Founders - #86 Carl Bosch and Fritz Haber (A Genius and a Doomed Tycoon)

Episode Date: August 25, 2019

What I learned from reading The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler by Thomas Hager. ----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

This is the story of two men who invented a way to turn air into bread, built factories the size of small cities, made enormous fortunes, helped engineer the deaths of millions of people, and saved the lives of billions more. Their work stands, I believe, as the most important discovery ever made. See if you can think of another that ranks with it in terms of life and death importance for the largest number of people. Most people do not know the names of either the men or their invention. Their work lives today in the form of giant factories, usually located in remote areas, that drink rivers of water, inhale oceans of air, and burn about 1% of all the Earth's energy. If all the machines these men invented were shut down today, more than 2 billion people would starve to death. Carl Bosch led me into this story. I learned quickly that he was a man of contradictions,

a business mogul who won a Nobel Prize, and an ardent anti-Nazi who founded and led a most infamous Nazi firm. Bosch is one of the great mystery men of the 20th century. He kept a very low public profile, avoided meetings, seemed to prefer machines to people, and hid away as public as Bosch was private. A scientist who reveled in attention, sought glory, drank, smoked, partied, hobnobbed with royalty, and loved making an impression in his hand-tailored military uniform.

But he too had his mysteries. How could a man who helped feed the world also be attacked as a war criminal after World War I? What was he doing in a secret laboratory hidden on an ocean liner? These men were giants of science. Their careers took off after their invention of the air-to-bread machine,

and they both attempted even bigger things. They pioneered new ways of doing science, built city-sized factories, controlled world markets, and made life or death decisions. Haber and Bosch are in many ways responsible for creating the modern chemical industry. Okay, so that is an excerpt from the book that I read this week, and the one I'm going to talk to you about today, which is The Alchemy of Air, A Jewish Genius, A Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler, and it was written by Thomas Hager. So this is one of the most unique, complicated,

engrossing stories I've ever read. I couldn't put the book down. It's like 300 pages long and I read it in two days and something happened to me. So I'm going to jump into the book in a minute, but I got to tell you what happened to me, which is unusual. This is the third try of me attempting to to record this podcast and the first two and i guess the the odd thing is that i'm kind of nervous and i'm not usually nervous and i couldn't figure out why like why did i start recording two other podcasts and then stop because it just didn't sound right it didn't feel right And I think it's because there's so much going on in this book that I don't know if I'm good enough to do the book justice. So I figured, you know what, let me just tell you that right up front and hopefully I'm able to create a podcast that you learn from and you actually enjoy.

But I am nervous. I don't like that feeling. So let me, before I jump in the book, the entire, I guess some background because Thomas Hager, the author does this fantastic job where he introduces us in the introduction to, you know, what he's writing about. And then he doesn't, he doesn't talk about Fritz or Bosch, the two main characters in the book for 60 pages. And he instead gives us this like riveting history of why the process that they came up with, which is called the Haber-Bosch process, was so important and why without it, it's basically responsible for half of the world's food production. So what you need to know about the Haber-Bosch process is it's an artificial nitrogen fixation process. And it's a way to turn

the nitrogen in the air into ammonia that ammonia is used for fertilizer and the main reason that that that Fritz Haber created the process and Bosch winds up being the one to implement it into like the factories like production is to solve like to solve the problem of how do you feed your you know your own population from a government perspective now what they didn't know or maybe they knew at the time but it was quickly weaponized because the same thing that makes fertilizer good for fertilizer is good for for creating crops and um making like each acre of agriculture yield more food, but it's also integral to war and to explosives.

So that's why the subtitles, it's a scientific discovery. It's fed the world, which is great, but it also directly fueled the rise of Hitler. And in the book, it talks about that without this invention, there's a good chance that Hitler would have been destroyed in a few weeks instead of being able to wreak havoc for several years. All right, so let me jump into the book. And I think I'll elaborate more on that. I got a bunch of notes as normal, and maybe even more so than normal, because I just absolutely

love this book. So let me start with first the book's why. And so before we even get into, before the invention's even made, the author takes us to this lecture that's given by this guy named Crook. He's like a really popular scientist. And we're in the year 18, I think we're in the year 1898 right now. So he's giving this talk and saying, hey, much of Europe doesn't have a way to feed the population. Like the population is going to grow too fast. If we don't find another source, like people are going to starve to death. So he's giving a lecture to like the most preeminent scientists of the day. And he's trying to have like basically a call to arms. So I'm going to pick it up right there. And he says, he ended by calling his fellow researchers to action.

The only answer he said was to find a way to make synthetic fertilizers, fixed nitrogen, refining it from the Earth's greatest reservoir of nitrogen, the atmosphere. That's why they say the machine can turn air into bread. Other scientific discoveries might make life easier, might help build wealth, might add luxury or convenience. But this was a necessary discovery,

the vital discovery, the discovery of a way to fix atmospheric nitrogen was a matter of life and death. The entire population of the world needed fixed nitrogen. Whoever found a way to create it out of the air would not only save humanity, but would likely become very, very rich. So it says, between those two points,

between Crook's dire warning and today's global epidemic of obesity, a discovery of unprecedented importance saved the world from starving. This is the story of that discovery. So that's the book's why. And it's also why in the introduction the author says, he's like, can you think, see if you can think of another invention that ranks with, like, can you think of another invention that's not, is this, like, how can you say this is not the most important discovery of all ever made if you if you calculate it by uh sheer numbers of people impacted by this so right around the time that crooks is given this call to action the global population something like 1.6 billion and because of this discovery um this this invention created by haber and then

obviously put into production by bosch, the human population has gone up. It's a little over 7 billion if I'm not mistaken today. So there's just this random sentence that I want to pull out because I think this is what we're all doing here. This is something that's – it's like why the entire point of me making this podcast is probably the point of you listening to the podcast, but it's also a desire, like an innate human desire that's seen throughout history.

And it talks about like, why do people like learn? Why are they doing research? Why are they performing experiments? And it says, they all wanted to understand how the world works and to use that knowledge to make human lives easier, safer, and more rewarding. Okay, so now I need to go back. And we're going to go, we started, let's say, right around 1900 in the story.

We're going to go back to the 1840s. And I needed to give you some history. I almost thought about making this like a standalone short episode. And I was like, you know what, it makes more sense sense and i was thinking about putting it at the end of this episode i was like let me just include it because i think the story is fascinating it's it's the the short history of one of the world's oddest industries and it kind of gives us a good idea of why like why there was so much pressure at this time once you understand what took place why there's so much pressure at this time. Once you understand what took place, why there's so much pressure at this time

to find an alternative. So it's going to start with, South American nitrate was a good fertilizer. Fast-growing and increasingly hungry European nations during the Industrial Revolution fixed their attention to the place where there were mountains of the most perfect and powerful natural fertilizer ever found. So during the 20 years from the 1840s to the 1960s,

now this is one of the craziest sentences in the book, it fueled national economies, determined foreign policy, caused a war, and earned a lasting reputation of the world's oddest industries. So what we're talking about here is guano and if you don't know what guano is it's bat and bird shit and it's used it's fertilizer so potent a natural it was estimated like 30 times more powerful than like the synthetic fertilizers available okay so so where was this industry? It was like, this is the world's oddest industry.

Where did it take place? It's in South America. It starts on this little chain of islands off the coast of Peru. And so let's pick that up right here. It says, these were the Chinchas Islands, a sprinkling of rocks six miles off the coast of Peru. And this is another crazy sentence,

which constituted in 1850, acre for acre, And this is another crazy sentence. So you got 100 feet of guano. So it talks about the Peruvian government, they imported a bunch of Chinese laborers. And when the book goes into detail, I'm only going to hit some highlights here, but essentially they were like slave laborers. And this is the living conditions that the guano was harvested. So the workers lived almost naked under the tropical sun, and they had no days of rest. They survived on two small meals a day. Up to a quarter of the workforce at any given time would be too sick to work. Scurvy was common.

Another thing that was common, the book talks about this thing called guano handling illness. I mean, think about it. You're essentially shoveling bird excrement all day. And so this unidentified disease or illness, you'd have like a shortness of breath. You'd cough up blood. You'd have cramps. You'd vomit. You'd have diarrhea. So they kept having – they basically rotate out their entire workforce because at any given time, a fourth of them were down with this disease. And so, and something to realize is

the guano that they're working on extracting at this point in human history was more valuable than gold. And they call it the guano boom. Guano was the best of all possible manures. It was like a necessity to us, wrote a British farmer. It was an all but indispensable fertilizer. A U.S. expert estimated that it was 35 times more powerful. So I was actually wrong. 30. I said 30, I think, earlier. 35 times more powerful than standard manure at the time. So what happens? It's discovered the Peruvians are extracting it from this tiny chain of islands and they're shipping it everywhere. It's going to America, it's going to Europe, it's going to Asia. And as a result, just like in the gold rush, there's this huge boom and they create vast fortunes really fast. But we're going to see something that we see over and over again in these books is that human nature our history doesn't repeat human nature does so it says the peruvian leaders use the enormous income as collateral to leverage

there's that word again foreign loans fueling a brief gilded age and then all of a sudden it was over it says and then it was over by the late 1850s uh the the workers on the chinchas began to hit rock check out this is another crazy sentence. The deposits of thousands of years had been stripped away in less than two decades. Okay, so now Peru's in a bit of a pickle here. And so is everybody else that was relying on this. And the United States was one of those countries

that desperately needed the guano to feed their population. So this led to something I've never heard of and one of the craziest laws that the U.S. Congress has ever had to pass. And it says, the need was so great that in 1856, the U.S. Congress passed the Guano Islands Act, which allowed any U.S. citizen to lay claim to any deserted guano island anywhere in the world and make it U.S. territory. What? The law essentially deputized all Americans to claim land in their nation's name as an act that has no parallel in history. Okay, so now the guano deposits are gone. There's a worldwide search for an alternative source for fertilizers because you need it to obviously grow crops. And this is going to cause a war between Peru and Chile

because they find these salt deposits, these nitrate deposits, in this area called the Atacama. And there's a dispute between who actually owns the land, and this turns out to be like this giant war. Chile winds up winning and Peru is like devastated. But real quick, let me just give you some background. The fact that Atacama nitrates could be used for both food and war made it, in the latter half of the 19th century, one of the world's most valuable natural resources. So anytime you have a valuable natural resource in human history, you're going to have a violent conflict that is going to occur to see who's going to actually control that very valuable natural resource. The author does a fantastic job. I had never heard of this

story before, so I thought it was great. If you're a history buff, definitely go ahead and read the book because I'm going to skip over a bunch of that, but he gives in great detail the naval battle that happens between Chile and Peru and all the crazy stuff that happens. Chile's victory was total, though that's the important part that you need to know. So now the industry switches from Peru to Chile, and then eventually Chile is going to be superseded by the invention that Fritz Haber makes in Germany. So it said, what ended Chile's nitrate age was not shortage, but plenty, and not plenty from Chile. It says, half a world away, a German chemist, this is Fritz Haber, was channeling his anger into perfecting a machine that would within 30 years bring down the entire Chilean industry. The man was Fritz Haber.

The machine he was working on could turn air into bread. Okay, so now I want to tell you a little bit about Fritz's work habits, where his work started, and then we'll get into his early life so we can give you some background. So it says, it was always the same thing. Fritz Haber got excited and anxious and eager and intensely productive, and then his stomach tied in knots, and he had trouble sleeping. He grew short-tempered.

He called it nerves. About once a year, the anxiety increased to a point where he could no longer focus effectively and had to take time off. So he'd have to go. He'd take a few weeks at a sanatorium or a spa. He'd just basically have to relax because he'd have to go, he'd take a few weeks at a sanatorium or a spa. He'd just basically have to relax because he worked himself to the bone. Haber had done his original ammonia work for an Austrian company that wanted to find a profitable way to take nitrogen, which is in the

air and costs nothing, and use it to make ammonia, which could be sold. And so the important thing to remember here is that this idea was not a new idea. People knew that there was a large amount, effectively an endless supply of fixed nitrogen in the atmosphere. They just couldn't figure out how to change it into ammonia to actually use as fertilizer. So people were playing around in this and experimenting in this, like trying to solve this problem for a few decades before Fritz was able to do so. Because obviously, as the book said in the beginning, like if you could figure this out, you're taking something that's free and making and turning it into something that is so valuable that people literally, like human life literally depends on it. So it logically follows that, oh, my God, I'm going to be able to print money if I'm able to do this and they were actually do print money all right so let's go back to fritz fritz early life give an idea of who this person was and maybe why like he was such a he was such a bizarre person

like everybody that we study is um his mother died a week after giving birth haber was raised by his father a successful manufacturer who was rarely idle, rarely around the house, and it seems, rarely satisfied with his son. Fritz grew into an impatient and insecure young man, and he devoted to proving himself and eager to gain acceptance and achieving high position. So this trait that we're seeing in his early childhood, maybe stemmed from some kind of psychological suffering, uh, like suffering he, he, at the hands of his father, never, never went away. And it goes from his father to other scientists to eventually the German government that he was kind of like slavishly devoted to. So this is

one aspect of his personality, uh, that I would not try to emulate. You can learn from it. Yeah. There's, there's some kind of power in finding like some uh like a slight that kind of motivates you to try to live up to your potential but he this idea that you need to constantly prove yourself in the eyes of others i think you should prove yourself in yourself and you all you'll understand more when i get there because it's it's just really disgusting some of the stuff he does um and and now here's the problem too so now he just has this issue when he's a young man but he's living in germany and this there's still it's not like the the level of anti-semitism that happens obviously under hitler but they were

they were second-class citizens even at this time so it says this is a gives you a good idea of what of what you you know, he's Jewish. So what does he have to deal with? He says, for every German Jew, there's a painful moment that he remembers his entire life. The moment when he is first made fully conscious that he was born a second class citizen. No ability and no achievement can free him from this. So that last sentence, Fritz didn't believe that. He thought, okay, I'm going to prove that I'm a, like he even converts to Christianity. He's not really into religion as it is.

He just does it so like he can become more accepted because that's what most Germans were. And he's like, no, I'm a German first. And we'll see that, yeah, but not in the eyes of Hitler. So it says, he endured his shares of taunts and teasing and emerged from school with an unexpected scar on his face. You got to Google Fritz Haber, see what this guy looks like.

At the same time, Haber's interest in chemistry blossomed, starting with semi-secret chemical experiments in his room. So he had a passion for chemistry from a very young age. When it came time to pick a profession, Haber proved a restless student,

focusing mostly on chemistry, but also writing a bit of poetry, working for his father for a time, and serving a required one-year stint in the military. He still planned to be a chemist but could not decide what kind of he wanted to be. It was as if he was too smart and too curious. He had a level of indecisiveness. And then the note I left myself on the next page is, progress is almost never linear. Ups and downs and bursts.

He never seemed satisfied and was always critical of himself. He earned money after graduation doing lab work in an alcohol distillery, a cellulose factory, and an ammonia soda factory. Also worked at a molasses plant. This all bored him.

He researched furiously but without focus that's why I mean it's not linear he achieved little the failure of this phase of Haber's career one of his closest friends later wrote was total and protracted so he's struggling with his own personal insecurities struggling with the fact that externally he's not achieving any kind of success eventually he gets a job he gets a job as a chemistry professor, but he decides that that's just not enough. As you can kind of guess from somebody that works themselves to almost dying all the time, and does so throughout his life. This is a description of his personality. He wanted

more. He always wanted more. He wanted more money, more fame, more respect. He worked too hard, took on too much, and still suffered from nerves. His career was everything to him, and he proved a distant and self-centered husband. His marriage suffered. So yeah, he's a terrible husband, got divorced twice. His first wife actually kills herself. Some people think she does it because she was also a chemist, and she was distraught because eventually Fritz Haber, among his other achievements, he's notorious and becomes almost – no, he becomes a war criminal military that kills, I think, 60,000 troops, allied troops.

So we'll get there in a minute. So this is the motivation for the search for the alternative. Just give you like a macro picture of what's going on. Germany depended on the Chilean nitrates for its fertilizer and gunpowder, buying it by the ton and shipping it by the fleet halfway around the world. It was a dangerous addiction, especially a dangerous addiction because Germany keeps getting into these wars. Okay, so around this time, Fritz works for a few years. He finally comes up with a way to make this tiny, tiny machine that actually takes fixed nitrogen and turns it into ammonia. And then he goes off and he wants, it's very popular at the time for scientists to make

a discovery and then they partner with a company. In some cases, they sell their patents. So one of his main competitors that was also trying to do this at the time had previous success of selling one of his inventions for like a million marks, German marks at the time. So that's the kind of model that Fritz was trying to emulate. So he does a deal with this company called BASF. Interesting enough, BASF is still around today. It's actually still the largest chemical producer in the world.

During the course of the story, it actually merges with like four or five other chemical companies and comes into companies and forms a new company called IG Faber. Sometimes it's also called just Faber or Farber. Maybe that's how you pronounce it. And that's Carl Bosch is working for BASF, becomes one of the founders of the new conglomerate. After World War II, it's like basically Hitler took over the firm. And so it's broken up. And now BASF is spun back out, and it still exists today.

It's actually 154 years old, which is kind of cool. All right, so first here's Haber doing a deal with BASF. On March 6, 1908, two contracts were signed between Haber and BASF. The company got what it wanted, ownership of any resulting patents, and Haber's agreement not to publish any of his findings without permission. Haber got 10% of any net earnings. So this is something we've talked about a few times. Always a bad idea if you can avoid it to do a deal where you get net profits. If you can negotiate, always go for gross profits because companies, you know, they can make that net number look however they want to look.

As gross as what gross is. So he got 10% of any net earnings determined through an intricate set of calculations, of course. So of course, who's going to benefit from that? The people actually doing the calculations. Come on. The BASF made from a process he developed. Now, this is the point in the story where we're introduced to Carl Bosch.

Out of the two characters, I identify more and kind of would emulate more of Bosch's, the way he goes about. Fritz has some defects in his personality that cause him to make some really poor decisions. Carl, he had his stuff together. He was real tight. So here's the thing, he's working, they bring him over to look at Fritz Haber's invention, right? And people are like, hey, this works now because you have to have like an insane amount of pressure. And they're like, it's only going to work in this tiny, let's say that the device is two feet tall. I forgot how tall it is, but it's tiny. And they need to get it. They eventually have to scale it up to something that's like 100 feet tall.

And they're saying the pressure required, like there's no metal or steel on Earth. Like it's going to explode or collapse. Like this is useless. Why are you doing this? So Carl actually, his previous experience serves him well. And he realizes that the people saying that are actually incorrect. And so this becomes Carl Bosch's life mission at least at this part of his career to find a way to scale up Haber's invention right and like the book said earlier it eventually turns into city-sized

factories the people that the person responsible for that is Carl Bosch all right so this is a little bit about Carl Bosch's early life and career and right now he's in a room full of skeptics they're they're examining Haber's machine he says Bosch knew something the and career. And right now he's in a room full of skeptics. They're examining Haber's machine. He says, Bosch knew something the rest of the men in the room did not. He knew about metals. Bosch had grown up around tools. His father was a successful gas and plumbing supplier who had fitted their home with a complete workshop and given his boys, meaning his sons, free run. He had an open door into his father's business and visited the workmen often, learning about pipe fitting, soldering, machining, and woodwork.

As a young man, he did an internship at a metalworking firm, took a summer job in a blast furnace plant, and studied mechanical engineering for two years before switching to chemistry. So these early, he didn't know at the time. That's why the common advice is you need to expose yourself, especially when you're younger, to all kinds of different experiences because you don't know how they're going to come into play later on in life. This winds up being extremely important to Bosch. Bosch was hired as a chemist at BASF fresh out of university in 1899. From the start, he was a bit of an oddity.

Chemists were kings at BASF, highly educated and highly prized experts responsible for discovering the new products that kept the firm afloat. Many of them came from the best universities in Germany. Most wore suits, ties, and stiff collars. They discussed art and music and literature in their off hours and maintained a clear dividing line between themselves and the firm's common laborers. Bosch did none of these things. He often took off his jacket once he got to work, loosened his tie, picked up a hammer or wrench, and started banging away on some machine. He kept to himself mostly and seemed uncomfortable socializing. That's why earlier I said, I was quoting the author when he said that he prefers machines to

people. He seemed unafraid of blisters and stains. Early in his career, Bosch was found by a BASF executive in a plant workroom, his sleeves rolled up, face gleaming, stirring something in a vat. My dear man, the executive said, if you think such foolishness will help you rise to the top of BASF, you are sorely mistaken. So this is Bosch's personality trait, why the manager of BASF trusted him.

So he winds up being like the person running the company. He's like right-hand guy. And what he thought of Fritz's experiment. So it says, this is what they liked seeing in Bosch, the young man's willingness to take on a giant of chemistry. So he was somebody before Haber had claimed to invent the same thing, and he was trying to sell it to BASF. BASF hired or asked Bosch to investigate, like, if it's actually true.

Winds up this guy was already won, like, a Nobel Prize and everything. Bosch tried to replicate his experiments it couldn't and wrote honestly what his findings were were and the nobel prize winner uh was like oh this is you know this is your fault this is what you get for hiring this there's nobody to check other people check turns out he was right um so that's what it means take on a giant of chemistry his ability to find answers and the backbone he showed. His appreciation for the engineering side of the enterprise, his careful, quiet, considered opinions. Bosch was not apt to run, to rush into anything. Bosch looked at Haber's machine. Then he said to his bosses,

I think it can work. I know exactly what the steel industry can do. We should risk it. And now we start to see little glimpses of the size of Bosch's ambition. And so it says, there was no end to the nitrogen in the air. So in theory, there was no end to the amount of ammonia they could produce. Germany would no longer have to rely on shipping its raw material from fertilizer and gunpowder halfway around the world. Humans would be able to make as much fertilizer as they needed forever from the air. This process still continues today. Global starvation would never again become a critical issue.

It marked a turning point in human history. One historian later compared those hours in Haber's lab to the Wright brothers' flight at Kitty Hawk or Edison's discovery of a successful light bulb. One of the attributes Carl Bosch had was he didn't rush into things, but once he committed to something, he optimized for speed. So things started to move quickly. Carl Bosch was eager to move ahead.

He wanted to start building a bigger prototype machine as quickly as he could. He and Haber worked together closely, exchanging visits, writing letters, conferring about details of design and operation. Bosch wanted to know everything Haber knew. It was not long before Haber, complaining of stomach pains and exhaustion, retreated to a Swiss health resort. Bosch pushed the project forward. So what's happening here is they're pushing the process forward. Before it's over, there would be dozens of patents covering every new aspect of the process. So this is another example. This is the beginning of another industry that never existed.

I feel like the last few weeks we've been covering this. We talked about the beginning of electricity industry. We talked about the aviation industry last week. And now we're into the fertilizer, basically the food and explosives industry. Okay, so the guy running BASF at the time, this guy named Brunk, Brock? I don't know, Brunk. And him and Bosch are kind of of like minds.

And here's some ideas they have about business. So it said, they had similar administrative styles. They were both gambling on nitrogen. They both appreciated the importance of machinery along with chemistry. They both liked to hire talented people and give them a relatively free reign. And they both disliked yes men. They both had the same ideal about the chemical industry. They both understood that the game could be won only through ceaseless rapid fire innovation with the next great idea going into development as soon as the

previous one went on the market. So that applied back then, it applied earlier in human history, and it definitely still applies today. They both understood the need for speed and for efficiency in order to make big ideas into reality. They both thought a decade or two down the road. They were both, in short, technological optimists. This is why I say I identify more with Bosch than I do with Haber. Haber is kind of like make himself sick, a little bit pessimistic. Although sometimes I guess you could even argue that he was not pessimistic enough. But this whole idea of technological optimist, specifically this point right here, Problems would be solved. Solutions would be found. In other words, you may not know how to solve the problem now,

but that's what you're doing. You get paid because you solve the problem. So just look at it like, hey, they're going to be solved. We're going to find the solutions. Haber had doubts about scaling up his ideas the way Bosch planned. That's what I mean about the pessimism. Bosch pulled ahead, devoting himself to the sole goal of planned. That's what I mean about the pessimism. Bosch pulled, bowled ahead, devoting himself to the sole goal of transforming Haber's two and a half foot high laboratory machine into something the size of a factory. That's a hell of a big problem, right? He knew about the potential difficulties,

but he also knew that if he started thinking too hard about all of them at once, he would be overwhelmed. So the note I left myself is sometimes you have to turn your mind off. So he says, if you think about too hard, he would be overwhelmed. So the note I left myself is sometimes you have to turn your mind off. So he says, if you think about too hard, he would be overwhelmed. So he stopped thinking and started working. That's good advice for all of us. And I like this idea. He has this idea a few paragraphs later about the idea of a company as a machine. I really like that idea. He says, Bosch liked machines. He organizes people as if he were building one. From the start,

he proved himself an able administrator and a master coordinator. This is a reminder to all of us that nothing worthwhile comes easily. Carl Bosch was dealing with a mountain of challenges, any one of which would become a disaster. The ammonia process was all tightly connected, one process flowing continuously into the next, so he's describing the machine he has to build, which meant that a breakdown at any point could shut down the entire thing.

Everything from the input gases to the heaters to the reactors to the recirculation system to the coolers every connection every valve pump gauge seal and fitting had to work flawlessly 24 hours a day seven days a week at high temperatures and pressures almost none of the most important equipment existed it all had to be invented systems like this had never been built and nothing could fail and we kind of see that this this problem is so large that it kind of overtakes his entire life he says he kept hiring engineers to help doubling the number of basf in the course of a few years bosch was obsessed with the project working day and night running his teams hard keeping the entire picture in his mind seeing systems feeding into systems,

fitting his gigantic machine together. Whenever anyone complained about the cost or the pace, when anyone balked at working long hours, he would say, this is about billions, billions of marks. The future of the entire company rested on their efforts. And as you can imagine with a project, the size and scale of this, most of which, almost all of which has never been done before, there's all kinds of problems where they're making progress, then they run into a problem they didn't think about, and the project literally stops until they find the solution, which is what Bosh was just talking about.

So this happens over and over and over again. I'm only going to use one example. Obviously, the rest are in the book. If you want to learn more, please read it. I can't recommend this book enough. I probably said it five times already, but it's insane. It's just such a crazy story. But anyways, I want to talk to you.

There's a specific thing that Bosch does that I think is applicable to all kinds of problems. And it reminds me of that Charlie Munger quote, invert, always invert. So my note out of myself is Bosch solves a huge problem by turning the problem upside down. Right now the project is stopped. It's I think months at this point, they can't figure this problem out. So it has to do with like uh there's all these explosions because hydrogen is getting into the steel and it weakens it and it winds up exploding so it says the next morning he realized that they'd been going about it all wrong they'd been trying to change the steel to protect the steel why not simply accept the fact that hydrogen hydrogen was going to attack it?

That was the problem. The hydrogen gets in there, weakens it over time, and explodes. There apparently was nothing they could do about it. High-pressure, high-temperature hydrogen was like some sort of universal solvent for metals. It eventually got into them all. Once he accepted that fact, Bosch realized something else. They'd been asking two things of their oven walls, which is made out of steel. First, that they contain enormous pressures. And second,

that they prevent the escape of gases, particularly the explosive hydrogen. What if he separated those two things? Why not let the hydrogen out? They had been, this is what I mean about turning the idea upside down. They had been so focused on making the outer wall impenetrable, holding in the gases and the pressure. But when they're doing that, eventually they reach a point where the pressure is too much and it explodes, right? He goes, but what mattered was not whether hydrogen leaked out, but how much. If only a little leaked and leaks slowly into a large area the

concentration would not build up enough to pose a danger meaning would not explode uh so they wind up doing these like fil they first they have a they're doing two things they're letting the hydrogen out they drill like these little holes and then you also find different levels of steel so it says basha's team started building and testing full-size ovens and they stayed intact after weeks and then months the project was back on track. And before I think they were exploding and failing within like two or three or five days, something like that. So it was a big, big problem. Okay. So let's skip ahead a little bit here. Oh, I like this idea. So he gets the first factor he makes, he creates this place called OPA, O-P-P-A-U. I don't know how to pronounce it, but I like the idea of viewing your accomplishments as a step along the way to better things. So it says within a year,

the factory, I'm just within a year, the factory, I'm just going to call it the factory, was making tons of ammonia-based fertilizer every hour. BASF was selling it as fast as they could make it. Once they got into a full swing, the profits were enormous. Bosch had done everything he could to maximize efficiency and to cut the cost of production. Instead of seeing the factory as a final stop, this is i mean about so another note i i love myself i guess i should read that to you first um was for obviously you need to the idea of viewing your accomplishments

is just one step along the way of being better like constantly improving getting to better things right and the second note was what what happens here is when you're reading these biographies and you're listening, I guess in your case, listening to them, reading biographies, listening to them, it really stretches what you believe is possible. You know, we have this tendency as humans to kind of just narrow, like constantly, like when you're a kid, the world is full of magic everything's amazing there's like possibilities and dreams are limitless and it's very natural over time like our dreams get smaller our possibilities get smaller we're like narrowing life for no good

reason other than it's just part of our nature and i think you need tools in your life or experiences your life to realize that the world is wide open and you can do and achieve whatever the hell you want to. And so I'm about to read, like, Carl Bosch had this mindset, you know. This mindset, I'm not saying it's impossible. It's rare, but we're seeing this over and over and over again in these books. And I think it's extremely important. It's like a slap in the face. Hopefully when you press play every week and you're listening to this, it's like smashing the face.

Like, no, you can do what you want to do. There are no limits. We have not reached the maximum of human potential. And so a microcosm of that is the maximum of your own potential in your own life. So you have this, he worked for years to get this up. Remember, I think it's like September 1913

is where we're at. Six, seven years or something like that of failure, starting again, failing, starting again, failing, starting again. Now they finally got to the point where they're making, they're the only company in the world that has this process. It's unbelievably valuable. They're printing money. And Bosch is like, okay, cool. Let's see what else we can do. Like, why am I going to rest on my laurels?

I'm still alive. So he says, instead of seeing Opal, the factory, as a final stop in the development process, Bosch seemed to view it as another bigger prototype, a step on the way to even bigger things. The speed at which Bosch made things happen was surprising. It was terra incognita for Bosch and his teams and problems had to be solved in new ways with new equipment and new ideas. They invented as they went. It was the birth of an entirely new technology, high pressure chemistry. Bosch began thinking, if this high pressure technology could make ammonia, what else could it make? Now, I'm just going to take a weird tangent here because I love – when I first started Founders Podcast, it wasn't called Founders.

I didn't know what I was doing. I was just reading biographies, and one of the biographies I read was Einstein's. And I did a podcast on it. I don't think it's that good. It's not around anymore, but he's just a really funny character. And I just want to compare and contrast because you know germany at this time is like basically the amount of talent they had and like this just shows you how stupid hitler was he's like the the probably the largest

collection of those talented people in the world and his racism and just and we're gonna i'll tell you a little more about Hitler in the book too. He's just a doofus. He's just a doofus. He's got all kinds of people and he just runs them out because they're Jewish. He's just so stupid. But anyways, a lot of these people know each other. And so Haber winds up making an acquaintance with Einstein.

And I just want to, this paragraph just makes me chuckle. And I just want to compare and contrast Haber and Einstein here. So he says, Einstein came to know Fritz Haber. Haber pushed for bringing Einstein back to Germany because at the time Einstein was in Switzerland. And so he greatly respected Einstein's mind. So he says, but the two men could hardly have been more different. Haber was completing his transformation into the perfect German.

Remember I told you these weird psychological issues of like wanting outside like validation. Maybe, I'm not going to psychoanalyze it, but who knows. Perfect German. He was pro-military, pro-Kaiser. Kaiser Wilhelm is the leader of Germany around World War I. He's the one that gets Germany into the disaster that is World War I. So he says he was pro-military, pro-Kaiser, even more than stiff-necked Prussian-style patriot, or ever the more stiff-necked Prussian-style patriot. Einstein was a free-thinking, wise-cracking cosmopolitan, a bohemian pacifist who enjoyed making fun of precisely the traits Haber was coming to embody.

I would much rather identify with Einstein. It's just like I don't think you should. A lot of the problems with interpersonal human relations is the fact that we're tribalistic. And I think if you just understand that's part of our nature, you bring it to the forefront of your mind, you kind of avoid like joining groups. I mean, that's part of the reason I call the membership program is the misfits because like, you know, I think we're studying and we're attracting like a group of people

that don't want to be in a group, you know? Like I want most of the people that I hear from, they're independent minded, they want to do their own thing. Like they don't need, they don't have this desire, this endless desire to conform like you see Haber has here. So give you a good point of where we're in the story. A few days later, Germany declared war on Russia. Yeah, that's real smart. Einstein, during that long night after his wife left, talked with Haber about the military mindset of Germany and the madness of war.

Haber, on the other hand, had already volunteered for service. So he says, you know what, I'm going to prove I'm a good German. I'm going to serve them in all the capacity. That's when he starts developing chemical warfare. So, you know, I don't want to be like Haber. I'd much rather be like Weinstein. Okay, so now we're going to get into this. They're feeding people, but now we see that, you know, this process also is why it fuels the rise of Hitler. And in World War I, before the process, so World War I jumps out, but the process isn't, like, perfect at the time, right? They're producing some, but not nearly the quantities they're going to do about 10 or 20 years from now.

So part of uh the allied forces realized uh oh germany like you need all this this you have to import the the nitrates that you're using for explosives from from chile well guess what we're going to send our boats over there and so they start disrupting the germany's flow of explosives and this is very common in world war ii uh once hitler effectively takes over ig faber farber whatever it's however you pronounce it um the allies do the same thing except they don't have to disrupt uh shipments from south america on sea they just bomb the crap out of this gigantic factory that bosch makes this we're still you know this is we're still 20 years earlier from this happening.

But this whole idea of basically trying to kneecap your enemies and trying to limit their ability to create weapons is very common. So the notes I left myself was, the side with access to fixed nitrogen would win the war. Germany miscalculated how long World War I would last. They thought it was going to take a few months. So dumb. And was running out of gunpowder and explosives.

And then a variation of the Haber-Bosch process would be the solution. So this is when BASF starts working with the government. It says, when the deal was signed, BASF was no longer just a chemical firm. It was a defense industry. Bosch did not much like it. His team recognized the irony. They had worked long and hard to feed people. Now the same technology was going to be used to kill them.

Bosch did not talk about it much, but he felt it. This is actually, he dies very unhappy, unfortunately. He felt a lot of guilt, especially with the rise of Hitler. The need for nitrate led to bizarre events like this. This led to one of the stranger moments of World War I when on November 1st, 1914, the first, this is what I was just referencing earlier, kind of stepping over my own point here. The first major sea battle of the war began halfway around the world from Germany and France off the coast of Chile. Oh, man.

A reminder, this is a note that I left myself, a reminder that traits that make you strong can make you weak. Bosch's genius in making his factory one great integrated machine was good for efficiency but bad during wartime. A POW, the factory, was so closely knit that one well-placed bomb could shut down the whole thing. And that's, I don't want you to mistake my point I'm making here. I'm not saying it's Bosch's fault.

He didn't think about utilizing this for war. His intentions at this time when he built a centralized factory was to make it a most efficient process to actually feed the people. And unfortunately, you know, Bosch dedicated his life to this and it was hijacked by a crazy asshole in Hitler. And this guy winds up drinking, becoming an alcoholic later in his life. And, you know, you have a supremely smart and talented person, and his life was ruined by this one of the worst human beings that ever lived. And at least Bosch sees it. The reason that, like, Fritz is a smart person who's got interesting ideas, but God, this is not one of them. And what I'm about to read to you.

And I wrote the note when I came across this section is bad idea. You should question everything. And Fritz doesn't do that. I don't understand. I shouldn't say I don't understand because we've seen this over and over again, but like you could be so smart.

And he's one of the few people who won, I think two Nobel prizes. One of the most integral scientists and chemists in human history. And this is his side of his personality where he doesn't, it's like, isn't science questioning what is actually true? Why wouldn't you apply it to different domains in your life? So it says, this is a description of Fritz in World War I. He became more prescient by the day,

organized, tireless, efficient, head shaved, mustache neatly trimmed, clothes immaculate, monocle at the ready. During this period of his life, Haber's existence revolved around, as one of his sons later wrote, an uncritical acceptance of the state's wisdom. You can't like, I don't think it's smart for any of us

to accept, like to just blindly accept anything anybody's telling us. Like we should question everything. Everybody makes mistakes. We're all imperfect human beings. This idea that there's some kind of deity, like this godlike character to human beings, it's just not true.

And that applies for individuals, it applies to companies implies to states like you can uncritical acceptance no way no way um what is this carl bosch managed the whole thing he hated war and rationalized his work by saying in wartime it'll keep germans safe In peacetime, it'll keep Germans from starving. So let's see what I meant by that. By 1918, running at full capacity. Oh, so this is the giant. So he built the Opal plant, or however you pronounce that, is smaller and it's closer to France. At the end of World War I, France comes in and kind of like occupies it

because it's so close to them. So they start building. They decide they need to build a bigger factory closer like in more like center of Germany. And it's called Luna. Well, that's not how you pronounce it, but that's how I'm pronouncing it. And it's giant.

So it says by 1918 running at full capacity, Luna had become Germany's industrial marvel. It was bigger than any Ford plant. It used technology that no one else could duplicate. It helped Germany in the war some historians have estimated that World War one would have ended a year perhaps two years Sooners sooner if Haber Bosch had not been able to make nitrates needed for explosives so this is the actual factory that I mentioned earlier that keeps Hitler alive in World

War two eventually the Allies start bombing it, but some historians said if they just bombed it, said if they would have wiped it out earlier in the war, like at the very beginning, if their entire... I'm tripping over my words here. Come on, I can speak. Let's go. If the Allies had made Luna the sole focus,

they said that Hitler would have been wiped out in eight weeks okay it took a lot of words to get to that point i'm sorry uh this may be one of the strangest most complicated progress problems a business had ever faced okay so this is what i mean france is going to come over here and take all their assets. This was a crucial moment for BASF. When the war ended, the victors occupied what had been German land, including the area around the ammonia factory. Bosch knew that it would be difficult for competitors to replicate his success with fixed nitrogen on the basis of seized patents alone.

So they were just saying, essentially they were saying, you were using these patents for war, so we're going to take it. We're not going to respect it. And not only that, we're going to take over the factory, and they're going to're using these patents for war so we're going to take it we're not going to respect it and not only that we're going to take over the factory and they're going to try to reverse engineer it so that's what i mean this is the strangest most complicated problems a business ever faced bosch is leading this at the time so it says um it would be difficult if they seized the factories reviewed their operation and dissected an oven or two if that happened there was a very good chance that the ammonia secret would be out and BASF would lose all its competitive advantage. Even in the midst of political chaos, business was business. So they're saying like, if the factory is not running,

there's no way you're going to reverse engineer it. But if the factory is running, you might be able to. So I needed to clarify my previous statement. The important thing for Bosch was that two of his company's three main factories would be under French control for who knew how long, because there's an interim time between, I it's a i think they yeah the treaty of versailles which kind of settles world war one there's like several months but they didn't know the time frame to between when hostilities ended world war one and the official ending right so he's got to navigate himself and try not because if if bsf is the only company in the world that knows how to do this and of course now now you know every country has uh plants that do the haber bros process but

the time he's trying to protect his competitive advantage because he's not like he's not involved in war he's just a business person um so he does stuff i mean this is kind of like he's got interesting ideas. Like he essentially does like guerrilla warfare, not obviously with weapons. But he says, whenever a French inspector appeared, the BASF employees laid down their tools. Any machine in operation was switched off. The inspectors would arrive at a building to find needed ladders mysteriously missing, and in at least one case, an entire flight of stairs. Important gauges sometimes disappeared or had their faces blacked out.

Without seeing the ammonia ovens in operation, the French could not figure out the Haber-Bosch system. Bosch and his people knew that the technology was too complex, too precise, and too interconnected for easy comprehension. Bosch was playing a difficult game. In the long term, he needed to deny his ammonia-making secret to the Allies. In the short term, however, he needed to make money for BASF and to keep his workers busy.

And now here's the thing. This is all temporary. Bosch is not a stupid man by any means. He knows, especially so that he's one of the people that goes to Versailles, and he just realizes, oh, this is not even a negotiation like they're they are clearly won the war and they're gonna take they're gonna do whatever they want to do because they won and so he realizes listen he's got to solve one of the most complicated problems and they're all the people from germany and Germany are in this hotel,

but it's really like a prison. There's guards outside and everything else. So he's realizing, like, my people need to work, and the factories need to be running for the citizens of Germany so we can feed them. So he realizes, I'm going to have to give up the most valuable thing I have. And that's the Haber-Bosch process. So this is the story of how he solves the problem. And he does this on his own.

This is why they said he's like one of the most complicated figures of the 20th century. Under the cover of darkness late one night, Bosch climbed over the wall and wires surrounding the hotel, avoided the guards and made his way through the streets of Versailles to a secret meeting. He spoke there with a highly placed representative of the french chemical industry businessmen to businessmen so there's a very just like most times of war there's a it's really hard to tell where business ends and the state begins and so he realizes like this these people have a huge um sway with what the government needs because they realize they want the process. They want it

for not only to feed their people, but they want it for the explosives. It was straightforward. Bosch only had one thing to offer and he offered it to the French, the chance to build a Haber-Bosch plant. In exchange, he wanted a promise that the two factories he built so far would stay open. That's a Paul and Luna. I don't know what happens to the third one. The French would get what they wanted, an operating Haber-Bosch plant, and Bosch would keep his nitrogen plants running. Bosch was rewarded for his negotiating skills by being made head of the company, something he both wanted and dreaded. Remember, he doesn't even like people.

He lived, meaning dealing with people. He lived and breathed BASF, thought himself skilled enough to run it, but hated the prospect of endless meetings. He would rather spend his time tinkering with machines than figuring out personnel issues. But his sense of mission was engaged now. That's kind of devastating. You have to give it away. And they do like this deal, quote-unquote deal,

and they're like, okay, don't worry. You tell us this process. We'll pay you like a royalty. They're not doing that. I think they wind up paying them a little bit, but they just wind up stealing it. I mean, what's the old saying? Like, to the victors go the spoils.

So that was definitely the case here. So I just want to – this is the chaos. I just can't imagine, like, how difficult and how much pressure Karl Bosch was under because this is the chaos of running a company in post-world war one germany so he said carl bosch understood machines he had an affinity for things made of metal but he was less talented when it came to understanding people this became an issue for him in his new role as the head of the world's biggest chemical firm he found remember he hasn't founded ig yet uh he found himself in the early 1920s running a

company blessed with the world's most profitable new technology and cursed with some of the world's most challenging labor and financial financial problems his first years of directorship were marked by crisis after crisis so i'm not going to read these different parts i just made a list for myself and i'm going to read the list i made to you. He has to do with labor disputes, the rise of communism, inflation. So this is around the time of the Weimar Republic. Armed factory takeovers by both the French and workers. Explosion that killed hundreds of workers and a re-invasion by France. they keep going in there um this is the emotional strain uh companies are not families and you have to treat humans you cannot treat humans like machines uh so this is just this is when um well let me just read it bosh felt both betrayed and perplexed

he wanted to be a good father to his first company as bronc that's the guy that used to run the company but is now dead and kind of the one that mentored him as Brunk had been. I think that's a mistake. Like we have to do this, this whole ethos and business that, oh yeah, we're one big family. No families are, if you really think about how family is operated, they're socialistic. Companies are capitalistic. They're not run the same. Like if you were for a company that says you're a family, like that's not true. You can tell how they treat you. You don't kick somebody out of the family. You could easily be fired from a company. I don't like that terminology, I guess is my point. He felt himself to be a liberal, giving man

willing to listen to reason. He did not seem to realize that it was his own personality, uncomfortable around people, chronically devoted to efficiency somewhat mechanical and often distant coming across as brusque that often got in the way of developing good labor relations so he had this thing which like uh have you ever read these these um these reports of how it is to work in like an amazon warehouse like the people actually collect the stuff we order and and and ship it it's like they're monitored by the minute they they uh they're like pushed to take faster bathroom breaks all this kind of like weird stuff bosch employed a lot of this in the name of efficiency the problem is like humans aren't machines so if you're going to act like that then then find a

way to automate it or do a robot but if you're hiring humans you should have at least a basic dignity to treat them as humans um just this is an interesting quote i referenced how you deal with inflation uh once that rampant inflation happened it said a pound of bread could cost 800 million marks a pound of bread could cost 800 million marks. A pound of butter would cost a billion. Bosch winds up going to the – he realizes that he's going to need to – this is when BASF and, I don't know, four or five other companies are going to merge into one giant chemical company um and that's the one that he runs that the problem was just like when he

centralized the initial factory and then uh once once they take it over like the what what was once an asset to the company becomes a liability same thing happens here but he goes what's interesting is like most of the people uh that we cover on the podcast he learned he studied other founders um and this is where he comes up with this idea of a super company so he goes over to america actually and he realized he said german chemists saw the united states as their only real competition for industrial dominance dominance bosch was thinking about fusing German dye and chemical firms into a single big organization and wanted to see firsthand how giant U.S. businesses like Standard Oil operated. He came home with new insights about the future. Everywhere he looked in American cities, he saw streets jammed with automobiles.

Everybody wanted one. The United States was car crazy in part because Henry Ford had figured out a way to mass produce them cheaply enough to bring them within reach of millions of buyers. So he's going to do the same thing, not for automobiles, but for this process of creating ammonia. And interesting enough, Hitler winds up becoming crazy. Basically, later in his career, he has to figure out how to make synthetic gasoline to power Hitler's tanks and planes and everything, but also because Hitler wanted to emulate, he wanted Germans to be driving cars like Americans drove. So this is more of the thinking here. This is what's going to cause him to found this giant company,

and he's the one that's going to run it. He says, in the post-war world, so this is after World War I, before World War II, corporations needed to join together if they were going to build vast new plants

using expensive new technology. In Britain, four firms banded together after the war to form the Imperial Chemical Industries. In the United States, five firms joined

to make Allied Chemical. If the Germans wanted to compete, they would have to do the same. When the German government began to pass laws in the early 1920s that benefited the formation of larger business entities, it became clear that the time was right to merge. So it's called, I'm not even going to try to pronounce the German thing of it, but it's called IG Farben or simply Farben. Farben was, at the moment of its birth, the largest business in Europe, the largest chemical company in the world, and the third largest business organization of any

sort. So what's interesting to me is these trends, I think, are reversing in the age that we live in. It's my sincere belief that the optimal size of a company is shrinking. And there's actually, if you listen to the podcast I did for the reviewers only feed on this book, it's called Unscaled. So it's essentially a book laying out saying, hey, for the last 200 years, everything was centralized and growing big and you had a benefit to being large.

And now that process is reversing. I think that's obvious, but some people still find that controversial, which I don't see how it is. You can look at the numbers and kind of extrapolate where that's going to end up to. I definitely think the numbers become... I think my own personal belief, and I don't really have any proof of this,

I just thought that I think companies are going to become tiny, and yet they're going to be able to serve tons and tons and tons of customers still. So they'll be large in impact, probably large in profit, not large in headcount. But anyways, if you haven't heard that, and if you don't have access to it, just get in touch with me and I'll send you the feed. And you can read the book Unscaled. I haven't read it. It's been a few months or I forgot when I read it, but I do recall that you don't have to read the middle of the book. I think at the time I said, if you just read the

first three chapters and the last three chapters, you kind of get the author's point. That's how it is with most business books. That's why I read biographies instead because you don't there's no point in skipping a biography but there's a lot of points skipping business books i think they're most of them should be way shorter um this is stretching what you think is possible so let me just read this standard oil was a big company but even its technical director was stunned by a visit in the spring of 1926 to the company's plant. So now this is far been. So remember, a few years prior, Bosch goes to the United States to learn from Standard Oil. Now he applied those lessons and Standard Oil is coming

over here to, or coming over here, coming over to Germany to study them. And they realized, oh my God, they're doing way, they're on a scale we didn't even realize. They were stunned by a visit in the spring of 1926 at the company's plants. The person that did the, the representative of Standard Oil said he was plunged into a world of research and development on a gigantic scale such I had never seen. He called Bosch's synthetic fuels project

tremendously significant. Remember, if the new firm's gonna succeed, it's gonna survive. It can't, it's going to survive it can't it's monopoly on the harbor the haber bosch process is over he had to give it away after world war one now all chemical companies in the world are using it some to differing you know levels of success or whatever cases so he's got to come up with a new thing synthetic fuels is like an even harder problem um and they wind up running because at the time

let me back up i didn't explain this clearly enough um around this time the world was convinced that we hit peak oil that they were gonna everything's gonna run dry oh my it's the same it's like the same thing that they thought was gonna happen if they don't find new fertilizers the world is gonna starve turns so they start doing synthetic fuel the problem is while all these chemical companies especially bosch's companies dumping tons of money in research development trying to find synthetic fuel they wind up being successful but then in the united states you have the start of the oil boom and they i think it was in oklahoma they accidentally discover what turns out to be like an ocean of oil and so that what's going to happen that drops

the price to where natural oil crude oil is way cheaper so we're not there in the story yet but that i don't even know if i talk about it but that that um throws off this whole idea but winds up being important because hitler's like well you know the united states when i'm at war with them is not going to let me import oil so So that's why he took over IG Farber. So it says, Kallingbosch's synthetic fuel project is tremendously significant. He, too, had to admit how far ahead of the United States the Germans were. I had not known what research meant until I saw it, he said. We were babies compared to what they were doing.

So that's just another example of exposing yourself to the full scope and capabilities of the human species, the very best of the best at whatever they're doing. It's just going to push you to realize, hey, I can do a lot more than I think I can. Okay, so now I'm skipping ahead. And now we have to deal with the jackass that is Hitler. And he's purging. We haven't been talking about Fritz.

Fritz at this time, he sold all his stuff to Bosch, essentially, Bosch's company. And he just wants to, you know, he's the head of an institute. He's doing research. They try to try him for war crimes. I don't think he was convicted. But no, he definitely wasn't convicted. Or maybe he was convicted but he could never travel to France. I don't remember the exact details, unfortunately. Sorry. He's running this institute in Germany and Hitler's

like, well, I want the Jews out of here. At the beginning, it was step by step. He's like, hey, Hitler's Jewish conspiracy is that they're controlling money, they're controlling science, so get all these people out of these institutes, like purge them, replace them with Aryans. And at first, Haber got an exception because he was a German war hero. Now, in Britain, he was hated because he killed, I think it was 60,000. The number was 60,000, 60,000 plus. But I'm pretty sure it was the British soldiers that died from that chemical attack.

And they knew it came from Haber. But in Germany, he was like, you know, a war hero. Because that helped them because they were at war with Britain at the time. So now he's going to direct order, get rid of these Jewish people. And it says, but how could he stay on when many of the people who worked at the institute would be forced out simply for being Jewish? How could he bring himself to sign the dismissal papers? While he thought about options options he made other decisions albert einstein traveling united states attacked the nazis in print and never returned to berlin so he knew

from the get-go he was telling haber get the hell out of there and he was like no i'm a german like his whole life was there he's he dedicated his whole life to being accepted as the as the like the the prototypical servant subservient german and didn't realize that hitler is not even though you had anti-semitism under uh the kaiser before like hitler's a different level and we're going to see this because he meets with bosch too the guy's so dumb um haber was torn part of him hoped that the madness would blow over that the german people would not stand for it that hitler's government would not cease that hitler's government would see sense didn't the nazis realize that forcing out jewish research would gut german scientific programs that's what i mean about how dumb this guy was uh not haber hitler obviously jewish

scientists were simply too successful too integral in germany's international eminence how could they be told to leave without doing irreparable damage? How could the Nazis throw away a century of achievement? It was beyond belief. It was madness. Yeah, well, look who you're dealing with. This is Einstein's perspective and Haber's regret. So he was, did he already leave? Eventually he leaves.

He has to leave. The problem Hitler explained was that Jews are all communists. A Jew is a Jew. They all cling together. So because Max Planck goes and meets with, he's a friend of Haber, and he meets with Hitler. He's like, do you understand? He called it German scientific self-munilation, what Hitler was doing.

And Hitler's response is, well, a Jew is a Jew. That is stupid. So Planck tried to return to his point about science. The chancellor, that's Hitler, began talking faster and louder, pounding his hand on his knee, flying into a rage so fierce that the elderly Plank had to leave the room. So he's telling his friend, he's like, you better get the hell out of here. This is not good for you.

He says, Haber was shattered. It was not just his health this time, not just nervous exhaustion, but a feeling that he created a life for himself that was false, that he had been living a lie. He had spent his career fashioning himself into the perfect German. He now understood what that meant in Hitler's terms. Despite his conversion to Christianity, his Nobel Prize, his Iron Cross, his efforts to save the nation, his international stature, his service, his

achievements, and his value as a man, the only thing that mattered was that he was a Jew. Einstein, writing to his old friend Haber from the United States, put Haber's dilemma into scientific terms. This is a quote from Einstein now. I can imagine your inner conflicts. It is somewhat like having to abandon a theory on which you can imagine your inner conflicts. It is somewhat like having to abandon a theory on which you have worked your whole life. It is not the same for me because I never believed it in the least, meaning I never believed that the German people

would ever put aside the fact that Einstein was Jewish. He's like, you believe in a fairy tale. Haber's response was more emotional. I am bitter as never before. And the feeling that this is unbearable increases by the day i was german to an extent that i fully feel only now and i'm filled with incredible disgust oh that's unbelievably sad getting to the end of your life he's gonna die in a few years from now, where we're in the story.

And I don't know. I always think about the importance of understanding what is real. How are things really, like not how people tell us how they are. Because people told Haber, he understood. Oh, if you're just a good service, you convert to Christianity, you know, German first. That was not true. And, you know, German first. That was not true. And, you know, he dies.

The last few life, he's like running from country to country and winds up dying of a heart attack, doesn't have a place to live. Eventually, Israel says that they'll take him in. But like the tries to go to Britain and Britain's like, dude, do you think we forgot what you did to us? Like, I don't know, man. It's just it's devastating. And so now Bosch is going to go through some of this too and bosch he winds up you know he doesn't die poor like haber does haber stopped getting his royalty and said instead decides his like place with the institute so secure he can live off the salary so

it gets a lump sum that obviously proves not a good idea so bosch is running the largest firm and he has such he has to meet Hitler because Hitler is going to tell him what he wants. Bosch made the mistake of meeting with Hitler privately. This is going to happen within a few weeks after Haber resigned. Bosch's meeting with Hitler started well enough. Bosch talked about synthetic gasoline

and the need to expand Luna. Hitler seemed agreeable. Then Bosch felt meeting with Hitler started well enough. Bosch talked about synthetic gasoline and the need to expand Luna. Hitler seemed agreeable. Then Bosch felt compelled to start talking about the civil service law. That's a law that expelled the Jewish people from any kind of important job. And the damage that would be done to German chemistry and physics if it was applied unsparingly to Jewish scientists. So Bosch, again, is trying to reason with this person. He's like, no, you're about to go to war.

You're going to need... I can't run the company, and Germany can't succeed without the talent we have. Hitler lost his temper. He shouted, you don't understand these matters, and started ranting about the Jewish threat. Doofus. That's the word I think of when I think of Hitler.

If Jews were so important to physics, this is what I mean. This is how stupid. Okay, I'm not going to get upset. If Jews were so important to physics and chemistry, Hitler said, then we'll just have to work 100 years without physics and chemistry.

How are you going to win? The World War II was a war of technology. How are you going to win that without reverting back 100 years in physics and chemistry? This is what I mean when you get obsessed with ideology and you stop being a rational person. Like, very common for humans to do, but very dumb for us to do.

When Bosch tried to disagree, Hitler, in a calculated insult, rang for an aide and announced that his visitor wished to leave. So he's not listening to reason. He's listening to, he's ideological. Oh, man. I just feel so bad for Bosch and Haber. This is Haber on regret.

This is, he's about to suffer. He's giving a speech. He's in Switzerland. And right after the speech, he's about to suffer. He's giving a speech. He's in Switzerland. Right after the speech, he suffers a heart attack. He lives for like a few, maybe like a few more months, but he's going to die very soon. And think about like this. So I want to bring this up because this is on the forefront of his mind.

This is the remarks he chooses to focus on. Like when you're giving a speech and you know people are going to hear it and then it's going to be reported on like it's probably going to talk about something that's important to you and it's just it's devastating to me that like you get to the end of your life and all the work and progress is done and you're filled with regret and this is what he says he says um i was one of the mightiest men in germany i was more than a great army commander more than a captain of And I'll close on this part, but before I it I just I can't imagine and I think um the author Thomas Hager has does such a great job painting the story for us um just the idea that you could have such accomplishments that were were so important to your species as a whole and for it to be overtaken.

Unfortunately, they both die. I think they both die before Hitler's dethroned. And just I couldn't imagine what that felt like, the fact that all your effort, all your time, everything, and it was taken, such a beautiful invention that could help humans. Humans alive now that's responsible for the population growth that we've seen. Literally billions and billions of humans in the future are better off because of the work that Fritz Haber and Karl Bosch did. And yet you see the downside of our species as well with what Hitler does.

So I just want to read this. And he's going to touch on that a little bit here back in 1932 just before hitler first took power bosch had said about the haber bosch ammonia process i have often asked myself whether it would have been better if we had not succeeded the war meaning world war one perhaps would have ended sooner with less misery and on better terms gentlemen these questions are all useless progress in science and technology cannot be stopped they are in many ways akin to art one can persuade the one to how to halt as little as the others they drive the people who were born for them to activity. He had been driven to activity

and the consequences were now clear. Bosch's life work, his breakthroughs and factories, his attempts to feed the world and make profits for his company were being used to arm and fuel the Nazi machine. That's what it had come to. Bosch was no longer relevant. The Nazi state had gotten what it wanted from him, and his opinion no longer mattered. After the invasion, this invasion of Poland, Bosch fell completely from public view.

He winds up becoming alcoholic and dies shortly thereafter. Probably an alcoholic that lasts like 10 years of his life or so. He struggled a lot internally with what his inventions were being used for. So I'll leave the story there. If you want to read more, I'll leave a link in the show notes. If you buy the book using that link, Amazon says it's a small percentage of the sale

and no additional cost to you. I can't recommend it enough. It was a fantastic story. I just, I cannot believe the skill which with the author had and just pack so much information in a relatively, you know, 300 pages or maybe even less than that.

All right, one other favor for you. Thank you. First of all, thank you very much for supporting the podcast. Without your support, I could not do this work. So I owe you everything. Really do appreciate it. One request, if I can, if you can just help me spread the word, tell friends about the podcast, send them links,

encourage them to subscribe and to listen. I'd greatly appreciate it. And I will be back next week let's see i have let me just tell you what i have coming up um i have a book that was recommended by mark andreason it's on the founder of ibm that's what i'll be doing next week and it looks like finally i've been working my way through 50 years of Warren Buffett's. I don't know if you can hear that. That's me opening and closing all the pages in this gigantic book that's in front of me.

And it's 50 years of Warren Buffett's shareholder letters. That would obviously be only for misfits, for you guys. It's taken me a while because it's like 700-something pages, and it's not like a normal-sized book. It's like the size of a textbook. But I think it's going to be really interesting. I do think it'll probably be done two weeks from now. So look forward to that.

So next week, Thomas Watson, founder of IBM, one of the most successful companies of all time. And then the week after that, Warren Buffett. So thank you very much for listening. Thank you for telling your friends. I love you very much, and I'll talk to you later.