CZM Rewind: Part One: How Cigarettes Invented Everything

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hey everybody, Robert here, just introducing we've got another rerun.
This is the first time we've done two weeks in
a row. Normally we just do one week at the
end of the year. But all of the other shows
on our network and most of the other shows that
I know in podcasting take off two weeks. And Sophie
was like, hey, Robert, why don't you actually take off

(00:25):
two weeks instead of cramming during your vacation to write
another podcast so that we don't fall behind. And I
was like, you know what, Sophie, that's a pretty good idea.
So anyway, that's what we're doing. Enjoy this episode on
how cigarettes invented Everything. Oh, welcome once again to Behind

(00:49):
the Bastards, the only podcast where the host regularly says
that his show is cash money. I'm I'm Robert Evans
here to talk with you about bad people. Sophie Lichtman
seems very unhappy, which is not.

Speaker 1 (01:06):
I just have extreme secondhand embarrassment.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
Well that's too bad, Sophie, because I'm bringing it back, bringing.

Speaker 3 (01:13):
Back the phrase, as you know, everything you do reflects
on me for some god forsaken reason. I know, I know,
and that is not very cash money of you, Robert.

Speaker 2 (01:24):
I think it's extremely cash money of me. But here
to be the tie breaking vote is James Stout. Now, James,
you're British, so so the phrase cash money may not
mean much to you in your language. I would say
it's drawings of an elderly man who's never worked today
in his life.

Speaker 4 (01:44):
Yeah it is now is now.

Speaker 5 (01:46):
Cash money has very little value when it's tied to
the life expectancy of an inbred old person with sausage fingers.

Speaker 2 (01:54):
I thought a bunch of different ways of describing the
new bills with King Charles on them. Part of me
wanted to make a reference to the weird sexts that
got leaked of him and Camillah I made. I made
an ethical decision that even the King of England deserves
to have his set be private.

Speaker 1 (02:13):
I just like, don't need nobody.

Speaker 5 (02:16):
Needed, Okay, just you don't want to think about him
sneaking outside and what was it like getting his pajamas
dirty and having his valet clean them.

Speaker 4 (02:26):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (02:27):
That and his he's got some he's got a very
specific kink okay, yeah, yeah, as well as William Yeah, okay, little.

Speaker 1 (02:38):
Is this kink murdering his first wife.

Speaker 2 (02:41):
No, it's it's it's a tampon thing.

Speaker 5 (02:46):
Yeah, not expected.

Speaker 2 (02:49):
Yeah, we we know far too much about what Charles
has been sending my heart breaking him out. I would say,
don't don't google it. Look, I'm telling you the truth,
but don't google this. Okay, hey, my heart anyway, So
I just broke my promise right there not to not
to laugh at the King of England's sexual escapades. James,

(03:13):
how do you feel about cigarettes? Oh?

Speaker 4 (03:17):
I think I wasn't expecting that kind of ambiguous. I guess.

Speaker 5 (03:23):
Yeah, a lot of the bad things happened because people
like to smoke cigarettes. A lot of people like to
get really really up in other people's business about smoking cigarettes.

Speaker 4 (03:35):
It's a difficult one.

Speaker 2 (03:36):
I I have the same difficulty because on one hand,
I'm kind of constitutionally anti prohibition, Like I don't think
things should be illegal or illegal. I don't think the
government should stop people from doing stuff just because it's
bad for their health. And I also see cultural value
to an extent in cigarettes. I've had some memorable there's

(03:56):
I tend to believe that every single drug, even the
one that we call bad drugs, has an ideal use
case where it is is a societal good for the
drug to be available, and for cigarettes, that good is
when someone has just tried to kill you. There's a
there's nothing like a cigarette someone tried to kill or hurt.

Speaker 4 (04:15):
You, which is why they're so valued about outside of
British nightclub Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (04:21):
You never know when a bottle's coming for your fucking
temple there, you don't. Yeah, that's it, you know, I
I but I get it, like it's one of those things.
The there was a need for a period of time
where we attacked and demonized, particularly the tobacco industry, because
they lied to everybody about the health risks of cigarettes

(04:41):
in a way that that caused that cost more lives
maybe than all of the wars in the last century.
It's kind of an unbelievable body count. That said, I
think today people throw down too much against smokers, and
maybe there's maybe maybe we shouldn't be quite so s
to people who just happen to smoke cigarettes. But what

(05:02):
I wanted to talk about this week is fucking the
history of cigarettes, because as I dug into this, I
was initially planning just to do an episode on Big
tobacco and how they hid the health harms of cigarettes,
and we will do those episodes. We're going to talk
about that. Some of these we will do dedicated episodes
on those. But as I got into the research, I

(05:24):
was continually amazed by the extent to which cigarettes are
responsible for most of like the things that we consider
the modern world. It's like the cigarettes in order to
get people to smoke, the tobacco industry had to invent
modern civilizations. And that's that's a fascinating story and I
just want to talk about it. It's one of those

(05:44):
we're getting behind a bastard at this point, you know,
when we're talking about the eighteen hundreds up through like
the middle of the twentieth century. You're not a bad
person for necessarily for trying to get people to smoke,
because if it's nineteen oh five, number one, cigarettes not
a massive risk above like walking outside your door, you know.
But also you just don't have good data.

Speaker 5 (06:05):
So yeah, the ambient level of smoking is pretty high
just from existing in any urban.

Speaker 2 (06:11):
Ama, just from being around. We'll talk about that a bit,
but first we have to do some prehistory. Now, we
don't know exactly when the first human beings started smoking
or otherwise ingesting tobacco for the first time, because there's
a good chance the earliest tobacco users were not smoking it.
But we're broadly speaking, I mean, and there's debate about

(06:33):
this too, but archaeologists can confirm that by at latest
the first century BC, the Maya people of Central America
were using tobacco as a part of their religious rituals,
and they were both smoking it and like inhaling it
in kind of a similar way to snuff. Right, you
can snort tobacco if it's ground. Finally enough, they probably

(06:54):
also chewed it. There were a couple of different devices
they had for smoking it. Next, we will never know
which was like the first, right, like we just know
which ones. We kind of have written records of early yes,
but a lot of those written records come from Europeans,
so obviously that's a long time after they would have
started using them. But and again there's even some debate

(07:15):
as to like, well, we're the Maya the first people
who are cultivating tobacco, and probably the answer to that
is no, But we certainly know the Maya we're cultivating
tobacco in the first century BC, and It spread from
Central America to the Mississippi Valley and beyond and was
quickly adopted by neighboring peoples from like four hundred to
seven hundred a d is when you see most of
this spread, and it makes it all the way out

(07:37):
to the fucking Caribbean.

Speaker 4 (07:39):
Oh yeah, that's where Columbus runs into it at first, right.

Speaker 2 (07:42):
That is exactly the next thing that happens in this
episode of James Christopher Goddamn. Columbus becomes the first European
to encounter tobacco, which was being smoked by the natives
of Hispaniola which is modern day Haiti and the Dominican Republic,
via a weird two pronged nosepipe. So they would smoke it,
but they would like inhale it through this pipe that like.

Speaker 4 (08:03):
No snokel kind of situation.

Speaker 2 (08:05):
Yeah, it looks a little bit. It looks a little
bit like a canula. Okay, yeah, like a nasal canula.

Speaker 4 (08:11):
Interesting.

Speaker 2 (08:11):
I made for my book A Brief History of Vice.
I recreated these pipes as best I could. I wound
up actually using the stock of dry like the dried
stock of marijuana plants, because it's hollow and so I
just had to kind of find wybins that were the
right shape. That's obviously. I don't think what they would
have used. I don't know what they plant they would
have used for it, But you do get pretty fucked

(08:32):
up when you smoke raw nicotine rustica through directly into
your mucous membrane.

Speaker 5 (08:40):
Yeah, I can see that one being pretty rough on
the old excituses as well.

Speaker 2 (08:44):
I would not. It's one of those things you have
to divorce kind of you're thinking about tobacco in this
period from modern day because it's not number one, most
people smoking it. This is not an habitual thing for them.
It's a ritual thing for them.

Speaker 4 (08:58):
Right.

Speaker 2 (08:59):
There are people, certainly by the time Columbus as Hispaniola,
who seem to just do it recreationally. But for the
most part, most people's encounters with tobacco is probably in
like a very kind of fairly strict ritual sense.

Speaker 3 (09:12):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (09:13):
And also it's pretty uncommon to have like a habit.
Even the people who would be heavy smokers, I doubt
are smoking more than the equivalent of a couple of
cigarettes in a day, in part because it's kind of
hard to when you're smoking at them but yes, right.

Speaker 5 (09:27):
Yeah, there's a lot of work that I imagine goes
into producing a nose cigarette, from growing the tobacco.

Speaker 4 (09:33):
Dry and get out and yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:35):
Yeah, that's a lot of work. And you also, you
can't smoke just when you when you want to fix
because you don't have lighters, you don't have matches, right
like fire. Obviously, the people who are living, you know,
in these places are a lot better at starting fires
than most people in the modern world are, but it's
still not nearly as easy, right, Like you're not going

(09:55):
to just make a fire because you want like a
fucking smoke in the.

Speaker 5 (09:58):
Like yeah fire, drill out, get a piece of word out,
rub it up.

Speaker 4 (10:03):
At the idea.

Speaker 2 (10:03):
So again, smoking, even when it's not like for a
religious purpose, it's probably broadly like okay, it's meal time
and we'll smoke after the meal, right, or like we'll
smoke before them because we've we've got the fire going,
or it's nighttime, we're cooling down, we've got the fire going,
you know, now we can smoke tonight, Like generally, that's
probably how it would have gone when Columbus winds up,

(10:24):
you know, meeting these people in fourteen ninety two and
watching them smoke. They actually hand him tobacco and he
doesn't know what to do with it until he watches
them smoke it, and he sees he encounters a couple
of different methods. He sees the nose pipes. He also
sees people wrapping tobacco leaves with corn husks, which is
probably the first cigarettes and hills.

Speaker 6 (10:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (10:43):
Yeah, It's also worth noting that over in Cuba people
would wrap their tobacco in tobacco leafs, so they were
again like hundreds and hundreds of years ago, smoking cigars
and cubea. That actually goes back really fucking far. It
probably more than a thousand years people have been smoking
something broadly similar to a cigar in that.

Speaker 4 (11:04):
That's pretty cool.

Speaker 2 (11:06):
It is kind of neat, right, I enjoy it.

Speaker 4 (11:08):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (11:09):
There are many things that we consume, I guess, you know,
sometimes we eat freese, vegetables and stuff, but it's not
much that we consume that people consumed a thousand years ago,
and it made in a pretty similar fashion. Right, Like
I've been to a Cuban cigar factory. Lisi is still
like rolled by hand.

Speaker 2 (11:24):
We're going to talk about that a lot in these episodes,
but yeah, they they obviously different techniques have become popular
over time, and you get better at it the way
you get it anything. I'm sure modern cigars are much
tighter and you know, together better than cigars in fourteen
ninety two did. But broadly speaking, like part I mean,
like I'm a cigar smoker, I tend to think Cuban

(11:46):
cigars are the best.

Speaker 5 (11:49):
I like to yeah, throughout the tragic that the cultural
inheritance of that today it's like guys who think that
they should enjoy a cigar.

Speaker 4 (11:56):
The entire Republican party.

Speaker 5 (11:58):
Yeah, yeah, like Ben Shapiro and friends pretending to perform
masculinity and then like going off to coffin be sick.

Speaker 2 (12:05):
Yeah, I mean it's it's a bummer they are. You know,
I'm not a I tend to like I've tried to
read a cigar afishing out on magazine once and it
had too many It had too many made up words.
They use words, and it's not like like liquor, you
know Number one liquor actually does like oh, sometimes you
get a bourbon, I'm like, oh this this almost tastes

(12:26):
more like a coffee, or there's like this this one's
sweeter and it's got this like rich body fucking like
cigars are smooth or not, but like I don't know,
I'll read them. They'll be like, oh and when you
on the on the retro hail, you get this like
taste of orange and juniper, And I'm like, no, you
fucking don't. There's no juniper in this fucking cigar. What
is wrong with you? People? Go to hell consumption, It's unreal.

(12:54):
The most pretentious thing that you can that you can
do is be a cigar efficient on cigar. Yeah, unreal.
Just smoke, Just kill yourself slowly. It's fine anyway. That's
kind of cute. Cool that Cubans have been making cigars
for hundreds and hundreds of years now. There were like,
as I said, the way that people most often use

(13:16):
tobacco in the Americas was in religious rights. And when
I'm taught, they're not just like smoking to get that
kind of little buzz you get from tobacco. The way
in which most of these indigenous groups would have used
tobacco was as a psychotropic right, like they are like
basically tripping on this stuff. Oh wow, Okay, Tobacco can
can cause hallucinations. And high enough doses. It's a it's

(13:38):
a powerful mind altering drug when you are taking like
massive quantities. Yeah, and they were number one. The tobacco
they're smoking is different than the tobacco that we cultivate.
It's a lot stronger, and the way they're doing it
is different. So one of the most common ways that
people would take tobacco in a ritual setting is the
chief or kind of religious there's a bunch of different
terms for local sort of religious and political leaders and whatnot.

(14:01):
But that dude would inhale a bunch of smoke straight
up raw from like a burning like hunk of tobacco,
and then he would basically shotgun it into the mouths
of the people participating in it. And obviously you're getting
a lot of smoke that way, like you're gonna get
pretty messy up. But and it's again, you know, it's

(14:22):
as silly as this is probably not all that bad
for you when you consider everything people are doing in
a thousand a d or whatever. Right, Like, if you
if a couple of times a year you're shot gunning
some tobacco, that's not going to be what kills you.

Speaker 4 (14:34):
Yeah, your life expectancy isn't long enough.

Speaker 5 (14:36):
For that to be the thing that kills you in
most cases, right, Yeah, yeah, one of the other thousand
things that's going to kill you that we've eliminated now
is going to kill you.

Speaker 2 (14:45):
Yeah. And it's also worth noting that there were a
number of health uses of tobacco. It was probably the
first effective insect repellent. One of those combinations of it
was to just rub it all over your skin because
tobacco's coated in an oil like that is. Bugs don't
it kills bugs like? They don't, They don't like I mean,
obviously there are specific bugs that do feed on tobacco,

(15:07):
but for the most part, it keeps insects away. So
people would ub it on themselves that or they would
also bathe in the smoke before like going in and
hunting in the bush and stuff, in order to keep
bugs off of them. It could work as a tranquilizer.
It was used to help put people to sleep. One
of the things that I tried for my book was
mixing it with urine and garlic in order to create

(15:28):
an emetic and like a constipation remedy, and it does
work for that. I don't recommend following that up, but
it does do what it says it was also so
there were a number of uses for Native Americans of
tobacco that absolutely work in a medical context. There were
also some that did not. For example, it was often
given to people as a treatment for asthma. Tobacco does

(15:49):
not help with asthma.

Speaker 7 (15:52):
Yeah you don't, but yeah, that's not a thing that
when like it's just you know, that's where not like
that historically separated from people smoking to clear the lungs.

Speaker 2 (16:07):
Right exactly. And it's also some of the time, a
lot of the times when these indigenous people would have
been taking tobacco to clear up their asthma, it might
not have been smoked as often as it was like
taken as a tea. And this can also be toxic.
People die. One of the things like ayahuasca ceremonies are
very famous in the West. Now, one of the things
that some groups do in their ceremonies is they precede

(16:29):
the ayahuasca with the tobacco tea. And there's a couple
of cases of people dying in ayahuasca ceremonies. Now, I
don't know if that's because the tea is just always
dangerous or because these specific folks that were doing it
were kind of like grifters and didn't know what they
were doing, weren't actually doing it the traditional way. I'm
not sure if that information exists properly, but this is
another way people would take it as a tea, which

(16:51):
don't don't take tobacco. It's actually pretty easy to kill
yourself by ingesting tobacco. Please don't do that.

Speaker 5 (16:57):
Yeah, I know every now and again, like a pet
will eat a bunch of cigarettes.

Speaker 4 (17:01):
Yeah, and and kill.

Speaker 2 (17:03):
The shit out of you. It's extremely deadly tobacco. But
you know, interesting plant. So the Portuguese were the first
Europeans to begin cultivating tobacco for export to Europe. In
fifteen sixty four, a Royal Navy captain brought the leaf
to Ingoland, and despite early opposition from people who considered
it a filthy, foul drug for foreigners, it took off
their like wildfire.

Speaker 4 (17:25):
Yeah, I just love that. Like the immediate British or
English response.

Speaker 5 (17:29):
Was just like to start was then a phobia and
then move along from there and work out of this
what drug is going to have become a pitcher part
of all of our lives?

Speaker 2 (17:38):
And in Europe. In the UK, the story with tobacco
was similar to the story with coffee, and that a
bunch of like weirdo Christians are like, this is a
heathen drug, we shouldn't do it. And then some king
will like pick up a cigarette or drink some coffee
and be like, oh, yeah, this shit's actually pretty dope.
You know what, I think. We're fine with tobacco.

Speaker 4 (17:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:58):
In coffee's case was literally Pope being like, oh, this
stuff rules, you know what. I'm just gonna baptize it.
Just gonna baptize coffee now Christians can have it.

Speaker 5 (18:06):
And then God changed his mind just like that. Yeah,
omnip being amazing stuff.

Speaker 2 (18:12):
It would be I would give a lot of kudos
to the Pope if he just baptized marijuana so that
Catholics could sue the federal government for restricting it.

Speaker 4 (18:20):
Just imagining him doing fentanyl, like.

Speaker 2 (18:24):
The Pope bless ues fitnyl to protect the kids.

Speaker 4 (18:27):
Yuck, he's dropped it in the.

Speaker 2 (18:28):
Fund to God says, this ship's red. You baby is
going to have a rough one. Now put some fitanyl
in the baptismal fought. Yeah, no, you're gonna want to
give them some narcan, they're not gonna have a good time.

Speaker 8 (18:43):
Yeah, that's what we call it the narth acts because
that was a that was a church joke for you
you kids anyway, Uh yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (18:56):
So the English start smoking tobacco. Uh it gets cold
ctivated in the Jamestown settlement in the seventeenth century, and
by the seventeen thirties, the English colonies in the Virginia
had tobacco factories that were manufacturing significant quantities of the stuff,
mostly as snuff, which was either inhaled or shoot. That
is the predominant way to consume tobacco in the kind

(19:17):
of the early period of colonization of the Americas.

Speaker 5 (19:21):
Was it like because you see pictures of them sometimes
and they got the old timey pipe, right, the long
pipe with a little bowlp yep.

Speaker 4 (19:28):
Yeah. Is that like a class thing?

Speaker 5 (19:30):
Is that like I can afford to have a pipe
in your conus?

Speaker 2 (19:34):
Some of its class cigars are generally like more expensive.
Snuff is very cheap. The other thing though, is that
again not easy to get access to stuff to light
a pipe or to light a cigar. So if you're
smoking a pipe or a cigar, you're probably in your
home right, so you know, the beginning of the day
or the end of the day, or maybe in like
the midday or for a meal, you could have a smoke,

(19:56):
but it's not convenient. You can't just light a pipe
when you're out in the field because like you don't
just have a thing that's on fire with you at
all times. But you can take snuff anytime of day.

Speaker 5 (20:07):
Man, it's addictive, yeah, yeah, extremely, and it's incredibly addictive.

Speaker 2 (20:14):
So all of the colonizing powers competed for a share
of the emerging global tobacco market. And again it's incredibly addictive,
so there's enough interest very quickly to spur rapid innovation
in the field. In eighteen forty three, a French company,
given a monopoly over tobacco by King Louis the fourteenth,
starts manufacturing the very first close to modern cigarettes. Now

(20:36):
people have been smoking again, when Columbus lends up, they
see people like wrapping shit in corn cobs. Those are
like for a couple of centuries, that's how you smoke
a cigarette. You get a corn cob. Sometimes you get
like old paper, like newspaper, like just kind of whatever
papery thing you can fill it with tobacco and smoke it,
you know.

Speaker 4 (20:53):
Yeah, and it's the frenchship ankle was and have never.

Speaker 2 (20:58):
Changed, the French gotts, which are which are still the
worst cigarettes on the market.

Speaker 4 (21:04):
They're still smoking something close to modern cigarettes today.

Speaker 2 (21:09):
Yeah, that was. Those were the most common cigarettes we
smoked in Syria. And it was like the galas that
you couldn't sell in France because the tobacco was too
low grade. Yeah, God, what a horrible cigarette. Yeah, well
it's yeah, it's yeah everywhere. I just have a lot
of memories of like bike racing in France and having

(21:31):
to go in to sign on to these races, and
like you walk in and you just like it's like
like they used to do in nightclubs with the smoke machine,
you know, just like yeah, yeah, yeah, Like you are
also enough to experience like smoking inside in bars, which
isn't a thing anymore.

Speaker 5 (21:45):
And you go and you come out and you're like
that was good for me. And then you see the
guy who is never going to kick your ass in
the race, or it's after the race and the guy
who's just won the race is having a fucking cigarette,
and just remember being one of the most experiences. Yeah,
he's here to the pharmaceutical industry, is what he is.

Speaker 2 (22:04):
Look, kids, if you want to know what it's like
to walk around in a world where people smoke indoors
constantly and in all places, there's an option. Fly to Serbia.
Belgrade will Belgrade will teach you what the seventies was like.

Speaker 4 (22:20):
Waste one.

Speaker 2 (22:21):
Yeah, in a number of ways you'll learn about the seventies.

Speaker 5 (22:25):
In Belgrade, banging hackcuts, go to bell Man.

Speaker 2 (22:29):
Oh, the tracksuits there are unreal.

Speaker 4 (22:33):
That's coming back.

Speaker 2 (22:34):
There's a cycle again when we're talking about what actually
is like a culturally beautiful use for cigarettes. Squatting in
a field with your buddies in a tracksuit and smoking.

Speaker 4 (22:47):
God, it's incredible culture experience.

Speaker 2 (22:50):
Burning through a pack of a knockoff Marlboroughs that have
two extra ease in them.

Speaker 5 (22:57):
It doesn't have the l it's just a you know what.

Speaker 2 (23:02):
You know who else sells discount cigarettes?

Speaker 4 (23:08):
Is it? Sophie? Is that what Sophie does? Sophie.

Speaker 2 (23:10):
If you meet Sophie behind the main gym building after
lunch or after classes, let out, She's always got a
couple of extra packs on hand and she'll sell you.

Speaker 1 (23:20):
Lucy's what what grade am I in? What school? Why
am I out of school?

Speaker 2 (23:24):
Normal age?

Speaker 1 (23:25):
I don't like the association, and.

Speaker 4 (23:27):
Yeah, she's still going there every day.

Speaker 2 (23:29):
Well, that we don't have, we can't fund our podcast.

Speaker 1 (23:34):
For some reason, also reflects on you, so we.

Speaker 2 (23:38):
Ask you to stop. But here we are, Sophie. Let's
let let's be honest with ourselves. If I were to
get caught selling loose cigarettes to children behind a high school,
it would only increase my popularity.

Speaker 4 (23:49):
Do not take.

Speaker 2 (23:52):
Un I'm trying to get I'm trying to get them
off the Jewels anti action. I've got a Joe Camel
tattoo on my chest.

Speaker 1 (24:05):
Oh my god, let's.

Speaker 9 (24:07):
Let's just add.

Speaker 5 (24:12):
Yeah, I'm going to spend this whole episode trying not
to say what is a homophobic slur in this country?

Speaker 6 (24:17):
By the way, we're back and James is discussing how
difficult it is to talk about cigarettes as a British
person without saying something that's offensive.

Speaker 4 (24:36):
That's right. Yeah, there's a word that we use in Britain. Cigarettes.

Speaker 5 (24:39):
So American people used to be horrible to gay people
and I'm not going to use it. It's very difficult
for me.

Speaker 2 (24:45):
So it is now it doesn't not. I mean, I
think the slur comes from the harmless term, which also
if you read JR or token, you will see that
word used constantly in its original meaning.

Speaker 4 (25:00):
It is a little bit off footing sometimes.

Speaker 5 (25:02):
But then the people I grew up well Exatinly where
my grandmother lived, right in rural Devon was very like
people still use the valdai.

Speaker 4 (25:11):
Yeah, but yeah, that that word.

Speaker 5 (25:13):
Would be used to describe like a small it's a
type of food, right, there's a food that uses that word,
but also like a small bundle of.

Speaker 2 (25:20):
Hay, a bundle of sticks or whatever.

Speaker 5 (25:22):
Yeah, any package, and I think get one.

Speaker 4 (25:25):
You can call it your Amazon word.

Speaker 2 (25:28):
Yeah, it's it's it's anyway whatever language. So it's amazing,
so uh yeah all yeah. So in the fourteenth or Louis,
the fourteenth gives the first French company a monopoly over
tobacco production and they start manufacturing cigarettes, which all have
to be handled at this point. But this is the

(25:49):
first time that like a company is selling people cigarettes
pretty much the first time that a company is selling
like a large company is trying to make cigarettes into
like a major business. Prior to this, if you bought cigarettes,
most people who smoked cigarettes were like poor people, and
you would just you would have a bag of tobacco
and you'd wrap it and shit right, or you know,

(26:09):
rolling papers even aren't aren't a thing that you could
just go out and get. The other way you would
get it is you would go to a tobacconist who
has someone roll them and you would buy them. Cigarettes
were generally, because of this, the least favorite method of
tobacco consumption. They were seen as the thing that like
homeless people smoked, because the most common way to smoke
cigarettes was to like go outside of a place where

(26:31):
people with more money had been hanging out, like a bar,
and pick up the cigarette, the cigar butts and like
then roll them into a cigarette read.

Speaker 4 (26:41):
And it came out.

Speaker 6 (26:41):
Then, man, it is the worst smoke I can imagine.

Speaker 5 (26:45):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that is bleak.

Speaker 2 (26:50):
Yeah yeah, but my god, that guy. The only person
today who could smoke on the level of a smoker
back then would be maybe Rudy Giuliani. You gotta give him,
he's one of these weirdos. Cigars. You don't inhale a
cigar unless your specific kind of cigar smoker who believes

(27:10):
that everyone else is wrong by not inhaling their cigars.
I forget what they call themselves, but Rudy is one
of them. He's an inhaler. He takes it all in. Baby.
I think cancer is just repudiated by him. He's refused.
That's gonna be bad for the cancer brand.

Speaker 1 (27:28):
Man.

Speaker 4 (27:29):
Yeah, I don't want to get.

Speaker 2 (27:30):
Mixed up with Juliani. So cigarettes start to get popular
with Europeans during hour right after the Crimean War when
soldiers you know who, returned, because the Crimean War is
a lot of it's in areas kind of a budding
in around Turkey, and so they encounter Turkish cigarettes. And
the Turks have been smoking cigarettes and making cigarettes for

(27:54):
a bit longer, and they decide they like the Turkish
tobacco is good and it's milder than the stuff that
they had add had access to. In eighteen fifty six,
one veteran of the war opens London's first cigarette factory,
which is called Sweet Threes. He has joined a few
years later by another English entrepreneur who creates the second
major cigarette factory in London. And this guy's name is

(28:16):
Philip Morris. Oh wow, so yeah, that's where that comes from.

Speaker 5 (28:19):
It yeah he is.

Speaker 2 (28:21):
Yeah, there he is old Philip Boris. Yeah, a man
with a body count that would rival fucking Hitler. So
at this point, all cigarettes are still rolled by hand.
Most are still sold by small retailers. But then the
Civil War happens in the United States, and right after
the Civil War things start to change. And I'm going
to quote now from a write up in the Journal

(28:41):
of Antiques. Seeing an opportunity in the emerging market for cigarettes,
tobacco man F. S. Kenny began cigarette production in New
York City, as well as a factory in Richmond, Virginia,
turning out brands with names like Full Dress, Sweet Caporal, Kenny,
Straight Cut, and Sportsman's Corporeal. Using similar blinds. Kenny's chief
competitor in the New York market was Good Winning Company,
which sold nationally advertised cigarettes with folksy sounding brand names

(29:05):
such as Old Judge, Canvas Black, and Welcome. Firms became
known as the Big Six of the cigarette industry by
the eighteen seventies, as they gained control of seventy five
percent of national sales. There were, of course, hundreds of
smaller cigarette firms operating out of backroom shops in most
major northern cities, but their distribution capabilities were usually very limited.

(29:25):
I love old cigarette brand names. I would I would
smoke Old Judge. I think i'd have been an old
Judge man. Well, yeah, there was one that was particularly
great old. It was one of them called old Black.
Uh no, there's Old Judge canvas back and.

Speaker 5 (29:40):
Well, okay, I thought it was canvas black, like what
it would do due to the old lungs. For the yeah, welcome,
I think I just make a welcome cigarettember welcome. Yeah,
you get one on your pillow when you go into
a hotel room. That's the kind of vibe that has.

Speaker 2 (29:53):
Yeah. It reminds me that that old Bill Hicks bet
when he's like, I'm love that they've put the warning
labels on the cigarettes. Lets me know which ones to
a void. I'm not gonna buy the lung cancer cigarettes
low birth weights though. Give me one of that. So
tobacco obviously is bad for you. It caused problems for
people because it's never good for you to smoke, or

(30:15):
especially on a regular basis, as people are increasingly doing
in this period. But the harms are still minimal and
they're pretty much impossible to see on a wide basis. Right,
very few people are able to smoke regularly throughout their
day for one thing. For another thing. You know, there's
there's not good matches the ones that people do have
matches in this period, but they're phosphorus based and they're
incredibly dangerous. It's like carrying a flash bang in your pocket.

(30:40):
I've seen no issue with that. I think that's amazing. Yeah,
that's a good idea. Yeah, I just want to whip
off a rot of phosphorus.

Speaker 4 (30:48):
Great. Is it like literally like like white phosphorus, Like.

Speaker 2 (30:53):
I mean, I don't know if it's like white phosphorus,
but yeah, I mean it's it's like a phosphorus, like
you grind up a bunch of foss f us and
then you strike it.

Speaker 8 (31:01):
I think, amazing, falling over and then yeah.

Speaker 4 (31:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:08):
And of course your beard oil and hair oil is
all alcohol and petroleum based. Your shirt has been washed
in pure ghastly, so you just gotch immediately on fire.

Speaker 4 (31:19):
Yeah. Yeah, cigarettes will kill you, but not in the
way you're expecting.

Speaker 2 (31:23):
Yeah. This is the period in which like spontaneous human
combustion starts to be a thing. And it's because everything
is flammable and everybody's carrying around fire bombs in their pockets. Yeah,
but yeah, again, as as much as we joke about it, heart,
it's if you were to tell someone's cigarettes are bad,
Like that's pretty obvious if you're hanging out with someone

(31:43):
today who was a smoker, because smoker's cough, right, and like,
you know, you joke about it if you're a smoker, like, yeah,
you know it's killing me whatever smoking cigarette, it's not
hard to be like put two and two together, like, oh,
this is bad for me. It wouldn't have been as
obvious back then. For one thing, yeah, smoker's cough. But
also you know who else coughs is people who live
in dense cities where the main method of transportation is horses.

(32:05):
And so there are okay, so New York City. The
most famous style of houses in New York City, they
have these big tall porches, right that are like four
or five or six feet off the ground. Those big
porches that New York and other East Coast cities have
exist because there would be so much shit in the
main streets that when it rained, there would be rivers
of feces and rotting carcasses of animals rush, and you

(32:28):
didn't want it to get near lake your house.

Speaker 4 (32:31):
So you could just sit there and watch the sling by.

Speaker 2 (32:35):
If somebody, if people are walking around coughing and looking sick,
your first guest isn't going to be it's probably the cigarettes.

Speaker 4 (32:44):
A lot of place.

Speaker 2 (32:46):
It really was a nightmare to be alive.

Speaker 5 (32:49):
Yeah, Jesus Christ, I'm surprised of the species we made
it cost that.

Speaker 2 (32:53):
It's it's striking, But you don't have to make it
very long to produce a bunch of kids and then
leave them fatherless.

Speaker 4 (33:00):
That's true. As you floaged off down the.

Speaker 2 (33:03):
Let's just throw your cup corpse in the shit river
and the cycle continues.

Speaker 4 (33:08):
Yeah, it's a circle of life.

Speaker 2 (33:10):
Cigarettes in the eighteen seventies were still a novelty to
most smokers. Less than two percent of people who smoked
used cigarettes. Again, the most common method of tobacco consumption
is not even smoking at all, but it was chewing
what was called plug tobacco, and it was into this
world and this market. Then a man named James Buchanan
Duke stepped in the nineteen or in the eighteen eighties.

(33:31):
Duke had been born on December twenty third, eighteen fifty
six near Durham, North Carolina, and his father was the
owner of a small tobacco company, which was eventually named W.
Duke and Sons Company or W. Duke Sons in Company.
Duke watched in eighteen seventy three as a powerful depression
hit the United States and temporarily cigarettes swelled in popularity

(33:52):
because the urban poor could afford cigarettes, right, So that
was you know, when they started to take off, and
he looks at the being an intelligent capitalist, He's like,
we're probably going to continue to have horrible economic crashes
because it seems like the system is designed to do
this every like five to ten years. So I bet
cigarettes have a bright future ahead of them if I

(34:13):
can find a way an amazing cheaper Yeah.

Speaker 5 (34:19):
People start expecting them more in times of depression because
they they didn't have food and they wanted to not
be hungry.

Speaker 2 (34:25):
They wanted to not be hungry. It's also just like
one of the few things you can afford, period, if
you're poor is a cigarette. Because they're they're cheap, They're
cheaper than food in a lot of cases, they're certainly
the cheapest method of getting tobacco. They're cheaper than drinking.
It's just like it's a little comfort that you can
have if you're a fucking tramp living on the street
in the eighteen seventies, because there's there's not a whole

(34:46):
lot of other things for you, but the cigarette is there.

Speaker 4 (34:50):
Wait, the working man's friend, isn't it.

Speaker 2 (34:52):
It is the working man. Look again, if you're on
the street in the eighteen seventies, they are risks of
a cigarette, or the least of certain you might.

Speaker 4 (35:01):
Get concussed by floating to.

Speaker 2 (35:04):
Yeah, it's the shit rivers, the main problem you've got
to deal with.

Speaker 4 (35:09):
He's drowning in a river of wholeseshit.

Speaker 5 (35:13):
Yeah, I'd be smoking whatever. Of course, of course they
invented crack beyond that too.

Speaker 2 (35:19):
Yeah, you want to get out of that situation as
quickly as possible.

Speaker 4 (35:22):
Yeah, absolutely, Yeah, so a godsent.

Speaker 2 (35:26):
Absolutely so. Duke at this point in time, his brothers
and his father were like locked into this vicious competition
with Bull Durham Tobacco, which was run by a guy
named W. T. Blackwell and was like the big tobacco
producer of the day. Duke saw this as a pointless
fight because they're fighting over plug tobacco. He knew that
the future of the industry was not in plug tobacco,
it was producing something convenient and cheap for urban poor people.

(35:50):
In eighteen eighty two, his company had just ten cigarette
rollers on the line, and so these are individual people.
Cigarettes are made like cigars, by random by just like
people who know how to do it. The first thing
he did was add fifty more rollers, which still put
him well behind the Allen and Ginter factory up in Richmond,
which employed four hundred and fifty female cigarette rollers. But
when a New York City cigarette factory went on strike,

(36:11):
Duke convinced one hundred and twenty five of their workers
to move down to Durham in eighteen eighty three, offering
to pay their moving expenses and giving them the highest
wages in the industry. This was a good deal for
these people for a while. But if you know anything
about capitalists, you know Duke has no desire to create
well paid jobs for laborers. These people are a stopgap.
He's thinking like uber here, right, I want to corner

(36:33):
the market and then find a way to get the
human beings out of it, to replace them with machines.

Speaker 4 (36:39):
No, he's not saying he's working freebit it.

Speaker 2 (36:43):
Works a lot better for cigarettes than it does for Uber.
Turns out this is actually a pretty reasonable business plan
for cigarettes.

Speaker 5 (36:50):
Both of them will kill you, but it's a self
driving cause, and a cigarettes get his self driving cass
will do it fasten.

Speaker 2 (36:56):
Yeah, the cigarettes will do it a little more ethically.
Though he was in the his goal was again he
wanted to make He wants to make the most profitable
tobacco company in the world, and the way to do
that is to rat fuck your laborers. For now though
he needed them, and by eighteen eighty five he had
about seven hundred hand rollers in two factories. Most of
these are again a young women. This is reasonably well

(37:17):
paying work for young women. He's got a quality control
team that checks the work. So they're trying to put
out like as uniform a product as possible. But that's
not really easy to do. And everyone in the industry
making cigarettes knows it's kind of slowly expanding, and they
know that we can make these a lot cheaper and
a lot more profitable for us if we can replace

(37:37):
the human beings with machine rollers. So a couple of
companies actually put out a bounty in order to produce
a machine roller. And I'm going to quote what comes
next from that write up from the Journal of Antiques.
A young man named James Bosnak approached Duke with a
cigarette making machine he had invented. The young inventor had
previously gone to the now Big four companies, but had
been turned down because his machine was prone to break down,

(38:00):
plus there was a belief that consumers would never accept
a machine made cigarette. Duke put top mechanics to work,
iiring out the bugs in the Bonzack machine, and signed
a deal with the inventor. During his first year of production,
using his team of important hand rollers, Duke turned out
nine point eight million cigarettes. In contrast, using the Bonsack
machines enabled him to produce seven hundred and forty four

(38:21):
million cigarettes in eighteen eighty eight. So eighteen eighty one,
nine point eight million cigarettes, he gets the Bonsack machine
seven hundred and forty four million. That is a snick
at significant increase in production.

Speaker 5 (38:36):
That right there as a turning point. Huh, that's going
to change a few things.

Speaker 2 (38:40):
So he's making a lot of cigarettes now, which is great.
He's able to make them half as expensive as they
were before, and he's able to, like number one, sell
them for cheaper and also make a lot more profit
for per cigarette. But there's problem, which is that only
about two percent of Americans who smoke smokes itigarettes, and

(39:01):
so the fact that he's making seven hundred and thirty
million more cigarettes per year means that he's got a
lot of cigarettes he can't sell because there's just not
that many smokers out there. So this is a this
is a problem for Old Duke, and Duke realizes that, like,
if he's going to make this thing profitable, what he's
going to have to do is create demand for cigarettes.

(39:23):
He's going to have to convince Americans that they actually
want not just to smoke cigarettes, but to smoke a
shitload of them. Because one of the things that becomes
clear is like, well, we went from nine point eight
million is seven hundred and forty four million for nothing.
We could make billions of these year. This wouldn't be
a problem at all. We just need that many smokers
to exist. So that's a difficult task, right, Old Duke

(39:47):
is going to need to actually like create a hunger
for billions of cigarettes in the world in order to
make this payoff. And that's exactly what he does next.

Speaker 5 (39:59):
Great, yeah, so wonderful world of tobacco marketing.

Speaker 2 (40:04):
Yes, it's that's what we're that's what we're building towards here.
So one of the things that happens when Duke starts
manufacturing his cigarettes is that suddenly no corporation can afford
to sell cigarettes without rolling them on a Bonzac machine.
It just is so much more efficient. And because Duke
hand helped fix the Bonzac machines, he owns part of

(40:25):
the patent effectively, So one of the ways he's making
money is that everyone who's making cigarettes is giving money
to Duke. He Also, one of the things he does
that's smart is in order to kind of everyone's worried, Okay,
are people not gonna want to smoke cigarettes that are
rolled by machine? Duke starts bragging that his cigarettes or
machine rolled. He puts it on the packages as like

(40:46):
a way of like, just what if we just trying
to convince people that machine rolled is better than handwriting.
It's cleaner, it's more hygienic, it's more modern, right, all
of which is technically true. The next I want to
quote from a book called The Cigarette Century by Alan Brandt.
By eighteen eighty four, while his competitors were still hesitating,
Duke had installed two Bonzack machines in his Durrow factory.

(41:07):
A year later, after experimenting to improve the machine's performance,
Duke signed a secret contract in which he agreed that
he would produce all his cigarettes with the Bonzac machine.
In return, Bonzac reduced Duke's royalties to twenty cents per thousand.
Duke and Bonzac soon reached a further agreement guaranteeing Duke
of twenty five percent discount on royalties against all other manufacturers. Also,
Duke shrewdly hired one of Bonzac's disgruntled mechanics, William Thomas O'Brien,

(41:30):
to operate his machines, assuring fewer breakdowns than his competition.
By June eighteen eighty six, O'Brien was meticulously maintaining ten machines.
Duke placed a heavy emphasis on efficiency and continuous production.
The lessons he learned to developing the mass production of
cigarettes he would soon apply more broadly to industrial organization.
By becoming Bonzak's premier customer, Duke secured essential control over

(41:50):
its technology and turned Bonzac's patent into a powerful competitive advantage.
It was increasingly common for inventors to relinquish their patents
to corporations. Duke understood the control of the bonsacked patent
through his secret discounted licensing agreement was a critical lever
in dominating the cigarette trade. His deal with Bonzac reflected
an important change in the character of the patent system

(42:10):
from a legal mechanism protecting independent inventors to one that
would protect large and powerful corporations. Duke is, what he's
done here is in the modern usage of patents corporations
for corporate advantage. Right, Like, everyone who is who, like
every business leader who follows in any kind of industry
is going to copy.

Speaker 4 (42:28):
Yes, yeah, man, that might be one of the things
that's killed more people than.

Speaker 2 (42:32):
Cigarettes, right Like, yeah, yeah, because a lot of medical
patents and stuff that works on the same fucking idea,
you know.

Speaker 4 (42:39):
Yeah, nearly every nearly every drug is patented.

Speaker 2 (42:43):
And of course he's not trying to do anything evil
with it. He just wants everyone to smoke cigarettes, perfectly, perfectly, morally, uncomplicated, ironically.

Speaker 5 (42:54):
I just we talked about it on the episode of
It Could Happen Here on Monday. But UCLA is pursuing
an IP case in India about a prostate counter drug
called egg Standy, which they're trying to stop a generic production,
a cheaper generic production of But I'm just imagining the
old handshake mean between CLA and Duke here and giving

(43:14):
people king service. The thing.

Speaker 4 (43:18):
Coming together.

Speaker 2 (43:19):
That's beautiful. So the Bonzac machine quickly replaced human rollers
who left the cigarette industry to roll cigars, which is
the only form of tobacco that's going to prove immune
to the corporate age that Duke is ushering in. Through
the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties, cigarette smoking increased, and
the size of a pack doubled from ten to twenty,
taking advantage of how easy it was to smoke.

Speaker 4 (43:40):
Now.

Speaker 2 (43:40):
The first proper matchbooks, invented in the early twentieth century
helped spur adoption, but by nineteen hundred, still less than
two percent of tobacco consumers are smoking cigarettes. Now, Duke
knows that his dream of selling cigarettes to the world
is not going to work if he can't convince Americans
that they wanted to smoke, and that they wanted to
smoke as a habit. So he set out to do
something no one had ever really done before, which was

(44:02):
create a market for a product using advertising. Obviously, merchants
since time immemorial had advertised their wares and attempted to
set themselves apart from the competition. But what Duke is
doing is new. Duke is trying to convince people they
want to do something they haven't done that that's not
really been a thing in capitalism up to this point.

(44:23):
It's one thing to be like, hey, I'm Samuel Colt.
I've invented a better handgun like you want. If you
want a handgun, you want a handgun. My job with
my marketing is is to convince you mind's the best, right,
But you're not convincing people well now I need a gun, right,
like they decide they need a gun because it's the
fucking eighteen eighties or what fucking Duke is like. These

(44:43):
people are fine without cigarettes. That's this isn't a problem.
There's not a need that I'm trying to serve here.
I have to create it. And one of the first
plays he's going to do this is really quite innovative
and it ends in a surprising place. So in the
late eighteen eighties, for much tradesmen had set to making stiff,
colorful cards to advertise their businesses. These cards often featured

(45:07):
illustrations of women generally wearing very little clothing, or sports heroes,
or like historical landmarks to make them collectible and thus
give individual people a reason to keep a business card
in their possession. Now we don't know where Duke first
heard about this phenomenon, but starting in the eighteen eighties,
he had a print shop installed in his Durham factory

(45:28):
that could make color prints. At first, he printed out
the standard advertisements and coupons that most businessmen used, but
soon he hit upon an idea and I'm going to
quote from Duke University here, with each pack of cigarettes,
a small cardboard insert was added to stiff in the box.
Duke employed a little imagination and turned these simple workhourses
into a powerful marketing tool by printing the brand name
of the cigarettes along with a picture that was part

(45:49):
of a larger series in which was meant to be collected.
Series of birds, flags, civil war generals, and baseball players
were employed frequently with historical or educational information on them.
Photographs of actresses, women placed in a variety of poses,
and often rather revealing costumes for the time were also
used on the insert cards and exceeded all expectations and
their popularity along the public. So a lot of these

(46:13):
trading cards, and these are the first trading cards, are
outright pornographic, at least by nineteenth century standards, and there
are outcries against the practice because the people who want
them the most are young boys. Are kids, right, kids
start smoking to collect trading cards. That's what how juvenile
smoking starts at the United States. Great They want the

(46:34):
collect baseball cards and to do so they have to
buy packs of cigarettes. And this works like gang. It
increases cigarette sales massively. It's a really successful ad campaign.
But it also leads to a wave of young cigarette
addicts who are also getting into porn, which is difficult
for people to accept. Busy bodies of the day to accept.

(46:55):
One of those busy bodies included Duke's father, who wrote
this letter to his son in eighteen ninety four. My
dear son, I have received the enclosed letter from the
Reverend from the Reverend John C. Hokott, and am much
impressed with the wisdom of his argument against circulating lascivious
photographs with cigarettes, and have made up my mind to
bring the matter to your attention and the interest of morality,
and in the hope that you can invent a proper

(47:16):
substitute for these pictures which will answer your requirements as
an advertisement as well as an inducement to purchase. His
views are so thoroughly and plainly stated that I do
not know how I can add anything except to state
that they accord with my own, and that I have
always looked upon the distribution of this character of advertisement
is wrong in its pernicious effects upon young men and womenhood,
and therefore has not jingled with my religious impulses, outside

(47:39):
of the fact that we owe Christianity all the assistance
we can lend it in any form which is paramount
to any other consideration. I am fully convinced that this
mode of advertising will be used and greatly strengthened the
arguments against will be used, and will greatly strengthen the
arguments against cigarettes and the legislative halls of the States.
I hope you will consider this carefully and appreciate my
side of the question. It would please me very much

(48:00):
to know that a change has been made. Duke does
not make a change he is fined with it. Yeah,
so Duke is obviously not going to turn his back
on all of this money because of simple morality. Instead,
he publishes advertising that encourages kids to complete sets of
trading cards, and he expands his advertising budget to keep

(48:22):
a steady stream of new collectibles going out with his cigarettes.
It was a stunning success, and, as Alan Brandt notes, quote,
this commodity connected collecting was a lasting innovation that continues
today with baseball cards and Pokemon. Duke had discovered important
incentives for smoking in the cultural rituals of youth. We
owe pokemon to cigarettes. Amazing, that's incredible.

Speaker 5 (48:44):
Yeah, yeah, wow, I'm just imagine buying a pack of
mulbras to see him like a scourge, a shiny Cha
median or something.

Speaker 2 (48:53):
Honestly, what about our culture wouldn't be better if, like,
in order to get a magic the Gathering Deck, you
had to smoke three entire cartons of Paul Moss.

Speaker 4 (49:06):
Yeah. I love that. It's just it's like the happy
meal of cigarettes. It's great. It's perfect.

Speaker 2 (49:12):
To match it like some nerdy sixteen year old like
lying on his side, like puking as he smokes his
fiftieth cigarette of the day. I need a lightning bolt card.

Speaker 5 (49:24):
He's trying to evolve his peak atue good dies of
smoking inhalation, trying to get a bulbo sore.

Speaker 4 (49:35):
I choose you lung cancer.

Speaker 2 (49:37):
Now you know what else will give you lung cancer? James?

Speaker 4 (49:41):
Is it the cigarettes that Sophie's saying to children behind
the it is?

Speaker 2 (49:45):
It is the cigarettes that Sophie's sells to children behind
the school are very likely to cause cancer. But uh,
you know that's the way it works, Okay.

Speaker 4 (50:00):
So.

Speaker 2 (50:07):
Ah, God, aren't we living well today? What a beautiful
world we have in this America that I love? How
are you all, Sophie?

Speaker 1 (50:26):
I'm just thoroughly disappointed in your actions? What else is new?

Speaker 2 (50:32):
Well, Sophie, you know what I'm not disappointed by is
the innovative thought leaders in big tobacco building the modern
world and inventing pokemon. So Duke understood instinctively that children
were the future of cigarettes. Established tobacco consumers had already
had their preferences like set for plug tobacco or snuff,

(50:52):
or for pipe tobacco or cigars, and these methods involved
less consumption or at least pickier consumers. Cigarettes smoked quickly
and more conveniently than other tobacco products, and they caused
less mess. They were also more addictive, which allowed for
a quick and repeatable high any time. Again, most people
were chewing tobacco prior to this, So if people start
smoking instead of chewing, suddenly you don't have buckets of

(51:14):
spit all over the place. Again, probably a net positive.
Now that said, you also have like more people smoking
in public places, which is a negative. But anyway. The
New York Times publishes an article at the time that
complains about Duke's attempt to entice boys to excessive cigarette smoking,
and notes every possible device has been employed to interest

(51:35):
the juvenile mind, notably the lithograph album. Youngsters seeking these
picture books clamoring for the reward of self inflicted injury.
Many a boy under twelve years is striving for the
entire collection, which necessitates the consumption of nearly twelve thousand cigarettes.
They're like trying to collect these picture books and smoking

(51:55):
twelve thousand cigarettes.

Speaker 4 (51:58):
That is how you got your mole. Oh if that
is a rough a music.

Speaker 2 (52:04):
That is an setting amount of cigarettes.

Speaker 4 (52:06):
Yeah, that's a lot of cigarettes.

Speaker 2 (52:09):
Wow, Yeah, that is that is an outrageous quantity of cigarettes.
Duke can just hit upon a baller way to move cigarettes.
He'd effectively invented the concept of collectible products as advertisements.
He starts doing like sweepstakes right where you collect you know,
different things that are on the boxes to turn them
in to see if you can win like a prize.

Speaker 4 (52:29):
And it's yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:30):
He also just like gives stuff. So basically everything from
how McDonald's happy Meals and like Funko pops to every
product sweep steaks you've ever seen are all descendants of
what Duke is inventing in this period, which is just
like different ways to get cigarettes in kids' mouths. We
like all the entire toolbox of capitalism is being created.

(52:51):
It's being created to push cigarettes to children. Duke changed
his company's name to American Tobacco, which reflected his ambition
to be the alpha and omega of tobacco sales and
production in the United States. He poured unheard of amounts
of money into his ad budget, soon spending nearly a
quarter of the money he made on sales on ads.
His competitors were forced to pour similar amounts of cash

(53:12):
into their own efforts igniting the first national billboard War
and leading to a massive surge in the amount of
visual advertising in the United States. This is what starts
to fill the country side up with ads with like
billboards and other kinds of big public ads. Is Duke
spending all this money on cigarette ads?

Speaker 4 (53:30):
Wow? So in ad gave us the monkey wrench Gang?

Speaker 2 (53:36):
Yeah, so he is. He has, in the space of
what we've talked about so far, given us like modern
patent law and all of the people that get killed
as a result of medical device patents. He's given us
trading cards, He's given us like sweepstakes and like toy collecting,
and he's given us fucking billboards and the monkey Wrinch Gang.

(53:56):
So that's that's a lot for one guy. Yeah, real
mikes bag. Now, one of the things that this does,
he's made it impossible, very close to impossible, for new
companies to get into the cigarette business. Number One, you
have to be able to buy a cigarette machine to
be profitable, and that costs money. Number Two, you have
to have a shitload of cash to make ads. So

(54:17):
just like some young upstart who wants to sell cigarettes
to people isn't going to be able to get into
the business unless they're backed by some serious moneyed interests,
because it's just too expensive to get into it. From
the late eighteen eighties, Duke sent out regular feelers to
his competitors asking if they'd be open to a buyout.
Most of them turned him down, but as the eighteen
hundreds drew to a close, the fortunes of Duke and

(54:39):
his competitors, the fortunes that Duke and his competitors were
throwing into ads had them all looking for a better way.
They're just spending too much damn money competing with each other.
In January of eighteen ninety, Duke strong armed his fellow
tobacco lords to join a consortium, the American Tobacco Company,
which would seek to monopolize not just tobacco sold in
the United States, but produced as well. Overnight, the American

(55:01):
Tobacco Company was responsible for ninety percent of all cigarette
sales in the United States. Duke had formed a monopoly,
getting his competitors to agree to fixed prices and wages
in order to save money on advertising and production, and
to avoid the struggles for dominance that had devoured their
money in recent years. This was a winning strategy, and
as Duke took total control over the tobacco market. Prices

(55:21):
fell for consumers, but this also meant a lot less
money for farmers, and the trust brought an end to
competitive bidding for tobacco harvests. As Alan Brandt makes clear,
in a single minded quest to control the future of tobacco,
Duke helped invent the modern concept of a mega corporation,
blazing a trail that would be followed by every ambitious
capitalist to come quote. Together, these three departments Audit, which

(55:43):
oversaw accounting and cost control, leaf and retail markets assured
the movement of cured tobacco from warehouse to factory to sales.
Individuals with specific expertise headed each department. The audit department,
for example, introduced innovative accounting procedures that would later be
utilized by many other industries. The success of Duke's enterprise,
which became a model for other industries, rested on salaried

(56:04):
executives who could assure the efficient functioning of their aspect
of the business, as well as tight coordination with other
departments and activities. In short, he invented the middle manager.

Speaker 4 (56:16):
Just another wonderful contribution to society.

Speaker 2 (56:19):
He's really just humming along here, creating the modern world.

Speaker 4 (56:22):
Yeah, he's taking them off. Now.

Speaker 2 (56:24):
One of the things that you know, when you invent
the middle manager, one of the things that you've done
is you've created the concept that's going to make up
most of the ranks of the emerging middle class. Right.
What are a lot of people in the middle class.
They're fucking middle managers, right, which is also a lot
of the people who are going to be tobacco consumers.

Speaker 4 (56:42):
Right.

Speaker 2 (56:43):
He's helping to create the basis of consumer culture here
as he builds effectively helps to build the idea of
a kind of new class structure in a lot of ways. Obviously,
like middle management had existed before, but not in the
kind of quantity that it had because prior to Duke,
you've got a lot of tobacco being made and sold,

(57:04):
and you've got a different sort of tobacco companies middle managers.
But the companies are all much smaller, and it's like
this company we handle production. This company like we we
handle like we get the tobacco from the farmers and
we process it. You know, we're the people who roll
it and sell it directly to the consumers. He's rolling
all of this into one giant venture, and instead of
the constituent parts being made up of small business owners,

(57:27):
the constituent parts are managed by middle managers who are
operating like rungs inside of this larger corporate structure. He's
not the first guy to do this, but he's the
first guy to do this and be this successful with it.

Speaker 4 (57:41):
Yeah. Yeah, So it's a convertically integrated supply.

Speaker 2 (57:44):
Chain, right, exactly exactly, So that's pretty cool. Everywhere he
cut out independent manufacturers and free agents, small reslers, and rollers.
The entire tobacco market went from an artisanal industry with
strong unions to a vast factory for the production of
identical machine rolled cigarettes. The only piece of the tobacco

(58:05):
business that successfully resisted and that maintained its high level
of unionization were cigars, which, for whatever reason, are kind
of immune to modernity.

Speaker 4 (58:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (58:15):
I'm just realizing this guy is like Jeff Bezos.

Speaker 2 (58:17):
He's the Besos of cigarettes.

Speaker 4 (58:20):
Yeah, yeah, which, Jeff Bezos.

Speaker 5 (58:22):
I'm sure we'd love to be the Besis of cigarettes
along with being on Bezos almost everything else.

Speaker 2 (58:26):
Because it's a great thing to be the Bezos of.
So kudos to cigars. For being respect yeah, respect to
the cigar industry for fighting back against this. But obviously
Duke barely notices that, like he's you know, losing out
on this chunk of the business. He tells his board
that quote, the world is now our market for our product.

(58:48):
And in nineteen oh two he sets upon the goal
of getting the world to start adopting cigarettes. He signs
a deal with his largest foreign rival, the UK's Imperial Tobacco,
and they formed the British American Tobacco Corporation.

Speaker 4 (59:00):
Of course, that's what the British wants called.

Speaker 2 (59:02):
Yes, and they do. They're doing a tobacco imperialism, right.
They're going out with a goal of convincing people nations
who had never smoked to smoke now. And Jordan Goodman,
the author of Tobacco in History, notes to him every
cigarette was the same. All of the globalization that we
are now familiar with through McDonald's and Starbucks, all of

(59:22):
that was preceded by Duke and the cigarette. So not
only is he getting people hooked on cigarettes, he's getting
them hooked on the idea of this is a product
that comes under a specific brand and everyone in the
world consumes the same product the same way, right that
you know, you may you maybe if you're a cigarette
smoker in Turkey in the early eighteen hundreds and a
cigarette smoker in France, a cigarette smoker in the United States,

(59:44):
you are smoking something that was rolled down the street
from you at a shop, right, and probably tobacco that
was grown fairly close to you. There's a little bit
of movement around then around the world, but generally speaking,
you're consuming a local product because everything is pretty local.
He has invented the idea that no, no, no, if
you're going to be in a cigarettes, you're going to
smoke this specific kind of cigarette, and everyone on Earth

(01:00:07):
does it the same way.

Speaker 4 (01:00:09):
Wow. Yeah, yeah, it's crazy.

Speaker 5 (01:00:10):
It's like, yeah, he's now more or less invented like
the global commodity, right.

Speaker 2 (01:00:15):
Yeah, yeah, this is like it's one of the very
first yeah, and probably the I think the first that's
like an individual consumer good, right, because this is starting
to happen with like steel and with fuel and stuff. Right,
But you as an individual are like going down to
the store to pick up you know, some fucking petroleum
or some cold generally, but you're gonna go down and

(01:00:35):
get a cigarette that's made by the British American company
every day, whether you live in fucking Tokyo or timbucktoo.
It hasn't spread quite that far yet, but this is
what's going to happen. Right. By nineteen oh four, cigarettes
had finally cracked five percent of the American market for
tobacco products. That seems small, but that means it's more
than doubled in a couple of years. Yea, Duke saw

(01:00:57):
them as the smart, smart product to push, but he
spent several years cornering the markets on plug and pipe
tobacco too, so they're selling everything. It's also worth noting that,
like Duke is a cigar man himself, he does not
understand why people like cigarettes. He does not like cigarettes.
He just is betting that they're going to be a
big deal, right perfect. So before he can kind of

(01:01:20):
take this idea further, though, the United States Congress starts
looking into his tobacco trust, which is, you know, what
he's made with American tobacco, He's formed a monopoly, and
they decide it's in violation of the Sherman Anti Trust Act,
which had also been created in eighteen ninety. Now it
took the governmental while to actually get to American tobacco,
and by the time it starts looking into things, American

(01:01:40):
tobacco controls not just ninety percent of the cigarette trade,
but seventy five to eighty five percent of all tobacco
sold in the United States. Duke had even recently started
buying up companies who were producing licorice paste to make
sweeter flavored cigarettes. So he's again a fucking trailblazer.

Speaker 4 (01:01:57):
Yeah. Yeah, guys, you can try out in a great direction.

Speaker 2 (01:02:01):
Necessarily maybe not in the best direction, but you can't.
You can't deny the man knows what he's doing. Yeah,
this is a dude who loves to make How rich
was this guy? I mean it doesn't because if you
actually translate it, it's just going to wind up being
in the tens of millions, which makes it like, effectively
he is a billionaire in his day, right, like for
everything that matters, you know, Yeah, he has infinity dollars.

Speaker 5 (01:02:26):
You do have to think how different would the world
be if we've just given him Twitter and he could
have done an Elon Musk and solve the war in
Ukraine instead of inventing new ways to give kids cancer.

Speaker 2 (01:02:36):
This new cigarette's gonna work as a boat briefly. So
this puts Duke about twenty years ahead of the invention
of the first menthol cigarettes. And we're not going to
talk a lot about this, but I have to let
you know that menthol cigarettes are invented by a man
named Lloyd spud Hughes, great, very very funny name. So

(01:03:02):
Duke is like a generation ahead of the competition. But
that's not enough to protect him from the Department of Justice, which,
and this is weird, used to actually punish corporations for
monopolistic behavior. This was the thing you could get in
trouble for back the way.

Speaker 5 (01:03:16):
Yeah. Yeah, rubber coming out and support of the DJ.

Speaker 2 (01:03:20):
Yeah, well, they don't do a good job of this,
so I'm not supportive, but it is more than they
try to do today.

Speaker 1 (01:03:28):
I'm more familiar with the not doing a good job part.

Speaker 4 (01:03:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:03:32):
Well, so during this period, the DOJ is going after
the three largest businesses in the United States for monopolistic behavior.
And the three largest businesses in the United States are
Standard oil, US steel, and American tobacco. So again to
understand the scale of this, the thing that he has
built is as big as the oil and gas industry, right,

(01:03:53):
like it's the steel industry. It's in that ballpark.

Speaker 4 (01:03:55):
It's wild.

Speaker 1 (01:03:57):
Yeah, impressively not great.

Speaker 2 (01:03:59):
Yeah, So Teddy Roosevelt, the trustbuster, forces the DOJ to
go after Duke Buster. Yeah, that's what he's doing. He's
busting trues some trusts. Well, there's a lot.

Speaker 1 (01:04:11):
Of funny coming out of your mouth.

Speaker 2 (01:04:13):
There's a lot of things that we have to dislike
Teddy Roosevelt for, but one thing the man legitimately hated
was monopolies, and he goes after them. There were there
were a lot of more problematic things than Teddy Roosevelt hated.
But in this case, he's broadly speaking, doing the right thing.
And and the DOJ is like, yeah, you've you've made

(01:04:35):
a monopoly. This is not legal, and you have to
dismantle American Tobacco. Now, this is impossible because Duke has
vertically integrated it to such a degree that everyone is
reliant upon the same supply and distribution change. You can't
actually split the companies back up the way they'd been
fifteen years before. So the DOJ, not wanting to destroy

(01:04:57):
one of the three largest businesses in the US, zimpts
a bunch of their sub businesses and their international partnerships
and like allows them to maintain certain supply chains and whatnot.
And obviously, while this is going on, American Tobacco appeals,
the Supreme Court rules against them in nineteen eleven, and
eventually they do split the trust up into five companies

(01:05:18):
that are technically independent, competing businesses. But as the Cigarette
Century makes clear, after all the Duke had done to
weave the companies together, there can't actually be cut apart.

Speaker 4 (01:05:29):
Quote.

Speaker 2 (01:05:29):
The settlement was meant to a share competition among the
five newly constituted companies. Each received factories, distribution and storage facilities,
and name brands. But given the size and complexity of
the business, there existed in superable obstacles to the creation
of perfect competitive conditions. No matter how the industry was restructured,
there simply was no going back. So Duke continues to

(01:05:49):
run this chunk of American tobacco. It remains in his control.
British American tobacco is what remains in his control, and
his fellow owners, even though they're all competing, continue to
collude to fixed prices in order to maximize profits. So
he's it's not as bad, but they've gone from a
monopoly to an oligopoly.

Speaker 5 (01:06:08):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:06:08):
That's that's, that's what the DOJ succeeds in actually doing.

Speaker 4 (01:06:12):
Great job, Grey Jay.

Speaker 2 (01:06:14):
And since his he's kind of peaked as a cigarette man,
Duke moves over to the power industry. He establishes a
power company that provides. Yeah, he builds, his company builds
the electrical grid for North and South Carolina.

Speaker 4 (01:06:27):
Can you just stop? I know he can with the
Pokemon cards. That apparently not.

Speaker 2 (01:06:33):
He he does when he gets old and is about
to die, he gives most of his fortune tens of
millions of dollars to Trinity College in Durham, which is
renamed Duke University in his honor. And that's and that's
where we get Duke University.

Speaker 5 (01:06:45):
Didn't see they're coming, Yeah, great man, They have a
good public health school.

Speaker 4 (01:06:49):
Now actually yes, yes, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:06:51):
Well they honestly a lot of the best information about
the cigarette industry, and all of the fund up shit
it did comes from Duke University. They have great resource
for understanding tobacco ad frantis.

Speaker 4 (01:07:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:07:03):
So, I mean, to the university's credit, they don't like
shy away from the but also what look, Duke is
immoral because he's a capitalist and he is profiting off
of people's surplus labor in a number of ways that
are unethical. There's nothing wrong with him selling cigarettes at
this point because he has no he dies in nineteen
twenty five, There is no nothing that even approaches a

(01:07:24):
medical consensus about cigarettes and cancer at this point.

Speaker 4 (01:07:27):
You can't blame it on.

Speaker 5 (01:07:28):
Him, right, He's doing horrific shit. So there will people
who work for him, I'm.

Speaker 2 (01:07:31):
Sure, absolutely, like destroying unions and whatnot, and there's like
a bunch that's unethical, But the fact that he's selling
cigarettes is not something that I would put on his
soul because you know, there's no way for him to
have known that they were harmful, you know.

Speaker 5 (01:07:45):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:07:47):
In nineteen nineteen, a US surgical student named Alton Oschner
was called along with several of his peers to observe
the autopsy of a lung cancer victim. His teacher was
excited to have an example of the rare illness in
their operating theater. He wanted Alton and his fellow students
to see the autopsy because he believed they would not
get a second chance to do.

Speaker 4 (01:08:05):
So you guys gotta check this out.

Speaker 2 (01:08:07):
You never got to see another lung cancer. Nobody gets
this shit less than the thirty years later, lung cancer
would be the number one cause of death in the
United States. As Robert Proctor of Stanford University told one interviewer,
the cigarette is the deadliest artifact in the history of
human civilization. It killed about one hundred million people in

(01:08:27):
the twentieth century.

Speaker 4 (01:08:28):
Ooh, Jesus rish.

Speaker 2 (01:08:34):
May And honestly he's probably lowballing it.

Speaker 5 (01:08:38):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And it's before you look at the
sort of downstream things.

Speaker 6 (01:08:44):
Jesus Christ, that is, that is quite a jult. Like
we can we can.

Speaker 2 (01:08:53):
Argue about fascism and communism and the things the Great
Leap Forward and La Sangoism what killed the most people.
But man, nobody's nobody's touching the cigarettes numbers.

Speaker 4 (01:09:04):
It's right, Yeah, the cigarettes.

Speaker 2 (01:09:07):
Out here dropping three pointers every shot into a goat
of killing people.

Speaker 5 (01:09:12):
I'm eagerly awaiting Michael Tracy to like go recuperate the
cigarettes's reputation on Twitter or something.

Speaker 2 (01:09:20):
So James, you get anything you want to plug before
we roll.

Speaker 4 (01:09:23):
Out afar wine, I do another podcast if you do too.
Sometimes it could happen here. I do listen to them.
It's about how things are falling apart and people are
putting them back together. It's a good podcast.

Speaker 2 (01:09:35):
It is a good podcast. I would say it's one
of the only two podcasts that should be legal.

Speaker 5 (01:09:41):
Yeah, yeah, fair enough if we're doing basically what he
did with cigarettes, but two podcasts, and very slowly we're
we're stealing all the microphones and giving everyone can.

Speaker 2 (01:09:52):
And I mean hopefully going to kill one hundred million
people of course of the century's.

Speaker 4 (01:10:00):
That's yeah, and see you've glad your goals.

Speaker 5 (01:10:05):
Yeah, we do have a live show if you survive
that long ship twenty six. Yeah it's twenty six. I
think it's on the twenty sixth of October. Yeah, that's right,
sight and everything.

Speaker 2 (01:10:19):
So check that ship out, motherfucker. Buy tickets to the
live show, and uh, look great. I'm not going to
tell you should smoke cigarettes, but have you ever tried, Okay,
the smooth, flavorful taste of a camel. It's like driving
through the desert in early November, you know, when you've

(01:10:43):
just got that pure dry coal wire. We're just take
it in a Marlborough red Oh, God, the flavor country.
That's what people are missing today, Sophie, do you know
how few gin zers have been the flavor country. That's
their heritage. Soaping, that's their heritage.

Speaker 1 (01:11:05):
Stop it all right, This is not cash money.

Speaker 4 (01:11:09):
Pick up, pick up some cigarettes kids, very much as
cash money.

Speaker 9 (01:11:16):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the
Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday
and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash

(01:11:37):
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}CZM Rewind: Part One: How Cigarettes Invented Everything