CZM Rewind: Part One: How Cigarettes Invented Everything

Robert is joined by James Stout to discuss the Tobacco Industry. (2 part series) https://daily.jstor.org/a https://daily.jstor.org/a-brief-history-of-tobacco-in-america/- https://daily.jstor.org/a-brief-history-of-tobacco-in-america/brief https://daily.jstor.org/a-brief-history-of-tobacco-in-america/- https://daily.jstor.org/a-brief-history-of-tobacco-in-america/history https://daily.jstor.org/a-brief-history-of-tobacco-in-america/- https://daily.jstor.org/a-brief-history-of-tobacco-in-america/of https://daily.jstor.org/a-brief-history-of-tobacco-in-america/- https://daily.jstor.org/a-brief-history-of-tobacco-in-america/tobacco https://daily.jstor.org/a-brief-history-of-tobacco-in-america/- https://daily.jstor.org/a-brief-history-of-tobacco-in-america/in https://daily.jstor.org/a-brief-history-of-tobacco-in-america/- https://daily.jstor.org/a-brief-history-of-tobacco-in-america/america/ https://daily.jstor.org/a-brief-history-of-tobacco-in-america/ https://www.africaresource.com/rasta/sesostris 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https://www.africaresource.com/rasta/sesostris-the-great-the-egyptian-hercules/james-buchanan-duke-father-of-the-modern-cigarette-by-william-kremer/comment-page-1/- https://www.africaresource.com/rasta/sesostris-the-great-the-egyptian-hercules/james-buchanan-duke-father-of-the-modern-cigarette-by-william-kremer/comment-page-1/kremer/comment https://www.africaresource.com/rasta/sesostris-the-great-the-egyptian-hercules/james-buchanan-duke-father-of-the-modern-cigarette-by-william-kremer/comment-page-1/- https://www.africaresource.com/rasta/sesostris-the-great-the-egyptian-hercules/james-buchanan-duke-father-of-the-modern-cigarette-by-william-kremer/comment-page-1/page https://www.africaresource.com/rasta/sesostris-the-great-the-egyptian-hercules/james-buchanan-duke-father-of-the-modern-cigarette-by-william-kremer/comment-page-1/- https://www.africaresource.com/rasta/sesostris-the-great-the-egyptian-hercules/james-buchanan-duke-father-of-the-modern-cigarette-by-william-kremer/comment-page-1/1/ https://www.africaresource.com/rasta/sesostris-the-great-the-egyptian-hercules/james-buchanan-duke-father-of-the-modern-cigarette-by-william-kremer/comment-page-1/ https://daily.jstor.org/a-brief-history-of-tobacco-in-america/https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/scriptorium/eaa/tobacco.html https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/scriptorium/eaa/duke https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/scriptorium/eaa/duke-doc.html- https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/scriptorium/eaa/duke-doc.htmldoc.html https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/scriptorium/eaa/duke-doc.html https://sites.middlebury.edu/smokingkills/forms https://sites.middlebury.edu/smokingkills/forms-of-tobacco-advertisement/- https://sites.middlebury.edu/smokingkills/forms-of-tobacco-advertisement/of https://sites.middlebury.edu/smokingkills/forms-of-tobacco-advertisement/- https://sites.middlebury.edu/smokingkills/forms-of-tobacco-advertisement/tobacco https://sites.middlebury.edu/smokingkills/forms-of-tobacco-advertisement/- https://sites.middlebury.edu/smokingkills/forms-of-tobacco-advertisement/advertisement/ https://sites.middlebury.edu/smokingkills/forms-of-tobacco-advertisement/ https://csts.ua.edu/files/2016/09/A https://csts.ua.edu/files/2016/09/A-History-of-Tobacco-Trading- https://csts.ua.edu/files/2016/09/A-History-of-Tobacco-TradingHistory https://csts.ua.edu/files/2016/09/A-History-of-Tobacco-Trading- https://csts.ua.edu/files/2016/09/A-History-of-Tobacco-Tradingof https://csts.ua.edu/files/2016/09/A-History-of-Tobacco-Trading- https://csts.ua.edu/files/2016/09/A-History-of-Tobacco-TradingTobacco https://csts.ua.edu/files/2016/09/A-History-of-Tobacco-Trading- https://csts.ua.edu/files/2016/09/A-History-of-Tobacco-TradingTrading https://csts.ua.edu/files/2016/09/A-History-of-Tobacco-Trading https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5402187/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/?report=classic#bib3 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/?report=classic#bib3https://www.jstor.org/stable/40469740 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1470496/?report=classic https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Cigarette/JX6mDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Cigarette/JX6mDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover http://www.cigarettecentury.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:32Robert Evans?

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• 1:03Speaker 03

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• 1:38Robert Evans?

  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? 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.

• 2:20Robert Evans?

  Oh, welcome once again to Behind the Bastards, the only podcast where the host regularly says that his show is cash money. Um, I'm, I'm Robert Evans, here to talk with you about bad people. Sophie Lickerman seems very unhappy, which is not cash money of her.

• 2:40Speaker 04

  I just have extreme secondhand embarrassment.

• 2:43Robert Evans?

  Well, that's too bad, Sophie, because I'm bringing it back, bringing back the phrase.

• 2:47Speaker 04

  As you know, everything you do reflects on me for some godforsaken reason.

• 2:53Robert Evans?

  I know, and you're gonna get a bunch of weird DMs from people.

• 2:56Speaker 04

  Very cash money of you, Robert.

• 2:57Robert Evans?

  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, in, in your language, I would say it's drawings of an elderly man, uh, who's never worked a day in his life.

• 3:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, 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.

• 3:27Robert Evans?

  I, I thought of a bunch of different ways of, of describing the new bills with, with King Charles on them. Um, part of me wanted to make a reference to the weird sects that got leaked of him and Camilla. But I made, I made an ethical decision that even the King of England deserves to have his sects be private.

• 3:47Speaker 04

  I just like, don't need, nobody need, ew.

• 3:51Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 3:52Speaker 04

  Just ew.

• 3:53Speaker 05

  But 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?

• 4:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that and his, he's got some, he's got a very specific kink.

• 4:04Speaker 05

  Oh, he's a kink, okay.

• 4:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 4:06Speaker 04

  Sir?

• 4:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, as well, as well as William?

• 4:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 4:10Speaker 05

  Okay, kinky little.

• 4:11Speaker 04

  Is this kink murdering his first wife, allegedly?

• 4:14Robert Evans?

  No, it's, it's, it's a tampon thing. Um, he talks about it at length.

• 4:19Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, okay. Yeah, not, not, not expected.

• 4:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we, we know far too much about what Charles has been sending Camilla. Um, a heartbreaking amount, I would say. Don't, don't Google it. Look, I'm telling you the truth, but don't Google this.

• 4:35Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 4:35Robert Evans?

  Um, hey.

• 4:36Speaker 05

  On my iHeart laptop.

• 4:38Robert Evans?

  Anyway, so I just broke my promise right there not to not to laugh at the King of England's sexual escapades. James, how do you feel about cigarettes?

• 4:50Speaker 05

  Oh, I think that's the idea. I wasn't expecting that. I 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.

• 5:09Robert Evans?

  I have the same difficulty because on one hand, I'm kind of constitutionally anti prohibition. Like, I don't think things should be legal 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 a, there's nothing like a cigarette. Someone's just tried to kill or hurt you.

• 5:50Speaker 05

  Which is why they're so valuable outside of British nightclub.

• 5:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 5:54Speaker 05

  One in the morning.

• 5:55Robert Evans?

  You never know when a bottle's coming for your fucking temple there.

• 5:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, you don't. Yeah, that's it.

• 6:00Robert Evans?

  You know, and 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 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.

• 6:26Robert Evans?

  That said, I think today people throw down too much against smokers and, and maybe there's, maybe, 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, um, Hide 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, like the cigarette,

• 7:08Robert Evans?

  the, in order to get people to smoke, the tobacco industry had to invent modern civilizations.

• 7:13Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 7:14Robert Evans?

  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, not a massive risk above like walking outside your door.

• 7:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's true.

• 7:37Robert Evans?

  But also you just don't have good data. So, yeah.

• 7:39Speaker 05

  Yeah. The ambient level of smoking is pretty high just from existing in any urban area at that time. So, yeah.

• 7:45Robert Evans?

  Just from being around. We'll, 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 ground finely enough. They probably

• 8:28Robert Evans?

  also chewed it. There were a couple of different devices they had for smoking it. And we don't, we, 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 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 B.C. And it spread from Central America to the Mississippi Valley and beyond, and was quickly adopted by neighboring peoples from like 400 to 700 A.D. is when you see most of this spread. And it makes it all the way out to the fucking Caribbean.

• 9:12Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. That's where Columbus runs into it at first, right?

• 9:16Robert Evans?

  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 and the Dominican Republic via a weird two-pronged nosepipe. So they would, they would smoke it, but they would like inhale it through this pipe that like.

• 9:36Speaker 05

  Like a nose snorkel kind of situation.

• 9:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it looks a little bit, it looks a little bit like a cannula.

• 9:41Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 9:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah, like a nasal cannula.

• 9:44Speaker 05

  Interesting.

• 9:45Robert Evans?

  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 Y 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 nicotine or Rustica through directly into your mucus membrane.

• 10:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, I can see that one being pretty rough on the old sinuses as well.

• 10:17Robert Evans?

  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. Cause 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?

• 10:31Speaker 05

  Right.

• 10:32Robert Evans?

  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.

• 10:55Speaker 05

  Right.

• 10:56Robert Evans?

  In part because it's kind of hard to when you're smoking it that way.

• 10:59Speaker 05

  Yes. Right. Yeah. There's a lot of work that I imagine goes into producing a nose cigarette from growing the tobacco, drying it out and.

• 11:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 11:09Robert Evans?

  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 to just make a fire because you want like a fucking smoke in the like, yeah.

• 11:33Speaker 05

  Get a fire drill out, get a piece of wood out, rub it up a piece of wood, yeah.

• 11:37Robert Evans?

  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 smoke before, 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. 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 nosepipes. He also sees people wrapping tobacco leaves with corn husks, which is probably the first cigarettes in history.

• 12:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 12:17Robert Evans?

  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. That actually goes back really fucking far. Like it probably more than a thousand years, people have been smoking something broadly similar to a cigar in, in that.

• 12:38Speaker 05

  That's pretty cool.

• 12:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It is kinda neat, right? I enjoy it. Yeah.

• 12:42Speaker 05

  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 it 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.

• 12:57Robert Evans?

  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 at 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. I like to, yeah.

• 13:24Speaker 05

  It's rather tragic that the cultural inheritance of that today, it's like guys who think that they should enjoy cigars.

• 13:30Robert Evans?

  The entire Republican Party.

• 13:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, Ben Shapiro and friends pretending to perform masculinity and then like going off to cough and be sick.

• 13:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's a bummer. They are, I, you know, I'm not a, I tend to like, I, 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, like liquor, you know, number one, liquor actually does like, oh, sometimes you get a bourbon and like, oh, this had, 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 smoother 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.

• 14:23Speaker 05

  One of the negative impacts of tobacco consumption.

• 14:26Robert Evans?

  It's unreal. The most pretentious thing that you can, that you can do is be a cigar aficionado.

• 14:32Speaker 05

  Cigar guy, yeah.

• 14:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah, unreal. Just, 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, the way that people most often use tobacco in the Americas was in religious rites. And when I, 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.

• 15:05Speaker 05

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 15:07Robert Evans?

  Tobacco can be, can cause hallucinations in high enough doses. It's a, It's a powerful mind altering drug when you are taking like massive quantities.

• 15:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 15:16Robert Evans?

  And 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 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 like hunk of tobacco. And then he would basically shotgun it into the mouths of the people participating in it.

• 15:47Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 15:48Robert Evans?

  And obviously you're getting a lot of smoke that way, like you're gonna get pretty messed up by it.

• 15:54Robert Evans?

  And 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 A D or whatever, right? Like if you have a couple of times a year, you're you're shotgunning some tobacco, that's not gonna be what kills you.

• 16:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, your life expectancy isn't long enough for that to be the thing that kills you in most cases, right?

• 16:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 16:14Speaker 05

  One of the other thousand things that's gonna kill you that we've eliminated now is gonna kill you.

• 16:19Robert Evans?

  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 get kills bugs like they don't they don't like it. There, 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 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

• 17:01Robert Evans?

  an emetic and like a constipation remedy, and it does work for that. I don't recommend following that up, but it does. 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 not help with asthma.

• 17:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think it might do the opposite of helping, in fact.

• 17:27Speaker 04

  You don't say.

• 17:30Speaker 05

  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 their lungs, right?

• 17:41Robert Evans?

  Exactly. And it's also some of the ti- 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 a 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 that information exists properly. But this is another way people would take it as a tea, which don't. Don't take tobacco.

• 18:25Robert Evans?

  It's actually pretty easy to kill yourself by ingesting tobacco. Please don't do that.

• 18:30Speaker 05

  Yeah. I know every now and again, like a pet will eat a bunch of cigarettes.

• 18:35Robert Evans?

  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 Ingolond, and despite early opposition from people who considered it a filthy foul drug for foreigners, it took off their, like, wildfire.

• 18:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, I just love that, like, the immediate British or English response was just like, to 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.

• 19:11Robert Evans?

  And in Europe? In 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,

• 19:26Speaker 05

  Hell yeah.

• 19:26Robert Evans?

  This shit's actually pretty dope. 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 gonna baptize it. Just gonna baptize coffee. Now Christians can have it.

• 19:39Speaker 05

  Then God changed his mind, just like that. Yeah. Omnipotent being, omnipotent being, amazing stuff.

• 19:45Robert Evans?

  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.

• 19:54Speaker 05

  Just imagining him doing fentanyl, like.

• 19:57Robert Evans?

  The Pope blesses fentanyl to protect the kids.

• 20:01Speaker 05

  Fuck, he's dropped it in the font and it's.

• 20:02Robert Evans?

  God says this shit's rad.

• 20:06Speaker 05

  Two babies are gonna have a rough one now we dissolved some fentanyl.

• 20:10Robert Evans?

  Put some fentanyl in the baptismal font.

• 20:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 20:12Robert Evans?

  No, you're gonna wanna give them some Narcan. They're not gonna have a good time.

• 20:19Robert Evans?

  That's why we called it the Narthax because of all the Narcan. That was a, that was a church joke for you, you kids. Anyway, uh, yeah.

• 20:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So the English start smoking tobacco. Uh, 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 the 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.

• 20:54Speaker 05

  Was it like, cause you see pictures of them sometimes and they got that, the old timey pipe, right? The long pipe with the little bowl.

• 21:00Robert Evans?

  Yep, yep.

• 21:01Speaker 05

  And yeah, is that like a class thing? Is that like, I can afford to have a pipe and you'll can chew it?

• 21:07Robert Evans?

  Some of its class cigars are generally like more expensive. Um, 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. Cause 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.

• 21:40Speaker 05

  So I

• 21:41Robert Evans?

  And it's addictive. Yeah.

• 21:42Speaker 05

  Yep. Yeah, extremely.

• 21:44Robert Evans?

  And it's and it's incredibly addictive.

• 21:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 21:47Robert Evans?

  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 winds 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?

• 22:27Speaker 05

  And then the French invent gauzz and it have never changed.

• 22:32Robert Evans?

  The French gauzz, which are which are still the worst cigarettes on the market.

• 22:38Speaker 05

  They're still smoking something close to modern cigarettes today.

• 22:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that was, those were the most common cigarettes we smoked in Syria. And it was like the gauzz that you couldn't sell in France because the tobacco was too low.

• 22:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Oh, God, what a horrible cigarette.

• 22:56Speaker 05

  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, like they used to do in nightclubs with the smoke machine, you know, just like

• 23:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 23:14Speaker 05

  Like you are also 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 never gonna 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.

• 23:37Robert Evans?

  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. Yeah, more ways to win. Yeah, in a number of ways. You'll learn about the seventies in Belgrade. I see some banging haircuts, go to Belgrade. Man, oh, the tracksuits there are unreal. I, 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 tracksuit and smoke, god, it's incredible.

• 24:23Robert Evans?

  Cultural experience. Burning through a pack of, of, of knockoff Marlboros that have two extra Es in them. It doesn't have the L, it's just a Marlboro.

• 24:35Robert Evans?

  You know what, you know who else sells discount cigarettes? Is it Sophie? Is that what her sign is? 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.

• 24:54Speaker 04

  What, what grade am I in? What school? Why am I out of school?

• 24:57Robert Evans?

  Normal age.

• 24:59Speaker 04

  I don't like this association and.

• 25:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, she's still going there every day, it's weird. Well, that, that, we don't have, we can't fund our podcast without selling loose cigarettes to children.

• 25:08Speaker 04

  For some reason also reflects on you, so.

• 25:11Robert Evans?

  We've asked you to stop, but here we are. I mean, I'm gonna be honest, Sophie, let's, let's be honest with ourselves. If, 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.

• 25:25Robert Evans?

  Uncancellable. I'm trying to, I'm trying to get them off the jewels.

• 25:32Robert Evans?

  Robert found anti-vaping action. I've got a Joe Camel tattoo on my chest.

• 25:38Speaker 04

  Oh my god, let's, let's, let's just go to ads. Hopefully, hopefully it's for gold.

• 25:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I'm gonna spend this whole episode trying not to say what is a homophobic slur in this country, by the way.

• 25:55Speaker 00

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• 26:26Robert Evans?

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• 27:25Robert Evans?

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• 27:35Robert Evans?

  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.

• 27:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's right. Yeah, 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 I'm holding it in.

• 27:56Robert Evans?

  It is. Now, it doesn't not, I mean, I think the slur comes from the harmless term, which also So if you read JR or Token, you will see that word used constantly in its original meaning. It is a little bit off putting sometimes.

• 28:13Speaker 05

  But the people I grew up with, like certainly where my grandmother lived, right? In rural Devon was very, like, people still use the Val di. Yeah. 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.

• 28:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's a bundle of sticks or whatever.

• 28:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, any package of anything. You can call it your Amazon word.

• 28:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's anyway, whatever.

• 28:41Speaker 05

  That's, that's talking about it.

• 28:42Robert Evans?

  Language. It's amazing. So, uh, yeah, um, all the, yeah. So in the 14th, or Louis the 14th 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, 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

• 29:27Robert Evans?

  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 cigar butts and like then roll them into a cigarette.

• 29:50Speaker 05

  Really nearly came out then, man.

• 29:53Robert Evans?

  The worst smoke I can imagine.

• 29:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:58Robert Evans?

  That is bleak. 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.

• 30:12Robert Evans?

  You gotta 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.

• 30:29Speaker 05

  I think cancer is just repudiated by him. It refuses to be anywhere near him.

• 30:36Robert Evans?

  That's gonna be bad for the cancer brand, man. I don't wanna get messed up with Giuliani.

• 30:44Robert Evans?

  So cigarettes start to get popular with Europeans during, 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 abutting 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 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.

• 31:27Speaker 05

  Oh, wow.

• 31:28Robert Evans?

  So, yeah, that's where that comes from.

• 31:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, there he is.

• 31:31Robert Evans?

  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 gonna quote now from a write-up in the Journal 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's Straight Cut, and Sportsman's Caporal, using similar blends. Kenny's chief competitor in the New York market was Goodwin & Company, which sold nationally advertised cigarettes

• 32:13Robert Evans?

  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."

• 32:35Robert Evans?

  I love old cigarette brand names. I would, I would smoke Old Judge. I think I'd have been an Old Judge man.

• 32:42Speaker 05

  Well, there was one that was particularly great. Old, was one of them called Old Black?

• 32:48Robert Evans?

  Uh, no, there's Old Judge Canvas Back and Welcome.

• 32:51Speaker 05

  Back, ah, okay. I thought it was Canvas Black, like what it would do to the old lungs. But, uh, yeah, Welcome. I think I just smoke a Welcome cigarette.

• 32:58Robert Evans?

  Smoke a Welcome.

• 32:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, that you get one on your pillow when you go into a hotel room. That's the kind of vibe it has.

• 33:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Reminds me of that, that old Bill Hicks bit when he's like, I'm love that they've, they've put the warning labels on the cigarettes. Lets me know which ones to avoid. Not gonna buy the lung cancer cigarettes. Low birth weights, though. Give me one of them.

• 33:18Robert Evans?

  So tobacco obviously is bad for you. Uh, 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, 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. Uh, 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 flashbang in your pocket.

• 33:50Speaker 05

  I see no issue with that. I think that's amazing.

• 33:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's a good idea. Yeah. I just wanna, just wanna whip off a rod of phosphorus next to my shirt.

• 33:59Speaker 05

  Great. Is it like, literally like, like white phosphorus? Like?

• 34:03Robert Evans?

  Um, I mean, I don't, I don't know if it's like white phosphorus, but yeah, I mean, it's, it's like a phosphorus, like you, you grind up a bunch of phosphorus and then you strike it, I think.

• 34:12Speaker 05

  Amazing. It's simulating someone like falling over and then just going up like an incendiary.

• 34:18Robert Evans?

  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.

• 34:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. Cigarettes will kill you, but not in the way you're expecting.

• 34:33Robert Evans?

  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. Uh, but yeah, again, as much as we joke about it, hard, 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, I'm gonna smoke my 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, smokers cough, but also, you know who else coughs? Is people who live in dense cities where the main method of transportation is horses?

• 35:15Robert Evans?

  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, 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 didn't want it to get into your bit, like, your house. So you could just sit there and watch the birds floating by. If somebody, if people are walking around coughing and looking sick, your first guess isn't gonna be, it's probably the cigarettes. Yeah, did it to. What a place. What a town. It really was a nightmare to be alive. Yeah. Jesus Christ.

• 36:00Robert Evans?

  I am surprised at the species we made it past there. 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. Yeah, that's true. As you float off down the shit river. They 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 plug 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.

• 36:41Robert Evans?

  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 and Sons Company. Or W. Duke's Sons and 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

• 37:22Robert Evans?

  of them. If I can find a way to make them cheaper. Yeah.

• 37:29Speaker 05

  People started smoking more in times of depression. They didn't have food and they wanted to not be hungry.

• 37:35Robert Evans?

  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 1870s because there's, there's not a whole lot of other things for you. But the cigarette is there.

• 38:01Speaker 05

  The working man's friend, isn't it?

• 38:03Robert Evans?

  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.

• 38:11Speaker 05

  You might get concussed by a floating turd.

• 38:15Robert Evans?

  It's the shit rivers, the main problem you've got to deal with.

• 38:20Speaker 05

  Drowning in a river of horse shit. Yeah, I'd be smoking whatever.

• 38:25Robert Evans?

  Of course, of course.

• 38:26Speaker 05

  They invented crack. I'd be on that, too.

• 38:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you want to get out of that situation as quickly as possible.

• 38:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So Fentanyl would have been a godsend.

• 38:36Robert Evans?

  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 were fighting over plug tobacco. He knew that the future of the industry was not in plug tobacco. It was in producing something convenient and cheap for urban poor people. In 1882, his company had just tin 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 50 more rollers, which still put him well behind the Allen and Genter factory up in Richmond, which employed 450 female cigarette rollers. But when a New York City cigarette factory

• 39:21Robert Evans?

  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. Um, now he's not

• 39:50Speaker 05

  How's that working for Uber?

• 39:53Robert Evans?

  It works a lot better for cigarettes than it does for Uber. Turns out this is actually a pretty reasonable business plan for cigarettes.

• 40:01Speaker 05

  Both of them will kill you. Both the self-driving cars and the cigarettes. Getting the self-driving cars will do it faster.

• 40:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah, the cigarettes will do it a little more ethically, though. So 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 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, you know, 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 the

• 40:48Robert Evans?

  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 Bonsak 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.

• 41:26Robert Evans?

  In contrast, using the Bonsak 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. That right there is turning point. Uh huh. That's gonna 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.

• 42:11Robert Evans?

  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. So, 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. 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 can 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?

• 42:55Robert Evans?

  Old Duke is going to need to actually like, 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.

• 43:09Speaker 05

  Great.

• 43:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 43:10Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 43:10Robert Evans?

  So.

• 43:11Speaker 05

  Wonderful world of tobacco marketing.

• 43:14Robert Evans?

  Yes. It's that's, that's what we're, that's what we're building towards here.

• 43:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 43:20Robert Evans?

  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, is so much more efficient. And because Duke had helped fix the Bonzac 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.

• 43:43Robert Evans?

  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, it's cleaner. It's more hygienic. It's more modern, right?

• 44:04Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 44:04Robert Evans?

  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 Bonzac 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 Bonzac machine. In return, Bonzac 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.

• 44:47Robert Evans?

  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 Bonzac'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 Bonzac 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 from a legal mechanism protecting independent inventors to one that would protect large and powerful corporations.

• 45:27Robert Evans?

  Duke is what he's done here is invent the modern usage of patents by corporations for corporate advantage, right? Like, everyone who is, like, every business leader who follows in any kind of industry is going to copy him in this.

• 45:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, man, that might be one of the things that's killed more people than cigarettes, right?

• 45:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, because a lot of medical patents and stuff like works on the same fucking idea, you know?

• 45:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, nearly every, nearly every drug is patented.

• 45:54Robert Evans?

  And of course, he's not trying to do anything evil with it. He just wants everyone to smoke cigarettes.

• 46:00Robert Evans?

  Perfectly, perfectly morally uncomplicated.

• 46:04Speaker 05

  Ironically, 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 cancer drug called Xtandi, which they're trying to stop a generic production, a cheaper generic production of. I'm just imagining the old handshake meeting between UCLA and Duke here and giving people cancer.

• 46:28Speaker 05

  Coming together on.

• 46:30Robert Evans?

  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 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.

• 47:16Robert Evans?

  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 hat, 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 decide 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.

• 48:01Robert Evans?

  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.

• 48:44Robert Evans?

  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,

• 49:28Robert Evans?

  at least by 19th century standards. And there are outcries against the practice because the the people who want them the most are are young boys, are kids, right? Kids start smoking to collect trading cards. That's what juvenile, how juvenile smoking starts in the United States. Great. They want to collect baseball cards, and to do so, they have to buy packs of cigarettes. Amazing. And this, 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, busybodies of the day to accept. One of those busybodies included Duke's father, who wrote this letter to his

• 50:09Robert Evans?

  son in 1894. "My dear son, I have received the enclosed letter from the Reverend, from the Reverend John C. Hockit, 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

• 50:54Robert Evans?

  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.

• 51:17Robert Evans?

  He is, he is fine with it.

• 51:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 51:21Robert Evans?

  So Duke is obviously not gonna 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 Brant 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.

• 51:52Speaker 05

  Amazing.

• 51:53Robert Evans?

  It's incredible. Yeah.

• 51:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 51:57Speaker 05

  Wow, I'm just imagining buying a pack of Marlboros to see if I can score a shiny Charmeleon or something.

• 52:03Robert Evans?

  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 Pall Mals?

• 52:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, I love that. It's just, it's like the Happy Meal of cigarettes. It's great, it's perfect.

• 52:22Robert Evans?

  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."

• 52:34Speaker 05

  Trying to evolve his Pikachu.

• 52:39Robert Evans?

  Good dyes of smoking inhalation trying to get a Bulbasaur.

• 52:45Speaker 05

  I choose do lung cancer.

• 52:47Robert Evans?

  Now, you know what else will give you lung cancer, James?

• 52:51Speaker 05

  Is it the cigarettes that Sophie sells to children behind the school?

• 52:55Robert Evans?

  It is, it is. The cigarettes that Sophie sells to children behind the school are very likely to cause cancer. But, uh, you know, that's the way it works.

• 53:08Robert Evans?

  Okay.

• 53:09Speaker 05

  They sell lungs, Sophie.

• 53:13Speaker 07

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• 53:43Robert Evans?

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• 54:43Robert Evans?

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• 54:54Robert Evans?

  Ah, God. Aren't we living well today? What a beautiful world we have in this America that I love. How are you all?

• 55:10Robert Evans?

  Sophie.

• 55:11Speaker 05

  It's just, it's been a pause.

• 55:13Speaker 04

  I'm just thoroughly disappointed in your actions. What else is new?

• 55:19Robert Evans?

  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.

• 56:02Robert Evans?

  So again, probably a net positive.

• 56:07Robert Evans?

  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."

• 56:36Speaker 05

  No.

• 56:39Robert Evans?

  Kids are like trying to collect these picture books and smoking 12,000 cigarettes.

• 56:45Speaker 05

  That is how you catch them all.

• 56:49Speaker 05

  Oh, that is a rough image.

• 56:50Robert Evans?

  That is an upsetting amount of cigarettes.

• 56:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's a lot of cigarettes. Wow.

• 56:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that is, that is an outrageous quantity of cigarettes. Um, Duke hadn't just hit upon a baller way to move cigarettes. He'd effectively invi- 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, he also just like gives stuff. So basically everything from how 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. We like all the entire toolbox of capitalism is being created. It's being created to push cigarettes to children.

• 57:42Robert Evans?

  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, is Duke spending all this money on cigarette ads.

• 58:17Speaker 05

  Wow. So he inadvertently also gave us the Monkey Ranch Gang.

• 58:22Robert Evans?

  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 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, uh, uh, fucking billboards and the Monkey Ranch Gang. So that's, that's a lot for one guy.

• 58:45Speaker 05

  Yeah. It's a make it real mixed bag.

• 58:48Robert Evans?

  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, to make ads. So just like some young, like 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

• 59:32Robert Evans?

  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 it into competitive bidding for tobacco harvests. As Alan Brandt makes

• 1:00:16Robert Evans?

  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."

• 1:01:00Speaker 05

  Just another wonderful contribution to society.

• 1:01:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he's really just humming along here, creating the modern world, yeah.

• 1:01:09Speaker 05

  He's ticking them off.

• 1:01:11Robert Evans?

  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?

• 1:01:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:01:25Robert Evans?

  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 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

• 1:02:07Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:02:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. It sounds like a vertically integrated supply chain, right?

• 1:02:31Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:03:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, seemingly. I've just realized that this guy is like Jeff Bezos. Like, he is...

• 1:03:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he's the Bezos of cigarettes.

• 1:03:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, which Jeff Bezos, I'm sure would love to be the Bezos of cigarettes, along with being a Bezos of almost everything else.

• 1:03:12Robert Evans?

  It's a great thing to be the Bezos of. So kudos to cigars for being

• 1:03:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, respect.

• 1:03:19Robert Evans?

  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." 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.

• 1:03:47Speaker 05

  Of course, that's what the British one's called.

• 1:03:48Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 1:03:51Robert Evans?

  And they do a, 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 and 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?

• 1:04:35Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:04:56Speaker 05

  Wow, yeah, yeah, that's crazy. It's like, yeah, he's now more or less invented like the global commodity, right?

• 1:05:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, this is like, it's one of the very first. 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 gonna go down, 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

• 1:05:42Robert Evans?

  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 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?

• 1:06:01Speaker 05

  Perfect.

• 1:06:04Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:06:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, no blazing trail in the great direction necessarily.

• 1:06:49Robert Evans?

  Maybe not in the best direction, but you can't, you can't deny the man knows what he's doing.

• 1:06:53Speaker 05

  No, this is a dude who loves to make, how rich was this guy?

• 1:06:57Robert Evans?

  I mean, it doesn't, because if you, if you actually translate it, it's just gonna 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?

• 1:07:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:07:10Robert Evans?

  He has, he has infinity dollars.

• 1:07:12Speaker 05

  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 solved the war in Ukraine instead of inventing new ways to give kids cancer.

• 1:07:22Robert Evans?

  This new cigarette's gonna work as a boat briefly.

• 1:07:29Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:07:46Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:08:05Robert Evans?

  Robert 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.

• 1:08:14Speaker 04

  I'm more familiar with the not doing a good job part.

• 1:08:18Robert Evans?

  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, US Steel, and American Tobacco. 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.

• 1:08:44Speaker 04

  Impressively not great.

• 1:08:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So Teddy Roosevelt, the trust buster, forces the DOJ to go after Duke.

• 1:08:52Speaker 04

  Trust buster.

• 1:08:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's what he's doing. He's busting trusts. He's busted some trusts. Look, there's a lot of-

• 1:08:58Speaker 04

  It's just funny coming out of your mouth.

• 1:09:00Robert Evans?

  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, 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 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 chains. You can't actually split the companies back up the way they'd been 15 years before.

• 1:09:41Robert Evans?

  So the DOJ, not wanting to destroy one of the three largest businesses in the US, exempts a bunch of their sub businesses and their international partnerships and like allows them to maintain certain supply chains and whatnot.

• 1:09:56Robert Evans?

  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 named 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

• 1:10:40Robert Evans?

  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 he's, it's not as bad, but they've gone from a monopoly to an oligopoly, right? Yeah. That's, that's, that's what the DOJ succeeds in actually doing. Great job, DOJ. 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. Can he not just stop? No, he cannot. With his Pokemon cards. Apparently not. He, he does. When he gets old and is about to die, he gives most of his fortune,

• 1:11:24Robert Evans?

  tens of millions of dollars, to Trinity College in Durham, which is renamed Duke University in his honor. Ah, there it is. And that's where we get Duke University. Wow, I didn't see that coming. Yeah. Great. And then they have a good public health school now, actually. Yes, yes. Yeah. 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. Fascinating, yeah. So I mean, to, 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, in, 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

• 1:12:08Robert Evans?

  is no, nothing that even approaches a medical consensus about cigarettes and cancer at this point. You can't blame it on him.

• 1:12:15Speaker 05

  Right. He's doing horrific shit to the people who work for him, I'm sure.

• 1:12:18Robert Evans?

  Absolutely. Like destroying unions and whatnot and, and, 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, no way for him to have known that they were harmful, you know?

• 1:12:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:33Robert Evans?

  In 1919, a US surgical student named Alton Ochsner 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 gotta check this out. You're never gonna see another lung cancer. Nobody gets this shit.

• 1:12:57Speaker 05

  Oh no.

• 1:12:58Robert Evans?

  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."

• 1:13:15Speaker 05

  Oh, Jesus Christ. Fuck me.

• 1:13:22Robert Evans?

  And honestly, he's probably lowballing it.

• 1:13:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's before you look at, yeah, like all this sort of downstream things. Jesus Christ. That is, yeah.

• 1:13:34Robert Evans?

  That is quite a death toll. Like, we can, look,

• 1:13:38Speaker 05

  Duke University.

• 1:13:39Robert Evans?

  We can argue about fascism and communism and the things, the, the great leap forward and Lysenkoism. What, what killed the most people? But man, nobody's, nobody's touching the cigarettes numbers, right?

• 1:13:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:13:52Robert Evans?

  The cigarettes out here dropping three pointers every shot.

• 1:13:56Speaker 05

  It's the goat of, of killing people. I'm eagerly awaiting Michael Tracy to like, go recuperate the cigarettes reputation on Twitter or something else.

• 1:14:06Robert Evans?

  So James, you got anything you want to plug before we we roll out of part one?

• 1:14:11Speaker 05

  I do another podcast that you do too sometimes called It Could Happen Here.

• 1:14:15Robert Evans?

  I do sometimes.

• 1:14:17Speaker 05

  It's about how things are falling apart and people are putting them back together. It's a good podcast.

• 1:14:22Robert Evans?

  It is a good podcast. I would say it's one of the only two podcasts that should be legal.

• 1:14:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, I yeah, fair enough. It's we're doing basically what he did with cigarettes, but two podcasts. And very slowly, we're stealing all the microphones and giving everyone cancer.

• 1:14:39Robert Evans?

  And I mean, hopefully going to kill 100 million people over the course of the century.

• 1:14:44Speaker 05

  It's on the vision board.

• 1:14:46Robert Evans?

  It's on.

• 1:14:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, you can see you've plaid your goals. Yeah, we had, we do have a live show if you survive that long.

• 1:14:54Robert Evans?

  Oh, shit.

• 1:14:55Speaker 05

  Twenty six. Yeah. It's October 26. Sophie Lichterman, but I think it's on the 26th of October.

• 1:15:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:02Speaker 05

  Yeah. That is right. Website and everything.

• 1:15:06Robert Evans?

  So check that shit out, motherfucker. Buy tickets to the live show and look, I'm not going to tell you, you should smoke cigarettes, but have you ever tried?

• 1:15:20Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:15:21Robert Evans?

  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 air. Just, just, or just take it in a Marlboro red. Oh, God, the flavor country. That's what people are missing today. Sophie, do you know how few Ginseers have been to flavor country?

• 1:15:48Robert Evans?

  That's their heritage, Sophie.

• 1:15:51Robert Evans?

  That's their heritage.

• 1:15:52Speaker 04

  Stop it.

• 1:15:53Robert Evans?

  All right.

• 1:15:54Speaker 04

  This is not cash money.

• 1:15:56Robert Evans?

  Pick up, pick up some cigarettes, kids.

• 1:15:58Speaker 05

  Very much is cash money.

• 1:16:03Speaker 04

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio 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.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

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