Selects: Robber Barons!

26:59And in 1250, Emperor Frederick III died. There was no successor, and basically that meant no regulation. And believe it or not, even way back then, a lack of regulation meant that people would take advantage of that. That's crazy. Same as it is today. It's almost like people are imperfect. Almost. And so these thieves would move into that gorge, jam up those tolls, maybe just steal stuff if they wanted to as well. And they were named the robber barons. That's where that term came from, those people. Yeah, because they actually were like low-level nobility, and they already were well-off, but that didn't prevent them from, you know, trying to take advantage of the merchant class who were just trying to make their way and make a living.

27:42That's right. And that became like a really great description for some of the most successful business tycoons of the 19th century. I think it first popped up in an Atlantic article in 1870. Yeah. where it didn't directly say that these guys are the new robber barons, but it said that the old robber barons of the Rhine Valley were actually probably more honest than the new aristocracy of swindling millionaires. Burn. That's a big, big-time burn. So even in 1870, people were saying, like, this is wrong. There's something, like, really wrong here. I mean, this is within just a few years of the Gilded Age really starting to take off, and people had already identified that there were some major issues developing.

28:29Yeah, it's so weird to look at this stuff and just how apt it applies to what's going on today. And we think, I think some people think that these are all new problems and new issues, but it's as old as time, you know? Yeah, it's so weird. It is a little weird to, it is weird. What's even weirder, though, is like I believe if we look back, if we zoom out far enough, we see humanity kind of ever going upward, even though there's like peaks and valleys in the line. And the line overall is kind of up, moves upward toward something great, I think. Toward perfection? I wasn't, maybe. I wasn't alive 10 ,000 years ago.

29:15So who knows? Maybe that was the pinnacle of human existence. I don't know. Yeah, maybe. So should we talk about a few of these dudes? Yeah. So I feel like we have kind of set this up, that the robber barons were ruthless business tycoons. And we're going to start with one of the first ones, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, who, for my money, was the OG robber baron. Yeah, and Commodore is a nickname that, and as you will see, he later, Their Vanderbilt University is named for him, and their mascot is the Commodores because of him. And a Commodore is a naval officer sort of above, not quite an admiral, but above a captain.

29:58I think they command like a fleet. Oh, well, that's actually pretty appropriate because he did command a fleet of ships, originally sailboats, originally a sailboat, I think when he was 14, and then steamships to ferry people around New York. I thought there were no steamships. There were by this time. And you know what's ironic? We were talking about steamships and when they were invented. The guy who invented steam, Robert Fulton, remember we did a whole episode on steam technology? Yeah, yeah. He had a 30-year monopoly in New York to ferry people using steamships. That's right. And ironically, Cornelius Vanderbilt had to overcome that monopoly using ingenuity and his own resourcefulness.

30:46and eventually was successful in breaking that monopoly just through good business tactics that actually resulted in far lower fares for everyday people and companies. I think just at his first try, by improving the size of the steam engine and using cheaper anthracite coal, he managed to drop the average ferry price from like$7 to$3 in his first try. That's amazing. Yeah. So I think that's really kind of like instructive though, man. Like think about it. You think of this guy as like a ruthless robber baron. And in many, many ways he was, as we'll see. But he was able to get to that position by outwitting and outsmarting other robber barons.

31:30And that was the climate at the time. Like it's so easy to sit back from this time and just be like, just judge, judge, judge. And it's actually kind of fun too. It's a great pastime. But you also have to remember at the time, that was the business climate. That's just what it was. And if you weren't willing to do that, well, then you were not going to make it in business, which is fine. Like maybe you'd say this is too cutthroat for me. I'm just going to sell out to these guys. And there's nothing wrong with that. But the ones who were left standing are the ones that, you know, history still remembers for better or for worse.

32:06Yeah, and it's worth pointing out, and as we'll do with I think we're going over four of these guys. But some had money born into it. Some started out very poor. And Cornelius Vanderbilt, even though that sounds like such a rich hoity-toity name now, he was born very poor. He was born in 1794 in a farming family on Staten Island and quit school when he was 11. And that's when he started working on the boat docks. And he was literally a self-made man starting with that first little ferry boat that you mentioned at age 14. He was a big dude and he was very savvy but also very ruthless. And this is something that you'll see with a lot of these men was a competition and a competitive edge and nature.

32:59Right. That was sort of the underlying thing with all of them, I think. I watched There Will Be Blood recently for Movie Crush, and Daniel Plainview was very much based on some of these robber barons. Yeah. And he has that great, great classic line from that movie when he goes, I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. And that just crystallizes that character. And I think a lot of these guys, it wasn't enough to just get rich. They wanted to devastate the competition. Right. Right. So it makes you wonder, like, is that just a normal, there's just at any given time, there's a, you know, a handful or a multiplicity of people who are like that.

33:46It's just that these guys happen to be living in a time where they had the freedom and ability to exercise that to their greatest ability. Or was it that these guys shaped the business world because they all happen to be alive at the same time? I don't know, man. I wonder. It's interesting, though. It's that competition. And again, with the Plainview, not just a competition to succeed, but a competition to see that others don't. Right. So did you talk about the railroad yet? I didn't catch it. No. So, you know, he started off in the steamboats. But if you know Vanderbilt, you know he was a railroad guy.

34:28And if you look at the list of robber barons, I'd say easily like a third of them were railroad men. Yeah, because there was so much money to be made from the railroads. It was just like printing your own money. And one of the reasons why was because there's so much stuff being shipped over the railroads that if you own the railroad, you got a cut of every single industry. Because every single industry basically had to use your form of transportation. That's why they all got into it. Plus, it was wide open. Like, there was so much open space and so much room for expansion that it was a good time to get rich off of the railroad for sure.

35:06So his first railroad ride was at 39 years old. He wasn't, like, in his 20s and early 30s getting into the railroad business. He wasn't even on a train until he was almost 40. And that train crashed. An axle broke and went down an embankment. and he punctured a lung, broke some bones, and I guess was lying there wheezing out of a hole in his lung saying, this is the future. That was so great. And he got into railroads. It's crazy. Like a year later. Yeah, he did. And one of the things that he had a really great talent for was identifying like loser railroads, seemingly loser railroads, and figuring out ways that they actually had been overlooked.

35:50And a really good example of that is the Harlem Railroad, which is just a short little line that other railroads, larger railroads, used to connect to New York City. But Vanderbilt recognized that it was the only line that went all the way into the heart of Manhattan. And so he bought that up. And he also, at the same time, not only got control of that little railroad, this is a really early chance for him to show how good he was at driving up stock prices. So when he came along and bought the Harlem Railroad or started buying shares of the Harlem Railroad, it was worth in today's money$168 a share.

36:27Not too shabby, but from what I could tell at the time, not very great at all. By the time he was done cornering this stock, he had driven the shares up to$5 ,998 in just a few years. And so in doing so, not only did he make a ton of money for himself, he also developed this reputation that made owners of other railroads say, I own a bunch of shares of my railroad. You want to come buy mine and drive my stock price up and then buy me out? And so eventually he didn't even have to plunder other companies. They came to him and just said, here, buddy, buy us, please. They were Blue Star Airlines. What is that?

37:12Remember that from Wall Street? From their will be blood? No, there were no airlines in there will be blood. No, remember Wall Street? That was the one that Martin Sheen worked for. Yeah. That Gecko came in and bought out, and I think he shuttered them, though. That was the difference. Yeah, yeah, he was a corporate raider. And actually that era, the 80s junk bond era, is frequently cited, or it was at the time, as the second gilded age. This is not the first time we're living in what's known as the second gilded age. So to put a bow on Vanderbilt, he consolidated, like you said, all these railways between New York and Chicago.

37:50He manipulated stock. He fixed prices. He, like you said earlier, the government wasn't looking, so you kind of do what you wanted. And he became a very, very, very wealthy man. And like a lot of these guys, late in his life, turned into a philanthropist, built Grand Central Station. It was called the Grand Central Depot at the time. which during the recession provided tons and tons of jobs for people. And then the Central University of Nashville was eventually renamed Vanderbilt University because all he did was give them a million bucks. Isn't that crazy? Is that right? I guess back then that's a lot of money.

38:28I mean, that's significant. Sure, sure. Like I feel like we could get Stuff You Should Know listeners to pitch in and get a university named after us. Let's try that actually. Like Stuff You Should Know You. We could do a, we can organize a struggling university. How about that? Hey, one more thing about Vanderbilt. So he left about$100 million to his, mostly to his eldest son, William. In six years, William doubled that. Wow. Mostly by investing in railroads. That's how much money you can make in railroads. And William was also well known for throwing probably the most lavish party in the history of New York City.

39:06They spent$1.8 million in today's dollars on champagne alone. Yeah, that was when he finished his mansion on Fifth Ave. And I looked it up to see if any of these robber baron mansions were still around today. Oh, yeah. I don't think it—I mean, I know this one was demolished in 1926. So if you want to get a really good idea of just how rich these people were, go to Newport, Rhode Island and visit Millionaire's Row. because there was a huge, there's a huge overlooking this cliff. There's a long row of the most astounding mansions you've ever seen built during the Gilded Age. It's one of the better walks you can take in life.

39:47It really is. You've got the ocean on one side and then these mansions on the other. It's really cool. And each mansion is so different from the others. Just touring them is amazing. You could just be utterly disgusted by the concept of billionaires or robber barons or whatever, and you can still enjoy taking this tour of these mansions. They're just works of art, you know? I agree. It's really worth a visit. Plus, Newport's just one of the more charming towns in the country. I love Newport. Or you could take a hate walk and just look at those mansions and think about what a wrecking ball would look like.

40:20Shake your fists at the dumbwaiters and all that. But then you turn around and look at the ocean and think, oh, okay, all right. It's really cool. It's definitely cool to visit them for sure. And by the way, a little piece of trivia, If you go, if you enter Central Park at the 105th Street entrance, that big, beautiful iron gate was from that mansion, the Vanderbilt mansion. They donated a lot of the stuff before they demolished it. Is that right? Yeah. So I mentioned Morganization, and that's actually named after the next Robert Barron we're going to talk about, okay? Do we break beforehand and tease that?

40:54No, I think we break after JP. How about that? Are you okay with that? Sure. Okay. So then we're going to hang in there, everybody. Don't fast forward yet. We're going to stick around and talk about J.P. Morgan right now. Yeah. He was born with money. He did not come from meager means and work himself up by his bootstraps. He was the son of a very successful banker and merchant and used those connections to get a plum job at Wall Street when he was 20 years old. And then when he was in his 30s, he partnered with a guy named Anthony Drexel, who was a banker from Philly and created Drexel Morgan & Company.

41:33And it became one of the biggest investment banks at the time in the world. Yeah. And this was when he was in his early 30s, like you said, right? So J.P. Morgan was known as the guy who financed all the other robber barons. And he had his fingers in basically every pot that was going on. And he also knew that like you could make money off of the railroads because you were taking a cut of all the other industries. So he definitely got involved in them. But his whole thing was what's called horizontal integration, where you basically come along, you say, this industry should be doing way better than it is.

42:13I think there's too many competitors and they're all holding one another down. I'm going to slowly start buying them up. And here's the thing. This is how you get control of a full industry during the Gilded Age. You go to a couple, you start buying them up, and then you put all those together and you form a bigger company that's way leaner, has much better economies of scale, and you can compete better against all the other guys. So you start buying some of the other guys up because they're facing going out of business now. And then you've got left the real holdouts, the ones that are never going to sell to you because they hate your stupid face and they'll never give a penny to you.

42:49Make sure that you'll never set foot in their offices ever again. And what you do then is you start selling for less than cost. You're a big company, so you can totally stand that for a much longer time than these holdout competitors. And they face either financial ruin or you eventually put them out of business. And either way, you no longer have that competition. You literally control an entire industry consolidated into one beefy mega company. And all of a sudden you have what's called Morganization, which is, I don't know if it was pioneered by J.P. Morgan, but he definitely perfected it enough that they named the process after him.

43:25Yeah, and that's a good example of what I was talking about earlier is it's not enough to succeed and be successful, but to make sure no one else can be. So, like, it would be the kind of thing in that one company you were talking about that may be kind of pretty small even, but they might hold, have an iron grip on one very tiny region of the United States. And you could just let them have their business or you could do what you're talking about and make sure that you squash them by any means necessary and force them to sell. And that's – I think that's where capitalism for a lot of people has gotten its bad name is like, yeah, work hard, succeed, do well, but not at the expense of every other person trying to do well.

44:14Right, because it interferes with something this country is based on, which is called the quality of opportunity, which is the idea that at least under the eyes of the law, every single person in America has an equal shot at making it, at making something of themselves, of having like a good life. And when somebody is cheating or engaging in monopolies or using underhanded tactics to run out the competition so that there is no competition any longer, that is problematic. That flies in the face of the idea of equality of opportunity. That's right. And if you listen to our Monopoly game episode, you might remember that J.P.

44:55Morgan was the basis of Monopoly Man, Uncle Pennybags. Yeah, we talked about that. Good, okay. That makes me feel good. Yeah, he was modeled after old J.P. Morgan himself. And he was actually one of the first people to be targeted for antitrust. In 1904, Teddy Roosevelt came after him under the Sherman Antitrust Act and said, hey, this Northern Securities Corporation is really monopoly. And Supreme Court said, yeah, it is. Bust it up. Yeah. And so today when we think of trusts, we think of like, you know, a legal entity that can hold assets. At the time, the word trust meant basically an industry that had been organized, where all of the competitors had been folded into one large company, and the market was cornered by this one mega company, General Electric, U .S.

45:49Steel. Both of those were organized companies. And apparently, U.S. Steel was the first$1 billion company that ever existed because of that level of consolidation. But then, yeah, when the Sherman Antitrust Act was passed in 1890, that was a clear sign that this was not going to stand much longer. And I think Roosevelt – it was Roosevelt you said, right? Yeah, Teddy. Who busted that up. And he ran on that and actually went against – he was a Republican, I believe. And he went against the advice of the elder statesman in the Republican Party, established himself as a genuine president of the people and helped set himself up for reelection just from that one antitrust act.

46:32So that's JP. Now do we take a break? Oh, one more thing, Chuck. Yeah. I'm not toying with you, I swear. So one of the ways that Morgan, one of the reasons he's reviled still, and he did some philanthropy, probably more than he gets credit for, for sure. But one of the reasons he's reviled is because one of the ways he made it so that he could compete with other companies and sell for lower than cost was by slashing wages, slashing the workforce and increasing productivity of the existing workers. and then just making sure that working conditions, he didn't spend a cent on improving working conditions to make them safe.

47:14And that is really not because he amassed a fortune. Some people criticize him for that. But it's tactics like that, like becoming a billionaire, basically, on the backs of people who he wouldn't have spent a cent to make sure could stay alive working in his factories. That is the quintessential problem people have always had with robber barons is that kind of mentality. That's right. Now I'm done. All right. We'll come back right after this and finish up with two more robber barons.

48:04Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one person billion dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game.

48:39This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

49:13Hello, everybody. We're back to talk about Andrew Carnegie. You've ever been to Carnegie Hall or Carnegie Mellon University? I've been to both. You've been to one. I've been to the university with you. That's right. We did a little job there one time. That was fun. I've been to Carnegie Hall. I ushered a show there. No, I didn't usher. I passed out the playbills, which meant I got to see the show for free. And I saw it. What show? Oh, man. It was one of those special nights. I got to see Beethoven's 9th with the full orchestra and German choir at Carnegie Hall. It was amazing. Wow. Something else.

49:54That's pretty neat. And all I needed was a bow tie. Is that the one that's...

50:04It's, um... No, maybe I named it wrong. It's the... Oh, the Die Hard song. Yeah, the Die Hard song. I gotcha. I went and saw Die Hard in concert. It was great. It was hilarious. So Carnegie, we're talking about Andrew Carnegie, who was born in Scotland, and they came to Pittsburgh. He was very poor. He's about 13 years old, and he worked in a cotton factory. And this will come into play later. He kind of self-taught himself from books that he borrowed from a wealthy benefactor from his private library, which will come into play later. His favorite one was Flowers in the Attic. Wow. I would have thought great expectations, but that's okay.

50:52Nope. Nope. So he, like Vanderbilt, is definitely a self-made man for sure. And I guess he kind of was, he had his fingers in a lot of different pots, kind of like J.P. Morgan at first. And then he turned his attention to Steele. Because again, remember, Steele is like basically the foundation for this American economy just blowing up. And he was in Pittsburgh. Sure. So his name became synonymous with Steele. And I guess at first, up until about 1892, he had a reputation as being a friend of the worker and that the workers at Carnegie Steel in Homestead, just across the river from Pittsburgh, they felt like, you know, Carnegie would take care of them.

51:40And they found out the hard way that that was not the case when they went on strike in 1892 during what came to be known as the Homestead Strike, which would result in the death of 10 people, which is not how they planned things to go. And apparently the reason why that happened is because the Pinkertons were called in as strike breakers. Yeah, I might want to eventually do an episode on this, but that's sort of the overview. You bring in the Pinkertons, and then they battle literally with guns. Pinkertons died. I think eight or nine of the 10 or 12 people that died were the Pinkertons. No, no.

52:18I think it was just one. I think the nine were the strikers. Oh, okay. Well, we should definitely do a full episode then because I want to get this right. But what I read was that the strikers, so the Pinkertons showed up in barges, And they were basically hired on as a private army to protect scab workers and bust the strike up. But they arrived in barges. And after the initial violence, the striking workers and some of their families surrounded these barges and demanded that the Pinkertons come off the boats. Didn't they burn them? So the Pinkertons said, OK, we'll come off if you guarantee our safety.

52:58And they said, fine. and the Pinkertons came off and they got beaten by all of the strikers. They just completely went back on their word and then set their barges on fire. I guess the Pinkertons escaped to the factory with their life and the National Guard was called in to quell the violence. Yeah, well, National Guard was called in not only to quell the violence, but also called in to act in the interest of Carnegie. So he kind of commandeered his own little personal army to help take care of things. Right. Starting with the Pinkertons and then with the National Guard. And it's like this kind of collusion that is also another huge criticism.

53:33Like we were saying, the government is known for being like laissez-faire as far as regulation is concerned. But they'll totally send in the National Guard not just to quell violence, but to make sure that the strike breakers don't attack the scab labor to keep the factory going. And that kind of like government capital collusion at the expense of the workers is that is there's a longstanding tradition of that being almost universally reviled in America. over enough of an arc of time, if that keeps up, more and more just everyday Americans start to notice and start to resent it. And that apparently is a really good force for social change because Americans don't like that kind of thing after a long enough period of time.

54:18Yeah, and I think Carnegie tried to distance himself from that strike by saying that he was sort of out of the loop. He was in Scotland the whole time. but they have since found correspondence that shows that he was very much involved in that. And, you know, there's some speculation that he may have had some genuine moments of regret and guilt over that because he was a big time philanthropist later in life. I think he said in his book, The Gospel of Wealth, the man who dies thus rich dies disgraced. And we mentioned the libraries coming back into play, he built more than 2 ,500 libraries. And that's really one of his big legacies, along with the arts, the Carnegie Corporation and the Endowment for International Peace, Carnegie Mellon University, Carnegie Museum.

55:11But the libraries really have made a pretty big difference in this country. They really have, for sure. And he was one of just the all-time great philanthropists in American history for sure. But he still pales in comparison to the all-time top record holder philanthropist, John D. Rockefeller, who is also a robber baron, but he also is far and away America's most prolific and generous benefactor for sure. He was also one of the most visionary philanthropists of all time too. Yeah, and some people say that he was, you know, if you just account for money and inflation, the richest man ever to live.

55:57I'm not sure how they calculate that because his$900 million peak in 1912 is about$23 billion today. So here, I saw how. You ready? I'm sure it's, yeah, go ahead. If you do his wealth relative to the total economic output, which is an even larger figure than gross domestic product. I had a feeling it was something like that. His wealth represented 2 % of the total economic output of the United States at the time. To have that value today, you would have to be worth about$350 billion. Okay, that makes sense. And I think Jeff Bezos is worth$140 or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, and I think we didn't even mention, was it Carnegie that had at one point like$1 of every$20 in circulation was his?

56:49Yeah, that's right. That was Carnegie for sure. Yeah, I mean these numbers are staggering. For sure. For people like Rockefeller and Carnegie. It's just unbelievable. But the thing is, and like John D. Rockefeller was a ruthless, ruthless businessman who put a lot of people out of business, brought a lot of misery and hardship on just small, everyday producers of oil, which we'll see. But again, it's really difficult to overstate the impact that his philanthropy has had on the United States. He peaked at$900 million, like you said. When he died, he had given away everything but$26 million of that.

57:28And he probably felt kind of bad that he had$26 million left because he was a very religious man. And apparently he learned very early on that it was every man's religious duty to make as much money as you possibly can and then to give away as much money as you possibly can too. And he apparently lived that even before he was wealthy when he was still just an average worker, he would give away something like 10 % of all of his paycheck. So he was a philanthropist his whole life for sure. He was still a robber baron too though. Yeah, and his whole, you know, of course, oil was his business, Standard Oil.

58:06It was just a Goliath. And there were a bunch of big, sort of like the railroads, it was oil and railroads were industries where you could have a bunch of people that had these huge, huge corporations. but Standard Oil was far and away bigger than any of them. By the early 1900s, they controlled more than 90 % of the oil market. Can you imagine? 90%. And the way that he cornered the market was, you know, he did that standard organization kind of thing where he went around and bought it first and then started to turn up the heat on the competition on the holdouts. But one of the ways that he turned up that heat was he colluded with the railroad, the different railroads in the area who were shipping all this oil to say not only were they going to give him a rebate, so he got money back where they wouldn't give money back to other oil shippers just because of, you know, volume.

59:02That makes sense. But they also had to get his business and he had so much business that they would do this. The railroads had to tax and added tax on all of his competitors. So they paid an extra 20 to 30 cents a barrel to ship, not just paid more than he did because of his rebates. They paid more in addition to that just for not being John D. Rockefeller. And then on top of that, to keep him from taking that rebate and going around to other railroads and getting a cheaper rebate and abandoning that railroad, they actually gave him a kickback of that added tax. So his competitors were getting taxed by the railroads, and he was actually getting some of that tax himself, too.

59:45You just can't possibly compete with that. And it put a lot of smaller oil producers and shippers and refiners out of business. That's amazing. It is. Let me see. He gave$75 million away to the University of Chicago. Well, it kind of founded the University of Chicago with that money. Also, Spellman, too, which was established to educate freed slaves. Yeah. He bankrolled Spellman for its founding as well. And in one of our best and most favorite episodes, you might remember, the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission helped eradicate hookworm in the South. Yeah, totally. Remember that? That is one of our better episodes for sure.

1:00:27So those are just four of the sort of most famous and some might say notorious robber barons. Big long list, you know, you could throw Henry Ford in there. John Jacob Astor, Charles Schwab, Andrew Mellon. Jay Gould. Yeah, I was thinking about Jay Paul Getty, but he was later on. He wouldn't have qualified. So some of these guys had some terrible quotes, too, that also just made them despised through history. Carnegie said that it's not the man who does the work who gets rich. It's the man who gets other men to do the work, which is not a very tasteful thing to say when you're ultra-wealthy and breaking strikes with guns.

1:01:09that Jay Gould guy I mentioned, he said that he could hire one half of the workers in America to shoot the other half to death if he wanted to, which is another nice thing to say. And apparently John D. Rockefeller once said competition is a sin. So these guys had some terrible PR. And because of that, a lot of people have said like, well, I wonder if some of the ultra-wealthy industrialists or innovators or people who are basically the billionaires who are leading the world today, are they just like robber barons with better PR and better marketing? Maybe. And apparently, supposedly that's not necessarily the case.

1:01:49And here's why. Remember I was saying that like robber barons were kind of being reformed by historians these days? Yes. Especially conservative historians. Well, they point to some like really indisputable things. Like these guys were ruthless and they engaged in horrific, anti-competitive, kind of anti-capitalist tactics to get those wealth. And they did it on the backs of workers who they took advantage of and didn't pay very well and killed in their workplaces, basically. But the reason that America is still powerful today is because of the work that these guys did, of the industries that they created.

1:02:31um public schooling came about and was kind of became widespread to prepare people for the jobs that these guys created um and you really can't you can't look away from the fact that some of them were the greatest philanthropists that the country has ever produced too um the that flies in the face with kind of the exception of bill gates it flies in the face of the people who are around today, that not only are they not great philanthropists necessarily, I'm looking at Steve Jobs, who isn't around anymore, but definitely was not a good philanthropist in his life. He is now, his family is, but he wasn't when he was alive.

1:03:13That's a big, big mark against people who have control of significant portions of the wealth in America today. But also even more than that, those guys today are presiding over a decline, a decline in wages, decline in living conditions. Whereas these guys, these captains of industry and the robber barons from the 19th century, they were presiding over a rise, like an improvement in the way that America lived and the standard of living. Kind of the polar opposite, even though the inequality is roughly the same. Very interesting. I think so, too. I also wonder, though, too, if this inequality will usher in a second progressive era, which it seems like it has all of the markings to do that, too.

1:03:59Maybe so. We need to do a progressive era episode, too, sometime, okay? Deal. All right, well, since you said deal, Chuck, I think that's time for a listener mail, huh? Yeah, I think I alluded to this in another one about the word marijuana. Yeah. Didn't I talk about that? Totally. But I didn't read the mail, right? Not that I remember, no. All right. This is from Jack Glick. Hey, guys. Love the show. Been listening for five years or so. And make sure not to miss any new episodes. I'm listening to the one on matcha when you started to talk about marijuana. I decided to get in touch. I am the lead analyst on cannabis taxation for the Canadian federal government.

1:04:38And we long ago made a decision to refer to the plant by its proper name, cannabis. us. Marijuana has a number of historically racist associations, and I know you guys are always wary of using appropriate terms for things. I had a good laugh at the question over whether womb was still okay to say in the ultrasound episode. I thought you might like to know that how outdated and implicitly offensive marijuana is, and I'd like to encourage you to use the word cannabis when referring to it in the future. All the best. Keep it up. That is from Jack Glick. That is a great name, Jack. Great job, great name, great email from a great guy, I assume.

1:05:18Sounds like a great guy. If you want to show off what a great person you are, you can email us yourself like Jack Glick did. Man, what a great name. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.

1:05:36Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

1:06:12age. Listen as I attempt to build a real startup run by fake people. Check out the second season of my podcast, Shell Game, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.