Behind the Smoke with John Safran Pt. I

John Safran on why we should be suspicious when one of the worlds’ biggest tobacco companies rebrands itself as a health enterprise.

Transcript

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Going where the silence is. The QUO Podcast. Welcome to The QUO Podcast, I'm Ally. Today, I'm going to be speaking to writer, filmmaker, and author of Puff Piece, John Safran. Puff Piece investigates Philip Morris and their attempt to rebrand from Big Tobacco company, contributing to the eight million deaths from traditional cigarettes a year, to a supposedly socially-minded start-up innovator, bold enough to imagine a smoke-free future, and provide the very smokers they hooked on cigarettes with a so-called better alternative, the IQOS. All the time while continuing to sell cigarettes and aggressively marketing them to developing countries. Thanks for joining me, John. No, thank you. Why did you set your sights on Philip Morris, and why do you think their actions weren't eliciting much rage in the community before your book? I was just minding my own business, a couple of World No Tobacco Days ago, and World No Tobacco Day, that's the United Nations, because they're against cancer. So they're trying to end cigarettes. And Philip Morris, the Marlboro people, they took out a full-page advertisement, on the eve of World No Tobacco Day, saying "We are shutting down as a cigarette company, and relaunching as a health enterprise, dedicated to getting the one billion smokers of the world, including our own customers, off cigarettes". I was like, "Wow!", is this like the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the end of apartheid, because, like, things happen. You know, so it's not like, even though it sounds strange, like it could be, it could be like the end of cigarettes and Philip Morris are just saying, "Yeah, we've we've got to stop", or whatever, and then I started poking around a bit and you'll never guess it. You can't always take what the makers of Marlboro cigarettes say at face value. Sometimes the makers of Marlboro cigarettes have a little slippery second agenda, and I was just, I was so fascinated, both by this story of them relaunching as a health enterprise, or trying to get away with relaunching as a health enterprise, and then also that, this incredible thing was going unnoticed. And I was like, I was so confused by it at first, I mean. And so this is, so consequential, what they're doing. This isn't like, "Oh, McDonald's says, we've got healthier alternatives", and everyone's like"Bullshit. We know Big Macs make us fat. But we know, we get it. You're going to say they're healthier because they've got salad in them or something. But we get it.", or whatever, this is like, such a brand new ... the most audacious hustle I've ever seen. Well, you make a really compelling argument as to why we should care deeply about, like, cigarettes and tobacco companies. But you also, in your book, sort of touch upon whether this is like a generational issue between what riles up millennials and Gen Z's, and what riles up Gen X's. And this idea that, you know, corporations, more broadly, are no longer public enemy number one, sort of. I feel like there's been this acknowledgement that everyone's complicit in corporate tactics to a degree, and it's sort of impossible to escape this completely, but you can mitigate it. And this idea that, you know, another thing that you kind of touch upon, is this idea that rejecting corporations entirely is potentially a privilege. So why do you think there's been a culture shift around the way corporations are viewed, which in turn mitigates and determines what kind of makes people really angry and riled up? Yeah, what do you think it says about how society is changing, and do you like the way society's changing? Well to give, like, a backdrop, when I was young, I'm Generation X, and when we were at university and we were progressives, like corporations were just seen as the be all and, not the be all end all, but the top of the pyramid of explaining why there were problems in the world. And, so even if you were like a good corporation, you're still kind of a bad corporation, because you're still a corporation. It was just, how the world was seen by progressives, and companies were seen as, even if they weren't explicitly doing this, but they were just seen as, if you own a corporation, whatever it is, it's kind of right-wing, like corporations are right-wing, like capitalism's right-wing, and we're left wing. And, for instance, advertisements for corporations were ... they tapped into things like family values of nuclear families and conservative values and patriotism, and being in the case of America, very patriotic to America, and in the case of Australia, patriotic to Australia. Like that's just, corporations ... that was just the starting point of, like, viewing corporations that way, and, there's just been this shift in the backdrop of the world, that it just changed because there's been the introduction, and I think part of it is this new kind of corporate behemoths like Apple and Google. And for whatever reason, maybe there's good reasons, and you know, like I'm not whatever. But for whatever reason, Apple, Google, these new big corporate behemoths that have decided that on a veneer at least, and possibly on a deeper level, I don't wanna be too cynical or whatever, that they're going to, they're not going to go with, they're advertising, the way they project their company brand, is not going to be"We're patriotic and we're into the nuclear family", or whatever. They're going to say that"We're into these progressive values. We think it's outrageous that black people, LGBT+ people are treated in a way, treated in a bad way, and we're going to ...". So, the corporations just now, the perception of it, by young, progressive people, is different to the perception of corporations back when I was a kid. Like now, they're seen as, maybe a force for good. Maybe they're not seen as right-wing or whatever. For better or worse, I'm not even, I'm just laying out the lay of the land here, by the way, I'm not even like saying whether it's good or bad, and I'm not even saying, like, maybe Google and Apple are sincerely progressive, and maybe that's a good thing or whatever. It's not that, it's just like, I'm trying to get in the heads of any of the youth who are listening to this, that, I can't tell you how this just was not the perception of like, if you're progressive back when I was younger. So I discovered in my book that, not that Philip Morris are intentionally doing this or whatever, but they just happened to be the happy beneficiaries of the fact that, we're not looking at corporations as being the big public enemy number one danger of the world anymore. And, I kind of in a comedic way, like point out some of these sort of tangles and ironies, in that, I say, and I'm sure people would go, "Yeah that's a good. Yeah, that makes sense", or whatever, that if a Philip Morris executive, had posts on Instagram, a photo of them hunting a lion on safari in Africa, and they've got the dead lion that they just shot with their rifle, that would go viral. That would be like, this is a moral problem, and Philip Morris, the Marlboro cigarette people would have to go into damage control, like, there's an executive, and he went on a hunting safari in Africa, and there's a dead lion. The executive would probably lose their job, or whatever, and then it's like, but compare that with the fact that, these executives are complicit, and run a company that, like, kills eight million people a year. And we're just in this ... in 2021, we're in this like, really interesting landscape where somehow, that's not un-woke. If you are enjoying this podcast, head to thequo.com.au, and follow us on our socials, using the handle @thequoau. So it's interesting that they're able to, yeah, as you say, maintain this veneer of wokeness when even just the fact that they're aggressively marketing cigarettes in places like the Philippines should be enough to kind of recognise how they're sort of targeting developing nations and marginalised groups in the very same breath as saying that they support them. Yeah, I mean, when this book really came alive to me, because I mean, people who don't know me, I'm like a comedian, I'm a storyteller, and I actually think I'm more of a, I'm like, driven by storytelling more than I'm driven, for instance, by like, or at least that's my like, number one. That's what I think about in my head, when I'm pursuing these things or pursuing my books or my TV shows, I'm going, "What's the story?", and I get really excited by stories. And even though on some subconscious level, or on some secondary level, there might be this, that means there's this morality tale. Like, in my head, I'm just just way more excited. What gets me excited is, like, stories, and like, things that haven't been told yet, or whatever. So what really, I remember when I was looking into this, what really, like, this really animated me about following this story, was when I saw that Philip Morris, through a foundation that's fully funded by Philip Morris. So there's something called the Foundation For A Smoke Free World, so that sounds like, Quit Victoria, or the World Health Organisation, but the Foundation For A Smoke Free World, even though it's got this, it says it's a non-profit and all this stuff like that. They're 100 percent funded by Philip Morris, the Marlboro cigarette people. And anyway, they 100 percent sponsor and fund this Maori, Indigenous health organisation in New Zealand, and this Indigenous health organisation that advocates for Indigenous health in New Zealand, 100 percent sponsored, funded by Philip Morris, the Marlboro people. They come up with these arguments, these thoroughly modern arguments for why, like governments and non-profits, shouldn't be trying to encourage Maori people to stop smoking. And their argument is, and it's so audacious, but sort of like, so fascinating, you got to kind of respect them in some weird way. So their argument is that, when you have people who aren't Maori, noting that there's a, even that's a bit of a fudge because it's like, the Maori people are also noticing that there's Maori ... anyway, when you have these organisations who are saying,"Maori people are smoking at a much higher rate, therefore they're dying. So therefore we should have campaigns that are trying to encourage Maori people to stop smoking". So this Philip Morris funded Indigenous Organisation, their spin on that is that these outside groups are like colonisers. So, you know, so the World Health Organisation, or like New Zealand, whatever their version of Quit Victoria is, when they're kind of doing a campaign saying, "Hey, you should get off cigarettes because, it's like, you're going to die", to Maori people, that's like they're Captain Cook, and like colonising, like, telling Indigenous people what to do. And you know, in this Black Lives Matter world, like, where the hell do people who aren't Maori, be telling Maori people what to do? Like, that's racist. So people trying to lower Maori people from smoking, are somehow colonisers like Captain Cook, and I can't even quite get my head together. Somehow Philip Morris are Eddie Mabo in all of this. So, they're not telling, Phillip Morris the Marlboro people, aren't telling Marlboro people to stop smoking Marlboros, so therefore that's for, that's Indigenous sovereignty, because it's allowing Indigenous people to do what they want. And when I read this, I was just like, "Man, this is so, like, stimulating", like, I don't want to sound like a real opportunist or whateverlike that. I was like, "This is insane", and I was really interested because I was kind of, on some level, aware that companies do this whole woke thing, and so even though I found it fascinating them getting into the gay community and sort of, doing that, I was like,"Yeah, I accepted that, like, I expected that", you know, that's, you know, companies to be, you know, white. But when they were like, this thing is absolutely audacious thing of pitching people who are trying to reduce Maori health rates, Maori cigarette smoking rates, as being Captain Cook, I was like,"This is insane", no one's ever written about this before, and everyone else would be scared to write about this, except for me because I'm a storytelling kamikaze. I'm definitely the person to write about this, because I'll find this fascinating, and I'll also not, like, be kind of like, "... maybe they're right, maybe. I don't want to be a white outsider telling this story", or whatever like that. Yeah, no, I find that really interesting. I've got a question about Dr Glover a bit later, but before we go on, I just wanted you to explain what an IQOS/HeatStick is, and how it exists in this space between a vape and a traditional cigarette. Yes, like, that's very important to establish. So, Philip Morris, faced with this problem, that menthol cigarettes have been banned across Europe, and were banned across Europe in 2020. They said, "Okay, we'll go along with that". And then they said, "Oh, listen, we've got this new product, whilst we've got your attention", and God knows it's not a cigarette. And then they show the product and I'm holding it up here. I don't know is this, like, an audio or a video podcast? It's well, it's an audio podcast. But I can see that it's, it looks like a cigarette to me, it looks so much like a cigarette. So it's tobacco rolled in paper, with a filter at one end, that you plant between your lips. Inhaling nicotine and tobacco into your lungs, which you then exhale, a discharge that looks, really, a lot like smoke, and contains smoke constituents. But they're, Philip Morris is saying, this isn't a cigarette. And it's like, "Why is it not a cigarette?". And they've done a few little linguistic things, that's got to do with words, and bending meaning, and language, and then also a few little nudges and, you know, reframing exactly how it works, "It's slightly different to how a cigarette works", they claim. So they claim this isn't a cigarette, and then amazingly, it worked. So all across Europe now, you cannot buy, you can go to Germany or Slovenia or whatever, you can't buy menthol cigarettes. And so this would have been an incredible beginning of the end for Philip Morris. But, you can buy menthol HeatSticks that just look exactly like a cigarette, but shorter. So the reason, probably a way to explain what this is, because it's a very complicated thing, is to explain what a cigarette is, and then say how are cigarettes different to a vape, and then how this new product, what we're talking about, is also different to a vape. So a cigarette contains tobacco leaf, and tobacco leaf is infused with nicotine, and nicotine occurs naturally in tobacco. So, and what happens is, when you light a cigarette, it generates tar. So you're inhaling tar, and tar's what is the main thing that kills you in a cigarette. Right, so then you got vaping right? And vapes have, with that your heating up, like liquid, and it contains nicotine, because you can extract nicotine from tobacco, so you can have the nicotine without the tobacco. So a vape contains nicotine, propylene glycerol, other flavourings and other agents, and that's heated up and you inhale that into your lungs. But, because it doesn't contain tobacco leaf, it doesn't generate tar. And because it doesn't generate tar, someone who's pro-vaping can fairly say, it's the truth, that the most deadly thing that's in a cigarette, tar, generated by tobacco leaf, is not in a vape, because it doesn't contain any tobacco leaf, right? Anyway, and then it becomes this other argument where like, OK, fine, it doesn't, with vaping, it doesn't contain tobacco leaf so it's not generating tar, but you're still inhaling things into your lungs, into your system, that could have consequence and, you know, perhaps dire consequences, that's, you know, separate to the fact that it doesn't generate tar. But anyway, let's park that to one side. Anyway, so then, so the reason this HeatStick that Philip Morris are putting out is different to a vape, is because it does contain tobacco leaf, so therefore it does generate tar. Therefore, the thing in this HeatStick, which they're like pitching as their big, like, gearshift, you know,"We're not like we once were", like, this contains tar like a cigarette contains tar. So, and the tar is the thing that is the main danger in a cigarette. So, yeah, it's a pretty audacious move, Philip Morris putting out this cigarette, and saying it's not a cigarette, it's a HeatStick. What you've just said sort of really highlights how Philip Morris, and I mean a lot of corporations, but especially Philip Morris, uses language to, like, to manipulate people, to misrepresent things, to sort of like cover their hypocrisy, basically. And you've touched on it before, but they're also good at shapeshifting, like you said, the Foundation for Smoke Free Future is exclusively funded by them. So, do you think that, like, the community needs to think more critically about the way corporations use language to avoid accountability? And I guess, like as a member of the community, who kind of wants to be more critical about this, and not be taken down all these rabbit holes from their shenanigans, like, how can we sort of cut through the bullshit in the words to sort of actually be able to make choices based on what their product is, not on what their product sort of purports to be, when they're so adept at using language to sort of lure us in? Yeah, I like, what I learnt through this book is that people in power, whether that's like politicians, or companies or whoever, they're really astute and alert to how, like, language builds the world, and words build the world. So in the case of Philip Morris, like, with their smoke thing. So there's a discharge coming out of this tobacco product that kind of looks like smoke, and contains smoke constituents, and they're like, "Okay, let's figure out a way that it's not smoke", even though it's this discharge from tobacco leaf that contains smoke constituents. So they realise, like, this is a word war, as much as it's a science war. And once you win the word war, you get to kind of create a reality in the world. So Philip Morris's like big challenge, which they had, they just had the audacity to do, and it paid off, and it worked, was,"How do we put out a cigarette, and just say it's not a cigarette?", and because it's, like, the word cigarette is so powerful, and has so much meaning to it, and has so much heat, and so much toxicness attached to it. I'm talking about the word, not the product. So how do we, so our game at Philip Morris is not only to go into science labs and try to, you know, work out a way that this cigarette isn't a cigarette from a science point of view, it's to go to the dictionary, to try to like, create a reality where this isn't a cigarette because,"We're going to bend the meaning of words. We're going to evaporate words that have toxic backstories to them.", and again, I say that on a linguistic level, not a science level. Like, the word 'tar', has this toxicity attached to it, like linguistically, you know, so,"How do we free ourselves and how do we continue as a company?", and that's as much a word game, as a science game. So in this like post-modern world where we all get to define our realities and say, well, words have meanings, or words have the meanings that I put on them. You've got to understand that, like, that's fine, I guess. Like on some like local level or some smaller personal level, like, I get to define things, and I get to say who I am and whatever. But you've got to understand that, like, companies and like, in this case, yeah, companies that don't have your best interests at heart, in fact, have your lungs, your heart, not at heart. Because they say they want you to inhale tobacco and tar, that they're going to take advantage of this. They're going to take advantage of this new world in which, I touch on this in my book, that we're living through a fertile time where language, and words, and meanings, are all up for grabs, and things are being redefined, and corporations are going to take advantage of that. Exactly. In your book, you also seem to be grappling with whether accepting freebies from Philip Morris like a lunch, or the potential of a trip to their research hub in Switzerland, is fundamentally compromising. And other people in your book, sort of highlight that saying no to the support of corporations like Philip Morris, you know, is a form of privilege that not everyone can take. But when it comes down to it, do you think accepting funding, in and of itself, is compromising or like, do you ever really get something for no strings attached when their whole game, when Philip Morris' whole game, is sort of on lobbying based on promoting people who might have sort of similar or complementary opinions or beliefs? Well, I mean, this is where I'm the perfect guy to be exploring this and telling the story because, I just, I'm just so drawn to all the tangles and the complexities. And when I say a tangle or a complexity, rather like a lot of other people, if they were like they're a journalist or an activist, they'd be going,"Oh, hang on, this is complicated, and this might make Philip Morris look good or something like that. I can't do this". I'm like the opposite, I'm like, I'm running, and running, and running towards the complexity. So I really heard out, and I really, I feel like in this book, I explain this really complicated thing, which I imagine myself hadn't thought about before, where this Maori dude's telling me, he's saying,"You got to understand that as Maori people, we've been, like, screwed over by the non-Maori, the white government, and we don't particularly trust them", and for good reason, right? So when, when Philip Morris comes in and says, we want to help fund you, and we want to, maybe fund research and things like that, like, we're not idiots, we know Philip Morris, we know they've got their own agenda. But, like, you know, like the non-Maori government, sort of like, they're funding, they're funding science. They've also got their agenda, and just because of our particular back story with the non-Maori government, we're like, "Sure, we're cynical about Philip Morris, but we're also cynical about the government as well". So, and that's why, he explained why he was happy for Maori people to accept funding from Philip Morris. And then this other, this Black American woman, a friend of mine, she was also telling me that, this whole thing of not accepting money from corporations, like, I brought up this thing with her where I said,"Oh, you know, when I was growing up, I noticed that, if you were like, a grunge band", and like, grunge bands are generally white, it's like,"the worst thing to do would be to be seen as attached to like a corporate sponsor", and it's like Pearl Jam were like,"We will not be working with Ticketek, because they're a corporate behemoth", and then I said, I noticed that exactly the same cultural moment as that was happening, hip hop bands, like, and which were largely black, and I point to, like, Run DMC, who were like, this was happening parallel to grunge, that they were happy to promote that, "Hey, Adidas is sponsoring us, or whoever is sponsoring us". And she said, this Black American woman said something parallel to what that Maori dude told me that, she said, like, it's sort of like, a bit of white privilege to be, like, saying,"Oh we're not going to accept money from corporations because, you know, you've worked out how to get money other ways, or you've already got money", or whatever. And she says that, this was her thing, not mine, where she said, as a Black American it's like, all money is going to be tarnished, wherever it comes by. And so, we're not necessarily going to be thinking that taking money from a corporation, is somehow more tainted than taking money, for instance, like public funding, which is from a government, that has, like, screwed over black people over the years. So I mean, that's one thing I learnt in the book from that, and like other things in my book, there's not really an answer to that. It's not like, "Then I hear that, and then I make my ruling". It's just like, the world is fascinatingly complex with lots of loose ends, which is, like, good for a storyteller obviously. But, obviously some other people just aren't comfortable with that. But yeah, I mean, at the very least, you can understand why, maybe a Maori person from New Zealand, or a Black American is, like, less concerned about, like,"Oh my god, I'm selling out if I take money from this corporation", then maybe some, you know, white person is.