production, and
Speaker 2: to avoid the struggles for dominance that had devoured their
Speaker 2: money in recent years. This was a winning strategy, and
Speaker 2: as Duke took total control over the tobacco market. Prices
Speaker 2: fell for consumers, but this also meant a lot less
Speaker 2: money for farmers, and the trust brought an end to
Speaker 2: competitive bidding for tobacco harvests. As Alan Brandt makes clear,
Speaker 2: in a single minded quest to control the future of tobacco,
Speaker 2: Duke helped invent the modern concept of a mega corporation,
Speaker 2: blazing a trail that would be followed by every ambitious
Speaker 2: capitalist to come quote. Together, these three departments Audit, which
Speaker 2: oversaw accounting and cost control, leaf and retail markets assured
Speaker 2: the movement of cured tobacco from warehouse to factory to sales.
Speaker 2: Individuals with specific expertise headed each department. The audit department,
Speaker 2: for example, introduced innovative accounting procedures that would later be
Speaker 2: utilized by many other industries. The success of Duke's enterprise,
Speaker 2: which became a model for other industries, rested on salaried
Speaker 2: executives who could assure the efficient functioning of their aspect
Speaker 2: of the business, as well as tight coordination with other
Speaker 2: departments and activities. In short, he invented the middle manager.
Speaker 4: Just another wonderful contribution to society.
Speaker 2: He's really just humming along here, creating the modern world.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he's taking them off. Now.
Speaker 2: One of the things that you know, when you invent
Speaker 2: the middle manager, one of the things that you've done
Speaker 2: is you've created the concept that's going to make up
Speaker 2: most of the ranks of the emerging middle class. Right.
Speaker 2: What are a lot of people in the middle class.
Speaker 2: They're fucking middle managers, right, which is also a lot
Speaker 2: of the people who are going to be tobacco consumers.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: He's helping to create the basis of consumer culture here
Speaker 2: as he builds effectively helps to build the idea of
Speaker 2: a kind of new class structure in a lot of ways. Obviously,
Speaker 2: like middle management had existed before, but not in the
Speaker 2: kind of quantity that it had because prior to Duke,
Speaker 2: you've got a lot of tobacco being made and sold,
Speaker 2: and you've got a different sort of tobacco companies middle managers.
Speaker 2: But the companies are all much smaller, and it's like
Speaker 2: this company we handle production. This company like we we
Speaker 2: handle like we get the tobacco from the farmers and
Speaker 2: we process it. You know, we're the people who roll
Speaker 2: it and sell it directly to the consumers. He's rolling
Speaker 2: all of this into one giant venture, and instead of
Speaker 2: the constituent parts being made up of small business owners,
Speaker 2: the constituent parts are managed by middle managers who are
Speaker 2: operating like rungs inside of this larger corporate structure. He's
Speaker 2: not the first guy to do this, but he's the
Speaker 2: first guy to do this and be this successful with it.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, So it's a convertically integrated supply.
Speaker 2: Chain, right, exactly exactly, So that's pretty cool. Everywhere he
Speaker 2: cut out independent manufacturers and free agents, small reslers, and rollers.
Speaker 2: The entire tobacco market went from an artisanal industry with
Speaker 2: strong unions to a vast factory for the production of
Speaker 2: identical machine rolled cigarettes. The only piece of the tobacco
Speaker 2: business that successfully resisted and that maintained its high level
Speaker 2: of unionization were cigars, which, for whatever reason, are kind
Speaker 2: of immune to modernity.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I'm just realizing this guy is like Jeff Bezos.
Speaker 2: He's the Besos of cigarettes.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, which, Jeff Bezos.
Speaker 5: I'm sure we'd love to be the Besis of cigarettes
Speaker 5: along with being on Bezos almost everything else.
Speaker 2: Because it's a great thing to be the Bezos of.
Speaker 2: So kudos to cigars. For being respect yeah, respect to
Speaker 2: the cigar industry for fighting back against this. But obviously
Speaker 2: Duke barely notices that, like he's you know, losing out
Speaker 2: on this chunk of the business. He tells his board
Speaker 2: that quote, the world is now our market for our product.
Speaker 2: And in nineteen oh two he sets upon the goal
Speaker 2: of getting the world to start adopting cigarettes. He signs
Speaker 2: a deal with his largest foreign rival, the UK's Imperial Tobacco,
Speaker 2: and they formed the British American Tobacco Corporation.
Speaker 4: Of course, that's what the British wants called.
Speaker 2: Yes, and they do. They're doing a tobacco imperialism, right.
Speaker 2: They're going out with a goal of convincing people nations
Speaker 2: who had never smoked to smoke now. And Jordan Goodman,
Speaker 2: the author of Tobacco in History, notes to him every
Speaker 2: cigarette was the same. All of the globalization that we
Speaker 2: are now familiar with through McDonald's and Starbucks, all of
Speaker 2: that was preceded by Duke and the cigarette. So not
Speaker 2: only is he getting people hooked on cigarettes, he's getting
Speaker 2: them hooked on the idea of this is a product
Speaker 2: that comes under a specific brand and everyone in the
Speaker 2: world consumes the same product the same way, right that
Speaker 2: you know, you may you maybe if you're a cigarette
Speaker 2: smoker in Turkey in the early eighteen hundreds and a
Speaker 2: cigarette smoker in France, a cigarette smoker in the United States,
Speaker 2: you are smoking something that was rolled down the street
Speaker 2: from you at a shop, right, and probably tobacco that
Speaker 2: was grown fairly close to you. There's a little bit
Speaker 2: of movement around then around the world, but generally speaking,
Speaker 2: you're consuming a local product because everything is pretty local.
Speaker 2: He has invented the idea that no, no, no, if
Speaker 2: you're going to be in a cigarettes, you're going to
Speaker 2: smoke this specific kind of cigarette, and everyone on Earth
Speaker 2: does it the same way.
Speaker 4: Wow. Yeah, yeah, it's crazy.
Speaker 5: It's like, yeah, he's now more or less invented like
Speaker 5: the global commodity, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, this is like it's one of the very
Speaker 2: first yeah, and probably the I think the first that's
Speaker 2: like an individual consumer good, right, because this is starting
Speaker 2: to happen with like steel and with fuel and stuff. Right,
Speaker 2: But you as an individual are like going down to
Speaker 2: the store to pick up you know, some fucking petroleum
Speaker 2: or some cold generally, but you're gonna go down and
Speaker 2: get a cigarette that's made by the British American company
Speaker 2: every day, whether you live in fucking Tokyo or timbucktoo.
Speaker 2: It hasn't spread quite that far yet, but this is
Speaker 2: what's going to happen. Right. By nineteen oh four, cigarettes
Speaker 2: had finally cracked five percent of the American market for
Speaker 2: tobacco products. That seems small, but that means it's more
Speaker 2: than doubled in a couple of years. Yea, Duke saw
Speaker 2: them as the smart, smart product to push, but he
Speaker 2: spent several years cornering the markets on plug and pipe
Speaker 2: tobacco too, so they're selling everything. It's also worth noting that,
Speaker 2: like Duke is a cigar man himself, he does not
Speaker 2: understand why people like cigarettes. He does not like cigarettes.
Speaker 2: He just is betting that they're going to be a
Speaker 2: big deal, right perfect. So before he can kind of
Speaker 2: take this idea further, though, the United States Congress starts
Speaker 2: looking into his tobacco trust, which is, you know, what
Speaker 2: he's made with American tobacco, He's formed a monopoly, and
Speaker 2: they decide it's in violation of the Sherman Anti Trust Act,
Speaker 2: which had also been created in eighteen ninety. Now it
Speaker 2: took the governmental while to actually get to American tobacco,
Speaker 2: and by the time it starts looking into things, American
Speaker 2: tobacco controls not just ninety percent of the cigarette trade,
Speaker 2: but seventy five to eighty five percent of all tobacco
Speaker 2: sold in the United States. Duke had even recently started
Speaker 2: buying up companies who were producing licorice paste to make
Speaker 2: sweeter flavored cigarettes. So he's again a fucking trailblazer.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, guys, you can try out in a great direction.
Speaker 2: Necessarily maybe not in the best direction, but you can't.
Speaker 2: You can't deny the man knows what he's doing. Yeah,
Speaker 2: this is a dude who loves to make How rich
Speaker 2: was this guy? I mean it doesn't because if you
Speaker 2: actually translate it, it's just going to wind up being
Speaker 2: in the tens of millions, which makes it like, effectively
Speaker 2: he is a billionaire in his day, right, like for
Speaker 2: everything that matters, you know, Yeah, he has infinity dollars.
Speaker 5: You do have to think how different would the world
Speaker 5: be if we've just given him Twitter and he could
Speaker 5: have done an Elon Musk and solve the war in
Speaker 5: Ukraine instead of inventing new ways to give kids cancer.
Speaker 2: This new cigarette's gonna work as a boat briefly. So
Speaker 2: this puts Duke about twenty years ahead of the invention
Speaker 2: of the first menthol cigarettes. And we're not going to
Speaker 2: talk a lot about this, but I have to let
Speaker 2: you know that menthol cigarettes are invented by a man
Speaker 2: named Lloyd spud Hughes, great, very very funny name. So
Speaker 2: Duke is like a generation ahead of the competition. But
Speaker 2: that's not enough to protect him from the Department of Justice, which,
Speaker 2: and this is weird, used to actually punish corporations for
Speaker 2: monopolistic behavior. This was the thing you could get in
Speaker 2: trouble for back the way.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah, rubber coming out and support of the DJ.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, they don't do a good job of this,
Speaker 2: so I'm not supportive, but it is more than they
Speaker 2: try to do today.
Speaker 1: I'm more familiar with the not doing a good job part.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, so during this period, the DOJ is going after
Speaker 2: the three largest businesses in the United States for monopolistic behavior.
Speaker 2: And the three largest businesses in the United States are
Speaker 2: Standard oil, US steel, and American tobacco. So again to
Speaker 2: understand the scale of this, the thing that he has
Speaker 2: built is as big as the oil and gas industry, right,
Speaker 2: like it's the steel industry. It's in that ballpark.
Speaker 4: It's wild.
Speaker 1: Yeah, impressively not great.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So Teddy Roosevelt, the trustbuster, forces the DOJ to
Speaker 2: go after Duke Buster. Yeah, that's what he's doing. He's
Speaker 2: busting trues some trusts. Well, there's a lot.
Speaker 1: Of funny coming out of your mouth.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of things that we have to dislike
Speaker 2: Teddy Roosevelt for, but one thing the man legitimately hated
Speaker 2: was monopolies, and he goes after them. There were there
Speaker 2: were a lot of more problematic things than Teddy Roosevelt hated.
Speaker 2: But in this case, he's broadly speaking, doing the right thing.
Speaker 2: And and the DOJ is like, yeah, you've you've made
Speaker 2: a monopoly. This is not legal, and you have to
Speaker 2: dismantle American Tobacco. Now, this is impossible because Duke has
Speaker 2: vertically integrated it to such a degree that everyone is
Speaker 2: reliant upon the same supply and distribution change. You can't
Speaker 2: actually split the companies back up the way they'd been
Speaker 2: fifteen years before. So the DOJ, not wanting to destroy
Speaker 2: one of the three largest businesses in the US, zimpts
Speaker 2: a bunch of their sub businesses and their international partnerships
Speaker 2: and like allows them to maintain certain supply chains and whatnot.
Speaker 2: And obviously, while this is going on, American Tobacco appeals,
Speaker 2: the Supreme Court rules against them in nineteen eleven, and
Speaker 2: eventually they do split the trust up into five companies
Speaker 2: that are technically independent, competing businesses. But as the Cigarette
Speaker 2: Century makes clear, after all the Duke had done to
Speaker 2: weave the companies together, there can't actually be cut apart.
Speaker 4: Quote.
Speaker 2: The settlement was meant to a share competition among the
Speaker 2: five newly constituted companies. Each received factories, distribution and storage facilities,
Speaker 2: and name brands. But given the size and complexity of
Speaker 2: the business, there existed in superable obstacles to the creation
Speaker 2: of perfect competitive conditions. No matter how the industry was restructured,
Speaker 2: there simply was no going back. So Duke continues to
Speaker 2: run this chunk of American tobacco. It remains in his control.
Speaker 2: British American tobacco is what remains in his control, and
Speaker 2: his fellow owners, even though they're all competing, continue to
Speaker 2: collude to fixed prices in order to maximize profits. So
Speaker 2: he's it's not as bad, but they've gone from a
Speaker 2: monopoly to an oligopoly.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 2: That's that's, that's what the DOJ succeeds in actually doing.
Speaker 4: Great job, Grey Jay.
Speaker 2: And since his he's kind of peaked as a cigarette man,
Speaker 2: Duke moves over to the power industry. He establishes a
Speaker 2: power company that provides. Yeah, he builds, his company builds
Speaker 2: the electrical grid for North and South Carolina.
Speaker 4: Can you just stop? I know he can with the
Speaker 4: Pokemon cards. That apparently not.
Speaker 2: He he does when he gets old and is about
Speaker 2: to die, he gives most of his fortune tens of
Speaker 2: millions of dollars to Trinity College in Durham, which is
Speaker 2: renamed Duke University in his honor. And that's and that's
Speaker 2: where we get Duke University.
Speaker 5: Didn't see they're coming, Yeah, great man, They have a
Speaker 5: good public health school.
Speaker 4: Now actually yes, yes, yeah.
Speaker 2: Well they honestly a lot of the best information about
Speaker 2: the cigarette industry, and all of the fund up shit
Speaker 2: it did comes from Duke University. They have great resource
Speaker 2: for understanding tobacco ad frantis.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, I mean, to the university's credit, they don't like
Speaker 2: shy away from the but also what look, Duke is
Speaker 2: immoral because he's a capitalist and he is profiting off
Speaker 2: of people's surplus labor in a number of ways that
Speaker 2: are unethical. There's nothing wrong with him selling cigarettes at
Speaker 2: this point because he has no he dies in nineteen
Speaker 2: twenty five, There is no nothing that even approaches a
Speaker 2: medical consensus about cigarettes and cancer at this point.
Speaker 4: You can't blame it on.
Speaker 5: Him, right, He's doing horrific shit. So there will people
Speaker 5: who work for him, I'm.
Speaker 2: Sure, absolutely, like destroying unions and whatnot, and there's like
Speaker 2: a bunch that's unethical, But the fact that he's selling
Speaker 2: cigarettes is not something that I would put on his
Speaker 2: soul because you know, there's no way for him to
Speaker 2: have known that they were harmful, you know.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: In nineteen nineteen, a US surgical student named Alton Oschner
Speaker 2: was called along with several of his peers to observe
Speaker 2: the autopsy of a lung cancer victim. His teacher was
Speaker 2: excited to have an example of the rare illness in
Speaker 2: their operating theater. He wanted Alton and his fellow students
Speaker 2: to see the autopsy because he believed they would not
Speaker 2: get a second chance to do.
Speaker 4: So you guys gotta check this out.
Speaker 2: You never got to see another lung cancer. Nobody gets
Speaker 2: this shit less than the thirty years later, lung cancer
Speaker 2: would be the number one cause of death in the
Speaker 2: United States. As Robert Proctor of Stanford University told one interviewer,
Speaker 2: the cigarette is the deadliest artifact in the history of
Speaker 2: human civilization. It killed about one hundred million people in
Speaker 2: the twentieth century.
Speaker 4: Ooh, Jesus rish.
Speaker 2: May And honestly he's probably lowballing it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, And it's before you look at the
Speaker 5: sort of downstream things.
Speaker 6: Jesus Christ, that is, that is quite a jult. Like
Speaker 6: we can we can.
Speaker 2: Argue about fascism and communism and the things the Great
Speaker 2: Leap Forward and La Sangoism what killed the most people.
Speaker 2: But man, nobody's nobody's touching the cigarettes numbers.
Speaker 4: It's right, Yeah, the cigarettes.
Speaker 2: Out here dropping three pointers every shot into a goat
Speaker 2: of killing people.
Speaker 5: I'm eagerly awaiting Michael Tracy to like go recuperate the
Speaker 5: cigarettes's reputation on Twitter or something.
Speaker 2: So James, you get anything you want to plug before
Speaker 2: we roll.
Speaker 4: Out afar wine, I do another podcast if you do too.
Speaker 4: Sometimes it could happen here. I do listen to them.
Speaker 4: It's about how things are falling apart and people are
Speaker 4: putting them back together. It's a good podcast.
Speaker 2: It is a good podcast. I would say it's one
Speaker 2: of the only two podcasts that should be legal.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, fair enough if we're doing basically what he
Speaker 5: did with cigarettes, but two podcasts, and very slowly we're
Speaker 5: we're stealing all the microphones and giving everyone can.
Speaker 2: And I mean hopefully going to kill one hundred million
Speaker 2: people of course of the century's.
Speaker 4: That's yeah, and see you've glad your goals.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we do have a live show if you survive
Speaker 5: that long ship twenty six. Yeah it's twenty six. I
Speaker 5: think it's on the twenty sixth of October. Yeah, that's right,
Speaker 5: sight and everything.
Speaker 2: So check that ship out, motherfucker. Buy tickets to the
Speaker 2: live show, and uh, look great. I'm not going to
Speaker 2: tell you should smoke cigarettes, but have you ever tried, Okay,
Speaker 2: the smooth, flavorful taste of a camel. It's like driving
Speaker 2: through the desert in early November, you know, when you've
Speaker 2: just got that pure dry coal wire. We're just take
Speaker 2: it in a Marlborough red Oh, God, the flavor country.
Speaker 2: That's what people are missing today, Sophie, do you know
Speaker 2: how few gin zers have been the flavor country. That's
Speaker 2: their heritage. Soaping, that's their heritage.
Speaker 1: Stop it all right, This is not cash money.
Speaker 4: Pick up, pick up some cigarettes kids, very much as
Speaker 4: cash money.
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