#359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty

25:31So it says, it is undoubtedly to Ludwig's benefit that one of his best, oldest, and truest friends was in a key position to influence the decision. Carl was the liaison officer once assigned to Emanuel, his father. He was also the chief inspector for the rifle and ammunition factories. He had previously had served as the head of armories and lieutenant general. Carl is also the person that arranged the financing for Ludwig. So it says in the early 1870s, Carl had loaned Ludwig his securities, Carl's securities, to use as collateral for bank loans to expand the factory. Ludwig had to pay 5 % interest for the securities and 6 % on the borrowed cash, but these were bargain rates in a country where bank loans were not easily procured.

26:20Such support, relationship, and encouragement was a most valuable asset for Ludwig's industrial enterprises. So I already said Ludwig is the most fascinating character in this entire book, and there's a ton of interesting characters in the book. And not only is, you know, he's a great manufacturing genius, He's a great entrepreneur, but he also always is capable of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. And he had the best reputation, I think, in all of Russia for actually giving a shit about the well -being of his employees at a time when that was just unheard of. In many cases, I'm going to get to this.

26:55They talked about, well, I guess Ludwig is the first person or one of the first people to realize increased care of your employees actually leads to increased productivity. and it's describing like the, you know, all these people are coming in from the countryside. Sometimes they're emigrating from other countries. They're working in, you know, inhospitable factory environments. And they said that cattle in many cases would have resisted the cramped quarters that they put humans in. And so Ludwig innovates in every single aspect of his business. I don't think I've brought this up yet and I should have from the very beginning.

27:29So I apologize. What's fascinating to me is Ludwig and Alfred, They're going to have this dual success at almost the exact same time, different industries. They have wildly different approaches. Alfred is like a delegator. He has essentially a monopoly. Ludwig is operating in an intensely competitive industry, and he does everything himself. But again, I think this is just one of the greatest things that you learn from reading all these biographies of entrepreneurs. It's like there's not one path. And now reading about both of them and their personalities, it's very obvious that they built businesses authentic to their true selves.

28:01So I should have said at the beginning, but keep that in mind. I'm going to go into what he did for his employees. And at this time, nobody was doing this. Ludwig made certain that his workers' accommodations were adequate and well -maintained. He built new housing. He encouraged them to save a portion of their wages and establish a savings bank for his employees. He regularly added substantial sums from his own profits into the employee bank. He refused to employ children. He reduced the workday from the usual 14 hours to 10 and a half hours and instituted the first profit -sharing plan in Russia.

28:33He also started a series of free educational courses for his workers. Decades before the business world discovered that overall efficiency and productivity are promoted by a generous and concerned attitude towards employees, Ludwig Nobel was doing it. And then the description of just this remarkable inventor and entrepreneur and genius that Ludwig was, there's a million different things that he's going to work on, but I want to go back to this idea. It's really important. Learning from mistakes is changing your behavior, right? So he realizes we need a bunch of just consumer products. We can't just rely on the military.

29:06And so at the time you have carriage drivers, you know, these are horse drawn carriages, the roads in Russia shouldn't even be called roads. It was hilarious. They said that the coach, the roads were so bad in this area where they are that the coach drivers would sit sideways with their legs hanging off the carriage. So they could jump off easily when they were get, when they hit the inevitable like giant hole in the road. So Ludwig makes the Nobel wheel, this carriage wheel that can actually withstand and not break. And the result was a monopoly on the market. This is also going to tie to this idea that the Nobel family had excessively high standards.

29:44And as a result, over time, they were able to build this incredible brand based on quality. The Nobel name meant something. In fact, later on, as they dominate the Russian oil industry, they talk about their employees were proud. They wore the fact that they were Nobelites, that they worked for the Nobel family as a badge of honor because that meant they were the best. Now, the reason I'm also telling you this is because one, he's learning from his father, but two, this is like Ludwig's MO for everything. He wants to control everything from the invention to the manufacturing to the sales to everything.

30:13And so they invent the wheel, they manufacture it, then they set up all the sales organizations all over, like all over Russia. Recruitment of the sales force, establishment of the sales districts, the administrative and financial direction, all were planned and implemented in Ludwig's office. This goes back to he's much more of like a micromanager involved in every single detail, more like a Steve Jobs and a Walt Disney than his brother Alfred Nobel, which I'll get to. He was interested in these administrative details as he was in engineering, design, and processes of manufacturing. A fanatic for work.

30:42He was constantly in the plant to check on the operation of some machine he had designed to supervise insulation, to oversee repair. There was no facet of production or distribution or direction that escaped his attention. He had demonstrated that whatever was produced in the Nobel factory was worthy of comparison with any competing product from abroad. So that is an overview and an introduction into Ludwig. We will return to him in a second. I need to get to Alfred because the brothers are constantly involved in each other's businesses. There's so many letters between the brothers. I wish there was some kind of book where you could just see their correspondence back and forth.

31:21Considering that the Bolsheviks invade and kind of take over everything, I bet you a lot of that correspondence was destroyed, but it's just fascinating. So let's get to Alfred. This is such a fascinating family. There's twin success. The twin success of Ludwig and Alfred are happening at the exact same time. So by the time that Ludwig is going to start building in the oil industry, by that time, Alfred already had a dozen dynamite factories all over the globe. And how that came to be was fascinating because he got the idea from his former chemistry tutor. Remember going back to what I said about what his father did that was so brilliant for his sons that he's like, we're going to hire tutors.

31:59You know, you guys are going to study engineering. You're going to do chemistry. You're going to learn all these languages. So his former chemistry tutor had told Emmanuel, his father, okay, about these Italian experiments with nitroglycerine. That's going to be the active ingredient in dynamite when Alfred tames this and had recommended it for use and making more powerful land and sea mines. Emmanuel had no time for such research, but his son Alfred did. And this is what I mean about how the family's constantly supporting them. When Alfred is doing his demonstrations, the first time he successfully detonates what's gonna turn into dynamite, his brothers Robert and Ludwig are there observing.

32:38And then this next sentence is something that's really important. It's not the first person to invent something that gets rich. It's the first person to match that invention. and build a phenomenal business around that invention. Alfred was not the first to experiment with nitroglycerin, but he was the first to combine successful experimentation with a genius for business organization and financial management. I double underline financial management. He is probably the shrewdest person in his entire family when it comes to managing the money, watching the costs of the business. He was very conservative.

33:11He did not want to expand faster if it meant putting the survival of his business at risk. What did Steve Jobs tell us a few weeks ago? Victory in our industry is spelled survival. All the money is in the future. Do not interrupt the compounding. And the way to interrupt the compounding is if you over optimize for growth at the expense of durability. The other book that I'm reading this week starts out, I'll give you a little sneak peek. 1 ,000 square foot store into a $40 billion company. It starts 60 years ago. They did like $8 billion revenue last year. The inability to build a durable business would have foreclosed that opportunity, that $8 billion a year opportunity that's 60 years into the future, that opportunity that most humans are incapable of seizing.

33:59So now I'm going to introduce the third brother, Robert. Robert is the older brother. He is, in this family, like the underachiever, yet a single spur of the moment decision changes the trajectory of the entire family. It could have been easy to be the older brother because the standard set by he's got two younger brothers that are complete overachievers. It says the standard set by two such overachieving brothers would be hard for anyone to match. And so Robert is working for Ludwig. Ludwig is making all these rifles and rifle stocks for the Russian military. He's like, hey, can you travel to this section over here?

34:33Because they're known to have phenomenal supplies of like walnut wood. and Ludwig gives Robert 25 ,000 rubles to buy up the whole stock of walnut wood, Robert is going to travel to this place called Baku. Baku is gonna be where they build their giant oil company. So we can call this section Robert's Pivot. In all his travels, he had never seen anything like Baku and in all his dreams for personal enrichment, he had never seen greater potential. There were parcels of oil -rich land in Baku along with a small refinery. So he goes, he's like, I'm not buying your walnut wood. I want your refinery.

35:11His offer was the walnut money. All 25 ,000 rubles of it, a sudden decision taken without consultation with either Ludwig, after all, it was Ludwig's money, or Alfred, the family expert in matters of finance and investment. When he returned to Petersburg, he would have to convince his brother that he had found a much better investment for the money than rifle stocks. And this is the remarkable thing about business. You only have to be right once. Up until this point, Robert had failed repeatedly. He just needed to wait until he found the right opportunity. So it says his two brothers looked upon this scheme with as much enthusiasm as they had viewed Robert's other projects.

35:49First, it was fireproof bricks, then kerosene, iron, glycerin, and now petroleum. What next? But here is one of the most important things in this book. Robert had an innate talent for this opportunity, and they're going to target a market full of second -rate talent, second -rate competition. And what he realized is like these refineries, these are yokels. They don't know what they're doing. And we're at the very beginning of a giant oil industry. So Robert is also a very good chemist. In fact, Alfred, who hired some of the best chemists in the world, said that his brother was a very good chemist.

36:23And so in a short time, Robert was able to suggest improved methods of refining the crude oil that's coming out of this Baku region in Russia to produce higher grade kerosene than was the norm for the competitive refineries. And they can combine the talents that the family had, the fact that they could build very sophisticated manufacturing facilities. And so very, very quickly, Robert's modernized refinery produced the highest quality kerosene that had ever come out of Russia, where the usual product was then known as Baku sludge. It was unquestionably one of the best, was the best of the 140 refineries crammed in this town of Baku.

37:03Listen to this, going back to this main theme. It was an all Swedish operation. The main chemist was Swedish. The engineer and production chief was Swedish. The machine shop foreman was Swedish. And in two short years, they were achieving what in later years would be expected of anyone associated with the Nobel company, producing the most reliable product, establishing new standards, setting a pace which others had to follow, providing goals and guidelines in all phases of a new industry. So Ludwig is about to move his attention into this brand new oil industry that's springing up in Baku. I need to tell you what Baku was like at the beginning and the contrast of what Ludwig's going to impose.

37:43Very similar to what Rockefeller did. There's a reason they're called the Russian Rockefellers. He essentially found this very chaotic brand new industry and imposed his will and order on it. So it says, it was a raw, merciless, and often barbaric society ruled by an adventurous frontier spirit and dominated by greed and the insatiable search for riches, typical of a gold rush mentality. There was a proverb among Russian businessmen that whoever lives a year among the oil owners of Baku can never again be civilized. Which is the perfect opportunity for someone like Ludwig. The time, the place, the setting were ideal for Ludwig's particular genius.

38:19When Ludwig Nobel entered Baku in the spring of 1876, a man with vision had arrived. It was the real beginning of the oil industry. Every phase of the business would have to be examined, every area rationalized, improved, and modernized. So there's a ton of detail, but I just want to pull out two sentences because this is one of the best things if you can find yourself in a situation where you're attacking a market full of second rate competition and second rate talent, which is exactly what Ludwig is doing. He shares ideas with all the quote unquote competitors in his field. Obviously, you're going to have to have some kind of organization in the early oil, he realized just like Rockefeller did.

38:58and they're just like, nope. They're at the very beginning. They don't know what the hell they're doing. They're producing a low quality product and they're just not interested in change. He says, others were simply not interested in any new idea. They had a complete lack of enterprise. So what he would do is obviously he's not looking around like, oh, I wonder if this is a good idea no one else is doing it. I guess I won't do it. He's like, no, I believe the idea is rational. It should happen. So he'll just go and build it. And then people try to imitate him and they're just not as talented as he is.

39:24The competition then started to build their own pipelines, frequently failing to match Nobel standards and erecting a maze of jerry -built, leaking and ill -fitting pipes. And then one thing that Ludwig does is he's constantly inventing. He's leading the way in his industry. He's the first. Think about how crazy, how many other fortunes after this are built off of oil tankers and super tankers, like Daniel Ludwig, like Aristotle Onassis. Ludwig is the one that invented the oil tanker, and it was just very common sense. Listen to his approach. If it could be transported in bulk, meaning oil, carried from one harbor to another in large tank, Ludwig believed that the product could compete with more traditional sources of fuel.

40:01There had to be a fast, reliable economic means of moving lakes of oil. The size of this industry is nuts, which I'll get to. That description, lakes of oil, is not hyperbolic. This is Ludwig's thinking, right? He's like, there has to be a fast, reliable economic means of moving lakes of oil from the isolated regions where it's readily available to the heavily populated centers where it's in demand. This invention is going to be later described as the most important fact in the entire history of the petroleum industry. That is nuts. When you think about it, the petroleum industry may be the world's most valuable industry that's ever been created.

40:39So Ludwig argues the facts of his case. Very rational person. The standard oil barrel weighs 64 pounds. That's 20 % of the oil that it can hold, which means that a fifth of any cargo of a barrel of oil consisted of wood that could only be shipped one way because you're not shipping empty oil barrels back the other way. Ludwig's arguments were as logical and persuasive as they seemed to him, failed to sway the opposition. This is what I mean. This is just second rate competition. Why? because they're just copying. They're incapable of independent thought. There was absolutely no support for the scheme.

41:19It was too great a risk because it had never been done before. And then his personality, very different than Alfred's, who's going to essentially have a technical monopoly. It says, Lugwood made no effort to keep secret any part of his designs, and he rejected the pleas of his associates and shareholders that he take out patents. He did not wish to profit in that manner to restrict dissemination of ideas that could benefit the entire industry. This is incredible. Okay, so, you know, they're small when he starts doing this. And then keep in mind, this book is from 1976. Okay, so it's even bigger and more developed now.

41:54But the main theme of what I want to tell you is a good idea, this is a note off of myself, a good idea not abandoned will always grow larger than expected. And so they talk about the fact that, you know, his first oil tanker is smaller, And then you just realize it's like, oh, we keep getting these bigger and bigger and bigger until the size of tankers increased to levels never dreamed of with captains of the ship having to use bicycles to move from one end of the ship to the other. A good idea not abandoned will always grow larger than expected. And so when I'm going to read this overview of this phenomenal business that Ludwig built and a description of Ludwig himself, you'll see why he was my favorite character in this entire book.

42:38Ludwig Nobel's tanker fleet was the most dramatic innovation in the Russian petroleum industry of the 1870s, but it was only part of the general transportation and distribution system, which he conceived and organized. Pipelines to carry the raw oil from field to refinery and the finished product to dockside. Tankers to carry that product 600 miles north. smaller tank barges for transshipment, barges for moving the oil up the mighty river, railroad tank cars and barges carrying the oil from all corners or to all corners of the empire, retail distribution centers in every major area of population, a labor force of thousands from field to consumer, drilling for oil, building barges, fitting pipe, refining kerosene, repairing tank cars and ships, peddling the products.

43:24This was Ludwig Nobel's empire within the Russian empire. He created it in 10 years. From well to wick, it was all Nobel. It was the achievement of an individual who thoroughly dominated all aspects of an industry, which he was literally creating as he went along. He was president, chief engineer, sales manager, an entire research and development department, chairman of the board, and market analyst, an incomparable, insatiable, overachiever. His deeds in Russia were without parallel. Absolutely incredible. You know what also is incredible? Human nature. Human nature is funny to me. Even after he's done all this, he tries to share ideas throughout his industry, and he always receives, not always, alarmingly number amount of times, negative responses.

44:21And he said the best thing. He's like, well, the only thing you do when you receive a negative response is you take out a pen and paper and you do it yourself. This guy's optimism, this mentality, I've just absolutely loved it. This is a great quote of his on struggle. Opposition never really bothered Ludwig, never really impeded his progress or diminished his determination. This is what he said. An industrial undertaking, properly managed and well organized, involves constant struggle. Its success is dependent upon foresight, perseverance, industry, and economy. Struggle is to be expected. Ludwig was accustomed to making his own decisions, traveling his own road, and he was certainly used to opposition.

45:04Okay, so now I want to go back to this idea I mentioned earlier that I think is really beneficial. The idea that the twin successes of Ludwig and Alfred are happening at the exact same times. They're operating different industries. They have different personalities. They have different ways approaching their business. Yet at the time this is taking place, they're two of the most successful and richest entrepreneurs on the planet. And so this goes on for a few pages. I just want to compare and contrast them because I love this idea. Again, there's no formula. Just do whatever is authentic to you.

45:30Self -sufficient, independent, with a devotion to work and a reliance on its routine. the Swedes demand a high level of order in that work. So they both share this, okay? A sense of purpose and perspective in their own rational civilization. For the Nobels, their boyhood of poverty strengthened that motivation. He who does not work need not eat, declared Ludwig. And so their father is going to weigh in on what he thought were the difference between his sons. Emmanuel believed that it was Alfred who demonstrated the greatest industry, but Ludwig the greatest genius. For Alfred, his rule was never to do myself what another could do better or at any rate as well.

46:12He wanted to delegate everything possible. Alfred Nobel was certain that if you do everything yourself in a very large concern, which concern at this time in history is just a business, okay? In a very large business, the result will be that nothing will be done properly and whoever tries to do it all himself will be worn out in body and soul and ruined. That is Alfred's perspective. Let's go to Ludwig. And Alfred was a very morose man. I don't know if you'd want to be friends with him. Ludwig drew people and he was very charismatic. Ludwig was not a person easily forgotten, even after the briefest encounter.

46:47He was, in the words of his closest collaborators, a personality in the fullest sense of the word. He dominated every audience. He revealed at once an inner clarity of purpose and deep concentration of power. Alfred preferred to be aloof from his employees. Ludwig's home was in front of his factory. Ludwig spent many hours with his engineers and draftsmen, his factory foreman and his section chiefs. I don't think Alfred ever had kids. Ludwig had 18. 11 of the 18 survived infancy. Ludwig was at heart an optimist and hopeful about mankind, as hopeful about mankind as he was about his own capabilities and career.

47:30Alfred more pessimistic and definitely had a cynical view of his fellow man. What they had in common was that Ludwig and Alfred both pushed themselves at such a pace that physical exhaustion probably would have overcome far hardier types. Alfred was more interested in the financial aspects of business. Ludwig regarded financial speculation as a refuge for those who were too lazy to work. Ludwig competed in a heavily competitive market. Alfred essentially had a monopoly. These were alien considerations to the man whose own industrial empire was based on a product that he alone controlled. He alone determined the quantity of Dynamite to release onto the market.

48:09He alone decided which plants in which country should charge what price. Competition was of little to no concern to him, and he could run his business from a hotel room in any country he chose. Alfred delegated. Ludwig was an entrepreneur who was never content to delegate to merely invest, but who always insisted on becoming personally and totally committed. So Ludwig is going to die relatively early. He's going to die at 57. We're not there yet. There is going to be this triarchy, is the way I described it. And maybe I've just been watching too much Game of Thrones. But the triarchy of the Russian oil industry at this time, once they see the success that the Nobel family had, is Standard Oil comes in, and then the Rothschilds are also financing and trying to break.

48:53The Rothschilds actually financed and developed the second largest, what's going to wind up being the second largest Russian oil company. And so they're going to be a major headache for the Nobels for the next two generations. And so this war between them is going to be known as Europe's second 30 -year war between Standard, it's going to be Dutch Royal Shell, the Rothschilds, and then the Nobel family. But I do want to point out a very fascinating idea where it's like, well, outside success attracts a lot of attention and in turn is going to attract a lot of competition. And so the one place on the planet at which Rockefeller and Standard Oil are not dominating is in Russia.

49:30And so they have there's a series of tax. But this is a great description of what was happening because the Nova family is producing just so much oil at this point. In late November, Standard Oil cut prices. Rockefeller already controlled more than 90 percent of all American oil exports and was the domineering force in all world markets except Russia. But this is such a great line. This is why I'm reading this section to you. But the price of monopoly is eternal aggression. The price of monopoly is eternal aggression. And when the Americans saw Nobel's sudden and successful invasion of their markets, they quickly counterattacked.

50:07And then once you understand the scale, this mind -boggling, brain -breaking scale of the Russian oil industry at this time, it makes sense why, you know, Standard Oil and Rockefeller were not going to ignore them and they were going to try to fight. This is insane. Okay, one Nobel oil well, a single one gushed over 11 ,000 tons of oil a day. That is more than the total oil flowing from all 25 ,000 wells in the United States at that time. These gushers would come out sometimes so fast and unexpectedly that they would shoot a stream of oil that's 225 feet straight up into the sky. that stream of oil would then be carried by winds a mile and a half away you'd have entire towns which would the outside their houses would be drenched in oil from these gushers and just like you and i have talked about in the past of like the two i've done a few episodes uh i did this book called the big rich and another book called wildcatters about the the first and second oil revolutions in texas and what i love about reading about oil is it just it draws the craziest characters.

51:15So there's a guy, this six foot three inch giant of a peasant. He worked as a servant in the Baku office of one of the czar's local military representatives. He saved some of his meager earnings from his paycheck. He buys a small vineyard on the outskirts of town. Under the grapes that he thought he was buying just happened to be lakes of oil. By the turn of the century, that peasant, that giant peasant became a man of fabulous wealth and fabulous extravagances. His son inherits the wealth and he becomes Russia's greatest gambler, a collector of paintings, racehorses and beautiful women. He would throw parties that look like from out of the pages of Arabian Nights.

51:57He would swagger across Europe, keeping a large entourage and then growing enormously fat with his movable feast and his permanent luxuries. One of these people that turned from peasant to unbelievably rich, they spend their money on hilarious things. And one One of them built this giant palace and the beginning it's shaped like a dragon. And to get into the palace, you have to actually go through the entrances, the dragon's jaws. I wish they had a picture of it because it sounded amazing. But Ludwig was very different from this. They were obviously very wealthy, but they didn't waste their time, you know, just throwing parties.

52:31He liked to work. Ludwig liked to work. And he was very proud that he was considered one of the very few. They considered like the Baku oil industry completely dishonest. And so it says Ludwig was proud of his own particular guarantee and that of his company. If you can find in Baku any man who can prove that we've been dishonest, that we cheat or refuse to redress any substantial grievances, we will face inquiry in your presence. And if guilty, make amends. From every report in this book, Ludwig was a great man. And unfortunately, he had severe health issues. He had issues with his lungs. He had heart disease.

53:08and at the early age of 57 years old, his heart fails and he dies. Now, the business turns over to his son, Emmanuel. A few years later, after Ludwig's death, both other brothers, Robert and then Alfred Nobel, also die. Now, Emmanuel's life story is also incredible because he's going to be one of the wealthiest people in Russia. He's the one that has to dress up as a peasant and leave. Okay, that's going to happen about 15 years into the future. But he's also remarkable because if it wasn't for Emmanuel, there'd be no Nobel Prize. He's the one, Emmanuel is the one. So this is Ludwig's son, Alfred Nobel's nephew.

53:45He is the one that saves the Nobel Prize because other people in the Nobel family wanted Alfred Nobel's will overturned. They wanted his gigantic fortune. And so you have kids of the other brothers that are doing everything in their power to try to void Alfred's will and keep that fortune in the family. And so one of the lines in here is kind of humorous because one side of the family does not have the financial security that the other Nobels did. These are Robert's kids. And it says, it could not have been easy to stand by and let all that money go to strange people in distant lands because they had written books or devised some new formula.

54:18So that obviously made me chuckle. But it is Emmanuel alone that is fighting the entire family. It's like, no, we have to honor what Alfred Nobel wanted. And so he says he had made his position clear. He would not fight the will. He was interested in preservation of the family name and honor in strict adherence to the wishes of Alfred. He told the other relatives of his, let the last will and testament speak for the soul. And this also speaks to the ethics and the morals that was passed down in the family. Because not only is his other family doing this, they're all Swedes, right? The Swedish king calls Emmanuel before him.

54:53He's like, hey, even the king opposed this idea. And Emmanuel refused to back down even from the king. This was the result. The will was validated and the Nobel Foundation was established. It took courage to oppose popular sentiment, to fight his own family and to brook arguments with the king. And then I think we need to move on to one of the main lessons of the book. I think I've understood this because I'm the son of Cuban immigrants. And I just cannot fathom how my grandfather, who was 38 years old, uneducated, didn't have any money, didn't speak English, worked in a shoe factory and at a butcher shop, understood the danger that his family was in when Castro took over and moved to a country where he didn't know anybody and didn't speak the language.

55:39And so growing up with these stories that you hear over and over again, this is something I talked to Sam Zell about when I had lunch with him, too, because, you know, his family escaped the Holocaust. They got out. I think they were on the last train in Poland. As somebody that's grown up in America, I think you can have the assumption that, you know, the way things are now is the way things will be forever. And history just shows how fast things can change. Emmanuel is the third generation of one of the wealthiest and most respected families in Russia, and he escapes hidden as a peasant. People come into the factories and murder their employees.

56:15And so now we have an account of what it was like to experience the Bolshevik Revolution not knowing what was going on. And so there's an executive in the Nobel company that kept a diary, and it goes—it's remarkable how fast things change. The diary lasts for less than two weeks, and I just want to pull out a couple lines that are spread across several days. They are in order. So it starts Thursday. Streetcars stop running. Strikes in several factories. The police clear the streets of demonstrators shouting bread. Friday. Strikes are spreading. Confrontations between police and the people. Streets cleared and closed off from crowds.

56:51Saturday. Police often disguised as soldiers and Cossacks hold the crowd in check. dead and wounded, lying on the streets. Sunday. Stores have boarded up their windows. The police are shooting. Cossacks are using whips. In the evening, a lot of shooting. Drivers who are carting off the corpses talk about hundreds. Monday. All offices and workshops are closed. We let anyone go home who wants to. An employee's nephew was killed by a stray bullet, hit him right in the forehead as he was standing in a window watching the activities on the street. Tuesday, as we were walking to the office, we came under fire, shooting at us from both sides of the street.

57:33In the evening, we do not use any rooms facing the street. And this is why. Between 9 and 10 at night, I opened the door to my study just slightly, lighting the front window for a second. Machine gun fire sprayed the entire facade of the building. Wednesday, more house searches. The person who lives on the floor below us is arrested and taken away. And what's remarkable is even after all that, he ends the journal, the worst is probably over. The anarchy in Petersburg soon spread to other cities, the collapse of the imperial government and the abdication of the Tsar. The wives and children of Nobel's Swedish employees moved back to the safe shores of their neutral country.

58:08Lenin and his Bolsheviks seized power. They wasted no time showing the nation the meaning of totalitarian revolution. All newspapers but their own were suppressed. Editors were imprisoned, and the only printed or spoken word permitted was that of the Bolsheviks. Their avalanche of decrees covered every phase of economic, political, spiritual, and intellectual life. The workers and soldiers demanded great sums of money from the industrialists. Nobel factories succumbed to the chaos and closed down. Transport was nationalized. Factories were nationalized. Owners and managers dismissed. Bank deposits seized.

58:44Prices skyrocketed. The czar and his family were murdered. The petroleum industry was nationalized. This is the craziest sentence in the book. A former insane asylum inmate was named Minister of War and promptly proposed the election of a donkey to the council to represent oppressed animals. An illiterate sailor was placed in charge of the schools, and a well -known pimp was given control of public welfare. Discipline and routine were replaced by endless series of meetings, decrees, and denunciations. None of the Nobel chiefs really believed that the danger was more than a passing phenomenon and that the Bolsheviks could continue very long in power.

59:27This idea that this won't last, things will go back to normal, is a very common, reoccurring belief in history around both wars and revolution. These are not stupid people, and yet they couldn't have been more incorrect. And they realize this is when they have to get out or they're going to be killed. The last Nobels had departed. After three quarters of a century, the Swedish saga of a family in Russia came to a bitter end. All of their assets are seized, all their factories. Emmanuel, the son of Ludwig, goes back to Sweden. And this goes back to even his grandfather and his father, this relentless optimism that they had in their blood.

1:00:04Emmanuel had found great pleasure in life, even in exile. he refused to be consumed by anger and bitterness. His few remaining years were not going to be wasted, worrying or falling victim to a paralyzing pestilence of hate and frustration. In Baku, all visual proof of the Nobel name was removed. The pre -Soviet slate wiped clean, wrenched from a place in history reduced to the category of non -person. Emmanuel the father, Ludwig, Robert and Emmanuel, the grandson, and all those nobles who struggled and strained to build and create disappeared into the mist. Their glory, power, and honor obliterated by those who seized what they had created.

1:00:50Their acts long forgotten by those secure from such a miserable fate. This book is amazing. There's so many stories that I couldn't get to. I could do a podcast on, you know, entire chapters, multiple podcasts, because there's just so much detail in this book. But I really wanted to focus on Ludwig because that's the person that resonated with me the most. So for the full story, highly recommend you buy the book. If you buy the book using the links, it's in the show notes on your podcast player or by going to founderspodcast .com. You'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. That is 359 books down, 1 ,000 to go.

1:01:26And I'll talk to you again soon. One of the things I love most about the story that you just heard is the importance of passing on the knowledge from one generation to the other, that undoubtedly Ludwig and Alfred's lives were changed forever and the lives of their descendants because of what they were learning from their father, from the mistakes he made in business to the really smart decisions he made in the way he educated his sons. That transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next has been going on for as long as we've had language, probably before we've had language. And it's one of my obsessions with making this podcast.

1:01:58I think the idea of all this reading and research that I'm doing. This weird, intense desire that I have to collect and distill the knowledge of history of greatest entrepreneurs and then record what I'm learning through that process, make that into the podcast, and then push that to the new, to the current and the next generation of entrepreneurs, I think is really important. Because what happens as a result of this is that we all get to benefit and learn from, in many cases, four, five, six, seven decade -long careers that these entrepreneurs have. And so if you're going to spend a lot of time learning from history of Greatest Entrepreneurs and listening to this podcast, I've also made a tool to make sure that you never forget the lessons.

1:02:35I actually made this tool for myself to make sure that I never forget the lessons so that I can pull them up on demand when I need them. Now I made that tool that was once just my own available to everybody. And that tool is Founders Notes. And even before it was something that was publicly available, it let me tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs. Because for the last six years, I've been putting all of my notes and highlights for everything that I read for this podcast into this giant searchable database. That app that I was using to do this is called Readwise.

1:03:03And so I know the founders of Readwise. And so I talked to them and I was like, hey, I get a lot of requests that people actually want access to all my notes and highlights. Can we team up and actually build a tool so we can externalize what I see to everybody else? And so even if you didn't know about this tool, you've heard me use it over and over again on the podcast. In this episode, you heard me pull up past things said in Alfred Nobel's biography. I was using Founders Notes to do that. Anytime on the podcast when I'm referencing past ideas from past episodes, from past books, when I talk about ideas from Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, Sam Walton, Munger, Buffett, all of this, that's me searching through Founders Notes and pulling up those ideas.

1:03:38And so that is a really important point to get across. What you see, if you wind up subscribing to Founders Notes, you see what I see. It's the exact same tool that I use. It is a tool that I made for myself. and I was using for years before I thought anybody else would ever see it. And so a bunch of subscribers to Founders Notes are using Founders Notes to help them think through issues that they're having inside their company. Anything from hiring, to recruiting, to marketing, to leadership, to preparing for board meetings, to preparing for sales presentations. If you are already running a successful company, I think it's a no -brainer to invest in the tool and I've added a new feature.

1:04:09This feature is going to show you how I use Founders Notes and it's also going to push ideas from History's Greatest Entrepreneurs directly into your brain quickly. And that feature is called Sage Advice, which is a private podcast feed that is included with every single subscription to Founders Notes. The last episode I made for that feed was on James Dyson. So what I did is I read two autobiographies of James Dyson. You know, that's 50, 60, 70 hours of reading. Countless hours of inputting the notes and all those highlights into Founders Notes. And so what I do is I go back and reread every single note and highlight from every single book that I read on an individual.

1:04:40In this case, it was James Dyson. And then there's also an AI assistant that lives inside of Founders Notes called Sage. and I asked Sage questions about James Dyson because Sage will read all my notes and highlights and transcripts from every single episode and then use all that reading to give me like an outline of how did James Dyson think about, what was his most important ideas? How do you think about marketing? Things like that. And then I took all of that research and I composed it into a single document and distilled that down to what I think are the most powerful ideas from James Dyson's 50 -year career.

1:05:09So you take a 50 -year career, 60 hours of reading, and I distilled that down into an episode that you can listen to in 12 minutes. All of the episodes I make on this feed are going to be around 10 minutes. The idea with these mini episodes is I want to create a tool that if you can condense the ideas, like the most important ideas, say 15, 20, 10, whatever the number is, the most important ideas over their entire career, ruthlessly edit down to 10 minutes, 12 minutes, whatever case is. As long as it's that length, you're going to be able to listen to that over and over again. So it ceases becoming a podcast and it really is just a tool.

1:05:43It's going to be something you can listen to over and over again that serves as this constant reminder and just an easy way for you to download those ideas into your brain. And then once they're in your brain, then you can use them in your career. So if you want access to that tool, that'll give you the superpower to access the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs when you need it on demand. Make sure you subscribe at foundersnotes .com. That is founders with an S, just like the podcast, foundersnotes .com. Thank you for the support. Thank you for listening. And I'll talk to you again soon.