Founders - #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty

Episode Date: August 7, 2024

The name of Nobel usually calls to mind Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite, and the internationally prestigious prizes that bear his name. But Alfred was only one member of a creative and innovative family who built an industrial empire in prerevolutionary Russia. The saga begins with an emigre from Sweden, Immanuel Nobel, who was an architect, a pioneer producer of steam engines, and a maker of weapons.Immanuel's sons included Alfred; Robert, who directed the family's activities in the Caspian oil fields; and Ludwig, an engineering genius and manufacturing magnate whose boundless energy and fierce determination created the Russian petroleum industry.Ludwig's son Emanuel showed similar mettle, shrewdly bargaining with the Rothschilds for control of the Russian markets and competing head-on with Standard Oil and Royal Dutch Shell for lucrative world markets.Perhaps no family in history has played so decisive a role in building an industrial empire in an underdeveloped but resource-rich nation. Yet the achievements of the Nobel family have been largely forgotten. When the Bolsheviks came to power, Emmanuel had to flee the country disguised as a peasant.The Nobel empire with its 50,000 workers lay in ruins. An empire which had taken eighty years to design and build, was nearly destroyed, bringing a sudden and bitter end to one of the most remarkable industrial odysseys in world history.This episode is what I learned from reading The Russian Rockefellers: The Saga of the Nobel Family and the Russian Oil Industry by Robert Tolf.----Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to Ramp and learning how they can help your business control your costs and save more. ----Founders Notes gives you the superpower to learn from history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. You can search all my notes and highlights from every book I've ever read for the podcast. Get access to Founders Notes here. ----Join my free email newsletter to get my top 10 highlights from every book----Follow Founders Podcast on YouTube (Video coming soon!) ----“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 ----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

You and I always talk about this phenomenon that reoccurs throughout the history of entrepreneurship, that you can always understand the son by the story of his father. The story of the father is embedded in the son. The story you're about to hear is one of the most remarkable industrial odysseys ever told. And at the center is this relationship between a father and his two sons. The founder of this family dynasty was a great inventor, but he wasn't a great entrepreneur. He knew how to build great products, but he didn't pay enough attention to the financial side of his business. And as a result, he goes bankrupt. That is a mistake that his two sons actually learned from and successfully avoided. His sons, Ludwig and Alfred, were both world-class entrepreneurs and

some of the wealthiest people on earth when they were alive. They both built their businesses to last. They never went bankrupt like their father, and they were both obsessed with watching their costs. They both knew that it's not enough to build a great product. You have to build a great business and people that built great businesses, businesses that last is who we study on this podcast. And every single one of them was obsessed with controlling their expenses, just like Ludwig and Alfred were. In fact, this book talks about the fact that Ludwig and Alfred were both born in the 1830s. And there's all these great founders are also born in that decade. And the book talks about what some of these great founders, all born in

the 1830s had in common. And one of the people that is mentioned in the book is Andrew Carnegie. And Carnegie would repeat this mantra time and time again. Profits and prices are cyclical, subject to any number of transient forces on the marketplace. Cost, however, could be strictly controlled. And in Carnegie's view, any savings achieved in the cost were permanent. This is something I was talking about with my friend Eric, who's the co-founder and CEO of Ramp. Ramp is now a partner of this podcast. I've gotten to know all the co-founders of Ramp

and have spent a bunch of time with them over the last year or two. They all listen to the podcast and have picked up on the fact that the main theme from the podcast is the importance of watching your costs and controlling your spend and how doing so gives you a massive competitive advantage.

That is the main theme for RAMP. The reason that RAMP exists is to give you everything that you need to control your spend. RAMP helps you watch your costs. If RAMP existed in the 1800s, the founder of this family dynasty's last years of life would have been a lot more pleasant. And one thing is for sure, Alfred and Ludwig Nobel would have definitely used RAMP. They would have jumped all over a tool that gives you everything you need to control spend and optimize your financial operations all in a single platform.

Ramp's landing page is incredible. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business control costs. That is ramp.com. The name of Nobel usually calls to mind Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite and the Nobel Prizes, which he endowed. But other members of the Nobel family were no less creative and innovative. In fact, the range of their achievements in building an industrial empire truly qualifies them to be known as the Russian Rockefellers. The founder of this Russian

industrial dynasty was an immigrant from Sweden. Immanuel Nobel was an architect, a pioneer producer of steam engines, and a weapons maker. Decades before his son Alfred's dynamite began to alter the character of modern warfare, Immanuel designed, invented, and produced underwater mines. Immanuel's other sons included Robert, who directed the family's activities in the Caspian oil fields. And as you and I will talk about, a spur-of-the- moment decision by Robert actually changes the entire trajectory of the Nobel family from weapon makers into developing the entire Russian oil industry. And Ludwig, who is going to be the majority of what I want to talk about today, this is my favorite Nobel. And Ludwig, an engineering

genius and manufacturing magnet whose boundless energy and fierce determination created the Russian petroleum industry. Ludwig's son, Emmanuel, was not only one of the wealthiest men in Europe, but the peer and occasional adversary of some of the most powerful figures in international business circles. He shrewdly bargained with the Rothschilds of some of the most powerful figures in international business circles. He shrewdly bargained with the Rothschilds for control of the Russian markets and did not shrink from head-on competition with Standard Oil and Royal Dutch Shell for lucrative world markets. Emanuel not only helped modernize the Russian Navy, he also expanded the Russian oil industry, was a pioneer user of the diesel engine, official of the state bank, and a commander of a fleet of 300 ships.

Perhaps no family in history has played so decisive a role in building an industrial empire in an undeveloped but resource-rich nation. Yet, the achievements of the Nobel family are almost entirely unknown. Why? The answer can be found in the official Soviet myth that when the Bolsheviks seized power in November 1917, they inherited an empty cupboard, which they transformed into a cornucopia. The truth was the exact opposite. When the Bolsheviks came to power, Emmanuel had to flee the country disguised as a peasant. A reminder of how fast things can change. He was one of the richest people in the country, has to flee the country disguised as a peasant, and two of his brothers were thrown in jail. The family's holdings were confiscated. The Nobel Empire, which its 50,000 workers,

lay in ruins. Its fleet of oil tankers were idled. The fires in its foundries were banked. The oil refineries ceased operations. Their oil wells were flooded, and Russia's largest engine factory shut down. An empire which had taken the family 80 years to design and build was destroyed, bringing to a sudden and bitter end one of the most remarkable industrial odysseys in world history. That is an excerpt from the inside flap of this remarkable book I'm going to talk to you about today. First published all the way back in 1976, it is called The Russian Rockefellers, The Saga of the Nobel Family and the Russian Oil Industry, and is written by Robert

Toth. So I found this book through my friend Cameron Priest, who continues to be one of the most prolific readers of entrepreneur history that I've ever come across. He's recommended, I don't know, 40, 50, 60 of these books to me. And I spent the last few days rereading my highlights and going through all my notes in the book to try to figure out what I want to focus on. So I want to focus on Ludwig Nobel, but to tell the story of Ludwig Nobel, I have to tell you the story of his father, a few of his brothers, and then his son. And so I want to start in the introduction of the book to give you an overview of what has to be one of the most remarkable

families in human history. So we start with Alfred Nobel. Everybody knows him because he's the one, he dies in his will, he endows the Nobel Prize, and then other people knew him as the inventor of dynamite. So it says, Alfred Nobel was only one member of history's most inventive family, and the story has never been told of his father, Immanuel, and his brothers, Ludwig and Robert, and his nephew, Immanuel, and their own individual entrepreneurial, technological, and financial achievements in the weapons, petroleum, chemical, and transportation industries.

So Ludwig Nobel, the reason the book is called the Russian Rockefellers is because Ludwig Nobel, Alfred's brother, literally created the Russian oil industry. This is nuts. So I've been going around talking about this book to all my friends and really anybody who will listen this week as I've been reading it, because at the time, to give you an overview, at the time that the book takes place, Russia at this point in history is going to wind up producing over half of all the world's oil. The Nobel family produces 30% of that half. One company. And that company is founded and created by Ludwig.

And so here's just a brief overview of some of his achievements. He designed the world's first oil tanker. He installed Europe's first pipelines. He built the world's first full-scale continuous distillation refinery. He forged gigantic infrastructure on water and land. He built a network of storage depots and tank farms, harbors, freight yards, and marketing outlets from one end of the vast Russian empire to the other and then across the European continent. Ludwig's father before him

pioneered development of underwater mines, designed steam engines to power Russian ships, and installed the first central heating systems to warm Russian homes. Ludwig's son after him launched the world's first diesel-driven tugboats and tankers while bargaining with the Rothschilds and struggling against the Royal Dutch Shell Company and bartering with Standard Oil. Okay, so keep that in mind. This entire conversation is going to center around Ludwig. I got to tell you about his father and the fact that they grew up in poverty. I read Alfred Nobel's biography a long time ago. It was probably three, four years ago. It's episode 163.

There's a line in there because you're going to understand that Emmanuel Nobel, the founder of this dynasty, the patriarch of the family, spent essentially decades in poverty. In fact, there's a lot. The reason I bring this up is because in Alfred Nobel's biography, it says that he never forgot poverty. And he never forgot poverty even after he was one of the wealthiest people on the planet. Keep in mind, this guy lived in the 1800s. And so there's a line in his biography that's that's nuts, where he asked somebody what they wish as a wedding present. And the young woman replied, I want as my wedding gift should be what you earn in one day. And Nobel, who's usually tight with money, actually agreed.

And he wrote her a check. His daily earning for himself was $110,000 a day in the 1800s. And so this poverty that his dad's really an inventor. We're going to talk a lot about this today. It's like, it's not enough to just be an inventor. You also have to be a skilled entrepreneur, which his dad wasn't, but his sons definitely were. And so this is, we're going to go right into Emmanuel's life and says only his marriage brought him some measure

of success. And it talks about the role that his wife and then the mother of Ludwig and Alfred, just how important she was to the family's success. Her patience, endurance, even her faith in her husband were sorely tested during those first years of marriage as one after another of Emmanuel's dreams turned into nightmares. They moved from house to house on the outskirts of Stockholm, needing but not being able to afford larger quarters for their growing family. Alfred was born just 10 months after his father had declared bankruptcy. adding commentary to the book about what it was like, not Four Seasons now, but when Four Seasons was just an idea in her husband's brain. She talks about the fact that she saw him stressed. She saw him lying awake in the middle of the night. And she said something that was very, I think,

profound. She said, my most valuable contribution to his success has been my silence. What does that mean? This is what she says in his autobiography. Early on, he made some audacious statements that sounded like pipe dreams. He told me once that his aim was to make the name Four Seasons a worldwide brand, synonymous with luxury like Rolls Royce. Sure, I thought, with only about 10 hotels, hardly likely. But I didn't let on. My most valuable contribution to his success has been my silence. And I think she's picking up on a very important idea. Entrepreneurs are going to get enough doubt from the external world.

They can't have it when they come home. They can't have it with the most important relationship they have in their life. And you see that just like Isidore Sharpe's wife understood that, Emmanuel Nobel's wife also understood that. The previous year, a fire had destroyed most of their home and possessions. Emmanuel, still faced with debts from his abandoned building projects, saw no alternative to the humiliation of declaring himself bankrupt. But he refused to be discouraged or defeated. He was determined to find practical applications for some of those ideas that never

stopped swirling in his head. And so not only is he inventive, but he's also very persuasive. So he's able to raise money multiple times, even after multiple failures. And so he starts setting up and he does these experiments with subsurface charges of gunpowder to destroy an enemy on land or on sea. What he is thinking about becomes underwater and underground mines. This is really important because it's going to lead directly to some experiments that his son does, which builds the empire and the monopoly that he built around dynamite. It says, it was the beginning of the Nobel family's fascination with explosives. So Emmanuel is Swedish. He's trying to sell his invention to the Swedish military. A main theme of the book is the fact that for a very long time, there's been a huge number of Swedish immigrants into Russia. And it is during this next generation of the Nobel family that the Swedish actually build the Russian oil industry. And so here's a little bit about the troubles that he's having. In Sweden of the 1830s,

Emmanuel was alone in recognizing the value of this new weapon. Financial security continued to elude him. Creditors continued to hound him. Now they're going to describe Sweden at this time. In an agricultural country in which poverty was thought to be a national characteristic, Emmanuel was beginning to believe that he would not have the chance to make the kinds of success he felt he could with the proper opportunities. His frustration was not a unique phenomenon in Stockholm at the time, but Emanuel was never one to let frustration block his path or force him to resign and accept his fate. When he met a visiting Russian emissary at a party in Stockholm, he was suddenly confronted by a crossroads, another new arena to seek fame and fortune.

Now, remember that line, Alfred Nobel never forgot poverty. The decision was as difficult as any Emmanuel would ever make, for he had to leave Andrietta, that's his wife, and their three sons behind. Can you imagine? Put yourself in his shoes. You are 36 years old. You have a wife. You have three sons. You are bankrupt. You are in debt. You have no track record to indicate that you are capable of bringing a successful—you invent a lot, but you have no track record to show that you can actually bring successfully one of your inventions to market. And you get on a boat and you wave goodbye to your family, not sure when you're going to see them again. So he first goes to Finland, then he goes to Russia. And so this idea of Swedes seeking fortune in Russia was not new.

This is a great paragraph I got to read to you about the stuff going on during Peter the Great. It says, from the time of the Vikings to the time of the Nobels, there were thousands of Swedes who, in an endless repetition of war and commerce, fought, plundered, traded, and settled in Russia. Swedish technicians were employed by the czars. Swedish metalworkers and gunsmiths laid the foundations of a weapons industry. A Swede established the first glassworks. Swedish prisoners of war were used by Peter the Great to cut a three-mile path through the forest for his great boulevard in the heart of his new city. Swedes seeking fortune in Russia was not new. And this massive risk that Emmanuel took, which is going to change the trajectory of his descendants' lives forever, wind up working out because the Swedish military was

not interested in Emmanuel's underseen minds, but the Russians were enthusiastic. So I'm going to skip over a big part here. He does a demonstration, and this is what I mean about how enthusiastic the Russian military was. The mine exploded when it was struck by a small boat. The general was ecstatic. He rushed over to Nobel and kissed him and then started to dance. The general had been under considerable pressure to find a successful underwater mine, which Nobel is the first person to invent. This is September 1840.

He is 39 years old. This is a remarkable description. It was the first sizable subsidy Emmanuel had ever received. And he uses that money to establish a factory. Two years later, he's making enough money to actually send for his family. Can you imagine? I could not imagine being away from my kids and my wife for this long. It's incredible. For the first time in his life, he enjoyed a certain prosperity, a comforting and encouraging feeling of success. In the summer of 1842, he sent for his family. Now, this is wild. He was gone for five years, okay? During his five-year absence, his wife and his three sons had scraped out a simple existence that at times bordered on poverty. Their only

source of income came from a little milk and vegetable store that she operated. The boys, now check this out. This is wild. The boys, Robert and Ludwig, so Robert's the older brother, Ludwig's the middle, and Alfred's the youngest, okay? Robert and Ludwig, to survive, had to sell matches on the streets of Stockholm. Now, how crazy is that? A couple episodes ago, on episode 348, I covered the book The Match King, which is about the founder of the Swedish match company, which still exists to this day, by the way.

And we see in this story the early days of what's going to turn into the Nobel family dynasty sustained by their young kids. I mean, these are young kids, probably seven, eight years old at the time, selling matches on street corners in Stockholm. And so once he has his family back together and he has all of his sons in Russia, he does a brilliant thing. This is the phenomenal education that he sets up for his sons. He says they were instructed solely by tutors, Robert and Ludwig primarily in engineering, Alfred in chemistry, which is hilarious because you could think of Ludwig as an engineer and

Alfred's empire is going to be in chemistry. And all three in Swedish, Russian, German, French, and English. They were also put to work in the factory, moving from one position to another, learning the business of running a business. That's a great line. Learning the business of running a business, acquiring's a great line. Learning the business of running a business. Acquiring from direct on-the-job exposure practical lessons in the problems and challenges of management, execution, and administration. Now, Emmanuel is going to have about a 20-year period of relative prosperity before he goes

bankrupt again. How could that possibly happen? There's two issues here. He's much more of an inventor, not an entrepreneur. He has two really big mistakes. One, he's got one customer, which we'll get into in a minute. And two, he doesn't have the financial discipline that his son, Alfred, will have. He expands too fast.

He's not conservative. He's not really paying attention to his costs. Alfred was probably the most gifted entrepreneur of the family. And so his dad didn't have that. But his dad did have a lot of success inventing and producing. And so in addition to the success of his underwater mines, he's also manufacturing marine engines. And then he's steadily expanding the factory until he had about a thousand employees. His reputation as an inventor and one of Russia's leading engineers and industrious were all striking indications of Emmanuel's

success. The ultimate rewards for his diligence, his persistence, and his genius, despite the achievements and the recognition Emmanuel was not in a secure financial position. His entire business depended on the contracts that he was getting from Nicholas, the czar at the time. Nicholas is going to die. The new czar takes over. This is Alexander II, and suddenly those contracts, those promises mean nothing. There's a, I think it was the Navy SEALs that said, two is one, one is none. You cannot only have one customer. Your business cannot depend on a single customer. The many pledges of contracts made to Emmanuel by the ministers of Nicholas were ignored by the ministers of Alexander. His pleas and protests that he had expanded his payroll and factory

in order to honor those contracts went unheeded. By 1857, he had a surplus of labor, a surplus of supplies, and no orders. For Emanuel, the decline was a disaster. Without his government contract, he could not keep the factory running. There was also the problem of Emanuel himself. This is what I mentioned earlier. He's less of a businessman and factory director than he was an inventor. He was simply not the man to manage an enterprise that had grown to the size and his tremendous talents lay in fields other than management. He was more inventor than entrepreneur. His two sons will be both. And this had to happen. I think this leads directly to their success because they are capable of learning from their father's mistake. Robert Ludwig and Alfred would never forget the bitter lessons of their father's failure. For Emmanuel, then 58, there would not be another chance. It was all over. 22 years after he had sailed from Stockholm as a bankrupt man, he returned again bankrupt.

But what I love about him is he's relentlessly optimistic and he has faith in his sons. So he says his dreams are going to have to be realized by the next generation of Nobels. And he was not pessimistic about that next generation. This is what he said. If my sons work harmoniously and carry on the work that I have begun, I believe that they will never want for their daily bread, for there is still much to be done here in Russia. So it is shortly after this where Ludwig opens his own factory. And so something that's been implanted, or I guess a habit that's implanted in my mind from Charlie Munger is like when you're analyzing somebody's

business success, you try to look for waves that they were able to surf. And so Ludwig is actually going to surf. This idea of surfing is in Port Charlie's Almanac. I think I covered it back on episode 329. But Ludwig is going to surf a change and there are going to be beneficial government policies from the government of Russia. And then this explosion in population growth and new industry development, essentially an industrial revolution comes to Russia at the time. And so it says, Ludwig took full advantage of the recent reversals in government policy. In contrast to Emmanuel's last years in Russia, the ministries, the war ministries, that is, it's insane. I think we're going to get to it, but I think more than a third of Russia's budget

at the time went to military. The ministries were once again beginning to encourage domestic manufacturing. The greatest stimulant to this new industrial initiative was the Emancipation Act of 1861, which was the liberation of 40 million Russian peasants that are now flocking from the countryside into these new city centers and then the areas that are springing up around these giant factories. All these people are coming into the cities and they need jobs. And so within 20 years, there's gonna be 250 new factories that pop up. They call this a belated awakening to the opportunities of the Industrial Revolution.

So he's going to start making weapons and things that support weapons. So he started making cast iron artillery shells and then gun carriages, which I think he builds the best gun carriage in the world. So a gun carriage plays the same role that like a carriage does for a human. A carriage carries a human. This is a carriage that covers this giant piece of artillery. The thing that would pop to mind is if you think about like a civil war cannon, they're usually on like two big wheels and you kind of pick it up and move it to a different spot. What allows that cannon to move is a gun carriage. That is what Ludwig's making.

He's also going to make rifles and rifle stocks for the Russian military, which inadvertently or accidentally leads to his discovery of this giant and brand new oil industry inside of Russia. We'll get there in one second. But this is the important thing. I always say learning is not just memorizing information. Learning is changing your behavior. He is changing. He's actually learned from his father.

He is changing his behavior. More than a third of the state budget went to the military. But Ludwig was careful to avoid total dependence on such contracts and to rely on the spoken or even written word of government ministries. He had no intention of repeating his father's costly mistake. So Ludwig's factory becomes the country's largest manufacturer of gun carriages, rifles. And here's what happened. He's expanding so rapidly, he cannot find the talent. So this idea that he keeps having to import Swedish talent to build the

Russian manufacturing and weapons industry, and then he's going to do the same to build the oil industry is something that pops up over and over again in the book. So it says the task of finding talent was just as difficult for Ludwig as it had been for his father. And the solution for both men was to recruit as many Swedes and Finns as were willing to work in Petersburg. As factory orders increased, so did the size of the factory and the number of workers. This meant additional Swedes, Finns, and an occasional Norwegian on the payroll. And another phenomenon that he is surfing

is the fact that the entire continent, the entire European continent, was engaged in a giant arms race. So keep in mind, this is two years after the American Civil War. So he's got this very successful and expanding manufacturing business, and he's got this very successful and expanding manufacturing business, and he's got all these factories. Where did he get the money to do this? His dad

was bankrupt. They were not a rich family yet. And this is another example of this maxim that I just see over and over again in the biographies, that relationships run the world. So not only the contracts are coming from relationships that he had and friendships that he had, but also the financing. So there's a captain in the artillery, this guy named Bildering. He had been a close friend of Ludwig's. He needs 200,000 rifles. And so he goes to the war ministry and he says, hey, Ludwig should be the one that makes this for us. Another one of his friends, and this guy was also friends with his dad's, was one of the people that made this, was influential making this actual decision, like being an actual decision maker for this. This guy's name is Carl. I'm not

even going to try to pronounce his last name. So it says, it is undoubtedly to Ludwig's benefit that one of his best, oldest, and truest friends was in a key position to influence the decision. Carl was the liaison officer once assigned to Emanuel, his father. He was also the chief inspector for the rifle and ammunition factories. He had previously had served as the head of armories and lieutenant general. Carl is also the person that arranged the financing for Ludwig. So it says in the early 1870s, Carl had loaned Ludwig his securities, his Carl securities, to use as collateral for bank loans to expand the factory. Ludwig had to pay 5% interest for the securities and 6%

on the borrowed cash, but these were bargain rates in a country where bank loans were not easily procured. Such support, relationship, and encouragement was a most valuable asset for Ludwig's industrial enterprises. So I already said Ludwig is the most fascinating character in this entire book, and there's a ton of interesting characters in the book. And not only is, you know, he's a great manufacturing genius, he's a great entrepreneur, but he also always is capable of like thinking for himself and making his own decisions. And he had the best reputation, I think, in all of Russia for actually giving a shit about the well-being of his employees at a time when that was just unheard of. In many cases, I'm going to get to this,

they talked about, well, I guess Ludwig is the first person or one of the first people to realize increased care of your employees actually leads to increased productivity. And it's describing like all these people are coming in from the countryside. Sometimes they're emigrating from other countries. They're working in, you know, inhospitable factory environments. And they said that cattle in many cases would have resisted the cramped quarters that they put humans in. And so Ludwig innovates in every single aspect of his business. I don't think I've brought this up yet, and I should have from the very beginning,

so I apologize. What's fascinating to me is Ludwig and Alfred, they're going to have this dual success at almost the exact same time, different industries. They have wildly different approaches. Alfred is like a delegator. He has essentially a monopoly. Ludwig is operating in an intensely competitive industry, and he does everything himself. But again, I think this is just one of the greatest things that you learn from reading all these biographies of entrepreneurs. It's like there's not one path. And now reading about both of them and their personalities, it's very obvious that they built businesses authentic to their true selves. So I should have said at the beginning, but keep that in mind. I'm going to go into what he did for his employees. And at this time, nobody was doing this. Ludwig made certain that his workers' accommodations were adequate and well-maintained. He built new housing. He encouraged them to save a portion of their wages and establish the savings banks for his employees. He regularly added substantial sums from his own profits into the employee bank. He refused to employ children. He reduced the work

day from the usual 14 hours to 10 and a half hours and instituted the first profit sharing plan in Russia. He also started a series of free educational courses for his workers. Decades before the business world discovered that overall efficiency and productivity are promoted by a generous and concerned attitude towards employees, Ludwig Nobel was doing it. And then the description of just this remarkable inventor and entrepreneur and genius that Ludwig was, there's a million things that he's going to, different things that he's going to work on. But I want to go back to this idea. It's really important. Learning from mistakes is changing your behavior, right? So he realizes we need a bunch of just consumer products.

We can't just rely on the military. And so at the time, you have carriage drivers. You know, these are horse-drawn carriages. The roads in Russia shouldn't even be called roads. It was hilarious. They said that the roads were so bad in this area where they are that the coach drivers would sit sideways with their legs hanging off the carriage so they could jump off easily when they hit the inevitable giant hole in the road. So Ludwig makes the Nobel wheel, this carriage wheel that can actually withstand and not break. And the result was a monopoly on the market. This

is also going to tie to this idea that the Nobel family had excessively high standards. And as a result, over time, they were able to build this incredible brand based on quality. The Nobel name meant something. In fact, later on, as they dominate the Russian oil industry, they talk about their employees were proud. They wore the fact that they were Nobelites, that they worked for the Nobel family as a badge of honor because that meant they were the best. Now, the reason I'm also telling you this is because, one, he's learning from his father. But two, this is like Ludwig's MO for everything. He wants to control everything from the invention to the manufacturing to the sales to everything.

And so they invent the wheel, they manufacture it. Then they set up all the sales organizations all over, like all over Russia. Recruitment of the sales force, establishment of the sales districts, the administrative and financial direction, all were planned and implemented in Ludwig's office. This goes back to he's much more of like a micromanager involved in every single detail, more like a Steve Jobs and a Walt Disney than his brother Alfred Nobel, which I'll get to. He was interested in these administrative details as he was in engineering, design, and processes of manufacturing. A fanatic for work, he was constantly in the plant to check on the operation of some machine he had designed to supervise insulation, to oversee repair. There was no

facet of production or distribution or direction that escaped his attention. He had demonstrated that whatever was produced in the Nobel factory was worthy of comparison with any competing product from abroad. So that is an overview and an introduction into Ludwig. We will return to him in a second. I need to get to Alfred because the brothers are constantly involved in each other's businesses. There's so many letters between the brothers. I wish there was some kind of book where you could just see their correspondence back and forth. Considering that the Bolsheviks invade and kind of take over everything, I bet you a lot of that correspondence was destroyed, but it's just fascinating. So let's get to Alfred. This is such a fascinating family. There's twin success. The twin success of

Ludwig and Alfred are happening at the exact same time. So by the time that Ludwig is going to start building in the oil industry, by that time, Alfred already had a dozen dynamite factories all over the globe. And how that came to be was fascinating because he got the idea from his former chemistry tutor. Remember going back to what I said about what his father did that was so brilliant for his sons that he's like, we're going to hire tutors. You know, you guys are going to start engineering. You're going to do chemistry, you're going to learn all these languages. So his former chemistry tutor had told Emmanuel, his father, okay, about these Italian experiments with nitroglycerine. That's going to be the active ingredient in dynamite when Alfred tames this, and had recommended it for use in making more powerful land and sea mines. Emmanuel had no time for such research, but his son Alfred did. And this is

what I mean about how the family's constantly supporting them. When Alfred is doing his demonstrations, the first time he successfully detonates what's going to turn into dynamite, his brothers Robert and Ludwig are there observing. And then this next sentence is something that's really important. It's not the first person to invent something that gets rich. It's the first person to match that invention and build a phenomenal business around that invention. Alfred was not the first to experiment with nitroglycerin, but he was the first to combine successful experimentation with a genius for business organization and financial management. I double underline financial management. He is probably the shrewdest person in his entire family when it comes to managing the money, watching the costs of the business. He was very conservative. He did not want to expand faster if it meant putting the

survival of his business at risk. What did Steve Jobs tell us a few weeks ago? Victory in our industry is spelled survival. All the money is in the future. Do not interrupt the compounding. And the way to interrupt the compounding is if you over-optimize for growth at the expense of durability. The other book that I'm reading this week starts out, I'll give you a little sneak peek,

1,000 square foot store into a $40 billion company. It starts 60 years ago. They did like $8 billion revenue last year. The inability to build a durable business would have foreclosed that opportunity, that $8 billion a year opportunity that's 60 years into the future, that opportunity that most humans are incapable of seizing. So now I'm going to introduce the third brother, Robert. Robert is the older brother. He is in in this family, the underachiever. Yet a single spur-of-the-moment decision changes the trajectory of the entire family.

It couldn't have been easy to be the older brother because the standards set by—he's got two younger brothers that are complete overachievers. It says the standards set by two such overachieving brothers would be hard for anyone to match. And so Robert is working for Ludwig. Ludwig is making all these rifles and rifle stocks for the Russian military. He's like, hey, can you travel to this section over here? Because they're known to have phenomenal supplies of like walnut wood. And Ludwig gives Robert 25,000 rubles to buy up the whole stock of walnut wood. Robert is going to travel to this place

called Baku. Baku is going to be where they build their giant oil company. So we can call this section Robert's pivot. In all his travels, he had never seen anything like Baku. And in all his dreams for personal enrichment, he had never seen greater potential. There were parcels of oil-rich land in Baku along with a small refinery. So he goes, he's like, I'm not buying your walnut wood. I want your refinery. His offer was the walnut money, all 25,000 rubles of it. A sudden decision taken without consultation with either Ludwig, after all it was Ludwig's money, or Alfred, the family expert in matters of finance and investment. When he returned to Petersburg, he would have to convince his brother that he had found a much better investment for the money than rifle stocks.

And this is the remarkable thing about business. You only have to be right once. Up until this point, Robert had failed repeatedly. He just needed to wait until he found the right opportunity. So it says his two brothers looked upon this scheme with as much enthusiasm as they had viewed Robert's other projects. First, it was fireproof bricks, then kerosene, iron, glycerin, and now petroleum. What next? But here is one of the most important things in this book.

Robert had an innate talent for this opportunity, and they're going to target a market full of second rate talent, second rate competition. And what he realized is like these refineries, these are yokels. They don't know what they're doing. And we're at the very beginning of a giant oil industry. So Robert is also a very good chemist. In fact, Alfred, who hired some of the best chemists in the world, said that his brother was a very good chemist. And so in a short time, Robert was able to suggest improved methods of refining the crude oil that's coming out of this Baku region in Russia to produce higher grade kerosene than was the norm for the competitive refineries. And they can combine the talents that the family had,

the fact that they could build very sophisticated manufacturing facilities. And so very quickly, Robert's modernized refinery produced the highest quality kerosene that had ever come out of Russia, where the usual product was then known as Baku sludge. It was unquestionably one of the best, was the best of the 140 refineries crammed in this town of Baku. Listen to this, going back to this main theme. It was an all Swedish operation. The main chemist was Swedish. The engineer and production chief was Swedish. The machine shop foreman was Swedish. And in two short years, they were achieving what in later years would be expected of anyone associated with the Nobel company, producing

the most reliable product, establishing new standards, setting a pace which others had to follow, providing goals and guidelines in all phases of a new industry. So Ludwig is about to move his attention into this brand new oil industry that's springing up in Baku. I need to tell you what Baku was like at the beginning and the contrast of what Ludwig's going to impose. Very similar to what Rockefeller did. There's a reason they're called the Russian whoever lives a year among the oil owners of Baku can never again be civilized, which is the perfect opportunity for someone like Ludwig. The time, the place, the setting were ideal for Ludwig's particular genius. When Ludwig Nobel entered Baku in the spring of 1876, a man with vision had arrived. It was the real beginning of the oil industry.

Every phase of the business would have to be examined, every area rationalized, improved, and modernized. So there's a ton of detail, but I just want to pull out two sentences because this is one of the best things if you can find yourself in a situation where you're attacking a market full of second-rate competition and second-rate talent, which is exactly what Ludwig is doing. He has these ideas for... He shares ideas with all the quote-unquote competitors in his field. Obviously, you're going to have to have some kind of organization in the early oil, he realized, just like Rockefeller did. And they're just like, nope. They're at the very beginning. They don't know what the hell they're doing. They're producing a low-quality product, and they're just not interested in change. He says, others were simply not interested in any new idea. They had a complete lack of enterprise.

So what he would do is obviously he's not looking around like, oh, I wonder if this is a good idea. No one else is doing it. I guess I won't do it. He's like, no, I believe the idea is rational. It should happen. So he'll just go and build it. And then people try to imitate him and they're just not as talented as he is.

The competition then started to build their own pipelines, frequently failing to match Nobel standards and erecting a maze of jerry-built, leaking and ill-fitting pipes. And then one thing that Ludwig does is he's constantly inventing. He's leading the way in his industry. He's the first. Think about how crazy, how many other fortunes after this are built off of oil tankers and super tankers like Daniel Ludwig, like Aristotle Anastas? Ludwig is the one that invented the oil tanker, and it was just very common sense.

Listen to his approach. If it could be transported in bulk, meaning oil, carried from one harbor to another in large tank, Ludwig believed that the product could compete with more traditional sources of fuel. There had to be a fast, reliable economic means of moving lakes of oil. The size of this industry is nuts, which I'll get to. That description, lakes of oil, is not hyperbolic. This is Ludwig's thinking, right? He's like, there has to be a fast, reliable economic means of moving lakes of oil from the isolated regions where it's readily available to the heavily populated centers where it's in demand. This invention is going to be later described as the most important fact in the entire history of the petroleum industry. That is

nuts. When you think about it, the petroleum industry may be the world's most valuable industry that's ever been created. So Ludwig argues the facts of his case. Very rational person. The standard oil barrel weighs 64 pounds. That's 20% of the oil that it can hold, which means that a fifth of any cargo of a barrel of oil consisted of wood that could only be shipped one way because you're not shipping empty oil barrels back the other way. Ludwig's arguments were as logical and persuasive as they seemed to him, failed to sway the opposition. This is what I mean. This is just second-rate competition.

Why? Because they're just mimicking, they're just copying. They're incapable of independent thought. There was absolutely no support for the scheme. It was too great a risk because it had never been done before. And then his personality, very different than Alfred's, who's going to essentially have a technical monopoly, it says, Lugwood made no effort to keep secret any part of his designs, and he rejected the pleas of his associates and shareholders that he take out patents. He did not wish to profit in that manner to restrict dissemination of ideas that could benefit the entire industry. This is incredible. Okay. So, you know, they're small when he starts doing this. And then

keep in mind, this book is from 1976. Okay. So it's even bigger and more developed now. But the main theme of what I want to tell you is a good idea. This is a note off myself, a good idea, not abandoned, will always grow larger than expected. And so they talk about the fact that, you know, his first oil tanker is smaller. And then he just realizes like, oh, we keep getting these bigger and bigger and bigger until the size of tankers increased to levels never dreamed of with captains of the ship having to use bicycles to move from one end of the ship to the other. A good idea not abandoned, will always grow larger than expected. And so when I'm going to read this overview of this phenomenal business that Ludwig built, and a description of Ludwig himself, you'll see why he was my favorite character in this entire book.

Ludwig Nobel's tanker fleet was the most dramatic innovation in the Russian petroleum industry of the 1870s, but it was only part of the general transportation and distribution system, which he conceived and organized. Pipelines to carry the raw oil from field to refinery and the finished product to dockside. Tankers to carry that product 600 miles north. Smaller tank barges for transshipment. Barges for moving the oil up the mighty river, railroad tank cars and barges carrying the oil from all corners or to all corners of the empire, retail distribution centers in every major area of population, a labor force of thousands from field to consumer, drilling for oil, building barges, fitting pipe, refining kerosene, repairing tank cars and ships, peddling the products. This was Ludwig Nobel's

empire within the Russian empire. He created it in 10 years. From well to wick, it was all Nobel. It was the achievement of an individual who thoroughly dominated all aspects of an industry, which he was literally creating as he went along. He was president, chief engineer, sales manager, an entire research and development department, chairman of the board, and market analyst, an incomparable, insatiable overachiever. His deeds in Russia were without parallel. Absolutely incredible. You know what also is incredible? Human nature. Human nature is just funny to me. Even after he's done all this, he tries to share ideas throughout his industry

and he always receives, not always, a alarmingly number amount of times negative responses. And he's said the best thing. He's like, well, the only thing you do when you receive a negative response is you take out a pen and paper and you do it yourself. This guy's optimism, this mentality, I've just absolutely loved it. This is a great quote of his on struggle. Opposition never really bothered Ludwig, never really impeded his progress or diminished his determination. This is what he said. An industrial undertaking properly managed and well organized involves constant struggle. Its success is dependent upon foresight, perseverance, industry, and economy. Struggle is to be expected. Ludwig was accustomed to making his own decisions, traveling his own road, and he was certainly used to opposition.

Okay, so now I want to go back to this idea I mentioned earlier that I think is really beneficial. The idea that the twin successes of Ludwig and Alfred are happening at the exact same times. They're operating different industries. They have different personalities. They have different ways approaching their business. Yet at the time this is taking place, they're two of the most successful and richest entrepreneurs on the planet. And so this goes on for a few pages. I just want to compare and contrast them because I love this idea. Again, there's no formula. Just do whatever is authentic to you.

Self-sufficient, independent, with a devotion to work and a reliance on its routine, the Swedes demand a high level of order in that work. So they both share this, okay? A sense of purpose and perspective in their own rational civilization. For the Nobels, their boyhood of poverty strengthened that motivation. He who does not work need not eat, declared Ludwig. And so their father is going to weigh in on what he thought were the difference between his sons. Emmanuel believed that it was Alfred who demonstrated the greatest industry,

but Ludwig the greatest genius. For Alfred, his rule was never to do myself what another could do better or at any rate as well. He wanted to delegate everything possible. Alfred Nobel was certain that if you do everything yourself in a very large concern, which concern at this time in history is just a business, okay, in a very large business, the result will be that nothing will be done properly. And whoever tries to do it all himself will be worn out in body and soul and ruined. That is Alfred's perspective. Let's go to Ludwig.

And Alfred, Alfred was a very like morose man. I don't know if you'd want to be like friends with him. Ludwig drew people in. He was very charismatic. Ludwig was not a person easily forgotten even after the briefest encounter. He was, in the words of his closest collaborators, a personality in the fullest sense of the word. He dominated every audience. He revealed at once an inner clarity of purpose and deep concentration of power. Alfred preferred to be aloof from his employees. Ludwig's home was in front of his factory.

Ludwig spent many hours with his engineers and draftsmen, his factory foreman and his section chiefs. I don't think Alfred ever had kids. Ludwig had 18. 11 of the 18 survived infancy. Ludwig was at heart an optimist and hopeful about mankind, as hopeful about mankind as he was about his own capabilities and career. Alfred more pessimistic and definitely had a cynical view of his fellow man. What they had in common was that Ludwig and Alfred both pushed themselves at such a pace that physical exhaustion probably would have overcome far hardier types. Alfred was more interested in the financial aspects of business.

Ludwig regarded financial speculation as a refuge for those who were too lazy to work. Ludwig competed in a heavily competitive market. Alfred essentially had a monopoly. These were alien considerations to the man whose own industrial empire was based on a product that he alone controlled. He alone determined the quantity of dynamite to release onto the market. He alone decided which plants in which country should charge what price. Competition was of little to no concern to him, and he could run his business from a hotel room in any country he chose. Alfred delegated. Ludwig was an entrepreneur who was never content to delegate to merely invest, but who always insisted on becoming personally and totally committed. So Ludwig is going to die relatively early. He's going to die at 57. We're not there yet. There is

going to be this like triarchy is the way I described it. And maybe I've just been watching too much Game of Thrones. But the triarchy of the Russian oil industry at this time, once they see the success that the Nobel family had, is Standard Oil comes in, and then the Rothschilds are also financing and trying to break. The Rothschilds actually finance and develop the second largest, what's going to wind up being the second largest Russian oil company. And so they're going to be a major headache for the Nobels for the next two generations. And so this war between them is going to be a major headache for the Nobels for the next two generations. And so this war between them is going to be known as Europe's second 30-year war between Standard, it's going to be Dutch Royal Shell, the Rothschilds, and then the Nobel family. But I do want to point out a very fascinating idea where it's like, well, outside success

attracts a lot of attention and in turn is going to attract a lot of competition. And so the one place on the planet at which Rockefeller and Standard Oil are not dominating is in Russia. And so they have, there's a series of attacks, but this is a great description of what was happening because the Noba family is producing just so much oil at this point. In late November, Standard Oil cut prices. Rockefeller already controlled more than 90% of all American oil exports and was the domineering force in all world markets except Russia. But the, this is such a great line. This is why I'm reading this section to you. But the price of monopoly is eternal aggression. The price of monopoly is eternal aggression. And when the Americans saw Nobel's

sudden and successful invasion of their markets, they quickly counterattacked. And then once you understand the scale, this mind-boggling, brain-breaking scale of the Russian oil industry at this time, it makes sense why Standard Oil and Rockefeller were not going to ignore them and they were going to try to fight. This is insane. One Nobel oil well, a A single one gushed over 11,000 tons of oil a day. That is more than the total oil flowing from all 25,000 wells in the United States at that time. These gushers would come out sometimes so fast and unexpectedly that they would shoot a stream of oil that's 225 feet straight up into the sky. That stream of oil would then be carried by winds. A mile and a half away, you'd have entire towns,

which outside their houses would be drenched in oil from these gushers. And just like you and I have talked about in the past, I've done a few episodes. I did this book called The Big Rich and another book called Wildcatters about the first and second oil revolutions in Texas. And what I love about reading about oil is it just, it draws the craziest characters. So there's a guy, this six foot three inch giant of a peasant, okay? He worked as a servant in the Baku office of one of the Tsar's local military representatives. He saved some of his meager earnings from his paycheck.

He buys a small vineyard on the outskirts of town. Under the grapes that he thought he was buying just happened to be lakes of oil. By the turn of the century, that peasant, that giant peasant, became a man of fabulous wealth and fabulous extravagances. His son inherits the wealth. And he becomes Russia's greatest gambler, a collector of paintings, racehorses, and beautiful women. He would throw parties that look like from out of the pages of Arabian Nights. He would swagger across Europe, keeping a large entourage,

and then growing enormously fat with his movable feast and his permanent luxuries one of these people that turn from peasants unbelievably rich they spend their money on hilarious things and one of them built this giant palace and the beginning it's shaped like a dragon and to get into the palace you have to actually go through the entrances the dragon's jaws i wish they had a picture of it because it sounded amazing but ludwig was very different from this. They were obviously very wealthy, but they didn't waste their time,

you know, just throwing parties. He liked to work. Ludwig liked to work. And he was very proud that he was considered one of the very few. They considered like the Baku oil industry completely dishonest.

And so it says Ludwig was proud of his own particular guarantee and that of his company. If you can find in Baku any man who can prove that we've been dishonest, that we cheat or refuse to address any substantial grievances, we will face inquiry in your presence and if guilty, make amends. From every report in this book, Ludwig was a great man. And unfortunately, he had severe health issues. He had issues with his lungs. He had heart disease. And at the early age of 57 years old, his heart fails and he dies. Now, the business turns over to his son, Emmanuel. A few years later,

after Ludwig's death, both other brothers, Robert and then Alfred Nobel, also die. Now, Emmanuel's life story is also incredible because he's going to be one of the wealthiest people in Russia, and he's the one that has to dress up as a peasant and leave. Okay, that's going to happen about 15 years into the future. But he's also remarkable because if it wasn't for Emmanuel, there'd be no Nobel Prize. He's the one, Emmanuel's the one, so this is Ludwig's son, Alfred Nobel's nephew. He is the one that So this is Ludwig's son, Alfred Nobel's nephew. He is the one that saves the Nobel Prize because other people in the Nobel family wanted Alfred Nobel's will overturned. They wanted his gigantic fortune.

And so you have kids of the other brothers that are doing everything in their power to try to void Alfred's will and keep that fortune in the family. And so one of the lines in here is kind of humorous because one side of the family does not have the financial security that the other Nobels did. These are Robert's kids. And it says, it could not have been easy to stand by and let all that money go to strange people in distant lands because they had written books or devised some new formula. So that obviously made me chuckle. But it is Emmanuel alone that is fighting the entire family. He's like, no, we have to honor what Alfred Nobel wanted. And so he says he had made his position clear. He would not fight the will. He was interested in preservation of the family name and honor in strict adherence

to the wishes of Alfred. He told the other relatives of his, let the last will and testament speak for the soul. And this also speaks to the ethics and the morals that was passed down in the family, because not only is his other family doing this, they're all they're all sweet, right? The sweetest king calls Emmanuel before him. He's like, hey, even the king opposed this idea. And Emmanuel refused to back down even from the king. This was the result. The will was validated and the Nobel Foundation was established. It took courage to oppose popular sentiment, to fight his own family, and to brook arguments with the king. And then I think we need to move on to one of the main lessons of the book. I think I've understood

this because I'm the son of Cuban immigrants, and I just cannot fathom how my grandfather, who was 38 years old, uneducated, didn't have any money, didn't speak English, worked in a shoe factory and at a butcher shop, understood the danger that his family was in when Castro took over and moved to a country where he didn't know anybody and didn't speak the language. And so growing up with these stories that you hear over and over again, this is something I talked to Sam Zell about when I had lunch with him, too, because, you know, his family escaped the Holocaust. They got out. I think they were on the last train in Poland. As somebody that's grown up in America, I think you can have the assumption that, you know, the way things are now is the way things will be forever.

And history just shows us how fast things can change. Emmanuel is the third generation of one of the wealthiest and most respected families in Russia, and he escapes hidden as a peasant. People come into the factories and murder their employees. And so now we have an account of what it was like to experience the Bolshevik Revolution not knowing what was going on. And so there's an executive in the Nobel company that kept a diary, and it goes, it's remarkable how fast things change. The diary lasts for less than two weeks. And I just want to pull out a couple lines that are spread across several days there. They are in order. So it starts Thursday. Street cars stopped running. Strikes in several factories. The police clear the streets of demonstrators shouting bread. Friday,

strikes are spreading. Confrontations between police and the people. Streets cleared and closed off from crowds. Saturday, police, often disguised as soldiers and Cossacks, hold the crowd in check, dead and wounded lying on the streets. Sunday, stores have boarded up their windows. The police are shooting. Cossacks are using whips. In the evening, a lot of shooting. Drivers who are carting off the corpses talk about hundreds. Monday. All offices and workshops are closed. We let anyone go home who wants to. An employee's nephew was killed by a stray bullet. Hit him right in the forehead as he was standing in a window watching the activities on the street. And this is why. And what's remarkable is even after all that, he ends the journal, the worst is probably over. the collapse of the imperial government and the abdication of the Tsar. The wives and children of Nobel's Swedish employees moved back to the safe shores of their neutral country. Lenin and his Bolsheviks seized power. They wasted no time showing the nation the meaning of totalitarian revolution. All newspapers but their own were suppressed. Editors were imprisoned, and the only printed or spoken word permitted was that of the Bolsheviks. Their avalanche of

decrees covered every phase of economic, political, spiritual, and intellectual life. The workers and soldiers demanded great sums of money from the industrialists. Nobel factories succumbed to the chaos and closed down. Transport was nationalized. Factories were nationalized. Owners and managers dismissed. Bank deposits seized. Prices skyrocketed. The czar and his family were murdered. The petroleum industry was nationalized. This is the craziest sentence in the book. A former insane asylum inmate was named minister of war and promptly proposed the election of a donkey to the council to represent oppressed animals. An illiterate sailor was placed in charge of

the schools, and a well-known pimp was given control of public welfare. Discipline and routine were replaced by endless series of meetings, decrees, and denunciations. None of the Nobel chiefs really believed that the danger was more than a passing phenomenon and that the Bolsheviks could continue very long in power. This idea that this won't last, things will go back to normal, is a very common reoccurring belief in history around both wars and revolution. These are not stupid people, and yet they couldn't have been more incorrect. And they realized this is when they have to get out or they're going to be killed. The last Nobels had departed after three quarters of a century. The Swedish saga of a family in Russia

came to a bitter end. All of their assets are seized, all their factories. Emmanuel, the son of Ludwig, goes back to Sweden. And this goes back to even his grandfather and his father, this relentless optimism that they had in their blood. Emmanuel had found great pleasure in life, even in exile. He refused to be consumed by anger and bitterness. His few remaining years were not going to be wasted, worrying or falling victim to a paralyzing pestilence of hate and frustration. In Baku, all visual proof of the Nobel name was removed. The pre-Soviet slate wiped clean, wrenched from a place in history, reduced to the category of non-person. Emmanuel the father, Ludwig, Robert, and Emmanuel the grandson, and all those nobles who struggled and strained to build and create, disappeared into the mist, their glory, power, and honor obliterated by This book is amazing.

There's so many stories that I couldn't get to. I could do a podcast on entire chapters, multiple podcasts, because there's just so much detail in this book. But I really wanted to focus on Ludwig, because that's the person that resonated with me the most. So for the full story, highly recommend you buy the book. If you buy the book using the links that's in the show notes on your podcast player, or by going to founderspodcast.com, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. That is 359 books down, 1,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon. One of the things I love most about the story that you just heard is the importance of

passing on the knowledge from one generation to the other, that undoubtedly Ludwig and Alfred's lives were changed forever, and the lives of their descendants because of what they were learning from their father, from the mistakes he made in business to the really smart decisions he made in the way he educated his sons. That transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next has been going on for as long as we've had language, probably before we've had language. And it's one of my obsessions with making this podcast. I think the idea of all this reading and research I'm doing, this weird, intense desire that I have to collect and distill the knowledge of history-based entrepreneurs and then record what I'm learning through that process,

make that into the podcast, and then push that to the new, to the current and the next generation of entrepreneurs, I think is really important. Because what happens as a result of this is that we all get to benefit and learn from, in many cases, four, five, six, seven decade long careers that these entrepreneurs have. And so if you're going to spend a lot of time learning from history's greatest entrepreneurs and listening to this podcast, I've also made a tool to make sure that you never forget the lessons. I actually made this tool for myself to make sure that I never forget the lessons so that I can pull them up on demand when I need them. Now I made that tool that was once just my own available to everybody. And

that tool is Founders Notes. And even before it was something that was publicly available, it let me tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs, because for the last six years, I've been putting all of my notes and highlights for everything that I read for this podcast into this giant searchable database. That app that I was using to do this is called Readwise. And so I know the founders of Readwise. And so I talked to them and I was like, hey, I get a lot of requests that people actually want access to all my notes and highlights. Can we team up and actually build a tool so we can externalize what I see to everybody else? And so even if you didn't know about this tool, you've heard me use it over and over again on the podcast. In this episode, you heard me pull

up past things said in Alfred Nobel's biography. I was using Founder's Notes to do that. Anytime on the podcast when I'm referencing past ideas from past episodes from past books, when I talk about ideas from Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, Sam Walton, Munger, Buffett, all of this, that's me searching through Founder's Notes and pulling up those ideas. And so that is a really important point to get across. What you see, if you wind up subscribing to Founder's Notes, you see what I see. It's the exact same tool that I use. It is a tool that I made for myself and I was using for years before I thought anybody else would ever see it. And so a bunch of subscribers to Founders Notes are using Founders Notes to help them think through issues that they're having inside their company. Anything

from hiring, to recruiting, to marketing, to leadership, to preparing for board meetings, to preparing for sales presentations. If you are already running a successful company, I think it's a no-brainer to invest in the tool. And I've added a new feature. This feature is going to show you how I use Founders Notes and is also going to push ideas from history's greatest entrepreneurs directly into your brain quickly. And that feature is called Sage Advice, which is a private podcast feed that is included with every single subscription to Founders Notes. The last episode I made for that feed was on James Dyson. So what I did is I read two autobiographies of James Dyson, you know, that's 50, 60, 70 hours of reading, countless hours of inputting the notes and all those

highlights into Founders Notes. And so what I do is I go back and reread every single note and highlight from every single book that I read on an individual, in this case, it was James Dyson. And then there's also an AI assistant that lives inside of Founders Notes called Sage. And I asked Sage questions about James Dyson because Sage will read all my notes and highlight his transcripts from every single episode and then use all that reading to give me like an outline of, you know, how did James Dyson think about what was his most important ideas? How do you think about marketing? Things like that. And then I took all that research and then compose it into a single document and distilled that down to what I think are the most powerful ideas from James Dyson's 50-year career. So you take a 50-year career, 60 hours of reading, and I distilled that down

into an episode that you can listen to in 12 minutes. All of the episodes I make on this feed are going to be around 10 minutes. The idea with these mini episodes is I want to create a tool that if you can condense the ideas, like the most important ideas, like 15, 20, 10, whatever the number is, the most important ideas over their entire career, ruthlessly edit down to 10 minutes, 12 minutes, whatever case is, as long as it's that length, you're going to be able to listen to that over and over again. So it ceases becoming a podcast. And it really is just a tool. It's going to be something you can listen to over and over again that serves as this constant reminder and just an easy way for you to download those ideas into your brain.

And then once they're in your brain, then you can use them in your career. So if you want access to that tool that will give you the superpower to access the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs when you need it on demand, make sure you subscribe at foundersnotes.com. That is founders with an S, just like the podcast, foundersnotes.com. That is founders with an S, just like the podcast foundersnotes.com. Thank you for the support. Thank you for listening. And I'll talk to you again soon.