He was born in the red dust of a defeated South with no money, no name, and no empire waiting for him — just a single leaf of cured tobacco in a boy's hand. By the time James Buchanan "Buck" Duke was finished, he had built and lost one of the most total monopolies in American history, then turned around and built a second empire out of falling water and electricity, then poured his fortune into hospitals and a university that still carries his name. In this episode of the MR. HANSoN Podcast, we trace the pattern beneath the man: how Buck Duke saw tobacco not as a product but as a system, how he weaponized a machine every other tobacco man laughed at, how the government broke his trust in 1911 — and how he had already moved on to the rivers. From the Bonsack cigarette machine to the American Tobacco Company, from the antitrust dissolution to the dams ...