Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1722 - Bartow Elmore
Uploaded: 2021-10-20T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1722 - Bartow Elmore' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-10-20. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1722 - Bartow Elmore' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-10-20. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1722 - Bartow Elmore

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Seed money.
Tell me.
Tell me about all this dirtiness.
Tell me about these monsters and the money that they make.
Yeah.
How did you get involved in this, first of all?
Yeah, sure.
Why did this become your field of study?
Well, thanks, Jeff, for having me on.
My pleasure.
Thanks for being here.
I'm excited to talk to you about this.
Yeah, so-
Very important subject, right?
Yeah, for me it was.
You know, it really started with the first project I worked on, the first book
I wrote,
which was the history of Coca-Cola and its environmental impact around the
world.
You were just telling us that Pepsi is actually older than Coke, which is
surprising.
Dr. Pepper.
Yeah, Dr. Pepper.
Dr. Pepper's older?
Yeah, Dr. Pepper's older, weirdly.
And you think of it as like the, you know-
Yeah, I thought it was like the new kid on the block.
Yeah, exactly.
That's the oldest?
1885.
Not the oldest, but it's older than Coke.
What's the oldest?
Coke was 1886.
I don't really even know what the oldest one would be.
So Dr. Pepper came along first, then Coca-Cola, and then Pepsi?
And then Pepsi later.
So Pepsi is still bullshit.
Pepsi is still-
Look, you're talking to a guy from Atlanta, so I agree with you there.
What does that mean?
Well, Atlanta's like-
Coke's from Atlanta?
Yeah, Coke's from Atlanta.
Oh, okay.
And, you know, when we were growing up, it was like in the water.
You had to drink Coca-Cola.
In fact, when you want any soft drink, you just say, I want a Coke.
Yeah.
Nobody says, I'd like a Pepsi.
Well, maybe they do.
But the thing about Pepsi is like it never had cocaine in it, did it?
No.
Actually, this is relevant.
I mean, so this was the beginning of this book because I was doing that.
I was looking at all the ingredients that go into Coca-Cola and saying, okay,
what's in the drink, first of all?
Because it's from my hometown.
That's where it started.
I said, okay, I want to find out all these natural resources in the product.
And, you know, is Coca in the drink?
And also caffeine.
We'll get to that.
That's how it connects to Monsanto.
But Coca was the most interesting, actually, because I thought, you know, it's
called Coca-Cola.
I said, does it have cocaine in it?
And so I went back to look at that and it turns out, yeah, you know, trace
amounts.
Still?
In the beginning.
No, no, no.
In the beginning.
Yeah, but this is what's interesting about the history of the drink.
So this is 1886.
Back then, the coca leaf was actually seen as something that was medicinal.
Medicinal.
Inocuous.
Absolutely.
And everyone was using the coca leaf.
I mean, there was a drink called Vin Mariani.
It was actually a wine, a red wine that was mixed with coca leaves.
Wow.
So it kind of had a little kick to it.
And, like, Queen Victoria of England drank this stuff.
Ulysses S. Grant, our president, was like, woo, you know, coca wine.
This is awesome.
And even the pope, actually.
And I wonder if communion would have had, you know, Vin Mariani.
We would all be Catholic or something.
But so it was really popular.
And this guy, this guy who was down on his luck, John Pemberton, who started
Coca-Cola in Atlanta, he wanted to make a coca drink himself.
And so he made this.
Originally, coca was actually a wine.
It was like a wine of coca.
It was a red wine mixed with coca leaves.
Exact knockoff of that drink that was really popular.
And then Prohibition hits Atlanta because we're in the Protestant South in the
1880s.
And so he has to take out the alcohol.
And so he creates this non-alcoholic drink, Coca-Cola, that has the coca leaf
in it.
They weren't concerned about the coca.
They were concerned about alcohol.
And it remained in the drink throughout the 20th century.
What kind of dose would it have in it?
Very small.
You know, and this, I think, is important.
You know, people equate the coca leaf with, you know, cocaine because, yes, you
can make cocaine like street cocaine from, you know, processing all these coca
leaves.
But if you go to Peru today or you go to certain parts of South America, people
chew coca leaves.
It's a normal practice.
It's been going back thousands of years to the Inca even.
And so it's very small amounts.
We're not talking about, like, in fact, you'd probably get a bigger hit from,
like, you know, experience from a cup of espresso from Starbucks.
But interestingly, the reason that cocaine became taboo and why it got pulled
from the drink had nothing to do with national laws in the country, which was
so interesting when I was studying it.
It had everything to do with racism, actually, in the South, because there was
a concern that cocaine was contributing to black crime in Atlanta, which was
being, of course, blown up by segregationists and white supremacists.
And Asa Candler, who was a white guy in Atlanta, didn't want to have anything
to do with that.
So he decides kind of quietly to take out the cocaine.
But here's the interesting thing, Joe.
They kept the coca leaf as one of their secret ingredients.
Yeah.
So secret ingredient number five.
By the way, Coke doesn't like talking about this.
This is not part of their history that they like discussing.
But it's clear as day in the archives.
You can see it.
So it's called merchandise number five, the fifth secret ingredient in Coca-Cola.
I like the name.
Isn't it merchandise number five?
Well, the whole idea is that you name things so that no one asks questions,
right?
What's merchandise number five?
Also, that ingredient includes a little bit of the cola nut, which is from West
Africa, actually.
And it was originally in there because it has caffeine, another kind of
caffeine kick.
That's where Coca-Cola comes from.
But cola, by the way, is with a K, the actual cola nut.
Anyway, that's merchandise number five.
And it's basically the flavor of the coca leaf, the essence of the coca leaf.
And the way it works is these leaves are brought in from Peru is actually where
Coca-Cola sourced it.
And that was crazy.
I had to track down, okay, where are they getting their coca leaves from?
And there's this company called Maywood Chemical Company.
Today, the company is called Stepin Chemical Company.
Is that in New Jersey?
It is in New Jersey.
Exactly.
Maywood, New Jersey.
Yeah.
No, they're the ones who process it and they make medical grade cocaine out of
it and then use the flavor aspect of it for Coca-Cola.
Exactly.
And, you know, technically, at first, as you put it, most of the cocaine was
going for pharmaceutical uses and for, you know,
Lidocaine.
All sorts of things like that they use for legitimate purposes.
But Coke needed actually so much flavoring.
Think about their brand.
It's so big.
Like wheatgrass juice.
You squeeze a lot.
Exactly.
Get a cup.
So they had to, like, come up with this special – I love it.
You can't make this stuff up.
This is why history is fun.
There's a special exemption in our laws for what are called special leaves from
Peru.
And if anybody looking at it is saying, well, what the hell are these special
leaves, you know?
And they're special because they're allowed to come into the United States
exclusively, basically, to create the flavoring extract for Coca-Cola.
A lot of people call it the Coca-Cola Joker.
How closely do you think they monitor that supply?
You know, I mean –
Very closely.
They even have to.
Yeah.
Like if a bundle or two fell off a truck here or there, that could be extremely
profitable.
Right.
I talked to somebody once.
They said, so is there, like, a pile of cocaine somewhere up in New Jersey, you
know, where this is happening?
And, you know, I don't think that's the case.
But here's the crazy part, too.
This is what's fun about tracing these stories of ingredients because they lead
you to places you never thought you'd go, like this book, which we'll talk
about.
But it got weird – if that's not weird, it got weirder in the 60s because
Coca-Cola wanted to figure out a way to make coca leaves in the United States,
to grow their own coca leaves.
They weren't satisfied with this trade with Peru.
And these are declassified DEA documents at the National Archives.
This is not like, you know, something crazy.
You can see it.
And actually, it's in the book.
But basically, they petition the federal government to start growing it.
At first, they're thinking, like, the Virgin Islands.
But then they're like, I don't know.
There's, like, all these tourists.
It's going to be crazy.
But they have to find a climate and a location, geography, where they can do
this.
And they ultimately go, okay, what about Hawaii?
And they do, Joe.
They grew coca leaves secretly, a totally secret operation called the Alakea
Project, also called Alakea.
What does that mean?
Exactly.
Nobody's going to ask questions, you know, obfuscate the story, in Kauai.
Oh, wow.
And it was done through the University of Hawaii.
They had to sign all these non-disclosure agreements, and they wouldn't publish
their papers, you know, on the study of all this.
The reason the government agreed to it is that Koch said, we're going to create
a cocaine-less coca shrub.
Like, basically breed a plant that doesn't have cocaine in it.
And, of course, that never really transpires.
But they do end up growing secretly, behind barbed wire fences, coca leaves for
Coca-Cola in the 60s.
But I'm an environmental historian, so I study the relationship between, like,
businesses and the environment.
And in this case, the environment matters, because nature bit back.
So, in the 60s, this fungus that's native to Hawaii was like, whoa, this plant
that's not native and attacks it, and it wipes out the entire coca crop of Coca-Cola.
So, the supply they had for a very brief time in the 60s is wiped out.
They go back to sourcing it from Peru.
But so, I was looking at all those ingredients, and it was when I was looking
at caffeine that I ended up talking about Monsanto.
So, does Coca-Cola have a legitimate relationship with coca leaf growers in
Peru right now?
Right.
Legitimate, I think, is the right kind of question to ask.
Yeah.
I mean, I went down to Peru because I think it's important if you're going to
write about people or you're going to write about a place that you go there.
Yeah.
So, I went down there.
Actually, my father, who doesn't speak any Spanish, was like my bodyguard down
there with me.
It was probably a bad idea to bring my dad with me.
But we kind of went on this journey to go see if we could figure it out.
He's from, you know, Georgia as well.
Sounds like a good way to find yourself missing.
Exactly.
We probably should have been more.
But this is how it goes.
When you're a historian and you're in graduate school and you don't really know
what you're doing, you're just taking risks and doing things that probably
years later, you're like, maybe this is not the smartest idea.
You wouldn't do if you had a family.
Yeah, exactly.
As I do now.
Although it wasn't that safe for this book either.
But anyway, we go down and we look into this story.
And I think to kind of answer your question, I mean, there is a trade.
It's managed actually by a state agency in Peru called Inaco.
And exactly where the coca leaf comes from for Coca-Cola is a little bit
unclear, you know, in the 21st century.
But if you talk to cocaeros or people who represent the cocaeros, the farmers
who produce the coca leaf, a lot of what they're frustrated about is that
basically Coke has this exclusive right to bring in coca leaves into the United
States.
Now, if you and I were to try and do that, we'd be arrested at the border,
right?
Right.
Because the laws in this country now say you can't bring in coca leaves.
Coca leaves are banned.
So one company only.
Basically.
And by the way, yeah, this is what Pepsi, we were talking about Pepsi earlier.
They were livid about this because they wanted access and other soft drinks
wanted access to this supply.
But the federal government was saying, no, no