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Beyond the Blade - King Gillette’s Revolutionary Business & Quest for Utopia · Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People

0:03
SPEAKER_03: Hello, everybody.
0:09
SPEAKER_03: Howdy, Alex.
0:11
SPEAKER_03: Should come up with an ASMR version of the show.
0:14
SPEAKER_03: Oh, this is already ASMR for me.
0:17
SPEAKER_03: I'm I'm loving that.
0:19
SPEAKER_03: Make your hair stand up.
0:21
SPEAKER_03: I just play that on repeat to fall asleep.
0:24
SPEAKER_03: It really gives me good dreams.
0:26
SPEAKER_05: It's my ringtone.
0:29
SPEAKER_03: Hello! Actually, it would be a great way for you to start answering the phone.
0:33
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
0:35
SPEAKER_03: Remember, Mr.
0:36
SPEAKER_03: Burns would always say, Ahoy hoy.
0:38
SPEAKER_03: I don't remember that actually.
0:40
SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
0:41
SPEAKER_03: Mr.
0:41
SPEAKER_03: Burns.
0:42
SPEAKER_03: Monty Burns would always say, Ahoy hoy when he answered the phone.
0:45
SPEAKER_05: Well, that is the voice of Kelly.
0:48
SPEAKER_05: I am Alex.
0:49
SPEAKER_05: This is Dirtnap City, the podcast about interesting dead people.
0:55
SPEAKER_05: Today I'm going to talk about somebody who on the you know, I think we have I think we have a few categories of people that we do, right?
1:04
SPEAKER_05: And I think one of those categories that you kind of started, but I picked up real quick is uh like eccentric rich guy.
1:15
SPEAKER_05: Oh yeah, I love eccentric rich guy.
1:17
SPEAKER_05: Like a crazy Titan, right?
1:19
SPEAKER_03: Right?
1:20
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, kind of the same Titan, Tycoon, all of the above.
1:23
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, especially if he wears a monocle.
1:25
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and I think there's something, especially 20th century guys that were really rich like that.
1:31
SPEAKER_05: I think when you're that rich, nobody, I mean, and still today, well, especially today, maybe, nobody calls you on your BS ever, right?
1:39
SPEAKER_05: You're just allowed to say whatever stupid thing and amplify it.
1:44
SPEAKER_05: And it gets amplified by newspapers and television and radio, especially if you especially if you own all if you own all those things like Ted Turner did, right?
1:53
SPEAKER_05: Exactly.
1:53
SPEAKER_05: And it's just like um I I I think we're both fascinated by the kind of people that are super successful but also a little bit off.
2:03
SPEAKER_05: Flawed, yes.
2:05
SPEAKER_05: Just off the beaten path, you know.
2:08
SPEAKER_05: Okay, like there's tons of people that aren't successful that are off the beaten path.
2:12
SPEAKER_05: We never hear about them.
2:13
SPEAKER_05: True, true.
2:14
SPEAKER_05: I think you and I both qualify as that.
2:17
SPEAKER_05: You know, from from Ted Turner, like you mentioned, to Tesla to uh, you know, I mean Henry Ford.
2:24
SPEAKER_05: I mean, there's a lot of people that make a lot of money that have ideas that are kind of out of the mainstream for sure.
2:29
SPEAKER_05: Howard Howard Hughes, Howard Hughes, yeah.
2:32
SPEAKER_06: I mean, even Rockefeller, you know, was a little different, you know.
2:36
SPEAKER_06: You can't all be Milton Hershey.
2:39
SPEAKER_06: He was a good boy.
2:40
SPEAKER_06: He was a good boy, yeah.
2:42
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
2:43
SPEAKER_05: Well, today I'm gonna talk about somebody, and the way I'm gonna do it is I'm gonna talk about his success, and then we're gonna roll it back and talk about his crazy, okay?
2:52
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
2:52
SPEAKER_03: Success first, crazy second.
2:54
SPEAKER_03: That's that's kind of like my criteria back when I was dating.
2:58
SPEAKER_03: Okay, yeah.
3:00
SPEAKER_05: What exactly you want to dive into that a little or are you good?
3:04
SPEAKER_03: Um, no, no, no, we'll let the audience figure it out.
3:07
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
3:07
SPEAKER_03: Jody, I'm looking at you.
3:10
SPEAKER_05: Well, our guy today um was born in 1855 in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.
3:17
SPEAKER_03: Oh, Fond du Lac.
3:19
SPEAKER_03: I love that name.
3:20
SPEAKER_03: And it's like Cordelaine Fond du Lac.
3:23
SPEAKER_03: No, but I've heard it's beautiful.
3:25
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
3:26
SPEAKER_05: Died in 1932 in Los Angeles.
3:30
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
3:31
SPEAKER_05: Now, maybe to introduce who he is, uh, I'll go back to when we were in Cleveland.
3:37
SPEAKER_05: Remember when we went to Cleveland?
3:39
SPEAKER_05: You and me and Al from Austin.
3:42
SPEAKER_05: We went to Cleveland, and I remember we went to uh concert, right?
3:46
SPEAKER_05: We went to see uh Leonard Skinnard, the remaining members of Leonard Skinner.
3:51
SPEAKER_05: And I remember the thing I remember about that, or one of the things that I may have verbalized it at the time, I don't know if you remember.
3:58
SPEAKER_05: I remember looking around and thinking, um, oh, we're the only like group of guys that don't have beards.
4:05
SPEAKER_05: And then I looked around and I was like, oh, we're the only three people in this whole place that don't have beards, including the women.
4:15
SPEAKER_05: That's a shot at Cleveland.
4:17
SPEAKER_05: I won't stand for that, sir.
4:19
SPEAKER_05: They don't call them Cleveland steamers for nothing.
4:21
SPEAKER_05: Hey, uh, it seems to me these days that you it's hard to run across clean-shaven men.
4:28
SPEAKER_05: You just don't see much of it, right?
4:30
SPEAKER_05: True, true.
4:32
SPEAKER_05: You just don't see much of it anymore.
4:34
SPEAKER_05: And the fact that all three of us were clean shaven, it like stood out to me.
4:38
SPEAKER_05: I've always been clean shaven.
4:39
SPEAKER_05: How about have you ever rocked a goatee or a beard or a mustache?
4:43
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, briefly.
4:44
SPEAKER_03: Briefly for a couple of times.
4:46
SPEAKER_03: It comes in gray, you know, it makes me look pro professorial, you know.
4:50
SPEAKER_03: I looked at it.
4:51
SPEAKER_06: Did you ever adjust a chin beard?
4:53
SPEAKER_06: Like a little um like a belly goat.
4:56
SPEAKER_05: Just the chin beard.
4:57
SPEAKER_05: Not not a no, not a full billy goat, just like a little like uh brilloard.
5:01
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
5:02
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think I think after I shaved off my beard.
5:06
SPEAKER_03: So I I went full beard and then I went goatee for a little while, and then I shaved off the mustache and just had the little chin beard for a few days.
5:13
SPEAKER_03: So you I tried it.
5:15
SPEAKER_03: It's itchy.
5:16
SPEAKER_03: It's itchy.
5:16
SPEAKER_05: You never did the whole C Everett Coop though, with just the beard, the full beard and the no mustache.
5:21
SPEAKER_03: And no mustache.
5:22
SPEAKER_03: No, no.
5:22
SPEAKER_03: That's that's uh that's sort of an Amish look that I think you remember C Everett Coop, the yeah, yeah, yeah.
5:30
SPEAKER_05: Future Durnap City uh guest, I'm sure.
5:33
SPEAKER_05: Well, anyways, um that story, um, however boring it is, has a tie-in with uh today's uh subject.
5:42
SPEAKER_05: Um that um and this guy his first his last name is kind of synonymous with um what we've been talking about in terms of um beards?
5:58
SPEAKER_05: Sure, or beard beards, but not not beards, but more just like um hygiene, uh facial hygiene.
6:06
SPEAKER_05: Okay.
6:06
SPEAKER_05: Um his first name was King.
6:09
SPEAKER_05: I love that as a first name.
6:10
SPEAKER_03: Don't you love that?
6:12
SPEAKER_03: Uh Alex, Alex.
6:14
SPEAKER_03: It's happened again twice.
6:17
SPEAKER_03: Have we done it?
6:19
SPEAKER_03: We've done it the second time.
6:22
SPEAKER_03: Nice.
6:23
SPEAKER_03: No, no way, no way.
6:25
SPEAKER_03: Uh yes, it's uh King Jill uh King Camp Gillette.
6:29
SPEAKER_03: King Camp Gillette.
6:31
SPEAKER_03: Yes, yes.
6:32
SPEAKER_03: I uh yeah, I I I was thinking the exact same thing.
6:37
SPEAKER_03: But uh Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, um, and died in LA.
6:41
SPEAKER_03: I I I kind of thought uh I gotta look down through my um look down through here that he would oh yeah, Fond du Lac and he was raised in Chicago.
6:52
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
6:52
SPEAKER_05: Well let's um let me tell you uh about him and you fill in uh what you know about him.
6:58
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, I like this.
7:00
SPEAKER_03: Do you?
7:01
SPEAKER_03: I do, yeah, yeah.
7:02
SPEAKER_03: I I think it's great.
7:03
SPEAKER_03: I I think it's really great when we both like end up in the same spot randomly on the same day, right?
7:08
SPEAKER_05: Well, you know that and you know he was he was like uh weirdo, right?
7:12
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
7:13
SPEAKER_03: He was his picture was on all of his uh packages, and people recognized him.
7:18
SPEAKER_03: He was kind of a celebrity when he traveled around the world.
7:21
SPEAKER_03: Exactly what I was I was gonna say.
7:22
SPEAKER_06: You well, you know what his mom was name was, right?
7:25
SPEAKER_03: Uh you didn't catch that of his mom's name.
7:28
SPEAKER_03: Uh what was his mom's name?
7:30
SPEAKER_03: Fanny.
7:31
SPEAKER_03: Fanny, that's right.
7:33
SPEAKER_03: We've talked about Fanny was also Milton Milton's uh mother's Milton's mother's name.
7:39
SPEAKER_05: Kismet, man.
7:40
SPEAKER_05: Um, so I don't know about you, but the the thing that I took from this was um the the very first thing in his life that was kind of a big deal was the great Chicago Fire.
7:52
SPEAKER_05: Right.
7:53
SPEAKER_05: Their family survived.
7:55
SPEAKER_05: Right.
7:55
SPEAKER_05: And um did you look into that the fire at all?
7:58
SPEAKER_05: Like this to you like, do you know about the Great Chicago Fire?
8:02
SPEAKER_03: Um uh I know it happened in the late 1800s and like killed a lot of people.
8:10
SPEAKER_03: Um well think about this.
8:11
SPEAKER_05: Like in Netflix, a lot of people homeless.
8:14
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
8:14
SPEAKER_05: But 1850, the population of Chicago was 30,000.
8:19
SPEAKER_05: Okay.
8:20
SPEAKER_05: Okay.
8:20
SPEAKER_05: And by 1871, just 20 years later, the population was 300,000.
8:26
SPEAKER_05: And that's when the fire took place.
8:28
SPEAKER_05: It grew 10 times.
8:29
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I mean, that's why the fire took place.
8:31
SPEAKER_05: I mean, the whole city was basically built out of wood, right?
8:34
SPEAKER_05: All the houses were made out of wood, a lot of the buildings, a lot of the sidewalks were made out of wood, the streets were made out of wood.
8:41
SPEAKER_05: Wow.
8:41
SPEAKER_05: And they had a dry summer and strong winds.
8:45
SPEAKER_05: Uh, contrary to popular belief, it wasn't uh uh Mrs.
8:49
SPEAKER_05: Oleary's cow that started the great Chicago fire.
8:52
SPEAKER_05: Right.
8:52
SPEAKER_05: Um, but yeah, I mean it destroyed a lot of the city, it was over three square miles, 17,000 buildings, 10 hundred thousand people were left homeless.
9:01
SPEAKER_05: It only killed 300.
9:02
SPEAKER_05: I mean, that's a big natural disaster, but I mean that's not as many as a lot of hurricanes or anything.
9:07
SPEAKER_03: But considering the size of the fire, that's not really as many as you'd expect.
9:12
SPEAKER_05: Right, but it had destroyed all of King's um possessions.
9:15
SPEAKER_05: Every he had basically he was 16 and he had to start all over in terms of like possessions in his home.
9:21
SPEAKER_05: And um, I think that was a um turning point for him.
9:27
SPEAKER_05: He grew up fast, but because of that, right?
9:29
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
9:31
SPEAKER_05: And then as you know, he became a salesman for crown and cork seal.
9:36
SPEAKER_05: That's right.
9:37
SPEAKER_05: So, what a crown and cork seal make, Kelly, that was so important.
9:41
SPEAKER_05: The pose of disposable metal bottle caps.
9:44
SPEAKER_05: Right.
9:45
SPEAKER_05: Now, these weren't bottle caps like the kind we have today.
9:48
SPEAKER_05: In fact, the bottles were reusable, it was just the cap that was disposable.
9:52
SPEAKER_05: Right.
9:53
SPEAKER_05: We didn't you kept the bottle, you didn't throw away the bottle.
9:55
SPEAKER_03: And that's a great name, actually, crown cork, right?
9:58
SPEAKER_03: It's kind of a cool um because because it's very visual, like it makes you think of I don't know if it was made of cork.
10:04
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
10:05
SPEAKER_03: It it it it very much describes the material and what it did.
10:09
SPEAKER_05: I think actually the bottom of the cap did have a cork lining.
10:14
SPEAKER_05: Probably, but they also made corks, I think.
10:18
SPEAKER_05: But you know, he was always he was kind of tinkered, tinkered around and was inventing, you know, stuff.
10:25
SPEAKER_05: But his boss said to him one time, he said, you know, you're always thinking about inventing stuff.
10:30
SPEAKER_05: The wait, why don't you think about something like the cork?
10:33
SPEAKER_05: Like this is where it's at.
10:34
SPEAKER_05: I mean, you throw it away, and then people have to come back for more, and every new customer is like a continuing source of profit because they have to keep buying the disposable items.
10:44
SPEAKER_05: So he he said, basically, you know, stop trying to figure out like how to make something complicated, figure out how to make something that people can throw away, use, throw away, and buy again.
10:56
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
10:57
SPEAKER_03: And and this was actually this was the clue I was gonna give you was he helped popularize that strategy of using selling a durable product, but using that product to establish a recurring revenue with a consumable, right?
11:12
SPEAKER_03: So the durable project product was the razor, the handle, and the you know, the part that it went on, and then the recurring cost is the blades, and right that's a very famous business conversation.
11:25
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, but it back then it was novel, right?
11:30
SPEAKER_03: That's right, that's right.
11:31
SPEAKER_03: People didn't think in those terms.
11:32
SPEAKER_03: People bought something, and before it was the straight razor, people thought of the straight razor as something that you kept for many, many years, right?
11:40
SPEAKER_03: You didn't you didn't throw your straight razor away.
11:42
SPEAKER_03: You might you might have it your whole life.
11:44
SPEAKER_05: And before he came up with that idea, though, he was kind of looking around at everything, trying to think about what could be like he was obsessed with trying to find somebody, something that was disposable.
11:57
SPEAKER_05: And so one day he was shaving with a dull razor, and the rest is history.
12:04
SPEAKER_05: He had the idea to make the blade as cheap as possible while people could retain the razor part that would include the handle and the thing that the blade would go into.
12:15
SPEAKER_05: But that's easier said than done.
12:18
SPEAKER_05: I mean, at the time when people shaved, they had to like with a straight you ever use a straight razor?
12:24
SPEAKER_05: I never have.
12:25
SPEAKER_05: It's no joke, man.
12:27
SPEAKER_05: And then when the blade got dull, you had to sharpen it with a leather strop.
12:31
SPEAKER_05: You ever see a strop?
12:32
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
12:33
SPEAKER_03: It's like the barber of Seville, right?
12:34
SPEAKER_03: He's going, he's doing it back and forth on that strop.
12:37
SPEAKER_05: Right.
12:38
SPEAKER_05: And um, so you know, that's that's that was a hassle to him, and so he wanted a blade that was thin and hard and cheap, yep, and had to be mass producible, and one that you could replace without getting rid of the whole razor.
12:58
SPEAKER_05: He didn't invent the safety razor, other people had had invented safety razors that had guards or removable blades, but his whole idea was about like repeat purchases, right?
13:08
SPEAKER_03: We should talk about that term safety razor too, because because that was a big differentiator.
13:13
SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, it's kind of similar to uh when we eventually do our episode about uh penny farthers or penny farthing, um, those were those bikes were very dangerous, they were very hard to ride because they had a giant front wheel and you could fall off, you could flip over.
13:29
SPEAKER_03: And then the the type of bicycle that followed was called a safety bicycle.
13:33
SPEAKER_03: Well, this was the same thing with razors, these were called safety razors because they had uh the the blade was between two non-sharp pieces of metal, I think, I think they were metal, that that protected you and didn't didn't make it as easy to cut yourself.
13:55
SPEAKER_03: And and and so the I always thought this was kind of interesting that the guy who eventually helped him um mass produce these, do you know what his name is?
14:04
SPEAKER_03: Nickerson.
14:06
SPEAKER_03: Nickerson, yeah.
14:07
SPEAKER_03: I thought that was really funny that uh a razor guy inventing razors was called William William Nickerson.
14:13
SPEAKER_05: I mean, he went around Gillette went around looking for all kinds of people to make like he had the idea, but he couldn't find anybody that knew how to do that.
14:22
SPEAKER_05: He went over to MIT, uh asked around.
14:26
SPEAKER_05: I mean, I I talked about him being from Wisconsin, but eventually he had uh Crown uh the Crown Court Company had sent him to Boston, so he was living in Boston.
14:35
SPEAKER_05: He went over to MIT, and none of those engineers knew how to do it.
14:40
SPEAKER_05: And then he found Nickerson, and Nickerson was an MIT trained engineer, but he figured it out and he's he's basically said that the the version that Gillette had was too thick, I mean, uh too thin.
14:54
SPEAKER_05: Right.
14:54
SPEAKER_05: It was too thin.
14:56
SPEAKER_05: He had to make it wider, more flexible, and then you'd make the holder um you use the holder to bend it into the right shape.
15:05
SPEAKER_05: Yep.
15:05
SPEAKER_05: Can't imagine how many trial and error they would have on this on this stuff.
15:10
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and and you're you're dealing with um you know, you're dealing with thin sheets of metal, which is it that's also part of the genius of it.
15:19
SPEAKER_03: The the prototypes for this, while machining the machines that were going to build them, the actual raw materials were not that expensive.
15:28
SPEAKER_03: And the product is small enough that you could take one sheet of metal and you know make a hundred prototypes out of it, right?
15:34
SPEAKER_03: It wasn't like it wasn't like you were uh dealing with something that every time you screwed up a prototype, it was costing you big money.
15:41
SPEAKER_03: It was I I think that was why he was on to something here.
15:44
SPEAKER_03: And also ultimately, this is not really an option for most people.
15:49
SPEAKER_03: I mean, people do have beards, but even if you had a beard back then or today, you still shave it, you trim it, you keep it, you know, you keep it neat and you shave around it and everything like that.
15:57
SPEAKER_03: So everybody needed a razor recession proof, something that was um not considered optional, right?
16:04
SPEAKER_03: And so when people started to take to these safety blades, his timing was perfect.
16:10
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, the blade just you talk about how thin it was, it was 0.01 inches thick.
16:16
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, that had to be just so revolutionary.
16:18
SPEAKER_05: I don't know how what a straight razor, how how thick that is, but I mean it seems like they were much thicker, right?
16:24
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean they came to a sharp point and you you sharpen the end of it, but the actual blade on these was was very thin.
16:31
SPEAKER_03: And and uh I have here that in he founded Gillette, well, he founded American Safety Razor Company in 1919 oh one.
16:39
SPEAKER_03: Quickly changed the name.
16:41
SPEAKER_03: Changed the name in 1902 Gillette Safety Razor Company, right?
16:44
SPEAKER_03: And and do you have do you have how many he sold in 1903?
16:49
SPEAKER_03: 51 razors.
16:50
SPEAKER_03: Yes, yes, and 168 blades, which which seems like a lot of work for not a lot of um not a lot of payoff, but boom, year two, oh almost a hundred thousand razors and over a hundred thousand blades.
17:04
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and they were expensive.
17:06
SPEAKER_03: That's the crazy part, is they were expensive.
17:09
SPEAKER_05: Five bucks.
17:10
SPEAKER_05: You know what five bucks in 1904, you know how much that is?
17:13
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, it was like several hundred dollars, right?
17:15
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, it's like 188 dollars, yeah, which is like several days' wages.
17:21
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
17:22
SPEAKER_03: No, uh people people who did that, but again, maybe they were still of the of the mentality.
17:28
SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, we might spend$188 today on like a fancy hairdryer or a you know, some sort of thing that you're gonna use for many, many years.
17:40
SPEAKER_03: But the minute you start having to buy replacement cartridges for something or replacement anything, oh well that printer, it it it's it's like a printer, right?
17:48
SPEAKER_05: It's like buying a$200 printer, yeah, and then you're constantly having to, you know, buy the yeah, yeah.
17:56
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's right.
17:57
SPEAKER_03: I just got rid of a printer and I I threw the printer away because it wasn't working properly, and then I did my best to sell the ink cartridges on eBay because I was like, this is like a hundred dollars worth of ink cartridges sitting here, and I got a different printer, right?
18:11
SPEAKER_03: So they weren't compatible anymore.
18:12
SPEAKER_03: Did you get any takers?
18:14
SPEAKER_03: I I didn't, and it's probably better because I found out afterward that um I think they had been sitting for three or four years, and I think if they sit too long, they they go bad.
18:23
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
18:24
SPEAKER_03: Printer cartridges.
18:25
SPEAKER_03: So yeah.
18:26
SPEAKER_05: So um, so he's got something here.
18:29
SPEAKER_05: He's people are uh grasping on it didn't take too long to to start you know ramping up sales by 1908.
18:36
SPEAKER_05: He's got operations all over the world.
18:39
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and by 1915, he's selling 70 million blades a year.
18:44
SPEAKER_05: Like that is just like production, right?
18:47
SPEAKER_05: And like you said, he's putting his face on the package.
18:50
SPEAKER_05: It didn't just have the Gillette logo like today, it was like his face, which was he was a classic, like 19 teens looking guy with a mustache and a suit.
19:02
SPEAKER_03: And and I think a lot of people actually didn't know he was a real person, right?
19:06
SPEAKER_03: Because he was the Colonel Sanders of shaving.
19:09
SPEAKER_03: Before I had before I had um done this research and and looked into him, I had heard the name King Gillette before, and I didn't think it was a name.
19:19
SPEAKER_03: I thought it was an expression or something.
19:20
SPEAKER_03: You know, I thought King Gillette was I I didn't realize that was actually his name until I until I started looking into him a little bit.
19:27
SPEAKER_03: Like King Crab.
19:29
SPEAKER_03: Right, right.
19:30
SPEAKER_03: Uh well King size bed.
19:33
SPEAKER_03: Um yeah, King of the Hill.
19:36
SPEAKER_05: Um but he was the Colonel Sanders of shaving, man.
19:39
SPEAKER_05: People recognized him wherever he went.
19:40
SPEAKER_05: And like you said, back then there weren't a lot of celebrities that everybody could kind of recognize.
19:47
SPEAKER_03: And and this was something that, you know, ultimately the US government, kind of like Hershey, the uh the Hershey bars were put into rations.
19:56
SPEAKER_03: The US government started buying Gillette razors to put into the men's kits, right?
20:02
SPEAKER_03: So they're World War I they're they're out in World War I.
20:05
SPEAKER_03: He didn't drive an ambulance, but he provided the um the things that the servicemen would shave with.
20:12
SPEAKER_03: And this ultimately not only was great for those sales at that time, but these men started using it, became brand loyal, and when they came back, that's what they wanted to use.
20:22
SPEAKER_03: They were they were used to that type of um safety razor, they were used to that type of blade.
20:27
SPEAKER_03: It was a habit, right?
20:28
SPEAKER_03: It helped us form a habit.
20:30
SPEAKER_03: And they didn't have a choice because that's what was in their ration kit and they had to use it.
20:33
SPEAKER_03: And then afterward, they did have a choice, but they were loyal, and that yeah was a huge part of his success.
20:39
SPEAKER_05: But you know what's crazy to me is that by by then, by 1917, when World War One broke out, he had long had sold the company.
20:49
SPEAKER_05: He sold that company in 1910, so it was only like six years after he started, he cashed out.
20:56
SPEAKER_05: He sold two-thirds of his company uh for like 900 grand, which is like 31 million dollars today.
21:04
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and he and he remained quote unquote president, right?
21:09
SPEAKER_05: But not he wasn't in charge of the day-to-day operations, but his but his name was I mean, it was kind of like Colonel Sanders again, like his name had so much cachet, but he just kind of he had other things he wanted to do, and we'll talk about that.
21:23
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, um, but um, but yeah, but by the time they were putting him in in um in um the shave the shaving kits in the ration boxes, he had he was he had cashed out.
21:37
SPEAKER_05: Do you know about the promotion that they did in 1922 with Wrigley?
21:42
SPEAKER_03: Did you hear about that?
21:44
SPEAKER_03: No, no, but I like the tie in.
21:45
SPEAKER_03: What was it?
21:46
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, well, you know our boy, we like to we like to connect the dots when we have Dorton Ep City uh alums uh hanging out together.
21:53
SPEAKER_05: Um well by 1922, again, he's not really running the day to day, but they have A cheaper version of the razor, and um Wrigley was trying to sell uh a new gum called PK.
22:09
SPEAKER_05: Okay, PK gum, I think it was for gum for uh Philip K.
22:13
SPEAKER_05: Wrigley.
22:14
SPEAKER_05: Um okay, but it was a uh I know these guys were all about themselves, right?
22:19
SPEAKER_05: Um, and it was a pellet, it was the first kind of pellet gum, it wasn't a stick, it was those pellets kind of like you have now, and it was a sugar-poated pellet, and they these guys were both trying to get people to try their new product.
22:33
SPEAKER_05: So Wrigley bought a million razors from Gillette at 15 cents a piece, okay, and had a promotion where the customers could get the razor for free if they send in a proof of purchase from the gum.
22:48
SPEAKER_05: Remember proofs of purchase when we were kids?
22:50
SPEAKER_05: Oh, yeah, yeah, it requires proof of purchase.
22:53
SPEAKER_05: Uh you had to like cut out a little, you know, a little coupon.
22:56
SPEAKER_05: It was almost like a barcode.
22:57
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, box top or something, yeah.
22:59
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
23:00
SPEAKER_03: And collect uh collect a hundred proofs of purchase and you get something free.
23:03
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
23:03
SPEAKER_05: And you know, Wrigley was already a master of that idea that you if you get a cheap product into people's hands and then you create get them hooked on it, and then just get them to buy it over and over.
23:14
SPEAKER_05: So those two, I mean, were two peas in a pot.
23:17
SPEAKER_05: And that was, you know, how how can you resist a good gum promotion, right?
23:22
SPEAKER_05: Right, right.
23:22
SPEAKER_03: I mean, I would if I if I got a free razor with my gum, uh, or a free gum with my razor, I would I would do that.
23:29
SPEAKER_05: So just like with Tesla, I could have probably spent a lot of time here talking about the technical aspects of razors and safety razors, and um, but you know, to me that's kind of boring.
23:46
SPEAKER_05: This is kind of where I want to leave the story of Gillette the tycoon off.
23:52
SPEAKER_05: Um, dear listener, you probably think this is a story about another 20th century capitalist.
24:00
SPEAKER_05: Right.
24:00
SPEAKER_05: And he was a rich guy, but he wasn't crazy about capitalism at all.
24:05
SPEAKER_05: No.
24:05
SPEAKER_05: He wanted to be a socialist.
24:06
SPEAKER_05: I would say Gillette was aggressively socialist, and that's putting it mildly.
24:12
SPEAKER_05: And long before he was rich, this wasn't some like guilt or realization or anything like that.
24:19
SPEAKER_05: Long before the Razor made Gillette rich, he was arguing that competition was a problem in the world, not the solution.
24:28
SPEAKER_05: In fact, let's take it back to 1894, way before he um back when he's just a bottle cap salesman.
24:38
SPEAKER_05: He's got a side hustle.
24:40
SPEAKER_05: He's got a side hustle, and that hustle is publishing crazy.
24:45
SPEAKER_05: He published a book called The Human Drift in 1894 and said that his idea was that businesses should all be absorbed into one publicly controlled corporation, not per industry, just in general.
25:04
SPEAKER_05: There should be one company that makes everything.
25:08
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
25:09
SPEAKER_05: Um you know, he had he had, I don't know if you found this, but when he was a traveling salesman, he had sunk 20 grand into uh a carbonating machine.
25:22
SPEAKER_05: Like he had dumped a bunch of money trying to like start a business and bought a carbon a failed attempt at a carbonating machine.
25:30
SPEAKER_05: I don't think it worked.
25:31
SPEAKER_05: It was trying to carbonate water, and he lost a bunch of money doing this.
25:36
SPEAKER_05: And so I don't I don't think he had a father like Milton Hershey that was always trying to get rich, but I think you know maybe that played into this, but he hated capitalism.
25:48
SPEAKER_05: He thought um monopolies were a good thing, but not to benefit capitalism like Rockefeller, maybe.
25:55
SPEAKER_05: Um he said that competition should be throttled and destroyed, and that um that basically unite everyone, unite all these companies.
26:07
SPEAKER_05: Well, you know, his idea was that look, competition always leads to consolidation, right?
26:14
SPEAKER_05: Monopolies and it always leads to consolidation.
26:16
SPEAKER_05: So as long as that's gonna happen anyways, you might as well just start from the point of having one company.
26:23
SPEAKER_05: And um, you know, and here we are, you know, 130 years or 150 years later, 180 years later, whatever.
26:31
SPEAKER_05: I can't do the math.
26:33
SPEAKER_05: Um, you look at like airlines, there's basically like three airlines right now, you know.
26:39
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and we're not better off for it.
26:42
SPEAKER_05: Um, you look at hotels.
26:44
SPEAKER_05: There's basically, you know, you've got the Marriott group, the Hilton group, and the IHG group, and that's about it.
26:50
SPEAKER_05: You've got three hotels and three airlines.
26:52
SPEAKER_05: Competition isn't exactly doing a lot of heavy lifting these days, you know.
26:57
SPEAKER_05: We always talk about this country being super capitalist, but when you think about it, it's a lot of crony capitalism and a lot of that monopolistic consolidation.
27:06
SPEAKER_05: So he wasn't wrong about you know the the eventual end uh endpoint, what what actually happens, but so much hubris thinking that you could actually pull this off.
27:21
SPEAKER_05: It wasn't just like just some scribblings, like he had he went in depth and he wrote this like a prospectus.
27:29
SPEAKER_05: Like, here's what we're gonna do.
27:31
SPEAKER_05: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
27:32
SPEAKER_05: The company was called the United Company, right?
27:35
SPEAKER_05: And the United Company makes everything, all the necessities of life, from shoes to steel.
27:43
SPEAKER_05: Yep.
27:43
SPEAKER_05: Uh and here's the twist: owned by the people, like of everything it was a giant publicly traded company, then every share was a dollar, and it always would be a dollar.
27:58
SPEAKER_05: Um, and but here's the difference between that and an actual um publicly traded company is that the shareholders would get one vote, stockholders would get one vote no matter how many stocks they owned, everybody would get one vote.
28:13
SPEAKER_03: Right.
28:13
SPEAKER_03: It was it was balanced.
28:14
SPEAKER_03: So it was baked, it was very democratic, even though it was socialist.
28:18
SPEAKER_05: Right, right, right.
28:20
SPEAKER_05: And it wasn't even like I I think his socialist, like we're calling it socialist, but it also wasn't owned by the government.
28:30
SPEAKER_05: In fact, he thought if you did this, you wouldn't even need governments.
28:33
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's private industry and it sort of regulates itself, right?
28:37
SPEAKER_03: It's it's utopian in his mind.
28:39
SPEAKER_03: Right, right, right.
28:41
SPEAKER_05: But you know, at that time, the late 1800s, going into the night the tw um the 20th century, kind of like if you remember kind of how the 1990s, 1990s were, um, there's a lot of like a little bit of angst going into a new century and like thinking about things in futuristic terms.
29:02
SPEAKER_05: And, you know, there was a lot of these kind of discussions going on.
29:06
SPEAKER_05: The standard oil thing had just happened.
29:08
SPEAKER_05: If you want to know more about that, listen to the Rockefeller episode and the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.
29:15
SPEAKER_05: You know, people were obsessed with talking about this kind of stuff.
29:20
SPEAKER_05: And um, you know, I I I think that he in a way could see into the future 130 years.
29:28
SPEAKER_05: Um, but this was not something that only he was talking and thinking about.
29:32
SPEAKER_05: I think a lot of people were thinking of of new ways to maybe organize the world.
29:39
SPEAKER_05: I mean, even like Hitler, probably at that time in the 1890s, was thinking about his version of new world order.
29:46
SPEAKER_05: You know, everyone was kind of thinking about what is the 20th century gonna look like and how are we gonna reshuffle the the deck, you know?
29:53
SPEAKER_03: And and it was such a big time of change in technology, too, right?
29:58
SPEAKER_03: Things were really changing rapidly in the industrial revolution, the the all these inventions, great wealth being produced, the the parts of the world that had never been explored were being explored and populated.
30:10
SPEAKER_03: So I probably felt like this epic time of change, much like we feel today, I think about like AI or or about the internet or some of the things that we've gone through.
30:21
SPEAKER_03: Um, but at that point, these ideas were, I believe at that point, a little bit more, especially Gillette's.
30:30
SPEAKER_03: Like, I don't think he had any malice in these ideas.
30:32
SPEAKER_03: As a matter of fact, I think he was truly interested in a better society, right?
30:36
SPEAKER_05: It was no, absolutely.
30:39
SPEAKER_05: And if you're listening and you've heard me say crazy and you've heard me say socialism, I haven't got to the crazy part, guys.
30:48
SPEAKER_05: Um I mean, you might think it's a little out there to have one company own everything and make everything, but we haven't even gotten to the good stuff yet.
30:55
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, let's talk about metropolis.
30:58
SPEAKER_03: Yep.
31:00
SPEAKER_05: So if you only have one company, you don't need a bunch of cities, you only need one city, according to King Camp Gillette.
31:09
SPEAKER_05: And that city should be called Metropolis.
31:13
SPEAKER_05: And let's put it in Niagara Falls, because that's where right, that's where, and you know who was hanging around Niagara Falls at that time thinking about power was our boy Tesla.
31:25
SPEAKER_05: Tesla, yeah.
31:26
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, he was he was doing his stuff, and so Tesla's kind of lurking in the background of this story because you know, remember Tesla was also playing around with the idea of wireless power, remember?
31:38
SPEAKER_05: Yep, yep.
31:39
SPEAKER_05: So I think he I think he was counting on Tesla kind of coming through with his power ideas.
31:47
SPEAKER_03: And and wasn't this metropolis supposed to be completely white, not not not racially, but um in color, like porcelain.
31:57
SPEAKER_03: All buildings shall be made of porcelain.
32:00
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, so that's like a toilet, right?
32:03
SPEAKER_03: Is made out of toilet.
32:04
SPEAKER_03: There, but there is a reason that toilets are made of porcelain, right?
32:08
SPEAKER_03: I mean they're durable, they literally get crapped on all the time, and yet they still can be polished up very quickly and and look shiny and and beautiful.
32:18
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, durable and hygienic, right?
32:20
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah.
32:21
SPEAKER_05: But why then, Kelly, do we not see porcelain buildings?
32:26
SPEAKER_03: I don't think earthquakes, I don't think they do well in earthquakes.
32:30
SPEAKER_03: Or if you threw a rock at it, that also wouldn't go well.
32:32
SPEAKER_03: I mean, there's a lot of reasons.
32:34
SPEAKER_05: That's the thing.
32:34
SPEAKER_03: How durable is a toilet, actually?
32:36
SPEAKER_03: Because, you know, that's true.
32:38
SPEAKER_03: That's true.
32:39
SPEAKER_03: Uh, one one one little whack to the side could crack it very easily.
32:43
unknown: Yeah.
32:44
SPEAKER_03: That's the thing.
32:45
SPEAKER_05: We're not sitting on these buildings.
32:47
SPEAKER_03: We're uh You know, you know, we just it's it's funny you mentioned that.
32:51
SPEAKER_03: We just um uh were redoing a bathroom uh up here in New York, and we just pulled a bathtub out of that bathroom.
33:00
SPEAKER_03: It's a claw foot bathtub, and it's a steel bathtub, it's made of metal, and but it's coated in some sort of white porcelain, it's all scratched up.
33:08
SPEAKER_03: But um it will it will be it's 96 years old, that bathtub.
33:12
SPEAKER_03: It had the it had the um uh manufactured date on it, and it was manuf, it was manufactured in 1930.
33:19
SPEAKER_03: So in four years, it'll be a hundred years.
33:21
SPEAKER_03: Fortunately, one of uh one of the neighbors took it and wanted to use it.
33:25
SPEAKER_05: Um, but we're whenever I see those kind of bathtubs, I always think of William Howard Taft.
33:29
SPEAKER_05: Wasn't he stuck in a bathtub once or something like that?
33:32
SPEAKER_05: We'll find out in a future episode, I'm sure.
33:34
SPEAKER_03: Right, right, right.
33:34
SPEAKER_03: I'd love to hear that story.
33:36
SPEAKER_03: Stay tuned, everyone.
33:38
SPEAKER_05: So it wouldn't just be a city called Metropolis, it would be a city where everybody lived.
33:45
SPEAKER_05: Everybody in the whole country, like all 60 million America had about 60 million people living there.
33:52
SPEAKER_05: Not optional.
33:53
SPEAKER_05: All 60 million people could live there, and there wouldn't be like a suburb situation, it would just be an enormous city, and the rest of America could just return to nature, tear down all the buildings, and it could just return to nature.
34:10
SPEAKER_05: Metropolis was supposed to be 135 miles by 45 miles, and I don't think he realized like putting 60 million people in an area that I mean you know, you think of a place like Beijing or Yeah, yeah, Dubai.
34:30
SPEAKER_05: There's not 60 million people in those places, right?
34:34
SPEAKER_05: Mumbai doesn't have 60 million people.
34:36
SPEAKER_05: I mean, those places have like 20, maybe.
34:38
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah.
34:39
SPEAKER_05: But not 60 million, and just like he was like, Oh, yeah, we could have schools.
34:44
SPEAKER_05: Well, how many schools would you need for 60 million?
34:47
SPEAKER_05: I don't think you had any idea of the scope of this.
34:51
SPEAKER_03: He he also wasn't taking into account the fact that you have to have people in different regions to produce different types of products, right?
34:57
SPEAKER_03: You people in Arizona are gonna produce different products than people in Florida and people in in um upstate New York.
35:04
SPEAKER_03: You know, it's all it's all gonna be uh relevant to the region that they're in.
35:08
SPEAKER_03: And so if you have everybody concentrated up there, you're gonna lo lose and lack a lot of things.
35:15
SPEAKER_03: Maybe.
35:15
SPEAKER_03: I don't, I mean, I'm not are you talking about food?
35:20
SPEAKER_03: I'm talking about food.
35:21
SPEAKER_03: I'm talking about like, for instance, uh sand to make cement, right?
35:25
SPEAKER_03: So if you want to make cement or concrete, you need to you need to mine and and or um drill for things.
35:31
SPEAKER_03: Oil, right?
35:32
SPEAKER_03: You there's not a lot of oil in all the areas, you gotta be an area.
35:35
SPEAKER_03: There's got to be areas where those natural resources exist in order to capitalize on them.
35:40
SPEAKER_03: And in that world, make all that porcelain.
35:43
SPEAKER_05: In that world, though, if that had happened in you know 1900, um maybe you don't eventually need automobiles and you don't need oil.
35:56
SPEAKER_03: You know, maybe they lives everybody lives close together.
36:00
SPEAKER_05: Well, I mean, maybe they invent some sort of elect electric moving system that doesn't require, you know, you don't need a car.
36:07
SPEAKER_05: Um, maybe the car never gets invented.
36:09
SPEAKER_05: Um now it sounds like Cloud City from Empire Strikes Back.
36:13
SPEAKER_05: Right, right.
36:14
SPEAKER_05: Um, you know, beneath the city was where they would they were moving all the stuff.
36:19
SPEAKER_05: Did you get to that?
36:20
SPEAKER_05: Like they had this like this underground system to move food, water, and energy around.
36:26
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
36:27
SPEAKER_05: It very when I picture this, it's very much like, you know, um um the boring Jetsons.
36:34
SPEAKER_03: Where did Jetsons live?
36:35
SPEAKER_03: Oh, uh that's a great question.
36:38
SPEAKER_03: Uh, from the town.
36:40
SPEAKER_03: No, that wasn't bedrock.
36:41
SPEAKER_03: Uh I don't I don't remember the name of space.
36:44
SPEAKER_03: Was it called Space Tropolis?
36:46
SPEAKER_03: Or Metropolis?
36:47
SPEAKER_03: Was it called Metropolis?
36:48
SPEAKER_06: I don't think so.
36:49
SPEAKER_06: Metropolis is where Superman lived.
36:51
SPEAKER_06: All right, hold on, let's see real quick.
36:54
SPEAKER_06: Jetsons home town.
36:57
SPEAKER_06: It wasn't spacely, that was his boss's name.
37:00
SPEAKER_03: Orbit City.
37:02
SPEAKER_03: Jetsons lived in Orbit City.
37:04
SPEAKER_05: So even though this was 130 years ago, I'm picturing like Orbit City.
37:08
SPEAKER_05: Um, and maybe there would have been inventions that we never actually would have invented.
37:12
SPEAKER_05: Maybe flying cars would have been the right way to go instead of Henry Ford, you know?
37:17
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
37:18
SPEAKER_05: Um, he also thought that if everyone was kind of taken care of this way and everyone had ownership in the company, and everyone was producing things and then buying things, there would be no crime and there would be no poverty.
37:32
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
37:33
SPEAKER_03: You you can you can you could we could probably get a lot closer to that um vision, but people are just different, right?
37:40
SPEAKER_03: There's there's just I feel like there's always going to be the people that follow the rules and always gonna be the people that want to break the rules for no even if they're not poor, even if they're not doing it to uh some people do horrible things and there's no real motivation behind it.
37:54
SPEAKER_03: They just do it.
37:55
SPEAKER_05: And if you and if you look at kind of the history of utopias, all the different people in the past, you know, um that have come up with ideas for utopia, that's always their claim, is that if if we just did it this way, no there would be no crime and there would be no poverty.
38:11
SPEAKER_05: But like you said, people don't just commit crime for economic reasons, right?
38:17
SPEAKER_05: You know, there's all kinds of reasons, and we still have as long as we have human connections, we're gonna have jealousy.
38:22
SPEAKER_05: We're gonna have you know, people uh-huh, uh-huh, pride, not to mention, not to mention romantic relationships, you know, that that deal with uh, you know, that it's all not economic stuff.
38:35
SPEAKER_05: And um, you know, even Elon Musk talks about how in his vision of the future there's abundance is the thing.
38:42
SPEAKER_05: I think we've talked about this before.
38:43
SPEAKER_03: That yeah, there's even a book called Abundance.
38:45
SPEAKER_03: I don't know if you've read it.
38:47
SPEAKER_05: And his his world that we're gonna have so much of everything that the only thing that people a hundred years from now are gonna have to uh worry about is is what what to do with all the free time they have.
38:58
SPEAKER_05: Well, you know, they said that same stuff a hundred years ago that the people of of the year 2000 were gonna work about five hours a week, and all the rest of the time they were gonna have free time.
39:08
SPEAKER_05: Where's my free time, Kelly?
39:10
SPEAKER_05: Right.
39:10
SPEAKER_05: Where's my flying car and my free time?
39:13
SPEAKER_05: He was also, I don't know if you uh saw this, um, and we have to be careful the way we you know modernize this, but he was also into what he called gender equality.
39:26
SPEAKER_05: Yes.
39:26
SPEAKER_03: Um I I did see that he he wanted um in in metropolis, he wanted all jobs to be equal.
39:33
SPEAKER_03: He wanted uh yeah, I'd be careful about calling him a feminist.
39:37
SPEAKER_05: Um he was about eliminating the traditional household and that you know the people of the future that it everything should be on merit.
39:48
SPEAKER_05: But he also then was quick to point out but women would probably only want to do these types of jobs and it was traditional women's roles.
39:56
SPEAKER_05: But you know, that is a long time ago, and we shouldn't that we shouldn't beat them up for it, but also not you know make them to seem like some you know modern feminist or don't put them on a pedestal for it either, yeah.
40:08
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, right.
40:09
SPEAKER_03: But but still, I I it you know, overall the impression I got was yes, a bit of naivety and a bit of um idealism, but ultimately not in a not coming from a selfish place, right?
40:22
SPEAKER_03: All of this was a dream of a world where people could have better lives and be more equal, written by a bottle cap salesman.
40:31
SPEAKER_03: Right, right.
40:32
SPEAKER_05: Before he was rich, before he was successful, but like a 40-year-old bottle cap salesman, he wasn't some kid, you know.
40:38
SPEAKER_05: I mean, he well, he was like 35, I guess.
40:41
SPEAKER_05: So, or maybe it was 40.
40:42
SPEAKER_05: So then he duh he gets rich with all the razor stuff that we've we've talked about, cashes out in 1910, and now he's got time to explore some of these ideas.
40:54
SPEAKER_05: And in 1910, right after he leaves his company, in fact, probably because why the reason he left his company was to publish another book called World Corporation.
41:04
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
41:06
SPEAKER_05: And this wasn't just another idea, this was like a blueprint.
41:11
SPEAKER_05: This was okay, let's actually do this now.
41:13
SPEAKER_05: This is a plan for a single publicly owned company called World Corporation with a charter and bylaws.
41:22
SPEAKER_05: He uh he actually opened an office uh um uh like uh for the for the president um of the company to have.
41:30
SPEAKER_05: And you know who he wanted to be president?
41:32
SPEAKER_03: The Theodore Roosevelt.
41:33
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, he was gonna pay him a million dollars.
41:36
SPEAKER_05: He was gonna get 50 people to don to pitch in 20 grand each, and he was gonna pay Teddy Roosevelt a million dollars for a four-year term to be the president of World Corporation.
41:49
SPEAKER_05: Would you take the job if you were Teddy Roosevelt?
41:52
SPEAKER_03: I um if if I was me, I think I would.
41:56
SPEAKER_03: I think I think if it sounded like it could actually work, yeah, that's it.
41:59
SPEAKER_03: If you were a former president, would you do that?
42:02
SPEAKER_03: Uh you know, Teddy Roosevelt sounds like the kind of guy that on one hand would take risks and would try things, but he probably he was also very practical, right?
42:12
SPEAKER_03: Teddy Roosevelt was a very practical and and down-to-earth and and kind of rugged guy, and this probably was like crazy talk to him.
42:20
SPEAKER_05: So I don't think he hated the idea.
42:21
SPEAKER_05: I think he contemplated the idea, though.
42:23
SPEAKER_05: I mean, I don't think he threw him out of his office or anything.
42:26
SPEAKER_03: Right.
42:26
SPEAKER_05: And you know, again, now you don't have a bottle cab salesman coming to pitch this soon, right?
42:31
SPEAKER_03: You got you've got King Cam.
42:32
SPEAKER_05: King Cam Gillette, right?
42:35
SPEAKER_05: Um, so this was the world version though of what he had come up with before.
42:41
SPEAKER_05: And just the idea.
42:43
SPEAKER_05: So the idea is there's one company that has that makes everything in the whole world.
42:49
SPEAKER_05: And um, and that he would make raise money for this by selling shares of this company to everybody in the world.
42:55
SPEAKER_05: Now, just let's think for a second about 1910, talking about things on a global level.
43:04
SPEAKER_05: I mean, I think today it's pretty, you know, I can get to you know, I can get to Europe in ten hours.
43:11
SPEAKER_05: Um, you know, we can do a do a video call with anybody in Australia or Asia and it the world's a very small place, but in 1910, you know, we hadn't we didn't have air travel.
43:25
SPEAKER_05: No that Wright brothers were just fooling around with going, you know yards.
43:30
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah.
43:31
SPEAKER_05: Um the idea of something being global is so like uh pie in the sky, right?
43:40
SPEAKER_03: Well, it also it also assumes that all the people in power in other places and in the US, but uh especially in other places, are just gonna say, Yeah, sure, that you you know, that's these Americans have this great idea.
43:52
SPEAKER_03: This guy, you know, he's he's he's of French descent, so he must he must be smart.
43:56
SPEAKER_03: So let's go ahead and do this, you know.
43:58
SPEAKER_05: But on the other hand, twenty years later.
44:00
SPEAKER_05: Later, we had a guy trying to take over the whole world, you know, 25 years later.
44:03
SPEAKER_05: So, I mean goes in cycles.
44:06
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
44:07
SPEAKER_05: So the idea was that um people would he'd raise money by everybody buying shares, and then you'd use that money to buy shares in existing companies, get on the boards and and take over the boards of those companies, shut them down.
44:23
SPEAKER_05: He called it absorption by consumption, which you know, describes my dinner last night, right?
44:30
SPEAKER_03: Almost like eminent domain, you know, where it's just like, hey, this is moving this direction, you're gonna have to get out of the way, or like hostile takeover of every company in the world, right?
44:39
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and this company, the world corporation, would be the only employer and seller of any product in the world, you wouldn't need governments anymore.
44:48
SPEAKER_05: You know, you say it sounds benevolent, and he probably did have that in his heart, but man, would this be a terrible idea?
44:57
SPEAKER_05: Right, you know, right?
44:58
SPEAKER_05: You think of I for some reason I kept thinking of FIFA, you know.
45:03
SPEAKER_05: I'm not sure how how much you know about FIFA or but we just had the World Cup, and FIFA is the organization that runs world soccer, right?
45:12
SPEAKER_05: And they're one of the few like global organizations where pretty much every country in the world is involved and there's voting, and every country gets one vote.
45:24
SPEAKER_05: You know, the Spain doesn't get any more votes than you know the Seychelles Islands, you know, everybody gets one vote, but it is far from democratic.
45:32
SPEAKER_05: It is corrupt, and it you know, it's just it's like the has the worst instincts of every anything you can imagine that would be like run by the whole world, right?
45:42
SPEAKER_03: Well, it's what they say is absolute power, um, what it corrupts absolutely.
45:47
SPEAKER_05: Right, right, exactly.
45:49
SPEAKER_05: Right.
45:49
SPEAKER_05: This idea that governments wouldn't be necessary, it's like, oh, that's cool.
45:53
SPEAKER_05: And then you're like, oh, but then everything's gonna be run by this giant company that makes everything.
45:58
SPEAKER_05: Trust us when we've got your best interests at heart.
46:02
SPEAKER_05: Can you imagine if you know the closest thing we have to that right now is probably Amazon, right?
46:07
SPEAKER_05: That a company that that makes everything and sells everything.
46:11
SPEAKER_05: And it's it's not, it's real hyperbole to say that they sell everything.
46:17
SPEAKER_05: I mean, yeah, they solve a wide variety of stuff, but you could clearly go through your whole life and never buy anything from Amazon, and it wouldn't even be a lot of people.
46:25
SPEAKER_05: Right, yeah, people do that on purpose.
46:27
SPEAKER_05: But this would be literally nope, they own everything.
46:30
SPEAKER_05: Now, there is no Jeff Bezos in this scenario.
46:34
SPEAKER_05: You've got the people running it or Teddy Roosevelt running it or something, but I'm guessing that if this had come to pass, Jeff Bezos would have eventually been the president of the world corporation, right?
46:45
SPEAKER_05: Right, right.
46:46
SPEAKER_05: True.
46:47
SPEAKER_05: Um he thought that the world corporation shares, you know, remember they only cost a dollar, right?
46:53
SPEAKER_05: That eventually that would be a universal currency, that people would just be trading their shares and we would have one currency.
47:02
SPEAKER_05: Um, you know, the idea is why fight capitalism when you can just buy capitalism, right?
47:08
SPEAKER_03: True, true.
47:09
SPEAKER_03: Well, and and that that idea of of standardizing things, I mean, why do we still have two different units of measurement, right?
47:17
SPEAKER_03: Uh I mean, that's we we've talked about this before.
47:19
SPEAKER_03: Why, why do we some people driving on one side of the road and other people driving on the other?
47:27
SPEAKER_03: I mean, some of this stuff, it it it comes down to though, again, what we talked about before, ego comes down to why should we change?
47:33
SPEAKER_03: Why is that better than this?
47:35
SPEAKER_03: You know, and and and we all we are all like, yeah, everybody should should drive on the right hand side of the road.
47:40
SPEAKER_03: Most of the world does.
47:41
SPEAKER_03: England get your act together.
47:43
SPEAKER_03: But then, but then the minute something they want us to change, you know, the US to change to the metric system, we're like, hell no.
47:50
SPEAKER_03: Right.
47:50
SPEAKER_03: You know, well, you can have it.
47:51
SPEAKER_05: It'd be like, okay, all of a sudden everybody's gonna speak Chinese.
47:54
SPEAKER_05: From here on out, everybody speaks Chinese.
47:56
SPEAKER_05: That doesn't sound good.
47:58
SPEAKER_05: If I said from now on, everyone's gonna speak English, you'd be like, Yeah, that makes so much sense.
48:02
SPEAKER_05: Yes, so much sense.
48:04
SPEAKER_05: Exactly.
48:04
SPEAKER_05: If everyone could just get on my page, you know, yeah.
48:07
SPEAKER_05: Right.
48:07
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
48:08
SPEAKER_05: Did you get to the part about corporate mind?
48:12
SPEAKER_03: No, no, what is it?
48:13
SPEAKER_03: Is it like a hive mind kind of thing?
48:15
SPEAKER_05: Corporate mind is like a collective intelligence where people contribute their knowledge about everything to the corporation.
48:22
SPEAKER_05: Now it's kind of a cool concept and a very like easy concept to grasp in the days of supercomputing now, you know.
48:29
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, yeah.
48:30
SPEAKER_05: In fact, a lot of companies, a lot of corporations today have like chief knowledge officers and they have you know ways that people can download or upload their their brains as they're retiring.
48:41
SPEAKER_05: You know, there's there's yeah, like corporate portals and corporate intranets.
48:45
SPEAKER_05: Absolutely.
48:46
SPEAKER_05: But in 1910, and I the 1910, the idea of shared intelligence, collective intelligence, crowdsourcing, none of that stuff had really been invented yet.
48:56
SPEAKER_05: And he was kind of like on to something a little bit.
48:59
SPEAKER_05: Um, let's see.
49:02
SPEAKER_05: The Upton Sinclair of it all.
49:04
SPEAKER_05: Did you get to this part?
49:05
SPEAKER_03: No, no, you went around a different path than me.
49:08
SPEAKER_05: Oh man.
49:09
SPEAKER_05: Did you want to fill in some blanks here?
49:11
SPEAKER_03: No, no.
49:12
SPEAKER_03: I mean, he he he was married, he had a wife named uh Atlanta and they called her Lanty.
49:17
SPEAKER_03: Um she died in 1951, she lasted quite a while, and then they had a son named King Gaines, that was Lanty's maiden name, who died in 1955.
49:26
SPEAKER_03: Um, but but yeah, no, that's that's kind of I had gone into his family and some of the property that he bought um a little bit more, but but I I think yours is more interesting.
49:36
SPEAKER_03: Do you remember Upton Sinclair from the the jungle?
49:39
SPEAKER_03: Yep, right?
49:40
SPEAKER_05: Yep.
49:40
SPEAKER_05: He was he was all about like workers' rights and um very much trying to like at the he was the the uh opposing force of the industrial revolution, right?
49:51
SPEAKER_05: Right.
49:51
SPEAKER_05: We read about him like in junior high, right?
49:55
SPEAKER_05: So he meets up, Upton Sinclair is really interested um in this I you know some of his ideas.
50:02
SPEAKER_05: And like I said, he's not a bottle cap salesman anymore.
50:04
SPEAKER_05: He's got you know he's got access.
50:07
SPEAKER_05: So Upton Sinclair, who was a writer but also like connected, he arranges a meeting between Gillette and Henry Ford.
50:16
SPEAKER_05: And this did not go well.
50:19
SPEAKER_05: Our boy Henry Ford is all about capitalism, like this is his thing, right?
50:24
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and and uh and they argued for two hours.
50:30
SPEAKER_05: Ford was Mr.
50:31
SPEAKER_05: Competition, he loves competition, Gillette hates competition.
50:36
SPEAKER_05: Upton Sinclair said it was w like watching two billiard balls hitting each other and flying apart.
50:42
SPEAKER_05: Neither man made an impression on the other.
50:46
SPEAKER_05: And then later, uh years after that, Upton Sinclair tried again.
50:51
SPEAKER_05: He tried to get a bunch of businessmen together at his at Upton Sinclair's house.
50:56
SPEAKER_05: He's like, just listen to this guy, you know?
50:58
SPEAKER_05: He's he's he's Mr.
51:00
SPEAKER_05: Gillette, he's he sold all these razors, just listen to him.
51:03
SPEAKER_05: And everyone just attacked Gillette at that meeting.
51:06
SPEAKER_05: In fact, uh the meeting ended with Gillette running out of the house screaming, these people are wolves.
51:13
SPEAKER_05: Didn't go well.
51:15
SPEAKER_05: No, it's like crazy though, because like he's he's he fits in the rooms with these guys, right?
51:20
SPEAKER_05: And he's a millionaire, and he's a capitalist.
51:23
SPEAKER_05: I mean, he's uh his company is successful in a capitalistic America and the industrial revolution, right?
51:30
SPEAKER_05: He like fits in with these guys, and I think he opens his mouth.
51:33
SPEAKER_03: He was a Freemason too, I think.
51:35
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, he opens his mouth, he's like, you know what we should do?
51:38
SPEAKER_05: We should have one company, put you guys all out of business, and then we should do our own thing, and then we'll all be free to roam the countryside, like in it, and we can just let it go back to nature.
51:47
SPEAKER_05: And they're like, get out of here, Gillette.
51:50
SPEAKER_03: Crazy.
51:50
SPEAKER_03: But but but the unspoken part of that might have been we'll have one company and this room will run it.
51:57
SPEAKER_03: This room will be the beneficiaries of it, you know, this room will be the power center for it.
52:02
SPEAKER_03: Do you think that was his idea though?
52:04
SPEAKER_03: I don't think it might have been his initial idea, but I think that's what would have happened.
52:10
SPEAKER_03: Of course that's what would have happened.
52:11
SPEAKER_03: And and that's how that's how he would have had to even get people recruited into this, you know.
52:16
SPEAKER_03: And then you get people who are already wealthy, who want to maintain their power, and they want to look like they're doing something good, or they want to even, you know, even by consolidating their competitors, right?
52:28
SPEAKER_03: They're taking over their competitors by doing this.
52:30
SPEAKER_03: It's it's it's kind of the play where he has the idea, maybe he has it at with an altruistic um uh motivation, but ultimately it would have fallen apart and there would have been so much corruption and no oversight, right?
52:43
SPEAKER_03: No government.
52:44
SPEAKER_05: No, I mean the and the the obvious end to that looks something like communist China today, right?
52:51
SPEAKER_05: But we would have never gotten that far.
52:53
SPEAKER_05: Like there's so many, like it was in the fabric of this country, still is that at least we're gonna pretend to be a capitalist nation and a merit-based place, and there and competition is the way we are wired, and I'm sure it was even more so back then, not less so, yeah, yeah, um, than it is today.
53:14
SPEAKER_05: Well, you know, he and Upton Sinclair um joined up again in 1924 and wrote a book together, a follow-up to World Corporation, the People's Corporation, and this was basically the same book, but just with more details about how to finance it.
53:30
SPEAKER_05: Yep, yeah.
53:32
SPEAKER_05: Well, by the late 20s, he was living in Southern California, super rich.
53:38
SPEAKER_05: Um he had he stepped down as the president of the Gillette company in 1931, died the next year.
53:48
SPEAKER_05: Um, sure there's um some kind of poetry in that, you know.
53:52
SPEAKER_05: I mean, bottom line is, you know, he's lost his purpose.
53:55
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I mean, he spent he he's gonna be remembered forever of being the Razor guy.
54:01
SPEAKER_05: Right.
54:02
SPEAKER_05: Not so much, it's like a footnote or a weird kind of quirk that uh he was trying to change the world's economy.
54:09
SPEAKER_05: But I think that's probably what he would have wanted to be remembered for.
54:13
SPEAKER_05: Not, you know, a razor guy or the you know, the name of the the Patriot Stadium in in New England.
54:21
SPEAKER_05: Like that all is just like all the all the stuff he tried, he spent his life obsessing about is just like a footnote in this guy's life.
54:29
SPEAKER_03: He did also um purchase a large amount of property um in the Santa Monica Mountains in 1926, and this this um was something that was interesting because when he died, so this was his um he was gonna be a ranch and it was gonna be a home for him.
54:47
SPEAKER_03: Uh, and when he died, his wife sold it to Clarence Brown, who was an MGM film director, um, who had A-list Hollywood parties there, and I thought that was interesting.
54:58
SPEAKER_03: And then in 1952, Bob Hope bought the property and gave it to the Catholic Church, where they had a monastery or a seminary for 25 years, and then Elizabeth Clare Prophet, who founded the Church Universal and Triumphant, bought the property in 1978 for a new age church.
55:17
SPEAKER_03: So it was several, several different churches, and then it eventually ended up in the hands of SOCA, which is um this the SOCA, SOCA University of America, SUA, which was a liberal arts college that used it as a campus for many years.
55:34
SPEAKER_03: They wanted to expand, but the public fought it because there were some issues with what they were going to do that was gonna be bad for the environment.
55:41
SPEAKER_03: Um, and the eventually the uh Parks and Rec department, the National Park Service, and the Santa Monica Mountain Convert Conservancy got together and bought it, and it is now a uh 558-acre ranch, a public park called King King Gillette Ranch that you can go on.
56:00
SPEAKER_03: I don't know if you knew that.
56:01
SPEAKER_03: So No, I didn't.
56:02
SPEAKER_03: Um was he a religious guy?
56:05
SPEAKER_03: No, no, I don't think he was.
56:06
SPEAKER_03: Um I I don't think he had ever I think he bought it maybe thinking this could be a uh outpost for all of his ideas, um, but but he didn't have very long on it before his he died and his wife sold it.
56:19
SPEAKER_05: And he wasn't an extremely educated guy.
56:22
SPEAKER_05: It wasn't like he this this idea is.
56:24
SPEAKER_03: No, he didn't go to Harvard and No, no, he he was a thinker.
56:27
SPEAKER_03: I mean, whether whether you agree with his ideas or not, he definitely was a thinker.
56:31
SPEAKER_05: And while business schools at the time were like banding about different different models of um you know economic models, uh there was no legitimate business professors at that time that were like teaching this to students.
56:49
SPEAKER_05: So it was even though it was yeah, it was out there.
56:53
SPEAKER_05: It was a s I don't know if I mean I don't know how if he was a serious person in terms of like he was a little bit out of his out of his depth when it came to like writing about economics, a little bit of a dreamer.
57:04
SPEAKER_05: And that's fine if you're a bottle cap salesman, but the idea that it's like one of the wealthiest guys in the country, one of the most successful guys in the company, in the country that's just out there promoting this kind of all companies.
57:18
SPEAKER_03: Um so so flashing forward, um how many uh Gillette Razor uh brand names can you can you name?
57:30
SPEAKER_03: Well Edge.
57:33
SPEAKER_03: Yep, Edge is one of them.
57:35
SPEAKER_05: That's that's my uh shaving cream of choice, Edge.
57:39
SPEAKER_05: Um but then you've got like there's all the different tracks, right?
57:45
SPEAKER_03: Like Yeah, you've got the fusion.
57:47
SPEAKER_05: Oh, fusion, right.
57:49
SPEAKER_03: That's I think that's the one I use.
57:50
SPEAKER_03: Fusion has there's the fusion three, um, the fusion five, there's the pro glide, there's the skin guard, there's the mock three.
58:02
SPEAKER_03: Oh, maybe I use the mock three.
58:04
SPEAKER_03: For the ladies, there's the Venus.
58:06
SPEAKER_05: And you know what makes me mad is that every one of these, and this was goes back to his idea, right?
58:14
SPEAKER_05: Like every one of these, the Mach 3, like I don't care.
58:17
SPEAKER_05: I just want to shave my face.
58:19
SPEAKER_05: I don't care if it's a Mach 3 or a fusion, but if I buy the wrong blades, I'm screwed.
58:25
SPEAKER_03: Right, right.
58:25
SPEAKER_03: You have you have to be careful.
58:27
SPEAKER_05: Now I've got 20 blades that don't fit a razor I have.
58:30
SPEAKER_05: So you know what I do?
58:32
SPEAKER_05: I go by the razor, so now I've got two, now I've got a Mach 3 and a fusion, and I'm sure I do.
58:38
SPEAKER_05: You talk about the different ecosystems, whether you're talking about cameras or computers, right?
58:44
SPEAKER_05: I mean, that that stuff follows suit.
58:46
SPEAKER_05: Like you, you know, Apple's done a great job at that same thing, right?
58:50
SPEAKER_05: Everything's proprietary.
58:55
SPEAKER_03: Hey man, it's the best a man can be.
58:59
SPEAKER_05: Is it best a man can get?
59:01
SPEAKER_03: Uh so so actually, um uh there were two different things.
59:06
SPEAKER_03: There were the original was the best a man can get, and then later they ran some ads that were kind of um the with the best a man can be, and it was about kind of fighting against hyper machoism and hyper, you know, the the sort of uh aggro man kind of kind of thing.
59:24
SPEAKER_05: You know, the best a man can get rhymes with Gillette.
59:28
SPEAKER_05: Ah, there you go.
59:30
SPEAKER_05: The best a man can be is lame.
59:34
SPEAKER_03: That doesn't matter.
59:34
SPEAKER_05: It's like when the big or shtick.
59:37
SPEAKER_05: You know, like it's like um this might not be politically correct, but it bothers me when I hear the Ace is the place for the helpful hardware folks.
59:47
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it was just a hardware man.
59:50
SPEAKER_05: Folks is just a turd in the punch bowl, man.
59:53
SPEAKER_05: It's ace is the place with the helpful hardware man.
59:58
SPEAKER_05: That's that's the song.
1:00:00
SPEAKER_05: Write a new song.
1:00:02
SPEAKER_05: If you want a different song that's inclusive, write a new song.
1:00:05
SPEAKER_05: Folks is just like it's almost like if they had sung off key to me.
1:00:10
SPEAKER_05: It just is unsettling to me.
1:00:12
SPEAKER_03: Really, really triggers you, huh?
1:00:15
SPEAKER_05: It's not the it's not the uh chauvinism that that uh that that I enjoy.
1:00:21
SPEAKER_05: Don't don't uh don't get it twisted here.
1:00:24
SPEAKER_05: It's not the inclusiveness that triggers me.
1:00:27
SPEAKER_05: It's the word folks, I think.
1:00:29
SPEAKER_05: Like it doesn't fit in that song.
1:00:32
SPEAKER_03: Ace is a place with a helpful hardware people, helpful hardware gals.
1:00:42
SPEAKER_04: Why are you stuck with that song?
1:00:44
SPEAKER_03: All right, uh, some somehow we got into Ace hardware at the end of Gillette.
1:00:51
SPEAKER_03: All right, thanks everybody.
1:00:52
SPEAKER_03: Uh, and and uh congrats on our second.
1:00:55
SPEAKER_03: Um, we should have a name for this when we when we both come up with the same one.
1:00:59
SPEAKER_03: It I don't know, I don't know what it's gonna call it.
1:01:01
SPEAKER_03: It's a quinky dink.
1:01:10
SPEAKER_02: Vendeur de capsule, pure rêveur de programme, king camp dis-moi, tété tes visionnaires ou dingue.
1:01:30
SPEAKER_02: Il vendait des bouchons, des capsules au comptoir, des promesses en carton, des rendez-vous sans gloire Dans les hôtels, les bureaux, costume contre commission Il cherchait le déclic au fond d'une conversation Puis la lame du rasoir lui mord là pour un matin Trop cher à réaffûter, trop fragile dans la main Il pense à la stimence plié comme une évidence Saint-Man, une tête et la lame perd sa puissance Pas besoin d'un party, pas besoin d'un trésor Tu changes la petite pièce, tu gardes tout le décor Le bénéfice c'est dans le geste, pas dans le premier achat Ils vend le rasoir presque rien, les lames après ça peut trancher Lames pour le visa fou fou Il fout les Ada La sécurité dans les tailles de vente entre vente de mes tas de viande pas possible pour les tas de vie entre sauté pour le faster pour le pop Il pop-matique Mais qui tient le couteau côté devient pisante pour le bizarre Il voulait raser le hasard Il a vu le marché comme une machine à régler Chaque pièce sous contrôle Chaque voix alignée Mais l'idée qui liberte aussi fermé la porte quand leur prend toute la place Il décide de ce qui compte qui nous conseille paroi mais son sonnait comme un plan Il vendait du présent Il destinait le lendemain Le hasard c'est génial sympathique rentable Ces trois projets reste vaste discutable Une ville unique un pays tabrié par le même scout Une compagnie géante au-dessus de tous les drapeaux Utopient sans fiction Couche ma bien pour lui La question reste planté dans l'assiette de sa vie bruyante Pour l'objet peut-être fou pour le cadre Fou assez brillant pour que l'histoire le gars il a changé dans ma tante Par le monde à sa manière Mais c'est la faute On revient dans la lumière pour le business