The Greatest World Conquerors In History | Ben Wilson

0:00Every great person is fundamentally an addict. So what's your internal monologue when an addict is doing meth or heroin? There's nothing other than the addiction. That's how Thomas Edison felt about inventing, how Steve Jobs felt about designing, how Napoleon felt about conquering. A lot of them have traumatic childhoods. It's so interesting the way in which they won't answer questions about them. It's not like it's so traumatic I can't think about it. It's literally like I'm a shark who smells blood and you're asking me about my childhood. You know what I mean? Like I smell blood like I got to go eat.

0:27Today I have the pleasure of sitting down with Ben Wilson. He is the creator of How to Take Over the World, which is a podcast about awesome world builders and the best company builders in history. I've kind of thought about a question for a while, which is basically where are the Napoleons of today? Well, objectively speaking, they're in private equity. So, you know, someone went and found a descendant of Napoleon. and because he had you know his only legitimate son died young but he had an illegitimate son with this like polish countess as one does as one does and his his legitimate his illegitimate you know great great grandson works for a private equity firm in london and then his greatest opponent was uh the duke of of um of wellington and someone found his descendant and he also works for a private equity firm.

1:18So it's like, this is the great warriors of our generation. This is where their energies are being focused is, uh, is into further financialization of the, of the economy. So, you know, you might, you might think that's better than warfare. I think many people probably do. I don't. To me, it, to me, it kind of feels like the whole, you know, there's one person that builds the entire lineage and then, you know, three or four or five generations in the future uh they're doing pointless stuff like that yeah i mean the opposing view is at least they're not causing harm right they're not you know millions of people died in the napoleonic wars right um but at the same time what does that generate you know um you've probably heard the the saying for 500 years the italians had um war and conquest and suffering and they gave us Michelangelo and Da Vinci.

2:16And in the same year, during the same time, the Swiss had 500 years of uninterrupted peace and gave us the cuckoo clock. And so Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher, says that God is war or war is God. And I do think in a certain sense, everyone is playing status games, competition games. and you at the end of the day you need the alpha you need the winner of like of the top game you know like war is the game that can say to every other game every other competition like no no you're subservient to me all right i am the top and you know i think of it like i don't know if you've ever seen those videos of yellowstone before and after the introduction of wolves but all the wolves went extinct from yellowstone and they reintroduced which is a national park in in wyoming and um they reintroduced the wolves and the wolves start eating the deer so the deer stop over grazing the grass which allows uh the riverbanks to to form better which brings the beavers back so you have this like huge flourishing it's like this desert system yeah it has all these knock-on effects and it recreates this ecosystem with all this biodiversity by reintroducing what like these bad guys these wolves these these these predators right and they're killing things but by killing things they create this great flourishing of the environment i see the same thing with with warriors like yeah we have the warrior has disappeared from society but i think it's creating a desert and uh actually by reintroducing some chaos some death and destruction the alpha the return of the warrior i think you would have a flourishing of arts and creation and technology all these other things do you think that it's a little bit like i know elon talks about how regulation just kind of is like every every new regulation is just a little string and eventually you have like 10 000 strings and it ties you know civilization down and war is basically the only function for eliminating that if you look at throughout history it just doesn't really happen it just keeps on building unless that happens.

4:28Yes, I think that's correct. I think there's a violence is a monopoly, right? And Peter Thiel talks about how important monopolies are, because otherwise, everything is defined by competition, which is necessarily drives everything down to zero to nothing, right? In business, you compete away all profits when it's nothing but competition. And you could say the same thing about war. But at the end of the day, someone wins in war, and that creates a monopoly, a monopoly of violence. And that is what creates the figure who can cut through all of these built up regulations and traditions and get things done and establish.

5:09Almost becomes like a mini dictator for a little while. Yes, correct. And I don't know that you want that as a permanent feature of life, but as someone who can come through and like set things right, I think it's it's can be important from time to time. when you're thinking about like uh company builders i you know there's this duality of like wartime ceo versus peacetime ceo and my hunch is basically there is no really great peacetime ceo i don't really know of a single one there's people that there's people like warren buffett where you look at him and you're like it's uncle warren and he's a good guy but then you look at what he's actually done and he doesn't fuck around well i mean the i think what people get wrong about that is that like what makes a truly great peacetime CEO is they're always preparing to be a wartime CEO.

5:53You know what I mean? It's, Warren Buffett says that it's only when the tide goes out that you see who's been swimming naked, you know? And like, you look at someone like Rockefeller or Carnegie or Warren Buffett, and what are they doing? It's like, they're building a war chest because they're, they're like the Starks, right? They always know winter is coming, you know? And Warren Buffett's been doing winter is coming to 400 billion in cash or something. Yeah, exactly. And so they don't just survive the winters, you know, the they don't just survive during periods of war. They thrive because they've been preparing for it.

6:27I think it's what makes a great peacetime CEO. If you look at someone like Mr. Peace today, how do you think he is going to evolve as a person? You know, I think he's like 26, 27 now and he's already got like one tenth of the population of Earth watching his stuff every month. I don't know. It's interesting. You know, I think his personality is very, very similar to Walt Disney's. It's just like if you study their lives, always been a showman, obsessed with innovating the medium, obsessed with pouring money back into like they're generating all this revenue and they just like pathologically almost cannot take profit.

7:10like they have to pour it into just making bigger and better content so what walt disney was doing which was what mr beast is doing um but you know you can look at that and you can say you know mr beast just announced mr beast land and like another step on the wall and so i do think in a similar way you can almost trace they're not the same person and mr beast is going to go his own way. But I do think that great founders come in certain buckets and certain types, right? And by figuring out what type of person is, you can sort of say, they might kind of go in this direction by looking at who they're what their forerunners became.

7:48And for Mr. Beast, if I was someone asked me to predict his future, I'd probably start by looking at what happened in Walt Disney's life and say, All right, it's probably gonna go something along these lines. Yeah, I was just listening to like a collection of john d rockefeller's letters and it's like the letters to his sons or his son and he's talking about in the same senses like mr beast and walt disney he loves having a fire under him um and what that meant for him is any time that he would like unlever himself and pay off his debt he'd go find more money you know go to the bankers and just create the fire yeah create a little bit of chaos right he like liked being levered up um do you how do you think about that when you're looking at like other great founders throughout history it's one of those things that like people who are risk averse always try and claim that they're more risky than they are and people who are naturally risk seeking try to claim that they are less risky than they are you know like if you had asked john d rockefeller and people did like are you a risk taker he would have said no like i'm a very cautious person and yet he was obsessed with like like you said levering up um i mean technically you know there were times in his career where he was levered up to his shoulders you know and uh and it could have all gone horribly wrong for him so but they also do have a way of of protecting their their downside as well like a lot of them i think i think because they love risk they know that they you can't just bet on black 20 times in a row and like hope to emerge unscathed right yeah i think i think the way that he described it is he he likes being in the fire but he wants to plan for every eventuality and he's got like a long-term strategy and all the different steps to get there and there's like all these little dominoes that he's setting up yeah i mean you think about someone like napoleon and there are like 20 battles where he risks it all right and he wins 19 of them you know and uh in every single one it seems like a 50 50 proposition all right you think about like the battle of austerlitz and the battle of friedland and the uh battle of marengo and like all these battles 50 50 proposition but this guy wins 19 times in a row what's actually going on here right and um i mean gamblers could could tell you exactly what's going on right is like he has identified a subtle but important shift in the odds that he's exploiting every single time and so they seem like bigger gamblers than they actually are um because no you don't win you don't win 19 coin flips in a row by actually flipping a coin right like you know it's weighted a little bit i heard this uh when david and Rose entering Michael Dell recently, he mentioned that basically any time where there has been a situation where there hasn't been a lot of chaos, he would actually just create chaos out of nowhere to align his people.

10:57Interesting. The creation of the intentional creation of chaos. Yeah. To basically create an enemy where there was none. To create an enemy where there was none. That's interesting. I don't know that I've ever thought of it quite that way. I think I think what you see with a lot of these great achievers in like in whatever domain right is

11:25like for example they're the least introspective group that you'll ever encounter right a lot of them have traumatic childhoods and they won't answer questions about them it's so interesting the way in which they won't answer questions about them it's not like it's so traumatic I can't think about it but it's literally like i'm a shark who smells blood and you're asking me about my childhood you know what i mean like i'm swimming yeah i'm swimming dude i i smell blood like i gotta go eat you know and um and so i think the chaos is just they're just trying to push through walls right and when the way is clear then that's then that's clear but when the way is not clear it's like you just have to go start swinging elbows knocking down walls and it's like the creation of chaos is an intentional strategy to just push forward to be able to keep moving forward which is what which is what they need at any given time this kind of feels like sam uh like sam altman right now where he's created like he's i think the master of basically creating a whole bunch of counterparties to make it so his company can't fail because if it you know if his company fails than everyone else along the chain like nvidia and amd and all these other companies are down bad yeah i also think like if you think that you're winning on the fundamentals then chaos is a good thing if that makes sense so napoleon famously said first i engage then i figure out what to do because he knew he won on he was going to win on the fundamentals right um and it's the same thing with like with Rockefeller right which is hey I can extract and deliver oil cheaper than you can those are the fundamentals okay now if you're if I allow people time to build up different strategies and approach things in a different way have time to think then like maybe someone else can come up with a different strategy can win in certain ways but like if I'm creating chaos all the time, I can extract and deliver oil cheaper than you can.

13:30That's it. That's it. Right. And the same thing for Napoleon warfare, which is, um, if you've got a really complicated multi-step plan and I do too, then, you know, some different interesting things, but if chaos is happening, then I can move faster and I can deploy more force to the right moment at the right time than you can. And that's, those are the fundamentals. So I think you see the same thing with with open ai which is like we think that on the fundamentals of like delivering the best ai at the cheapest price we win so chaos benefits us yeah i also think with uh someone like john d rockefeller and i think vanderbilt as well they at least john d he really loved having a competent enemy and like a competent opponent i there is one of the the letters in that book was him talking about how one of his opponents had just died and he was he was like this was one of the good ones right this was one where i actually had to think and he countered all these different decisions that i was trying to make and it was you know it made me angry but i was excited and loved to love to fight and i think with that in particular first he tries to like buy the other guy's company won't sell then he tries to buy the railroad to not allow them to you know ship their oil to New York, you know, gets through, tries to buy all the land next to the railroad, you know, to stop it and all this.

14:50And then he like tries to buy the politicians to basically eliminate it. And then eventually he like figures out how to cripple them. And, you know, over the course of like three years, I think it was. And then eventually he does sell and he's like, but this guy, this guy actually fought. Yeah. I mean, you know, this is something Nietzsche talks about is like never debase yourself by having an enemy that's below you. Right. You should always, he says that uh there's there's a tight connection between enemies and friends no one can be your friend that isn't capable of being your enemy because they're not a peer they're because they're not a peer right and you debase yourself anytime that you make someone an enemy of yours who's not a peer and i think like founders would would do well to remember that i think far too many companies try to make enemies of companies that like really are below them um do you have like the the counter example is easier right which is like think of a great brand in any domain okay who is the enemy of in and out like mcdonald's no one no one's the enemy of in and out right because mcdonald's is like not worthy to be their enemy you know maybe maybe uh chick-fil-a or uh brazen canes right right and those are more opponents right you wouldn't think of them as like real true enemies so uh i wouldn't even yeah i i think that's right simply because like people don't want to eat burgers every day or chicken every day right so it's a little bit of a like you know exactly what you're getting when you go there and it's uh there's like a locked customer experience and they only want you know a certain amount of that right and so i think anytime a company becomes overly fixated on on their enemies it's probably a sign of decline this is something peter teal talks a lot about in zero to one um because he you know his whole thing is zero to one is like don't compete don't compete don't compete just have a monopoly focus on your monopoly and um he talks about how we were so focused on not competing at paypal that when we did get an enemy that was worthy of us which was x which is elon musk we engaged in like a six month like battle to the death you know both of us were willing to like kill each other and ourselves in order to beat the competition and it just took that that little spurt of competition to realize like oh no this is this is actually worthy of us so let's let's just let's merge uh because otherwise like this is like a real warrior ethos right like we are actually going to kill each other in this competition.

17:30And so let's merge and be successful together. Who do you think are the founders today that most align with the greats of the past? Well, I think Elon is the only person who is, if you ask the question, who's going to be remembered 500 years from now? One of the facts that I love is that Caesar essentially founds the Roman Empire, right? And emperor is actually not really a title at first. And the emperors actually are not known generally as emperors, they often take the title of Augustus or of Caesar, which then morphs into Kaiser in Germany, into czar, czar, in the Slavic countries. And there is a czar, I think the last czar is Bulgarian, the czar of Bulgaria, and he gets in like 1937 the last it's like over a thousand years later so it's almost 2 000 years that the name caesar is synonymous with king with rulership all right so it's 2000 and of course we're long long ways from forgetting caesar okay there's 2000 years that his name is synonymous with power all right so you ask yourself in 2000 years who is going to be remembered still and like there are so many unbelievably successful wealthy people from 2000 years ago that just no one remembers so who's gonna be remembered 2000 years from that's a very high bar and i think like donald trump and elon musk are two of the only people who even have are even holding a lottery ticket who even have a chance um i guess sam altman i actually i don't really believe that I don't I don't really buy that but maybe why would you why would you think no um I think the LLMs probably have uh will reach a plateau but again I will just say this he's holding a lottery ticket maybe they don't right and maybe Sam Altman becomes one of those guys my hunch would be the reason that Elon is remembered is probably because he makes life multi-planetary like that's probably like the pinnacle of remembrance right if that happens then then yes i mean that's that's going to go down in the books right as is one of the great accomplishments of of humanity but generally beyond founding a a nation or an empire a new way of life a new religion founders of companies are generally not remembered for thousands of years so elon because of the uniqueness of what he's attempting i guess it's possible but that's why it's very few people that i think are likely to remember remember that way i think over time attention spans and everything are shortening and shrinking and i think probably what that means is eventually people think less about like legacy and what they're going to be remembered by and building something enduring and more of even like mr beast like his content i don't believe a given mr beast video will be watched 150 years from now um i don't think i think it has like cultural zeitgeist you know like especially a short he'll create something that's relevant for right now and then in three weeks it's like not relevant anymore have you heard of the lindy effect go for it uh it's it's basically um is this cafe and these economists are talking and um like if you look at fruit fruit is anti-lindy okay so if you go to a supermarket and you say um how long is fruit likely to be in the supermarket it is um how how new is it right the the newest fruit is going to be there in the longest but if you actually go and look at uh broadway plays is what they look at that is lindy it's the opposite so you can guess how long something is likely to be on broadway by how long it has been on broadway so uh like the bible it'll probably still be wrong exactly exactly like people will still be reading the bible 2 000 years from now right and um like what are some of the broadway plays that have been there for like phantom of the opera is probably hamilton is actually hamilton is a good counter example something that's that's a newer but might be around for a while um but oklahoma phantom of the op phantom of the opera is actually not that new either um but but some of these like old great Broadway plays are probably going to be around for a long, long time.

22:00And stuff that's newer, that's just less likely that it's going to be around for a long time. So I do think you're seeing this great bifurcation of more content that is like, I mean, look at TikToks or Instagram reels, right? These are things that blow up, are seen by... A hundred million people. A hundred million people, potentially billions of people. and then I can remind you of it a month later and you're like oh yeah that I forgot about that you know I forgot about that viral moment anything that was seen by a hundred million people 80 years ago was like not forgotten about for decades and decades and decades right so you have this whole creation of this new category of things that are seen by hundreds of millions of people, but are ephemeral.

22:50Like I just did not exist as a category. But you still have the things that are Lindy, you still have the things that are going to last for for generations, I think potentially the creation of those things is more difficult than ever. But it's not going away. I don't think you get to think like throughout history, what have been the biggest moments where one of these like great people took a very big short term loss in order to kind of like achieve a much broader like long-term gain i mean to me the the great example of this is julius caesar and it was like the ultimate loss right it was the loss of his life because this is someone who said i am not going to take the short-term gain that everyone has taken before me of just wiping out my enemies and it's securing complete control of rome I'm going to try to grant them clemency, try and grant them forgiveness in order to ensure the long-term good of the Roman state.

23:51And Rome had been through so many purges. You know, the aristocracy of Rome were the only people that were capable of running sort of the machinery of state. And it was greatly weakened by the time that Caesar came along. It's greatly weakened even further by his successor, Augustus, because he does go through, you know, further purges. But I think that like Julius Caesar by granting clemency in that one pivotal moment allows Rome to survive with enough of an aristocracy, enough, enough senators to keep running the machinery of state that allows Rome to become Rome. You know, go look at the United States Capitol.

24:34Look at the fascis on either side of the rostra. Look at the columns in front of the Supreme Court. Like we're just LARPing Rome. That is what the United States is. We've been LARPing Rome for 2000 years now. Like money. You look at our money. People are going to be LARPing Rome for 2000 years from now. So he creates this, this, uh, eternal thing by sacrificing his own life, by being willing to, to sacrifice these, these short-term gains for the Roman state. Um, to me, That's like the ultimate example of short term sacrifice for a long term accomplishment is the first thing that comes to mind.

25:10I'm sure there are more like, you know, relevant business examples. You know, like Carnegie. Was the ultimate. Like this was his whole whole philosophy was like trust, trust, trust. You know, actually, I'll give you one good business one, which is the Rothschilds, OK? The Rothschilds, their whole thing was, we want to be the most trusted banking house in all of Europe. And so one of these great, one of these great stories is they have this incredible intelligence network. Like they basically have the CIA. Faster information. Faster information, right? They have the CIA of the 1800s, not dedicated to any state.

25:54It is dedicated to the Rothschild banking house. So they have a man present on the scene at the Battle of Waterloo. And a lot of what they're doing is currency trading is bond trading. And so their man sees Blucher's charge, sees that Napoleon is defeated, takes off immediately, hands the message, another man crosses the channel, goes to London, delivers the message to Nathan Rothschild in London. He's got a generational money making opportunity, because he knows that the British pound and british bonds are about to go through the roof and that um the french i think it's the franc back then and uh and french bonds are about to go through the floor okay generational money making opportunity because he has the money he knows this information for the british military no one in london knows this information before him private message delivered straight to nathan rothschild what does he do he takes the message he sells all this stuff no no he doesn't sell anything.

26:53He goes and he takes it to parliament and he lets everyone else know why, because they're outsiders. They're, they're this Jewish banking family that just arrived in, um, in London a couple of decades before. And so it's a generational money-making opportunity. Yes, but it's also a generational opportunity to build trust and build a reputation. Right. And so he, he, he forgoes the short-term money-making opportunities for the longer term. Okay. but how much money are we going to make if all the aristocracy of London feel grateful to us and are willing to bank with us and don't view us as outsiders anymore and view us as a legitimate part of British aristocracy.

27:34And so he forgoes the short term money making opportunity for the long term trust building opportunity. And of course, that pays off very, very handsomely over the next 50. I mean, it's the greatest run of money making of any financial institution, probably in human history does anyone else like i know like jp morgan i think may have held a similar weight where he kind of like supported new york and a few other like major events throughout uh i think like the 19th 20th century um is there anyone else that basically just optimized for like extreme reputation at the you know expense of short-term money making yeah i i think like that was a major theme of of the 19th century frankly of like a lot of these people was and there's different ways to build your reputation right so you talk about someone like Vanderbilt and you know it it's reputation a different way it's like if you cross me I might take years it might take but but I will die before I will let anyone wrong me without it going avenged right whereas you look at someone uh like andrew carnegie and carnegie could be tough in his own way but it was a much um it was a much friendlier uh reputation built on cooperation and trust rockefeller is interesting because he's actually probably more like vanderbilt than he is like carnegie but he it's like he had the vanderbilt with the carnegie veneer you know he seemed on the on the exterior very placid very christian never raised his voice never raised his voice but he was a stone-cold killer on the inside but anyway the thing that they all had in common is that they were building a reputation yeah because i know warren buffett basically took and like charlie munger said this that he basically just took johnny rockefeller and tried to copy as much as he could into berkshire hathaway um i think he the only thing that he really meaningfully changed was he just wanted to use less leverage to like minimize the likelihood of blow up and I think they said, like both of them have said, that Berkshire Hathaway could be like multiple times bigger if they had just used slightly more leverage.

29:44Right. Over the course of the history. Right. Well, and I think in a business sense, you can see it. You know, I think that like Southwest Airlines is probably not going to be a company 30 years from now. Because the thing about Southwest Airlines is, is it always the cheapest flight on every route? No, not necessarily. and in the past you know maybe at certain times but like the thing is you went to southwest.com and you knew that there was a company that was always trying was always trying to give me the cheapest flight possible with a sufficiently good customer experience right like experiencing me okay enough and this company is always working their hardest to make sure that the the cost is gonna be as low as possible to me and then they get bought by private they have this you know i won't go through the whole history of southwest but basically they have a big disaster they have to reconfigure their all their systems they get bought by business like recently like a couple years ago just in the last few years big minority stake bought by private equity and now they're trying to make them get away from select your own seating and it's like they just don't have a reputation once you take away this idea that they are doing everything possible to give me the lowest cost flight that they can and um and once like that reputation is built over decades and five minutes to ruin that situation i just no longer have that feeling i go to southwest.com i no longer have the feeling that this is a company that is doing everything that they can to get me the lowest cost flight that is possible and so just like once you lose that feeling you lose everything and so so i think that's a good example of like something that is built and then is destroyed very quickly.

31:28And I think we're gonna see the consequences of that very soon. I think this is a little bit similar to the whole scale economy shared idea, where you basically have a company whose main objective is to get as big as possible so that they can just have the best customer experience, lowest possible prices across like a broad array of like Costco's the best and Amazon's the best example of this, where over time, they had lots of opportunities to kind of like, you know, gouge their customers on a specific item, whether it be like jeans or something where I think like one time they got a shipment of jeans and they could have priced it.

32:01It was like one fourth or something, the normal price. And they were like, oh, well, we could just just this once, you know, we could have a 60 percent margin on these jeans instead of 15 percent. Right. And the CEO was like, no, because that sets the wrong precedent and we'll do it again. Right. Right. Well, this is one of the things I like to think about a lot is selective irrationality. because you know the famous quote from jim senegal they're talking in a board meeting they're like hey we just cannot keep the hot dog and soda at a buck 50 like come on we're gonna triple the price and it'll be the best deal in america and he says if you raise the price on the effing hot dog i'll come back and kill you if i'm dead i'll come back and kill you it is just like it's it's irrational it's totally irrational right and but that's what a reputation that's what a brand is built on is of course at any given time it's rational to cheat just a little bit on this on this reputation if you're looking at like a given like specific unit of time exactly if you take it within its limited context then it's irrational to make this decision so in order to to build a brand you have to be able to be irrational in a narrow time frame in order to of course, over the long term, it's rational to build a brand and build this great reputation.

33:18But all of these, all of these great founders, all these great generals, all the like anyone who's great in any domain. You know, one of the things I knew a guy who was this Stanford trained engineer who went to work for Apple. And he said, I said, Oh, why'd you leave? It was a big military, he's working on, on nuclear technology. Why would you want to leave nuclear, cool nuclear technology you go work on apple computers and he said it's the insides it's the ins you oh you crack open a mac and like people cared people cared people really cared it's the whole steve job so rare as an engineer to find that of like i really care about it's it's not just the bottom line i really care about this product for its own sake like its beauty and its function and its function and it's irrational to care about the the way it looks on the inside is something that no one will ever see but they cared right that was a selectively irrational decision but of course that's what a brand is built on it's a little bit like the jeff bezosism where he says on a long enough time horizon both the interests of investors and customers are like aligned because over time you can kind of build a reputation with the customer so that they again like you said just trust you implicitly and they don't have to go check the other price because they just know that you're going to give them the best possible price and like with amazon they did things in the early days where even if some other they could have gotten a higher price for a book or some other product they would actually price match with their competitor or even do lower just so that people could build that perception well and i think that's why um someone like bezos is so important like why founder-led companies are so powerful right is because once you lose that it's almost impossible to get back yes exactly i don't know of a single case where it actually got back you basically have to take it private in order to get that back i also think struggle to think of an example but you know if if you have a ceo that's making a decision based on the share price quarter to quarter and you've got a board who's breathing down his neck and you don't have the right as kind of the same pinnacle or you know platform where you're the founder and you can say i'm going to make this call it's the whole like correct you know super voting shares where it's like i get control and you get to be along for the ride or not you talk about being selectively irrational again it's because you're making decisions on a longer time horizon uh who was it he had a longer that's the rockefeller quote he had a more settled will and a longer time horizon than his opponents i think that's from titan and you just can't have that more settled will and that longer time horizon if the market is dictating what your company does quarter to quarter and so um anytime you see these great brands being built it's always a founder-led company or someone who comes in later and takes over the company and treats it like a founder-led company and those are vanishingly small it does happen um from time to time uh but it's very rare i think it's super rare for you know like with tim cook and apple i'm pretty sure i saw this yesterday where every single day since tim cook took over in like 2011 or 2012 he's created roughly apple's market cap has gone up by roughly 700 million dollars yeah um which is insane obviously but i think at the same time you don't really people don't have the same perception of apple as they did back in the day and i think that kind of like steve jobs set him up and it's you know he's a great operator and he's great at supply chain, but he's not like inventing new products.

36:56Yeah, yeah. I mean, so Carnegie retires at age 35. And he's, he's, he's done really well. But he's not one of the 300 richest people in the world. All of the but he has, he has basically created all the value. It's just on a time delay, right? And so he doesn't become the richest person in the world for like three decades later and he's been retired all that time right but it's it's really he created the value and then it's just on a time delay and then it explodes into into this enormous massive empire same same thing with rockefeller rockefeller does extremely well but he doesn't become the richest person in human history until automobile was invented yeah yeah right and um and he's been retired for a long time but he already created the value it's just it's a ticking time bomb right and i remember specifically with like rockefeller there was this moment where someone brings him the message that uh they've you know had all these monopoly laws created and people are like breaking up monopolies now and there's this moment where he's playing golf and someone brings him the message that standard oil is going to be broken up right and instead of being like angry he just like smiled because he's like oh i know i'm gonna and and then if you look fast forward you know 110 years or something like that uh now all of the big oil companies of today are basically just descendants of standard oil correct and if he had just held his stock in all those different businesses he'd be like a trillionaire right now yeah chevron is a descendant of standard oil aramco is a descendant of standard oil bp bb i think shell shell no but shell they did end up buying like a minority stake so it's like 10 of shell you know it's anyway exxon exxon uh and eventually it's it's kind of like it goes almost full circle where eventually it's it's broken up first it's broken up and then like years later you just see them re-emerging together exactly yeah yeah exactly yeah that is a great moment he's like okay it's it's too late now like they don't know that i already won uh so you can say that it's all broken up but yeah you've studied more than just like the great leaders of the past um you've also studied a bunch of really great artists.

39:10And I think art has slightly more timelessness than like companies in general and even empire building. How do you think about timelessness? And how do you think like the grace of the past thought about that? I think in a certain way, aesthetic contributions are almost the only lasting contributions. So for example, you think about someone like Steve Jobs, you don't think of as an artist, think of as a founder. But what's his great contribution to humanity. If Steve Jobs never comes around, is the personal computer never going to emerge? Are we never going to get smartphones? It's like, no, it's not likely, right?

39:47These technological innovations are going to happen anyway. So what is the lasting contribution? The contribution is that we got them in the form that we did. And that I'm glad that Steve Jobs exists because let's have beauty on the inside. Exactly. The beauty on the inside, beauty on the outside. It's much more aesthetically pleasing than it would have been otherwise. And yeah, I also think that art has a way of inspiring humanity in certain directions and, um, and giving humanity certain goals. And so, um, I do think that great art has that capability. I think for that reason, great architecture is, is perhaps the highest form of art.

40:34like i think that the cathedral is what locks in christianity into europe for 1500 years is it because it's almost something like i've noticed in a lot of buildings you walk in and you just you don't feel anything and i think like the biggest the biggest impact that you can have on someone is just like an emotional impact like people don't remember sounds or voices or faces They remember how someone made them feel. Right. And I think the cathedral is inherently seductive for that reason, right? Of, yeah, so much of life just makes you feel nothing, right? And then you walk into St. Peter's or St.

41:14Paul's or the Cathedral of Cologne and you're just overwhelmed, right? And so, yeah, I think that art has the ability to last much longer. I mean, there's this great quote of Carl Sagan. We're launching the first satellite that is going to go outside the solar system. And so they want to include different things that are representative of humanity. So if any alien form, life form finds this, they'll know like what we were all about. Right. And so this one physicist says, well, maybe we should include the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. He says, but then again, that would be showing off. Right.

42:01And and I think that. Bach is going to be listened to for hundreds or even thousands of years from now. So, yeah, I do think it's much more lasting than than almost any other contribution to humanity. One of the biggest things that is in my mind is like, how can I make the thing that I'm creating be timeless? And for any normal business, you want to make investments early so that you like create an amazing product. And then only then do you actually like go out to the market and try to sell it. You know, you don't like create, you don't try to sell like a bad chicken sandwich before it's, you know, baked.

42:34Right. And I think like very few people genuinely take the time and thought required to make something that will last or what gives it the best likelihood of lasting. And like even if you look at many of the VC funds today, they all have a podcast, but the podcast isn't, it's the same four walls. It's the same mics, the same cameras, the same people, same questions, same format. Part of what I'm trying to do is like if you're going to go interview Elon, you shouldn't be doing it over Zoom. You should be like going out to what makes him special. Well, and I think that's one of the reasons that I do what I do is you look at some of those like what stories have stood the test of time.

43:14OK. Well, what are the first stories that we have that have survived? It's Gilgamesh. It's the Iliad. It's the Odyssey. like david and goliath david and goliath right moses it's it's a great biography that has always captured our attention and um it has always been the rocket fuel that has inspired human achievement is the it's just amazing story like one of the one of my favorite stories of all time is thomas edison he's telegraph operator he's doing well kind of like a young tech bro he's like 22 years old i want to say he's doing well but he hasn't gotten deaf yet he hasn't he actually started going to very young he has started going deaf a little bit but um but but young accomplished but no one's special and he's traveling around with these other telegraph operators they go from station station around the midwest and he and his roommate get home one night and edison starts reading this biography of michael faraday the roommate goes to bed he wakes up in the morning he finds Edison still in the kitchen has not gone to bed he's still reading this biography of Faraday he throws it down in disgust and says I'm already 22 I may live to be 60 can I accomplish as much as he did I am going to hustle and it's that rocket fuel of reading about a great inventor from the previous generation and that he feels um Aristotle defines it, calls it zeal, and says it's the feeling that a man has when he sees present in others great virtues that he is capable of possessing but does not.

44:57And so it's that emotion, right? It's the emotion that Caesar felt when we saw the statue of Alexander. It's the emotion that Steve Jobs had when he thought about Edwin Land, right? That emotion is what has spurred great artists, great founders, great financiers, great conquerors through all generations. And that's, you know, Plutarch's lives has been inspiring people now for almost 2 ,000 years. Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad for 5 ,000 years, whatever. So I think it's going to be much of the same. And that's what I'm trying to inspire with how to take over the world is people. It's a new format, but it's really the same content.

45:40And I think that is what is going to inspire people for the next 10, 100 million years is going to be that same stuff. There's this idea that you are kind of like the five people that you surround yourself with. And I think like only recently, especially like you go back to Andrew Carnegie, he was super lucky and that he had he figured out i think as a teenager he went and wrote the notes for some rich person and this rich person had a library and later on in life he ended up building a bunch of libraries to kind of like commoditize knowledge or let people give themselves an advantage if they wanted it um but back then he was he started reading super super early read through this entire library and he kind of built this mental model of his world and like the people that he look up to and what he was kind of going after.

46:30I think personally for my life, I've kind of tried to find the people, you know, you look and you say, if you want to become the richest person in the world or build a great company, you probably shouldn't go to college. You probably shouldn't like study from the person that's saying, here's how to do it. You should probably just go study the person that has actually done it. I think what's so powerful about that is the single most destructive thing to motivation and to great accomplishment is uncertainty. and that's one of the things you see about great leaders um i was just uh reviewing my episode of shackleton because i'm going to re-release it ernest shackleton and he says one of the most important things is to create a new plan straight away when an old one goes to goes to shit yeah because that was happening all the time for for him right he's trying to go to antarctica and the plan goes to crap because they get trapped in the ice okay well great we're gonna wait for the ice to thaw um so everyone like feels calm feels good and so let's just survive on the ship okay the ice starts crushing the ship okay we got a new plan and like immediately comes up with a new plan and it's like every plan goes to shit five or six times but everyone stays together stays motivated does what they need to do because every single time he comes up with a new plan and when you find a great historical figure that you want to be like you've got the plan and and all that's left is the work just execution just execution right it's so clarifying and so it that's why it motivates like once you're caesar and you know you want to be alexander once you're steve jobs you know you want to be edwin land once you are Rockefeller and you know you want to be Amos Lawrence all that's left is the work right and and so once all that's left is the work once the uncertainty is removed achievement is so much easier generally when you're talking with like an employee of a company you shouldn't have a huge amount of uncertainty they don't generally people don't want to live with uncertainty right but from what I can tell like the best founders in the world the best like world conquerors they constantly live with live with uncertainty and they just kind of like feed on it.

48:45Right. And they're willing to kind of go out on a limb, even with you say like Walt Disney or Mr. Beast spending all the money, reinvesting all the dollars like Mr. Beast. At one point, his mom's crying on the phone with him because she's like she'd hid$10 ,000 in some bank account. And and he was like, oh, well, I just heard, you know, there's this extra$10 ,000. I'm going to take that money and spend it on the next video. And she's like, why won't you just like keep a little bit off to the side just in case? Right. And he's like, no, no, I'm not going to do that. um do you think that the best people that are those types of builders have an unusual ability to live with uncertainty and be willing to take that type of risk yeah i mean i think people get such bad advice now when people say great leaders are like are vulnerable and open up to their subordinates it's like no dude as a as a leader it is literally your job to like take doubt and uncertainty and fear and just eat it internalize it but not show it yeah yeah exactly like you that is what any great project but especially entrepreneurship is right it's like uh what's what's what's winston churchill's quote um victory is going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm right like hopefully not actually hopefully you do have a success at some point but like uh maybe not from failure to failure but from like uncertainty to uncertainty from problem to problem right and um you know steve jobs says that the founder their job is to be the reiterator of the vision because stuff just comes up and when stuff comes up you're the the natural human instinct is is what mike tyson said everyone has a plan until you get punched in the face right and so you get punched in the face and now all of a sudden you're in survival mode right and you just take the short-term view and you and you're just dealing with whatever is in front of your face.

50:34But as the founder, you're saying, no, this is the long, remember the vision, remember the vision, remember the vision, remember the vision. And so as, as problems arise, as uncertainties arise, you have to be the one who says, no, like we're going forward. This is the plan. This is the plan. This is the plan. And then everyone can, can march to the beat of that tune. So you provide certainty in an uncertain world. That is like the number one job of a leader. I'm pretty sure it was Caesar. At one point he like goes to and he just like takes out a ridiculous amount of debt and makes it so he's like almost too big to fail.