The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Business of Tomorrow: The Visionary Life of Harry Guggenheim: From Aviation and Rocketry to the Creation of an Art Dynasty by Dirk Smillie

Episode Date: September 7, 2021

The Business of Tomorrow: The Visionary Life of Harry Guggenheim: From Aviation and Rocketry to the Creation of an Art Dynasty by Dirk Smillie The first biography of the brilliant and complex Harry Guggenheim by a veteran Forbes journalist. At the turn of the last century, the Guggenheim family ran the most powerful mining conglomerate on earth. Decades later came the Guggenheim museum, which would become the hub of the world’s most powerful art brand. But who was behind this transformation? It took three generations of Guggenheims to build the wealth and power in its first era. Yet it was the singular force of Harry Guggenheim who would guide the family’s next generation of businesses in to modernity. Part angel investor, part entrepreneur, part technologist, Harry launched businesses whose impact on 20th century America went far beyond the Guggenheims’ mines or museum. His visionary investments continue to profoundly influence our world and hold valuable business lessons for billionaire dynasty builders like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, who can only aspire to match Harry’s lasting, multigenerational impact. A flawed but brilliant man, Harry Guggenheim was the confidante to six U.S. presidents and a key financial force behind commercial aviation and space exploration, two innovations that catapulted the nation into the future. Epic and intimate, The Business of Tomorrow reveals the groundbreaking life of an American icon.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks is boss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast we did it again oops like the time or something who knew no one saw that coming anyway guys we certainly appreciate you tuning in today and spending some quiet time with us

where we sit down by the fire and we have one of those little fdr moments and i'm going to pet the dog and sit in my little uh chair here and tell you about uh really cool podcasts and author that we have on the show today and everything else. I was settling in with that. I was thinking I need a little one of those lap rugs or whatever they used to have. I think the FDR used to put over his legs. Anyway, so guys, pull up to the fire. It's September.

It's probably fire lighting season. If not, you could be in California and it's fire lighting season there. I'm not sure why that's not funny. But anyway, guys, be sure to subscribe to the show. Go to YouTube.com for Fortress Chris Foss, hit the bell notification button. It's a little one that's shaped like a bell and a notification button. Just punch it and good things will happen to you for the rest of your life or something like that. I don't know. The lawyers said I can't say that anymore. Anyway, guys, go to goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Foss. Follow us over there on everything we're reading and reviewing. See all the groups. There's a whole list of groups. You can track them on Facebook, LinkedIn,

Twitter, Instagram, TikTok. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership,

how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. So you can pre-order the book right now wherever fine books are sold. But the best thing to do on getting a pre-order deal is to go to beaconsofleadership.com. That's beaconsofleadership.com. On there, you can find several packages you can take advantage of in ordering the book. And for the same price of what you can get it from someplace else like Amazon, you can get all sorts of extra goodies that we've taken and given away. Different collectors, limited edition, custom-made numbered book plates that are going to be autographed by me.

There's all sorts of other goodies that you can get when you buy the book from beaconsofleadership.com. So be sure to go there, check it out, or order the book wherever fine books are sold. Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in in we certainly appreciate you being here we've got a wonderful author on the uh show today he's written a couple books at least his name is dirk smiley and he's got a book that's coming out october 5th 2021 the business of tomorrow the visionary life of harry The Business of Tomorrow, The Visionary Life of Harry Guggenheim, I think I got that right, Harry Guggenheim, From Aviation and Rocketry to the Creation of an Art Dynasty. We're going to be talking to him about his book today and everything that is in it.

It's going to be a pretty interesting read. You're going to learn a lot of stuff. He was the chief content officer at Guggenheim Partners, which he left to write his biography of Harry Guggenheim. Prior to that, he was the senior writer at Forbes magazine covering stories from Paris, Lyon, and the Bahamas in Mexico City. He worked and covered media for Christian Science Monitor and has been a contributor to Newsweek International, the New York Times, Upfront, and The Nation. He was a researcher at a media think tank at Columbia University and director of the News Research Group in New York.

He is the former chair of the news category for the Webby Awards and Coro Fellow in Public Policy. He lives in Manhattan and has a daughter who started college this year. Give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs. Yeah, I'm on Twitter at Absolute Smiley, S-M-I-L-E-Y, like the vodka but not affiliated with the vodka. And I am at the Pegasus Books site as well. You can get a little more information about the book if you are so interested.

That's Pegasus Books on the web. There you go. You had me at vodka. So there you go. So what motivated you to write this book? Chris, I was a writer at Forbes for about a decade, as you mentioned, and I then made a move to Wall Street. And that was based on a friend of mine who actually became a friend, but she was profiled in a story that I did at Forbes about the future of online education. And she moved over to Guggenheim Partners and called me one day about a job which I took. And working at Guggenheim Partners, I'd get phone calls from people who were like fund managers, a fund manager in Switzerland who would call up and say, we have a Swiss pension fund who's interested in possibly being a client. What have you got on the Guggenheim

family history in Switzerland? Because the Guggenheims are from Switzerland originally. Or I get another question about the mining business that the Guggenheims used to be in, or philanthropy, aviation, rocketry, all these different subjects. And the answer I'd have each time was nothing. I got nothing. So I started writing up these kind of mini business biographies when I was at Guggenheim. And the name who kept coming up over and over again was Harry Guggenheim. He was engineering a lot of these ventures and enterprises in the early to mid 20th century. So at one point, I said to the co-founder of Guggenheim Partners,

Harry Guggenheim, he's been involved with so much in family history, someone should do a book on him. And there was someone who was working on a project, a book-length project at the Harry Guggenheim Foundation at the time. So some time went on, basically to make a long story short, I took the project on myself, left Guggenheim Partners to work on it. And that was the origins of the book. That's awesome.

So who are the Guggenheims? And tell us what the Guggenheim Partners did that might be a good foundation for people that aren't too familiar with them. The Guggenheims at one point operated the largest mining conglomerate on the planet. Wow. They were into copper, lead, silver, every metal on earth. That's really where they made their fortune. And then around the turn of the century and leading up to the depression, two of the founding seven brothers left the firm. So there were five brothers left and the firm was being headed at the time by Daniel Guggenheim, who was Harry's father.

And so when Daniel died in 1930, Harry was a likely person to take over Guggenheim Brothers. Harry had two siblings. He had a daughter named Gladys, who in that age, women were really not considered as material to take over a family business, which is unfortunate. So she was out of the running from the beginning. And then there was Harry's older brother, Bert, who at one point said to the family, every family needs to have a man of leisure, and I'm going to appoint myself in that role. So he just took himself out of the race. So it was left to Harry to take over the Guggenheim legacy, which he did in the early 30s, and then got involved in all these businesses as time went on. Guggenheim Partners came much later, but I have some material on Guggenheim Partners because even though the firm was started many years after Harry died, the firm kind of grew out of

the brand that he created, the Guggenheim brand. So it's a legacy of his in some respects. And Guggenheim Partners is a financial services firm. It's got an asset management side. It's got a securities business. And they're a privately held kind of boutique Wall Street firm that's done very well over the last decade or so. There you go. Wall Street's been good. Is there a reason we haven't heard more of them? They're not like a household name of some of the robber barons of the 20s and stuff. Is there a reason we haven't heard more about them? Are there more of a common name? They were known in the mining industry up until about the 1920s and the 30s. And then when Harry and his father began to put a lot of money into aviation and then rocketry. The brand kind of changed and

the Guggenheims became known as these huge philanthropists in aviation. And then in, during the rocket age, they became, I wouldn't say household names, but Harry was known as a godfather of aviation, popular science, given that title. And as time went on, there were a lot of businesses that the Guggenheims were involved in, but they weren't Oh, wow. I think when the museum came along, that kind of redefined the family brand and the family became known for the museum probably more than anything else. So this book is a kind of an attempt to go back and to highlight all these different businesses the Guggenheims had been involved with over the years and why their role was so important in these various business sectors. And you call Harry the original space investor. You've got Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson and anybody else who wants to fly into space.

I know a few people I want to fly into space right now. That would be a one-way trip. A one-way trip, yeah. There's no return. No deposit, no return. So why do you call him the original space investor? Let's get into some of that. That's an interesting question. He placed his bets on two different strategies at the very beginning of the space race.

He bankrolled Robert Goddard, who today is known as the father of American rocketry. Goddard was a physics professor at Clark University who was basically shooting off rockets at his aunt's cabbage farm in Massachusetts. And the stories about him initially were he was basically covered as this like nutty professor who was trying to get to the moon, which is not really true. All he was trying to do was essentially work on propulsion systems. And the idea of space travel was certainly something that he wrote about and thought about, but it wasn't really the focus of his rocket experiments. So in any case, Charles Lindbergh and Harry learned about Goddard and decided to back his experiments. And Goddard initially had funding from the Smithsonian, Carnegie Institution, and a few others early on. But that was short-term funding and it didn't last. Harry's funding lasted year after year. I think he funded Goddard's

experiments for over a decade. So that was one bet that Harry placed on the rocket age. The other was he put a lot of money into programs at the California Institute of Technology, Caltech, out in Pasadena, California. And they had their own programs going. But Harry basically underwrote Theodore von Kármán, this sort of aviation genius who was in Germany at the time. Harry paid for von Kármán to come over and start rocket research in the United States at Caltech. And one of the programs that spun out from that Caltech program was the Jet Propulsion Lab, which has been responsible for the Mars landers and so many other things during the period of research in space. So Harry had a two-track approach with the individual, with Robert Goddard, and then the institution with Caltech. And back then,

there really wasn't anybody spending a lot of money on space. Even the military really didn't see the value of investing in research in rockets until well after World War II. And after World War II, there was this long period of time when the United States really wasn't doing much in the way of rocket research at all. And then Sputnik came along, Russians launched the first satellite into orbit. And, you know, then all hell broke loose in the United States and the military and scientifically severance saying, what have we been doing?

What's happening? How could the Russians be so far ahead of us? So that's when the U.S. Aerospace Program really ramped up. But a lot of the research that was deployed around that time was based on Robert Goddard's liquid fuel propulsion systems. The liquid fuel rockets and the multi-stage rockets, which ultimately put men on the moon, those were ideas that Goddard developed several decades earlier. And you say in the book that Harry had a greater impact on the development of aviation than the Wright brothers. That's a pretty tall order, right?

That's a pretty tall order. And I was skeptical when I first read that claim, but that claim was made by a guy who was the former dean of the Harvard Business School, who got together with a couple of other researchers and did a study of leadership during the air age. And they essentially, you know, asserted that with all of the money that Harry Guggenheim put into aviation really amounted to a greater contribution to the advancement of aviation than the Wright brothers themselves. And that's because when, after the Wright brothers essentially invented the airplane, they did everything in their power to protect their patents and their designs. So they wound up in court one year after the next trying to

stop people from using their designs and employing them in their aircraft production models. So the Wright brothers blamed them for wanting to protect their invention. On the other hand, it slowed down the development of aviation until people like Harry Guggenheim and others came along and did a lot of things to try to basically lift the field off the ground, jumpstart it as it were. Did he ever have any, do anything with Howard Hughes? I know Howard Hughes during that time did a lot with aviation. I know that he was aware of Howard Hughes and what he was doing, but I think that Harry had his own money. And Howard Hughes was a guy that was in what he was trying to do,

which is to basically lay the foundations for aviation to become commercially viable. As far as I know, he didn't have any contacts with Howard Hughes, but he was certainly another kind of eccentric, wildly rich person who was interested in aviation. And there were quite a lot of people like that at the time. Sounds like Harry was born to rockets, and I know Howard Hughes was born to TWA and building all of just normal airline stuff. And then, of course, the Spruce Goose. That was an interesting thing.

That's still down in Long Beach, right? I believe it's moved up to, I think it's in Oregon or Washington now. They moved it. Oh, okay. Yeah. It was an interesting thing. It's a lot of money just to park in a while. But yeah, for a long time, it was there by the Queen Mary.

And you mentioned the book, He Was a Confident to Six Presidents. So he saw some interesting stuff in financial force behind commercial aviation, space exploration. And this guy was into everything. Yeah, he really was. Aviation was his real love. He had been a pilot during World War I, and he was a pretty good pilot. He had an analytical mind, and he understood a great deal about the engineering of planes and what kind of technology would be required to take them to the next level in terms of speed and distance, elevation, et cetera. I think he felt that he was knowledgeable enough about the technology and the business, such as it was,

that he knew where the kind of pressure points were. He knew where to put the spark plugs, the financial spark plugs, to try to help lift aviation off the ground and into a level of production that it could actually be commercially viable. And some of that was psychological because a lot of people, particularly in the 1920s, most people had never actually seen an airplane in person. They might've seen drawings or

illustrations or photos of airplanes in the newspaper, but Harry bankrolled Lindbergh's national tour after Lindbergh did his famous flight to New York, to Paris. And that was an opportunity for people to come and see an airplane actually land and take off on time. That must have been wild. And hundreds of thousands of people came to see Lindbergh whenever he landed in their city. Lindbergh, I think, went to 82 cities across 48 states. And it also generated a huge amount of press coverage. But I think what Harry's idea behind that was to try to change the narrative

of air travel to try to demonstrate that airplanes are actually pretty reliable. They can land and take off on time safely. And so there was a kind of a psychological hurdle that he knew had to be made before there would be more general acceptance of air travel, regardless of how many planes are being produced in the U.S. Yeah. I think about that every now and then when I'm on a plane and I take off. And I think about 100 years ago, this was like not possible. Like we just do this. Yeah. It's a plane taking off.

It's just routine. And you just think about it. And my favorite moment is that moment when you, when it, you know, the wind or whatever catches the velocity, the wind catches the wings and it takes flight. And that moment that you leave the ground, it's just the most special moment for me. And it's not the special moment when I'm being felt up in TSA. So there's that. Yeah. You also talked about this. You need in TSA. So there's that. Yeah. You also talk to us.

You need a TSA pre-check. Yeah. I just, I hate the whole experience of being jammed into a tube with a bunch of people on Sardineville. They make those, they just make everything smaller and smaller. I used to have fun back in the days before the computers got really good at

making at overbooking the flights. You know, there, there used to be a time where sometimes you just catch a flight and you're just like, I'll sit anywhere on this thing. And you could always maybe bet that we might have a couple rows or a couple seats next year that would be empty. Now it's just they got people piled on top of each other.

We can't blame Harry for that. He had rockets. This is true. You tell the story behind the – oh, that was the other question I had, a thing I had for you. I grew up loving the – I can that was the other question I had, a thing I had for you. I grew up loving the... I can't remember the guy's name now, but the X-Wen rocket. You remember that where it broke the speed of sound and then they broke the speed of whatever and mock and all that sort of stuff.

I grew up reading those stories and was just so enamored by them. And I guess we can credit him for that, huh? Yeah. Robert Goddard, with his various rocket experiments, at one point developed a rocket that could be put underneath the wings of airplanes. And the military worked with Goddard on that and also Caltech because they were interested in rockets that could basically add to the payload of fighter jets and also have their taxiing distance be shorter. And those things were amazing. They just basically lifted the plane up immediately at the moment that it really needed that lift and led to those supersonic planes.

You were talking about the X-1 and the X-2, Chuck Yeager breaking the sound. Chuck Yeager, that's it. He's the first man to break the sound barrier, which is amazing. And yeah, all of those kind of successive experiments with rockets on planes that eventually turned into the jet age were largely due to Robert Goddard's work on liquid fuel engines. Your book talks about the story behind the Guggenheim Museum and its creation. Tell us a little bit about that. Of course, I was really interested in that part of Harry's story because I think most people who know the Guggenheim Museum,

they may know its full title, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. And we'll assume that Solomon was the guy who built it. Solomon was one of the Guggenheim, one of the original Guggenheim brothers. And it was, in fact, Solomon's idea to create the museum and Solomon and his art director at the time, Hilla Riebe, had retained Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect to design the museum. But the truth is that Solomon died 10 years before the museum even opened. And so it was left to Harry, who was on the board at the time. Solomon had put Harry on the board because he admired Harry and thought he'd be an asset

to the building of the museum, but he didn't put him in charge. The guy who was in charge was Solomon's daughter's husband, but he and his wife lived in England at the time. And there was some controversy that was developing about the creation of the museum. And so the trustees decided to put Harry in charge of it because they wanted someone in New York and also someone, I think, with Harry's skills to be able to guide it to completion. Harry actually was the kind of driving force behind the museum being built in the first place. And he also, I think he did something that was important, which was he renamed the museum. The museum originally was going to be known as the Museum of Non-Objective

Art, which is a strange title. It's strange to have a title of something that tells you it's something that it's not. A non-objective argument. Whatever that even means, most people don't really understand what that would mean in the first place. So Harry just kind of, he changed the title to the Solomon Guggenheim Museum and he knew that it would just be referred to as the Guggenheim. And that was important because it branded the family's values with the museum itself. And that brand became a kind of a global art brand. And spinoff museums were created from the Guggenheim brand. The Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain has been a pretty big success. The Abu Dhabi Museum is underway. It's taking a long time to get that

built, but I think that's going to be finished around 2026, I believe. And then you have a lot of other museums that have been built around the world where the architect is the star. And so it's turned museums into works of art themselves to some degree. I credit Harry with a lot of that trend because that's exactly what he did with the Guggenheim Museum. But the interesting part of the story for me was early on when the museum was just based on Solomon Guggenheim's art collection. And he wanted to have a repository for it. And his art director at the time, Hilla Riebe, was this kind of very eccentric German, I call her kind of a minor aristocrat. She knew a lot of artists back in Europe, and she introduced Solomon to this whole world of non-objective art. But she set up the museum in a way, almost as if it was going to be a kind of a spiritual experience. Like the forerunner to the Guggenheim Museum was in a former auto showroom,

and Hilla Rebay would light incense, and then she'd play Bach in the background. And then you'd have these like Ottoman couches in the middle of the room where people would sit down and look at the paintings, which had been mounted way low on the walls, like just above the baseboard with these thick wooden frames. And so it was a sort of a wacky experience. And the Guggenheims were getting a lot of criticism for the fact that all of these favorite artists by Hila Ribe were being displayed. Meanwhile, like Chagall or Picasso would be collecting dust back in the

storeroom. Those guys were hacks anyway. Yeah, who cares about them? Hila Ribe had all these kind of eccentric business practices, and the criticism of her management of the museum was mounting, particularly in the New York Times at the time, because the museum was a non-profit organization, so it had some obligation to the public interest. And the Times actually at one point wrote an editorial suggesting that the Guggenheims should just give up the museum and its collection to one of the established museums like the Met or MoMA, because these people know how to curate. They know how to manage a museum and just get it out of the hands of this wacky hill at Rebay. And I think when that story came out, hit the ceiling, it was, you can imagine what

the feeling was like to be criticized in the New York Times, to be told that the Guggenheim family is too incompetent to manage its own museum, much less its own museum, you know, archives and its collections. So at that point, Harry brought in, he had a meeting with the New York Times reporter and some others, and basically he made a series of reforms. And one of those was changing the name of the museum and then also expanding the mission of the museum. So it's not just looking at the non-objectives work, but it's looking at all these other kind of modernist painters and sculptors. And that went over very well. It was those fixes were very effective and I thought led a lot to contributed a lot to the museum opening with a lot of acclaim.

Certainly a lot of controversy at the time, but also in the long run, I think it was considered a success. Probably better than the chick's idea of the wacky tobacco. Let's get high and look at pictures. I don't know that there was any mind-altering drugs involved, but I can't say that. What's that type of art you were saying again? The non... Oh, non-objective art. Is that abstract art? Is that what that is uh i don't even know

what that is yeah it's considered to be like a subset of abstract art because abstract art can have real symbols and images in it i mean abstract painting could have a tree yeah uh or a person in it even but the non-objective art is like pure lines and figures and shapes that you don't see in nature. And it's interesting work, but it's a genre. It's a sort of a subset of the larger umbrella of abstract art. And to have a museum that just focused on non-objective art is fine, but the collection, Solomon's collection, had over a thousand pieces of work in it. And people were upset that all these other pieces were not getting showcased. And also, Hila Ribe was showing a lot of her own work.

She was an artist. And at one point, she put on her one-woman show at the Guggenheim. And the entire museum was filled with Hila Ribe's work. Oh, wow. You know, she's got my own stuff here. That Monet guys act.

Monet might look good if you use a little wacky tobacco. Yeah. I don't know. So what else we touched on in the book? You like to tease out. I think that the aviation rocketry in the museum, those are like the lasting institutions that Harry helped to create. There were two others that he was involved in, which were great successes.

One was a thoroughbred horse farm that started out with basically one horse. And Harry built it into what was in 1959, the largest, I should say, the highest earning stables in the US.S., which is pretty good when you consider he's competing with people like the Vanderbilts and these famous families with, it put huge amounts of money into their horse racing hobbies. And they'd be at the Kentucky Derby every year. Calumet Farms was just dominated horse racing in the 40s, 50s, and some of the 60s. So Harry was really punching above his weight and he managed to create this thoroughbred horse farm, which brought a lot of horses to the Kentucky Derby. He actually won the Kentucky Derby in one of his five trips there.

And that was a very lucrative hobby for him. And the other business that he was involved in was the founding of Newsday. And Newsday is a suburban newspaper on Long Island. His wife, Alicia Patterson, was really the brains behind it in many ways because Harry bought it for her. Alicia Patterson comes from this famous newspaper publishing family. Her father had founded the Daily News in New York, but she was always been on the outs with the business. She was a good writer, but she never really felt like her father ever gave her a real chance in the newspapering. So her dream was to run her own newspaper.

So Harry essentially bought the paper for her. It was a News day at the time. It was a defunct newspaper out in Hempstead. And so Alicia built it into a real powerhouse. But she died in 1963. And at that point, Harry took over the newspaper. It's not that he wasn't involved with it. It's just he wasn't involved with the editorial side.

But he was running its business operations, basically negotiating with the trade unions and negotiating prices on print, newspaper print, which was tricky during the war years. So Harry contributed a lot to Newsday even before Alicia left the scene. And then when Harry came on as publisher of Newsday in 1963, he made a lot of changes which kind of continued the forward expansion of the newspaper. But I think probably the most important thing that he did was to bring on Bill Moyers as publisher at Newsday, because Moyers at the time was LBJ's press secretary. And Bill Moyers was like the most visible person in the Johnson administration. He's holding press conferences every day. But he was against the Vietnam War, and he was having to represent an administration that was getting more and more involved in the mid to late 60s in Vietnam,

committing troops and material and all that. So Moyers, I think, was happy to leave the Johnson administration. He went to work for Harry in late 1966. And he did a lot of good things at Newsday. He hired additional people of color on staff. I think he hired at least 10 or 11 people of color on the editorial side. And he brought in these people like Saul Bellows, the novelist, to come and cover the Arab-Israeli war. So Moyers did a lot of interesting things, but in the end, he had a kind of a bad falling out with Harry decided to sell Newsday about a year before he died. And Moyers tried to offer his own kind of counteroffer to take over the newspaper, which

Harry didn't accept. Harry didn't really care about the money. He just wanted to sell the newspaper to a, quote, conservative publisher who would maintain the kind of conservative values that he held. But even that was a mistake because he thought he was selling the paper to Norman Chandler at the LA Times, who was a conservative gentleman and probably would have run the newspaper with kind of more of a conservative bent. But actually, at that point, Otis, his son, Otis Chandler, was really running the show. So in some respects, Harry sold his newspaper to a organization that was even more liberal than what Bill Moyers would have been. And that was not I'm not sure was the greatest decision on his part, but those two businesses, horse racing and newspaper publishing were businesses that he exited

shortly before he died. And so those don't have the legacy that the other business sectors that he was involved with. This has been pretty interesting, man. I've learned a lot, man. I'm learning history. Of course, that's why I love my show. And that's why I love being on it because I get like a front row. You guys spend tens of thousands of hours. Tens of thousands? Yeah, tens of thousands. Something's going on with Labor Day today and Monday.

Tens of thousands of hours researching this stuff, studying it and stuff and I get like a front row seat to it. Give us your plugs so people can order the book and get a chance to get that pre-ordered off the fine bookstores there. Thanks, Chris. Yeah, you can pre-order it on amazon.com. And to get that link is pretty easy, but you can also get that link off of the Pegasus Books site. It's got 16 pages of photos, and it's a pretty breezy read, if I do say so. I've tried not to get too down into the weeds from one sector to another.

But I feel like it's an interesting business backstory that's never been told. Most people just don't know the name Harry Guggenheim. And they might know Lindbergh. And they might know Robert Goddard. But Harry's name is really worth knowing. And now they will. Now they will. So guys, you can order it up. The Business of Tomorrow, The Visionary Life of Harry Guggenheim, From Aviation and Rocketry to the Creation of an Art Dynasty. Thanks so much, Dirk, for being on the show and spending some time with us. We

certainly appreciate it. My pleasure, Chris. Great to be with you. Thanks to my audience and everyone for being here today. We certainly appreciate it. My pleasure, Chris. Great to be with you. Thanks to my audience and everyone for being here today. Be sure to, of course, subscribe to the show on YouTube, go to Goodreads, go to all the different groups that we have over there as well.

Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other and we'll see you guys next time. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021.

And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. So you can pre-order the book right now wherever fine books are sold, but the best thing to do on getting a pre-order the book right now wherever fine books are sold but the best thing to do on getting a pre-order deal is to go to beaconsofleadership.com that's beaconsofleadership.com on there you can find several packages you can take advantage of in ordering the book

and for the same price of what you can get it from someplace else like amazon you can get all sorts of extra goodies that we've taken and given away uh different collectors limited edition custom made numbered book plates that are going to be autographed by me. There's all sorts of other goodies that you can get when you buy the book from beaconsofleadership.com. So be sure to go there, check it out or order the book wherever fine books are sold.