Cola Wars with Miles Klee

Miles Klee can’t take it anymore. This week, a tale of corporate intrigue, world domination, and soda. Read Miles Klee at Rolling Stone. Support You're Wrong About:Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are GoodLinks:https://www.rollingstone.com/author/miles-klee/http://patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-good Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Sarah Marshall?

  I never get paid in vodka and worships, you know, what have I done wrong?

• 0:14Sarah Marshall?

  Welcome to You're Wrong About the show where sometimes and without meaning to, we take a little break. We have not had a new episode for you in a month. It's been a month since Election Day. Feels related. I know it's probably been an overwhelming time for you. It's been an overwhelming time for us. Also, in terms of good things, I, Sarah Marshall, am doing some live shows with our beloved friends Chelsea Weber Smith and Miranda Zickler of American Hysteria. Our producer Carolyn Kendrick has a new album out, Each Machine. So, things are busy all over, in scary ways, in exciting ways, and we're just so happy

• 0:58Sarah Marshall?

  that you're here along for the ride with us. As I'm recording this, it's the day of our Seattle Massive Sances show at the Moore, December 10th, but we have a couple more shows coming up. We are doing our Massive Sances where Chelsea Weber Smith and I decide to not just talk about spiritualism and ghosts, but try to summon some real ghosts of our own. And we're going to be doing a show in San Francisco at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater on January 11th, and in beautiful, breezy downtown LA at the Regent Theater on January 24th. We really hope that you can

• 1:38Sarah Marshall?

  be there, and if you can't, our goal is to send out just a big glob of love and energy and Fleetwood Mac that will find you wherever you are. You'll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you.

• 1:55Sarah Marshall?

  So, on a lighter note, or kind of lighter, our new episode is on the Cola Wars with Miles Klee. I was very excited to do this topic. It is the last lyric in We Didn't Start the Fire, the Billy Joel magnum opus, and that seemed like a fun episode to me, but it is, of course, also a history of some of the ugliest aspects of American colonialism, of business, of the collusion between business and war and government, and, say it with me, It was capitalism all along. Miles Clie, of course, wears many wonderful hats. He writes for Rolling Stone and we're going to talk today about the history of Coke,

• 2:38Sarah Marshall?

  where it came from, how it or anything else can become quite so ubiquitous, and why we as Americans have such strong feelings about Coke versus Pepsi. That is about it for me. We have bonus episodes for your perusal. We have a new one up today about Bachelor Nation with Megan Burbank. I have never seen an episode of The Bachelor. Megan recaps The Bachelor as part of her work as a gadfly and gal about town. And so she told me the tale of The Bachelor slash The Bachelorette. And why did I have a lovely time? Again, kind of a lighthearted topic, but it gets right to the core of a whole lot of stuff. And that's it. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for being with us.

• 3:21Sarah Marshall?

  Thank you for listening. Thank you for journeying with us for however long you have been. Here's your episode.

• 3:37Sarah Marshall?

  Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where we talk about life under capitalism. And with me today is Miles Clie. Miles, hello.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  Hello, how are you?

• 3:49Sarah Marshall?

  I'm pretty good. I think appropriately for what we're recording, we're in the time of year. It's October as we're having this conversation. And it's the period where America can't decide if we're selling Halloween stuff or selling Christmas stuff. And it's just both at once, which is, you know, a very, that's how we do fall. Yeah. How are you doing? How does October find you?

• 4:13Speaker 01

  Good. Yeah. Nightmare before Christmas predicted this.

• 4:15Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And I'm having you on today to talk about a topic that to me, and for many people, I feel like I should be saying this in like a James Lipton voice, for whatever reason, which to me is inextricable from the lyrics by Mr. Billy Joel. Hypodermics on the shore, China's under martial law. Rock and roller cola wars. I can't take it anymore. And I've always found it delightful that of all the songs listed in Billy Joel's, We Didn't Start the Fire. The thing that leads him to not be able to take it anymore is the cola wars. And that's what we're talking about today.

• 4:58Sarah Marshall?

  The straw that broke Billy Joel's back.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  And this was a strong man we're talking about. He just couldn't, he just couldn't put up with it.

• 5:06Sarah Marshall?

  No.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  I mean, what are, what are your feelings about cola products or soda more generally? Do you have any dog in this fight?

• 5:12Sarah Marshall?

  I guess, I mean, I, I was raised by a Diet Coke woman of the nineties.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  Well, we're, we're starting off on the same page here because I, I wanted to do this episode because it's just crazy to me how loyal I was to the Coca-Cola brand as a kid and into adulthood.

• 5:28Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  Part of it is that, part of it is just that soda is addictive, right? But I was also strangely dogmatic in my belief that Pepsi was bad. It tasted wrong. If a restaurant served Pepsi instead of Coke, that was a problem. I, I mean, I think to people who don't really drink soda, this probably sounds ridiculous. They would maybe argue the flavor is the same, but to this day I swear I would know the difference in a blind taste test and I will always prefer Coke. That's just a fact.

• 5:56Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. So like, the question is, have we been brainwashed?

• 5:59Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Am I making that up? Am I in fact the pod people?

• 6:05Speaker 01

  You know, it's funny, I was on the phone with my mom and sister talking about this topic the other day and, and the seemingly innate belief that Coke is better. And they both laughed and they said, uh, well, it is though. And there's a political dimension to that as well.

• 6:16Sarah Marshall?

  Yes. Well, and I, and the sort of American quest for being the best of something or dominating an area, and also maybe this, like, if they do taste different, then maybe it's based not in superiority than on like Coke gets there first. So everything else feels like an imitation unless you're in Pepsi country, wherever that is.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, let's talk about Coke getting there first. So, um, so what we recognize as soda kind of dates back to early 19th century. Before that artificially carbonated mineral water had taken off as a health fad. And people started adding fruit flavors and extracts that we've been using to mix beverages since like the medieval era. At this time sodas are still associated with medicine, you know, sold in pharmacies. So there's kind of a snake oil cure for whatever ails you.

• 7:04Sarah Marshall?

  Huh.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  Right away, you also see how geopolitical forces have a role to play here. So like British colonizers in tropical regions had to take the anti-malarial drug quinine, but it was so bitter, they mixed it with sugar and water, which gave us tonic water. Then they invented gin and tonic because of course they also had to get wasted on the job.

• 7:26Sarah Marshall?

  No, you don't want to be sober when you're taking over a country.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no. And I'm sure listeners are aware of Coca-Cola's origins as like a dubious medicine. But what I didn't know is that it came directly out of the Civil War.

• 7:40Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, tell us about that because I feel like there's like, there's a joke about it in the T C Boyle book, The Road to Wellville, and that's my historical context for it, but that doesn't get me that far.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's a, it's a, it's a southern brand. I mean, a young doctor and chemist named John Pemberton, served as a lieutenant colonel in the Confederate Army. And in a pointless battle that took place in Columbus, Georgia, a week after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox.

• 8:08Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, get it together, you guys.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  He took a saber wound to the chest. Unfortunate. In the following years, he became addicted to morphine that he used to treat the pain from this injury. And meanwhile, he was inventing patent medicines at his drugstore. Eventually, he came up with something intended to cure his addiction and other veterans hooked on morphine in this post-war period. Pemberton's breakthrough is called, not joking, French Wine Cola.

• 8:36Sarah Marshall?

  I drink it. I buy it. I try it out. $2.99, right?

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, and when you hear what's in this, this was his take on mid 19th century French patent medicine called Van Mariani, which mixed Bordeaux wine and cocoa leaves.

• 8:50Sarah Marshall?

  Oh.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  The ethanol in the wine extracts the cocaine from the leaves. So yes, it's a wine and cocaine cocktail.

• 8:59Sarah Marshall?

  Boy, that's, that would be a really good follow-up to the espresso martini if we had slightly different laws.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  It would be huge.

• 9:06Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God. The hot girl drink of the year.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  Every Bravo reality show would just have like a contract to basically shoot a fire hose of this stuff at the cast.

• 9:16Sarah Marshall?

  Drinking it out of big gold flutes the whole time for continuity.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  Pemberton adds extracts from the Cola Nut, which is a seed of a plant native to Africa that has caffeine in it, and the aromatic flower, Demania, a woody shrub found in the Americas. So cocaine, of course, is a legal pharmaceutical at the time. It's considered a remedy for morphine addiction. You could just get off morphine and on cocaine, and supposedly that's fine. Yeah, I think just needless to say, we could surmise that the drink's popularity extends beyond its health applications, quote unquote.

• 9:51Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, I don't know how the Cola got from Africa to Atlanta, but it does feel like colonialism has something to do with it. And so the fact that we have an African nut being used as an ingredient by a former Confederate soldier is like, it's just there.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And we'll see how the colonialism goes both ways as these brands expand abroad. And, you know, we should also note that the cocoa leaves, those are coming from like Peru.

• 10:16Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Wow.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  So these are, these are all very exotic ingredients that are being extracted from elsewhere in the world, and that will cause problems for Coke later on.

• 10:25Sarah Marshall?

  And sold to Americans with a pack of random claims, which is really a lot of continuity.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  As somehow French.

• 10:33Sarah Marshall?

  Perfect.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  So by 1886, Pemberton moves this burgeoning operation to Atlanta. That'll remain Coke's headquarters forever.

• 10:42Sarah Marshall?

  And they will not be subtle about it.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  No, no, it's, it's, it's a, it's a big part of the identity. But he runs into a big problem right away, which is that Fulton County, you know, where Atlanta is, bans alcohol that same year. So he could still sell French wine cola elsewhere in the state, but he needs a non-alcoholic version for the home market. So his new formula of replacing wine with sugar syrup became Coca-Cola, which he marketed as the Temperance Drink, a supposed cure for, quote, nervous affections.

• 11:11Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, boy. It's non-alcoholic. Yeah.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  It still had cocaine in it.

• 11:16Sarah Marshall?

  But, but no alcohol, which is just, we're interesting people, anyway.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  I, I, I should say too, that, I mean, the cocaine, the amount of cocaine is often wildly exaggerated when this comes up today, because I think we like imagining people at the turn of the century just absolutely zooted off soda. That's just a very funny image. So.

• 11:34Sarah Marshall?

  It is. It's very fun.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  We'll just indulge that.

• 11:37Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, but, but it does seem like, you know, it's, you don't want to put too much cocaine in your soda, or else people are gonna have heart attacks and not buy it again.

• 11:49Speaker 01

  I will shout out Pemberton's partner Frank Mason Robinson. He came up with the name Coca-Cola and he also wrote the flowy Coca-Cola script that you recognize. In some ways, the true genius behind the product, I have to say.

• 12:02Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, that script is gold.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Hasn't changed really. You know, Pemberton didn't live to see his invention become a global or even nationwide phenomenon. He died in 1888. Before that Coca-Cola had caught the attention of Asa Kandler, a Georgia tycoon and politician who would later become mayor of Atlanta. So over the next couple of years, he secured ownership of the formula and brand for a total of $2,300.

• 12:27Sarah Marshall?

  Love it.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  Or about 80 grand in today's dollars, still a great deal.

• 12:31Sarah Marshall?

  Well, you know, something similar happened with Jell-O where it was invented by this guy who just like could not make it work commercially for whatever reason and sold the rights to it for $400 at the time, which was like around 1900.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love how often in the in the history of these sodas that somebody else comes along over and over and says, well, I have bigger ideas for this than than this asshole can possibly pull off. So, so in Kandler's case, this involved taking down existing local competitors and prying the Coca-Cola name loose from Pemberton's opium addict son.

• 13:06Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, well, that sounds like he would have to do some stuff that might stop someone else from sleeping well at night, I would wonder.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  And and over the course of this succession style drama, he also formed the Coca-Cola company that still exists today. But even before his takeover was complete, Kandler went on the offensive with advertisements that sound quite familiar more than a century later. So in 1889, he took a full page ad in the Atlanta Journal to announce that his drugstores were, quote, "sole proprietors of Coca-Cola, delicious, refreshing, exhilarating, invigorating." Now, wouldn't you want to drink that?

• 13:46Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, yeah, it's, it's, I don't know. I feel like the amount of caffeine people are forced to consume daily. It's like, are we different? I don't know. Dutch Brothers is doing really well.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  I mean, I would identify this as the moment when Coke acquires this identity of something more than a health tonic.

• 14:04Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  You know, now, now it's this effervescent treat. So by the turn of the century, nineteen oh three, Coca-Cola has a competitor, marketing itself in almost the exact same terms.

• 14:15Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, no.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  This is Pepsi Cola, which is bottled in New Bern, North Carolina. It has the tagline exhilarating, invigorating, aids digestion.

• 14:24Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, no.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  So Pepsi was originally called, and I love this, Brad's Drink.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Uh, a pharmacist named Caleb Bradham came up with the formula in the eighteen nineties. Like Coke, he was using cola nuts.

• 14:38Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  As his business grows, Bradham buys the trade name Pep Cola and rebrands to Pepsi to fit the claim that the soda is good for dyspepsia or indigestion.

• 14:48Sarah Marshall?

  Love it.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  Side note, not true. That's like an old wives' tale.

• 14:52Sarah Marshall?

  So many good concepts in there, though. I also, doesn't Brad's Drink sound like, there's like a diner with like a regular named Brad and he orders the weirdest thing, you know? It's like a, like a grape soda with an egg in it. They're like, yeah, it's Brad's Drink.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Nobody else orders it.

• 15:06Sarah Marshall?

  It's for Brad. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's, um, how on earth does A C handler deal with this glove slap to the face?

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Well, it's interesting. There are different challenges at first. So unlike Coke, Pepsi Cola contains no drugs, not even caffeine.

• 15:22Sarah Marshall?

  Wild.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Uh, Bradham, yeah, Bradham specifically wanted to create a beverage without the narcotics found in other soft drinks because, you know, this is actually sort of starting to become a political issue. I mean, this is relevant in terms of competition because through the early years of the twentieth century, Coca-Cola is facing pressure to remove its, uh, let's say, active ingredients.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  The Gilded Age has produced all these really potent drinks. And along with that came new anxiety over their habit form and quality. A lot of this backlash is distinctly racist and anti-immigrant, based around fears that the non-white underclass is likely to become these dangerous raving addicts of soda.

• 16:02Sarah Marshall?

  Because every time white people get addicted to something, we're like, it's not, we, we, we're fine. We can have all we want. But it's other people, minorities, they can't have it. That would be awful.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. And like I said, Coca-Cola is a product of the Jim Crow South. The same climate cooked up a moral panic about cocaine supposedly contributing to black crime. So by 1903, Kandler amended the original formula, switching to de-coconized cocoa leaves. He sells the cocaine extract that is produced as a byproduct to pharma companies because it's still pharmaceutical. In 1906, the US government passes the Pure Food and Drug Act, which eventually gave us the FDA and made manufacturers liable for stuff like, you know, accidentally putting arsenic in children's candy.

• 16:50Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, you shouldn't do that. I mean, yeah, I know that there's a lot to complain about in America, but like, I am very appreciative of the existence of the FDA and the ADA, and it's worth pointing out.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  Pepsi takes advantage of this by adopting the slogan, "The Original Pure Food Drink."

• 17:06Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, love it.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was conceived from the start as a beverage without potentially harmful ingredients or additives. Coca-Cola has the, all the problems here. The Department of Agriculture seizes 40 barrels and 20 kegs of a shipment and brings a lawsuit against the company alleging that its added caffeine content is a public health hazard. So, concerns just about the caffeine at this point.

• 17:28Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God. Yeah.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  And this gets tied up in the courts for years. Coca-Cola originally wins. The government appeals all the way up to the Supreme Court, says the case should not have been dismissed and would have to be tried in a lower court, but Coca-Cola, to avoid this, voluntarily cuts its caffeine content in half, covers all legal costs. Meanwhile, Pepsi is kind of rolling along here. No, no issues with the government yet. It's still small.

• 17:55Sarah Marshall?

  Still a health food.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's pioneering what will become a long-term strategy of celebrity endorsements. And it runs newspaper ads featuring race car driver Barney Oldfield, who calls it, quote, "A bully drink, refreshing, invigorating, a fine bracer before a race."

• 18:12Sarah Marshall?

  I love it. You gotta have a fine bracer.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Uh, World War I is a turning point for both brands. Unlike Pepsi, Coca-Cola is spending millions on advertising already. Basically, an unprecedented level of mass marketing at this point. It's already nationwide. It's exporting abroad. It's part of why they're facing government scrutiny.

• 18:31Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  But this popularity also means they're dealing with more than 100 imitators selling knockoff sodas. Knockoff Coca-Cola.

• 18:39Sarah Marshall?

  Can I ask, is, um, because one of the reasons we're, I don't know, that this timing for this episode felt right was that Coke has managed to associate itself so strongly with Christmas? Is, when does that happen?

• 18:53Speaker 01

  Pretty early. Um, yeah, we will see that there are, um, like in the 1930s and 40s. They get a lot of Santa ads. It's part of their, it becomes part of their family slash wholesome slash holiday, uh, marketing, which is, you know, kind of knitted in with, uh, they're all their nostalgia plays. Cause Coke, even, even as soon as it exists, is immediately already playing on nostalgia for the very recent past, essentially. Coca-Cola and the hundreds of franchisees it has bottling the soda around the country realize they have no good way of protecting the brand. In 1914, their head attorney, Harold Hirsch, calls on everyone to band together behind a new bottle design,

• 19:38Speaker 01

  telling them they will have to absorb the immediate expense because, quote, "We are not building Coca-Cola alone for today. We are building Coca-Cola forever, and it is our hope that Coca-Cola will remain the national drink to the end of time."

• 19:51Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, it feels very American to like invent a thing and then the next day be like, this will be the most important soda. And, you know, until the history of time. And it's like, okay, it's soda, you know, calm down.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  Several glass companies are given the challenge to create a bottle, quote, "So distinct that you would recognize it by feel in the dark or lying broken on the ground."

• 20:14Sarah Marshall?

  I gotta say, they did do that.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  I mean, they snapped. The winning company came up with the curvaceous design. We all know, sometimes referred to as the hobble skirt shape. There was a trend at the time for narrowly tapered skirts that hobbled women who wore them. They couldn't walk in them, as well as the Mae West bottle for similarly horny reasons, I think.

• 20:34Sarah Marshall?

  The Mae West bottle. That's fantastic.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  It was actually inspired by an illustration of elongated cocoa pod, but sex sells.

• 20:43Sarah Marshall?

  Businessmen in the early 20th century would just get turned on by, you know, pencils.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, shapes.

• 20:49Sarah Marshall?

  If they looked at them long enough.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  Candler becomes mayor of Atlanta. No more time for Coca-Cola. He steps away. He gives controlling stake in the company to his kids. They apparently weren't up for the job or just wanted some quick cash, so they sold it to investors led by another Atlanta businessman, Ernest Woodruff, for $25 million.

• 21:12Sarah Marshall?

  In what year?

• 21:14Speaker 01

  That would be 1919.

• 21:16Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  It goes public that year. Stock priced at $40. One share bought that year with dividends continually reinvested. About $10 million today.

• 21:27Sarah Marshall?

  Gosh darn it.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  So that's what I'm using my time machine for.

• 21:33Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  So this acquisition creates a central part of the Coke legend. As collateral for the loan, Woodruff needed to acquire the company. He gave his bank the only written copy of the formula for Coca-Cola syrup. And they kept it in a vault in New York. When the loan is repaid, he gets it back and puts it in a vault in his Atlanta bank. The document is now in Coca-Cola's own publicly displayed vault at their World of Coca-Cola museum. And the formula remains one of the ultimate trade secrets in existence, in part because they've never patented. I mean, which, they would have made it public domain 20 years later. This way, they can keep it secret. I mean, but as you might guess from the cheeky museum display, there's a bit of theater to this. I mean, if you pulled off.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  An Ocean's Eleven heist and got your hands on the formula. You still wouldn't be able to market it as Coke, which is the valuable part.

• 22:26Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  The brand is the product. You also can't compete with Coke's global distribution system. And on top of everything else, you don't have a special contract with Stepan Company in New Jersey, which is the only corporate entity in the US that is specifically authorized by the DEA to import cocoa leaves.

• 22:44Sarah Marshall?

  It still has cocoa leaves in it?

• 22:45Speaker 01

  Stepan doesn't even process that much cocoa.

• 22:47Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  It's and you don't taste, you're not tasting that in the drink. It's just this weird signature thing and it goes to all this trouble to de-coconize these leaves. And this company is still thought to be creating about $200 million worth of cocaine annually as a byproduct of the leaves it processes, which is either destroyed or sold to the only pharma company in the US permitted to receive it as like an experimental drug base.

• 23:13Sarah Marshall?

  You're really, you're, you're giving some good heist inspiration in this section, I think.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  I will say that the arrangement with the Stepan Company, which de-coconizes the leaves, this whole arrangement is a result of Coca-Cola's power already in the early 1920s because they effectively lobbied Congress as they passed something called the Harrison Act, which otherwise outlawed the importing of cocoa, but includes a special provision for the use of de-coconized leaves. And whose idea do we think that was?

• 23:44Sarah Marshall?

  Well, you know, I, is this an expression of the fact that by this point they're big enough and they're generating enough gross domestic product, I guess, that it's valuable for the government to stay on their good side?

• 23:58Speaker 01

  I think so. Yeah. I mean, they, they have done a good job, not only of cozying up to government power and political power, but for certain, this is like, again, they were a product of, you know, the Gilded Age and up through the roaring twenties and big business is, you know, good for everyone at the top. They're all basically the same people. As I said, Kandler becomes, you know, mayor of Atlanta. It's like, you basically have politicians running the place already. So the connections go really deep and especially in Atlanta, as we've just said, um, we're going to see just, you know, how, how powerful they kind of are in that area and, you know, increasingly in DC as well. Yeah, I mean, as all this was happening, Pepsi is failing. It goes bankrupt in 1923.

• 24:40Sarah Marshall?

  Pepsi.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Sold to a new owner who can't revive it. Over about a decade, Coke has offered the chance to buy Pepsi several times, but never does.

• 24:48Sarah Marshall?

  Are the people running Pepsi like, the people aren't responding well to purity, sir?

• 24:55Speaker 01

  They're like, you know, we have a bottling operation. Like, it's just kind of big. Like, don't you want this? I mean, instead, in 1931, Pepsi is bought by a guy named Charles Guth.

• 25:06Sarah Marshall?

  Love it.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  Guth is what you might call a bit of a bastard. Not only was he known for being sued by his business partners after screwing them over.

• 25:14Sarah Marshall?

  That's familiar.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  He was acquitted in a murder trial in his 30s.

• 25:18Sarah Marshall?

  Oh.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  After killing, yeah, he killed his black chauffeur.

• 25:21Sarah Marshall?

  Jesus.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Supposedly because of a dispute that arose over Guth not wanting his milk delivered at the same time as the chauffeurs.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Makes no sense. A really awful case that the NAACP brought a lot of attention to at the time. Of course, he gets away with it. And this wonderful human specimen is, of course, the president of a major candy company called Loft when he buys the Pepsi formula.

• 25:47Sarah Marshall?

  Of course. Yeah.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  So, yeah, so he's like a classic Willy Wonka character.

• 25:53Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, in a way, I find it impressive that it made it to trial at all, as opposed to being just kind of dismissed by the the system at the time.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's how that's how bad it was, basically. Yeah. So he acquires it through his own family business as opposed to Loft, the candy company. His his own family business makes soft drink syrups, and he's motivated to do this also because of spite.

• 26:16Sarah Marshall?

  Against Papa, I would guess.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  Actually, no, against Coca-Cola.

• 26:21Sarah Marshall?

  Oh.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  Chiseler that he is, he's mad that Coca-Cola won't give him a discount on the Coke he's selling at his own drugstore.

• 26:30Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, all right.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  So he says, fuck it, we're a Pepsi soda fountain now, and I own the brand. Things still don't go that well. Guth tries unsuccessfully to get Coca-Cola to buy him out at one point, but they won't. Then he has the chemists at Loft, the candy company, reformulate the Pepsi-Cola formula. Guth moves the company to Queens, New York. They come out with a six ounce bottle, but the game changer comes at the height of the depression. Pepsi debuts a 12 ounce bottle that is critically the same price as the six ounce bottle, just a nickel. By the mid 1930s, Pepsi can be found around the world as the second largest company after Coca-Cola. Boom, done.

• 27:12Sarah Marshall?

  Wow. Yeah. Undercutting until you achieve domination and then not doing that anymore is truly one of the great American business strategies.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  You know, Pepsi is really stealing Coke's playbook here. I mean, they're leaning hard into the advertising game because there's not much to distinguish it on the flavor level. There's, people don't really get a difference between the two. So they're hiring skywriters. They're putting the name everywhere. They're just drilling it into people's heads and it works.

• 27:40Sarah Marshall?

  And that does feel like kind of a marker of what the 20th century and then, you know, the 21st century became about for consumers where you have, you know, companies marketing virtually indistinguishable products and having to continually find ways to make them seem different from each other.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  But something else interesting was going on, and that's to return to Coca-Cola, which was based in the deep Jim Crow South, led by Ernest Woodruff's son, Robert Woodruff, a segregationist who publicly said his fair share of racist things. It did not market directly to black people at all. I mean, part of the reason cocaine was removed from the drink, as we said, was because of this racist moral panic. The Coke ads at this time really painted as a drink of wholesome, white respectability. Often there's a white guy in a suit and a tie, which I don't associate with soda at all. I even found a poster where it's like a man in a tuxedo and a woman in a gown being served Coca-Cola on a silver tray by a black butler.

• 28:36Sarah Marshall?

  All right. Right. So it is, it is the, the soda of white supremacy as well.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, some of this is like less overtly

• 28:46Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  harmful. I mean, some of the 1930s images are by Norman Rockwell.

• 28:50Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  So pure, uncut nostalgia, but still a very like genteel, southern, white milieu. I mean, it's like, it'll be like a little white boy in a big straw hat fishing with his dog and he has a Coke. So you get the picture.

• 29:01Sarah Marshall?

  Well, it's like when you see sort of a Republican attack ad now, and it's like a white family in a cornfield. You're like, fuck you, you know, and you're like, I'm not against any of these things, but I know what this is standing for and what it is saying it's against.

• 29:16Sarah Marshall?

  Unnecessarily nostalgic, white, idyllic, imagined past feels still part of it.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's not as, it's not as subtle as they think.

• 29:25Sarah Marshall?

  No, yeah.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  I mean, Charles Guth, who literally murdered a black man, probably wouldn't have seen the possibility here, but fortunately for Pepsi, shareholders of the Loft Candy Company sued him for breach of corporate duty for snatching up the Pepsi-Cola formula for himself instead of selling it to them. They also accused him of using their assets and employees to build the Pepsi empire and line his own pockets. Guth lost this case and it was such an important precedent that there's now a principle in corporate law known as the Guth Rule, which basically says that if you, as a company director, recognize in business opportunity that your employer can financially and logistically take advantage of, you can't just take it yourself behind their backs.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  It would have been different if Loft couldn't afford to buy Pepsi or was in some radically different industry, but they're like the world's biggest candy company. Obviously they would acquire Coca-Cola's upstart competitor if they'd had the chance. And naturally they realized this as soon as Pepsi started to actually succeed.

• 30:24Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  So in the aftermath of this lawsuit, Loft merges with Pepsi, keeping the Pepsi-Cola name and Guth is replaced with a new CEO, Walter Mack.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  Mac is a far more liberal Jewish man from Queens and he is the one who starts to appreciate that Coca-Cola has no standing in black markets.

• 30:42Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, interesting. So he he likes noticing things.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  He's a noticer. He hires an African American sales team that targets urban northern regions and black areas of the South. They put out ads with black models that don't conform to offensive stereotypes. There's no Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben. It's like middle class, well dressed, aspirational families. Some ads highlight prominent black businessmen and women. They get Duke Ellington as a spokesman. It's this extraordinary experiment in multicultural marketing, all because Pepsi notices that Coca-Cola is deliberately ignoring this whole segment. But it is not by any means some enlightened or woke campaign. Let's say that. It's

• 31:21Sarah Marshall?

  It's probably no such thing as a woke ad campaign.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no.

• 31:24Sarah Marshall?

  It's

• 31:25Speaker 01

  I think it's just an instructive example because it's something that looks progressive, but it's actually just pretty cutthroat.

• 31:32Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And well, and it's like the idea of like, that selling a product to somebody means noticing that they're there and that they exist as people. And that's sort of humanizing. But it's also, you know, it's fundamentally about realizing that you could get their money. So, yeah.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  And Pepsi still has to walk this super fine line because by courting a black customer base, they risk white backlash. They could, they could have the go woke, go broke problem. And over the 1940s, they do see a stigma develop so that even as Coca-Cola becomes known as the Jim Crow soda, Pepsi gets attached to like racial epithets. I mean, you have a few attempts at boycotts as well by racist white people. And this all comes to a head in 1949, when Walter Mack gives a speech at a bottle or convention explaining that Pepsi will have to gain, quote, "a little more status" and no longer be strictly identified as, quote, "an N-word drink."

• 32:26Sarah Marshall?

  Ooh, buddy, buddy, buddy.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Our liberal hero, not so much.

• 32:32Sarah Marshall?

  I tried to not have high hopes, but even so, you know?

• 32:36Speaker 01

  So Edward Boyd, a Pepsi employee who was one of the only black corporate executives in America back then, and genuinely adored Mac, other than this, was so offended by this that he walked out of the presentation. He had seen, he'd overseen a lot of the sales strategy that helped Pepsi make inroads with the black markets, all while his team faced discrimination from other Pepsi employees, not to mention out on the road and even threats from the Ku Klux Klan. He leaves the company and his team basically disbands. Only one member will climb the corporate ladder. Harvey C. Russell, who in 1962 becomes the first black vice president at any major American corporation. However, I mean, as Pepsi is expanding in the US, World War II gives Coke a big opening to expand their

• 33:20Speaker 01

  footprint abroad.

• 33:22Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, boy.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  And it comes to be seen, for better and worse, as a defining symbol of Americanism and globalization.

• 33:29Sarah Marshall?

  How does World War II help Coke out? What does that involve?

• 33:33Speaker 01

  It all kicks off with a kind of corporate patriotism. Robert Woodruff declared in 1941 that every American serviceman should be able to get a bottle of Coke for a nickel, no matter where in the world, no matter what it cost the company. This entailed a huge effort to ship the soda to the troops and set up dozens of bottling operations as close to the front lines as possible in North Africa and Europe, South Pacific. As the secondary brand, Pepsi had a much harder go of it and complained that the US government was favoring Coca-Cola in its military theaters. Coca-Cola was exempted from sugar rationing, for example, which is crazy to me.

• 34:09Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  But Pepsi still sold plenty of soda at like army bases and defense plants and what have you. I mean, the war benefited both sides, no doubt.

• 34:17Sarah Marshall?

  It is fascinating to think of like, just the, you know, the construction crews that were like knocking up these Coke plants, you know, in Algeria or whatever and during World War II, like what, that's a What was that like, you know, day to day, the World War II coke plant? Was it scary? You know, were you, were they gonna bomb you to take down morale?

• 34:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't, I don't know if those were targeted, but um, you know, it probably looked like any other kind of uh, munitions manufacturer.

• 34:48Sarah Marshall?

  Right, God.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  Got to worry about that.

• 34:50Sarah Marshall?

  If something is manufactured and distributed on the scale that we do things, you know, for the last hundred years or so, then like, nothing ever stays simple. It always gets involved in war and corporate racism and everything else.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  This also sets us up for a great example of Coca-Cola playing both sides. Uh, of course, it becomes associated with the patriotism of, uh, you know, our boys in World War II. But before the US entered the fray, Coca-Cola had distributed sodas at Hitler Youth rallies.

• 35:19Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  And raised the swastika bottling conventions in Germany, in part because a competitor in Germany had tried to demonize it as a Jewish drink.

• 35:30Sarah Marshall?

  Coke.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  I mean, the weirder footnote here is, once the US imposed the trade embargo with Germany, preventing the import of Coca-Cola syrup, the siloed German branch of the company tried to invent a substitute using the crappy available ingredients they had. Uh, what the head of the regional operation called leftovers of leftovers. And they called it Fanta.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  Short for the German word Fanta-see or imagination, because they were told to use their imagination to come up with a good name. Uh, just something fun to think about when you see someone drinking Fanta.

• 36:03Sarah Marshall?

  It's more to connect it to the Nazis than I expected, but what's nice about it is that it means that the Nazis had terrible soda. That's something. Wow.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  They wanted, they wanted Coke and this was the best they could do.

• 36:15Sarah Marshall?

  They really ended up pretty far away if the, the modern version is, is at all close.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  You know, as Coke is spreading around the world, there are many who try to stop its relentless march into their domestic culture. This process becomes known as Coca-Colaization.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  Very clever. I don't know who came up with that, but man, that's good.

• 36:37Sarah Marshall?

  I do really like that. Yeah. Cause it is, I mean, and is that from a sense partly of like, you know, this being the period when America does start to take over the world with our products and our exports and like, everybody starts wearing our trash.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Absolutely. There is an awareness of America becoming a superpower. And in particular, spreading our capitalist nonsense everywhere. So some of the staunchest opponents of Coke in the post-war era would be the French Communist Party, God bless them, which not only argued that the company was no help in their efforts to, you know, rebuild the war-torn nation, but that its vast corporate hierarchy could be used for espionage.

• 37:18Sarah Marshall?

  I don't see why not.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  Who can blame him? I'm sure Coke, I'm sure Coke had spies abroad, you know?

• 37:24Sarah Marshall?

  You're just like spitting out Netflix series left and right here, you know?

• 37:28Speaker 01

  It could be a 10-season show. Another funny development of note this time, you know how in the South, people say Coke to mean any kind of soda?

• 37:36Sarah Marshall?

  I do. I love that. Yeah.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that's because from the very early days, people abbreviated abbreviated the name Coca-Cola that way. And Coca-Cola fought for decades to reverse this trend unsuccessfully. They didn't want any association with the coal-based fuel Coke. And besides, they hadn't trademarked Coke.

• 37:54Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  So they went as far as running ads in the 1910s pleading with people to order Coca-Cola by its full name, to ensure they're getting the genuine article. Cause if you just say Coke, who knows what you're getting right now?

• 38:05Sarah Marshall?

  You guys.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  Uh, it makes no difference. They just continued to live with the problem that Coke might turn into a generic trademark, you know, similar to how anybody can sell their pain relievers as aspirin, even though that used to be like a bear brand name. If you lose control of the, the word, then it's over. In the early 40s, they start to use Coke in advertising materials and they create a very confusing mascot to explain that Coke and Coca-Cola are the same thing.

• 38:30Sarah Marshall?

  Something that anyone could have figured out because that's how language works. But yeah, okay. Who is this horrible mascot?

• 38:38Speaker 01

  His name is Sprite Boy. There was no such soda as Sprite.

• 38:42Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  By the way, this was a rather demonic looking elf child who wore a Coca-Cola bottle cap for a hat. And he was designed by the artist Had and Sunblum, whose illustrations of Santa Claus for Coke ads are some of the most recognizable depictions of the character that we've discussed. I should say, there's a bit of a misconception that Coke like invented our contemporary image of Santa, the red and white jumpsuit being some side of kind of subliminal brand hypnosis. But the 19th century artist, Thomas Nast, was doing basically the same thing before Coke existed. So in the second half of the century, you know, as we said, America is this superpower and a lot of the jockeying between Coke and Pepsi comes to resemble kind of Cold War chess game.

• 39:26Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  Where they compete to infiltrate new countries before the other.

• 39:30Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And you begin to resemble each other more closely than you resemble anybody else.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  Before we move past the mid-century fascism, though, I will drop my most academic reference. There's a Theodore Adorno passage I happened to come across the other day that really made me bolt up, right? Adorno was writing about the rhetoric of Martin Luther Thomas. This was a fascist American demagogue on right wing Christian radio in the 1930s. And Adorno had this to say, quote, "The mode of selling an idea is not essentially different from the mode of selling a soap or a soft drink. Socio psychologically, the magical character of the word leader and therewith the charisma of the Fuhrer is nothing but the spell of commercial slogans taken over by the agencies of immediate political power."

• 40:22Speaker 01

  That's bars. That's bars. I mean, to me, the example of a soft drink is really striking here. If you flip this around. If you flip this around for this era, you could say we're enthralled to the global dominance of the big soda brands, the same way people can support authoritarian rule and be excited about that.

• 40:39Sarah Marshall?

  It's something that like, it doesn't cost that much. You kind of go through it. So you need to keep buying it. So they need to keep advertising it. And they're all basically the same. And so it has to come down to like selling the feeling. And yeah, that if you look at just. Our current totalitarianism that it is about like selling an emotion, selling an affective space, but there's nothing of substance really in the pitch.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  So for the soda giants, the 50s and 60s are all about maximizing optimism over American prosperity and technological progress, but without any of the pesky anxiety of the atomic age, nobody at Coke commercial is worried about getting new.

• 41:24Sarah Marshall?

  It's true. I can't think of any.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  A ton of TV ads, a medium that transforms and heightens this rivalry. The increased exposure really allows Pepsi and Coke to insinuate themselves into the very fabric of American experience and leisure. I mean, cola is there when you go to the movies. It's there when you're at the beach. It's what you drink at the holidays. It's what Santa Claus drinks.

• 41:45Sarah Marshall?

  Let's all go to the lobby.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  You know, the companies also settle more into their identities. Coca-Cola wedding itself to the kind of American iconography that feels idealized and timeless. Pepsi striving to define itself as the new and different choice of younger people, the future. Their big win on the youth front is from a 1963 campaign about the so-called Pepsi generation.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  This is an idea that came out of a slogan contest won by a woman in Wisconsin. Her prize was a car. So congrats to her.

• 42:18Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, should have given her more, but that's how they get slogans. They get some lady to come up with it and then never, you know, pay her royalties. It's great.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  Pepsi's play here was to maintain that it is actually different from Coke. A cool alternative, preferred by a cool alternative crowd. Commercials were showing attractive young people riding motorcycles and surfing. They called Pepsi drinkers livelier, active people with a young view of things.

• 42:47Sarah Marshall?

  Nice. Yeah, it implies being kind of exciting and edgy without committing to any kind of idea ever, which is ideal, I'm sure, for marketing.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, they kind of had their cake and ate it too here because they were appropriating sort of a burgeoning counterculture, but without, you know, getting specific. And they're selling a lifestyle as opposed to a beverage, right?

• 43:10Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  They, in 1965, acquire Frito Lay or merge with them, expanding into the snack market. And then that's on their way to buying Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and KFC, which is, you know, where you're still going to get Pepsi products to this day.

• 43:24Sarah Marshall?

  That's very, and Sierra Mist, R I P.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  Coke was also changing with the times, though kind of more behind the scenes. Of course, by now, they've realized that they have to compete for their share of black customers. Robert Woodruff is no longer president of the company, but kind of steered it from the board of directors for decades. He seemed to understand where the civil rights movement was taking the country. Interesting anecdote is that Martin Luther King Jr. had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and was said to be honored at a huge banquet dinner in his hometown of Atlanta the following year. Certain business and political leaders, who you can probably imagine, were against King and his politics, threatening not to take part.

• 44:09Speaker 01

  The story goes that Woodruff put the word out that he supported the banquet and would be attending even if no one else did. And the rest of town fell in line because that's how powerful he was at this point. Supposedly, Woodruff didn't want Atlanta and by extension Coca-Cola embarrassed by a snubbing of a civil rights hero.

• 44:27Sarah Marshall?

  So again, it's, yeah, it's a strategy.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. I don't think he gives a shit about people's rights.

• 44:35Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Well, and it's like, when you look today, it's sort of, you know, the way corporations are tweeting at each other and it's, yeah, you know, Wendy's is beefing with Burger King. It's like, you know, they're never going to be people. So Coke has figured out a couple of things. They're slow learners, but they do know how to survive.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  And, you know, he is, he is basically like the most powerful person in Atlanta. I mean, he, he, Woodruff is out the White House, the Night King is assassinated in 68 and actually learns of his death directly from LBJ, then immediately calls his people down in Atlanta to make sure nothing goes wrong with the public memorial. And he personally paid for funeral expenses the city couldn't cover, sent the Coca-Cola company jet to bring Coretta Scott King back to Atlanta for the funeral. And it does have, again, you know, to be a little cynical about it, it is all these like, he's paying a lot of attention to these appearances. Let's say that.

• 45:34Sarah Marshall?

  I don't know. To build on the previous point, you can never train a corporation to have morals, but you can train them to know they're being observed. And maybe that's the best we can do.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  Very true. The war on drugs is taking shape. There's, there's a US agency called the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, predecessor of the DEA. It's actively working to eradicate coca crops in Central and South America to stifle cocaine production, of course, despite the cultural significance of the plant in these regions.

• 46:02Sarah Marshall?

  Right, yeah.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  Coca-Cola is worried they won't be able to get their leaves from Peru to be de-coconized by their chemical firm in New Jersey, but they're so powerful, they can go straight to the FBN and say, hey, we'd like to set up a secret coca farm in Hawaii.

• 46:17Sarah Marshall?

  What?

• 46:17Speaker 01

  The feds are like, sure thing. And they even negotiate with the Peruvian government to make sure that supply channel remains open as well, all for an ingredient they don't need.

• 46:26Sarah Marshall?

  Alrighty, but that's what makes it fun when you think about

• 46:31Sarah Marshall?

  getting the government to bend the law so you can do something that you don't need to be doing.

• 46:37Speaker 01

  Plus, you know, the name is still Coca-Cola, so I guess they just have to stick with it.

• 46:41Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. So that, I don't know, that is an incredible expression of what a big superpower they are, you know, because it's like, who else could have done that in the eighties? It's kind of hard to imagine Reagan, maybe a bit.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  Well, this was just in the sixties. I mean, they saw the writing on the wall.

• 46:56Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my gosh. Yeah. They're like, yeah, okay. So this is an area where they are quick on the uptake. Yeah.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  They saw that this was about to happen. Yeah, these crackdowns. Speaking of addictive substances, so a final novelty of the 1960s seduce scene. Curiously, it was a third company, RC Cola, shout out to them. Beat Coke and Pepsi to the diet soda fad.

• 47:20Sarah Marshall?

  Good job, RC. Also, Tab. Tab was around way before Diet Coke, right?

• 47:25Speaker 01

  So Tab is a Coke product.

• 47:27Sarah Marshall?

  What? Oh, my God.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  Okay, so Pepsi responds to RC Cola in 1963 with a line of diet drinks called Patio. There's a bunch of different flavors. This actually gets a subplot on season three of Mad Men, if people remember that.

• 47:40Sarah Marshall?

  Patio, it's a good name. I like it.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  Patio Diet Cola is soon just Diet Pepsi. Coca-Cola is very uptight about using the name on anything but the flagship product. So they come out with the Diet Cola Tab at the same time.

• 47:54Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, okay.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  And the commercials have, the commercials have to specify, this is made by Coca-Cola, so you can trust it. But they don't, they, they refuse to put the name on there.

• 48:03Sarah Marshall?

  Fascinating. Yeah. Can I just tell you, my, I have a personal favorite Tab commercial?

• 48:09Speaker 01

  Oh, please.

• 48:10Sarah Marshall?

  Well, it's so good. It's like shot in like Stepford Wives vision. And it's got this very eerie jingle. And basically, it's about drinking Tab so you can be a mind sticker. Stick on your husband's mind when you're not around, so he doesn't forget you and have an affair. Be a mind sticker. Drink Tab. Keep your shape in shape. Your husband will forget you. Good night, ladies. It's the commercial.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  That is dark.

• 48:39Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, it's rough. I don't know. I, I, I guess it's kind of silly for my mind to be this blown, but I really had been under the impression, why had I thought Tab was somehow independent? And why do I care? It just goes to show the whole theme. Yeah.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  Just an upstart soda company that came out of nowhere.

• 48:56Sarah Marshall?

  Independent, yeah. I guess, oh, God.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  I mean, it's funny because while, while there are obviously ads that focus on the, the diet culture aspect of this, the Diet Pepsi commercials kind of take aim at Tab for supposedly having this like gross aftertaste because of the saccharine that's in it.

• 49:13Sarah Marshall?

  Well, yeah, it did.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  So they were like really laser focused on how Diet Pepsi tastes just like real cola. And there's a very unsubtle subtext of like FYI, the other Diet Cola tastes like shit.

• 49:24Sarah Marshall?

  Well, you know, I mean, if you, if it's true, you might as well point it out.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, that's an interesting segue to 1971.

• 49:32Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, Don Draper.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Which brings a master stroke from Coke, a worldwide commercial spot known as the Hilltop ad, which some consider the greatest commercial ever made. And yes, to spoil the series finale of Mad Men, the ad that Don Drake was implied to have written. You could argue that it takes the Pepsi generation concept and levels it up to a kind of utopian mindset. You get a multicultural group of young people on top of a hill, holding Cokes labeled in all different languages, singing, "I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. I'd like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company."

• 50:10Sarah Marshall?

  It's the real thing. Coke is what the world wants today. Coca-Cola. It's so good. Like, it's so sinister. I think it's quite evil, but like, I have goosebumps thinking about that ad. I really do think it's fantastic.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  For some reason, this cost the equivalent of 1.9 million dollars to make.

• 50:31Sarah Marshall?

  How expensive were those kids?

• 50:33Speaker 01

  It became the most expensive commercial ever produced to that point. But, you know, I guess if we're considering the upheavals of the late 60s, festering trauma of Vietnam, you can see how this sunny take on globalization, American greatness exported seamlessly to non-Americans who embrace it, might have been comforting.

• 50:52Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, well, and also, it's, I think I remember, you know, because it like zooms out and it's this sort of like United Colors of Benetton thing of like multicultural, everyone brought together by Coke. But the first face it's on is a young blond white woman, right? So it's like, yeah, like keeping its core focus.

• 51:09Speaker 01

  Still very prominently, you know, a lot of white people leading the, leading the charge, I guess you could say. But it still wasn't everywhere. So this is where we have to introduce Donald Kendall. He's a Pepsi boss, one of the chief architects of the cola wars. As pure a company man as you'll ever find, he drank Pepsi for breakfast.

• 51:30Sarah Marshall?

  Did he ever do the hot Pepsi like Laverne?

• 51:32Speaker 01

  I have no doubt.

• 51:33Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, yeah, you gotta try it at least if you believe so much.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  He had no college degree. He worked his way up from a job at a bottling plant to become president and CEO in the early 60s. Before that, however, Kendall struck up a friendship with one Richard Nixon, who had formerly represented Pepsi in his legal career.

• 51:53Sarah Marshall?

  What? Okay. Love it. That is, that is a very Nixon thing to do, honestly.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  He loves soda.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  That's why Nixon.

• 52:03Sarah Marshall?

  Exactly.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  The two of them traveled together to Moscow in 1959 when Nixon was vice president.

• 52:10Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  For an exhibition of American products, Kendall wanted to beat Coke to the Soviet Union.

• 52:17Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm. Can we do an operetta about this, this trip?

• 52:22Speaker 01

  This is when he had the, the, the kitchen debate with Khrushchev. But when that wasn't happening, Kendall wanted Nixon to guide Khrushchev to the Pepsi display at the exhibition where Khrushchev sampled the drink. Khrushchev tried it and deemed it, quote, "very refreshing." The New York Times ran a headline I just love that said, "Cola Captivates Soviet Leaders."

• 52:46Sarah Marshall?

  Incredible.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  Kendall wouldn't be able to set up Pepsi operations behind the Iron Curtain until 1973, but it was the first American consumer product made and advertised in the country.

• 52:58Sarah Marshall?

  Good going Pepsi.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  It gets weirder because to get around the currency exchange issues over the next two decades, Pepsi continued to strike barter deals through third parties, accepting payments from the USSR in the form of stolichnaya vodka, as well as Russian submarines and warships that could be harvested for scrap. And Kendall would later tell an adviser of President George H. W. Bush that, "We're disarming the Soviet Union faster than you are."

• 53:24Sarah Marshall?

  Nice. I mean, it does seem like they're getting some of their junk, but yeah, I, I never get paid in vodka and warships, you know, what have I done wrong?

• 53:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. Why, why don't you have a navy?

• 53:35Sarah Marshall?

  I don't know.

• 53:37Speaker 01

  Kendall unfortunately also connects Nixon with a Chilean Pepsi bottling magnate who was seeking to oust President Salvador Allende in the early seventies, which may or may not have influenced the president as he helped to set the stage for a coup in Chile.

• 53:50Sarah Marshall?

  Okay. Wow.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  On the flip side, Kendall was also the guy who convinced Nixon to install a tape recording system in the Oval Office. So he could refer back to audio transcripts when later writing his memoirs.

• 54:04Sarah Marshall?

  Kendall.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  So we have him to thank for the Watergate tapes. Incredible character.

• 54:12Sarah Marshall?

  That's amazing. Is it true also the thing of like, cause the way I remember it is that there were, there was supposed to be like a button that Nixon could press to start recording, but he just like couldn't master it. And finally they're just like, okay, fine. You'll just, we'll just have it record everything.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  I think we got everything. In fact, um, in fact, Kendall is on the Watergate tapes because at some point he shows up and gives Nixon advice about what to do.

• 54:35Sarah Marshall?

  Perfect. And then they have a nice soda, I hope.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Back in the US soda market, Kendall is responsible for a memorable, though pretty cynical Pepsi pitch in the mid 1970s known as the Pepsi challenge.

• 54:47Sarah Marshall?

  Oh no.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  The idea here was to stage blind taste tests of Coke and Pepsi in malls and stores to demonstrate that when people don't see the branding, they actually prefer Pepsi.

• 54:57Sarah Marshall?

  I feel like this might have backfired.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  You know, there are a lot of theories about how Pepsi gained an edge in this comparison. That the obvious truth is that when people do see the labels, they pick the brand they have already aligned themselves with. That's always been Coke's advantage. They're the default name. But other things that could have swayed customers included whether the sodas were served at different temperatures, uh, natural bias toward sweeter tastes served in smaller doses and how the cups were labeled. It wasn't a scientific study by any means. I mean, the participants preferred Pepsi by a really slim margin anyway. It didn't prove much. The idea was just to make you question your own buying habits, right?

• 55:33Sarah Marshall?

  The idea was just to make us question reality. Yeah.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  I mean, toward the end of the seventies, Coke answered Pepsi's victory in Soviet Union by breaking into China first.

• 55:43Sarah Marshall?

  Ha ha.

• 55:44Speaker 01

  They are the first foreign corporation allowed in almost three decades after the communist revolution. Anti-American propaganda within the country tended to regard Coke as a prime symbol of capitalist empire and waste. And Communist Party media pretty sharply criticized Coca-Colaization. But Coca-Cola chairman J. Paul Austin was not going to let Pepsi win this time. Uh, he constantly lobbied Chinese diplomats in Washington. He would bring them boxes of Cokes and then gave them a refrigerator when he realized that they were drinking it at room temperature.

• 56:17Sarah Marshall?

  Oh yeah, it's not going to make a great impression.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, it just doesn't, it doesn't hit. But they're impressed by Coke's factories, their technology, their quality assurance. I mean, this has been the model for a lot of the company's international franchising. They give away cutting edge infrastructure. They let foreign partners run the plants and they just import the secret syrup. That's it.

• 56:38Sarah Marshall?

  Wow. Yeah, it is fascinating that they managed to have that much syrup leverage.

• 56:46Speaker 01

  So let's come back to the United States for the 1980s.

• 56:49Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, boy.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  The fiercest years of the cola wars.

• 56:52Sarah Marshall?

  The years which drive Billy Joel to madness, apparently, yeah.

• 56:57Speaker 01

  From here through the late 90s, Coca-Cola is helmed by a guy named Roberto Goizueta, whose family defected from Cuba when Castro rose to power. Like Kendall at Pepsi, he's someone who rose fast in the organization at a really young age. He was such a maniacal arch capitalist that I could spend 20 minutes just reading you insane quotes from him.

• 57:18Sarah Marshall?

  Wonderful.

• 57:19Speaker 01

  He takes over in 1980 and instantly decides the company has no direction. Rudderless, it's a disaster. It's gradually been losing market share to Pepsi in stores and it's barely holding on to the top spot thanks to distribution in restaurants and the like.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  Goizueta talks a big game about Coke not competing with Pepsi, but with coffee, tea, milk, water. Saying stuff like, saying stuff like, what's our share of the stomach? His goals were, quote, "A Coke within arms' reach of everyone on the planet." And, quote, "To make it impossible for the consumer to escape the Coca-Cola company." I mean, he sounds like a Bond villain.

• 57:57Sarah Marshall?

  Yes.

• 57:58Speaker 01

  He's an incredible guy.

• 57:59Sarah Marshall?

  It's like, yeah, if you, I don't know, if you need a level of dominance where you want people to be unable to escape, it's like. But why?

• 58:08Speaker 01

  Asked if he ever drank Pepsi, he said, only when I've eaten something I don't like and I want to throw up.

• 58:13Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, love it. Love the commitment.

• 58:17Speaker 01

  Most importantly, though, he believed in action and change. He said, don't wrap the flag of Coca-Cola around you to prevent change from taking place. It is extremely important that you show some insensitivity to your past in order to show the proper respect for the future.

• 58:32Sarah Marshall?

  And I thought Hannah Arendt said that. What do I know? Wow. It is like, I don't know. I love the sort of the like, the corporate intensity. It like, it does feel like, much like war, corporations exist so men can feel like they're doing something important by destroying each other. It's very interesting. All right. Well, great. This is very dramatic.

• 58:53Speaker 01

  In 82, he takes the extraordinary step of putting the brand name on what is essentially a reformulated version of Tab. This is the Diet Coke juggernaut we know and love.

• 59:04Sarah Marshall?

  Nice.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  They buy the film company Columbia Pictures because the Reagan years are an insane frenzy of mergers and acquisitions. And the company wants to see Coke products and movies that are then shown at theaters that sell Coke. That's that seems like a good idea at the time.

• 59:18Sarah Marshall?

  There are, there, right. There was a bump in Coke products and movies in the 80s. I feel like now that you're saying that to me.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  They sell it to, they sell it at a profit to Sony by the end of the decade because they realized they have no business in the film game. Goizueta also swaps out the sugar in Coke for corn syrup to save on costs.

• 59:36Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, wow.

• 59:38Speaker 01

  R I P to the, to the good Coke.

• 59:40Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 59:41Speaker 01

  Both Coke and Pepsi unveil caffeine free versions, which would have pleased the Puritans who were making a stink about it at the beginning of the century. Pepsi Co. gets its own new hungry CEO in 1983. This is Roger Enrico, whose original job at the company was in the marketing department for Funyuns. He climbed fast. Enrico aggressively signed celebrities to endorse and advertise Pepsi, including Madonna, Michael J. Fox, Lionel Richie, and the biggest of all, Michael Jackson, who inks a record breaking $5 million deal. Famously, Jackson's hair caught fire while he was filming a Pepsi spot in 1984. We all know that.

• 1:00:18Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  The brand having these stars on their side only contributes to the ongoing sense of Pepsi being young and hip compared to their dusty old rival. And on top of that, they're running these amusingly mean commercials that dunk on Coke in unexpected ways. There's one where a UFO hovers over Coke and Pepsi vending machines and then uses its tractor beam on the Pepsi machine. There's another where archaeologists in the future find a Coke bottle and don't know what it is.

• 1:00:45Sarah Marshall?

  It is like, yeah, I like that Pepsi embraced bitterness at a certain point.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, you have. I think you have to, right?

• 1:00:51Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  The upshot is that by 1985 Pepsi is clawing its way to a 30% market share. This is just unprecedented. A Diet Coke is also somewhat cannibalizing the sales of original Coke. So the company knows it's time for a big swing. You might know what's coming here. Sergio Zaiman, a marketing executive at the company who had previously worked at Pepsi and spearheaded the success of Diet Coke, advanced the idea that Coca-Cola's secret formula should be changed again.

• 1:01:19Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, God, yeah.

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  Then you can call it New Coke.

• 1:01:23Sarah Marshall?

  Yep.

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  And push an advertising blitz for this revamped flavor, which would be noticeably sweeter, more like Pepsi.

• 1:01:30Sarah Marshall?

  It is a great example, I think, of how you shouldn't try and compete by doing the thing your competitor is doing, which just so happens to be the opposite of the thing that you have always done.

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  It makes, it makes sense if you consider Coke's insecurity about being a lumbering dinosaur in the industry, but I think as any consumer alive right now is aware, New Coke did not survive.

• 1:01:56Sarah Marshall?

  It's like, yeah, the one thing we know about it is that it didn't make it. And I don't, right, but it's like this idea of Coke, you know, for better and for worse and in benign ways and in quite, you know, evil ways, building itself year by year is like the establishment drink, the drink of nostalgia and childhood and idyllic white families. And then, you know, to just kind of like panic and dick shit, you know?

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  As soon as new Coke comes out, customers revolt.

• 1:02:26Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I would.

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  I mean, it would be one thing if they could still buy original Coca-Cola, but they couldn't. It's just new Coke. They went all in, all in.

• 1:02:35Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, and it seems like they've made fairly conservative choices until now, like they wait to get into, you know, very to change. They kind of wait stuff out. And in this case, it's like, you couldn't have thought this over a little bit?

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  Well, as you're sort of describing, I mean, they're a victim of their own manufactured nostalgia. Once you take away real Coke, suddenly that's all anyone wants because you can't have it anymore.

• 1:02:58Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, it's the real thing.

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  You don't, you don't have people embracing new Coke or Pepsi, really. You just have customers forming organizations called like Old Cola Drinkers of America and signing petitions demanding Coke bring back the original formula.

• 1:03:12Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  And this is all despite Coke's own internal research, which indicated that people did prefer new Coke. It's this encapsulation of our loyalty to an emotion as opposed to a product. Nobody cares what the product is.

• 1:03:26Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Is it better or does that matter? Like, how much better can it be versus the comfort you get from it tasting the same as it has tasted since you were born?

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  So Pepsi and Roger Enrico see this blunder as their moment of triumph. This guy is so delightfully petty that after the failed rollout of new Coke, he buys a full page ad in major US papers that says, quote, "After 87 years of going at it eyeball to eyeball, the other guy just blinked."

• 1:03:58Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  That goes so hard.

• 1:04:00Sarah Marshall?

  These guys are like fricking Carnegie. This is great.

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  I mean, three months later, Coca-Cola puts regular Coke back on the shelves under the name Coca-Cola Classic.

• 1:04:09Sarah Marshall?

  Uh huh.

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  This proved so popular that there were conspiracy theories to this day about the company deliberately sabotaging itself with new Coke just to make people clamor for the Coke that had been taken away.

• 1:04:22Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  They quickly regained their market share. Pepsi remains the number two beverage company. And as of this year, actually, Dr. Pepper has edged out Pepsi in sales volume.

• 1:04:31Sarah Marshall?

  What? This is because of Mormons?

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, apparently by connecting with Gen Z.

• 1:04:37Sarah Marshall?

  Oh.

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  Who like a spicier soda.

• 1:04:40Sarah Marshall?

  Fair enough.

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  Uh, surprisingly, Coke did keep trying to sell new Coke after rebranding it as Coke two.

• 1:04:48Sarah Marshall?

  Oh.

• 1:04:48Speaker 01

  Which feels even sillier.

• 1:04:50Sarah Marshall?

  It does. It's like the first Coke is a family pet that died.

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  You can imagine their scientists being finally Coke two. We've cracked it.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  You know, Crystal Pepsi only ran from like 1992 to 1994 and yet, uh, occupies like a large part of my memory for some reason.

• 1:05:09Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Well, it had that Van Halen song in the commercial, right? That was, that was, you know, can't do better than that.

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  Um, some of the stunts of the eighties and nineties were truly absurd. Uh, Coke and Pepsi competed to be the first soda into space.

• 1:05:24Sarah Marshall?

  Okay. Who won and how or did anybody?

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  I don't think there are any winners here. Coca-Cola invented a special dispenser can for zero gravity first. But Pepsi contacted the White House and demanded the chance to hardly develop their own gadget. Eventually both cans went up on a Challenger mission in 1985.

• 1:05:43Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, no. Yeah, that one didn't go well.

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  Coke in 1990 has another really harebrained scheme with a multimillion dollar promotion called the magic can. It's just part of a tie in with a New Kids on the Block concert tour that summer.

• 1:05:59Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  The gimmick here is that certain cans of Coke, instead of soda, contain cash or vouchers for other prizes that would jump out from a spring loaded device when you popped the tab. Now, to make it impossible to tell which cans were winners just by picking them up. The company partially fills them with gross smelling chlorinated water, which was also meant to keep you from drinking out of a prize can once it was opened.

• 1:06:27Sarah Marshall?

  For once, they're overestimating the intelligence of the American public. And also, I hope nobody opened one of these while driving.

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  If this is sounding like a very, your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they did, they didn't stop to think if they should type moment, like that's right on the money. I mean, stores report that customers are shaking up cans, trying to determine which ones have prizes. The packaging was faulty and it leaked. So sometimes the money or tickets would get soaked in the chlorine water. A little boy did end up going to the hospital after drinking some of the chlorinated water. Uh, he was fine. He was fine. Thank God. Cook scrapped the campaign. They scrapped it in three weeks, but the company can't recall the magic cans that are already on sale because thanks to the ingenious design, there's no way of telling them apart from the regular cans.

• 1:07:13Sarah Marshall?

  They've become too big to, I guess, too big to fail is a more specific, you know, it means too big for the government to allow them to fail or else we'll all die. But in this case, they're just like too successful to tell good and bad ideas apart, maybe at this point.

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  Pepsi faced an even more insane disaster in the early nineties. Uh, its manufacturer in the Philippines held a contest called Number Fever, in which the underside of bottle caps were printed with a three-digit number and confirmation code that corresponded to different prizes, including a grand prize equivalent to about 40 grand in US dollars. Importantly, that's like hundreds of times the average monthly salary in the country. Winning numbers were announced nightly on the news and the promotion is so popular that Pepsi extends it. One night, a news channel announces that the number three, four, nine is the grand prize winner.

• 1:08:06Speaker 01

  There were supposed to be just two winners, but because the contest had been extended, there were already 800,000 bottle caps in circulation with that number without the confirmation code.

• 1:08:17Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  Paying out that many grand prizes would have cost around thirty two billion dollars.

• 1:08:22Sarah Marshall?

  God.

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  Thousands of customers in the Philippines try to redeem their caps. Uh, Pepsi initially points out that they don't have the confirmation code. Then they try to buy these people off for twenty dollars apiece. Some customers take this deal, but others form a consumer group and start holding protest rallies that sometimes turn into riots. People are tipping over Pepsi trucks and setting them on a fire.

• 1:08:44Sarah Marshall?

  Jesus.

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  Executives receive death threats. Three employees are killed when someone throws a grenade into a warehouse.

• 1:08:50Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  A couple more people die when a homemade bomb is thrown at a Pepsi truck. One of the men accused of orchestrating the bombings will go on to claim that Pepsi paid him to stage them as false flag attacks so they could smear the protesters as terrorists. The fraud suits about number fever would take another fifteen years to fully settle with a number of plaintiffs finally receiving a few hundred dollars. But it only took about a year for Pepsi to recover the market share it lost in the country during the scandal.

• 1:09:18Sarah Marshall?

  Man. That is like, I don't know. Yeah, it feels like these are the years when the consequences of the supremacy start coming back, maybe where it's like, right? Like you are sort of this like god sized power if you're promising people money and then not giving it to them and it's sort of, I don't know. It's, it's hard to blame people for for wanting to take Pepsi down and not thinking through the consequences.

• 1:09:43Speaker 01

  Around the turn of the millennium, Coke and Pepsi continue to expand their product lines to keep pace with one another. You may remember Coke selling Surge to challenge Pepsi's Mountain Dew.

• 1:09:53Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  Um, some people still hoping that'll come back. Uh, the tie-ins get more and more expensive. Pepsi is the official beverage of the Star Wars prequels. Um, in two thousand and one, Coca-Cola faces a lawsuit from a Colombian trade union seeking five hundred million dollars in compensation for the deaths of three members. Claiming that a Coke bottling partner in the country assisted right wing power militaries in murdering them. Columbia, because of its never ending civil war is one of the most dangerous places for union activism. Coke and the bottlers eventually get their complaints dismissed. But if you've ever heard offhand comments about quote unquote Coca-Cola death squads, they're referring to this controversy. Coke continues to deny the allegations through

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  the odds, but it's just one more example of how these corporate behemoths wind up embroiled in every kind of geopolitical conflict, thanks to their kind of imperial ambitions.

• 1:10:46Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Right. And if you're expanding aggressively into international markets and trying to maintain a foothold, then like at a certain point, you do, I think, have to commit the same kind of crimes as governments do just in order to keep your place. Not that it's justified, but that that's how people justify it.

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  Now, throughout the, you know, rest of the 21st century so far, I can't help but feel that some of the fight goes out of the cola giants era. I think that some of it is because outside of the Super Bowl, we don't really experience the TV ad monoculture.

• 1:11:22Sarah Marshall?

  That's true.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  But because of the escalation of their battle in previous decades, Pepsi and Coke are just stuck burning ungodly amounts of money to remain in the public eye. This is like the paradox of being a product that's everywhere and that everyone already knows about. You have to continually reinforce your omnipresence. I mean Pepsi and Coke both now spent around $4 billion a year on advertising.

• 1:11:46Sarah Marshall?

  That's amazing. I mean, and that does, I don't know, that goes back to the arms race comparison because I feel like, like what if Coke just decided to stop advertising completely? Wouldn't they be fine? I mean, not really, but you know, but they would though. We wouldn't forget about them, you know?

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  They can't take that chance there.

• 1:12:03Sarah Marshall?

  No, they can't. They can't. They can't. What am I saying?

• 1:12:06Speaker 01

  And you know, sometimes the efforts to remain a part of the conversation backfire enormously. You mentioned the Kendall Jenner ad. So this was, this was interestingly like Pepsi kind of going for like a Coke style message. You know, the spot features of what vaguely resembles a Black Lives Matter protest, of course, with all the slogans kind of downgraded to being generic, facing off against the cops.

• 1:12:26Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, but it's like the timing is sort of, yeah, the implication is there.

• 1:12:31Speaker 01

  They're like, ah, we're here and we have signs.

• 1:12:34Sarah Marshall?

  We are young.

• 1:12:35Speaker 01

  I'm surprised there wasn't a sign that just said sign on it.

• 1:12:39Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:39Speaker 01

  And the tension is diffused when Kendall Jenner, of all people, hands an officer a can of Pepsi and the whole scene turns into a celebration of soda and togetherness.

• 1:12:47Sarah Marshall?

  You're just like, what were you going for, you guys?

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  So the social media outrage is so intense that Pepsi pulls that commercial after a day.

• 1:12:53Sarah Marshall?

  Incredible. Faster than the Like a Prayer ad.

• 1:12:57Speaker 01

  But I guess to sort of wrap up, I mean, the question that inspired this episode was, why was I not only a Coke drinker, but in some way committed to Coke over Pepsi?

• 1:13:08Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 1:13:09Speaker 01

  Can be answered in part by its relative success. I mean, maybe without consciously choosing, I wanted to back a winner and maybe Pepsi drinkers want to root for an underdog.

• 1:13:21Sarah Marshall?

  If we ever find any of them, we'll know.

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  We can't really uncouple our cola desires from the fact that they've been locked in combat for more than a century.

• 1:13:29Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:30Speaker 01

  It's possible that neither would have prospered at this level without the other company kind of driving it to, you know, even greater extremes. I mean, personally, I have to conclude that while the cola wars may have sold oceans of soda, they were more about the frenemies you made along the way.

• 1:13:45Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, that's nice. It is fascinating, isn't it? It's like tracking the expansion of Christianity. Miles, what a romp. You're gonna go get a Coke at some point, but until then, like, what are you up to and where should people find more of your, your weird, wild stuff?

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, my byline is over at Rolling Stone where I'm a staff writer. You can also find me on Twitter for the time being, I guess, at, at You Wouldn't Post, my terrible joke framing like the, you wouldn't download a car.

• 1:14:23Speaker 01

  And I'm just on my own name at Blue Sky. Yeah, you know, I'm just shitposting around, so you'll see me.

• 1:14:31Sarah Marshall?

  Thanks for just having a great brain and using it around town. I really appreciate it.

• 1:14:36Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:14:50Sarah Marshall?

  And that was our show. We have learned so much. Thank you so much for being with us through this year. Thank you for your patience as we get back to you. And I promise, we won't ever leave you alone for so long again. Thank you to Miles Cleve. Please check out his work over at Rolling Stone. Thank you to Corinne Ruff for editing, and thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for editing and producing. You can check out her new album, Each Machine, over at Bang Camp. He's got a song about the devil out. You're gonna like it.

• 1:15:29Sarah Marshall?

  We will see you in two weeks.