Founders - #135 Joseph Pulitzer (Politics & Media)

Episode Date: July 12, 2020

What I learned from reading Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power by James McGrath Morris.----Come see a live show with me and Patrick O'Shaughnessy from Invest Like The Best on October 19th in New York City. Get your tickets here! ----Subscribe to listen to Founders Premium — Subscribers can listen to Ask Me Anything (AMA) episodes and every bonus episode. ---[0:20]  Joseph Pulitzer was the midwife to the birth of the modern mass media. Pulitzer’s lasting achievement was to transform American journalism into a medium of mass consumption and immense influence. [3:04] He was the pioneer of the modern media industry.  [5:06] Teddy Roosevelt tried to have Joseph Pulitzer put in jail.  [7:11] How one of Pulitzer’s adult sons viewed him: One of the strange differences between us two is the fact that you have never come near learning how to enjoy life. [9:42] Joseph favored reading works of history and biography.  [10:12] Joseph understood fully the extent of the calamity [his father’s death]. He had been 9 years old when his older brother died, 10 when his younger brother and sister died, 11 when his father died, and 13 at the death of his last sister. [11:50] At 17 years old Joseph escapes to America. A group of wealthy Boston businessmen recruit thousands of young Europeans to fight for the Union in the American Civil War. This scheme became Pulitzer’s escape route. [13:18] Describing how he came to the United States: He was friendless, homeless, tongueless, and guideless.  [14:05]  One of the places he slept when he was homeless was in the lobby of a hotel. They kept kicking him out. Later in life he buys the hotel. [14:44] What he said about his job of tending mules: Never in my life did I have a more trying task. The man who has not cared for 16 mules does not know what work and trouble are.  [15:18] Pulitzer was a voracious reader. When he was not working he spent every free minute improving his mind.  [17:12]  Edwin Land said, "Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess". Joseph Pulitzer would have agreed with that. [19:15]He was so industrious that he became a positive annoyance to others who felt less inclined to work. Pulitzer was unwilling to put forward anything but his best effort. [25:10] In only 5 years he had grown from a bounty hunting Hungarian teenager to an American lawmaker.  [28:54] There are only two or three human stories and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they have never happened before.  [38:10] He is 30 years old and depressed. In the best of circumstances the loss of one’s only surviving parent inspires self-reflection, for Joseph with no specific profession or even a home, such introspection was demoralizing.  [40:45] It is hard to understand how much money newspapers made, especially at this time. William Randolph Hearst’s net worth would be the equivalent of $30 billion today.  [48:34] One did not work with Pulitzer. For him, surely. Against him, often. But not with him.  [51:44] Pulitzer was extremely ambitious. He was not satisfied to be the 500th best newspaper. He wanted to be number 1.  [1:06:20] When we think that, a hundred years hence, not one of us now living will be alive to care or to know, to enjoy or to suffer, what does it all amount to? To a puff of smoke which makes a few rings and then disappears into nothingness and yet we make tragedies of our lives, most of us not even making them serious comedies. ————“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested, so my poor wallet suffers.”— GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book. It's good for you. It's good for Founders. A list of all the books featured on Founders Podcast. ----Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Like Alfred Nobel, Joseph Pulitzer is better known today for the prize that bears his name than for his contributions to history. That is a shame. In the 19th century, when America became an industrial nation and Carnegie provided the steel, Rockefeller the oil, Morgan the money, and Vanderbilt the railroads, Joseph Pulitzer was the midwife to the birth of the modern mass media. What he accomplished was as significant in his time as the creation of television would be in the 20th century. And it remains deeply relevant in today's information age. Pulitzer's lasting achievement was to transform American journalism into a medium of mass consumption and immense influence. He accomplished this by being the first media lord to recognize the vast social changes that the industrial revolution triggered, and by harnessing

all the converging elements of entertainment, technology, business, and demographics. This accomplishment alone would make him worthy of a biography. His fascinating life, however, makes him an irresistible subject. Ted Turner-like in his innovative abilities, Teddy Roosevelt-like in his power to transform history, and Howard Hughes-like in the reclusive second half of his life as a blind man tormented by sound, Pulitzer's tale provides all the elements of a life story that is important, timely, and compelling. All right, so that is it from the very beginning of the book called Pulitzer, A Life in Politics, Print and Power, and it was written by James McGrath Morris. Pulitzer's life is almost

unbelievable. I could not wait to sit down and talk to you about this. I mean, just look at the introduction there, who the author compares him to. Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan, Vanderbilt, Turner, Roosevelt, Hughes. So I want to jump into his early life. Before I do that, there's two things I want to bring to your attention that I thought were unique. And I think knowing this at the very beginning will give you a good understanding of the life of Pulitzer. So this is taking place in Havana in 1909. What I'm about to read to you is just a few years before Pulitzer dies. And it says, Since becoming blind at the apex of his rise to the top, the 61-year-old Pulitzer suffered from insomnia, as well as numerous other real and imagined ailments,

that's what they meant about Hughes-like, and was tormented by even the smallest sound. During his long exile. And what they mean there is later in his life. He would just roam the earth on a yacht. And run his businesses through a series of telegraphs. And he would travel with just this large group of secretaries. It's very much like what Howard Hughes did.

If you remember the podcast I did on him. And away from his family. Which is very bizarre. but I'm going to get into a lot of that. So it says, during his long exile, Pulitzer never relaxed his grip on the world, his influential New York newspaper. So he founded what became, and this is what part of what makes his life story so amazing, is how he able to transform. And really, he's the pioneer of the modern media industry. He's going to have this massive rivalry with somebody that used to idolize him, and that's William Randolph Hearst. But I think reading the biography of Pulitzer gives you an idea into the early days of what the media, like the birth of the media industry. So it says, he never relaxed his grip on the world,

his influential New York newspaper, that had ushered in the modern era of mass communications. Okay, so I just ran over my own point there. An almost unbroken stream of telegrams, all written in code, flowed from ports and distant destinations to New York, directing every part of the paper's operation. The messages even included such details as the typeface used in an advertisement and the vacation schedule of editors. So we see his maniacal desire for control.

Although he had set foot in his skyscraper headquarters only three times, whenever anyone talked about the newspaper, it was always Pulitzer's world. So it talks about the rivalry, the business and personal rivalry between Pulitzer and Hearst. I will cover the biography of William Randolph Hearst soon. So it says, the no-hold-barred attitude of the world and the journal, the papers owned by Pulitzer and Hearst respectively, put the newspapers into a spiraling descent of sensationalism and outright fabrications. So something to know about both Hearst and Pulitzer is they're credited with the birth of yellow journalism, which is not the birth of yellow journalism,

which is not the reporting of facts, but the ones shaped by their own personal biases, basically how our media still operates to this day. And that's a huge part of this book. So it says, for a quarter of a century, Roosevelt and Pulitzer, so now he's talking about Joseph had feuds with both Hearst, right, but also Teddy Roosevelt. Interesting to note, Teddy Roosevelt tried to have Joseph Pulitzer put in jail. So it says, for a quarter of a century,

Roosevelt and Pulitzer had battled for the soul of America's reform movement. It had been an epic clash. On one side was an egotistical, hard-boiled politician convinced that Pulitzer was an impediment

to the resplendent future of his own leadership. On the other side was a sanctimonious, they don't call him egotistical, but he definitely is. On the other side was a sanctimonious publisher who believed he was saving the republic. So that gives you an idea of the size of his ego, right? And that's a quote from Pulitzer. I think God Almighty made it for the benefit of the world when he made me blind. So he loses, suddenly loses his eyesight when he's about 41 or 42 years old.

And he's largely, he cannot read anymore. He can see kind of light. But when he meets somebody, there's interesting enough, like he'll rub their face. Like he'll want to touch their head and their face and kind of, that's how he knows what you look like, which is also devastating. And I think that's that leads into this like mental breakdown because the first half of his life is amazing. When you see the struggle that he has to go through and how he's very clever, very smart. And he came up literally from nothing to becoming one of the most influential and wealthy people that has ever existed. And he did so in a lot of intelligent and clever ways, which I'll talk to you about today.

But then the second half, after going blind, you see this like descent into madness. So let me go back to this paragraph, though. So he's saying, I think God Almighty made it for the benefit of the world when he made me blind. Pulitzer had confided to one of his editorial writers a few months before. Because I don't meet anybody, I am a recluse. Like a blind goddess of justice, I sit aloof and uninfluenced. I have no friends. The world is therefore absolutely free. Okay, so then I want to go, that's at the beginning of the book. I want to go to the end before i go back to his early life which i find to be one of the most fascinating stories uh fascinating parts of his life rather um this is when he has adult sons and his son is writing him a letter and this is where

i feel like the second half of politzer's life is a cautionary tale and this is what his son this is when his son this is how his son is viewing his father, right? He says, one of the strange differences between us two, to my mind, is the fact that you have never come near learning how to enjoy life. Okay, so let's go back in the timeline. Let's go to Hungary where Joseph Pulis was born in 1847. This gives you an idea into the family that he is born into. This is his father's, how his father's disciplined his children. Okay. So he said, when disciplining his three boys, their father terrified them by recounting the Roman historian

Livy's tale of Titus Manilus, who decapitated his own son for defending the family's honor in battle because he had not first sought his father's permission. So their family did not have a lot of money until they moved away from the countryside and into the city. And that's where all the opportunity was. And this is a, his father had a transformation from, you know, being just a, not a peasant, but not somebody who has a lot of money to being a very, very successful entrepreneur. So they use the word merchant. Today we'd say entrepreneur. So much so that they were able to hire private tutors. Now, this is also the beginning of Joseph's life is full of death. And so I'm going to get into that, too. This is this is the well, let me just read it to you.

I'm not going to run over my point here. So it says because of the family's elevated social position, this is after his father founded a successful business. The parents sought to educate their children for a city trade. Uh, Joseph mastered German and learned to speak French. He was a difficult pupil. However, this is something we've seen over and over again. Uh, when it comes to what he wants to learn, you can't stop him. But if you tell him, hey, you've got to learn A, B, and C, he's not interested. So he said he was difficult pupil, however, and displayed a volcanic temper. There's a lot of violence in this book.

Joseph once chased a tutor out of the window when the tutor made the mistake of insisting on teaching mathematics rather than entertaining the youth with war stories from history. If Joseph didn't take well to formula instruction, he succumbed to the pleasures of reading. The Pulitzer's flat was filled with books. Joseph, this is also going to see something we see over and over again, speaks to the importance of what we're doing here. Joseph favored works of history and biography. Now, good times do not last. His father dies extremely young, and this spirals the family into poverty.

Okay, so it says only 47 years old, and at the peak of his business success, he had contracted tuberculosis. So his father dies. Now this is one of the most devastating sentences I've ever found in any of the books I've read for the podcast. It says, Joseph understood more fully the extent of the calamity. He had been nine years old when his older brother died, 10 when his younger brother and sister died, 11 when his father died, and 13 at the death of his last sister. Can you imagine the pain and suffering in that one sentence?

So Joseph's parents had nine kids, and the only ones that survived later in life are his mother and then Joseph and his brother. And Joseph outlives everybody um joseph joseph is prone to like periods of intense depression and so is his brother and his brother even though he's wildly successful um he winds up going to the store taking some poison and then putting a gun to his right temple and firing and so that leaves joseph as the last remaining survivor of his entire family so it says the death led to an obsession with his health that would remain with him until the end of his life. Every ailment, no matter how small, was accompanied by an underlying fear that he was dying. His father's death created a financial nightmare.

It was only a matter of time before the enterprise went bankrupt. Within six months, their property was seized by authorities for failure to pay taxes, and the family limped along. Years later, he conveyed the toll from the deaths. He described himself as a poor orphan who never even enjoyed as much of a luxury as a father. So after several years of toiling, trying to do menial jobs to support his family, he realizes, I've got to get out of Hungary. I've got to go to America. And at 17 years old, Joseph escapes to America.

And this is how, this blew my mind. So he's asked his friends, they're having a conversation. He says, are you going to America? Yes, said Pulitzer. I must go because my mother cannot support us. And here there is no work. So this is how he got there. There's a group of wealthy American businessmen in Boston.

They have the idea that, hey, they're trying to get more soldiers because the Civil War in America is going on at this time. And they need more soldiers for the Union to fight the Confederacy. So that's how this is the scheme that Joseph uses to get to America. Because remember, he has no money to buy a ticket. So it says, events in the United States presented him with another opportunity. The American Civil War was in its third year. Soldiers were dying at a rate of 13,000 a month. And the government had instituted a draft to meet the insatiable demand for more men.

To meet the quota imposed on their city, a group of wealthy Bostonians looked eastward for able bodies. They wagered that there were thousands of young men in Europe who would join the American military provided their passage could be paid. The scheme became Pulitzer's escape route. So he winds up in America. He's a soldier for, he's in the cavalry for the Union Army. I want to just tell you how later in his life, how he described this period of time to give you the idea of how just remarkable it was he was able

to survive and thrive this experience. He said, describing how he came to the United States, he said he was friendless, homeless,ess and guideless all right so this is joseph's life at 18 he's alone in a strange new land uh with that now has high unemployment this is going to be the end of the civil war and he doesn't speak english so it says uh for his service to the union cause politzer pocketed 135 dollars and 35 cents The soldiers knew that they were returning to a civilian workforce already suffering considerable unemployment. So he's wandering on the streets. He doesn't speak the language, has no place to live, has no money. So it says he continued to look in, that means in work or for work in vain, wandering the streets of New York at day and at night, sleeping in doorways and any

other place he could find. Interesting enough, one of the places that he tries to like sleep in a lobby of a hotel at this time, and he winds up getting kicked out later in life, he buys the hotel. So he realizes, hey, there's no opportunity in New York, I got to get out of here. He heads west because he hears there's a large German speaking community in St. Louis. So he heads over there to look for opportunity. And this is just a little bit gives you an idea of what he has to do to survive at this point in his life. He's doing a bunch of odd jobs, anything he can possibly do to make ends meet. So this is for the first several months after reaching St. Louis, Pulitzer worked at a variety

of jobs. He tended mules. This is what he said about the job, which I thought was hilarious. Never in my life did I have a more trying task. The man who has not cared for 16 mules does not know what work and trouble are. He labored as a deckhand on a riverboat. He unloaded bales and barrels from river steamers. He was a day laborer in construction. He was a waiter. So he's taking anything he can at this point to make some money. He starts joining this German society and they're trying to help like all the German immigrants find jobs. So he actually gets an opportunity here. And one thing to know about Pulitzer is he's a voracious reader, which makes losing his eyesight devastating. Right. And he spent every free minute that he was not working improving his mind, which we've seen this trait over and over and over again by the people we study, right?

It's very important because not only is he improving his mind, but as a result of his improved mind, he has improved conversation. And that's extremely important in terms of unveiling opportunities because people find you interesting to talk to all right so it says in polis's case the german aid society had located an assistant's clerk job at a lumber yard it's owned by the strauss family it says strauss and his family were impressed this is how they describe him at this time i think he's 18 or 19 years old we found him to be bright and highly educated and at this point he has very little money, but he does something

really smart. And he joins the new, new at this time in America, that is, subscription libraries, right? And so they're called the mercantile library. So it says a library could offer lectures, concerts, and classes for mutual improvement, then considered the path of social and economic elevation. Pulitzer paid the $2 initiation fee and the $3 annual due. And so he just starts hanging out there. He says the library held a large collection of books, carried newspapers from all over the world, and was open each day of the week from morning until late at night. Pulitzer spent every free moment he had at the mercantile, often bringing a pair of apples for sustenance so not to waste a moment leaving the library for a meal. So it says in the elegant library's main room, he had his choice of over 27,000 books.

So I just want to pull out a couple of things or draw your attention to a couple of things that's happening in that paragraph. Even as a young man, we see Pulitzer's early personality. The fact that he brought apples, he didn't want to stop what he was doing. Remember in the last few books I did on Edwin Land, where Edwin Land's one of his most famous quotes is that if anything's worth doing, it's worth doing to excess? That is very much a quote that a young Pulitzer would agree with. He was obsessed with learning, obsessed with reading, obsessed with the newspaper industry, and obsessed with work to the exclusion of almost everything else. Okay, so this is, I want to fast forward a little bit and tell you how Joseph got his start in the newspaper industry. This is the industry that he's going to dedicate his entire life to. So again, through this immigrant society, the German society, he learns about a job. And it's a German word that I'm not going to pronounce. I'm going to call it the post.

It's that's the second word in the in the title. So says Pulitzer learned about a job opening at the post. The post was owned by two of the city's most eminent Germans. And the former civil war general in whose calvary pulitzer had served talk about a small world and uh and another guy named emil with whom pulitzer had made friends in the mercantile chess room uh so since the post was casting about for a new reporter for pulitzer the timing was fortunate not only did pulitzer know both the men but in recent months the elder man had as president of the German Immigration Aid Society had observed his diligence.

This is going to remind you of Benjamin Franklin here. And so I'm going to tell you what this elder gentleman says about him one second. So it says, I could not believe it. Pulitzer recalled, I, the unknown, the luckless, almost a boy of the streets, meaning homeless, selected for such a responsibility. It all seemed like a dream. It took Pulitzer no time to confirm that they had made the right decision in taking on the 20-year-old.

What he lacked in experience, he more than made up for raw, resolute effort. His time for work seemed to be all the time. This is one of the owners of the paper. I never called on him at any hour that he did not immediately respond. He continues to describe Pulitzer. He says, for a beginner, he was exasperating inquisitive. He was so industrious, indeed, that he became a positive annoyance to others

who felt less inclined to work. That is a hell of a sentence. Pulitzer was unwilling to put forward felt less inclined to work. That is a hell of a sentence. Pulitzer was unwilling to put forward anything but his best effort. So there's a sentence in the biography I read about the founder of Hyundai. His name is Chung Ju-young. And he's extremely poor, raised on a farm, goes to the city in Korea and gets a job at a rice, like a rice shop and eventually takes over the rice shop. And there's a sentence in that book I never forgot. It says the delivery boy had become the owner.

The same thing is going to happen. That's what Pulitzer was, the newspaper Pulitzer was just hired at. He eventually becomes the owner. We're not there yet, though. There's a few things I need to talk to you about. One, he found a calling, not a career, not a job, a calling. That's the way he looked at it. And then like Ben Franklin, as I just mentioned before him, Pulitzer impressed older influential people with his conversation and his mind. And the way to do that is just to read a lot, right? So that opens up all kinds of

opportunities for him, which eventually includes being able to buy in and become a part owner of the newspaper. So it says the world into which Pulitzer peaked seemed to be one of limitless possibilities. To be a newspaper editor was to do more than report on the world. It was to shape it. It was not long before the visitors, meaning to the paper, took an interest in Pulitzer. That young fellow clinches the future. That's this guy named Brockmire, who was the principal mover behind this local philosophical society. He's continuing to describe Pulitzer.

He possesses greater dialectical ability than all the rest put together. I know it for i have felt it so during this time he's also doing a lot of smart things where he's observing the people that run the paper they become mentors to him um he learned essentially he learned from the people that came before him and then he's able to use the things that he learns to fully realize his ambition so this talks this section talks a little bit about that so this is none of this was lost on pulitzer who had now spent two years working at the paper. He's describing one of his mentors. He was my chief. We often traveled together, yet in all that time, this is so

important, I never saw him pass an idle moment, either in the office or on the road or anywhere else, meaning the guy did not like to waste time. Pulitzer's ambition did not go unnoticed. This is now the mentor talking about Pulitzer. There never seemed to be any doubt in his mind that he would succeed in something. So before I tell you the sentence that gives you an idea of his personality, which was definitely aggressive, argumentative, hot tempered, go back to the description that the author gives us for his father disciplining his son, saying, like, if you disobey me, I'll chop off your head kind of thing, right? So this gives

you an idea of, like, the formidable individual that Pulitzer becomes and the environment that he was raised in. And this is just a really great sentence. And he's getting into all these, like, fights, right? He's very, like, a partisan. And he thinks if you all these like fights. Right. He's very like a partisan. And he thinks if you're on the opposite political aisle from him, you're evil or dumb or, you know, all the same stuff that happens today. Right. But on any side. And this is leading to it's going to lead to violence, which I'll tell you a little bit about. But his friend is telling was like, man, you got to calm down. You got to be careful. Because what happens one day when you run into another you uh so he says i cautioned him that he must become more conservative and forbearing for fear that he might someday meet a person like himself and then there would be trouble so remember this is largely a story about the birth of the media industry uh one of his

former writers gets shot six times on the streets of new york and dies this is way in the future of the uh from where we are in the story uh because he wrote something about somebody's family in the paper um pulitzer tries to shoot two different people gets i mean he gets in i don't even know how many fights just he'll be walking on the street somebody didn't like what he wrote or said about him and then just start hitting him in the face. The guy running his St. Louis paper before he moves to New York, he wrote something about a local businessman. The local businessman comes in with a gun, and the editor, Pulitzer's editor, has a gun,

winds up winning the gun battle. I mean, these are insane. I cannot... This book is really, really fantastic, is what I'm telling you. There's just so many things in here, and the author did such a fantastic job of telling the story. On the back page, it says, Morris paints a vivid picture portraying his subject as an ambitious, hot-headed, and at times violent, but often charitable man.

The well-researched biography reads like a novel. That's accurate. It does read like a novel. It's really fantastic. So at this time, Joseph's writing a lot of editorials. He's mastering the English language. And the way you think about Pulitzer, Pulitzer thought media and newspapers and politics was the exact same thing. He thought that if you had a paper, it has a point of view.

It's a Democrat paper. It's a Republican paper. It's a socialist paper. It's whatever it is that you think, but we're not objective here at all. I'm not telling you the news. I'm telling you my opinion. And so he winds up, he saw no reason not to be a newspaper person and also an elected official. Later in his life, he kind of, after he's really, really wealthy, kind of becomes disinterested in politics. But at this time, he serves, he's in Congress, he wins a bunch of elections. And this is the first one. So he's nominated by others at this time. That's one thing to know. He didn't choose to run on his own, but like I said before, people found him interesting.

They thought he was a great writer, a great speaker. They thought he was a great conversationalist. So he's nominated by others. He's running against a novice, somebody he shouldn't have ran, and he's using his paper. He's got the minds of tons of voters because they're reading his paper every day. So he wins his first election, but he's also still poor at this time. So it says, in only five years, he had grown from a bounty hunting Hungarian teenager to an American lawmaker. He was now an elected politician.

OK, so something Joseph liked to write about was corruption. He wanted reform. He's a young idealist. And so he accuses a contractor, somebody doing work for the government, of corruption in the newspaper, in his editorial section. So this is the result. And this is the first time he winds up getting in a duel. So it says, Mr. Augustine, just one word, and I hope that it will be the last word that I ever speak to you, Pulitzer said. I would like to explain to you that I'm no longer inclined to associate with you. And I also do not wish that you speak to me again. Should you, however, persist in insulting me, you will, despite your great physical advantage, find that you have come to the wrong man.

So we see this, you know, what his friend was warning him about he's you know very aggressive hot-tempered uh really down for a fight for sure and down to kill somebody if need be i want to tell you in clear and understandable english that you are a damn liar and a puppy replied augustine so puppy i guess that was like an insult of the day where if you call somebody a pup in writing or in words, it's saying it would lead to a duel. Ten paces, turn around and shoot kind of thing. This is wild times. Words ceased. Augustine moved toward Pulitzer.

When Pulitzer had completed about 10 to 12, they're inside like a lobby or something or like a private meeting room. There's a ton of other people in here. This is not outside. When Pulitzer had completed about 10 to 12 paces of his retreat, because Augustine's huge, Augustine raised his fist. In his assailant's hands, Pulitzer thought he saw a heavy gleaming yellow instrument. So this guy was known for carrying brass knuckles. Pulitzer drew his pistol and fired. Incredibly, he missed his massive target. Pulitzer pulled the trigger again, but the barrel of the gun was deflected downward and the bullet only grazed Augustine in the right calf. Nevertheless, the wound in his leg enraged Augustine, who like a speared bull, charged and pinned Pulitzer in the corner of the room. There he flung Pulitzer down.

I mashed his head against the case board of the room and tried to get the pistol out of his hand, Augustine said. Okay, so he gets out of that. I think he has to pay a fine, but he doesn't have to go to jail. I want to focus something that I found really interesting. It's really one of the main benefits of studying history, reading biographies, is you realize that, you know, history doesn't repeat human nature does, right? And it's kind of predictable where you have this young idealistic person shouting against corruption. Joseph, you know, writes about all times that he says he's against corruption. But at this point, this is like a few years later. Now he's got a lot of power. He's got like an audience. He's an elected official. Now he's, you know, he's willing to take money. So this is really interesting. I mean, it's kind of predictable. the person yelling from the rooftops against corruption is now going to accept a high paying job from a political ally and not do the job.

I mean, what do you call that? That's corruption. And it's just, again, another illustration of, you know, the people we study, they're a large part intelligent, driven, very successful people, but they're not perfect. They're fallible, just like I am, just like you are, just like the future humans will be. There's a quote at the beginning of, or in the, there's a, there's a quote in the biography I read of Frank Lloyd Wright that I always think about. And it says, there are only two or three human stories and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they've never happened before. And so we see an example here. So it says, a seat on the St. Louis Police Commission was about to open up.

It required very few hours of work and paid $1,000 a year at a time when the average skilled worker earned less than $600 a year working six days a week. So he's got to dedicate a few hours a year to this thing he's going to get a thousand dollars the governor who got this is where i talk about the corruption he got very favorable um coverage in pulitzer's newspaper assured that he would appoint pulitzer this is outright corruption there's no other word for it and yet it's so we talked about this over and over again. It's very easy to point out the, like the negative attributes in other people than it is to do the, to find those attributes in ourselves. Just know that we're not immune to it. And in this case, Pulitzer is showing he's not immune to it. He's like, yeah, I don't want you

making extra money. I'm willing to shoot you in the calf. But you know, two years later, whatever the timeframe is, if I can get a little bit of money, I'm going to take it. This is extremely predictable. This is never going to go away. So I want to give you an example. This is where Pulitzer is observing. He's again, he's not built his media empire. He's going to, but he's really learning how the media can manipulate. And so this is an example of that. This is a political convention. They're trying to figure out who's going to run for president, right?

Or who's going to run for some kind of office. It might be government at this point. But it says, the convention was a striking example of the confluence of independent journalism and politics. Like a fly on the wall, Pulitzer witnessed a few of the nation's most powerful publishers

try to impose their will on the convention. So it's a group of the nation's most powerful publishers tried to impose their will on the convention. So it's a group of five newspaper owners. They named themselves the Quadrilateral after the four northern Italian fortresses that had been prominent in the Milanese insurgency of 1848. This is where we get into the corrupt part. As they saw it,

the task before them was not solely to report the news of the convention but to shape it the first serious business that engaged us was the killing of the boom for judge david davis so these five people very influential they have large audiences they're saying hey this guy that's that that may win we're gonna knock him out because he's not one of us uh we can't essentially we can't he's not going to do our bidding is really what's happening the power of the press must be invoked they said it is our chief if not only weapon sitting at the same table the editors wrote editorials for their respective papers saying that there was no support among the delegates for davis despite the arrival of 700 of his supporters this is straight up lying they are lying to

benefit themselves uh and pressing on the the arriving delegates the futility of supporting davis and they wind up knocking this guy out um something i've been uh talking about this week as i work my way through this book uh with friends is that if i think if you read this book and uh not only as poets are doing it not only these five newspaper people doing it but every single other media figure that we're running into in this story including william randolph hearst i think studying this is extremely important because you realize that the manipulation that happens the information that you take in is it impact on you, to everybody, right? And one lesson I definitely take away from this book, and I encourage you to read it, is a fantastic, fantastic book, which I'll repeat over and over

again, is it's going to have you view the media a little bit more skeptically. And I think that's probably a smart viewpoint given, you know, the fallibility of humans and the fact that, you know, there is no such thing as an objective person. And the amount of corruption and outright lying from the people that are running the media organizations, in some cases, these circulations get huge. You have over a million people a day reading what you write. Think about the influence that Pulitzer has on the world. So this is the beginning of his media empire. Some of the proprietors of the Post, that's the newspaper he's still working at, became nervous and wanted to retire. They approached Pulitzer to see if he would buy into the paper. Pulitzer was the most valuable member of their staff,

and he had toiled for them for five years. It took him five years from being essentially homeless to now he's owning a part of the paper uh he says they thought it was necessary to the paper pulitzer said they probably would have done the same thing to any other this is really important he's got a giant ego but he also realizes it's like he's not really special the fact that he he worked really hard is what made him special they probably would have done the same thing to any other man who works 16 hours a day as i did through that campaign within a week he was the owner. The seven years after reading his first copy of the Post

in hopes of finding employment in St. Louis, Pulitzer was an American newspaper publisher. So he doesn't stay. He eventually sells back his interest into this paper because Pulitzer, like a lot of people we cover, he can't have partners. There's no working with Pulitzer. There's only working for him. But he winds up switching political parties and he winds up getting bought out.

So it says, with this loss, it seemed as if Pulitzer's political career was at an end. So he loses the election, doesn't get reelected. He had been voted out of his House seat. So it says, and he would not win reappointment of the police board. Pulitzer, the politician, was on the cold. The owners of the post offered to buy him out. The price they proposed was commensurate with their desire to be free of him because now he's on the opposite end of the political party from them. Right. So this is Pulitzer walked away with about thirty thousand dollars, three to six times his original investment.

Remember, at this time, if you're really skilled, you make $600 a year. Let's say it's just for the sake of round numbers, you make $1,000 a year. He just made 30 years, 30 years. I don't think he's even 30 yet. So he's still very young. So now he finally has, he's got a little bit of money and this is where he's going to find a paper of his own. Now, before to find a paper of his own. Now, before he finds a paper of his own, this is a really, really clever move by a young Pulitzer. And you clearly see he's an extremely smart person. So it says, Pulitzer spotted a journalistic business opportunity.

The collapse of the banking firm J. Cook & Company, which acted as the chief financing agent for the nation's railroads, started a severe national depression. Remember, a severe national depression is going to happen right at the time when he's got a boatload of money. Among the victims of the economic downturn was a small German-language newspaper in St. Louis. The paper was put on the auction blocks. He does a lot of smart things here. He says, well, let me tell you the first one. One is realizing value where others didn't see it, right? So it says, Pulitzer saw value where others didn't see it, right? So it says, Pulitzer saw value where others didn't. He won the auction paying a modest sum and announced that it was his intention

to start a German evening paper. This was a smokescreen. What the corporation owned caught Pulitzer's attention. He doesn't want the paper. He wants their membership in the AP, which is extremely valuable. It says the newspaper was a member of the Associated Press. Because it restricted its news items to its members,

a membership in AP was a valuable asset. Those who were not members were excluded from a vast source of national, international news. So he bought the paper. He's not going to run the paper. He's like, no, I don't care about the paper. I care about the fact that you have membership to the AP, which then I can then flip to another newspaper owner.

So that's what he's going to do here. Membership in the AP gave a newspaper a tremendous competitive advantage. In St. Louis, all the major newspapers were members of the Associated Press, except the St. Louis Globe. So he goes to them. He's like, here, here's my proposal.

If they bought the entire corporation, they would gain membership in AP. Pulitzer would then buy back the presses type and office equipments that they didn't need so he'll buy back the physical infrastructure of the paper right besides the membership of ap and he's going to sell those off so says pulitzer disposed of the presses typefaces and the office furniture they were bought by a group of investors in his 48 hours this is all that took to do this in his 48 hour tenure as newspaper publisher uh pulitzer netted between 11 and 20 thousand dollars for the second time in a year he had parlayed a newspaper

investment into a considerable cash return he now had between 30 and 40 thousand dollars in capital this time instead of looking for a safe place to stash his earnings pulitzer was ready to gamble so he does some investments in like local infrastructure projects that wind up working out and he gets a handsome return. This is where, this is where the weird part of Pulitzer happens though, right? His poverty, homeless, dead family, new land, all the stuff that's happening, right? Serving the civil war. And now he's going to start several years of kind of like, he's comfortable. He's traveling the world at this point. He's young. He's looking for a wife. But he is. This is where we see his first like deep depression state. This happens multiple times in his life because he doesn't feel like he has a calling anymore. He wants a successful career, but he doesn't know where that opportunity is going to come from. And right around this time, his mother dies, who he is extremely fond of. And so we find Joseph Pulitzer, he's 30 years old, and he's depressed. In the best of circumstances, the loss of one's only

surviving parent inspires self-reflection. For Joseph, now 30, with no specific profession, or even a home, such introspection was demoralizing. Whenever Pulitzer was in turmoil, he would become restless and pick up and go elsewhere, as if he were searching for a geographical solution to his woes. A year later, he's no better. He's writing to a friend. And it says, Pulitzer frankly described his life to Davis in melancholy terms. A life void of purpose, love, and home. I am impatient to turn over a new leaf

and start a new life. One of which home must be the... Oh, this is actually to his soon-to-be wife. Of which home must be the foundation, affection, ambition, and occupation, the cornerstones. And you, my dear, my inseparable companion. So they're about to get married. And we see, you know, something that never leaves Pulitzer is the fact that he was extremely, extremely ambitious and extremely

driven. His wife, Kate, realizes this. Kate soon learned from Joseph's frantic business pursuits on the eve of their wedding that her husband's attention would never be hers alone, even on a honeymoon. His mind constantly churned with political and business schemes. Interesting enough, on the way back from this few month long honeymoon, this is where Pulitzer and Hearst cross paths unbeknownst to them at the time the passage presented one of those singular moments in history when two figures whose names will be closely linked pass by each other unknowingly in new york among the passengers preparing to board the ship for its return to europe was 15 year old william randolph hearst so when he comes back he has there's huge opportunity. And this is another smart thing that he does. There's a ton of clever things in this book.

He buys a bankrupt paper. But he realizes that he has to make it profitable before his money runs out. Remember, I just said he's $30,000 or $40,000. He doesn't have that money at this time. I think he's down to maybe his last $5,000 or something like that because he's been living several years

looking for opportunities, not being frugal by any means. And so he kind of puts himself in a situation where he's forced to succeed. His back is against the wall. So says Pulitzer heard of the dispatch. This is the St. Louis dispatch. His family's going to own this paper. I think they just sold it in like 2005. And it makes, I don't know what it did later on but in the beginning it's hard to understate or how much money newspapers made especially this time um pollster is making millions of dollars a year at the time when the average worker made a thousand dollars a year um william randolph hearst becomes the net worth of that william randolph hearst eventually uh compiles with his uh with his news he owned like 30 newspapers or something like that, would be the equivalent of like $30 billion today.

So an unbelievable amount of money that these people are making. But we're not there yet. He's going to get there. So it says, Heard the Dispatch was a struggling evening newspaper in St. Louis was going to be auctioned off at bankruptcy. So that's another thing. You'd have wildly successful newspapers and then a bunch that made no money or went bankrupt and so that's a lot of people would buy bank they'd buy them at the auction like bankruptcy auction and try to do something like try to reinvigorate them and boost up their circulation and subscribers and it's exactly the m that's exactly what polliter does here and he also does

when he wants to move into new york because eventually he thinks you know st lou Louis is too small for my ambitions New York's the media capital of America at the time so that's where I want to go but I'll get there in a little bit um operating the paper however was an unresolved question if Pulitzer could not eliminate its daily deficit his cash would only would last only 17 weeks so he's 17 week runway oh let me back up for a minute too i want to show you tell you another smart thing he does so he's well known he's a politician you know he's a writer um he'd give speeches all the time so he can't go but he realizes people like they're like oh polis is going to buy uh the dispatch and so he doesn't he sends in a trojan horse because he doesn't want his because he was successful like buying used uh newspaper assets in

the past if people realize that pulitzer wants it they he's going to invite unwanted competition and raise the prices so it says he sends this other guy there he says he was pulitzer's trojan horse pulitzer knew that if he was to openly join the bidding others would assume that he had seen in the paper something of value that it escaped their attention and the price would soar. It's also a good indication of Pulitzer's personality. He was extremely secretive, very Howard Hughes-like. He was not going to share with you his strategy beforehand. He would openly lie over and over again. There'd be a report, hey, you're buying this newspaper, hey, you're moving to New York, hey, you're doing this. He'd be like, nope, don't know what you're

talking about. And he'd lie all the time. He's just not going to tell you what he's doing until after he does it. So what he does is, you know, he was by this paper, but he, uh, he decides there's three evening newspapers in St. Louis. He does a deal, another smart move here where he's going to merge two of the three evening papers together and consolidate power. And this is also comes from somebody that railed in the editorial papers against monopolies over and over again. So there's that, you know, a little bit of hypocrisy there. His business acumen drove him. Although he was at times an innovator in journalism, this was not his strength.

Rather, he possessed remarkable foresight and had an uncanny ability to recognize value where others didn't. He was willing to take risks based on his insights where others remained timid. So that's another thing. There's two times in his life that he goes all in. This is the first one where he's burning the boats. He's like, all my money's in here, and this will succeed. He does it in St. Louis first. And he can buy this paper for, I don't even know, $10,000.

I think all in when he has to merge, $10,000, $15,000, something like that. And then he does it again in New York where he he buys the world from um from jay gold i think i'll get there in a little bit because i have the name wrong but he winds up going in for like 300 000 which is everything he had i think he had to borrow money to do that as well uh so this other guy who's running the paper agreed to merge his paper with pulitzer's a major a merger good sense. Pulitzer and Dillon, that's his name, shared essentially the same political views. For Dillon, the merger would prevent a potentially disastrous circulation fight.

And for Pulitzer's, it would bring readers and most important time. See what he did there? He's like, okay, well, I have 17 week runway. You already have a bunch of subscribers and your circulation, whatever it is, might be 10,000, 20,000 people, whatever it is. Let's merge.

And so we're making money right away. And so it buys him time to build up and to reinvigorate the papers. He's an extremely gifted writer. And so, you know, he's not going to become the owner of the most influential paper in America without being really gifted in both his speech and his writing. And so now we're going to see he's like, okay, well, I've run this playbook before. He's going, this is like the yellow journalism, the sensationalism, the, you know, sharp point of view that he's credited for pioneering. So he needs new readers. He knows that to build wealth and influence, he needs more subscribers, right?

So he decides to pick a fight. The essential problems remained. New readers were needed. And for that to happen, the paper had to be noticed. Years before, when he worked at the Post, Pulitzer had gained attention with his crusading reporting, exposing corruption in the county government and exhorting readers to action.

Now, with an entire newspaper at his disposal, he went at it again. But this time he selected a larger target. City laws ensure that only a select group obtain lucrative business monopolies. So he's going after corruption. And this is right. I mean, he's definitely right about this. This is crony capitalism. This is stuff we should, you know, we should be against even to this day.

So he says a growing number of merchants, professionals and small businessmen chafed under the economic restrictions and monolist monopolistic behavior of the elite. So there's a difference between building an empire and arming the rebels. Pulitzer saying, hey, you know, there's a lot more merchants just like you and I. Then there are these these hand selected political cronies that are building these what should be illegal monopolies at the time. Right. A newspaper that espoused their cause would find a ready audience. And at this time, we see an example that he's definitely all in here. Despite the paper's progress toward financial stability, Pulitzer did not relax or let up. He practically lived in the office, staying late into the the night working by a light of a single

gas lamp i would pass by on my way home between 11 and 12 o'clock and he was always there recalled one nocturnal st louis resident no matter how late he worked pulitzer always arrived at the office in the early morning to examine the paper's vital signs he demanded this is something this is a trait that he did for the rest of his life so uh let me read it to you he demanded precise information exactly how many copies were printed the day before how many were sold how many were returned how many street uh street sales of the paper how many lines of advertising had run in the last issue uh during the last week since he essentially wants like a dashboard before there was dashboards of the overall health of his paper so and he always said he wants everything in a

nutshell everything in a nutshell everything in a nutshell He says that over and over again in the book. And so this is the first signs we're seeing of that. He basically gets a report every day to see the overall health of his business. In these first days of running the post-dispatch, feeling the sharp anxiety of potential failure, Pulitzer learned to ask questions that provided him with the most realistic take on the financial health of his paper. He honed his questioning down to a precise mix of queries, yielding a statistical portrait that revealed in a single glance where things stood. Another clever thing that he does. Until the end of his life, and no matter how far he wandered from the office, or how much he delegated to others, he would never give up this

habit. So eventually his partner realizes that there's an exercise in futility trying to be partners with him. Joseph's clearly fully in charge. It says it became increasingly clear to Dylan and Pulitzer that their partnership would not work. Dylan's mentor, this guy named McCullough, predicted this. McCullough, who predicted that the partnership would not

last, attributed the breakup to incompatibility of temper, super-induced, induced perhaps by an excess of talent so he's saying they're not equals Pulitzer's way more talented the truth of the matter was that one did not work with Pulitzer for him surely against him often but not with him and that's just really good writing the author did a fantastic job I got to look up to see if he wrote any other books because I enjoy this one so much. So during his time in St. Louis, he's becoming wealthy. He moves into nice neighborhoods, but his paper is essentially attacking all the rich other fellow wealthy people now. And this causes problems. His family's

ostracized. He gets assaulted in the street multiple times. Like I said before, he's got to carry a pistol everywhere he goes. Some people just get to jump on him and just start punching him in the face and all kinds of things. So he realizes it's time to leave. He wants to go to New York. He feels he mastered St. Louis. The St. Louis paper can run essentially by itself. Had a large circulation, so he was making tons of money, and he didn't need to be there. So he says he decided to rid himself uh oh now now this is jay gold so um i did get to write

the name correctly jay gold accidentally bought this paper he bought it in with like a collection of other businesses he didn't care about he's one of the richest people in history he doesn't care about this thing so says he decided to rid himself of the burdensome new york world this is the paper that pulitzer's eventually going to buy uh an even greater sin in the to rid himself of the burdens from New York World. This is a paper that Pulitzer is eventually going to buy. An even greater sin in the eyes of the railroad and industrial baron was that it had never made him a dime since he acquired it four years earlier. I never cared anything about the world, the meaning of the newspaper Gold said. The world had an anemic circulation of 15,000 and was losing money every week.

So this is the opportunity that Pulitzer is going to get the greatest opportunity in his entire life. This is what builds. He was wealthy at this point, but he's orders of magnitude more wealthy in New York than he, any ever was in St. Louis signing the contract, but Pulitzer nearly $500,000 in debt.

So I was wrong about that $300,000 number I gave you earlier. Less than five years after spending his last few thousand dollars to buy the bankrupt dispatch, he was betting he could repeat his success on a far grander scale. So this book is full of really, really good ideas that Joseph uses to transform the anemic circulation of the world into the one with the greatest circulation ever. This is one of them.

It's the idea that he's going to start slowly and build on that because he's got to completely revamp the paper. This is the dramatic changes for which he would eventually become known were still years away. At this point, he sought solely to condition his editorial staff to his principles of how a paper should be written and edited. This effort, however modest as it may seem, is how the world began on its path to becoming the most widely read newspaper in American history.

That is a banana statement. In an era where the printed word ruled supreme and over a thousand newspapers competed for readers, content was the means of competition. This is what Joseph understood. So he had to have the best. It's not just that he did tricks and any of that he was they were gifted at what they did the medium was not the message the message was that's what joseph's telling his staff this is where pulitzer started so it's very start smart we're going to start very slowly and we're going to build on that um and during this time he another smart move he realizes listen he pulitzer was extremely

ambitious i'm not i'm not satisfied if i'm 500th newspaper for a thousand i want to be number one and he realizes you can't stand out by looking the same so he changes not only that the content the words the message of the paper he changes changes how it looks. So it says, Pulitzer had wanted illustrations in the world since he bought the paper. On newsstands in the arms of newsboys, the gray unbroken front pages of the city newspapers were indistinguishable from each other. Pulitzer's like, no way.

You're going to know just by sight before you read a word that this is my paper. He had found every excuse possible to add illustrations to make their paper stand out. So the other person there is his brother. His brother had moved to New York and starts a paper as well.

But for Pulitzer, for Joseph Pulitzer, he thought about paper and politics as the same and as a way, as a means to power. Yes, he wanted money, but he wanted power more than money, right? His brother takes a completely different and also successful route um where he makes like a i wouldn't call it a tabloid but he didn't talk about politics at all just like oh

like you know this famous it's like almost like tmz is now is the way i would describe it it's called the journal and interesting enough hearst Hearst buys The Journal and Hearst essentially studies. This is really interesting. I can't wait to read his biography because Hearst essentially studied Joseph's playbook, copies it like Sam Walton did for all other retailers and then blows right past Pulitzer. But he also does it by buying Pulitzer's brother's paper

and merging with another one, just like Pulitzer did in St. Louis. So, oh, I'm telling you, I love this. Okay, so let me go back to this part before I go on this weird tangent. Found every excuse possible to add illustrations to their paper to stand out. So it says, a great many people in the world require, this is also a keen insight that Pulitzer understood because there's a ton of people coming into New York City right now

that don't speak the language, just like he did, right? So it says, a great many, this is Polish talking now, a great many people in the world required to be educated through their eyes as it were. Uh, Pulitzer said mindful that, that many of the research readers he pursued were struggling to learn English.

This is the same thing we learned all the way back when we studied Levi Strauss, which he also knew cause he immigrated to this country. Um, that that's why they had Levi jeans jeans had this this giant i uh logo on like the the waistband of the the jeans because a lot of people a lot of his customers had just they came to california to mine for gold they didn't understand the language but they they stayed they could communicate visually so pollsters and very much using similar tactics, but with newspapers.

So this is several years later. Another smart thing that Pulitzer does is he finds ways to get his attention from the newspaper in creative domains. So at this time, America was falling behind on the, they guaranteed, Statue of Liberty was coming over, right? And Americans had agreed to take delivery

and also pay for the base, right? It was like a couple hundred grand, something like that, that they needed. And they were well short of their fundraising goals. So he starts to rate something also. This guy's a remarkable life stories. He's essentially responsible for the completion of the Statue of Liberty. It wouldn't have happened without him. And he realizes that raising money for the Statue of Liberty was actually good for his business.

It's a little bit about that. He called on readers to send money to the paper and promised he would deliver it to the project. Give something, however little, Pulitzer asked, and in return, he pledged that every donor's name would be published in the newspaper. For as little as a penny, the poorest New Yorker could have his name in print

in the same newspaper whose columns were populated with the names of the Vanderbilts, the Whitney's, the Roosevelt's, and the Astor's. The public service also turned out to be good for business as the world's circulation soared. So people heard about, people that may have never even bought or heard about the world, definitely heard about, hey, we have the Statue of Liberty coming coming let's all chip in let's get this done and oh by the way if you there's one central there's one central person there's one person excuse me that centralized all the donations send it to this guy and his newspaper so again just really adept and very very clever person um i need to go fast forward in the story

it's really remarkable if you think about let's say he started around 31 he's depressed doesn't know what he's going to do by the time he's 41 he built his entire empire and then he goes blind and then the the you know the last let's say 20 years of his life is is where he gets kind of like how are you use esk um and part of the reason that no one really knows you know why it happened it could have been genetic it could have been uh all kinds of different reasons. But something that definitely didn't help is Pulitzer drove himself to the breaking point over and over again. He did not take care of his body. He'd work, you know, every hour of every day.

So it says work intention continued to wear Pulitzer down. Newspaper publisher George Child, which is also like a mentor of Joseph, is trying to, you know, get him to calm down. So he says, George Child, who was older than Pulitzer, often counseled Pulitzer to ease up on his workload. Joseph was endangering his health. He must be careful and remember that he has a wife and children who have a claim on him. He must try to learn to take things more rationally he is under too great a pressure and is doing more than anyone can do and retain his health so saying hey if you keep down this path and this is what his doctors also told him um you know your body's going to break down you're going to have severe issues they did not predict blindness being one of those

issues though um in just a few short years he brought it so it says from less than um i know is uh from less than 15 000 circulation when he took over to to a quarter million now he's at 250 000 uh the paper now circulated more than a quarter of a million copies each day even if pulitzer ceased his constant self-promotion that's another thing to know about him uh i'm about to read a book on estee lauder and she says something that's fantastic and that's something that's fantastic. She's like, I never worked a day in my life without selling. If I believe in something, I sell it and sell it hard.

That's something also Pulitzer would agree with, so he was constantly self-promoting. The success of the world was now so widely known that it was spawning imitators in other cities. His formulas worked, even for a young dropout from Harvard. Who are they talking about there? William Randolph Hearst. I think he's like 20 years younger than Pulitzer, 15 years younger, something like that. So now we get this introduction to Hearst.

So it says, 24-year-old William Randolph Hearst persuaded his father to turn over control of the family's money-losing San Francisco Examiner to him. So it's a newspaper his family owned. He drops out of Harvard. He's like, forget Harvard. I want to be in the newspaper business hearst set about transforming the examiner into a west coast version of the world for years hearst had read studied and cut out articles from the world he was studying joseph's playbook he winds up copying it and then exceeding it so now we got to the beginning of the end unfortunately

he's only 41 years old uh and this is where his retina detaches so it says when the dot so one eye is completely blind the other one's partially blind and over time he essentially almost all blind and think about that he's dedicated he spent hours every day he read every single newspaper he would read writing he'd read books i mean he just can't do that anymore i mean i just can't imagine the heartbreak and the it's just it's like i said his life is cut in half so it's like the first first part of his half is extremely inspiring he overcame every single obstacle put in front of him through hard work through intelligence through seizing opportunity you know he rose himself up i love that story and the second half is just it's just devastating when the doctor peered into pulitzer's eyes it was clear in an

instant what had gone wrong the retina in the right eye had become detached and the left retina was in danger of detaching the prognosis was grim in a great majority of cases the natural course of the disease is slowly but surely progressive leading finally to total blindness vision failure was only one manifestation of pulitzer's health problems insomnia asthmatic lungs and almost continuous indigestion it was as if pulitzer was having a breakdown. I cannot imagine the stress this person was under. Not only is he building his empire, he's involved in politics, he's in fights all the time. It's not a happy existence. It did not have to be this way. That said Pulitzer was the beginning of the end. And so just one of the devastating effects of this is that he can't even

see his daughter's birth certificate. This is great writing writing so i'm going to read this to you although pulitzer could could sign the birth certificate he was incapable of reading or other writing to cope with his increasing infirmity he hired 30 year old claude pornsby ponsby ponsby would be the first in a long succession of young men who would handle pulitzer's correspondence read aloud to him That is just great writing, though. As the world darkened around him. Spread throughout the book is just these fascinating, fantastic sentences. Gives you an idea of, you know, the person that we're talking about. The only person who ever met Pulitzer's expectations was Pulitzer himself.

He was an unrelenting boss. And unrelenting to his family, by the way. More great writing and illustration of this time in his life. A giant intelligence internally condemned to the darkest of dungeons. A caged eagle furiously belaboring the bars. And so Pulitzer, even though he's blind, he's still obsessed with quality. And so he's got some good insights on competition and quality. And the competition he's referring to here is William Randolph Hearst.

Hearst is not satisfied saying San Francisco. He goes right into New York to compete directly with his former not mentor because they didn't hero, I would say. And they went, you know, having a fierce battle, I think, towards the end. They were kind of like partial to each other. But, you know, these are two alpha males. They're not there's there's not room. They're not going to be best friends, even if they know respect each other later on uh so it says we must recognize the the extraordinary competition no doubt but we must also recognize extraordinarily foolishness and not imitate it so it's like don't get down in the mud with him let's just have the best paper so he says i regard it as more important to have the best paper than the biggest in size and that's one of the innovations he has he made

he gave instructions write shorter paragraphs shorter sentences short he's like shorter everything uh he understood that people are not going to sit there for hours and hours and hours that the number of people that read you know uh a story that's three paragraphs long is a lot larger than the person that will read a story that's three three uh three pages long uh something to know about joseph he's constantly you know he's disappointed with everybody around him uh this is the negative aspect of personality the way he says he says to his kids i just could never imagine saying to mine um but his friend is telling him you know because now he's extremely wealthy he's one of the at this point in the story he's one of the richest people in america and he's just like

why are my kids not like me essentially and his friend who also came from nothing illustrates this point that we've seen over and over again i think it was charles kettering kettering that brought this up the last time how like uh you know you have people that are uh go through really rough childhoods uh strength is do that surviving that adversity makes them you know more formidable individual and yet they remove any adversity from their kids lives and then they wonder why the kid's not like them so it says self-made men like you and myself only come to maturity in the battle for existence and who knows uh and who knows should we have been the sons of wealthy parents if we were if we'd be what we are now? And the answer is most likely not right. Your children do not form any exception from those children who have grown up in similarly

favorable conditions. So he's like, it's not your kid's fault, you know, but they were raised in private schools, boarding schools in Switzerland, you're a giant yachts. I mean, just you're letting them hang out with, you know with the Vanderbilt's kids. What did you expect was going to happen? Thought they were going to be getting up at five in the morning and driving really hard? They never had a need to do that. They did not experience what you experienced, Joseph. And so as this blindness progresses, he becomes more reclusive. This is where I learned a lot from reading about him. A lot of it's inspiring. This is where I feel he lost the point. He lost the thread in life.

And so even though the beginning of Joseph's story is inspirational, I really do feel it has a profoundly unhappy ending. And knowing that and understanding that in my own life, I want to avoid this. I want to learn from the mistakes he made and not have that come to pass. Because what is the point of being wealthy and building a successful business and influencing and inspiring people around you if you're deeply, deeply unhappy? You spend no time with your own family. The families, I forgot how many kids, like seven kids, something like that they wind up having, some of which obviously pass away before adulthood, which is just devastating

to have to go through. And I just, he just lost the point. He lost the thread. And I don't even know how much I blame him. You know, I do think there was a, there was hereditary mental illness in his family. I couldn't imagine, you know, being at the apex of success and you lose your eyesight, what that could do, and then be reclusive for 15, 20 years. What is that going to do your mind? So this is just really the end of Joseph's life is really, for me, a cautionary tale. And I think this is the best summary to give you an idea of what I mean by that. He was bereft of friends, and the companions with whom he spent his days were paid to be with him. His most important connections to his

beginnings in St. Louis were dead. He was estranged from his only living sibling, who was his last tie to his childhood in Hungary. Joseph's children were a disappointment, and his family provided no comfort, broken up as it was on two continents. His wife Kate remained willing at all times to fill the void, but Joseph had spurned her offers of companionship so frequently that she ceased to ask. Writing to Joseph, Kate marked the moment. Twenty-five years married. How strange it seems, she said, when we think that a hundred years hence,

not one of us now living will be alive to care or to know or to enjoy or to suffer. What does it all amount to? To a puff of smoke which makes a few rings and then disappears into nothingness. And yet we make tragedies of our lives. Most of us not even making them serious comedies. And that is where I'll leave the story. That's 135 books down, 1,000 to go. If you buy the book using the link that's in your show notes, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time, and I'll talk to you again soon.