00:24:19 · Ty Morse, Ryan Petersen
[00:24:19] S0: Was back home Britain aware of the fact that most of the profits from this company were coming from opium trade? [00:24:25] S1: Yeah, I think so. It radically changed everything because now you don't even really need to evolve Britain. You would just go from India to China, make a bunch of money. And they... I guess they would they would take the Chinese goods of tea and stuff and ship that back. And, of course, you know, the tea party... The original tea party, the Boston Tea Party was British East India Company. Yeah. The same company. Right? Trading this tea from, from China, but it had been opium exchange for tea shipped to Boston, here in The United States or then the American colonies. I guess we've come full circle back to Pablo Escobar trading. Now we're trading opium, but as a government into China, Chinese are still very bitter about this, rightfully so. Devastated, I think twenty to thirty percent of their population was addicted to opium, which if you go to Downtown San Francisco, fentanyl is an opiate much stronger. [00:25:21] S0: That's way less than thirty percent. [00:25:22] S1: Yeah, it's a small percent and it's devastating. I think it was having a similar effect on their people and they tried to ban it. And the British sent gunboats in and soldiers and burned down the emperor's palace in Beijing and conquered the country to enable the trade to continue. So I think still a lot of historical, anger over that.
00:25:22 · Ryan Petersen, Ty Morse
[00:25:22] S1: Yeah, it's a small percent and it's devastating. I think it was having a similar effect on their people and they tried to ban it. And the British sent gunboats in and soldiers and burned down the emperor's palace in Beijing and conquered the country to enable the trade to continue. So I think still a lot of historical, anger over that. [00:25:44] S0: In a different timeline where you didn't have the opium trade in China, do you think that the Chinese, like, evolution of power changes and and it's kind of different today? Like, we just set back or you know, the British set back China by, you know, fifty years or something
00:25:57 · Ryan Petersen
[00:25:57] S1: Yeah, like maybe thirty or fifty years or something like that. Hard to... It's really hard to say. I think the Chinese... The Qing dynasty was really failing to modernize, but it was possible to happen. I think in some of these cases, it's a question of leadership and how do you get a strong enough leader to... That's probably the more interesting counterfactual is what if there had been a great emperor born who could have reformed and modernized the way the Japanese did. The Japanese had similar problems. They tried to keep the foreigners out successfully for a long time. The Americans showed up with gunboats, forced to open their markets. They had a huge wake up call and said, we need to modernize. And they sent some of their best and brightest people to the West to learn about industrialization, to learn about the technologies, the structures, the military structures, the economic structures. And it's called the Meiji Reformation, Meiji something, basically the Meiji Dynasty. They put in these reforms that led to Japan becoming a superpower. Ultimately, it wasn't strong enough to do what their ambition was, which was to take over the whole Pacific. The Americans didn't let that happen, but they became a superpower in almost no time. And so, yeah, could that have happened earlier? I mean, I think that's a little bit of what's happened since Deng Xiaoping and more modern China's said, hey. We need to learn from the West and adopt these things and go. But it took, right, there's a hundred years or more in in there, hundred and fifty years from the Opium War to... Till Deng Xiaoping. It could've... Yeah. It certainly could've happened earlier, but probably more about leadership than it was if opium hadn't been discovered. I don't know that opium itself held them back. I mean, the industrial revolution was very real. And if you don't adopt the industrial... The technologies of the industrial revolution, you're probably gonna fail whether or not you get addicted to to opium.
00:27:44 · Ty Morse
[00:27:44] S0: Before we started, you mentioned the Forbes family, not the Forbes family with a magazine, but a different Forbes family. Go into that.
00:27:50 · Ryan Petersen
[00:27:50] S1: Oh, yeah. Well, we were talking about opium. I should have hit it when we were there. So most of the opium... There were... The... In the beginning, the opium was all traded by the British East India Company, the monopoly that we were talking about. Over time, though, they had competition and the early competition was actually from a couple of families' dynasties. One was called the Sassoons, a Jewish family from Baghdad actually, who got pushed out of Baghdad and settled in Mumbai. The Sassoon docs are still there in Mumbai. You can visit those. But the other big family that got into this was the Forbes family. And it is not, as you said, it's not related to the Forbes magazine, it's unrelated. But the Forbes family was Americans. So the Americans did the Forbes family and the Americans did about 20% of all the opium trading into China. They were based out of Boston. You hear this term, Boston Brahmins, a very wealthy Boston family. There's probably more than one, but the Forbes family was the big one. There's actually a museum I haven't been to it yet, it's on my bucket list next time I'm in Boston Their old family has... Their house has been turned into a museum of the China trade, and they were big collectors of Chinese art, antiquities, paintings, and and the like, and that's all on display there. But they traded about 20% of the opium. They they still are a very prominent family in The United States. They own this private island, which you can see on Google Earth. If you go to Google Earth, look at Martha's Vineyard, and then just to the west of Martha's Vineyard, between Martha's Vineyard and the mainland, there's this long skinny island. It's, like, probably a third the size of Martha's Vineyard. I mean, it's a very big private island, but maybe the biggest private island in America. That's just for the Forbes family. And the patriarch of the Forbes family is John Kerry. He's... The the family is still very powerful, and they... People think John Kerry made his money by marrying the ketchup, the Heinz ketchup fortune, but actually no, he had his own fortune long before that, the Forbes family. And I don't think China took lightly to the fact that Obama made him the secretary of state to negotiate with them because they have a long memory. Mhmm.
00:30:02 · Ryan Petersen, Ty Morse
I've never heard this written about, but I don't think, there was that famous incident where the Chinese did not, bring out the red carpet and Obama had trouble getting off of air force one because they didn't bring out, like, stairs. And I... My my personal conspiracy theory is that they remember the Forbes family trading all this opium into their country because we would not take kindly either if the cartels that were trading fentanyl into The United States also had a navy and showed up and took over our cities and, you know, started blasting the San Francisco Bay, like, we would not be very happy. We'd probably have a long memory for that as well. [00:30:40] S0: I would love to talk about the Jewish trading networks. And before we start recording, you were talking about how basically being able to trade on paper notes on trust versus actually hard currency and having to ship silver all over the place was a huge benefit. So tell me about that.