Transcription
Hi, I'm Lindsay. And I'm Connor. And I promise this is interesting. And it's been a minute since it's been a second since we've recorded an episode. Um, why don't you explain what happened to you? You've been on set. You've been It was my fault. A very important uh set person for the last month. Yeah. I was in production for a feature film here in Los Angeles for the last month and we had some overnight shoots. We had some very early morning shoots, which is way worse. And then we had some really fun like 3 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. Uh, shoots. So, I don't know what to call those call times, but they were pretty. They were kind of the worst of what? You don't want me to play with your glasses? I need something to fidget with. I can't just sit here like like a monk just like I don't desire anything. But anyway, yeah, I was on set for the last month and so we weren't able to film and then Yeah, that's what we we learned that and we kind of knew this like production makes it really hard. Being in production, being on a show makes it really hard to record a podcast. Yeah. Or to script anything podcast. 20 minutes for lunch. Like even during lunch, I I would write one sentence of my script and be like, "God, I'm so productive." And then go home and be like, "This script is nowhere near done." I know. Yeah. And that's the thing like it it really goes to show like how much effort I think you and I forget how much effort it takes to write some of these episodes just like the research that goes into it, you know, generally. So, yeah, that's where that's where we've been. It's all Lindsay's fault. It is all my fault. I'm sorry. And I'm also leaving town in September. I'm going to be gone the entire month of September. Uh, I'm gonna be a writer in residence in Vermont, which is very exciting. It is. Um, but we will have some episodes pre-recorded. Um, so this is not going to be a, you know, graveyard of a channel. We, we have some things planned for that time, but just to let you know what's going on. Yeah. So, we're going to have a bank of episodes and, uh, I'll have to do some solo stuff by myself without you, which I'm very excited about. Yeah. We'll see how it goes. It'll probably be shorter content. will be up like a full podcast episode, but I think you should call it uh Waiting for My Wife to Return from the War. We'll see. Okay. Do you have any If you had to guess what my episode's about, what would you say? Well, I did print it. You did print it. So, so I did see the word journalism. Okay. So, I assume we're delving into the the roots of journalism kind of, but I would expect a thicker packet if that's where that just goes back to the written word, you know, like more than four pages worth of content surely. So, oh, there's there's so much. And that's the thing, like this episode might be long, it might be short. I still had to cut a lot of stuff. There's so much in here that I could not cut or that I could not include in the episode. Um, but yes, it is about journalism. And Lindsay, you and I are big fans of good journalism. Very much. Uh, you're an avid reader of The New Yorker. I am. Not to brag. Not to brag. Not to clearly be better than everybody else, but I do read The New Yorker and The Atlantic, right? Which the New Yorker is considered journalism, right? There's so much news in there. And to be honest, I don't always read the news, right? Portions of that. They do these huge profiles on like the tariffs or on like a very specific decision that the president made two years ago. And I just I don't have the capacity for that. I'm here for the fiction and the funnies. Yeah. And the podcast recommendations, right? So, and like who who's the new writer that they're kind of pushing on? Yeah. So, don't quiz me, you know? But I'm uh I'm doing my part to be a citizen of the world. Um you also have a very good friend who's a journalist and you speak very highly of her and all the work that she does. Uh Lauren Lauren Peace with the Tampa Bay Times. She's fabulous. She's still with the Tampa Bay Times. Yes. That's great. Not to totally dox her but no she's public figure. She's very important award-winning journalist with the Tampa Bay Times and she does great work. You've shown me some of she does very important work. She just released a huge piece that she's been working on for a year about domestic violence in the state of Florida. So, you should definitely read that if you feel like being bummed out, but in an informed way. Well, Lauren Piece might have a lot to say about this episode and how little uh how how not good it is. How how bad how not good this podcast episode is. Yeah. How bad of a job I did as a researcher on this episode. So, hopefully I do write by Lauren Peace and she's happy with it if she watches our podcast. Um big shoes. Big shoes. Big shoes. Uh sorry Lauren in advance. Um journalism is in kind of a weird space today. Yes, I would say. Uh, we've obviously had we still have like big publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. They're like titans of American media and they've been around forever, right? Um, but for every kind of major publication like that, you get a dozen Buzzfeeds or kind of the the schlocky the Daily Mail, the Daily Mail, the schllocky like tabloid, you know, publishers, that kind of thing. And especially with like the advent of the term fake news, you know, journalism is is been in a weird spot, I think, in American culture. It's in my mind, it's never been harder to be a journalist and be able to be recognized as like legit, you know. Um, everybody's questioning everything all the time. Yeah. Which is good to a point, I think. Right. Yeah. It's the same thing with the scientific community where it's like, you know, this new research project will become available or like a new experiment reveals really exciting, you know, findings, but then everybody's wondering like, okay, well, who paid for the research? Who paid that grant? Exactly. And that's a those are valuable questions. Absolutely. But, you know, once I, a screenwriter, am in charge of determining like what is real scientifically and journalistically and politically, it gets a little corny. It's like I can't do this all right. And that's that's also like that's a fair criticism of places like the New York Times or or CNN or Fox News. It's like you having these monolithic institutions are a good thing in terms of just getting information out there, but once they become massive corporations, they start having an interest in certain things, right? They're all biased and you have to know that when you're absorbing information. Exactly. And journalism just doesn't feel like it's as respected of a profession as it used to be. And it used to be a very respected profession. loved Walter Kronhite. Oh, they did. Really trusted Walter Kronhite. Well, that movie uh His Girl Friday, remember that movie? Oh, I love that movie. Yeah. Oh, seriously, the movie is so great. We just finished our whole Oscar series recently. Yes, we did. Um and one of the biggest patterns that we saw was that every couple of years a big journalism movie would come out. It's the newspaper movie. Yeah. And it would win best picture. It's the bianual newspaper movie. And honestly, if you have seen one, you have seen them all. It's the same thing with biopics. If you've seen Spotlight, you've seen every newspaper movie. Congratulations. That's the thing. The the biggest recommendation for that is just watch the most recent one and then you've seen all of them. Yeah. Watch the one that your friends keep talking about and then like you're in the know and you've also seen every newspaper movie and you can log it in your letter box and I will not dox you. You'll be truthful. Exactly. Now, I think it it does speak to something about kind of culture when it comes to that kind of thing is that there is something that's kind of compelling about journalism and uncovering the truth. You know what I mean? Um and that's always what they depict. It's like getting to the bottom of a big, you know, get finding a break in the case. Yeah. Like journalism movies and detective movies live in the same vein. Like True Detective, he's also kind of acting like a journalist. Like the undecorated apartment and like the obsession with the truth, just like digging, digging, digging, trying to figure out what the hell's going on to be like challenging big powerful people and corporations and getting fired. Like this all happens in journalism movies constantly. Somebody in a peaked cap is like, "Yo, won't stop me from delivering deliverance." From delivering deliverance. Yeah, that's it. Um, well, today I want to introduce you to a journalist that I found, one journalist who might be one of the most impactful and kind of like badass journalists in American history. Her name Cooper is Ida Tarbell. Ida Tarbell. Ida Tarbell. And she's considered the mother of investigative journalism. and her work is said to have contributed to the breakup of some of America's largest monopolies in the early 20th century. Now, my research into this topic was sparked by a conversation that you and I had recently. Are you saying I'm an inspiration? Kind of. It was a conversation about Amazon and how it's looking to potentially break up and shut down the company. Do you remember this conversation vaguely? So, what is Wre? I'll just do a brief. It's an American podcasting company that's been producing a ton of podcasts since about 2016. Yes, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Um, they managed to grow into one of the largest independent podcasting companies in the world. From Wondery. From Wondery. From Wondery. From Wondery. From Wondery. And after all that success, Amazon bought them a few years ago for around $300 million with the idea of folding them into like their Amazon music division. Right. Right. Okay. Just like expanding their own podcast section essentially, right? The best way to do or the easiest way to start into business is to buy a successful business. Right. Right. Um I hate that. At the time of this recording, Amazon has announced that they're going to be doing some quote restructuring of Wondery, which is kind of like an American corporate double speak for we're about to lay off everyone and strip all the assets and make our quarterly reports go up pretty acutely. Right. Right. Now, when I told you about this, you responded by saying, "Doesn't America break up monopolies? How are they allowed to do that? Because that feels kind of weird. They they could take over one of the largest companies and then just get rid of them, right? You're just eliminating your competition, right? And you and I had a super great and totally not depressing conversation about corporate oligarchies and the history of antirust legal cases in the United States. For anyone that doesn't know, a monopoly is defined as a company or entity that has an unreasonable control or restraint over the competition in any given market. I'm sure some corporations are immediately coming to your mind. The one I always think of is Disney. Yes. Because we all know that Disney owns a lot of IP. Correct. But anytime you if you want to do a little bit of googling and just figure out how much Disney owns in terms of not only like movies and films and intellectual property like book titles, but property and action figures and toys and they have such a firm grasp on so many things that nobody comes close to touching Disney. It's well and in in countries where antirust isn't a priority, right? Uh you get companies like Nintendo like Nintendo is a massive corporation in Japan. Yes. And they they're kind of like the Disney of Japan. They keep Makes sense a firm grip on their IP. They're very latigious. Um same with Disney. Same with Disney. Yeah. So basically a a monopoly is a large company that controls an industry so well that it gives them the ability to control the prices of the goods and services they provide, which is bad for everybody involved. Terrible. Except for them. They win. Yeah. because you make all the money. Yeah. And you corner the market. And when you corner the market, you also get to determine pricing. Because if people want your product badly enough, but you're the only person selling it, you get to decide. Oh, we're going to get into that. Oh boy. Oh boy. And the answer to your question is yes. It is absolutely illegal to own and operate a company with a monopolistic level of control over any given market. Interesting. So, how's Amazon getting away with it? Well, that's a good question. So, the United States has the Federal Trade Commission, the FTC. Mhm. And the Department of Justice, which has an entire division dedicated to handling antirust cases. Yes. We talked about this a little bit in the witness protection episode. We did. Yes. These exist for handling and going after companies that exhibit monopoly like behavior. In modern times, they go after companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple, right? But the United States has a very colorful history of monopoly. Yes. You and I work in the film industry. We've established this. Mhm. And the film industry used to have a series of intensely controlling monopolies, which a lot of people don't know. This is a big part of like the American film industry and how like the unions became a thing and how the studios became a thing. So, we've said it before, but film and movies are a relatively new industry and like any new industry, there was no regulation when the massive studios started popping up, right? So, the old studio system used to work like this. A studio would produce and create the movie Then they would own the distribution company that was responsible for putting that movie into theaters. And then they would also own a series of theaters that would almost exclusively play the movies that they owned and produced. Right. Right. Right. That gave them a lot of control over who got to see what and what got to play where. Mhm. This led to them being able to kind of strongarm smaller independent theaters into showing only their movies or to give them preferred showing days and times or to outright keep competitors movies out of theaters entirely. And all of the big studios were doing this, right? The big five, which are Paramount, MGM, RKO, Fox, and Warner Brothers. Right. Right. I forget about RKO. Everybody does. But they were massive. They were massive. All of these monopolistic business practices led to the case of the United States versus Paramount Pictures in 1948. Okay. And it's important to point out Paramount Pictures was like like singled out in the title of the case. But every major studio at the time was brought in as kind of an addendum. Yeah. To the case. This was a major major change in the way that Hollywood operates. Correct. And this was an antitrust case which made it so studios couldn't own their own theaters anymore and kept them from strongarmming smaller theaters into only showing their films. And this kind of paved the way for a wider variety of independent American films and even foreign films to enter the American market because when they had such a strong like kind of grip on the market, it keeps everything out. All competition gets refused including like foreign films, right? So part of the only reason we have foreign films in America is because of the antitrust cases in the ' 40s, which is crazy to think about. So huge win for people who like going to the movies and seeing good movies. Regulation is the word, right? It's always the last thing that gets talked about when it comes to industry and business, which makes sense because it's really boring to talk about. It's very boring. Yeah, I can tell. Yeah, I can tell that me talking about this is a little boring, you know, but it's vital for actual fair market competition, especially in a capitalistic society. Yeah, vital. It's vital. Um otherwise, every company would just be a monopoly. The only thing keeping anybody and especially any corporation from behaving morally is the law. Yes, that's literally it. And you can see it in huge corporations like Disney and like Amazon. They will push it and push it and push it as far as they can until legal action is taken. Like nobody I know I think my mom is like this. I almost said we like to pretend but I don't like to be optimistic ever. But like people like my mom are very optimistic and I think like to believe that people are generally good and will do the right thing when left to their own devices. Sure. I don't see evidence of that. At least at the corporate level there's no evidence of that. No. And also if somebody if you have the option to I think this goes back to caveman time where it's just like if you had the most rocks that and you could sell them and get money or land or food for them, you would do anything for those rocks. And if somebody else came along and realized, oh, you have a pretty good business model. I too am going to collect rocks and sell them for money or food or property. You would just kill him with a really big rock. And now your competition doesn't exist anymore. Amazon's doing the same thing. It's just with money and it's really boring and it's all through politics buying people out. It's Yeah, it's Yeah, white collar crime is really really boring. Blue collar crime is where all the fun stuff happens. Exactly. That's where you rob banks. Exact. I know that's the the joke I make and it's a very offcolor joke, but Oh, boy. I I always say like the only thing keeping the studio system and other businesses from using slave labor is the law. That's literally it. I almost said it when you mentioned the uh the rise of unions, but unions are not born out of wonderful working environments. No, they never are. They are born out of slave labor. Yeah, they they're born out of people getting killed, people getting hurt, people getting taken advantage of, people working 20 hours a day and not being fed and working minimum wage or less, right? And then not showing up and then getting fired for it. Yeah. Like that's that's where unions come from. Yeah. Right. So, yeah, I think it is important to point out like regulation is boring, but it's so vital to keeping people safe and happy and working, you know. Yeah, it's like getting your doctor to stick a finger up your butt. Yeah. It's really boring and like not pleasant, but you got to do it. Everybody hates it. What if you want that or cancer? I mean, like when it when the other option is cancer. Yeah. It really puts that in perspective. Okay, put the finger up my butt. Let's just make sure that it's not cancer. So monopolies are a very effective strategy when it comes to business, which Oh, they're really effective. You can make a lot of money on a monopoly. So effective that most of the wealthiest people in American history that we think of are people who just owned monopolies in one sector or another. I hate them so much. Andrew Carnegie, yes, had a monopoly on steel. Yep. Right. Cornelius Vanderbilt had a monopoly on railroads. That was his big phone. And probably the no most wellknown was Mr. John D. Rockefeller. Yeah, there we go. Of Rockefeller Plaza fame. All right. Rockefeller was the founder of the Standard Oil Company. Yes. Who owned at their height about 90% of all of the oil refineries in the United States. I'm going to say, listen, I'm not a part of the the Fair Trade Commission or the Federal Trade Commission, but I'm going to say that 90% is too much. Way too much. I would say that is a little over the top. Yeah. Crazy. At that point, why even what's keeping you from owning the last 10? Just go all the way. Well, and so much money from that that you know Rockefeller in his later years became a philanthropist and gave a lot of his money away. Carnegie did too. Yeah. Because frankly they didn't have another choice because the antitrust laws came in and they couldn't operate businesses. Yeah. Again, they didn't donate all that money because they just really cared about the children and they wanted to, you know, invest in education. They did it because they get like tax breaks and also the government was like, you got to give some of that money back. Well, and it's also I'm sure it's also partially related to what we talked about before which there's a really good book. I'll put a picture up of it right now that I forget, but it it talks about how like new age billionaires aren't like old age billionaires because new age billionaires don't live anywhere. Old age billionaires like Rockefeller lived in New York. They did. And they invested in New York, right? They invested in their own neighborhoods and they wanted to make things nice and they invested in the the museums around their area and artists in their area and public transit in their area. But people like Jeff Bezos basically live in their private jet. Just flying from like a meeting in Dubai to the UAE to UK to California. Exactly. He has a huge house here in LA. He's never home. No. Ever. No. He doesn't live there. Mark Zuckerberg owns a basically a bunker facility in Maui, right? You know, like it's they don't they're not citizens of a place. So they don't put money back into the place where they are a citizen, which is really too bad cuz if Mark Zuckerberg were like an old age billionaire and like had that big bunker in Maui, the amount of good that he could do with his money in Hawaii would be they [ __ ] it. They might build a sand castle with him with his face on it on the beach. They might be like the volcano. Like we kind of hate him. He's a robot. But man, he like basically fixed Hawaii, right? He stopped the volcano for $1 billion. He fixed all the problems with Hawaii. So, we got to build a sand castle in his honor. Like, [ __ ] it. I don't know. So, Standard Oil was one of the most powerful companies in the US and was responsible for killing more businesses at that time than just about any other company in history. Brutal. Brutal. And this was kind of baked into the culture that Rockefeller himself believed in because he was at one point quoted as saying, quote, "Competition is a sin." What? And it seemed like that would remain true with how much power and money the Standard Oil Company controlled. They were basically unbeatable until they met Ida Tarbell. Ida. Ida. Tell me everything that you know. Okay. I want to know everything about Ida right now. Ida was born in 1857. Terrible year to be born. Yeah, I don't like that year. In a Pennsylvania log cabin to a school teacher and a carpenter. Okay, this is looking pretty rough. It doesn't get much more American than that. It really doesn't. And her name is Ida. Ida. Holy mackerel. Unfortunately for her, she had been born just in time for the panic of 1857, which was a massive financial crisis in the US that we really wouldn't recover from until after the Civil War in the 1860s. I have not heard of this ever. It was also like it wasn't the cause of the Civil War obviously, but it was a big part of like why people were upset and there was a lot of like financial burden on people at the time. It had to do with um it's it was very similar actually to the big crash. It's like credit speculation basically. Ah yeah. Are we figuring out that credit is not real and we should not put value in it? Yeah. I guess not. I'm going to tell everybody right now. I do not have a credit card. I've never had a credit card. I will never have a credit card ever. I have one in because I have a Costco. It's not real. If I could pay for everything with little sacks of coins. Yeah. I would because that's real to me. Or with beans. I grew these beans in my garden. I'll give you a sack of beans for a sack of different beans that I'm not growing. That makes sense to me. This credit business makes no sense. Yeah. And no one is able to explain it to me in simple terms, which tells me that it's not real and I'm not doing it. That's my big conspiracy. I will not bow to the credit companies. Anyway, this is not the point of the episode. This panic of 1857 led to the Tarbell family losing all of their life savings, which is great because they just had a baby, so it's perfect timing. Oh boy. This downturn didn't last forever for them though as western Pennsylvania began to develop oil fields. And Ida's father began a business of building wooden oil tanks for the oil fields. So we talk about how destructive drilling for oil can be to the environment today. Like even today, right? But imagine what it must have been like back when it was first starting and they had they had no idea how to do things properly. Yeah. Just building bombs. I think just building bombs that go down into the ground and blow everything up, right? I mean, or just like digging with shovels. Like based on Ida's writing, crude oil used to just be everywhere in sand, in random pits and puddles. Like it it was just everywhere. You couldn't get away from it and it would kind of seep into every aspect of life. She wrote, quote, "No industry of man in its early days has ever been more destructive of beauty, order, decency than the production of petroleum." She and Ted Kazinski would get along real well. They would. This is what Ted Kazinski could have been. Yeah. Eventually, Ida's father became an oil producer himself. He had worked so long and saved up enough money to finally start building up into a bigger aspect of the industry, right? He was into kind of production and refining. But his business along with many other small oil businesses were taken over and absorbed by the South Improvement Company, a company that was specifically created by the major oil and railroad interests at the time. One of them being Mr. John D. Rockefeller himself. Okay. It was really, they don't use this verbiage, but to me it makes sense. It's basically a shell company for Standard Oil at the time. Sure. Ultimately, the South Improvement Company would absorb or take over 22 of its 26 competitors in a 4-month period. That's crazy. Imagine a Walmart opening in your neighborhood, right? And then more than 80% of all the stores in your in your town close. Yeah. Because of it. That's essentially what they did. So, this wasn't exactly fair market capitalism work. No, it's not fair about this. No, it was Rockefeller pulling the strings. Right. Right. He made it so that an independent refiner who thought they could survive found that when they went to borrow money from a bank, all of the local banks were in Standard Oil's pocket. Wow. And they would refuse them loans. Jeez Louise. So now Ida's father, Franklin, didn't exactly take it sitting down. He protested, would go to marches, and part of these marches included tipping over Standard Oil Company railroad tankers. Like that a lot. Yeah, I like the energy here. A lot of unrest around this. Very good. Eventually, the government of Pennsylvania would disband the Southern Improvement Company, but the damage had already been done, right? You know, disbanding that company doesn't bring back the businesses. No, it doesn't bring back the money or like the lives potentially lost. This is the thing is like it's not dramatic to say that when you ruin people's livelihoods, you destroy their lives, too. People have to leave town. People can't afford medication. They can't afford food. Exactly. You know, you destroy people's lives with that. So, yeah. Really like you're too little too late here, buddy. Well, that's I think about that even when like just a random business goes out of business in my neighborhood, right? When a restaurant goes under, a restaurant going under represents a person being at the bottom of their economic ladder. Yeah. Like it's awful. You lose everything. Like business is like if you open your own business, that is your whole life. Like running a restaurant is even just being a cook in somebody else's restaurant is a 24-hour 7 day a week job basically. So running your own restaurant, you are never not at the restaurant. Correct. You are always doing something for that restaurant. And then to have it fail and go under, like not only do you lose out economically, but like that's a huge emotional, physical, spiritual toll, too. That's the thing like you know bosses and stuff get they get a bad rap and for a good reason a lot of the times. But to own a company and to be a boss of a company or a business specifically a local business like you don't get a day off. You have to think about it all the time. You don't get to work 9 to5. You have to work all the time. Yeah. all the time, especially if you're managing other people. You're managing their schedules, you're managing their pay, you're managing the environment in which they work, you're managing clients when they come in and like their whole experience. I don't know. I don't know how anyone It's a wonder anybody starts a business. It's a miracle. Anytime I see a woman selling cupcakes on Instagram, I'm like, "God bless." Like I truthfully, seriously, truthfully, now we're going to get back to Ida because that's the focus of the episode. What is Ida up to? So Ida herself studied biology in college where she was the only woman in her class of 41 students. Yeah, that makes sense. After college, she became a head mistress for a seminary in Ohio. She taught classes in geology, botany, geometry, trigonometry, and taught language courses in Greek, Latin, French, and German. I'm going to say don't [ __ ] with Ida. Wild educational. I'm going to say Ida knows what the [ __ ] is going on. Absolutely. Her first real writing gig came from a publication called the hopefully I get this right. The Chiakwan Chiakwan. I think it's Chiakquin. I'll put it on the screen so you can see it. It's It's a hard word to pronounce. Watch. It's going to say Cherokee. Which was a magazine that was focused on creating teaching supplements for home study courses for adults. Mhm. Ida honed her journalistic voice over a number of years working for the publication and eventually became the managing editor. Now eventually she felt like she had outgrown the at the age of 34 moved to Paris. She started really focusing on making a career out of writing and ended up writing for a few American newspapers while abroad. Right. As well as publishing short stories in various magazines. That was kind of her thing. She would write a lot of like journalistic pieces and some fictional pieces. During this time she was working on her first book which was a biography on Madame Roland who was a major thought leader and writer during the French Revolution. So kind of like a feminist icon at the time I think to Ida. Okay. Right. And that's what she wanted to work on. She wanted to work on biographical pieces of powerful feminine figures that history had kind of forgotten about. Her idea was like, I want to bring women out of the obscurity of history, right? Because they can have an impact on women today. That was always kind of a a goal in her mind is like teaching and showing women that they can do whatever they want to do, right? She was somebody who was so fascinatingly curious about everything, hence the number of subjects that she was kind of proficient in, right? But the more she discovered about Madame Roland, the more disappointed she became. Oh boy. And at his research, right, she found that Roland wasn't really a freethinking force of good that she thought she was, but someone who was like kind of directly complicit in the cause of the French Revolution for her own selfish hopes and was trying to like use it to accomplish her own goals. She was so disappointed with her findings that she said, quote, "The heaviest blow to my self-confidence so far was my loss of faith in revolution as a divine weapon. Not since I discovered the world not to have been made in six days had I been so intellectually and spiritually upset." She's like, "This hits harder than finding out God is dead." Yeah. Holy mackerel, Ida. Yeah. Talk about a crisis of the spirit. Seriously, so this time can be seen as her kind of like seeing the realities of some of her heroes and how her investigative nature led to a lot of personal growth as a writer and as like a freethinker. Right. This is why I say there are certain heroes of mine that I never want to meet because I I want them to just stay who they are in my mind. As long as I don't meet Wes Anderson or Conan O'Brien or any other gangly man in the entertainment industry, I guess I can just assume that they are wonderful people to work with and funny and totally true to the image that they put out to the world and I can just look up to them and admire their work and never have it be ruined. I can't have the Grand Budapest Hotel be ruined by meeting Wes Anderson and having a bad conversation with him at a party, right? Or realizing he has some like off-putting political views. Yeah, like if he makes an anti-Semitic joke, then anytime I'm watching Gran Puba's Hotel, instead of just admiring that movie and loving that movie so much, I'm just going to think about that weird anti-semitic joke that he made by the fountain, right? I'm like, well, now this movie is ruined for me forever and I can't afford it. I can't There are some things I'm not letting go of. I will watch Manchester by the Sea. I will I'll watch it multiple times a year. I agree. I'm not letting it go. You pull it out of my coffin. So Ida at this time was writing so much and apparently her writing was great because she was offered quite a few editing positions at major magazines. Well, she sounds incredibly intelligent. So I I would find it hard to believe her writing was just right. I imagine very like his girl Friday, right? Like talking very fast. Snappy. Yeah, very snappy. She instead stayed freelance though even with these offers. Very nice. Be free. Yeah. And she wrote articles about women, intellectuals, writers, scientists in Paris specifically. Oh, okay. Right. With the silent hope that these articles would provide a sort of blueprint to other women uh to become journalists and writers. That was like her big goal. So she also continued her biographical work. That's a hard word, biographical. She would go on to write a series of seven articles on Napoleon Bonapart for the Mccclure magazine. Boy, that's a lot of information. I read it of some of the articles. Great stuff skating about Napoleon. I should have included a couple quotes. It was like basically in the first couple sentences he's like in history there have been so few men who have represented the manchild so perfectly as Napoleon Bonapart. There's nothing there are very this is getting into my angry mean little spirit that lives inside of me, but there's very few things I love more in this world than an intellectual takeown of another person. Correct. Not just someone who's like, "You're a bitch." But like there's no better example of a manchild than Napoleon Bonapart, right? You'll ne seven-part series of this. Yes. He'll never recover. He died again that day. Yeah. The series in that magazine helped quadruple the readership of it. But oh, obviously I'm buying that magazine tomorrow. And the articles would later be made into a book that became a bestseller. Oh my god. Oh, so it's available publicly. Well, actually, we'll include a link to it in the description of this. We'll include some quotes for sure cuz I'm I'm reading this. Um, another one of her big biographical pieces was on Abraham Lincoln. Ooh. What' you say? What' you say? So, keep in mind that she was born in 1857, right? So, this is very close. Napoleon Bonapart's been gone for a second. He's been dead. Yeah. But Abraham Lincoln was alive during Tarbell. I mean, she was alive during the Civil War. Very interesting. Well, he's dead by now. Well, and that's what she recounts like her parents when Lincoln was assassinated. Yeah. Her dad was like silent for basically a week and her mother was just weeping into her apron. Like she remembers that, you know. Oh my god. So Abraham Lincoln was a very realistic subject for her to go over. She was actually discouraged by people from taking up the project because other biographers had told her there was nothing else left to say about Lincoln. And it's important to mention all those biographers are men who had written about Lincoln. So they didn't want to feel No, I got it covered. Yeah, I already wrote about that. Exactly. We can talk about he was from Illinois. I wrote that. I already wrote he was from Illinois. So after ignoring them and doing extensive research, she published five books about Lincoln. Five books. Five books. And became known as the leading authority on his life. Ida was somebody who totally ignored any doubters that tried to enter her sphere and would prove them wrong time and time again. I have a question. Yes, please. Was she a lesbian? That's a great topic. This is some lesbian behavior. There's debate about that. That means she was I didn't include it in this episode because like there's a lot about Ida that goes into it. She had some kind of controversial opinions about feminism later on in her life. Really? Yeah. Uh I think the the wave of feminism that followed kind of her was like, well, you got kind of old ideas about what's going on. But that's everybody at some point. At some point people are going to tell me you don't know anything about the world and I'm going to be 80 and I'm going to be like you know what you're right but in the world I lived in I was right. Exactly. So, but yeah, this is some strong lesbian writing five books about Abraham Lincoln after a bunch of men tell you no you we already said everything and then becoming a winner. I don't know. There's something about that that exactly says gay to me. Exactly. I'm going to pause right here and I'm going to put up a whole thing or maybe I'll do a voiceover that says she was definitely a lesbian. Hey it's editing Connor here. So very little information is actually known about this. Ida was apparently wooed by several men, but she refused their advances generally, and she was later credited with saying that no woman of her era could be a wife and pursue a career outside the house at the same time. So that could be why she never married or pursued family life, even though she would later sort of tarnish her feminist icon status by claiming that women belong in the home, not in the workforce. So, weird combo of things there. Lindsay still thinks she's gay or at the very least like asexual and she wanted me to include that she will be dressing up as her for gay pride next year. So, anyway, back to the episode. I'll I'll include that in episode. I want to see if I'm right. Um, but yeah, this is Ida. I mean, she was genuinely curious and through the power of investigation like made her life in the world, you know. So we get to Standard Oil. Okay. While working for Mccclure magazine, she and the team decided to start looking into these new big business trusts that were popping up in the American economy, right? Steel, sugar, and oil. Those are the big industries. They decided on doing a big story on Standard Oil, Rockefeller's company. Some of this interest had to do with Ida's firsthand experience with Rockefeller and the oil oil industry out of Pennsylvania when her dad was trying to enter and got bought up by Rockefeller. Right. Another part of it was like she was fascinated and kind of became the earliest depictions of the kind of great man, you know what I mean? Like great men of history, right? Big figures of history who do great things and strive greatly and have a big impact. That wasn't really a thing that we talked about until journalists started writing about them. You know, hence Napoleon Bonapart, Abraham Lincoln, right? Rockefeller kind of fits that mold as well. Very much. You know, he regardless of how you feel about him, he was a great man of history. Like had a massive impact on the United States. Everybody recognizes the Rockefeller name. Yes. Still Rockefeller Plaza is still named after him. Yeah. Like so so when she moved back to the states to start the story in earnest, her father actually warned her that Rockefeller would stop at nothing to ruin her and the magazine that she was writing for. And in fact, one of Rockefeller's banks did threaten the financial security of the Mccclure magazine in a private meeting between one of the banks executives and IDA, to which Ida responded by saying, quote, "That makes absolutely no difference to me." Just gangster gangster [ __ ] Like, we're going to destroy the magazine you work for. Okay. Try me. I speak Greek and Latin. Yeah, I'm I'm probably gay. I You have no power over me at all. Ida persisted nevertheless. That's her thing. Now, you have to remember at this time information was hard to find very just about on anything. Right. There were no digital archives or internet and mass communication was done by telegraph still. You know, the amount of time all of this would take. You couldn't even call a library and say, "What's the deal?" No. There was like one woman in town who was rumored to have some knowledge of something. Exactly. And you had to go to her house physically to determine, oh, she doesn't actually know anything. She's crazy. Exactly. So, the real work of writing a piece like the one she was planning was in finding all the bits of information that were scattered around various government record buildings around the country. Right. A historian wrote that quote, "Tarbell's biggest obstacle was neither her gender nor Rockefeller's opposition. Rather, her obstacle was the craft of journalism as practiced at the turn of the 20th century. She investigated Standard Oil and Rockefeller by using documents, hundreds of thousands of pages scattered throughout the nation. And then amplified her findings through interviews with the corporation's executives and competitors, government regulators and academic experts, past and present. In other words, she proposed to practice what today is considered investigative reporting. which did not exist in 1900. Indeed, she invented a new form of journalism. End quote. So that that's like a really good point. How much effort does it take to put together a story like this with all the pieces, you know? Well, and probably before her, people thought it's impossible to do that. Yeah. Like the document's not here. It's in Oregon. I live in Florida. I'm investigating someone in New York. How am I going to get a document from Oregon? I'm not going to. Exactly. So, I'm just going to publish based on this one interview. That's what we've got. Right. Well, that's the thing. Like, it's important to say things that like history used to be written by whoever. You know, traveling minstrels used to write songs about the same thing and it would be different accounts of it. And part of that was they remembered it differently, they were told it differently, or part of it was they wanted a song that sounded better and would be stickier. You know, it's like that's how information used to travel was by people telling us, right? It was all verbal. It was all verbal, right? That changes from person to person. It does. But investigative journalism, that's exactly what she did. She traveled around the country and delved through public documents and even private archives, gathering oral interviews and archival documents, all of which proved that Standard Oil had a history of using strong armed tactics and manipulation to reach its goals. In fact, Ida was able to find one critical piece of information that had somehow gone missing from most records. It was a book called The Rise and Fall of the South Improvement Company. Rockefeller's company back in Cleveland. The book laid out how the South Improvement Company managed to take over most of the Ohio and Pennsylvania oil industry through strong armed tactics. This was important because Standard Oil and Rockefeller had its roots in that company and its illegal schemes. And because of this connection, Standard Oil had actually attempted to destroy all available public copies of the book. They had they had paid people to seek out these books and destroy them to remove anya case that somebody might have built about the illegal practice that they used to do. But Tarbell was able to locate one copy in the back of a New York public library. Oh my god. You know, she was relentless. You know it. So, there's a lot of great stories about her, too. like uh there was an assistant who worked at
Standard Oil, who was charged with burning a bunch of documents that also proved that they were doing kind of sketchy and illegal things, and one of the documents happened to have that kid's Sunday school teacher's name on it, and he went, "Huh, that's funny." And he didn't burn it, and he gave it to his Sunday school teacher, and Ida found it, found that person, found the connection, and questioned her and found that document through the Sunday school teacher. Crazy stuff.
All of her research led to the very clear conclusion that Standard Oil was still using illegal business practices, to nobody's surprise. I don't know. I'm really glad that Ida did all this work, but I think it was pretty clear what they were doing. I agree. I don't know why we made her run around the country collecting documents like this is Luigi's Mansion and we're trying to free Mario from Bowser's basement. Like they own 90% of the, what, what do we even call it? The field. Yeah. The oil industry. The field of oil. Like, yeah. That's what's called a monopoly. I don't, what do we, what was, what, what was the big discovery here? She just had numbers to point to. Yeah. You know, basically it was like proof, right? That was the big thing was amplifying the proof. Oh god. Cuz her dad knew it. Yeah. All the people had, everybody knew it. All the people who had businesses taken over knew it. Yeah. Right. But it's about amplifying that. It's that thing of like, well, I'm starting a conversation. Ida actually was starting a conversation with the ability to take the story and get it in front of as many people as possible. Right?
The project was serialized in 19 articles that ran for two years in McClure's magazine, and it was seen to have ushered in the era of muckraking journalism. Muckraking. Yes. Yes. It was a term for journalists who would go after big corporations, right? Um, magazine historian Frank Luther Mott called it, quote, "one of the greatest serials ever to appear in an American magazine." End quote. Ida concluded the series with a two-part character study of Rockefeller. Oh. Which is probably the first CEO profile ever, though she never met or even talked to him. Please tell me. Oh, I need. Please. I know. We'll have to. I want to find it. Give me the quote. Give me a quote right now. Well, Rockefeller called Tarbell, "Miss Tar Barrel." That's the best he's got. That's the best he's got. I know. He wasn't exactly Donald Trump, brother. Yeah. So, Ida again broke down. Wait, are we giving Donald Trump more credit for creativity? Everything is just big and beautiful. What is with these men? They're so powerful. They can't afford a third word. Mrs. Tarabel. Tarabel. She just released a seven-part series knocking your monopolization of the oil industry. Everybody, that's more clever than what he actually said, which was "tar barrel," as in a barrel of tar. Like, oil industry tar. You got her. Yeah. It's curtains for her, I guess. Oh, Ida. Pack it up. Go home. Right. He called you a barrel full of tar.
The CEO profile she did was very akin to the profile she did on Napoleon Bonaparte, which was, it was honest about like his life and about the good things he did. You know, he actually was a grocer or a, a, a produce seller in his first business, and then eventually moved into oil, um, and actually helped the Union win the Civil War, believe it or not, like through what he was doing. But Ida's articles were very popular. I mean, think about the growth that she had seen with the Napoleon Bonaparte. Mhm. That's, I mean, McClure's magazine had over a quarter million readers by the end of the, the series that she had written on Rockefeller. Yeah. You know, because of Ida's work, people began to take more notice of Standard Oil and how much control they had over the companies. Get your pitchforks. Everybody, get your pitchforks. And the shady practices that they were using, and the shady practices of other companies at the time, at the exact same time, including the railroad companies and the steel companies, who were all kind of in bed together. How about the sugar company? Yeah. I don't know what's going on with the sugar companies.
Its impact on the public would lead to the passing of the Hepburn Act and the Mann-Elkins Act, which helped the Interstate Commerce Commission finally get enough power to oversee the railroads and keep railroad companies from gouging competition, which is a big use of how the Standard Oil Company actually bought out a lot of its competition was by cornering the railroads and like basically making it so that the railroads would overcharge their competition to ship their oil. I know, crazy, dude. It would also lead to the creation of the Federal Trade Commission. We didn't have the FTC before this, which is directly responsible for dealing with antitrust cases against American companies.
In the end, Ida's work was directly responsible for the dissolution of the Standard Oil Company as a monopoly. The US Justice Department determined that Standard Oil was in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and identified major illegal patterns with the company's practices, alleging that, quote, "Almost everywhere, the railroad rates from the shipping points used exclusively by Standard Oil are relatively lower than the rates from the shipping points of its competitors." Rates have been made low to let Standard into markets, or they have been made high to keep Standard's competitors out of markets, just like cutting off everybody. The government also said that Standard Oil clearly had a history of raising prices to its monopolistic customers but lowering them to hurt its competitors, often disguising its illegal actions by using bogus, supposedly independent companies it controlled. We've talked about this before, right? They would essentially create fake businesses, right, to act as competition and point to them and say, "We're not a trust. We're not a, we're not a monopoly. We have competition." And they own those companies. They own those companies. Yeah.
The company was deemed to be an unreasonable monopoly and was ordered to break up into 39 independent companies. That's how big it was. 39 independent companies. Of these companies, one eventually became ExxonMobil, and the other became Mobil, which are still around today. Right. So, there's still echoes of Standard Oil in America, but they'll never be as big or as all-encompassing as they once were. And I hope the next time you pass by one of those gas stations on the road, you think of Ida Tarbell and the work she did over a hundred years ago to break them up. And that is my rabbit hole on Ida Tarbell. I could have gone on this for two more hours. There's so much information about the work she did in investigative journalism, but the work on Standard Oil was kind of her seminal piece. Yeah. You know, and I think it is worth pointing out that like breaking up a monopoly that big led to more innovation across American, the American economy at the time, you know. Um, yeah, there are a lot of rabbit holes tied up in this one rabbit hole. Like you could go down the Rockefeller rabbit hole or the Civil War rabbit hole or the Vanderbilt and the railroad rabbit hole, right? Like these huge corporations and how they monopolized all that power and money and property. Yeah.
I mean, we didn't even get into like company stores and like mining facilities, you know? No. It used to be a practice that companies out west would employ people to dig in mines and then pay them with a, a currency that they, the company, created and owned. And you could only use it to buy things at the store that they possessed. And the US government had to come in and say, "You can't do that. That's totally wrong." Are you your own country at that point? You're your own country. You own your own property. You have your own currency. Like, what is even the point of being an American company? Exactly. And that's that's part of like why it's illegal to manufacture your own, um, currency. And like why defacing currency is such a big, like, it is illegal to deface American currency, right? And part of that is related to the, the laws about making your own currency, right? That's like, and it all goes back to like company store. You know, companies keep trying to be monopolies, and we keep having to kind of bop them down like gophers. It's crazy. So yeah, that's my rabbit hole for today.
It sounds incredible. And this is also a good reminder as to why I will never be a billionaire because I don't care that much about ruining other people's lives. Right. I really don't want to go that far out of my way to do it. Yeah. Well, I would argue the billionaires also don't care about ruining other people's lives. Just. No, but they, they do it. But they do it. That's they care enough to like, I'm going to buy a company. Yeah. That is me. And I'm going to lie to the government and to everybody who works for the company and say that I don't own it, and that it is for sure fair competition, right? And then I'm going to fire all those people and they'll die, and I don't care because now I have $1 billion more dollars than I had this morning. I don't even want to file the paperwork to set up a shell company. That's it for me. I, I get that idea. I'm like, you know what? What if I just set up a fake corporation? That's me competing with me. And then I realize I have to fill out an application, and I got to file an LLC, and I got to call so and so at the, whatever DMV company, and I, that's it. Ah, no, never mind. Don't want to be rich that badly. I'll just stick to my cupcakes, right? We're not getting off the starting line here. Not getting off the starting line. Yeah.
But yeah, Ida's work is, I mean, we still feel it today. Like the antitrust laws and the FTC are still around to this day and still being used on companies like Microsoft and Amazon and Alphabet. Like, well, we could probably use another investigative journalist like Ida Tarbell to break up some of these corporations because I think now they're just buying off the government. They are. So it's like, oh, why isn't the FTC, uh, going after that? They're money, right? Money is always the answer, right? And then they're murdering the journalists. Like, that's it. Yeah, that's just it. Yeah. You remember that journalist a couple years ago that came out with an article that said, "Hey, by the way, all of the incredibly wealthy people around the world are all connected and working together to control everything." And then he got car-bombed and nobody said anything. I don't remember this guy at all. That was the Panama Papers. Oh, the Pa. Oh, I do remember this. I do remember this. Never mind. I don't know what I thought you were talking about. I, I was imagining a 1950s man with a peaked cap. I don't know. I don't know where my mind just went. It's like him or, um, who was that, uh, journalist that the, um, that documentary we were talking about the other day? It was about, Oh, what's his last name? Keladini or something. Yeah. Mishogi or something. Yeah. And he got assassinated by like some Middle Eastern prince. That's the thing is like the murdering of journalists has become so routine by other groups of people. It's, it's not just terrorists. It's also like foreign governments and our own government that it's just you don't even think anything about it. You're like, "Oh, there, there is no such thing as like, oh, journalist just died in a car bomb." That doesn't happen. Car bombs are very purposeful. Yeah. Who put that there? Yeah. It's crazy. It's crazy.
But yeah, here's to the Ida Tarbells of the world and all the good work they do, and hopefully keeping the car bombs out of their cars. She didn't get assassinated, did she? She didn't. She died. Awesome. Yeah, she. No, she died. She just died of natural. Yeah, she's just old. Yeah, that's good. So, and so did Rockefeller. Actually, Rock lived to be 98 years old, if you can believe it. Well, when your life's that good. Yeah. You get to live all the time. He said his only goals in life when he was a kid were he wanted to make $100,000, which is like the equivalent of a million or something. And he wanted to live to be a hundred. That's so depressing. I know. That's all he had. That's the saddest little boy in the world. Honey, do you like your toy train? I want $100,000. Okay. I'm sending you back to God. Right back to God. Where you came from.
But yeah, that's my rabbit hole, and I hope you enjoyed it. I'm Lindsay, and I'm Connor, and I told you this would be interesting. I hope you enjoyed this rabbit hole as much as Lindsay did. I know it can be a little boring to talk about finance and white-collar crime, but I found it deeply fascinating. No, it's very interesting, and we'll throw in some videos and photos so it's even more interesting for the YouTube audience. If you're listening to us on Spotify or any other podcast network, though, we do appreciate you very, very much. Yeah, I don't know who's listening on Spotify. We, we don't want my sister mostly. Anyway, that's it. That's the episode. That's the episode. And we'll see you, we'll see you next week probably. And I'll see you in two seconds. Alrighty. Bye.