Who ACTUALLY Rigged Society

the perfect lunch combo that first bite of your favorite sub followed by ice-cold pepsi add a couple of friends and now that's next level suddenly the laughs get louder the stories keep flowing and the food tastes better because pepsi brings out more flavor more fun and more of the moment food deserves pepsi grab a pepsi zero sugar today one man secretly bailed out the entire united states government not a president not congress but a private citizen with his own money his name was jp morgan and in 1895 when america's gold reserves collapsed towards zero the government didn't turn to washington they turned to him and he wasn't alone there was once a man who cornered the gold market and tried to own every dollar in america and a man who owned 90 of the oil in the country and got richer even after the government broke up his empire a governor who was also the president of the railroad he was supposed to be the president of the railroad and he was supposed to be regulating america had two names for men like this captains of industry who built the modern world and of course robber barons who stole it right out from under everyone else and the thing is these are the same guys and today we're breaking down their entire journey how the robber barons got set up in american history and how they grew to have this insane amount of power and wealth and ultimately asking the question that never really gets answered what happens when businessmen become more powerful than the government itself can they be stopped or do they just absorb the government well today we're going to find out so sit back relax and welcome to history camp what's up people and welcome back to history camp my name is mark and thank you for joining me in my tent where every single wednesday we explore the most interesting fascinating controversial stories from all history from all time forever yes that is what i do here in this very tent as i try to figure out everything that's ever happened and every day i'm going to be talking about the history of america and i'm going to be talking about new stuff keeps on happening so here i am once again and oh boy do we have a fantastic episode for you now before we begin let me just point out that you might hear some audio disturbances outside our tent today there is uh some some construction happening there's some deforestation going on in the forest and so if you hear that i apologize we're going to do our best to cut it out also before we go i want to say thank you to you dude or woman whoever you are i want to say thanks for tuning in because every time you click on an episode or like or comment or interact with our audience you keep my dreams alive and you keep the fire burning here at the campsite i also want to give a big thanks to my pal christos papadopados for abandoning us once again instead i'm here by uh by my side is my friend miles how are you pal i'm doing great miles we have a fantastic episode about a topic that you probably are going to like yeah robert barons yeah i mean the carnegies the rockefellers the jp morgans yeah i mean maybe robert moses mentioned here and there it's a it's an awesome time in history to learn about it is the best time in history of the best guys doing awesome stuff yeah there are nothing wrong you're like a big capitalist so you probably love this stuff yeah now if you've never heard of this term let me break it down you probably you may have heard the phrase robber baron right and if you're like most people you have like a vague picture where like you're probably thinking like the monopoly man or something right it's like a rich guy he's got a top hat he's kind of uh you know doing some type of shady deal and that image is not wrong but it's actually not where the phrase came from here's the actual story and it starts all the way back in medieval germany not even in america so let me take you to the rhine river all right there were these like petty noblemen that were called the robritter they're literally robber knights that was like the the translation and their whole business was pretty simple you would build a castle at a narrow point in the river and then you charge a toll on every ship that tries to pass by that's it that's the whole operation and uh it's a pretty good business model because people got to go through and you know people were annoyed because they didn't grow anything or mine anything and they didn't build anything that anyone actually needed they just kind of owned a choke point and they didn't build anything that anyone actually needed and forced people to pay now as we go forward keep that image in your pocket right the castle the river the toll because we're going to come back to it a lot and it's going to be very important to the story so how does a story about a medieval german like river pirate basically end up describing american oil tycoons 600 years later well because the first time anyone used the metaphor in american journalism they almost meant the opposite of what it means today so february 9th 1859 a new york times editor named harry j raymond published an editorial with the headline your money or your line and he's comparing cornelius vanderbilt to those old like german river toll guys now if you know anything about vanderbilt your brain probably just filled in the rest of that sentence for you ruthless monopolist crushing the little guy right well kind of wrong vanderbilt at that moment was the literal little guy he was like the the underdog he was undercutting prices on a shipping route to california a route that a government favored company pacific mail considered its own private monopoly so raymond wasn't actually mad that vanderbilt had too much power at that time he was mad that vanderbilt was competing too well so the very first robber baron in american history was accused of being the one that was actually offering cheaper prices that's almost the exact opposite of what the term means to us today which means right off the bat we kind of need to hold the label loosely because history didn't always agree on what this term meant even at the moment that it was coined and the phrase didn't really explode until decades later when it finally did it wasn't a journalist who made it permanent it was actually a historian so we got to go to 1934 you got this writer named matthew josephson and he published a book called the robber barons and that book is the reason that you and i are using this phrase at all and here's the thing worth knowing before we even go further into this josephson wasn't writing a neutral history he was writing in the middle of the great depression a moment where the entire country was pissed at the concentration of wealth and ultimately looking for someone to blame and his book was very important to him and he was writing a book called the robber barons which means the whole captains of industry versus the robber barons debate that we're going to walk through both sides have an agenda and of course they're extremely biased you know because who isn't and they've been biased since the very first day so i want to pose the question before we meet all these robber barons slash captains of industry and i want you to think about it because we're going to keep on coming back to it at what point does a man who owns like the river stop being a merchant and start a business and start a business and start a business and start a business and start becoming its own rival government so we're going to meet the man who might actually be the first person in american history to actually fulfill that question hey guys we're going to take a break real quick because this episode is sponsored by brunt workwear i got the marin boot right here and what immediately stood out to me about this is the quality they feel substantial they are genuinely comfortable and just being honest they are a really good looking boot i like them i wear them this is even the pair that i 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who not only escalated the robber baron pattern but also set the foundation for it like they really created so decades before the gilded age there was a guy named john jacob astor you're probably familiar with this guy you've heard his name miles if you've ever been on astor place in new york city astor place it's the name of the empire that was so dominant it controlled the industry east of the mississippi by 1816 and how did he do it well it kind of depends on who you ask but it seems like he exploited the native trading partners with a little bit of alcohol and stoked some violence between you know rival tribes over you know fur trapping territory there were no railroads at this point there were no oil wars it was just fur okay so just keep him in mind next we have cornelius vanderbilt and i'm sure you've heard his name and he was a very good trader he was a very good trader and a funny thing happened over the next few decades for vanderbilt after being accused of making his prices cheaper in that new york times article vanderbilt went from being the underdog to being the king he moved from steamboats into railroads and did the exact same trick everywhere that he went he would undercut the competition on price until they either sell out or go broke and then once he owns the entire route he would raise the price back up the disruptor then became the toll booth and now here's where it gets fun because now we have jay gould and james These two were not subtle businessmen. Together, they went to war with Vanderbilt over the control of the Erie Railway. This is the so-called Erie War, and their weapon of choice was basically fraud. They flooded the market with fake stock to dilute Vanderbilt's ownership, and then they would bribe judges and legislators to make the fraud retroactively legal. And then in 1869, they tried their most audacious scheme yet. They tried to corner the entire U.S. gold market secretly by getting a relative of President Grant to influence federal gold sales from the inside. And it actually worked for a little bit, at least. And then on September 24th, 1869, the scheme falls apart. The date goes down in history as Black Friday, a national financial panic. Investors wiped out overnight, and this guy Gould, I'm sure you're wondering, he was actually tipped off about the whole thing falling apart early. So he was able to walk away completely clean without really taking much damage. Now, if Gould and Fisk were chaos. John D. Rockefeller was the exact opposite. Rockefeller didn't thrive on chaos. He needed a system. So here's basically how Standard Oil grew. This is obviously John Rockefeller's company. If you've ever read the book Titan by Ron Chernow, it is fascinating and goes through like every little detail about who Rockefeller was. But here's basically what you need to know. He would use secret rebate deals with the railroads and basically undercutting every single competitor's shipping costs. And then he would just buy out. Who? Whoever was left. And so by 1890, Standard Oil controlled somewhere around like 90% of American oil refining. 90%. But here's Rockefeller's real innovation. And it's actually not oil. In 1882, his lawyers invented something called the trust. And this is important to explain because you've probably heard the word all the time. You're like, oh, yeah, the trust, the family trust. And most people can't really tell you what it is. So here's how it works. Shareholders from a bunch of competing companies hand their stock. Over to a single board of trustees. And then that board coordinates prices and output across the entire industry. While every individual company still technically operates as its own independent business on paper. So basically one hand, one group of people is secretly controlling every other company behind the scenes. And that loophole is exactly what antitrust laws would eventually be built to close. And now the one that we kind of mentioned in the intro, J.P. Morgan. Morgan didn't operate down in the country. He was in the mud with, you know, the rest of these other guys. I would say Rockefeller kind of did. But some of the other guys, like obviously Gould and Fisk, those guys were just like con artists. He stood above it. So in 1901, he orchestrated the merger that created U.S. Steel, the world's first billion dollar corporation. And what's wild is that that's actually not even his biggest move. His biggest move came in 1895. The U.S. Treasury's gold reserves are basically collapsing. They're going to zero. And the federal government is realizing that, you know, this is this is it. Like. The government could collapse if these gold reserves go down. And they're realizing that, you know, this is a possibility of the first peacetime default in all of American history. And of course, the president at the time, Grover Cleveland, he doesn't turn to Congress. He goes directly to J.P. Morgan and Morgan's private banking syndicate hands over sixty five million dollars in gold using an obscure Civil War era statute that no one really was even thinking about. They all basically forgot it even existed and single handedly bails out the United States federal government. It's crazy to think a private citizen rescued the U.S. government from complete insolvency. And if I mean, if that's not power, I don't know what is. So think about the question we asked earlier when one man owns a part of a river, then when does he stop being a merchant and just starts becoming basically like an extension of the government? Well, right now, in 1895, that's kind of the answer. Now, Carnegie shows up in this era, too, which obviously he has a steel empire that was pretty untouchable. And so he has a steel empire that was pretty untouchable, ruthlessly efficient and had an entire vertical integration that really controlled his share of the market. But we're going to hold off on his story until the end because it has its own name for its own specific reason. Now, one last thing before we move on. You've heard the phrase the Gilded Age, and it actually comes from Mark Twain. He co-wrote a novel with that title in 1873. Gilded, not golden, meaning gold on the surface, hiding a cheaper material underneath. And that concept applies to almost everyone. Everyone that we just talked about, every person, every billionaire, every great business magnate I just talked about is kind of a beautiful gold flowering with a veneer on top, with some rot underneath, some cheapness underneath. And there's a reason it defined the entire period. And it's about to apply to the entire government itself. So we know all the men. We understand how they made their money, more or less. Now let's talk about how that money bought something that you probably don't even think is for sale, the U.S. government. And I don't want to start with, like, the whole rotten infrastructure because it's kind of. It's kind of abstract and not really the point. It's important, but not the point of this. I want to start with one guy. The one guy who makes the entire section really make sense. You've probably never even heard of him. His name is Leland Stanford. Now, here's what makes Stanford different from everyone else in the episode. He wasn't just rich. He was the governor of California and the president of the Central Pacific Railroad. Think about that. He's on both sides of the deal. So he's sitting in the governor's office, and he's steering millions in state money towards his own. And he's sitting in the governor's office, and he's steering millions in state money towards his own. Meanwhile, up in Washington, the Central Pacific and its partners walk away with roughly 9 million acres of federal land and tens of millions of dollars in government bonds. It's not corruption. Like, it's just the same hand writing both checks. Like, you can't be corrupted by your own interests. That's just, like, your own interests. Like, it's bound to be corrupted. So that's Stanford in a nutshell. Our first robber baron who has a legit seat in the U.S. government. And while he doesn't inherently, like, make him corrupt, he's just kind of, like, funneling things into his own business, it does make it fishy and a little weird. But this is just the beginning for him. Let's look at the U.S. Senate, for example. It's actually earned a nickname during the era. It was called the Millionaire's Club. And there's a structural reason that that nickname stuck. And it came from a loophole built right into the Constitution. So until 1913, U.S. senators weren't elected by the public. They were chosen by state legislatures, which means if you wanted to buy a senator, you didn't even need to buy an electorate. You just needed to. bribe or sponsor a few dozen state lawmakers. It was way cheaper and way easier. Then there was a scandal of Credit Mobilier. So in 1872, the scandal breaks, and it turns out that members of Congress had been quietly handed discount stock in a construction company that was massively overbilling the Union Pacific Railroad. This is a railroad funded by federal subsidies because the guy that's running the railroad is also in the government. So walk through the money trail for a second. The government funds the railroad. The railroad. The railroad overpays a construction company, and that construction company hands stock, as in literally like a cut of the profits, basically, back to the very congressman who approved the funding in the first place. You see how that works? It's a perfect circle going straight from the hands of the taxpayers directly back into the hands of the lawmakers. And Congress was basically profiting on both ends. But in 1896, the game evolves again, even further because of a new man named Mark Hanna. Hanna is a wealthy industrialist. He runs. William McKinley's presidential campaign. And he's really the first guy to run like a modern fundraising machine disguised as a presidential campaign. He assesses corporations and banks directly for contributions. And. Dave Portnoy here. Football is here, and so is DraftKings. The DraftKings sports app is now live in all 50 states, from Texas to California to Florida. 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Varies by state. Terms at DKNG.co slash offer. He does it in exchange for policy favors down the line. You're probably hearing this being like, oh, that's just politics. Well, Hannah was the guy that kind of like invented it. Historians consider this the actual birth of the modern corporate-funded American election. And this era left behind something that we don't always get from history. There's pictures. There's actual visual proof of how people saw this and like what they were actually experiencing in real time. And the most famous one is a political cartoon from 1889. It's called The Bosses of the Senate. And it shows this enormous, we'll put it up on the screen here so you can see. It's this enormous bloated money bag, each one labeled with a trust, looming behind a row of tiny, cowering like senators in the Senate chamber. And you don't really need that explained, right? You don't need it now. You definitely didn't need it then. And another thing that's really interesting before we move on, because it's kind of a smaller story, but it is the seed of something massive that still plays a huge role today. It's lobbying. Lobbying as we know it now basically started with these railroads. Their move was pretty simple. You hand out free rail passes to sitting legislators. And it's like a little favor, just like a little courtesy. And that's fine, right? And that is the entire origin. But that tiny little courtesy grew into a multi-billion dollar industry. And once again, we're going to come back to that number in a minute. And when we do, It's going to kind of tie everything in. it's going to make everything else in this era look tiny by comparison. So every empire eventually has a body count, right? You can't really do an empire without some people getting hurt along the way. And for this one, the moment really arrives in 1892 at Carnegie's steel plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania. His second in command, a man named Henry Clay Frick, locks the workers out. They'd gone on strike over wage cuts. And Frick's response was basically, hey, bring in armed Pinkerton agents and take the plant back by force. And it turns into a massive battle. There's gunfire on the riverbank. There's men dying on both sides. And Carnegie, well, Carnegie for this entire thing, he's in Scotland, just conveniently, just kind of like posted up in like the Highlands, probably just, you know, having, you know, some whiskey and just chilling. And think about that, because it's not like a throwaway detail. It's like the whole point of the thing. Frick gave the order. Frick's hands are the ones that are actually getting dirty. He's the one that's dealing with actual bloodshed. Outside of his factory, Carnegie, he was just chilling. So one man built the weapon, and then the other man actually got to keep his reputation spotless. And that's not an accident. It's a feature. It's how power actually protects itself. And you can see this tactic happening over and over again throughout history. Now, only two years later, 1894, it happens again. This is the Pullman strike. Railway workers walk out over wage cuts. And this time, it's the president of the United States who steps in. Grover Cleveland sends federal troops to break the strike, and the official justification was that it was obstructing mail delivery. Now, what's crazy about this whole thing, while all of it's happening, while soldiers are breaking into a strike of, you know, workers, basically, the actual trust, the ones that provoked the unrest in the first place, they were just untouched. And there's a reason for this. The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. It was written explicitly to break up monopolies, but in its earlier years, the courts used it far more often against labor unions than against the trust that it was actually built for. Unions treated as illegal combinations in restraint of trade. So the very law that was meant to stop these monopolies and stop the barons, they got turned against the workers instead. So do you see like the through line with all this? Like, did anyone have the nerve to stand up to against how these strings were being pulled against the corruption of this whole thing? Well, yes, there was one woman in particular. Again, if you read Titan by Ron Chenault, by Rockefeller, Ida Tarbell is referenced all the time. And her story isn't really a, policy story. It's very personal. You see, her father had been financially crushed years earlier by Rockefeller's rebate scheme, like just completely wiped out. So when Tarbell sits down to write her expose, this isn't abstract journalism for her, like writing from afar about an industry. It is literally her trying to reclaim her family name. Her father's ruin is, you know, an expose in print. And that's what her life mission is at this point. So starting in 1902, she publishes a serialized investigation later collected as, The History of the Standard Oil Company. And she does something that no one expected from what they call a muckraker. She uses Standard Oil's own internal records, its own testimony against itself. So the company's own paper trail was laid out for the entire country to read. And what's crazy about what Ida Tarbell did is that it worked. Public opinion turned in a way that no politician's speech was able to do. And it switched in just over a decade. And speaking of politicians, here's where they actually will come in. A little bit. Teddy Roosevelt earns the nickname Trustbuster by taking on the Northern Securities Company. This is a railroad holding company backed by J.P. Morgan himself. And he takes it all the way to the Supreme Court. And in 1904, he wins. But there's nuance that a lot of people miss about Roosevelt. He didn't actually hate all trusts. He drew a line. He said, you know, there were good trusts that were efficient and fair and good for the economy and good for the American people. And we had to leave those alone. And then there were bad trusts. And those are the ones that existed just to gouge the public. You know, Roosevelt wasn't like some big ideologue. He wasn't like, I think sometimes people try to frame him for their side. He was a sorter and he was pretty pragmatic about it. Now, here's a fact that surprised a lot of people. William Howard Taft, Roosevelt's forgettable successor, big fat guy, had a custom bathtub. Well, this is kind of a president that no one really remembers. But Taft actually busted way more trusts in one term than Roosevelt did in nearly eight years, including the big one in 1911. The Supreme Court orders the breakup of standard oil itself. This is massive. Woodrow Wilson ends up finishing the job on paper through the Clayton Antitrust Act and the creation of the Federal Trade Commission, both in 1914. And standing behind a lot of that thinking is a man named Louis Brandeis. And he actually coins the phrase worth remembering, the curse of bigness. His whole argument was that concentrated power is dangerous to democracy. Whether or not it's efficient, whether or not it's good, it is just dangerous when it gets this concentrated. So by 1911, on paper, it looked like the good guys were winning. But of course, the Senate wants to change that because the trusts are getting broken up one by one and standard oil, the biggest of all of them, is actually dead, except this is a caveat. Standard oil gets broken up in 1911. 34 separate companies carved out of one massive empire. But Rockefeller keeps his shares in every single company. Now, here's what no one expects. The market looks at these 34 pieces now free of all the political risk, all the antitrust heat, and actually prices them higher. And like individually, they're bigger, like the sum is smaller than the pieces. So now the whole company is worth more as fragments. So within a year, Rockefeller's net worth actually goes up because of the trust busting. Think about that. The government dismantles his monopoly and it makes him richer. Some estimates put his peak fortune adjusted for inflation somewhere between $400 and $600 billion in today's money, which would make him by a wide margin, like one of the richest people who ever lived. I mean, I guess like Elon is now closed, but for, I mean, a hundred years, like no one was even touching him. The breakup didn't like destroy his fortune. It just diversified his equities. So those 34 like baby standards, as they called them, like the pieces of standard oil, they grew up and you probably know their names, Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Marathon. And in 1999, in a twist that is like so funny, I'm going to tell you about the first one. Exxon and Mobil just merged back together, right? Like the companies that were trust busted that were now separate little fragments, they just joined back up again, you know, some 70, 80 years later, like the river finds its way back to its owner. Now, before we go further, I want to actually give both sides of this a fair fight, not some like, you know, some people disagree, but like an actual case. So Carnegie wrote an essay in 1889 called The Gospel of Wealth. And it's really interesting to hear his own words. And his argument is basically this. The rich have a moral duty to give their fortunes away while they are still alive for the public good. And to his credit, he actually put his money where his mouth was. I mean, over 2,500 public libraries funded out of his own pocket. Rockefeller, the same way, poured a ton of money into medical research. He even founded the University of Chicago. A ton of HBCU colleges like Spelman was founded by Rockefeller, actually named after his wife, Steady Spelman. And the strongest, version of the defense comes from historian Burton Folsom in a book called The Myth of the Robber Barons. And his argument in defense of the robber barons as these, you know, captains of industry is that there is a difference between market entrepreneurs who build value through actual competition and innovation and political entrepreneurs who just basically leaned on government favors and used loopholes to get rich. Folsom's case is that men like Rockefeller earned it and they were really smart and they worked really hard. And through efficiency, they grew out of a complex of empires, not through corruption. But of course, critics push back and their argument is that, hey, the philanthropy conveniently shows up after the monopolistic damage is already done to the economy. So it's not generosity. It's like a PR cleanup. It's just a reputational repair on a scale that, you know, you can't even really imagine because they have so much money. And honestly, I don't think you really have to, like, pick a side here. I think both are true. Now, the bigger picture is underneath all of this. And you can't really ignore it. Every single time regulation has finally caught up to one version of power, the power just changes shape. So AT&T, for example, becomes a regulated monopoly instead of a broken one. Holding companies, conglomerates, new legal structures, same underlying logic. You have the same choke point that these people are getting rich on. It's just a different river. Fellows, this episode is sponsored by Blue Chew. Look, life is about preparation. You've got to prepare for a camping trip, for your job, for a podcast. And you've got to prepare for all of the things happening in your life. And, you know, sometimes when the vibe is right, everyone's, you know, being an adult, you're on the same page. Sometimes people forget to prepare for the bedroom. And that's why you need Blue Chew Gold. 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When you visit bluechew.com, use the promo code Gagnon, and you can check out more details and important safety information. Thanks so much, Blue Chew. Let's get back to the show. is the river now? Where are the choke points on these rivers? Where are the tolls? And I'm not going to name every name because you don't really need me to. You can imagine, right? There are major tech antitrust case that are moving through the federal courts right now. And the playbook here looks identical to Standard Oil. Different substance. Instead of oil pipelines, it's search results and app stores and advertising. But the same question still applies. Who controls the choke point that everyone else has to pass through? Critics are actually starting to call this a second Gilded Age. Defenders are pushing back and they argue that comparing a search engine to 19th century oil trusts misunderstand the eras. But, you know, today's giants built something that didn't exist before them in a way that Rockefeller never really had to. And both the arguments, I think, deserve time. So I'm going to try to give them both to you and let you decide. But here's number one before we move on. And earlier, I promised that we would come back to this. So this is like all the money that's used by corporations for, you know, basically getting favors in politics. It's tracked through official disclosure filings and it runs into the billions of dollars every single year. And even adjusted for inflation, even being generous to the Gilded Age, that number dwarfs anything a 19th century lobbyist could even imagine with like a handful of free rail passes. I mean, the tools are fundamentally different. The size of the toll on the river, it didn't change. It didn't get smaller. Just the river is now digital. So data, attention, infrastructure. But again, the same question is still here. Who owns this choke point? So were the robber barons stopped? Kind of. Standard oil got broken up. The Senate got reformed. All these antitrust laws, they exist because of exactly the men we just spent the last 30 minutes talking about. But also, not really, because every generation builds its own toll booths on a different river. Every generation eventually notices. And then the fight between, concentrated power and everyone else never actually ends. It just, again, changes industries, changes technology, change, the name on the door switches around. But all the guys we looked at earlier, like Carnegie, Rockefeller, JP Morgan, these guys who laid the foundations for the modern robber baron in America, well, they're not gone. And they're not going to be going anywhere anytime soon. Even though we can honestly say, yeah, every generation will have people with concentrated power, it doesn't mean that it's not potentially dangerous. And that doesn't mean we should just ignore it and let it happen. So we have to be careful. We have to be careful. We have to keep on looking at these same patterns in history and keep on asking these questions. How much power can one private citizen have before they stop just being a citizen like you and me and they start becoming a rival government inside the same country? Like you just watched that line get crossed again and published and then recrossed again across nearly a century of American history and it's still going on right now. So I'm not going to tell you who's doing it necessarily, because honestly, by this point, I don't really think you need me to, but you know the names. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a brief summary of the robber barons in American history. It's a fascinating topic, right? Because these robber barons at the time, again, it's even funny because growing up, I would use the term robber baron like in school, and I never considered it a pejorative. It's so funny because they would just be like, yeah, robber barons. And I'd be like, yeah, I almost thought like the red baron. I was like, red baron's cool. So I was like, these guys aren't that bad, you know? But like, yeah, they just invented, I almost don't even, like, I don't even criticize Rockefeller. Like, he was just doing capitalism. You know what I'm saying? Like, what? There were less rules. There was less like. He just was playing the game. Like, you almost can't fault him because by all standards, he seemed like a pretty nice guy. Like, the issue with Rockefeller, don't be wrong. Like, I don't think it's on him. It's kind of just on the system. He built a massive company. He would go into other industries. Like, I think he was in Cincinnati, if I'm not mistaken. And then he would go to like Cleveland. He would go someplace in Pennsylvania and be like, hey, you have an oil refinery. Well, I'm going to give away oil for free. You can't like, and then I'm just going to just drive you into the ground. And then you can sell to me or go bankrupt. It's your choice. And then they would all just be like, fine, I'll sell to you. That's what happened to Ida Tarbell and her daddy. So she was just like, fine, I'll give you all, I'll give you my company. And then they would sell. These people would make pretty good money, a couple mil. They lived the rest of their life happy. And then Rockefeller just built a massive empire. Is it his fault for playing the game? It's just kind of the game. It's really the government's fault for not being like, hey, don't do that. You know what I mean? Like, so yeah, you can put it on them for being, like Rockefeller in particular, because I know the most about him. He wasn't really like, like, yeah, he would kind of do schemes and he would kind of use like these kind of backdoor little things, but he wasn't like going out of his way to like defraud people. He was just ruthless in his business, but also like a devout Christian was also like building colleges, trying to like give his money away. So it's a complicated case of like, he was just, he was just doing what capitalism does. And it's ultimately on the government to try to censor and like control it as best they can and not let these things get out of control. Yeah, I guess they didn't expect one person to be able to like amass the power also. Like when you build rules to a game, which like, I guess capitalism and government creating is a game. Also that deforestation is crazy. Are you getting some late night bites with friends already hard to beat that first too hot bite of fries you couldn't wait for followed by ice cold Pepsi. Now that hits different. Suddenly the energy kicks back in the night goes longer and the last don't stop because Pepsi brings out more flavor, more fun and more of the moment food deserves Pepsi. Grab a Pepsi zero sugar today. Deforestation. We're getting a little bit of it. All right. Well, maybe we can edit out some of the, some of the deforestation. Who knows? Um, but yeah, when you're making the rules of a game, like which capitalism is, or like government making and all of these things, like, at some point it is game theory. You sometimes forget that like people will break the rules for the game or like find loopholes and exploits in the game. That's the thing. Any type of rule comes in after the rules have been broken. Yeah. So all these antitrust laws, I don't know how you could foresee them. Yeah. Like, I don't know if you're like developing like the economic code in the early 1800s and you're like, Oh, people are able to kind of like trade across the entire country really quickly. Like it's hard to even imagine. It's hard to imagine what the future will look like. And then someone does it. And then all of a sudden you're like, Whoa, hold on. Yeah. You can't do that. And they're like, it's what? It's not the rules. Yeah. It's like, I imagined like sports had this where it was like, like I'm sure in basketball, like they had to make a rule where like you couldn't do something because they were like, no, no one can do that. And then some freak athlete came along and did something no one could imagine. Dunking was like a big example of this. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a bunch of yellow cards and like sports and soccer. Right. Exactly. We were just talking about that. They were like, Oh yeah. Like you, you're not going to kick someone in the face and then someone kicks the game. Isn't going to create actual like bedlam and chaos on the field. And then they make yellows and reds. And then there's a massive riot in a world cup and they're like, all right, well we got to have a code here. Yeah. So I'm almost like kind of ambivalent to the robber barons. Uh, yeah, I don't know. I like, is the aggregation of wealth terrible for America? Yeah. Is like consolidating all the power into one private citizen's hands and they're able to do anything they want. You got to hope that they're a good guy. Not great. But it's like, it's just them playing the game. Yeah. It was the logical end point of capitalism in a funny way. Like, I'm not mad at LeBron James for having all the points. Yeah. Now imagine those points gave him like the ability to start wars. Yeah. Now all of a sudden I'd be a little bit like, Whoa, but it's also like, no, he's just playing basketball better than anyone. Yeah. There's many books and many different things to read about this, but if you're overwhelmed by books or any of that kind of stuff, there's a great show on Amazon prime called Titans, the rise of wall street. You tell me about this. I got to watch that. It's awesome. It's, it's equal parts like documentary. And equal parts like re recreation of what's happening. So there'll be like a guy who voices over like, and then this happened and then like guys in old timey suits act out certain scenes. And of course parts are dramatized and shortened down and whatever, but it's, I find it to be very fun and a great example. And it goes all the way into the eighties. So it's, it's the history of wall street and it's just so happens the first few episodes are of course like Morgan and, and, and the last episode you get to like the twenties. Yeah. It's just, it's easy for people to like, just bag on these people and be like, Oh dude, rock fillers is dummy. Use a scumbag. I'm like, sort of. Yeah. I don't know. Is that, is this coming across? I don't want to seem like I'm, I'm just, you know, glazing. I'm not shilling the standard oil company, but it's like he played the game. The rules had to catch up and now we're in a position where the rules got to catch up again. If we're facing another massive monopoly, which I mean, there's plenty in America that aren't called monopoly. Monopolies, but function as monopolies, like even industries you don't think about, like, like pistachios, you know what I mean? Oh yeah. It's like controlled by like two companies. Well, we just had this issue with, uh, like the global market of food. There was this breakout of like diarrhea causing bacteria and they found out that like the, the same farms that, uh, that people are buying from at like big box stores, Walmart or whatever that might be, are also the same places they're selling to like quote unquote boutique stores, whole foods or whatever. And then just white labeling the different name, but it's all coming from like four facilities. Yeah. And it just goes to show that like, yeah, Pat, like at most times under like a capitalist, uh, system, it will always sort of, uh, uh, it's, it aggregates. It just, it monopolizes, which is like capitalism is a lot of great things, but I think you gotta be realistic that there's some bad things. And one of those is it's prone to monopolization. So you need to have a strong government to go against it. Yeah. Concentrate. But now what happens? When you're, you know, got a little Senate seat and all of a sudden you're getting a kickback from one of the monopolies. If I'm in that Senate seat, you're probably just like, Like, hey, this is a nice monopoly. These guys are great. They sent my kid to college. They got me a new house. I got a boat. Yeah, if Taylor Farms is throwing you money. This episode should be sponsored by Taylor Farms. One of the best farms in America. It's in Mexico, I think. One of the best farms in America and Mexico. That's how amazing they are. They're multinational. That's the best kind of company to have. You want a company that's just in one country? No, I want a company in every country. That's fire. And on top of that, you eat a little bit of Taylor Farms. What is it, lettuce? Yeah. Why do you eat lettuce? To lose weight. And what happens if you get explosive diarrhea? Dude, you're losing a lot of weight. Thin as a rail, baby. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. Taylor Farms is doing what no one else is doing, allegedly. I don't even know if that's true. Don't sue me. But it's just an interesting little ripple, right? I think we've got to be pragmatic and realistic. Things are not all black and they're not all white. Everything's kind of gray. And I think these robber barons are kind of the same case. Hey, let them innovate. Let them push the limits. And then have a strong government that's able to trust bust and get them out of here. Like old Taft. I wonder if he got maligned. I wonder if he got maligned by the history books because he was trust busting. Yeah. No one really hears about him. They were like- Make him fat. McGraw Hill. They were like, yeah, dude, this guy was so fat. Make him fat. Think about how fat this guy was. And they're like, wasn't he like super against monopolies? They're like, no, dude. This guy was the fattest guy ever. This guy sucked at monopoly, dude. He lost all the time. Yeah. This guy was terrible. Dude, this guy, he tried to break a McDonald's because he loved it so much. I don't know. I'm kind of losing the bit here. But you got my point. What do you guys think? Am I shilling? Or am I just a lib? I don't even know what my take is at this point. I don't even know where I land. But where do you guys land? Drop a comment, YouTube, Spotify. I read all of them, even if I don't respond to them. Someone else will, and it'll be productive conversation. And just please keep it civil. Like I always said, History Camp is a small show. It's this little enclave on the internet where me and all my friends talk about stuff. And I don't want it to be gross and mean. So just be a normal human being and try to have a polite conversation, please. For the love of all that is good. Also, if you like. Religious content, great news. We have Religion Camp. You can check that out in the description. If you like crazy deep dives, conspiracies, mysteries, well, great news. We have Camp Gagnon. I'm saying it correctly from now on. That's the main channel where I talk with people way smarter than me, thank goodness. And also do deep dives all on my own, just like this, but on more esoteric topics. Furthermore, we have Secret Society. Yes, it is very secretive. You're going to get every episode of this show ad-free. You're also going to get monthly Zooms with me and the rest of the homies. You're also going to get episodes that never go out to the public and early release. You're going to get a series of episodes and merch discounts. I mean, you're basically just going to become a friend of mine, and you'll have all the things that I give to Miles. Now, the Secret Society is not free. It's about the price of a cup of coffee every single month. You can find it at patreon.com slash campgagnon. Now, if you'd just like to rock with the history vibe, well, great news. We do this episode every single week, so make sure you subscribe, and I will see you in the future to talk about the past. God bless you all. Peace. Dave Portnoy here. The DraftKings Sports app is now live, in all 50 states, from Texas to California to Florida. That's code SPOTIFY. In partnership with DraftKings, the crown is yours. Event trading offered by DraftKings Predictions, a CFTC, registered Futures Commission merchant. $50 in non-withdrawable predictions dollars issued every 7 days via click-to-claim for 21 days. Predictions dollars expire in one year. Nationwide based on sportsbook predictions and or free-to-play sports contest availability. Varies by state. Terms at DKNG.co slash offer.