#359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/701438bb2cc45086

You and I always talk about this phenomenon that reoccurs throughout the history of entrepreneurship.
That you can always understand the son by the story of his father. The story of the father is embedded in the son.
The story you're about to hear is one of the most remarkable industrial odysseys ever told.
And at the center
Is this relationship?
Between a father and his two sons.
This family dynasty.
was a great inventor, but he wasn't a great entrepreneur.
He knew how to build great products.
But he didn't pay enough attention to the financial side of his business.
And as a result, he goes bankrupt.
That is a mistake.
that his two sons actually learn from
And successfully avoided. His sons, Ludwig and Alfred, were both world-class entrepreneurs and some of the wealthiest people on earth.
when they were alive, they both built their businesses.
to last. They never went bankrupt like their father.
And they were both obsessed.
with watching their cost.
They both knew that it's not enough to build a great product. You have to build a great business. And people that built great businesses, businesses that last.
is who we study on this podcast and every single one of them.
Was obsessed.
with controlling their expenses.
just like Ludwig and Alfred were. In fact, this book talks about the fact that Ludwig and Alfred were both born in the eighteen thirties.
And there's all these great founders are also born in that decade. And the book talks about what some of these great founders
all born in the eighteen thirties had in common and
One of the p people that is mentioned in the book
is Andrew Carnegie. And Carnegie would repeat this mantra time and time again.
Profits and prices are cyclical, subject to any number of transient forces on the marketplace.
Cost, however.
Could be strictly controlled.
And in Carnegie's view, any savings achieved
In the cost.
We're permanent.
This is something I was talking about with my friend Eric, who's the co-founder and CEO of Ramp. Ramp
is now a partner of this podcast. I've gotten to know all the co-founders of Ramp.
And have spent a bunch of time with them over the last year or two.
They all listen to the podcast and have picked up on the fact that the main theme from the podcast is the importance of watching your costs and controlling your spend.
And how doing so gives you a massive
competitive advantage. That is the main theme.
For ramp the reason that ramp exists
is to give you everything that you need to control your spend.
Ramp helps you watch your costs.
If Ramp existed in the eighteen hundreds, the founder of this family dynasty's last years of life would have been a lot more pleasant, and one thing is for sure.
Alfred and Ludwig Nobel would have definitely used ramp.
they would have jumped all over a tool that gives you everything you need to control spend and optimize.
your financial operations all in a single platform. RAM's landing page is incredible.
Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud.
by going to ramp dot com to learn how they can help.
your business control costs. That is ramp dot com.
The name of Nobel usually calls to mind Alfred Nobel.
Inventor of dynamite.
and the Nobel Prizes which he endowed.
But other members of the Nobel family were no less creative and innovative.
In fact,
The range of their achievements in building an industrial empire truly qualifies them to be known as
As the Russifellers.
The founder of this Russian dynasty.
Was an immigrant from Sweden.
Emmanuel Nobel was an architect.
A pioneer producer of steam engines
And a weapons maker.
Decades before his son Alfred's dynamite began to alter the character of modern warfare.
A manual design invented and produced by
Underwater mines.
Emmanuel's other sons included Robert
Who directed the family's activities in the Caspian oil fields.
And as you and I will talk about a spur of the moment decision
By Robert actually changes the entire trajectory of
The Nobel family from weapon makers.
into developing
uh the entire Russian oil industry. And Ludwig, who is going to be the majority of what I want to talk to you about today. This this is my favorite Nobel.
Ludwig
An engineering genius and manufacturing magnet whose boundless energy and fierce determination created the Russian petroleum industry.
Ludwig's son, Emmanuel
was not only one of the wealthiest men in Europe.
But the peer and occasional adversary
Of some of the most powerful figures in international business circles. He shrewdly bargained with the Rothschilds for control of the Russian markets.
and did not shrink from head on competition with standard oil and royal Dutch shell.
For lucrative world markets. Emmanuel not only helped modernize the Russian navy.
He also expanded
The Russian oil industry.
Воза панір юзер.
Of the diesel engine
Official of the state bank and a commander of a fleet of three hundred ships.
Perhaps no family in history could
Has played so decisive a role in building an industrial empire in an undeveloped but resource rich nation.
Yet
The achievements

Are almost entirely unknown.
Why?
The answer can be found in the official Soviet myth.
That when the Bolsheviks seized power in November nineteen seventeen, they inherited an empty cupboard.
Which they transform into a cornucopia.
The truth.
was the exact opposite.
When the Bolsheviks came to power, Emmanuel
had to flee the country disguised as a peasant.
A reminder of how fast things can change. He was one of the richest people in the country.
has to flee the country disguised as a peasant and two of his brothers were thrown in jail.
The family's holdings were confiscated, the Nobel Empire, with its fifty thousand workers, lay in ruins, its fleet of oil takers were idled.
The fires in its foundries were banked.
The oil refineries ceased operations.
Their oil wells were flooded.
And Russia's largest engine factory shut down.
An empire.
Which had taken the family eighty years to design and build
Was destroyed.
bringing to a sudden and bitter end one of the most remarkable industrial odysseys in world history.
That is an excerpt from the inside flap of this remarkable book I'm going to talk to you about today. First published all the way back in nineteen.
seventy six. It is called the Russian Rockefellers
The saga of the Nobel family
and the Russian and is written by Robert Tolf.
So I found this book through my friend Cameron Priest, who continues to be one of the most prolific readers of
entrepreneur history that I've ever come across. He's recommended I don't know, forty, fifty, sixty of these books to me.
And I spent the last few days rereading my highlights and going through
all my notes in the book to try to figure out what I want to focus on. So
I wanna focus on Ludwig Nobel.
But to tell the story of Ludwood Nobel, I have to tell you the story of his father.
A few of his brothers, and then his son. And so I want to start in the introduction of the book to give you an overview of what has to be
Они мост ремакво фаліз.
in human history.
So we start with Alfred O Nobel, everybody knows him because he's the one. He he dies in his in his will, he endows the Nobel Prize, and then uh other people knew him.
As the inventor of dynamite. So it says
Alfred Nobel was only one member of history's most inventive family,
And the story has never been told of his father Emmanuel
And his brothers Ludwig and Robert.
And his nephew Emmanuel.
and their own individual entrepreneurial, technological, and financial achievements in the weapons, petroleum, chemical, and transportation industry. So Ludwig Nobel,
And the reason the book is called The Russian Rockefellers is because Ludwig Ludwig Nobel, Alfred's brother
Literally created
The Russian This is nuts. So I've been going around talking about this book.
Uh to all my friends.
And really anybody who will listen this week as I've been reading it because
At the time to give you an overview, at the time that
The the the the book takes place, okay?
Russia at this point in history
is going to wind up producing over half.
Of all the war world's
Oil.
The Nobel family.
Produces
Thirty percent of that half.
One company.
And that company is founded and created
By Ludwig.
And so here's just a brief overview of some of his achievements. He designed the world's first oil tanker.
He installed Europe's first pipelines.
He built the world's first full scale continuous
Distillation refinery.
He forged gigantic infrastructure on water and land.
He built a network of storage depots and tank farms
Harbors, freight yards.
and marketing outlets from one end of the vast Russian Empire to the other, and then across the European continent.
Ludwig's father before him pioneered development of underwater mines.
Designed steam engines to power Russian ships.
And installed the first central heating systems.
To warm Russian homes, Ludwig Sun after him.
Launch the world's first diesel driven tugboats.
and tankers while bargaining with the Rothschilds and struggling against the Royal Dutch Cell Company and bartering with Standard Oil.
Okay, so keep that in mind. This entire conversation is gonna center around Ludwig. I gotta tell you about his father and the fact that they grew up in poverty. I
Read Alfred Nobel's
Biography a long time ago. It's probably
Three, four years ago. It's episode one sixty three.
There's a line in there because you're gonna understand that
Emmanuel Nobel.
The founder of this dynasty, the patriarch of the family.
Spent.
essentially decades in poverty. In fact there's a lot the reason I bring this up is because in Alfred Nobel's biography
It says that he never forgot poverty.
And he never forgot poverty even after.
He was one of the wealthiest people on the planet. Keep in mind.
This guy lived in the eighteen hundreds, and so there's a line in his biography that's that's nuts where
He asked somebody what they wish as a wedding present.
And the young woman
Replied.
I want
Uh as m uh w my wedding gift should be what you earn in one day.
And Nobel, who's usually tight with money.
actually agreed and he wrote her a check.
His
His daily earning for himself.
was a hundred and ten thousand dollars a day in the eighteen hundreds.
And so this poverty that his his dad's really an inventor. We're gonna talk a lot about this today. It's like
It's not enough to just be an inventor. You also have to be a skilled entrepreneur, which
His th his dad wasn't, but his sons definitely were.
And so
This is we're gonna go right into Emanuel's life and says only is marriage brought him some measure of success.
And it talks about the role that his wife and then the mother of Ludwig and Alfred
Just how important she was to the family's success.
Her patience, endurance, even her faith in her husband were sorely tested.
During those first years of marriage.
As one after another of Emanuel's dreams turned into nightmares.
They move from house to house on the outskirts of Stockholm, needing
But not being able to afford
larger quarters for their growing family.
Alfred was born just ten months after his father had declared bankruptcy.
Nobel's wife was the strong supportive pillar upon which he's gonna build his business. This reminded me of when I read
The the autobiography of the founder of four seasons is Adore Sharp.
There's a bunch.
of times where his wife is kinda comment adding commentary to the book.
About what it was like. Not four seasons now.
But when four seasons w was just an idea in her husband's brain, she talks about the fact that
She saw him str stressed. She saw him lying awake in the middle of the night. And she said she said something that was very
Very
I think profound she said my voice my most valuable contribution to his success has been my silence.
What does that mean? This is what she w she says in his autobiography.
Early on, he made some audacious statements.
That sound like pipe dreams.
He told me once that his aim was to make the name four seasons a worldwide brand.
synonymous with luxury like Rolls Royce.
Sure, I thought.
with only about ten hotels hardly likely.
But I didn't let on.
My most valuable contribution to his success has been my silence. And I think she's picking up on a very important idea.
Entrepreneurs are gonna get enough doubt from the external world.
They can't have it when they come home. They can't have it with the most important relationship they have in their life.
And you see that just like
Isidore Sharp's wife understood that, Emmanuel Nobel's wife also understood that.
The previous year a fire had destroyed most of their home and possessions.
Emmanuel, still faced with deaths from his abandoned building projects, saw no alternative to the humiliation of declaring himself bankrupt.
But he refused.
To be discouraged or defeated.
He was determined to find practical applications for some of those ideas.
That never stop swirling in his head.
And so not only is he inventive, but he's also very persuasive. So he's able to raise money multiple times, even after multiple failures.
And so he starts setting up and he does these experiment experiments.
With sub surface charges of gunpowder.
to destroy an enemy.
Under on land or on sea.
What he is thinking about
becomes underwater and underground mines.
This is really important because it's going to lead directly to some experiments that his son does, which
Builds
the empire and the monopoly that he built around Dynamite says it was the beginning of the Nobel family's
Fascination with explosives.
So email is Swedish. He's trying to sell
His invention.
to the Swedish military.
A main theme of the book is the fact that
For
A very long time.
There's been a huge number of Swedish immigrants into Russia.
And it is during this next generation of the Nobel family that the Swedish actually build
The Russian oil industry.
And so here's a little bit about the troubles that he's having.
In Sweden of the eighteen thirties, Emmanuel was alone in recognizing the value of this new weapon.
Financial security continued to elude him, creditors continued to hound him.

Sweden at this time.
In an agricultural country in which poverty was thought to be a national characteristic
Emmanuel was was beginning to believe that he would not have the chance to make the kinds of success.
He felt he could with the proper opportunities.
His frustration was not a unique phenomenon in Stockholm at the time.
But Emmanuel was never one to let frustration block his path or force him to resign and accept his fate.
When he met a visiting Russian emissary
At a party in Stocm, he was suddenly confronted by a crossroads.
Another new arena to seek fame and fortune.
Now remember that line, Alfred Nobel never forgot poverty.
The decision was as difficult as any Emmanuel would ever make, for he had to leave Andrea, that's his wife, and their three sons behind. Can you imagine? Put yourself
In his shoes.
You are thirty six years old, you have a wife, you have three sons.
You are bankrupt, you are in debt.
You have no track record.

That you are capable of
having to bring a successful uh you you invent a lot, but you've have no track record.
To show that you can actually bring
Successfully one of your inventions to market.
And you get on a boat.
And you wave goodbye to your family, not sure when you're gonna see them again.
So he first goes to Finland.
Then he goes to Russia, and so this idea.
Of Swedes.
Seeking fortune in Russia.
was not new. This is there's a great
uh paragraph I gotta read to you about the stuff going on during Peter the Great
Says from the time of the Vikings to the time of the Nobels, there were thousands of Swedes who, in an endless repetition of war and commerce, fought.
Plundered, traded, and settled in Russia. Swedish technicians were emplo employed.
By the Tsars, Swedish metal workers and gunsmiths.
Laid the foundations
Of a weapons industry.
A Swede established the first glassworks.
Swedish prisoners of war were used by Peter the Great to cut a three mile path to
To the forest.
For his great boulevard in the heart of his new city.
Swedes seeking fortune.
In Russia.
was not new.
And this massive risk that Emmanuel took, which is gonna change your trajectory.
of his descendants' lives forever.
Wind up working out because the Swedish military was not interested in Emmanuel's underseen mines.
But the Russians were enthusiastic. So I'm gonna skip over a big part here.
I mean he does a demonstration.
And this is what I mean about
How enthusiastic the Russian military was.
The mine exploded.
When it was struck by a small boat.
The general was ecstatic. He rushed over to Nobel.
And kissed him.
And then started to dance.
The general had been under considerable pressure to find a successful underwater mine, which Nobel's the first person to invent.
This is
September
eighteen forty. He is thirty nine.
Years old.
This is a remarkable description. It was the first
sizeble subsidi
Emmanuel had ever received.
And he uses that money.
To establish a factory.
Two years later he's making enough money to actually send for his family. Can you imagine?
As I could not imagine being away from my kids and my wife this song. It's incredible.
For the first time in his life he enjoyed a certain prosperity, a comforting
an encouraging feeling of success. In the summer of eighteen forty two he sent for his family.
Now this is wild.
He was gone for five years, okay?
During his five year absence
His wife and her th and his three sons
Had scraped out a simple existence.
that at times bordered on poverty.
Their only source of income came from a little milk and vegetable store that she operated.
The boys now check this out, this is wild.
The boys Robert and Ludwig, so Robert's the older brother, Ludwig's the middle, and Alfred's the youngest, okay?
Robert and Ludwig Ludwig to survive.
Had to sell matches.
On the streets of Stockholm now, how crazy is that?
A couple uh episodes ago on episode three forty eight.
I covered the book The Match King, which is about the founder of the Swedish match company, which still exists to this day, by the way.
And we see in this story the early days of what's gonna turn into the Nobel family
Dynasty sustained
by their young kid I mean, these are young kids, they're probably seven, eight years old at the time.
selling matches.
on street corners in Stockholm.
And so once he has his family back together and he has all of his sons in Russia, he does
A brilliant thing. This is the phenomenal education that he sets up for his sons.
He says they were instructed solely by tutors.
Robert and Ludwig primarily in engineering.
Alfred in chemistry, which is hilarious because
You could think of Ludwig as an engineer.
And Alfred's empire is gonna be in chemistry.
and all three in Swedish, Russian, German, French, and English. They were also put to work in the factory,
moving from one position to another, learning the business of running a business. That's a great line. Learning the business of running a business, acquiring from direct on the job exposure practical lessons in the problems and challenges of management.
Execution and administration.
Now Emmanuel is going to have about a twenty year period of relative prosperity before he goes bankrupt again. How could that
possibly happen. There's two issues here.
He's much more of an inventor, not an entrepreneur.
He has two really big mistakes. One, he's got one customer.
Which we'll get into in a minute, and two
He doesn't have the financial discipline that his son Alfred will have.
He expands too fast, he's not conservative, he's not really paying attention to his costs.
Alfred was probably the most gifted entrepreneur of the family.
And so his dad didn't have that.
But his dad did have a lot of success inventing and producing. And so in addition to the success of his underwater mines, he's also manufacturing marine engines.
And then he's steadily expanding the factory until it had
about a thousand employees. His reputation as an inventor and one of Russia's leading engineers and industrialists were all striking indications of Emmanuel's success.
The ultimate rewards for his diligence, his persistence, and his genius, despite
The achievements and the recognition in Manuel was not insecure.
financial position.
His entire business depended on the contracts.
That he was getting
From
Nicholas, the Tsar at the time.
Nicholas is gonna die.
The new Tsar takes over. This is Alexander the second, and suddenly
Those contracts, those promises mean nothing.
There's a I think it was the Navy Sales that said, Two is one, one is none.
You cannot only have one customer.
Your business cannot depend on a single customer.
The many pledges of contracts made to Emmanuel by the ministers of Nicholas were ignored by the ministers of Alexander, his pleas in protest.
that he had expanded his payroll and factory.
In order to honor those contracts went unheeded.
By eighteen fifty seven he had a surplus of labor, a surplus of supplies, and no orders. For Emmanuel, the decline was a disaster. Without his government contract, he could not keep the factory running.
There was also the problem of Emmanuel himself. This is what I mentioned earlier.
He's less of a businessman.
and factory director than he was an inventor.
He was simply not the man to manage an enterprise that had grown to the si to the size. And his tremendous talents lay in fields other than management. He was more inventor.
An entrepreneur.
His two sons will be both.
And this had to happen, I think this leads directly to their success,'cause they are capable of learning
From
Their father's mistake, Robert Ludwig and Alfred would never forget the bitter lessons of their father's failure.
For a manual, then fifty eight, there would not be another chance.
It was all over twenty two years after he'd sailed from Stockholm.
As a bankrupt man, he returned again to
Bankrupt.
But what I love about him is he's relentlessly optimistic and he has faith in
In his son's.
So he says his dreams are going to have to be realized by the next generation of Nobels. And he was not pessimistic about that next generation. This is what he said.
If my sons work harmless harmo harmoniously
and carry on the work that I have begun. I believe that they will never want for their daily bread.
For there is still much to be done here in Russia.
So it is shortly after this where Ludwig opens his own factory.
And so something that's been implanted, or I guess a habit that's implanted in my mind from Charlie Munger is like when you're
Analyzing somebody's business success, you try to look for waves that they were able to surf. And so Ludwig is actually going to surf.
I th this idea of surfing is in poor Charlie's Amac, I think I covered it back on episode three twenty nine.
But Ludwig's gonna surf a change and there are gonna be beneficial government policies from the government of Russia.
And then this explosion in population growth.
and new industry development.
Essentially an industrial revolution comes to Russia at the time.
And so it says Ludwig took full advantage of the recent reversals in government policy. In contrast to Manuel's last year's in Russia.
The ministries, the war ministries, that is, were it's insane. I think we're gonna get to it, but I think more than a third of Russia's budget at the time went to military.
The ministries were once again beginning to encourage domestic manufacturing.
The greatest stimulant to this new industrial initiative
was the Emancipation Act of eighteen sixty one, which was the liberation of forty million
Russians.
They're now flocking from the countryside into these news.
Like city centers and then the the
The areas that are springing up against these gi around these giant factories.
All these people are coming into the cities and they need jobs.
And so within twenty years there's gonna be two hundred and fifty
New factories.
that pop up. They said they call this a belated awakening.
to the opportunities of the industrial revolution.
So he's going to start making weapons and things that support weapons. So he starts making making cast iron artillery shells.
And then gun carriages, which he gets, I think he builds the best gun carriage in the world. So a gun carriage plays the same role that like a carriage does for a human, a carriage carries a human.
This is a carriage that covers this giant piece of artillery.
the thing that would pop to mind is if you think about like a civil war cannon, they're usually on like two big wheels and you kinda pick it up and move it to a different spot, that what what allows that
uh cannon to move is a gun carriage. That is what
uh what Ludwig's making. He's also gonna make rifles
And rifle stocks.
For
The Russian military, which
inadvertently or accidentally leads to his discovery of
This giant
and brand new indust oil industry inside of Russia.
We'll get there in one second. But this is the important thing. I always say learning is not just memorizing information, learning's changing your behavior.
He is changing he's actually learned from his father. He is changing his behavior.
More than a third of the state budget went to the military. But Ludwig was careful to avoid total dependents on such contracts.
And to r or to rely on the spoken or even written word of government ministries. He had no intention
Of repeating his father's costly mistake.
So Ludwig's factory becomes the country's largest manufacturer of gun carriages.
Rifles.
And here's what happened. He's he he's expanding so rapidly he cannot find the talent. So this idea that he keeps having to import
Swedish talent.
to build the Russian manufacturing and weapons industry and then he's gonna do the same to build the oil industry.
It's something that pops up over and over again in the book.
So it says the task of finding talent was just as difficult for Ludwig as it had been for his father.
And the solution for both men was to recruit as many Swedes
And Finns as were willing to work in Petersburg.
As factory orders increased, so did the size of the factory and the number of workers. This meant additional suedes.
Finns and an occasional Norwegian on the payroll.
And another phenomenon that he is surfing is the fact that the the the entire continent, the entire European continent.
was engaged in a giant arms race. So keep in mind this is
Two years after
The American Civil War.
So he's got this very successful and expanding manufacturing
business and he's got all these factories. Where did he get the money to do this? His dad was bankrupt.
They were not a rich family yet.
And this is another example of this maxim that I just see over and over again in the biographies that relationships run the world.
So not only the contracts are coming from relationships that he had and friendships that he had, but also the financing. So
There's a captain in the artillery, this guy named Buildering.
He had been a close friend of Ludwig's
He needs
Two hundred thousand rifles.
And so he goes to the war ministry and he says, Hey, Ludwig should be the one that made that makes this for us.
Another one of his friends, and this guy was also friends with his dad's
was one of the people that made this that was influential making this actual decision, like being an actual decision maker for this.
This guy's name is Carl, I'm not even gonna try to pronounce his last name.
So it says it's 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 a liaison officer once assigned to Emmanuel, 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's also the person
That arranged the financing for Ludwig.
So it says in the early eighteen seventies
Carl had loan Ludwig his securities, his Carl's securities.
To use as collateral for bank loans.
To expand the factory.
Ludwig had to pay five percent interest for the securities and six percent on the borrowed cash, but these were bargain rates in a country where bank loans were not easily procured.
Such support, relationship, and encouragement.
was a most valuable asset.
for Ludwig's industrial enterprises.
So already said Ludwig is the most fascinating character of this entire book, and there's a ton of interesting characters in the book.
And not only is you know, he's a great uh manufacturing genius, he's a great entrepreneur.
But he also it always is capable of like thinking for himself and making his own decisions.
And he he was one of the uh they 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 gonna get to this.
Th they talked about well, I guess Ludwig is the first person
Or one of the first people people to realize increased care.
of your employees actually in leads to increased productivity.
And it's describing like the 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 uh factory environments.
And he 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 I don't think I've brought this up yet, and I should have from the very beginning, so I apologize.
What's fascinating to me is is Ludwig and Alfred, they're gonna 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 intense
uh intensely competitive industry and he does everything himself.
But again, I think this is just one of the greatest things that you you learn from reading all these biographies of entrepreneurs. Like there's not one path.
And now reading about both of them and their personalities, it's like it's very obvious that they built
Businesses
Authentic to their true self. So
Uh I should have said at the beginning, but keep that in mind. I'm gonna go into what he did for his employees, and at this time there's 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 established a savings banks for his employees.
He regularly added substantial sums from his own profits into the employee bank.
He refused to employ children.
He reduced the workday from the usual fourteen hours to ten and a half hours.
and instituted the first profit sharing plan in Russia.
He also started a series of free educational courses.
For his workers.
Decades.
Before the business world discovered that overall efficiency and productivity are promoted by a generous and concerned attitude towards employees.
Ludwig Nobel was doing it.
And then the description of just this remarkable inventor and entrepreneur and genius that Ludwood was.
There's a million things that he's gonna different things that he's gonna work on.
But I wanna go back to this idea. It's really important. Learning from mistakes is changing your behavior, right?
So he realizes
We need a bunch of just consumer products. We can't just rely on the military.
And so at the time you have carriage drivers. You know, these are
Horse drawn carriages.
The roads in Russia
Shouldn't even be called roats.
It was hilarious. They said
that the coach the the roads were so bad in this area where they are.
that the coach drivers would sit sideways with their lane 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.
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 gonna tie to this idea that the Nobel family
Had excessively high standards.
And as a result, over time they're able to build this incredible brand based on quality.
The Nobel name may meant something.
Later on as they dominate the the Russian industry.
You know, 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,'cause I meant they were the best.
Now I need to the reason I'm also telling you this is because one, he's learning from his father, but two, this is like
Ludwig's MO for everything. He wants to control everything from the invention to the manufacturing to the sales to everything.
And so they invent the wheel, they manufacture it, then they set up all the sales organizations
All over, like all over Russia.
Recruitment of the sales force, establishment of the sales districts.
The administrative and financial direction all were planned and implemented in Ludwig's office. This goes back to he's much more of like a micromanager.
involved in every single detail, like a more like a Steve Jobs and a Walt Disney.
Than his brother Alfred Nobel, which I'll get to.
He was interested in these administrative details as he was in engineering, design, and processes of manufacturing.
A fanatic
For work.
He was constantly in the plant to check on the operation of some machine he had designed.
To supervise insulation.
To oversee repair.
There was no facet of production or distribution or direction that escaped his attention.
He had demonstrated that whatever was produced in the Nobel factory
was worthy of comparison
with any competing product from abroad.
So that is an overview and an introduction into Ludwig. We will return to him in a second. I need to get to Alfred.
'Cause the brothers are constantly involved in each other's businesses.
There's so many
Letters.
Between the brothers. I wish there was some kind of book where you could just see their correspondence back and forth.
considering that the Bolsheviks invade and kinda take over everything, I'm I betcha a lot of that correspondence
was uh destroy, but it's it's just fascinating. So
Let's get to Alfred.
This is such a fascinat family.
There there's twin success. Th the twin success of Ludwig and Alfred are happening at the exact
Same.
Time.
So by the time
that Ludwig's gonna 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 gonna hire tutors, you know, that you guys are gonna study engineering, you're gonna do chemistry, you're gonna learn all these languages.
So his former chemistry tutor tutor
Had told Emmanuel his father.
Okay.
About these Italian experiments with nitroglycerine.
That's gonna be the active ingredient in dynamite when when Alfred uh tames this.
and had recommended it for use in making more powerful land and sea mines.
Emmanuel had no time for such research.
But his son Alfred did.
And this is what I mean about how the family's constantly supporting them.
When
Alfred is doing his demonstrations the first time he successfully detonates what's gonna turn into dynamite.
His brothers Robert and Ludwig are there observing.
And then this next sentence is something that's really important. It's not the first person to invent
Something that gets rich.
It's the first person to match.
that invention and build a phenomenal business around that invention.
Alfred was not the first to experiment with nitroglycerin, but he was the first to combine successful experimentation with a genius for business organization and financial management. I double underline financial management. He is probably the shrewdest person in his entire family.
When it comes to
Managing the money, watching the costs of the business.
He was
Very conservative.
He did not want to expand faster if it meant putting the s survival of his business in
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 a little sneak peek.
one thousand square foot store into a
forty billion dollar company. It starts sixty
Years ago. They did like eight billion dollars of revenue last year.
the inability to build a durable business would have foreclosed that opportunity, that eight billion dollar a year.
Opportunity that's sixty years into the future. That opportunity that most humans
Or incapable
Of seizing.
So now I'm gonna introduce the third brother, Robert. Robert is the older brother.
He is
In this family the underachiever.
Yet a single
Spur of the moment decision changes the trajectory of
The entire family. It couldn't have been easy to be the older brother.
Because the standard's set.
By he's got two younger brothers that are
Complete overachievers. It says the standards set by two such overachieving brothers would be hard for anyone to match.
And so Robert is working for Ludwig. Ludwig is making all these rifles and rifle stock for the Russian military.
He's like, Hey, can you travel to this section over here?
Because they're known to have
phenomenal uh supplies of like walnut wood.
And Ludwig gives Robert twenty five thousand rubles to buy up the whole stock of walnut.
Wood.
Robert is going to travel to this place called Baku.
But Ku is gonna be where they build the j 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.

in Baku along with a small refinery.
So he goes, he's like
I'm not buying your walnut wood.
I want your refinery. His offer was the walnut money.
All twenty five thousand rubles of it, a sudden decision taken without consultation with either Ludwig.
After all, it was Ludwig's money.
Or Alfred.
the family expert 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
So it says his two brothers
looked upon this scheme with as much enthusiasm as they had viewed
Robert's other projects. First it was fireproof bricks, then kerosene, iron.
Glycerin and now petroleum. What next?
But here is one of the most important things in this book.
Robert had an innate talent.
for this opportunity.
And they're gonna target a market full of second rate
Talent.
second rate competition.
And what he realized is like these refineries, these are y 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 front if fact Alfred, who's uh who hired some of the best chemists in the world, said that his brother was a very good chemist.
And so in a short time, Robert was able to suggest improved methods of refining the crude oil that's coming out of this Baku Baku re region in Russia.
To produce higher grade kerosene.
than was the norm for his for the competitive refineries.
And they can combine the f the talents that the family had, the fact that they w could build very sophisticated
Manufacturing
facilities and so very sh 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 be was the best of the hundred and forty refineries crammed in this town of Baku.
Listen to this, going back to this main theme. It was an all Swedish operation.
The main chemist was Swedish.
The engineer in 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
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
uh oil industry that's springing up in Baku. I need to tell you what Baku was like at the beginning.
And wh the the contrast of what Ludwig's gonna impose
Very similar to what you know, Rockefeller did. There's a reason they're called the Russian Rockefellers.
He's you know, he essentially found
This very chaotic
uh brand new industry and imposed order and his 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 is
Can never again be civilized.
Which is the perfect opportunity for someone like Ludwig. The time, the place, the setting were ideal for Ludwig's particular genius.
When Ludwig Nobel entered Baku in the spring of eighteen seventy six,
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 you've you're attacking a market.
full of second rate competition and second rate talent.
Which is exactly what
Ludwig is doing. He has these ideas for other he shares ideas with all the
quote unquote competitors in his field, obviously you're gonna have to have some kind of organization.
Any early oil.
He realized just like Rockefeller did.
And they're just like nope.
Like they're at the very beginning, they don't know what the hell they're doing. They're low they're producing low quality product and they're just not interested in change.
Says others were simply not interested in any new idea.
They had a complete lack of enterprise.
So what what he would do?
is obviously he's not looking around.
Like, oh, wonder if it's 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 they're just not as talented as he is.
The competition then started to build their own pipelines, frequently failing to match Nobel's 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 much f how many other fortunes after this?
Are built off of oil tankers and super tankers.
Like Daniel Ludwig, like Aristotle and Assis. Ludwig is the one that invented the oil tanker, and it's 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 would cum could compete with more traditional sources of fuel.
There had to be a fast, reliable economic means of moving lakes of oil.
The size of this industry's nuts, which I'll get to.
that that 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 mean.
means of moving lakes of oil from the isolated regions where it's readily available
To the heavily populated centers.
Where's in demand.
This invention is going to be later described.
As the most important fact.
In the entire history
of the petroleum industry. That is nuts.
When you think about it, the petroleum industry may be the world's most valuable industry that's ever been created.
So Ludwig argues the facts of his case, very rational person.
The standard oil barrel
Weighs sixty four pounds.
That's twenty percent 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'cause you're not shipping.
empty oil barrels back the other way.
Ludwig's arguments.
Were as logical and persuasive as they seem to him.
failed to sway the opposition.
This is what I mean.
This is just second rate competition.
Why? Because they're just mimic they're just copying. They can they're in they're incapable of independent thought.
There was absolutely no support for the scheme.
It was too great a risk.
Because it had never been done before.
And then his personality very different than Alfred's who's gonna essentially have a technical monopoly.
It says Lugwood make 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 they're small when he starts doing this. And then keep in mind, this book isn't from nineteen seventy six. Okay, so it's even bigger and more developed now.
But the main theme of what I want to tell you.
Is
A good idea. This is a note I thought myself.
A good idea not abandoned.
will always grow larger than expected. And so they talk about the fact that you know
He's his first oil taker smaller.
And then you just realize it's like, Oh, we can keep
getting these bigger and bigger and bigger until
The size of Tinkers 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 gonna read this overview
Of this phenomenal business that Ludwig built.
And a description of Ludwig himself, you'll see why he was my favorite character in this entire book.
Ludwig Nobel's tanker fleet was the most dramatic innovation in the Russian petroleum industry of the eighteen seventies, 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 Docside.
Tankers to carry that product six hundred miles north.
Smaller tank barches for transhipment.
Barges for moving the oil up the mighty river.
Railroad tank cars and barges carrying the oil
From all corn or to all corners of the empire.
Retail distribution centers in every major area of population, a labor force of thousands from field to consumer.
Drilling for oil.
Building barges, fitting pipe,
Refining kerosene, repairing tank cars, and ships.
Peddling the products.
This was
Ludwig Nobel's.
Empire.
Within
The Russian Empire.
He created it in ten 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, and Entire Research and Development Department, Chairman of the Board,
and market analyst and incomparable insatiable
Overachiever.
His deeds in Russia
We're without
Parallel.
Absolutely incredible. You know what also is incredible? Human nature. Human nature is just funny to me.
Even after he's done all this.
He he sh tries to share ideas.
Throughout his industry.
And he always receives and not always.
a alarmingly number amount of times.
negative responses and he said the best thing. He's like, Well
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 his mentality, I've just I 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 is
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.
travelling his own road and he was certainly used to opposition.
Okay, so now I want to go back to this idea I mentioned earlier that I think is
really beneficial. The idea that you the 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 of 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.
'Cause I love this idea. Again, there's no formula. Just do whatever's uh authentic to you.
Self sufficient, independent, with a devotion to work and a reliance on its routine.
The Swedes
demand a high level of order in that work. So they both share this, okay?
A sense of purpose and perspective in their own rational
Civilization.
For the Nobels, their boyhood of poverty strengthened that motivation.
He who does not work need not eat.
declared Ludwig.
And so their father is going to weigh in on what he thought were the
The difference between his sons.
Emmanuel believed that it was Alfred who demonstrated the greatest industry.
But Ludwig the greatest genius.
For Alfred, his rule was never to do myself what another could do better.
Or at any rate as well, he wanted to delegate everything possible.
Alfred Nobel.
Was certain that if you do everything yourself in a very large concern, which concern at this time in history is just a business, okay? In a very large business.
The result will be that nothing will be done properly.
And whoever tries to do it all himself
Will be worn out in body and soul and ruined.
That is Alfred's perspective. Let's go to Ludwig. And Alfred
Alfred was a very like s morose man. I don't know if you'd wanna be like friends with him. Ludwig drew people in he was very charismatic. Ludwig was not a person easily forgotten, even after the briefest encounter.
He was in the words of his closest collaborators a personality in the fullest sense of the word.
He dominated every audience.
He revealed at once an inner clarity of purpose and deep concentration of power.
Alfred preferred
To be aloof from his employees.
Ludwig's home was in front of his factory.
Ludwig spent many hours with his engineers and draftsmen.
His factory foreman and his section chiefs.
I don't think Alfred ever had kids, Ludwig.
Had eighteen.
Eleven of the eighteen survived infancy.
Ludwig was at heart
An optimist.
and hopeful about mankind as hopeful about mankind as he was about his own capabilities and career.
Alfred more pessimistic.
And definitely had a cynical view of his fellow man.
What they had in common was that Ludwig and Alfred both pushed themselves at such a pace
That physical exhaustion probably would have overcome.
Far hardier types.
Alfred is 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 quad quantity of dynamite to release onto the market.
He alone decided which plants in which country should uh 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 fifty seven. We're not there yet. There is going to be this like triarchy.
Is the way I described it.
And maybe I've just been watching too much Game of Thrones, but the triarchy of the Russian oil industry at this time, once they see the success that the Nobel family had.
is standard oil comes in.
And then the Rothschilds.
are also financing and trying to break the Russell's actually finance and develop
uh the second largest what's gonna wind up being the second largest
uh Russian oil company.
And so they're gonna be a major headache for the Nobels.
for the next two generations.
And so this war between them is gonna be known as Europe's second thirty year war.
between standard
It's gonna 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 is in turn is gonna attack uh attract a lot of competition.
And so the one place on the planet at which Rockefeller and Standard are not dominating is in Russia.
And so they have they th there's a series of tax.
But this is a great description of what was happening'cause the the Noba family is producing just so much.
Oil at this point.
In late November, standard oil cut prices. Rockefeller already controlled more than 90% of all American oil exports.
And was the domineering force in all world markets except Russia.
But the pr this is such a great line, this is why I'm reading this section to you.
But the price of monopoly is eternal aggression.
The price of monopoly is eternal aggression.
And when the Americans saw Nobel's sudden and successful invasion of their markets.
They quickly counterattacked.
And then once you understand the scale.
Just mind boggling, brain breaking scale.
Of the Russian at this time.
It makes sense why, you know, Standard Oil and Rockefeller were not gonna ignore them and they were gonna try to fight
This is insane.
Okay, one no bell.
Oil well.
A single one.
Gushed over eleven thousand tons of oil a day.
That is more.
Than the total oil flowing.
from all twenty five thousand 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 two hundred and twenty five feet straight up into the sky.
That stream of oil would then be carried by a wind
A mile and a half away you'd have entire towns
Which would their 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 then another book called Wildcatters about
the the s the first and second oil revolutions in Texas.
And
What I love about reading about oils it it's just
It draws the craziest character. So
There's a guy the six foot
Three inch giant of a peasant, okay?
He worked as a servant in the Baku office of one of the Tsar's local military representatives. He saved some of his meager earnings from his paycheck.
He buys a small vineyard on the outskirts of town.
Under the grapes that he thought he was buying
just happen to be lakes of oil.
By the turn of the century.
That peasant, that giant peasant
became a 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, race horses, and beautiful women.
He would throw parties
That look like
From out of the pages of Arabian Knights.
He would swagger across Europe.
Keeping a large entourage
And then growing enormously fat.
with his movable feast
And it's permanent luxuries.
One of these people that turn from peasant to unbelievably rich.
They spend their money on hilarious things and one of them built this giant palace.
And the beginning it's it's shaped like a dragon, and to get into the palace, you have to actually go through the entrances to dragon's jaws.
I wish they had a picture of it'cause 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. The he liked to work. Ludwig liked to work and he was very proud.
that he was considered one of the very few uh they they considered like the
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.
and at the early age of fifty seven 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 died.
Now Emmanuel's life story is also incredible incredible because he's gonna be one of the wealthiest people in Russia and he's the one that has to dress up as a peasant and leaf.
Okay, that's gonna happen about fifteen years to the future.
But he's also remarkable because if it wasn't for Emmanuel, there'd be no Nobel Prize.
He's the one, Emmanuel's the one. So this is
Ludwig's son.
Alfred Nobel's nephew. He is the one that saves the Nobel prize because
other people in the Nobel family wanted Alfred Nobel's will overturned. They wanted their 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 i is kinda humorous.
'Cause one side of the family does not have the financial security that the other Nobel's 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'd written books or devised some new formula. So
So that obviously made me chuckle.
But it is a manual 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 his 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 other family doing this,
Th the they're they're all s they're all sweets, right?
The Swedish king calls Emmanuel before him, he's like, Hey, even the king opposed this idea.
And Emmanuel refused to back down even from the king. This was the result. The will was validated.
and the Nobel Foundation was established.
It took courage to oppose popular sentiment, to fight his own family, and
To brook arguments with the king.
And then I think we need to move on to one of the main lessons of the book.
Um I think I've understood this because um the son of Cuban immigrants.
And I just cannot fathom.
How my grandfather, who was thirty eight years old,
Uneducated.
Didn't have any money.
Didn't speak English.
Worked in a shoe factory and at a butcher shop.
Understood.
The danger that his family was in when Castro took over?
And moved.
to a country where he didn't know anybody and didn't speak the language.
And so growing up with these stories that you hear over and over again, this is something I talked to Sam Zell about when I had lunch with him, too, because you know, his family escaped the Holocaust.
They got out. I think they were on the last train in Poland.
As somebody that's grown up in America, I think you can have the assumption that, you know, the way things are now is the way things will be forever and you d it's it's
human history just shows is like how fast
things can change. Emmanuel is
The third generation of one of the wealthiest and most respected families
In Russia and he escapes
Hidden.
As a peasant.
People come into the factories and murder
Their employees.
And so now we have an account of what it was like to experience the Bolshevik Revolution, not knowing what was going on. And so there's an executive in the Nobel
Company that kept a diary.
And it goes it's remarkable how fast things change.
The diary lasts for less than two weeks, and I just wanna pull out
A couple lines.
That are spread across several days. They're they are in order.
So it starts Thursday.
Street cars 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.
Saturday.
Police often disguise 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.
In the evening
We do not use any rooms facing the street.
And this is why.
Between nine and ten 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 move back to the safe shores of their neutral country.
Lenin and his Bolsheviks seized power. They wasted no time showing the nation the meaning of totalitarian revolution.
All newspapers but their own were suppressed.
Editors were imprisoned, and the only printed or spoken word permitted was that of the Bolsheviks. Their avalanche of decrees covered every phase of economic, political, spiritual, and intellectual life.
The workers and soldiers demanded great sums of money from the industrialists.
Nobel factories succumbed to the chaos and closed down.
Transportalized.
Factories were nationalized, owners and managers dismissed.
Bank deposits seized.
Prices skyrocketed.
The Tsar and his family were murdered.
The petroleum industry was nationalized.
This is the craest sentence in the book.
A former insane asylum inmate
was named Minister of War and promptly proposed the election of a donkey to the council.
To represent oppressed animals.
An illiterate sailor was placed in charge of the schools.
And a well known pimp.
Was given control.
Of public welfare.
Discipline and routine were replaced by endless series of meetings, decrees, and denunciations.
None of the Nobel chiefs really believed that the danger was more than a passing phenomenon.
And that the Bolsheviks could continue very long in power. This idea that this won't last
Things will go back to normal is a very common
reoccurring belief in history around both wars and revolution.
These are not
Stupid people. And yet they couldn't have been more incorrect.
And they realize this is when they have to get out, or they're gonna be killed. The last Nobels d had departed after three quarters of a century.
The Swedish saga 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 is goes back to the his even his grandfather.
And his father, this relentless optimism that they had in their blood.
Emmanuel had found great pleasure in life, even in exile. He refused.
To be consumed by anger and bitterness.
His few remaining years were not going to be wasted worrying or falling victim to a paralyzing pestilence of hate and frustration.
In Baku, all visual proof of the Nobel name was removed.
The pre Soviet slate wiped clean.
Wrenched from a place in history.
reduced to the category of non-person.
Emmanuel the father.
Ludwig.
Robert and Emmanuel.
The grandson and all those nobles
who struggled and strained to build and create
disappeared into the mist.
Their glory.
Power and honor obliterated.
By those who seized
What they had created.
Their act.
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.
It 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'cause 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
Three hundred.
And fifty nine books down, one thousand to go.
And I'll talk to you again soon.
One of the things I love most about the story that you just heard is the importance of
passing on the knowledge from one generation to the other, that undoubtedly Ludwig and Alfred's
Lives were
changed forever in the lives of their descendants because of what they were learning from their father from the mistakes he made in business.
Two
the really smart decisions he made and the way he educated his sons. That transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next has been going on for as long as we've had language, probably before we've had language. And
It's one of my obsessions with
making this podcast. I think the idea of all this reading and research that I'm doing.
This this weird intense desire that I have to collect and distill the knowledge of history space entrepreneurs.
And then record what I'm learning through that process.
make that into the podcast and then push that to the new, to to 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
you know, in many cases four, five, six, seven decade long careers that these entrepreneurs have. And so if you're gonna spend a lot of time learning from history entrepreneurs and listening to this podcast, I've also made a tool
To make sure that you never forget the lessons.
I actually made this tool for myself to to make sure that I never forget the lessons so 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's founders' notes.
And even before it was something that was publicly available, it let me tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs because
For the last six years, I've been putting all of my notes and highlights for everything that I read for this podcast.
Into this giant searchable database.
That app that I was using to do this is called ReadWise. And so I know the founders of ReadWise. And so I talked to them and I was like, hey, I get a lot of requests that people actually want access to all my notes and highlights.
Can we team up and actually build a tool so we can externalize what I see to everybody else? And so even if you didn't know about this tool, you've heard me use it over and over again on the podcast.
In this episode, you heard me pull up
Past things said.
In Alfred Nobel's biography. I was using 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. And 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.
This feature is gonna show you how I use founders notes and is also gonna push ideas from history squash entrepreneurs directly into your brain quickly. And that feature is called Sage Advice, which is a private
podcast fee 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 by uh two autobiographies of James Dyson. You know, it's fifty, sixty, seventy hours of reading.
Countless hours of inputting the notes and all those highlights into founders' notes. And so what I do is I go back and reread every single note and highlight from every single book that I read on an individual. In this case it was James Dyson.
And then there's also an AI assistant that lives inside of Founders Notes called Sage.

questions about James Dicing because Sage will read all my notes and highlights and transcripts from every single episode and then use all that reading to

you know, how did James Dyson think about what was his most important idea? How do you think about marketing, uh things like that.
And then I took all that research and composed it into a single document and distilled that down to what I think are the most powerful ideas.
from James Dyson's fifty year career. So you take a fifty year career
sixty hours of reading and I distilled that down into an episode that that you can listen to in twelve minutes.
All of the episodes I make on this feed are going to be, you know, 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 idea say fifteen, twenty, ten, whatever the number is.
The most important ideas over their entire career.
Ruthlessly edit down to ten minutes, twelve minutes, whatever case case is.
As long as that it's that length, you're gonna be able to listen to that over and over again. So it ceases becoming real uh a podcast.
And it really is just a tool. It's gonna s be out 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 case entrepreneurs when you need it, on demand.
Make sure you subscribe.
At FoundersNotes.com
That is founders with an S.
Just like the p podcast.
Founders notes.
Dot com.
Thank you for the support. Thank you for listening and I'll talk to you again soon.