War, Exploration and Beer: How the Tin Can Changed the World

26:59I am referring, of course, to the explorer. Oh. You know, with the hat, the pith helmet, and the khakis, right? Now, at this point, explorers are really starting to make progress in the Arctic and Antarctic. Not so much the pith helmet and khaki vibe. I picture them up there, right? No, no, they have the fur. Fur, you got a fur. The fur covered, yeah, and the coats made of seals. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is the age where men would join the Explorers Club, right? And they would raise money for these big expeditions. And so it was a little bit like an influence. These people were famous and they would be out on the ice for several years.

27:38You wouldn't know what's going to happen to them. And they'd come back triumphant, all without eating a single vegetable for years. So it was a problem from a canned point of view. So Donk and his company send their tinned veal stew to one of the most famous explorers of the time, Sir Joseph Banks. He had sailed with Captain James Cook. He was a member of the Royal Society. And Banks sat down to dine on the two-year-old canned veal and declared it one of the most important discoveries of the age we live in. Uh-huh. And this man knew discoveries. He knew discoveries. It is a real breakthrough. We're kind of making fun of it, but it's real.

28:14It's absolutely real, right? Right. Because you immediately see this as a tool. The can is a tool, well, for military conquest, but it's a tool for exploration. And soon it will be a tool to transform, you know, the way countries worked. There was no refrigeration to state what is perhaps obvious. It's just hard for us to understand the scarcity of fresh food at that time. In the winter, even on land, people would get sick at the end of the winter. There was this thing called winter sickness because you wouldn't eat fresh food all winter so that by the time spring came, everybody would be kind of sick.

28:50Exactly right. And this is what Sir Joseph Banks saw. It's just that at the time, only the military and the explorers had the money to buy it. Soon everyone would. But at this moment, it is for the well-funded, right? So there is this one dramatic moment that seals the legend of the tin. William Perry is in the Arctic on his ship HMS Fury. Love those names. HMS Fury. And as often happened, maybe happened every time, they get trapped in the ice flows, right? The ice starts to crush the ship and they decide they have to abandon ship, go over land, right? So they throw all the cans out onto the ice.

29:29They drag them to a beach. They take a few of the cans and it takes them months, but they eventually get to safety, right? Four years later, another explorer, John Ross, trying the same thing. Same thing happens to him. He also gets stuck in the ice, except his men are hungry and they are desperate. But they stumble upon the cans. Perry's cans from HMS Fury are on the beach. They open the cans. It's four years later. Saves their lives. Cans! It's so impressive. I can't believe this because they're heavy. They take one of these cans back to London to show everyone the can saved our lives. And you can still see the can at the Science Museum in London.

30:13Is the meat still good? Great question. In the 1930s, so this is like 100 years after it was canned, right? In the 1930s, scientists open it for analysis. To quote them, it was in perfect condition. Did they eat it? They did not eat it. They reportedly fed it to laboratory mice and a cat, all of which survived. Okay. Until the mouse was eaten by the cat. That does happen. The scientists can't prevent nature, right? So, Donk and his company have now locked up the government contracts, the Explorers. There's other competitors now. They just need a way to convince regular people that everyone needs canned foods, right?

30:59And this is a harder sell because if you think about it, up to this point in history, you probably never bought food that you didn't see. Uh-huh. That you couldn't actually inspect, right? So for the regular person, they're like, oh, yeah, there's a fish inside this can. And you'd be like, I don't know. You're operating on trust. And maybe there wasn't a lot of trust, especially about industrial things at the time, right? Especially industrial food. That's another level of trust required. which really didn't exist, right? So 1852, unfortunately for the can industry, the newspapers are filled with the great can scandal.

31:38Putting the can back into the scandal. The S-candal. Scandal, right? A group of meat inspectors were opening cans bound for the Royal Navy. First can, rotted. Second can, spoiled. It wasn't until the 19th can that they found one that they said a human could eat. So the technology of cans was mostly working. It was the contents and what they put into the can that was completely gross. Now, at this point, there are a lot of competitors making cans, putting food into cans. And one of them figured out, well, if nobody can see inside, why don't I put the cheapest meat I can possibly find into these cans?

32:23Jacob, I want you to read from the newspaper coverage at the time. So this is a list of what they found inside the cans. Pieces of heart, coagulated blood, pieces of liver, ligaments of the throat, pieces of intestines. In short, garbage and putridity in a horrible state. And those weren't even on the paper on the outside of the can. They didn't even say garbage or putridity on the list of ingredients. Apparently they even found a dog's tongue. They trace the problem back to Romania or Moldova, depending on which source you use. I take it they didn't write that on the can either, right? Huge PR scandal.

33:04Inspectors around the globe start to spot check cans. They find the same thing. Lousy meat inside. Everyone's reading about this, as you can imagine. Like, what do they find today in the cans? The can manufacturers strike back with a huge advertising campaign. They have, you know, testimonials. And pain. No, that doesn't work there. They have testimonials, awards awarded for, you know, the fine meat service, right? Seals of approval. They start to pitch the nutritional claims. They do canned demos at fairs and expos. There's stunts like they had this public dinner prepared solely from canned meats that only cost a penny for you to come and eat it.

33:44Yeah, I know. Right. And as we talked about last week in our show about the grocery chain A &P, this is the birth of the brand. They're really starting to signal there are no dog tongues in this can. Well, a brand is truly valuable in this context. Yeah. You literally can't see inside the can, for one thing. The industrialization of food means you're getting farther from the source. And today, I feel like we primarily think of brands as sort of superficial marketing tools. Maybe, maybe not. But truly, brands can signal quality. If some people are putting rotten meat inside their cans and you reliably are not, that is meaningful.

34:25A brand is meaningful in that context. And they're starting to realize you can have different brands for different people, the sales aspect of this. Apparently, they sold cans to women called My Lady Can and Little Duchess Can. The Virginia Slims of cans. Exactly. For men, Jack Tar brand. And Sailor's Savories. Oh. Manly canly. Go down to the pub and have some Sailor's Savories. And perhaps most importantly of all in the marketing of the can, they developed the can opener. Wait. Yes. It's been decades. I didn't even think of the can opener. Yes. What were they doing before this? How did you open a can before the can opener?

35:10It's 50 years since the first can. How did you open a can for 50 years? So it boggles the mind. On some of the cans, they had instructions, which were get a hammer and a chisel and just like donk, donk, donk, donk, donk, donk to open the can. I am aghast. It does. Here's a question. Here's a question. What is a thing today where we have the can but not the can opener? where once some new thing is going to be invented, they're like, how did you go so long without the thing to use the thing? What would it be? I don't know. You know, I was thinking about all the cords and everything, and I know they're starting to solve that with just placing something down and having a charge.

35:53People have this dream of where you're just in an electric field, where your thing is charging just ambiently. I don't know the physics of that. But yes, maybe someday they'll be like, you had to plug in your things all the time? How did you live? Okay, the can opener. Now, everyone's using a hammer and chisel. I was thinking about this, and perhaps the notion of convenience wasn't associated with food in the 1800s. You had specialists, cooks and chefs, and at the time housewives, who would spend all day cooking. There was no easy, fast way to do anything in the kitchen. And so it's like you already have peas from six months ago, this miracle.

36:36Oh, now you're saying it's too hard to open? Nobody's going to think of that. I don't want to take the time. My hammer is way over there. My chisel. Who has my chisel? The first can opener was developed by Ezra Warner, and I saw a picture of it. It looks like basically a piece of metal with a little hook on it. It looks a little bit like the kind of can openers you get at a camping store. Those are terrible can openers where you have to kind of hook it every time. There's no wheel. Hook it and you're sawing the can. Yeah, and all the sharp edges. Oh, so sharp. So once you do this, it's not just that the edge is sharp, but it's jagged and sharp.

37:13Yeah, it's extremely hard to open a can with. I would rather use a hammer and chisel. It was terrible. But people started to buy it, and some stores would stock one single can opener, and they would open the can for you before you left. Oh, genius. Yeah, I'm having peas tonight. The rotary design didn't come until 1870. It's such a beautiful tool. It's so good. It has the two little gears and the handle. I love a can opener. By the end of the 1800s, cans were something everyone could buy, and they did. Everyone forgot about the dog tongue. I will personally never forget about it, but everyone forgot about this.

37:48And it was helped along by this huge movement of rural folks into the city. So industrialization was reducing the labor needed on farms. Factories were opening in the cities. People were coming into, you know, crowded areas of New York and Chicago. And it's really hard to get fresh foods into the city, into the tenements and apartments. And cans were the answer. The killer app for cans? Condensed milk. Because you're in the city. I thought it was the can opener. No, the stuff inside, the condensed milk made by Borden in 1856. They would put the milk in the can in Connecticut and bring it down to New York City.

38:28And people were like, oh, this reminds me of having a cow. Except very sweet, as we know, with condensed milk. Because, again, refrigeration, cold chain, still not a thing. If you live in a city, it's hard to get milk. They used to have, I think it was cows in Central Park in Manhattan. For the milk? For the milk, if I recall correctly. They would give it to the children or something. Campbell's soup? 1895. Same here. Our can of Heinz baked beans. It's a U.S. company, but a year later they debut it in the U.K., and for reasons I will never understand, the British decide to eat it for breakfast.

39:08With sausage and tomatoes. It seems incredible. It's a whole thing, right? Full English. We'll be back in a minute with one more can.

39:50I'll see you next time. show you at iheartadvertising.com. That's iheartadvertising.com. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, a.k.a. Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology.

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41:33Robert Smith, it is time for our story to arrive in 20th century America, USA. development of the aluminum beer can, the silver bullet on the corporate battlefield. See what you did there. By the 20th century, food cans look pretty much like they do today. Standardized size, thinner walls. But these little things, I would argue, have transformed the earth. It's easier for people to move food, so now it's easier to move to the cities. Also transformed farming. think about this for a moment if you're growing tomatoes in the 1800s in new jersey with cans there is no limit to the amount of tomatoes that you can grow because you could put them in a can you could sell them years later and this is a thousand miles away also as we saw in the last episode cans now make it easier for grocery stores to open all the logistics chains.

42:34And all of these things mean cheaper food. You mentioned our story about A &P, how expensive food was for people. Now you can eat out of cans. And you have an economy of scale at some margin emerging for food. So as the scale grows, it is perhaps inevitable that a behemoth will emerge. On March 20th, 1901, it's kind of amazing. This happened on one day, A bunch of rich people finally pull off their plan to combine 90 % of America's tin can manufacturers into one giant. Do they call it CanCo? They do not. They call it the American Can Company. I love those turn-of-the-20th century names. You just say what the company does.

43:20U.S. Steel, American Can Company. I mean, Ameri-Can was right there. It was 100 years later, 100 % they would have called it Ameri-Can. Who can? You can. American. Thank you for calling it the American Can Company. 123 factories from Brooklyn to Seattle. And even in the emerging age of monopolies, this one was huge. People called it the Tin Can Trust. Yes, this was the trust era. And weirdly, even though antitrust laws had been passed a few decades before this, this was this era when they were essentially not enforced. Was this a J.P. Morgan move? This sounds extremely J.P. Morgan. J.P. Morgan wannabes.

44:01But it was a dream team of capitalists. You had William the Judge Moore. He was an actual judge at some point who created trusts like the National Biscuit Company. Nabisco. And Diamond Match. Still exists? Yeah. There's some Match King story that somebody told me to do. Put it on the list. On the list. You had Daniel the Tsar Reid. I don't know why it was called that. He was a steel baron. William Leeds, who was the tin plate king. William Tin Plate Leeds. Tinny. And someone who actually knew how to make food in a can? Helpful. Edwin Norton. And Edwin became the president of the trust. And it was clever how they did it.

44:40They went to all these different can manufacturers and said, you know, we want to do a deal. We want it to close on this one date. Can-u-facturers? Can't stop one-stop. Keep going. The team already controlled much of the tin supply. So it was, you know, a carrot stick situation with the manufacturers. They said, oh, you know, it would be a shame if you suddenly had to pay more for your tin supply. You're really going to want to sell your can company to us. And then when the can manufacturers were scared, they offered very large checks for the factories to sell out. And all they had to do was promise that they could not reenter the can business for 15 years.

45:18It's so anti-competitive. 123 factories. They did some calculations afterwards and looked at how much they paid for all these companies. And it was pretty clear that they could have just built new factories for the same price. But then they would have had to compete. Then they would have had to compete. So instead, of course, they take these companies. And what's the first thing they do? They shut a bunch of them down. 70 % of the factories were just like, you're out of business. Close them down. Fire everybody. And then... Jack up prices. What do you do? You suppress supply and you raise prices.

45:52This book. We've talked about monopolies. Are they really monopolies? This was a monopoly. They're leaning into it. They're the guy with the top hat on the board game. One of the things we're learning in the show is that really pulling off a true monopoly is very difficult. Yes, they bought almost all the factories, shut them down, raised prices. But at that point, now it is much more profitable to get into the canned business. It's not like they have intellectual property. It's not like they can prevent other people from making tin cans. Tin cans are basically a commodity. And there is this truism in commodities, which is the cure for high prices is high prices.

46:31If suddenly people are paying absurdly high prices for tin cans, other people are going to build their own tin can factories and start competing to sell tin cans. And they did. It was a little bit of a tin rush, people getting into the business. And one of the Dream Team members was about to defect. Edwin Norton, the guy who actually knew something, was unhappy. I imagine it was because he actually knew how to can food, and the rest of them are just guys in top hats smoking cigars and telling them what to do. He had signed a contract that said he could never compete with the American Can Company, obviously, but he spotted a loophole.

47:09Contract said nothing about family members. Edward Norton organized with his son, wait for it, the Continental Can Company. shiny new factory in Syracuse. And in fact, the technology was better than the old American can factories that they had. Could have gone with continental. Keep going. By 1905, it was American can versus continental can. The trust versus the rebel. The American can boys were furious. And for the next half century, this would be one of those epic industrial rivalries. It was so fierce that Fortune magazine said their relationship was tart. Tart. Tart. In Fortune magazine, that's like fisticuffs.

47:54Presumably that's good for consumers. I mean, two doesn't seem like enough to me. Two, I feel like you could still have sort of tacit price fixing or maybe explicit price fixing. I don't know. I'm surprised that it's only two. I guess, is it because there's an economy of scale and so it's hard to enter and compete? It's a duopoly. There's two big ones, but there's lots of little ones. And in fact, 10 years later, the U.S. government, slow as they are, like, huh, can monopoly. There's one thing we've learned in this show. If there's one thing we've learned in this show, it's that the government is so slow to respond to what's going on in competition, right?

48:31It takes them 10 years to get all their briefs together. So this goes before a judge. And it's against American can. It has nothing to do with continental can. Clearly, American can acted like the mafia. They intentionally tried to dominate the industry, screw the little guy. But the judge determines they didn't really pull it off. He said that the current state of competition with the new entrance and the continental can, he said it was, like, basically fine. He decides not to take a hammer and chisel to the company. Well done. He wrote that he was reluctant to destroy so finely adjusted an industrial machine.

49:05I'm... Fine. You think they bragged him? I don't know. Oh, there was a dude named The Judge who started the company, I'm just saying. Well, it is good for beer drinkers everywhere that The Judge did not break up American Can because they were about to make the last big breakthrough of our can saga, beer. It is the holy grail of canning. At this point, it's served in bottles. No one's figured out how to make it work in cans. And they want to figure it out because beer people think that beer is better if it isn't exposed to light, I guess, and cans block the light. It keeps that oxygen better. Presumably, the fact that it's harder to break a can matters.

49:48The country is getting bigger. You're transporting beer more. But the problem is beer, because of the way it is, tends to react with the metal, which makes the beer taste metallic, which people hate. And it weakens the can. and since beer is carbonated and under pressure, it would blow the cans apart, the weakened cans apart. It was sort of a yeast-fueled explosive device. Apparently, the pressure in a beer can is twice that of a car tire. Who knew? Who knew? American cans started to work on this in 1909. They wouldn't solve it until after Prohibition, where they were secretly working on it, in 1935.

50:24The answer was something they called the Keg Liner. Each tin distant for beer was lined with a form of plastic. This is before aluminum, so it's still the tin cans that we know. But they started out with pine resin and enamel was the first thing they tried. They ended up with something called vinylite plastic. Vinyl plastic was eventually used in another famous product. The siding on my house? That too, but the vinyl record. Oh, yeah, we're finding vinyl. At one point, I think American Can owned a vinyl manufacturer that actually supplied record vinyl as they became a conglomerate. American Can needed to test this out, and they partnered with the Kruger Beer Company of Newark, New Jersey, to release the first canned beer.

51:12American Can offered to put in the canning equipment for free, and Kruger would only have to pay if it was a success. And the very first can of beer, it looked just like a vegetable can, steel and tin, sold individually. An American can was thinking about this because they're already thinking about how long it had taken for can openers. And so they developed a special can opener. You can't just crank the top of your beer can and then put your lips to the sharp edge of metal. They developed something called a church key. That's what they call it. I don't know why. But it puts a little triangle indentation in the top of the can.

51:45We used to do this for canned orange juice when we went camping. When I was a kid, it was like tin can orange juice. And you do it on two sides. You do it on one side to drink out of it on the other so that the air pressure pushes the orange juice into your mouth, I guess. They didn't know if any of this was going to work. So they sent the first batch to Richmond, Virginia, figuring, well, if it's a flop in Richmond, no one's going to hear about it in New York City. They did that with credit cards in Fresno. Yeah. The first credit card they sent to Fresno. I was thinking about this. I don't know if there are still test markets because everyone knows everything happening all the time.

52:16But in the day, you would go to try things out in Peoria or Columbus, Ohio. Whatever it was, it was a place where new products would emerge, and they would see how the regular folk liked it before they moved it to the big leagues. So what happens? People loved it. Sure. People loved the can. It stayed cold. It's easy to stack. And this is key. You didn't have to pay a deposit on it. Oh, yeah. The old school bottle. This was true in Mexico when I was a kid. If you bought beer in Mexico when I was a kid, it came in these really thick bottles, and you paid a deposit that was on the order of as much as the beer.

52:52Yeah. And you would take the bottles back to that beer shop. Like, that was a huge percentage of the price, so much that you would always bring them back to that shop to get your deposit. Now, you want beer, you buy the can, get the little church key, which they sometimes gave away, you drink it, and then you just throw the can out the window. Perfect. No problem. America, right? Kruger sales went up, the beer company went up 550%, 180 ,000 cans a day. Other brewers jump in. Continental can, you'll remember the Tarte rival. They jump in with another technical innovation that did not survive, a beer can with a cone on top so that brewers could use the same bottle caps.

53:34So it was essentially a metal bottle that you could run through the machines and put the caps on. I wonder why that didn't survive, because that seems easier to drink out of than the church key style. Probably just more expensive. Oh, yeah. And I guess you can't stack them, to your earlier point. And, of course, it would be the 1960s, after the can had turned aluminum, that they would figure out how to put an opener into the can itself. This was the deadly version, right? The version that I still remember occasionally seeing when I was a kid, Tecate beer. I lived in Southern California, and Tecate beer still had that old 1960s style where there's a little ring, and you put your finger in the ring, and you pull it.

54:16And what you get off of the top of the can is this razor-sharp piece of metal that is a weapon, essentially. And that's how you open the can. And it seems manifestly a bad idea in the way a lot of things from that era do now. Many people must have truly hurt themselves on these razor-sharp things that came off the top of cans. I'm a little older than you. And when I was growing up, the gutters of the city were filled with these little can tops, these little pieces of metal that you've pulled off. I remember my mother warning me when we went to the beach, because obviously people would drink beer at the beach.

54:53They would toss these little pieces of metal and you would step on them on the beach. Famous Jimmy Buffett song, Stepped on a Pop Top.

55:30Oh, didn't know. article in Pediatric Emergency Care called Swallowed Can Tab. Is it still stuck in the esophagus? I hope not. Or do you hope so? No, you hope not, right? What do you want to happen in that setting? In 1974, a doctor who swallowed one began a crusade against them. And this is actually how we get the tab that we have today. I mean, the thing we have now is genius, and I actually don't know how we got it. Are you about to tell me? I am. The solution came from an engineer at Reynolds metal. So they'd been working on this for a while. Daniel Kudzik, he says it came to him one night when he was watching TV.

56:07And he had just swallowed a pull tab? I have an idea. Why don't you read from his patent application? The opening construction of the invention requires a tab, which must be stiff against transverse bending and yet flexible enough and tough enough at the connection between the tab and wall to permit lifting and retracting the tab without causing a fatigue crack at the connection. This is not easy. I have thought about this a lot. It's called the stay tab, and I've been watching slow motion videos of the opening. They're all over YouTube. You should really watch it. This is an amazing piece of engineering, and it actually works in two steps.

56:50Okay. So the first step is it opens, it acts as a sort of like what they call like a lever, like a wheelbarrow where the fulcrum's at the end. And so it opens a tiny little hole in the top and it releases the pressure. Now at that point, the way this is designed, now it's a lever with the fulcrum at the little rivet. So now that it's like opened a little bit, It acts in a different way to open the top in a sort of circular way. It's so clever. I want to take a moment to appreciate how much cleverness there is in the world. We are surrounded by cleverness like this that in most cases is opaque to us.

57:35In this case, it's right in front of me, has been my whole life, and I sort of got that it was clever. But until you just explained it to me, I never understood how subtle and clever it is. And it's even better than that because it's all parts of the can went through this process. The aluminum in a beer can is so thin that it would easily collapse, except for the pressure that it's under. So the pressure is the thing that is making a can incredibly strong. You could stand on it. And then when you drink it, you can crush it. Amazing. Or if you take the cans with the vegetables. Where's my other can here?

58:09Oh, they put the ridges on the can. They put the ridges on the can so that it doesn't collapse, but also so that if the contents expand a little bit under heat, there's a little bit of give in the can. Incredible. I never knew. The age of the industrial can company peaked in the 1950s and the 1960s. Weirdly enough, when Andy Warhol decides to paint those Campbell's soup cans as the emblem of modern culture, sure. All these other things will get invented, right? You obviously had refrigeration, frozen food, TV dinners. You had cartons, resealable pouches. Like, you just didn't need to eat meat from a can anymore.

58:47And, you know, it's interesting, the can has this business history arc. It starts out as such an amazing insight, right? An amazing invention that wins a prize. It's incredibly profitable at first. It brings in competitors. It gets cheaper and cheaper. And then it just becomes a commodity. No one ever thinks about it a can. Like, sure, like a half trillion cans are produced every year. Half trillion, right? Mostly beverage cans, but also the vegetable cans, right? Half a trillion. 500 billion. Yes. Mostly beverage cans. More than a billion a day. Incredible. Yeah. Incredible. Tiny little margins on each one.

59:26Somebody's making some money, but this is not the business that, you know, you want to be in or have your kids be in. It's just a normal commodity business that's out there. And the consumer just never thinks about it. You look at the label, what you want to eat, you open it up, wear the stuff out, throw the can away. The can is invisible. The can is invisible. The great can companies, the American Can, Continental Can, they don't exist anymore, not in their former glory. In 1987, what was left of Continental Can became part of the United States Can Company, a subsidiary of Inter-American Packaging.

1:00:04Okay. Okay. American Can had an even sadder end. In the 1980s, Norman Pels, hedge fund guy, starts rolling up packaging companies. He buys American Can's factory operations and National Can, another competitor. And that leaves American Can with no cans. American Cannes still exists as a sort of conglomerate. They have these other businesses they went into and the vinyl and all of this, but they don't have any cans. They have no can factories. They renamed themselves. Americant. Oh, that's good. That's great. No, Primerica. So disciplined. Primerica. Primerica is the perfect late 20th century company.

1:00:42What do they even do? What is Primerica? Financial services. Yes. Yes. USA. They bought Smith Barney. They became a part of Citigroup. It is perfect from the candy stores of France to being part of a giant financial company. I saw this dream that like in the vault of the Citigroup building here in Manhattan, maybe in the basement, there's a vault and some banker goes down there looking for old mortgage documents or something. And he's sorting through the piles of documents, you know, there's stacks of money in the corner. And there underneath the documents is a single rusted can. It's veal. Veal and gravy.

1:01:24And it still tastes great. Please email us or leave a comment below. You can tell us what you want to hear on the show. You can also tell us what is the oldest can of food you have in your house. Let me ask you, Robert Smith, what's the oldest can of food you have in your house? I've been thinking about this. The oldest can is from about 15 years ago. It is a canned ham. And there's no way I'm ever going to eat it unless things get really bad, because, like, old ham is better than no ham at all. I also have something 15 years old. It's from when my first daughter was born, and she's 15. It's a can of freeze-dried milk, which I'm not sure if it's still good.

1:02:01Was it the financial crisis that panicked us? So write us with your oldest can. Send us a picture if you like. We are businesshistory at pushkin.fm. Or leave your answer in the comments if you're watching on YouTube. Our show today is edited by our showrunner, Ryan Dilley, a man who loves a can of baked beans. Do you love a can of baked beans, Dilly? He gets generic beans. Our engineer is Sarah Bruguer, and our producer is Gabriel Hunter Chang, and I am Jacob Goldstein. I'm Robert Smith. This is Business History, a show about the history of business. Thanks for listening. What if mind control is real?

1:02:34If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. Mind Games, a new podcast exploring NLP, aka neurolinguistic programming. Is it a self-help miracle, a shady hypnosis scam, or both? Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:03:12When the economic news gets to be a bit much... Listen to The Indicator from Planet Money. We're here for you, like your friends, trying to figure out all the most confusing parts. One story, one idea, every day. All in 10 minutes or less. The Indicator from Planet Money. Your friendly economic sidekick. From NPR.