Jason Feifer: This is Pessimists Archive, I’m Jason Feifer. If you were a British man who liked coffee, the 1670s were a interesting time for you. Coffee houses had sprung up all over town where a man would gather to sip this hot new beverage and talk about the news, but they just wouldn’t be left in peace. First in 1674 came the women’s petition. It was a pamphlet literally called, the women’s petition against coffee, which presented itself as a plea from the sex starved women of England, whose husbands were so addicted to coffee, that they lost all interest in a good shag. Here’s from the petition.
Voice Clip (British Reader): For can any woman of sense or spirit endure with patience, that when she approaches the nuptial bed, expecting a man that should answer the vigor of her flames, she on the contrary should only meet a bed full of bones and hug a meager useless corpse.
Jason Feifer: The men had responded with their own pamphlet claiming, among other things, and here we go with my bad British accent, quote, “Collects and settles the Spirits, makes the erection more Vigorous, the Ejaculation more full, adds a spiritualescency to the Sperme, and renders it more firm and suitable to the Gusto of the womb, and proportionate to the ardours and expectation too, of the female Paramour”, end quote. And that seemed to be that, the men went back to the coffee houses and the women went back to not having sex, I suppose, and all well in coffee land until next year on December 30th, 1675, when Londoners opened the London Gazette and discovered a proclamation from the king, King Charles II, it said that coffee houses quote, “Have produced very evil and dangerous effects as well for that many trades men and others do they’re in misspend their time”, end quote, and that starting in January, they’d all be banned.
Jason Feifer: And here’s the crazy thing about these two little coffee scuffles, neither of them, neither of them are unique in history. In fact, quite the opposite, in this back-to-back anti-coffee spasm, England managed to summarize at least 500 years of endlessly repetitive coffee history. Consider the two moments. One is about health. That coffee is debilitating and dangerous. The other is about politics. That coffee makes people dangerous. Across time, continents and cultures, these are the themes that keep repeating about coffee. It is arguably one of history’s most scandalous drinks, which all sounds a little crazy of course, because today coffee is as scandalous as a donut. And I don’t mean a pumpkin spice donut, which actually is a little scandalous. I mean like basic glaze, just listen to the numbers here, in 2017, 62% of Americans woke up every morning and had a cup of coffee, which is up from 57% the year before.
Jason Feifer: According to a survey from the national coffee association in England, T-cells are tanking while coffee consumption has tripled since the 1970s leading the Washington Post to run a piece headline, to quote, “The slow death of the most British thing there is”, end quote. In fact, if you want to find a place that bans coffee today, you pretty much have to dig so far down that your inside a creepy shop in a horror movie, nobody saw called Troll 2.
Voice Clip (Troll 2): Can I help you?
Voice Clip (Troll 2): Coffee?
Voice Clip (Troll 2): There’s no coffee here in Nilbog, it’s the devil’s drink.
Jason Feifer: The devil’s drink. The clearly underpaid writers of Troll 2 didn’t come up with that by the way, that is literally what coffee was once called. So, the question of our episode is why. Why for so many sultans and monarchs throughout time was the best part of waking up, not to Folgers in their cup? Why did America wants not just not run on Dunkin, but literally ran away from Dunkin? Or well, the Dunkin of its time. Anyway, to understand it all. We first need to understand where coffee came from in the first place, or at least the best the historical record can tell us.
Mark Pendergrast: Arabica coffee, which is the good stuff grows wild in Ethiopia. And that is where it was first discovered. We’re not quite sure when.
Jason Feifer: This is Mark Pendergrast, author of a book called Uncommon Grounds, The History of Coffee and How it Transformed our World.
Mark Pendergrast: There are references to what appear to be coffee as early as a thousand AD. But it’s pretty clear that nobody figured out how to roast it and grind it up and infuse it in hot water the way we currently it until sometime in the 1400s. It was adopted at first by Sufi Monks to keep them awake for their midnight prayers.
Jason Feifer: Which is an interesting start considering the fears that would come later. Coffee didn’t start out as a recreational beverage, it was a tool embraced for religious purposes, though by the 1500s, it had made its way more broadly into the Arab world. People would get together in little rooms and serve coffee in an elaborate ritual. The coffee would be brought to a boil three times in a copper pot and then poured into small cups with the server carefully shaking the pot so that a little froth topped each cup. These were functionally the first coffee houses, and they became a place where people would come to talk, entertain, do business. And it appears, write some naughty things.
Mark Pendergrast: The Governor of Mecca whose name was Khair Beg, in 1511, got very upset because people were apparently being affected by coffee to write satirical verses about him and he didn’t appreciate that.
Jason Feifer: So, Khair Beg rounded up some religious scholars and got them to agree that coffee was like alcohol, which is to say, a drug that should be banned by the Koran. Then in 1511, he banned coffee houses in Mecca, but it did not last long because as it turns out, Khair Beg’s boss was the Sultan of Cairo. And the Sultan of Cairo had himself a steady coffee drinking habit. And he did not appreciate this sudden reinterpretation of religious law. So, the world’s first known coffee ban was swiftly reversed, and Khair Beg had to go sooth his fragile ego in some other way. As coffee became more popular, a sturdy economy started to be built around it. And some of the early parts of that economy are still with us. For example, the Yemeni port of Mocha became a place where coffee beans were exported. And so coffee from that region became known as Mocha.
Jason Feifer: The Ottoman Turks were occupying Yemen at the time and they did all they could to maintain a monopoly over these coffee beans. But, of course, smugglers managed to sneak seeds or even whole trees out. By the 1600s, the Dutch had gotten involved and were transporting trees all over the world, including, and you might recognize this place, the Indonesian island of Java. So, now coffee is making its way through Europe, but its arrival in new lands, doesn’t always go well. For one, coffee was thought of as a Muslim drink, which is why some religious leaders started calling it, you guessed it.
Voice Clip (Troll 2): It’s the devil’s drink.
Jason Feifer: And now here, the devil’s drink was invading Christian Europe.
Mark Pendergrast: So, one of the stories about coffee is that Pope Clement VIII, who died in 1605, so this would have been quite early on in terms of Europe, decided he liked coffee. And he said, “Why, this Satan’s drank…”, because it was a Muslim drink, “… Is so delicious that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it. We shall fool Satan by baptizing it and making it a truly Christian beverage.” I don’t know whether that’s true or not. There’re all these stories.
Jason Feifer: Pope’s blessing or not, coffee was still seen as a threat across Europe, especially in areas where some other drink had been enjoying a very long monopoly. Wine merchants, for example, railed against coffee, which led to a hysteria against the new drink. French doctors seem to try one upping each other on terrifying diagnoses.
Mark Pendergrast: And one of the young physicians blasted coffee, asserting that it quote, “Dried up the cerebrospinal fluid and the convolutions, the upshot being general exhaustion paralysis and impotence.”
Jason Feifer: And this seems like a good place to stop and split our story into two because as you can see, objections to coffee keep ping-ponging back and forth between health and government. So, let’s take them separately, starting with health. We can pick up where that physician and his cerebrospinal fluid left off.
Mark Pendergrast: This was the first of many assertions that coffee rendered people impotent, and that it was terrible for you. And it was frequently expression pseudo-scientific terms like that that sound very impressive about the cerebrospinal fluid and blah, blah, blah. A few years after that, another French physician defended coffee strongly to the point that he prescribed coffee enemas to sweeten the lower bowel. So, there was a lot of pseudoscience on all sides.
Jason Feifer: As we already know, When coffee made its way into England, the women’s petition would claim the coffee made men impotent. And in America, coffee would come to be feared by a very, very influential man who you might know as the guy who made your morning cornflakes.
Mark Pendergrast: John Harvey Kellogg said, “The tea and coffee habit is a grave menace to the health of the American people. Tea and coffee are [inaudible 00:10:43] drugs and their sale and use ought to be prohibited by law.” And he alleged that quote, “Insanity has been traced to the coffee habit.”
Jason Feifer: In the 1870s, Kellogg and his brother took over a health institute and called it Battle Creek Sanitarium. It became the hotspot for wealthy and famous people to come and be treated by total junk science, which amounted to no medicine, and no coffee, and no masturbation, for some reason, and lots, and lots, and lots of enemas. No, seriously, they called it hydrotherapy, but it was just a lot of squirting water up your butt. They were also really into treating people with light and air, and they believed food should be chewed down to its atomic level. Patients goals were four odor-free bowel movements a day. And you know, as I say all this, I realized, Kellogg’s Sanitarium is basically Gwyneth Paltrow’s goop, but minus all the glamorous selfies.
Voice Clip (Goop): There all also workout classes, crystal therapy, sound healing or readings, and antioxidant IV drips with vitamin boosters.
Jason Feifer: That was from a vice video about the Goop Wellness Summit. Though, fun fact, Gwyneth Paltrow actually follows Pessimists Archive on Twitter, so in case you’re listening Gwyneth, “Hi.” Anyway, back to the Sanitarium, one of the regulars was a guy named C. W. Post, who’d go on to bring the world, Honey Bunches of Oats and Grape-Nuts. But at the time, Post was particularly interested in a fake caffeine-free coffee made out of barley and other grains that the Sanitarium served. So, then he went out and made his own and he called it Postum.
Mark Pendergrast: So, in 1895, Post first manufactured Postum. And he had incredibly effective negative ads that drove the coffee people in saying, let me just read you some of them, “Remember, you can recover from any ordinary disease by discontinuing coffee and poor food and using Postum food coffee.”
Jason Feifer: Any disease. You know what I wonder about wild, totally broad claims like this? How do they survive when they’re so easily disproven? I mean, what is it? It does not take much to test this out. If you have a disease, stopped drinking coffee, do you still have the disease? Oh, you do? Then why are you listening to this? But anyway, Postum was a huge hit and kept pumping out ads that are just, they’re just so bananas that I’m going to let Mark go on for a while here.
Mark Pendergrast: By 1897, he was a millionaire because of Postum. He talked about coffee heart, coffee neuralgia, brain fag, caused by drinking too much coffee. One of his headlines said, “Lost eyesight through coffee drinking.” Another ad said, “It is safe to say that one person in every three among coffee users has some incipient or advanced form of disease.” Coffee contained, quote, “A poisonous drug caffeine, which belongs in the same class of alkaloids with cocaine, morphine, nicotine, and strychnine.” Another ad featured coffee spilling slowly from a cup, accompanied by an alarming text, “Coffee dripping wears away the stone, perhaps a hole has been started in you. Try leaving off coffee for 10 days and use Postum food coffee.” Another ad, “Is your yellow streak the coffee habit? Does it reduce your work time? Kill your energy? Push you into the big crowd of mongrels? Denton, what thoroughbred blood you may have and neutralize all your efforts to make money and fame?”
Mark Pendergrast: Postum also claimed that it was the scientific way to repair brains and rebuild waste tissues. Sooner or later, the steady drugging of coffee will tear down the strong man or woman in the stomach, bowels, hearts, kidneys, nerves, brain, or some other organ connected with a nervous system will be attacked.
Jason Feifer: I’ve never heard of Postum, but it turns out it’s still around. It was discontinued in 2007, but then revived by company called Eliza’s Quest Food in 2013. But we’re skipping ahead of ourselves because by the 1960s and seventies, Postum’s advertising was suddenly backed up by a string of terrifying scientific studies.
Mark Pendergrast: By the late 70s and early 80s, coffee appeared to be implicated in birth defects, pancreatic cancer, heart disease, breast lumps, cholesterol levels. During the 1980s, coffee was associated with over 100 diseases and disorders.
Jason Feifer: Coffee consumption in America fell from 58% in 1977 to 50% in 1988. It’s also recent, which seems crazy when you think about our love affair with coffee today. I mean, there are people in the industry right now who grew up in a totally different atmosphere. People like Peter Martin, a Professor of Psychiatry and Pharmacology at Vanderbilt University, School of Medicine.
Peter Martin: When I first was approached to start the Institute for Coffee Studies, I was very reluctant to engage in this because in medical school, I was taught and this, I went to medical school in the 70s, I was taught that coffee was bad for you.
Jason Feifer: And it should be noted, the people who first approached him were in the coffee industry. But Peter decided to dive into the scientific literature and he discovered something really important about those studies from the 60s and 70s. They were looking at correlation, not causation. So, if you took 100 people who drank coffee and 100 people who didn’t drink coffee, the hundred coffee drinkers were likely to have worse health, but that was because they were also more likely to be alcohol drinkers and cigarette smokers.
Peter Martin: But if you scientifically, statistically, tease out the lifestyle effects that are sometimes associated with coffee drinking, and just to look at coffee, per se, it becomes very clear that coffee is very good for health.
Jason Feifer: So, he did found the Institute for Coffee Studies, although he’s not there anymore. But what he’s found during his career and what he’s seen replicated by other researchers is that coffee is nothing to fear, it’s nutritious. It seems to even help the body ward off disease.
Peter Martin: There are very good studies showing the benefits of coffee drinking with respect to cirrhosis, with respect to Alzheimer’s disease, with respect to depression and suicidality, and a whole variety of cancers.
Jason Feifer: And let’s not get carried away here like the 17th century, French physicians prescribing coffee enemas. So many enemas in this episode, right? Look, nobody’s saying that drinking coffee will cure cancer or that coffee is good for everyone at all times at any quantity. But the important takeaway here is, generally speaking, Postums was wrong. Drink your coffee. Enjoy your coffee. It’s fine. And for the average healthy individual, how much coffee is too much? Peter offers a simple formula. If you cannot sleep at night, cut back. There it is.
Peter Martin: So, if you’re drinking 10 cups of coffee, go down to nine, and don’t drink the last one of the day. And if you’re still having trouble sleeping, go down to eight. And if you’re still having trouble, go down to seven. And if you can sleep well with six, keep on drinking six.
Speaker 8: Hmm. How many cups a day do you drink? I’m sure that’s the other question everyone asks, yeah.
Peter Martin: Yeah. I drink one really big one in the morning.
Speaker 8: That sounds very reasonable.
Peter Martin: I mean, it’s probably one or it’s probably more of a big one that’s about two.
Jason Feifer: So, that’s health concerns. Now, let’s rewind the clock and look at our second coffee objection, which is that coffee leads to coffee houses and coffee houses lead to an attack against the government, and thus the coffee house must be shut down. You remember, of course, the Governor of Mecca and 1511 and his ban against coffee houses. Some version of this story would play itself out over and over again in Constantinople in the 15 and 16 hundreds, a series of sultans banned coffee or coffee houses because they suspected coffee drinkers were plotting against them.
Jason Feifer: Murad IV’s ban in the 1630s had become the most famous of them because he just kept upping the ante. First, coffee houses were banned. Then when coffee houses operated in secret, he had them raised. Then he banned coffee entirely, as well as, tobacco and wine. And if someone was caught violating the law, they’d be flogged. And if they were caught again, they be given a coffee enema, kidding. I’m kidding. They’d actually be sewn up in a bag and thrown in the river, or so the legend has it. So, what’s going on here? When I asked Mark Pendergrast about why government leaders kept targeting coffee houses, here’s what he said.
Mark Pendergrast: One of the effects of coffee, and whether it’s the caffeine or all the other more subtle ingredients, is that people tend to become a more critical, more thoughtful, and less afraid to say what they think. So, many revolutions were planned in coffee houses, including the French Revolution, the American Revolution, et cetera. And there were protests, coffee houses outside military bases during the Vietnam War. And all of them created problems for the establishment.
Jason Feifer: And this filled me with so many questions like, “Wait, is it true that coffee changes the way we think? And why weren’t other gathering places seen as equally dangerous? Like at least in England, there were also alehouses and the king wasn’t trying to shut them down. Was it just because drunk people make for bad revolutionaries?” So, let’s get some answers by zooming in on the British coffee house, which two different kings tried to ban. All right, here’s the scene. It’s 1675 and you’re walking into a coffee house, which is not like a Starbucks. So, nobody’s getting a frappuccino. Coffee houses at the time were actually just a room in someone’s house.
Brian Cowen: The houses there weren’t always divided up in the same way as they are today. So, you might have a coffee room that was also leading into private chambers where people would live.
Jason Feifer: This is Brian Cowan, a Professor of History at Yale University and author of the book, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse. So, you’d walk into this room in someone’s house and there’d be a bench, and a table, and possibly a bar where the proprietor is actually serving the coffee, and coffee might have cost a penny, at least we think that, because coffee houses had been nicknamed penny universities, though Brian says we don’t have a great record of the coffee price. And anyway, people weren’t there just for the coffee, the coffee houses also had newspapers and pamphlets.
Brian Cowen: You know, that’s a big part of why people went to the coffee houses. It wasn’t just to get coffee, but it was to read the news and to hear the news. And so, there would also be people, obviously, gossiping and talking about what was going on, current events and such. But you’d sometimes have people that would read the news too, because not everybody was literate at that time.
Jason Feifer: And this wasn’t by accident. The coffee houses were intentionally distinguishing themselves from the alehouses, which had existed before the coffee houses, but we’re not the kind of place an educated fellow would go.
Brian Cowen: Alehouses scenes was a lower class [inaudible 00:22:03], scum and villainy where the lower orders go to get drunk and get wild. And the coffee houses tried to promote a more sober image.
Jason Feifer: But here’s the thing, even the act of getting together and talking about the news made the British government anxious. Keep in mind, we’re talking about the restoration here, which is when the English, Scottish, and Irish monarchies were all restored under Charles II, which meant that our friend, Charles probably wasn’t feeling very chill, so lots could, and eventually did, go wrong. And one order of business was restricting the news. By law, newspapers were made with a printing press that had to be licensed. And only one license was given.
Brian Cowen: The Gazette, after the restoration, was established as the only legitimate newspaper, the only licensed newspaper. And it specialized mainly in foreign news, which merchants needed quite a lot, because they were relying on foreign news in order to make business decisions and such. But it had very little to almost none of domestic news because that was considered to be none of your business.
Jason Feifer: But people still wanted domestic news, of course. So, they got around the system by literally hand writing little newspapers, which were called manuscripts. And guess where the manuscripts became really popular.
Brian Cowen: And a lot of those manuscript newsletter writers set up shop in coffee houses and they got their information from people they were meeting in coffee houses. They were often actually writing them down in coffee houses. They were certainly circulating them in coffee houses. Coffee house proprietors would subscribe to these manuscript newsletters as well.
Jason Feifer: And that is how we end up with Charles II going after coffee houses. I had quoted a little bit of his proclamation earlier in the show, but let’s revisit it. So, he says that coffee houses, quote, “Have produced very evil and dangerous effects…”, end quote, “… Upon people.” And he describes them as, quote, “Idle and disaffected”, end quote. And then he puts them in their place by writing that quote, “Many tradesman and others do their in misspend much of their time, which might and probably would otherwise be employed in and about their lawful callings and affairs.” Their lawful callings and affairs. Because the government, the news, the decisions that impact people’s lives, they are not as far as Charles II is concerned, these people’s own affairs. But you know what is these tradesman’s callings and affairs? Their own damn businesses, that’s what. Coffee was making a lot of people a lot of money. And so, they pushed back hard against this coffee house ban. And about 10 days later, Charles II backed off.
Brian Cowen: It’s a classic failure. Yeah. He tries to assert royal prerogative and meets a lot of resistance. There are a lot of business owners that are [inaudible 00:25:00] stand to lose a lot of money. There are a lot of people that say, “Look, legally, this isn’t going to fly. I know you’re the king, but you can’t just tell people they can’t practice their business anymore.”
Jason Feifer: Charles’ younger brother, James II, eventually succeeded Charles, and tried and failed to enact the same ban, which is great in theory, hooray for businesses of coffee, except here’s the horrible downside to this. The business of coffee houses may have been noble, but the business of coffee was shameful. At first, people drank their coffee with milk, but by the late 17th century, they were also drinking it with sugar, thanks to the rise of the plantation slave economy in the Caribbean, and coffee itself was driving a slave economy around the world. Of course, none of this was particularly concerning to the coffee drinkers at the time, but we should keep it in mind. So, looking back, the ban on coffee houses wasn’t exactly about coffee. It was about what happens when free thinking people gather and discuss, but that still leaves open a question, did coffee itself have anything to do with it? Were revolutions planned in coffee houses because they were places to meet? Or did drinking coffee make people somehow more revolutionary? On this point, paranoid government officials may have actually been onto something, because here’s Peter Martin again, the coffee researcher from Vanderbilt.
Peter Martin: Coffee does not put ideas into a person’s head that aren’t already there. Coffee may allow one to better focus and better find solutions.
Jason Feifer: Revolutions, in other words, are not planned on pure caffeine. They’re not planned on caffeine pills, because if you’re a child of the 90s, you’d know exactly how that’s going to turn out.
Voice Clip (Saved By The Bell): (singing). I’m so scared.
Jason Feifer: But coffee, which keeps you alert and yet calm? If you say you want a revolution, well, that’s a great start. And this, right here, is what I would argue, holds the key to coffee’s endurance. Think back to that first ban in Mecca, the governor may have hated coffee houses, but his boss, the Sultan of Cairo, loved coffee. Why? Because coffee does not discriminate. Coffee is simply an innovation, a discovery that has been honed and refined and put to use, and much like other innovations throughout history, innovations that have been opposed and then embraced and then absorbed into the fabric of our lives, this innovation will benefit all who use it.
Jason Feifer: What can enlighten the masses can also enlighten their leaders. And if one leader can’t see that, it’s a pretty safe bet that the next one will, which leads me to my favorite quote from a coffee opponent, it comes from a Frederick II, also known as Frederick the Great, who ruled Prussia for 46 years during the 18th century. He set up a state monopoly for coffee with taxes that made the drink prohibitively expensive. And this was meant to make money, yes, but also to discourage people from drinking coffee in the first place.
Voice Clip (Frederick the Great): It is disgusting to notice the increase in the quantity of coffee used by my subjects and the like amount of money that goes out of the country. In consequence, my people must drink beer. His majesty was brought up on beer. And so were his ancestors.
Jason Feifer: Frederick the Great died in 1786. He was succeeded by his nephew, Frederick William II, who lifted the monopoly on coffee. It was, once again, a time of coffee for all, until the next ban, of course, which no matter when it was [inaudible 00:28:29], no matter why it was enacted, would surely not last long.
Jason Feifer: And that’s our episode. But, let me tell you, I have two extra goodies for you at the end of these credits. One, I’m going to tell you a personal detail that will shock and delight you. Shock and delight. And two, I have an outtake from that Frederick the Great reading you just heard that we just couldn’t, in good conscious, let go to waste. So, you’re going to want to hear both. And first, let me tell you, hey, if you like this podcast, please do us a favor. Subscribe to the show, wherever you get your podcasts. And please, please, please, please leave us a review on iTunes, which will help us reach a larger audience. We also have an awesome Twitter feed at pessimists arc, where we’re posting a regular stream of pessimists throughout history. And you can also get in touch with us directly at Pessimists Archive at gmail dot com. And now for some thanks. The British reader you heard at the beginning of this episode. Well, not actually British.
Heather Spiegel Auden: My name is Heather Spiegel Auden.
Jason Feifer: And you can find her on some podcasts, including…
Heather Spiegel Auden: Diary of a Madman and You Are Here Scifi, Choose your own adventure.
Jason Feifer: Our Frederick the Great, on the other hand, an actual German guy.
Voice Clip (British Reader): My name is [inaudible 00:29:31] and my podcast is called [foreign language 00:29:36], pretty famous podcast in Germany. And the fan is German podcast, of course.
Jason Feifer: Thanks again to the experts interviewed in this episode. Again, they are Mark Pendergrast, author of a book called, Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How it Transformed our World, as well as Brian Cowan, author of the book, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse, and Peter Martin, a Professor of Psychiatry and Pharmacology at Vanderbilt University, School of Medicine.
Jason Feifer: You can find links to everyone’s work, as well as, other research materials I used in this episode at our show page, pessimists dot CO. Our theme music is by Caspar Babypants. And you can find more at Babypants music dot com. And thanks, as always, to the folks at timeline dot com, where we run accompanying articles for our episodes. Pessimists Archive was created by Louis Anslow. Our producers, this episode, were Louie and Jennifer Ritter, and we were edited by Chris Cornelis. And now, as promised, two goodies. First up, a confession, ready for it? I don’t drink coffee, literally never once if I walked up to a counter and said, “I’ll have a coffee”, and then drank that coffee. I just don’t like the caffeine really, makes me jittery. But don’t worry, the coffee industrial complex has already reached my two and a half year old son, who knows exactly what Pete the Cat is holding in one of his favorite books.
Jason Feifer: What is Pete the Cat holding?
Son: Coffee.
Jason Feifer: Coffee?
Son: Yeah.
Jason Feifer: Yeah.
Jason Feifer: And now, finally, we have Frederick the Great, laying it on really thick.
Voice Clip (Frederick the Great): Is disgusting to notice the increase in the quantity of coffee used by my subjects and to like amount of monies that goes out of the country in consequence. My people must drink beer. His majesty was brought up on beer and so were his ancestors.
Jason Feifer: I deliver folks. I promise and I always deliver. Thank you again for listening to Pessimists Archive. My name is Jason Feifer and we’ll see you in the near future.