James Buchanan Duke revolutionized the tobacco industry by mechanizing production with James Bonsack's machines, surging output from 9.8 million to 744 million cigarettes between 1881 and 1888. To solve oversupply, Duke pioneered modern marketing via trading cards and aggressive advertising, while leveraging secret patent agreements to dominate the market and form a monopoly controlling 90% of U.S. sales by 1890. Although antitrust laws eventually broke up his empire into an oligopoly, Duke's strategies established the template for global commodities, corporate patent abuse, and mass marketing that continues to drive modern capitalism despite the industry's devastating health legacy. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Mostly Human Intro00:02:52
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
How could this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with the man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world of AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Cool Zone Media.
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 two weeks instead of cramming during your vacation to write another podcast so that we don't fall behind?
Early Smoking Habits00:17:23
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 the Bastards, the only podcast where the host regularly says that his show is cash money.
I'm Robert Evans, here to talk with you about bad people.
Sophie Lichterman seems very unhappy, which is not cash money.
No, I just have extreme secondhand embarrassment.
Well, that's too bad, Sophie, because I'm bringing it back.
As you know, bringing back the phrase.
As you know, everything you do reflects on me for some god-forsaken reason.
I know, I know.
And you're going to get a lot of money.
And that is not very cash money of you, Robert.
I think it's extremely cash money of me.
But here to be the tiebreaking vote is James Stout.
Now, James, you're British, 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 a day in his life.
Yes, it is now.
It is now.
Cash money has very little value when it's tied to the life expectancy of an inbred old person with sausage fingers.
I thought of 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 sects that got leaked of him and Camilla.
I made an ethical decision that even the King of England deserves to have his sex be private.
I just like don't need nobody needs okay.
Just ill.
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?
Yeah, that and his, he's got some, he's got a very specific kink.
Uh, he's kink.
Okay, yeah, sorry.
Yeah, as well, as well as William.
You're okay.
Kinky little is this kink murdering his first wife, allegedly?
No, it's it's it's a tampon thing.
Um, he talks about it at length.
Oh, yeah, okay, yeah, not expected.
Yeah, we know far too much about what Charles has been sending to Nila.
Um, a heartbreaking amount, I would say.
Don't don't Google it.
I'm telling you the truth, but don't Google this.
Okay, um, my high heart laptop.
Anyway, so I just broke my promise right there not to laugh at the King of England's sexual escapades.
James, how do you feel about cigarettes?
Oh, I think I wasn't expecting that.
Kind of ambiguous, I guess.
You know, a lot of bad things happen because people like to smoke cigarettes.
A lot of people like to get really, really up in other people's business about smoking cigarettes.
So it's a difficult one.
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, I tend to, I tend to believe that every single drug, even the ones that we call bad drugs, has an ideal use case where it 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 nothing like a cigarette when someone's just tried to kill or hurt you.
Which is why they're so valuable outside a British nightclub.
Yeah, exactly.
One in the morning.
You never know when a bottle's coming for your fucking temple there.
You don't.
That's it.
You know, but I get it.
Like, it's one of those things.
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 in a way 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 we shouldn't be quite so shitty to people who just happen to smoke cigarettes.
But what 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 was continually amazed by the extent to which cigarettes are responsible for most of like the things that we consider the modern world.
Like the cigarette, In order to get people to smoke, the tobacco industry had to invent modern civilization.
Yes, yeah.
Um, and that's that's a fascinating story.
I just want to talk about it.
It's one of those we're getting behind a bastard at this point.
You know, when we're talking about the 1800s up through like the middle of the 20th century, you're not a bad person for necessarily for trying to get people to smoke because if it's 1905, number one, cigarettes are not a massive risk above like walking outside your door.
You know, but also you just don't have good data.
So, yeah, yeah, the ambient level of smoking is pretty high just from existing in any urban area at that time, 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 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 grinding ground finely enough.
They probably also chewed it.
There were a couple of different devices they had for smoking it.
And we don't, we will never know which was like the first, right?
Like we just know which ones we kind of have written records of earliest, 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 it and again, there's even some debate as to like, well, were the Maya the first people who were cultivating tobacco?
And probably the answer to that is no.
But we certainly know the Maya were 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 400 to 700 AD is when you see most of this spread.
And it makes it all the way out to the fucking Caribbean.
Oh, yeah.
That's where Columbus rans into it at first, right?
That is exactly the next thing that happens in this episode, 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 in the Dominican Republic, via a weird two-pronged nose pipe.
So they would smoke it, but they would like inhale it through this pipe that like a nose snorkel kind of situation.
Yeah, it looks a little bit, it looks a little bit like a cannula.
Okay.
Yeah, like a nasal cannula.
Interesting.
I made for my book, A Brief History of Vice.
I recreated these pipes as best I could.
I wound up actually using the stalk of dry, like the dried stalk of marijuana plants because it's hollow.
And so I just had to kind of find why bends 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 up when you smoke raw nicotina rustica through directly into your mucous membrane.
Yeah, I can see that one being pretty rough on the old sinuses as well.
I would not, it's one of those things you have to divorce kind of your thinking about tobacco in this period from modern day because it's not, number one, most people smoking it.
This is not a habitual thing for them.
It's a ritual thing for them, right?
There are people, certainly by the time Columbus hits 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.
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.
Right.
In part because it's kind of hard to when you're smoking it that way.
Yes.
Right.
Yeah.
There's a lot of work that I imagine goes into producing a nose cigarette from growing the tobacco and drying it out.
Yeah, that's a lot of work.
And you also, you can't smoke just 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 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 to just make a fire because you want a fucking smoke in the like, yeah, get a fire drill out, get a piece of wood out, rub another piece of wood.
Yeah, so again, smoking, even when it's not like for a religious purpose, it's probably broadly like, okay, it's mealtime and we'll smoke after the meal, right?
Or like smoke before because 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.
Um, like generally, that's probably how it would have gone.
Uh, when Columbus winds up, you know, meeting these people in 1492 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.
Um, 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 in history.
Yeah, yeah.
Um, it's also worth noting that over in Cuba, people would wrap their tobacco in tobacco leaves, so they were again like hundreds and hundreds of years ago smoking cigars in Cuba.
Like that actually goes back really far.
Like, it probably more than a thousand years, people have been smoking something broadly similar to a cigar in that place.
That's pretty cool.
It is kind of neat, right?
I enjoy, yeah, yeah, there are many things that we consume.
I guess, you know, sometimes we eat fruits and vegetables and stuff, but it's not much that we consume that people consumed a thousand years ago and made in a pretty similar fashion, right?
Like, uh, I've been to a Cuban cigar factory, lots of them are still like rolled by hand.
We're going to talk about that a lot in these episodes, but yeah, 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, keep together better than cigars in 1492 did.
But broadly speaking, like part, I mean, like, I'm a cigar smoker, I tend to think Cuban cigars are the best.
Uh, I like to smoke, yeah, it's rather tragic that the cultural inheritance of that today is like guys who think that they should enjoy cigars, the entire Republican Party, yes, yeah, like Ben Shapiro and friends pretending to perform masculinity and then like going off to cough and be sick.
Yeah, I mean, it's it's a bummer.
They are, I, you know, I'm not a, I tend to like, I've tried to read a cigar aficionado magazine once, and it had too many, it had too many made-up words.
They use words, and it's not like liquor, you know, number one, liquor actually does like, oh, sometimes you get a bourbon and like, oh, this has, this almost tastes 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 and 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.
It's one of the negative impacts of tobacco consumption.
It's unreal.
The most pretentious thing that you can, that you can do is be a cigar aficionado.
Cigar guy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Unreal.
Just smoke.
Just kill yourself slowly.
It's fine.
Anyway, that's kind of 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 tobacco in the Americas was in religious rites.
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 be can cause hallucinations in high enough doses.
It's a powerful, mind-altering drug when you are taking like massive quantities.
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.
But that dude would inhale a bunch of smoke straight up raw from like a burning 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 going to get pretty messy, but it's again, you know, it's as silly as this is probably not all that bad for you when you consider everything people are doing in a thousand AD or whatever, right?
Like, if you, if a couple of times a year you're shotgunning some tobacco, that's not going to be what kills you.
Yeah, your life expectancy isn't long enough for that to be the thing that kills you in most cases, right?
Like, yeah, one of the other thousand things that's going to kill you that we've eliminated now is going to kill you.
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 the most common uses of it was to just rub it all over your skin because tobacco is coated in an oil.
Like that is bugs don't, it kills bugs.
Like they don't like it.
I mean, obviously, there are specific bugs that do feed on tobacco, but for the most part, it keeps insects away.
So people would rub it on themselves.
Or they would also bathe in the smoke before 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 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.
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 not help with asthma.
Yeah, it might do the opposite of helping, in fact.
Don't say.
I should say.
But that's not a thing that went away.
Like, just, you know, that's we're not like that historically separated from people smoking to clear the lungs, 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 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 and 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 don't.
Don't take tobacco.
It's actually pretty easy to kill yourself by ingesting tobacco.
Please don't do that.
Yeah.
I know every now and again, like a pet will eat a bunch of cigarettes.
Yeah.
It'll kill 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 1564, 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 there like wildfire.
I just love that, like, the immediate British or English response was just like, start with xenophobia and then move along from there and work out if this drug is going to become a picture part of all of our lives.
And in Europe and the UK, the story with tobacco is 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, Hell yeah, this shit's actually pretty dope.
Tobacco Arrives in England00:09:54
You know what?
I think we're fine with tobacco.
Yeah, in coffee's case, it was literally the pope being like, Oh, this stuff rules.
You know what?
I'm just going to baptize it, just going to baptize coffee.
Now Christians can have it.
Then God changed his mind just like that.
Yeah, omnipot being, omnipotent being.
Amazing stuff.
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.
Just imagining him doing fentanyl.
The Pope blesses fentanyl to protect the kids.
Fuck, he's dropped it in the font.
God says this shit's red.
Two babies are going to have a rough one now with dissolves fentanyl.
Put some fentanyl in the baptismal font.
Yeah.
No, you're going to want to give them some Narcan.
They're not going to have a good time.
Yeah.
That's why we call it the Narthax because of all the Narcan.
That was a church joke for you, you kids.
Anyway, yeah.
Yeah.
So the English start smoking tobacco.
It gets cultivated in the Jamestown settlement in the 17th century.
And by the 1730s, the English colonies in Virginia had tobacco factories that were manufacturing significant quantities of this stuff, mostly as snuff, which was either inhaled or chewed.
That is the predominant way to consume tobacco in the kind of the early period of colonization of the Americas.
Was it like a because you see pictures of them sometimes and they got the old-timey pipe, right?
The long pipe with a little bowl.
Yep.
Yep.
Yeah.
Is that like a class thing?
Is that like I can afford to have a pipe and you'll chew it?
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 for a meal, you could have a smoke, 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 any time of day.
So it's addictive.
Yeah.
Yeah, extremely.
And it's incredibly addictive.
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 1843, a French company, given a monopoly over tobacco by King Louis XIV, starts manufacturing the very first close to modern cigarettes.
Now, people had been smoking.
Again, when Columbus lines 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?
And it's the French invent galas and it have never changed since they've invented the French invent galas, which are which are still the worst cigarettes on the market.
They're still smoking something close to modern cigarettes today.
Yeah, that was those were the most common cigarettes we smoked in Syria.
And it was like the galois that you couldn't sell in France because the tobacco was too low crit.
Oh, God.
What a horrible cigarette.
Yeah.
Well, it just, yeah.
It's yeah, everywhere.
I just have a lot of memories of like bike racing in France and having to go in to sign on to these races.
And like you walk in and you just like, it's like they used to do in nightclubs with the smoke machine, you know, just like the old enough to experience like smoking inside in bars, which isn't a thing anymore.
And you go and you come out, you're like, oh, that was good for me.
And then you see the guy who is inevitably 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 like, just, I remember it being one of the most demoralizing experiences.
Yeah.
He's a hero to the pharmaceutical industry, is what he is.
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 70s was like.
Yeah, in more ways than one.
Yeah, in a number of ways.
You'll learn about the 70s in Belgrade.
I see some banging haircuts go to Belgrade.
Man, oh, the track suits there are unreal.
There's a coming back.
That's on the 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 track suit and smoking.
God, it's incredible.
Cultural experience.
Burning through a pack of knockoff Marlboros that have two extra E's in them.
It doesn't have the L.
It's just a Marlboro.
You know what?
You know who else sells discount cigarettes?
Is it Sophie?
Is that what hero?
Sophie does.
Sophie, if you meet Sophie behind the main gym building after lunch or after class is let out, she's always got a couple of extra packs on hand and she'll sell you Lucy's.
What grade am I in?
What school?
Why am I out of school?
What normal age?
I don't like this association.
And yeah, she's still going there every day.
It's weird.
Well, that's weird.
That we don't have, we can't fund our podcast without selling loose cigarettes to children.
For some reason, also reflects on you.
So we've asked you to stop, but here we are.
I mean, I'm going to be honest, Sophie, 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.
It would do nothing.
Uncancelable.
I'm trying to get him off the jewels.
Oh, my God.
Robert found anti-vaping action.
I've got a Joe Camel tattoo on my chest.
Oh, my God.
Let's just go to ads.
Hopefully, it's for gold.
Yeah.
I'm going to spend this whole episode trying not to say what is a homophobic slur in this country, by the way.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Moda.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be right.
It wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Yeah.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
Cigarettes Gain Popularity00:15:32
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world of AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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.
That's right.
Yeah.
There's a word that we use in Britain for cigarettes that American people use to be horrible to gay people.
And I'm not going to use it.
But it's very difficult for me.
So it is.
No, it doesn't not.
I mean, I think the slur comes from the harmless term, which also, if you read JRO token, you will see that word used constantly in its original meaning.
And it is a little bit off putting sometimes.
But the people I grew up with, like certainly where my grandmother lived, right, in rural Devon, was very, like, people still use the valves eye.
But yeah, that word 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 hay.
Yeah, a bundle of sticks or whatever.
Yeah, any package of anything.
Get one.
You can call it your Amazon word.
Yeah.
It's anyway, whatever.
That's fair.
That's talking about a word.
It's amazing.
So, yeah, all the 14th or Louis XIV. gives the first French company a monopoly over tobacco production and they start manufacturing cigarettes, which all have to be hand-rolled at this point.
But this is the 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 in shit, right?
Or, you know, rolling papers even 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 favored 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 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.
Really nearly came out then, man.
The worst smoke I can imagine.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
That is rough.
Bleak.
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 got to give him, he's one of these weirdos.
So cigars, you don't inhale a cigar unless you're a specific kind of cigar smoker who believes 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.
It refuses to do anything.
That's going to be bad for the cancer brand, man.
Yeah, yeah.
We got to get mixed up with Giuliani.
So cigarettes start to get popular with Europeans during or right after the Crimean War when soldiers, you know, who return, because the Crimean War is a lot of it's in areas kind of abutting and around Turkey.
And so they encountered Turkish cigarettes.
And the Turks have been smoking cigarettes and making cigarettes for a bit longer.
And they decide they like them.
Turkish tobacco is good and it's milder than the stuff that they had had access to.
In 1856, one veteran of the war opens London's first cigarette factory, which is called Sweet Threes.
He is joined a few years later by another English entrepreneur who creates the second major cigarette factory in London.
And this guy's name is Philip Morris.
Oh, wow.
So, yeah, that's where that comes from.
Yeah, he is.
Yeah.
There he is, old Philip Morris.
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 of Antiques.
Seeing an opportunity in the emerging market for cigarettes, tobacco man F.S. Kinney 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, Kinney's Straight Cut, and Sportsman's Caporal, using similar blends.
Kinney's chief competitor in the New York market was Goodwin and Company, which sold nationally advertised cigarettes with folksy-sounding brand names, such as Old Judge, Canvas Black, and Welcome.
Firms became known as the big six of the cigarette industry by the 1870s as they gained control of 75% 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.
I love old cigarette brand names.
I would smoke old judge.
I think I'd have been an old judge man.
Well, there was one that was particularly great.
Was one of them called Old Black?
No, there's Old Judge Canvas Back and Welcome.
Okay, I thought it was Canvas Black, like what it would do to the old lungs.
But yeah, welcome.
I think I just smoke a welcome cigarette.
Smoke a welcome.
Yeah, you get one on your pillow when you go into a hotel room.
That's the kind of vibe it has.
Yeah.
Reminds me of that old Bill Hicks bit when he's like, I love that they've they've put the warning labels on the cigarettes.
Let's me know which ones to avoid.
I'm not going to buy the lung cancer cigarettes.
Low birth weights, though.
Give me one of them.
So tobacco obviously is bad for you.
It caused problems for people because it's never good for you to smoke or 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 the day, for one thing.
For another thing, 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 flashbang in your pocket.
I see no issue with that.
I think that's amazing.
Yeah, that's a good idea.
Yeah.
I just want to just want to whip off a rod of phosphorus next to my shirt.
Great.
Is it like literally like white phosphorus?
I mean, I don't know if it's like white phosphorus, but yeah, I mean, it's like a phosphorus.
Like you grind up a bunch of phosphorus and then you strike it, I think.
Amazing.
Just imagine someone like falling over and then just and of course your beard oil and hair oil is all alcohol and petroleum based.
Your shirt has been washed in pure gasoline.
So you just catch immediately on fire.
Yeah, yeah.
Cigarettes will kill you, but not in the way you're expecting.
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 firebombs in their pockets.
But yeah, again, as much as we joke about it, heart, it's if you were to tell someone cigarettes are bad, like that's pretty obvious if you're hanging out with someone today who is a smoker because smokers cough, right?
And like, you know, you joke about it if you're a smoker, like, yeah, you know, it's fucking killing me, whatever, smoke my cigarettes.
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, smokers cough, but also, you know, who else coughs is people who live in dense cities where the main method of transportation is horses.
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 rushed.
And you didn't want it to get into your house.
So you could just sit there and watch the turrets floating by.
If somebody, if people are walking around coughing and looking sick, your first guess isn't going to be, it's probably the cigarettes.
Yeah, I didn't cheat.
What a place.
What a town.
It really was a nightmare to be alive.
Yeah.
Jesus Christ.
I'm surprised if the species we made it past that.
It's striking, but you don't have to make it very long to produce a bunch of kids and then leave them fatherless.
That's true.
As you float off down the shit river.
Just throw your corpse in the shit river and the cycle continues.
Yeah, it's the circle of life.
Cigarettes in the 1870s were still a novelty to most smokers.
Less than 2% 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 plugged tobacco.
And it was into this world and this market that a man named James Buchanan Duke stepped in the 19 or in the 1880s.
Duke had been born on December 23rd, 1856, near Durham, North Carolina.
And his father was the owner of a small tobacco company, which was eventually named W. Duke Sons Company, or W. Duke Sons Company.
Duke watched in 1873 as a powerful depression hit the United States and temporarily cigarettes swelled in popularity because the urban poor could afford cigarettes, right?
So that was, you know, when they started to take off.
And he looks at this, 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 10 years.
So I bet cigarettes have a have a bright future ahead of them if I can find a way to make them cheaper.
Yeah.
People started smoking more in times of depression because they didn't have food and they wanted to not be hungry.
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 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 1870s because there's not a whole lot of other things for you.
But the cigarette is there.
The working man's friend, isn't it?
It is the working man.
Look, again, if you're on the street in the 1870s, the health risks of a cigarette are the least of your concerns.
You might get concussed by a floating turbine.
It's the shit rivers, the main problem you've got to deal with.
Drowning in a river of horseshit.
Yeah, I'd be smoking.
Whatever.
Yeah, of course.
Of course.
If they'd invented crack, I'd be on that too.
Yeah.
You want to get out of that situation as quickly as possible.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
So 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 plugged tobacco.
He knew that the future of the industry was not in plugged tobacco.
It was in producing something convenient and cheap for urban poor people.
In 1882, his company had just 10 cigarette rollers on the line.
And 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 50 more rollers, which still put him well behind the Allen and Ginter factory up in Richmond, which employed 450 female cigarette rollers.
But when a New York City cigarette factory went on strike, Duke convinced 125 of their workers to move down to Durham in 1883, 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-paying jobs for laborers.
These people are a stopgap.
He's thinking like Uber here, right?
I want to corner the market and then find a way to get the human beings out of it, to replace them with machines.
No, he's not.
How's that working for Uber?
It works a lot better for cigarettes than it does for Uber.
Turns out this is actually a pretty reasonable business plan for cigarettes.
Both of them will kill you.
Both the self-driving cars and the cigarettes.
Again, self-driving cars will do it faster.
Yeah.
The cigarettes will do it a little more ethically, though.
He was in the 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 1885, he had about 700 hand rollers in two factories.
Most of these are, again, young women.
This is reasonably well-paying work for young women.
He's got a quality control team that checks the work.
So they're trying to put out 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 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 Boznak 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 breakdowns.
Plus, there was a belief that consumers would never accept a machine-made cigarette.
Duke put top mechanics to work, ironing out the bugs in the Bonsak machine, and signed a deal with the inventor.
During his first year of production, using his team of imported hand rollers, Duke turned out 9.8 million cigarettes.
In contrast, using the Bonsack machines enabled him to produce 744 million cigarettes in 1888.
So 1881, 9.8 million cigarettes.
He gets the Bonsak machine 744 million.
Jesus.
That is a significant increase in production right there.
It's a turning point.
That's going to change a few things.
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 per cigarette.
But there's a problem, which is that only about 2% of Americans who smoke smoke cigarettes.
And so the fact that he's making 730 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.
Creating Demand for Smoke00:10:40
So this is a problem for old Duke.
And Duke realizes that if he's going to make this thing profitable, what he's going to have to do is create demand for cigarettes.
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 9.8 million to 744 million for nothing.
We could make billions of these a 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 is going to need to actually create a hunger for billions of cigarettes in the world in order to make this pay off.
And that's exactly what he does next.
Great.
Yeah.
So wonderful world of tobacco marketing.
Yes.
It's that's that's what we're that's what we're building towards here.
Yeah.
Um, 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 Bonsack machine.
It just is so much more efficient.
And because Duke had helped fix the Bonsak machines, he owns part of 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 going to want to smoke cigarettes that are rolled by machine?
Duke starts bragging that his cigarettes are machine rolled.
He puts it on the packages as like a way of like, just what if we just try to convince people that machine rolled is better than hand rolled.
It's cleaner.
It's more hygienic.
It's more modern, right?
Yeah.
All of which is technically true.
Now, next, I want to quote from a book called The Cigarette Century by Alan Brandt.
By 1884, while his competitors were still hesitating, Duke had installed two Bonsak machines in his Durham factory.
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 Bonsak machine.
In return, Bonzak reduced Duke's royalties to 20 cents per thousand.
Duke and Bonzac soon reached a further agreement, guaranteeing Duke a 25% discount on royalties against all other manufacturers.
Also, Duke shrewdly hired one of Bonzac's disgruntled mechanics, William Thomas O'Brien, to operate his machines, assuring fewer breakdowns than his competition.
By June 1886, O'Brien was meticulously maintaining 10 machines.
Duke placed a heavy emphasis on efficiency and continuous production.
The lessons he learned in 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 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 that control of the Bonsakt patent through his secret discounted licensing agreement was a critical lever in dominating the cigarette trade.
His deal with Bonzak reflected an important change in the character of the patent system from a legal mechanism protecting independent inventors to one that would protect large and powerful corporations.
Duke is what he's done here is invent the modern usage of patents by 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 him.
Yeah, man, that might be one of the things that's killed more people than cigarettes, right?
Right?
Like, yeah, yeah, because a lot of medical patents and stuff like work on the same fucking idea, you know?
Yeah, nearly every drug is patented.
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, I just 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 cancer drug called Eggstand, which they're trying to stop a generic production, a cheaper generic production of.
I'm just imagining the old handshake meme between UCLA and Duke here and giving people cancer.
It's the thing that they're both coming together on.
That's beautiful.
So the Bonsak 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 1880s and 1890s, cigarette smoking increased and the size of a pack doubled from 10 to 20, taking advantage of how easy it was to smoke now.
The first proper matchbooks invented in the early 20th century helped spur adoption.
But by 1900, still less than 2% 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 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's not really been a thing in capitalism up to this point.
It's one thing to be like, hey, I'm Samuel Colt.
I've invented a better handgun.
Like, if you want a handgun, you want a handgun.
My job with my marketing is to convince you mine's the best, right?
But you're not convincing people, well, now I need a gun, right?
Like they decided they need a gun because it's the fucking 1880s or whatever.
Fucking Duke is like, these people are fine without cigarettes.
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 ways he's going to do this is really quite innovative.
And it ends in a surprising place.
So in the late 1880s, French tradesmen had set to making stiff, colorful cards to advertise their businesses.
These cards often featured 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 1880s, he had a print shop installed in his Durham factory 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 stiffen the box.
Duke employed a little imagination and turned these simple workhorses into a powerful marketing tool by printing the brand name of the cigarettes along with a picture that was part of a larger series and 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 among the public.
So a lot of these trading cards, and these are the first trading cards, are outright pornographic, at least by 19th 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 how juvenile smoking starts at the United States.
Great.
They want to collect baseball cards, and to do so, they have to buy packs of cigarettes.
Amazing.
And this works like gangbay.
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.
One of those busy bodies included Duke's father, who wrote this letter to his son in 1894.
My dear son, I have received the enclosed letter from the Reverend John C. Hocut, 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 in the interest of morality and in the hope that you can invent a proper 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 as wrong in its pernicious effects upon young men and womenhood and therefore has not jingled with my religious impulses.
Outside 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 in 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 to know that a change has been made.
Duke does not make a change.
He is fine with it.
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 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.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Wow.
I'm just imagining buying a pack of mulberries to see if I can score a shiny Charmeleon or something.
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?
Yeah, I love that.
It's just, it's like the happy meal of cigarettes.
It's great.
It's perfect.
I just imagine like some nerdy 16-year-old like lying on his side, like puking as he smokes his 50th cigarette of the day.
I need a lightning bolt card.
He's trying to evolve his Pikachu.
Good dies of smoking inhalation, trying to get a bulbasaur.
I choose you, lung cancer.
Now, you know what else will give you lung cancer, James?
Is it the cigarettes that Sophie's selling to children behind the school?
It is.
It is.
The cigarettes that Sophie sells to children behind the school are very likely to cause cancer.
The Happy Meal of Cigarettes00:04:25
But, you know, that's the way it works.
Okay.
Anything hurts their lungs, Sophie.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Moda.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop.
Even if you did a lot of redistribution, you know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Sherry stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Building a Global Brand00:14:32
Oh, God.
Aren't we living well today?
What a beautiful world we have in this America that I love.
How are you all?
Sophie?
It's just been a post.
I'm just thoroughly disappointed in your actions.
What else is new?
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 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 anytime.
Again, most people were chewing tobacco prior to this.
So if people start smoking instead of chewing, suddenly you don't have buckets of 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 the juvenile mind, notably the lithograph album.
Youngsters seeking these picture books clamored for the reward of self-inflicted injury.
Many a boy under 12 years is striving for the entire collection, which necessitates the consumption of nearly 12,000 cigarettes.
Kids are like trying to collect these picture books and smoking 12,000 cigarettes.
That is how you catch them all.
Oh, that is a rough image.
That is an upsetting amount of cigarettes.
Yeah, that's a load of cigarettes.
Wow.
Yeah, that is an outrageous quantity of cigarettes.
Duke hadn't 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.
And it's, yeah, he also just like gives stuff.
So basically, everything from McDonald's happy meals and like Funko Pops to every product sweepstakes 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.
The entire toolbox of capitalism is being created.
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 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 countryside up with ads, with like billboards and other kinds of big public ads, is Duke spending all this money on cigarette ads.
Wow.
So he inadvertently also gave us the monkey wrench gang.
Yeah, so he has 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 like 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 wrench gang.
So that's that's a lot for one guy.
Yeah, it's a real mixed 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 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 1880s, 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 1800s drew to a close, the fortunes of Duke and 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 1890, 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 Tobacco Company was responsible for 90% of all cigarette sales in the United States.
Duke had formed a monopoly, getting his competitors to agree to fix 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 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 his 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 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 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.
Just another wonderful contribution to society.
He's really just humming along here, creating the modern world.
Yeah.
He's ticking them off.
Now, 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, right?
He's helping to create the basis of consumer culture here as he builds effectively, helps to like 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, 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 he's rolling all of this into one giant venture.
And instead of the constituent parts being made up of small business owners, the constituent parts are managed by middle managers who are operating like rungs inside of this larger corporate structure.
That's not, he's not the first guy to do this, but he's the first guy to do this and be this successful with it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It sounds like a vertically integrated supply chain, right?
Exactly.
Exactly.
So that's pretty cool.
Everywhere he cut out independent manufacturers and free agents, small resellers 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 business that successfully resisted and that maintained its high level of unionization were cigars, which for whatever reason are kind of immune to modernity.
Yeah, exceedingly.
I've just realized that this guy is like Jeff Bezos.
He's the Bezos of cigarettes.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, which Jeff Bezos, I'm sure, would love to be the Bezos of cigarettes along with being the Bezos of almost everything else.
It's a great thing to be the Bezos of.
So kudos to cigars for being.
Yeah, respect.
Yeah, respect to the cigar industry for fighting back against this.
But obviously, Duke barely notices that he's losing out on this chunk of the business.
He tells his board that, quote, the world is now our market for our product.
And in 1902, 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 form the British American Tobacco Corporation.
Of course, that's what the British one's called.
Yes.
And they're doing a tobacco imperialism, right?
They're going out with the 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 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 may be, if you're a cigarette smoker in Turkey in the early 1800s and a cigarette smoker in France, a cigarette smoker in the United States, 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 that 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 into cigarettes, you're going to smoke this specific kind of cigarette and everyone on earth does it the same way.
Wow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's crazy.
He's like, yeah, he's now more or less invented like the global commodity, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is like, it's one of the very first.
Yeah.
And probably the first, 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, aren't like going down to the store to pick up, you know, some fucking petroleum or some coal generally, but you're going to go down and get a cigarette that's made by the British American company every day, whether you live in fucking Tokyo or Timbuktu.
It hasn't spread quite that far yet, but this is what's going to happen, right?
By 1904, cigarettes had finally cracked 5% of the American market for tobacco products.
That seems small, but that means it's more than doubled in a couple of years.
Duke saw them as the smart product to push, but he'd spent several years cornering the markets on plug-and-pipe tobacco too.
So they're selling everything.
It's also worth noting that 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.
Perfect.
So before he can kind of 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 Antitrust Act, which had also been created in 1890.
Now, it took the government a while to actually get to American tobacco.
And by the time it starts looking into things, American tobacco controls not just 90% of the cigarette trade, but 75 to 85% 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.
Yeah, no, no placing a trail in a great direction necessarily.
Maybe not in the best direction, but you can't deny the man knows what he's doing.
This is a dude who loves to make how rich was this guy.
I mean, it doesn't trans 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's a billionaire in his day, right?
Like for everything that matters, you know?
Yeah.
He has infinity dollars.
You do have to think how different would the world be if we'd just given him Twitter and he could have done an Elon Musk and stolved the war in Ukraine instead of inventing new ways to give kids cancer.
This new cigarette's going to work as a boat, briefly.
So this puts Duke about 20 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 funny.
Very funny name.
So 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 then.
Yeah, yeah.
Rubber coming out in support of the DOJ.
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.
I'm more familiar with the not doing a good job part.
Yeah.
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, U.S. 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?
Like it's the steel industry.
It's in that ballpark.
It's wild.
Yeah.
Impressively not great.
Yeah.
So Teddy Roosevelt, the trust buster, forces the DOJ to go after Duke.
Yeah, that's what he's doing.
He's busting trusts.
He's busting some trusts.
Look, there's a lot of funny coming out of your mouth.
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 are some things that he hated.
There were a lot of more problematic things that Teddy Roosevelt hated.
But in this case, he's broadly speaking doing the right thing.
And the DOJ is like, yeah, you've made a monopoly.
This is not legal and you have to dismantle American tobacco.
Teddy Roosevelt Busts Trusts00:02:11
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 15 years before.
So the DOJ, not wanting to destroy one of the three largest businesses in the U.S., exempts 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 1911.
And eventually they do split the trust up into five companies that are technically independent competing businesses.
But as the cigarette century makes clear, after all that Duke had done to weave the companies together, they can't actually be cut apart.
Quote, the settlement was meant to assure 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 insuperable 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 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 fix prices in order to maximize profits.
So it's not as bad, but they've gone from a monopoly to an oligopoly, right?
That's what the DOJ succeeds in actually doing.
Great job, JOJ.
And since 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.
Can you not just stop?
No, he cannot.
No, apparently not.
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 where we get Duke University.
Didn't see that coming.
Great.
Man, they have a good public health school now, actually.
Yes, yes.
Duke University Research00:02:28
Well, they honestly, a lot of the best information about the cigarette industry and all of the fucked up shit it did comes from Duke University.
They have great resources for understanding tobacco advertising.
Yeah.
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 1925.
There is no nothing that even approaches a medical consensus about cigarettes and cancer at this point.
You can't blame it on him.
Right.
He's doing horrific shit.
So there will be work for him, I'm 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?
Yeah.
Yeah.
In 1919, a U.S. 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 so.
You guys got to check this out.
You're never going to see another lung cancer.
Nobody gets this shit.
Less than 30 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 100 million people in the 20th century.
Jesus Christ.
And honestly, he's probably lowballing it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it's before you look at, yeah, like all those sort of downstream things.
Jesus Christ, that is quite a death goal.
We can argue about fascism and communism and the things, the great leap forward in lasangoism, what killed the most people.
But man, nobody's touching the cigarettes numbers, right?
Yeah.
The cigarettes out here dropping three pointers every shot.
It's a goat of killing people.
I'm eagerly awaiting Michael Tracy to go recuperate the cigarette's reputation on Twitter or something.
Cigarette Death Toll00:04:40
So James, you got anything you want to plug before we roll out of part one?
I do another podcast, which you do too, sometimes called it could happen here.
I do.
It's about how things are falling apart and people are putting them back together.
It's a good podcast.
It is a good podcast.
I would say it's one of the only two podcasts that should be legal.
Yeah, fair enough.
We're doing basically what he did with cigarettes, but two podcasts.
And very slowly, we're stealing all the microphones.
God.
And giving everyone cat.
And I mean, hopefully going to kill 100 million people over the course of the century.
It's on the vision board.
It's on the vision board.
Yeah.
See, you've plaired your goals.
Yeah.
We do have a live show if you survive that long.
It's 26.
Yeah.
It's October 26th.
But I think it's on the 26th of October.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's his website and everything.
So check that shit out, motherfucker.
Buy tickets to the live show.
And I'm not going to tell you you should smoke cigarettes, but have you ever tried the smooth, flavorful taste of a camel?
It's like driving through the desert in early November, you know, when you've just got that pure, dry, cold 20th century.
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 to Flavor Country?
That's their heritage, Sophie.
That's their heritage.
Stop it.
All right.
This is not cash money.
Pick up some cigarettes, kids.
It very much is cash money.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
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