#316 Bugatti

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/85b98537647a7af3

If there was a prototype operation for what Enzo Ferrari envisioned.
It had to be what
The legendary Itori Bugatti built.
In Molsheim.
This part artist.
Part engineer, part entrepreneur, part sculptor.
had created an automotive fiefdom in a tiny village in Alce Lorraine, France.
The Bugatti estate included a small, elegant inn for the entertainment of customers.
A stable of thoroughbred horses.
And the factory itself.
Which was a series of low buildings set among landscaped gardens with a trout stream meandering through the factory machinery.
Bugatti was from Milan.
Born into a family of artists.
The boss, as he was known, was generally to be found conducting business
Dressed in riding breeches.
Boots.
And a yellow coat.
His automobiles were and remain a stunning combination of industrial aesthetics.
And the jewelers art.
As if Faberger had somehow been able to motorize an ache.
They were simple.
Flawlessly fabricated and reliable.
Bugatti was just one of a bevy of colorful eccentrics.
Dissolute nobles.
Playboys, dreaming commoners, and hard-eyed egomaniacs who populated the world of European motorsport in the 1930s.
He certainly stood above the rest in terms of lifestyle.
A feudal barony had been created around the spidery machines that he manufactured in limited quantities and sold only to those he personally deemed worthy.
By contrast, Enzo Ferrari at the time was still a drab, simple journeyman laboring in a small garage in an Italian backwater.
But the example that Bugatti was setting for Ferrari did not escape him.
Bugatti was a prototype for success.
He was manufacturing cars for the very wealthy.
And fielding his own team of professional race car drivers.
Mobs of people were flocking to Molsheim to have their Bugattis anointed by the master himself.
Surely if Bugatti could succeed at this, a similar concept could be developed.
by Enzo Ferrari.
That was an excerpt not from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, but a book that I read originally back on episode two twenty. It's called Enzo Ferrari, The Man and the Machine, and it was written by Brock.
Yates.
But that was the excerpt that originally got me interested in reading a biography of Bugatti.
Up until last week I had failed to find one.
There is a founders listener by the name of Cameron Priest who's probably sent me dozens.
I don't even know, maybe fifty excellent
hard to find biography recommendations over the years, and he was the one that made me aware of the book that I'm actually holding in my hand, which is called The Bugatti Story. And it was written by Bugatti's daughter, Laeb Bugatti.
And this is the perfect book.
For Founders Podcast. It was originally published.
Very hard to find. It's originally published in nineteen sixty seven.
The copy that I'm holding in my hand
was actually somebody's Easter gift in nineteen seventy two. You can still see the note.
And I can tell you right up front, this is a book that I'm gonna wind up reading again. I'm gonna make more episodes on the future.
I absolutely loved I spent the last eight days going over the book. I could spent another week reading and just rereading certain parts of this book.
It is perfect. I feel like I've stumbled upon some kind of like hidden treasure.
Okay, so I wanna start with the foreword where his daughter is talking about like why she decided to write the book. This book was written in response to the long felt desire of the Bugatti family to have a full and objective account
of the life and work of Vitori Bugatti.
And one of the things I like most about the book is the fact that towards the end of his life Bugatti was uh
Very sick.
A few months before he died, he started to try to write his autobiography. It was never published.
But his daughter had a copy and so there's large chunks.
of his autobiography in this book. So it's like
Bugatti ta speaking directly to you and I almost eighty years after he died.
So I wanna start in the preface of this book. It was actually written by an engineer who worked with
uh Bugatti. So
An idea that you and I have talked about over and over again, there's always a blueprint.
all of the founders that were studying, they were inspired by founders or scientists or inventors or explorers that came before them.
Obviously from the excerpt of Enzo Ferrari's biography, we see that in large part the blueprint for Ferrari was Bugatti.
And so these observations about Bugatti the man made by the engineer that worked with him.
You can clearly see why somebody like Enzo Ferrari would want to pattern much of his career after Bugatti.
And so he says car manufacturers at this time
Looked upon their products
As parts of themselves.
Bugatti was one of the last car manufacturers to keep the flag of the artistically built car flying high.
When the mass produced car invaded the scene.
Bugatti maintained that quality production depended upon a small number of skilled workers.
And a small output.
His character was too strong to change to new methods. So what they're talking about here is this is uh the reason this came to mind is because
And so Ferrari.
uh he has this famous exchange with henry ford the second so that is henry for
grandson who was running Ford Motor Company in like the nineteen fifties when this is happening.
and Ford Motor Company had attempted to buy Ferrari and Henry Ford the second and Enzo Ferrari get into this argument.
And Ferrari says that you make ugly little cars in an ugly factory.
Ferrari like Bugatti before him were still hand building.
His cars.
In fact, in that book that the Ford versus Ferrari movie that came out a few years ago.
It's actually based on this book called Go Like Hell, which I also did a uh podcast on.
There's this great line.
that talked about how the contrast between the cars that the Ford uh factory was producing and then these like hand built cars.
that Ferrari was making at the time.
And so it says nothing like a Ferrari had ever graced American roads. They were cars built by Italian artisans, every detail down to the steering wheel handcrafted using some of the same methods used to make Roman suits of armor.
and the royal carriages of the ancient kingdom.
And so this idea of cutting against the bias to use the term that Balenciaga used uh last week.
You have the like the trends within your industry that everybody else is adopting copying.
Bugatti was like Balenciaga, Bugatti was like Ferrari, he would constantly cut.
Against the bias.
So says he was uh he's too strong to change to do to new methods.
as other car manufacturers resigned themselves to doing. So they're talking about changing from these this like an artisan f uh handmade factory to
Mass reduction.
Bugatti had no interest in that at all.
And he taught
all of his employees to adopt this mindset as well.
By his training Bugatti raised his workmen.
to the love of artisan artisans and craftsmen.
These two words evoke his own personality. He was an artist and a craftsman.
He always insisted that his engineers and technicians should never ignore
the promptings of their intuition.
I was a young engineer at the time, and I felt under the spell of his charm and his singleness of purpose.
To the end of his days he remained a figure of another age, an age in which the conveyor belt
Had not yet eliminated craftsmanship.
And when individual imagination could have free reign.
And then we get to the first excerpt from his unpublished
autobiography where he says in order to explain the strange development of my career
I must first describe my environment during my childhood.
And what my life was like as a youth.
And so the influence of his father, Carlo.
is very fascinating to me. It's gonna go on for several pages.
But
I w I wanna give you what I think are the most important parts. So he he comes from a a f a family full of artists.
They were pretty well off. His grandfather was a famous architect and a sculptor.
His dad
was an acclaimed jewelry and furniture designer and he also painted and and sculpted as well.
R was extremely important in their family.
It we can see this because they named uh Bugatti's younger brother Rembrandt, and he's gonna be a a famous artist in his own right.
But there was just one line that jumped out on me when I was reading through this about his early childhood.
And that his dad would s would tell him that art could not be learned.
that if you were going to be an artist, it would be an innate skill, it would be something that came completely natural to you. And if you didn't have it,
You're wasting your time.
The interesting
thing to me behind that statement is the fact that that then sent Bugatti on this search for one of my naturally inclined
and talented at doing.
And Bugatti, like Henry Ford.
just stumbled upon the fact that they had a gifted mind for mechanics and engineering.
without any kind of training at all.
And discovering this also came from advice that he got from his father. So
His father told both of his son that you should work with your hands.
And you can do whatever you want. You just cannot be mediocre.
And so when he's really young, he's like fifteen or sixteen years old at the time.
He winds up trying out this thing called a motor tricycle. So it's just what it sounds. It's a tricycle with a motor on it.
And this is the first time he realizes he has some kind of innate talent here.
In a short while by just looking at the machine I had grasped all the intricacies
Of its mechanism. My father attached great importance to his two sons being able to work with their hands.
And so Bugatti wrote that even in establishments of higher education, manual work
would be of great value to those who are choosing a career.
It is r a relaxation, and at the same time, it exercises your muscles and your brain.
And so a young, like high school age Bugatti, we're talking like late eighteen nineties is where we are in the story, right?
He discovers okay, wait, he's at the right place, the right time, he's the right person with the right set of skills.
He says it was a time when people were awakening to the possibilities of self propelled road vehicles. And I was immediately fascinated by these new machines.
None of the people who were working on these road vehicles at the time was in fact motivated by thoughts of commercial gain.
listen to the language that he uses to describe the work that he was doing at this time.
It was an aspiration to greater freedom.
To an emancipation from the ties which bound man to the earth.
And it's at this point where he realizes, Oh, this is going to be my art form.
Since he threw himself into this entirely new kind of art.
Where so much was still to be invented.
For Bugatti, the main attraction of h was having something to create, to model, to perfect, and the joy of seeing the machine come into being.
As a work of sculpture did in the hands of his father or his brother.
This revelation changed the whole course of his life.
And there's a factory producing high quality motor tricycles.
Right in Milan. This is where Milan is where Bugatti and his family are living at this point.
And so at seventeen years old, he becomes an apprentice in this factory that's producing these motor tricycles.
And so he starts with this initial passion, this passion of mechanics, this p uh this passion of engineering.
And then it's going to join with another lifelong passion.
that he has, and that is for racing.
Initially it is for motor tricycle racing, then it's obviously gonna be for car racing.
So by time before he's even eighteen, he makes his own model of a motor tricycle.
Then he takes it from Milan.
All the way to this race in France.
And so before I get to why racing was so important to him even when he was seventeen, it's important to him until he dies.
I gotta tell you more about his per personality. This guy's got like Kanye West levels of self confidence.
And so before he enters this race, he's on record saying, even before the start, I was sure that I'd win.
And to put in the context why that's so astounding is this next sentence.
This tricar was the first that he had ever made.
I wanna get to this part why racing was so important though. It was it was fascinating because
The way that Bugatti thought about racing.
And uh I talked about this, you know, I I did like a thirteen part series years ago.
on all of these like early American
Automobile company founders.
It was still true in the late eighteen hundreds, just like it was true in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties in in Europe.
Racing is the best distribution channel f if you're a a car manufacturer.
You win a race, you have a line of customers out the door that wanna buy that car.
But aside from the benefit of the business.
Bugatti liked it.
Because it was able racing was the only true objective way.
To prove to himself.
How good his designs were.
And so this is a little bit about how he looked at it here. His passion
For racing was at once aroused, and this was a passion that he was never to lose.
І вас на сомач фото рейс і цев.
It was because it was a natural complement.
Of his passion for mechanics.
Racing constituted the testing bench without which all mechanical inventions remain abstractions.
It alone could decide all problems and was the indispensable true
Test.
And so the fact that this passion and obsession
Right, grabbed him from the very beginning.
refused to let him go. He didn't want it to want
It to let him go either is one of the things I most admire.
about Bugatti and why I said earlier this is a book that I plan on reading and rereading many times in the future and hopefully making many more episodes about.
And it's because of how he describes this. He's you know seventeen, eighteen years old at the time.
Essentially he just wants to spend as much time as possible learning everything he can about his obsession.
Uh, meanwhile I was studying the different types of engines, examining their qualities, and discussing their defects. I determined to build a car of my own.
I had realized by then that I was completely taken by mechanics in which I could clearly see so many imperfections.
My ideas gave me no rest.
And so this is like the first hint, but the book talks about it later on that, you know, he kept very regular hours. There's really no separation between him his life and his work. I mean
We even talk about the the way he's set up.
His house and his family are is literally on the grounds of his factory. That is like the physical manifestation of for what is happening in his mind.
Uh he would see the perfect car in his imagination, but he lacked the material to build it. No one was prepared to invest in his capabilities as a car builder.
And so he has to get these ideas out of his head. This is now something that he talks about
Uh he he'll do he'll work this way for the rest of his career and he he would recommend other people doing it as well.
He put everything
Down on paper.
He began to put down all of his ideas down on paper, in drawings and in designs. All the ideas that his head was full of. He spent whole days designing his car in every detail.
He talked about it with such enthusiasm that it seemed to be speeding along at forty miles an hour, even then.
I sometimes feared that it might turn his mind.
So this idea where
He sees the perfect car that he wants to build in his mind.
Right. It it comes from his imagination first.
He has to get it out. So his version of a prototype is like drawing it out on paper, and then he uses this paper to go and try to raise financing. So
This is very similar. I talked about this before. There is this legendary meeting.
That takes place between Steve Jobs when he was like in his twenties and Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid, when he was like in his seventies. This is from the book Instant, the story of Polaroid that I've done multiple times.
And it it talks about
The conversation that a young Steve Jobs and an older Edwin Land are having. He says the two inventors describe to each other a singular experience. Each had imagined a new
A perfect new product whole
Already manufactured and sitting before him.
And then spend years prodding executives.
Engineers and factories to create it with as few compromises as possible. That is exactly
What happened with Bugatti?
So eventually he finds two very wealthy brothers. In fact, he they invite them out.
Ah, they invite Bugatti to their huge estate.
And
This is the first time uh another passion. Bugatti is like passion personified.
Another passion of his
As you could probably guess.
The fact that he conducted business dressed as he was riding horses.
was horse riding. And it's actually at this estate from these two brothers that are gonna wind up uh funding this initial prototype.
uh that Bugatti's about to build when I think he's like eighteen.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure he's eighteen here.
He learns to love horses and horse riding.
on a visit from their estate.
But these two brothers meet him and they're like, Oh, this guy's a genius.
Uh, they recognize that once a hidden brilliance in him.
And we're prepared to go into partnership with him to enable him to build his car.
And then we get the first indication of something that he does for the rest of his life. He's a micromanager. He's involved in every single step of the process. He supervises everything.
Uh, in many cases he can do every single
There's a there's a line.
uh at the very end of the book in the appendix.
Uh let me get to it real quick,'cause I
I might not bring it up later.
And it reminded me of James Cameron and Christopher Nolan, who have just spent a bunch of time
uh studying and in the minds of.
And this is about Bugatti. He says he can do any job in the factory as well as or better than the most skilled mechanic. I'm not kidding.
This is crazy. This book is
What was it? Sixty years old, seven no longer now. Seventy something years old, w however old the book is.
That line.
There's a line just like that in the James Cameron biography. There's a line just like that in the Christopher Nolan biography.
It is spooky.
How you and I are keep studying the same personality in different bodies.
alive at different times, working in different industries. It's so crazy to me.
So let me get to this point.
He would let no one but himself put the car through its paces. It was his from start to finish. He had been responsible for.
or had supervised the whole construction. He is nineteen.
From the drawing board to the final assembly.
So then he goes, this goes back to this like
Kanye West level of of confidence that is very beneficial.
He goes and enters this into the very first International Motor Show.
Which was being organized in Milan. This is the year nineteen o one.
And so it's a car show based on like obviously how the cars look, but actually how it performs too. So then he does he takes it like around this track.
And of course he drives it himself.
And yet again we see more evidence that he was right, that he had stumbled upon
This innate talent.
Because he wins it.
He won first place.
At the first ever international motor show.
And so this idea that you have this gifted person, he's a perfectionist by nature, he wants to control everything. He's completely obsessed, he's keeping irregular hours, he's giving everything to this like new craft.
By the time he's nineteen
So he wins the the international motor show, right? Then there's this car manufacturing firm
In
Germany. It's called D Dietrich.
They wind up offering Bugatti a contract.

His car
for them and he's gonna get paid a royalty fee. So he this is the first time he moves from
Italy.
Two
Germany.
And so because his daughter had access to his unfinished
autobiography we see how he writes about how he felt about his very first contract.
I mean he had a bunch of success up until this point, but this is like the the the the turning point in his life.
And so he talks he says uh I received twenty five or thirty thousand francs.
When I handed over my designs, I was happy to have money to spend on, which I had earned myself.
I drew satisfaction from being able to support myself without anyone's help.
and I found satisfaction in receiving a sum of money for a completed job of work
Which had given me pleasure to think about and to do.
Which had been fun to do. He has work that feels like play.
And we see again the sustained level of confidence. He's nineteen and he's like, listen.
I want to do something new. I want to do something that no one else has done before.
And this is the first time he mentions patents, but I think
Think he winds up dying with like nine hundred patents or some it's a crazy number. So he says my patents result from my own work and I'm happy when I can improve on something already existing and arrive at a point which others have not yet reached.
At one point I had been granted more patents in Germany than anyone else.
And then he talks about the importance'cause remember he comes from a family of artists
He had studied intently Leonardo da Vinci.
And he realizes that
the way Da Vinci approached his work. There's ideas in the way Da Vinci approached his work.
that Bugatti can use in his own and the fact that he knew this at nineteen's incredible.
the the importance of being influenced by, you know, the great work and the great people that did that work that came before him.
And so one thing you learn is it's like oh
If you can you can develop your like powers of observation.
That is like a meta skill that can be used for anything. So he says powers of observation are indispensable.
In order to produce anything.
Leonardo da Vinci had wonderful powers of observation.
He could reproduce with exactitude something which today would take a magnifying glass to do.
He could catch movement as the camera does now.
And at the same time, he gave the illusion of life to his sketches.
Something that photography is unable to do.
It is by this observation that one can penetrate into the nature of things.
If a man like Leonardo became a military engineer, he would have been an expert at it.
His advice on any subject would be invaluable and his ideas on the matter would be highly original.
An artist of this class
Misses nothing.
The smallest detail invisible to ordinary people
І нафтовим то фикс із субєкт.
This habit of observation leads to the heart of the matter.
in all branches of human activity.
Faster progress.
This is wild. Faster progress would be made in all fields if conceit did not cause us to forget or disdain the work done by others before us.
There is a tendency to believe that nothing worthy of note has been done in the past.
And this has an unfortunate bearing on our judgment.
Thus the present trend
Toward mediocrity.
The improvements I have made to mechanical constructions have resulted
From such habits of observation.
And so he talks about that starts in your mind first. I often think that one should not put pencil to paper before having visualized
What one wants to do from all angles. Over the years, and after much experience in drawing quite novel and complicated things in pocketbooks.
Ах, ком тюворк.
By a series of mental images.
And the drawing board enables me to give effect to those images, a technician.
Who cannot put down his ideas on paper.
Is that a great
Disadvantage.
To sum this up, the powers of observation.
And a great facility with the pencil.
Ar the two attributes that matter the most.
And so before he sets up Bugatti
as like his own independent company. He is going to design cars for other car manufacturers and then he gets paid
per carp manufactured on like a royalty basis.
And so he does this two or three times, but the way he sets this up.
It really tells you like how important independent independence
Like maintaining his independence.
Was
Before I get there though.
This is what finding your life's work sounds like.
I was hypnotized, drawn more and more to the mechanics of motors.
These exciting problems had me completely under their sway.
And so began for me the hard uphill task.
The thankless labor of constructing
And destroying and beginning again without a break or rest.
En forдейs monts
Years even until success finally rewarded all my efforts.
And so he has a little team. There's like three people in the the workshop putting together the car.
three people in like the design shop.
Putting it together.
They don't have enough money to manufacture it themselves, so he does another deal with this company called Dutts. This is Doots gas engine.
Uh it's also in Germany.
So they're gonna manufacture the car, but they also make Bugatti the manager of the production department.
In his contract, though.
He make sure.
He's always retaining his independentness.
And so this is what he says. It was the first time that I had agreed to take an appointment with a firm, meaning an actual day job.
While being compensated
by the royalties I received on the production of my car under their license.
I had retained this is the important part.
I had retained the right to work independently on any other project.
In which I might be interested.
He did not want to be relegated to the servitude of employee.
He said so much himself, he had felt fettered.
By his appointment in the service of others.
And so that clause was the most important clause in the entire contract because what he's doing is in his spare time.
He is going to build the very first Bugatti.
So Bugatti decided to build it himself in his spare time. He worked patiently for many months
Gradually assembling it in the cellar of the house where he was living.
When it was complete, he gave it a name which would later become renowned.
Persang it means thoroughbred animal in French.
And so this is the beginning of the business. This is the beginning of him building his own world within the world. This is the birth of Mol Shame.
where the Bugatti factory is still to this day.
So he goes to a banker with his plans.
They give him the funding to start his business. And this is his daughter describing this point in their life. At Christmas, we all moved into the new house.
We were to live for the next thirty years.
So Bugatti's around thirty years old at the time and a description of
The early days of his company really tells you a lot about what was important to him.
says his cars were hand built.
each an expression
Of the creator's personality.
He retained his independent outlook.
His freedom to invent, and his urge for perfection down to the smallest details.
He took little notice of trends among rival car manufacturers. That reminded me of
Uh last week with Balenciaga was like this with other fashion designers.
And Bugatti paid no more attention to the presumed taste.
Of the public.
That sounds like Steve Jobs.
Is essentially what they're saying there is he relied on his own taste.
He built the product that he wanted to use.
And you're gonna see another similarity with
Uh, Balenciaga, I think uh last week it said like
Dior Christian Dior made.
dresses for the rich and Balenciaga made dresses for the wealthy.
right from the very beginning. Bugatti with his actions is essentially saying, Hey, uh I make expensive shit.
I only want to make high quality products.
And I'm aiming for the top.
And he did this from day one. Bugatti made no attempt to compete with the low priced popular models already on the market.
The price of the Bugatti was higher than any other car of equal horsepower.
The reason is that this new production stands in a class by itself.
And so they start out making like five
Ten cars a year. This is not a large production.
Within two years his business is already fantastically successful.
And this is gonna remind us of one of my favorite ideas that David Ogie noticed about people that get to the top of their profession.
And he summarized it with the good ones no more.
The public began to take notice of this new constructor of cars. It's obviously Bugatti.
whose business was only two years old.
And that he knew more about the subject than the big firms whose fame had spread around the world.
And so before I move on, I just want to pause here.
Like remember a few pages back where he's like
I felt hypnotized.
I was drawn to this, I'm under the sway.
You fast forward two years later and he knows more about it than anybody else.
It reminded me of if you think about the main
Like guiding s like North Star.
to Paul Graham's uh essay on I think episode three fourteen.
How to do great work.
Essentially he's just telling us over and over again, what are you intensely interested in? What are you irrationally curious about?
If you're interested and you're not astray, just follow that.
And the reason I think he gives that advice is because we see this the when you do that, you wind up like Bugatti.
You know more about the things that you're intensely interested and curious about than anyone else in the world.
And so this idea that he starts out, he's like, Listen
I make the best products in the world.
They're gonna be expensive, but you're not gonna find anything better than them.
This is where these cult like followings.
Start.
To use the terminology of Steve Jobs, Bugatti believed that he made insanely great products.
And what happens?
Yeah.
you develop a cult like following and then those believers of Bugatti go out and recruit more believers of Bugatti.
And so this guy named Doctor Espinette
winds up buying a Bugatti, he's so obsessed with it, he tells everybody about it.
He tells he just happens to be really good friends with this world famous pioneer.
Aviator, this guy named Roland Garros, who's gonna wind up becoming a really close friend.
Of
uh Bugattis.
And so Garros goes to check out. It's like this guy, my friend Doctor Espinette won't shut up about this guy. Let me go
to Moshe.
And see what's going on. So he says he went to visit Bugatti. His first impression was one of surprise. When he entered the gate, instead of the usual coming and goings of a car factory,
He saw Bugatti dressed for writing.
Walking a fine pony around the courtyard.
And this actually enhances his work. This is really, really important.
Bugatti loved writing and kept a number of thoroughbreds.
Many of his ideas and solutions of mechanical problems came to him while writing.
It was a means of relaxation. He would interrupt his writing and go to the workshops when the idea popped in his mind, right?
In writing breaches.
Uh, if he had suddenly found the reason for a car part not working properly, this is one of my favorite ideas.
From David Og V's book, Confessions of an Advertising Man. It's this idea that you have to keep open.
The telephone line to your unconscious.
And you see this all the time. Like w why do I d you have ideas
uh like suddenly like you a problem that you're like unconscious or even subconscious mind is like mulling over
you know, it maybe pops up when you're in the shower or you're on a walk or whatever it c whatever the case is.
In Bugari's case.
It's riding his horses.
And so
You see this throughout history. These people talk about the fact that like
These ideas spa to mind when you're doing something else.
And so Og V says, I have developed techniques for keeping open the telephone line to my unconscious in case that disorderly re repository has anything to tell me.
I hear a great deal of music. I take long hot baths.
I garden.
I go into retreat among the Amish. That is not a joke. He actually did that.
I watch birds.
I go for long walks in the country and I take frequent vacations so that my brain can lie fallow.
No golf.
No cocktail parties, no tennis.
No bridge.
No concentration.
Only a bicycle, while thus employed in doing nothing.
I receive a constant stream of telegrams
from my unconscious and these become the raw material for my advertisements.
That same idea is happening exactly where we are in this Bukati book. What I found fascinating is when
Roland Garros, this famous pioneer aviator, is on the visit.
Uh on this visit to the factory, he finds who he he's interested in a car.
What happens? He finds out who just bought this car.
The Duke of Bavaria.
I had just bought the car.
And this Duke just happens to be the brother in law to the king of Belgium. And so it says Garros ordered one right then and there.
And so me and my friends use this word set up all the time. And so the way what a setup is is like
How does where you live and where you work?
And the world you're building for your company and everybody in it, like how does it interact with each other?
Bugatti has one of the best setups at Mol Shame, Mol Shame than anybody I've ever come across. It gets even better.
In addition to having this like English mansion on the property for his family, his workshop.
The stream of trouts, the gardens.
Uh the horses, he also has a landing strip in a meadow.
A lot of the early Bugatti customers was a there was a big overlap between people that wanted super fast cars
And we're also capable of flying, you know, when they're flying planes, like we're talking about like right flyers. This is like nineteen ten, nineteen fifteen kind of planes.
And so they come in
Two Molsheim and they just land right in the meadow next to the factory.
And so between the increased production
The fact that he has he's funding his own racing team, obviously that's where a lot of people are finding us out about his cars and making uh and making orders.
Like between the racing and the increasing in the product production, this is a seven days a week long hours thing. This is how he's building his company.
My small factory acquired great import importance, Spugati said. Production was increasing, the nights were often short, and
But orders were flowing in.
And then we get to the first of many turns.
in Bugatti's life that are outside of his control but can but destroy his business.
There's a paragraph that comes
later in the book, after he dies. He dies relatively young, and I would make the argument that he actually died of a broken heart.
I want to read this paragraph that gives you an overview for what's about to happen in his life.
It says he was a creator and a humanist before he was an industrialist, and then he showed himself to be an astute and wily businessman.
conducting the affairs of his factory with success, despite keen competition, financial difficulties, and the destruction of two wars. This is World War One.
That is gonna take all of the progress that Bugatti's been making. So he's around thirty three years old at this point. He has around two hundred employees, okay?
He's been
working at this since he was about seventeen, and is going to be destroyed.
Then came the war.
World War One and Bugatti's plans for the future had to be shelved.
And it's amazing that he was able to realize that he's in trouble.
And then he has to get out right away. A lot of people would hesitate, it's like I'm I'm gonna lose everything.
And so
His factory now it's in France, but at this point it was considered German territory. So like France and Germany s constantly fighting over
I think you pronounce it like Os Al Saurraine.
I think is what it's called now.
But at this point in nineteen fourteen is in German territory. He's like, Oh, I gotta get the hell out of here. So it says his decision
uh was immediate. Others might have hesitated, weighed things in the balance, consider the importance of what was at stake, but not he.
As soon as mobilization was declared, he decided to close his factory and leave Mol Shame.
With his family.
Giving up the rich prospects of his flourishing business.
And so the book goes into great detail about how like perilous the journey is.
He winds up getting his family out of Germany.
gets him back into Italy. Now this is a crazy thing.
He sneaks back into occupied German territory.
'Cause he has to hide his engines.
Remember this part'cause this is gonna become really important a few years from now.
The factory was later taken over by local authorities, but before then, soon after seeing his family safely to Italy, Bugatti returned for a few days. He buried the engines of three racing cars in the grounds of his state.
These engines, which were his latest constructions,
Were never detected, and he was able to recover them at the end of the war.
And so imagine you're in his shoes, you have I think three kids at the time.
A wife
A successful business.
Essentially his business is gonna be paused for five or six years. He's eventually gonna go back
and reclaim it. He's gonna lose it again in World War Two, which we'll get to.
But what was he doing like what was he doing during World War One?
He's not building cars anymore.
And so we see for the first time that his mechanical genius is universal.
And he does this for his whole life, like he'll make cars, he'll make boats, he'll make airplane engines.
He'll make rail cars.
This guy's a legit genius. So he starts designing
During World War One, he's making airplane engines.
For the Алайс, а специфик фімерики.
I just want to pull out one part'cause it it made me laugh.
Uh this American company, I think this is nineteen sixteen, maybe, around there.
Uh, he's making he's making airplane engines for him. It says Bugatti received a nice fat check.
Less than a week after his first contract with the Americans.
And not being used to such promptness on the part of official departments.
He went to the bank with the check.
And had to ask if it was valid.
And so this is the first time
The book mentions but I need to bring this to your attention'cause it's
I'm obsessed with Bugatti, the fact that the way he built his life, the way he built his business, everything he did, I find him fascinating.
But this is something that also
is extremely important.
This idea that friends greatly enhance
The magnificent
Mysterio Odyssey.
That we call life.
And Bugatti was a good friend. He prioritized it.
I thought this was very fascinating.
An account of Bugatti's life would not be complete without mention of his friendships.
Work was not everything to him.
He opened up
When in the company of a few friends.
He was fortunate enough to enjoy several great friendships.
during the course of his life.
And one of these was Roland Garros, who I'd mentioned, the famous French aviator, the one that would land in in the m in the meadow at uh
uh Bugatti setup, right?
Listen to the the the how deep their friendship was. This is incredible.
It's even more incredible in the fact that there is war raging around around them, right? These are Europeans in nineteen fifteen.
Garos offered Bugatti all the money in his bank account.
About two hundred thousand francs.
It was his whole fortune.
You're helping the war effort.
Garrow said.
Just as I am.
But I know of your difficulties. You have a wife and three children.
I'm a bachelor and I might get killed at the front any day.
Garrison sent Bugatti a f a picture of them together.
To Itor Bugatti, the incomparable artist.
Who alone knows how to give.
Life.
to steal
In admiration and friendship, sign Roland Garros.
This is how crazy this is.
He says, I'm a bachelor and I might get killed at the front line any day. He does get killed.
He is a pilot in World War One and he dies, I think, a year or two after this.
And so the deeper we get into this book, I think you can see why
I had such a
Yeah.
a like a passionate and positive response to Gugati'cause like
There's just so many lessons like he's he can teach us, right? It's like
One, can you find what you're you have a natural aptitude for and a deep curiosity for? This is gonna sound a lot like
I feel it's like
Bugatti's like the the the personification of Paul Graham's essay How to Do Great Work, right? It's like
What do you have a natural aptitude for and a deep curiosity for? Can you work in that environment?
Can you make a commitment to be the best in the world at what you're doing?
Can you care deeply about making truly great work?
And then can you also make room for other humans in your life? It's not just all work all the time. Like
You saw in the way he built his entire life. His kids were in the factory. His son Gene, who is going to die in a car accident.
when he's I think thirty or thirty two. It's it's it's right before
Bugatti's gonna die shortly thereafter.
Like
His kids were involved in the business. His wife was involved in the business from day one.
He creates an inn.
on the property so friends can say, customers can say
He was relentless about building deep friendships inside and outside of his industry and helping them as much as possible.
And then another thing.
This is what I'm about to read to you.
Your entire business was destroyed. You have to start from scratch and Buggy's like All right then
Might as well get to it.
At the end of World War One, this is the state of his business. When Bugatti saw his factory again at the end of nineteen eighteen, only the walls were of views.
What remained of the machinery and the tools was scarcely good for scrap, a completely fresh start.
had to be made, but Bugatti did not hesitate.
And so before the war, he had his own company. He was self-contained. Now he's like, Okay, well, I have to build up everything from scratch. I need a lot of money. I don't have a lot of money. What do I do?
So this is how he financed the rebuilding to finance his business.
He sold the license to produce his engines.
As well as a few of his patents to various
Foreign car manufacturers.
So all these uh they list a bunch of these companies.
He does this in Italy, he does this in England, and he does this in Germany as well.
And then he goes and recruits some of his former employees.
And so then we see this again, cut against the bias inside your industry.
Yeah.
Mass production had grown rapidly over the last four to five years, right?
And so some of his comp quote unquote competitors were now mass producing and making a hundred cars a day.
This was Bugatti's response. Bugatti, true to his standards, took no interest in that aspect of things.
As in the past, he was more concerned.
To create
than to produce.
And this is crazy how good he was.
Member he's picking up almost six years later. Imagine having your business pause like that.
He recovered the three engines that he had buried.
They were just as he had conceived them in nineteen fourteen. The general arrangement of these engines is worth recalling for these cars were to dominate racing in the early nineteen twenties.
Six years later, almost to the day, one of those cars.
was entered for the light car Grand Prix
At Lamon.
And one.
And part of the reason he was able to win is because it goes back to this idea of cutting against
The bias at the time, a theory was generally accepted.
That the heavier the weight of the car, the better that the car would hold the road at high speed. Bugatti, however,
Believed the opposite.
And he proved that he was right.
This lighter car.
Would win the race.
With a lead of nearly twenty minute.
This car was called the Bugatti type ten. Now
I skipped over it earlier, but there's a bunch of examples in the book where he's just got a bunch of controversial innovations, and they're controversial because
Essentially the exact opposite.
Of what everybody else in the industry thought and believed at the time.
So he was the very first person to place the driver and the engine low and towards the back of the car.
And like many things, at the very beginning, uh one of his engineers I worked for him that was written the preface of the book would talk about hey, he he preached to us like follow your in your intuition.
Like you should you should trust in your intu intuition.
The reason that he made this innovation, he instinctively thought that this was going to be better for aerodynamics. There was no way to test this.
It's just something he instinctively believed. Every other car designer at that time believed that that the driver being seated higher was better.
And we all know the result because now all the cars do it like Bugatti had figured out, you know, a hundred years ago.
Now you could say cutting against the bias is kind of a form of
Maybe confidence or even stubbornness.
There's a
a negative side to it. Like what if you're wrong?
And in the case like he's winning a ton of races.
And the races are what's fueling like his sales growth, right? This is in the early nineteen twenties.
Now what was fascinating is he starts to lose a bunch of races.
Because he was stubborn.
He refuses to to add
All of his competitors?
In the industry we're adding blowers. So these are superchargers.
And Bugatti thought that was like vulgar, like almost unnatural, so he he resisted in doing it.
takes him like a few years to realize, hey, I have to do this and then once he does it, like he completely dominates. I think they win like I don't know, like two thousand races or something like that.
But this was fascinating.
And it was Bugatti's description of their sales strategy. All the finest trophies.
were won easily by engaging in every important race without pause.
And so Bugatti, like Ferrari after him, realizes hey, if I just win, if I just focus on winning on the racetrack.
Then the sales will take care of itself. You see this in how they advertise
Is models.
Uh his cars. He knew that racing was the one true means of showing the quality of his cars and enabling him to improve on it.
He was also well aware of the publicity he got from racing, and right from the beginning, his annual catalog proudly listed his successes.
So the beginning of the catalogue is just like here's all the races I won. Boom.
I listen to them.
All his racing and this is why it's important.
All of his racing cars.
Were catalog models available to anyone.
And many amateur drivers were only too ready to purchase them.
And so something that reappears in the career of Bugatti.
is the fact that he was constantly willing to scrap what he's working on to build something new.
He would not rest on his laurels. And so what I would think about
is what he's about to tell you and I here is like when you go do something great
Just go off and do something.
Oh, that's great.
Don't stop to like celebrate the win or like admire what you did. Just keep going. Like you you just have to keep pushing progress forward.
And so he wrote, It is tempting to stop when you've made some progress.
But if you want to follow it up, you can't stop.
That is why I shall go on, as long as I'm able to.
I know you can't always win.
But when I'm beaten, I shall know why and I'll beat my rival later on.
When a car manufacturer builds a racing car
He always employs the best possible.
The best workmen.
The best engineers.
All the best that his firm can provide.
Nothing is too good.
Nothing is too dear.
You've got to win.
Whatever the cost.
You work day and night.
If necessary.
Okay, so I wanna spend more time going over Bugatti's setup or what it was like
And more shine.
And I think this is important because it's gonna be a reflection of him, of the man, of his personality.
Visitors came expecting to find a factory.
And none was able to hide their astonishment.
There was a factory, obviously, and even one of the most perfect of its kind, for Bugatti sometimes found that the machines and tools that he needed were not available.
And so he designed and made them himself, of course he did.
However, Molsheim was more than that.
It was a house and a family.
It was a little world.
Where the attitude to things and the relations between people
We're out of the ordinary.
A customer came to take delivery of a car.

That he had suddenly discovered in this small corner.
O Alce
This little fiefdom
Of an Italian
Of the Renaissance.
Who had strayed into the industrial age.
And so this is what a typical experience would be like for a customer.
On arriving, all I could see at first were some stables close to a country house.
The stables were being used as a workshop, and above them in a loft.
Was an office reached only by a short ladder.
There sat the accountant.
I was explaining the purpose of my visit to him when Bugatti came up.
He was wearing a colonel helmet and a well fitting cream silk jacket.
He took me to see the workshop.
Everything there except for the cylinders, which were made for him somewhere else.
Everything was produced in his workshop.
And this is one of the most important lines in this entire section, which this section goes on for quite a for quite a while.
The personality of its founder.
Continue to show in even the smallest details.
and unexpected ways. They start calling this the Mol shim.
Touch.
What a surprise you come across a hamlet of long low buildings with brass bound doors of polished oak and with cement path between them.
Also clean and tidy.
Not a loose stone or a spot of dust in it.
Anywhere.
A car factory, surely not, and yet it is.
You get the feeling of being suddenly confronted with something unusual and beyond classification.
The explanation of the shining cleanliness of all the doors in the various workshops.
was quite simple.
An employee one employee did nothing else but keep the paths and the workshops floan.
And the door plates.
From which all oily marks left by mechanics.
were wiped away immediately.
When they were made.
That is also something that pops up over and over again the book, that he insisted on everything being organized and clean.
Twenty four seven to the point where he
Somebody's job.
was to make sure the rocks were off the pathway.
And if there was a smidge of oil on a door as a mechanic left, that had to be wiped away immediately.
And so before moving on, I want to go back to this one line, the personality of its founder continued to show in even the smallest details.
And unexpected ways.
The best way to think about this.
Is a line that I read in one of the 10 or 15 books, whatever I've read on Steve Jobs. It says Steve made and remade Apple in his own image. Apple is Steve Jobs with 10,000 lives.
You could say the same thing about Bugatti and another example of his very unusual personality.
Bugatti once received a bill for electricity, accompanied by a letter written in terms which he considered to be discourteous.
He said as much to the manager, adding
Come and see me in a year's time. I shall have something interesting to show you.
A year later, he had built his own electricity generating plant.
There was nothing at Molshin which did not bear the mark of one man.
His taste.
His wishes
And even his moods.
This is one of my favorite parts of the book because it just goes on and on, page after page, and I finally just wrote
I finally just wrote this note to myself.
All of this is excellent. I love everything about Bugatti. He was always well dressed.
and wore his clothes with a quiet elegance
Whether at the factory or in town.
He had a style and manner all of his own.
He was an optimist.
He had a remarkable gift.
of observation which spiced his conversation.
He was genial and generous in every respect.
And his egoism only showed if his habits were threatened.
He was excitable at times, young and lively in spirit.
Tackling problems with enthusiasm.
He liked beauty in all things.
Cost and financial return were secondary matters.
He made plenty of money.
Nevertheless, and almost without noticing it.
Bugatti used to say that work was never an effort to him.
that he built up his business while enjoying himself.
He was not envious of others.
Like some English squire, his personal interests were in his estate.
And his horses and a boat or two.
High society held little interest for him.
And when obliged to attend social functions
He did so without real pleasure.
The truth was that his work was his life, and in matters of work he had a horror of utopias.
And of mad schemes.
His insistence on the job being done properly, down to the smallest detail, and for any ordinary task, such as shoeing a horse,
was evident of his concern for exactitude.
And this made a great impression.
On all those who lived and worked within his orbit.
His brain was always at work.
He had no fixed hours.
He sometimes spent many hours in the drawing office at night.
For he found that the silence helped him to work out problems which had cropped up during the day.
His starting point.
Was always
To create the most extraordinary things.
And so then I want to get into more of how Bugatti worked and why this reminded me of an excerpt from James Dyson's first autobiography.
So said Bugatti had no technical education and possessed no diplomas.
He had learned as he went along.
From experience and a natural mechanical ability.
And so then he tells a story about
working as apprentice when he was eighteen.
And realizing hey, the best way to learn something is to try to take it apart and try to figure it out.
So he comes across this engine and he says, I dismantle it all and I said to myself, What a mess this is. I must put this right.
And that's how I began to understand internal combustion engines.
And so this race car driver is one of the first uh customers he ever had, purchased one of the first uh
cars that we've got ever produced.
And he says I was struck by the simplicity and directness of the mechanical solutions.
In technical schools, apprentices were taught that the outlet valves of an engine had to be wider than the inlet valves because the volume of gas was greater.
Bugatti was the first to do just the opposite.
Making his inlet valves the larger, which is what everyone does now.
And so in his autobiography called Against the Odds.
James Dyson tells a story where he's a young man apprenticing
with an older engineer, this guy named Jeremiah Fry, who was one of the biggest influences on James's career.
And this is what he learned.
Here was a man who was not interested in experts.
He meets me, he thinks to himself, here's a bright kid.
Let's employ him.
And he does.
He risked little with the possibility of gaining much.
It is exactly what I do now at Dyson.
This attitude of employment extended to Fry's thinking in everything, including engineering.
He did not when an idea came to him.
sit down and process it through pages of calculations.
He didn't argue it through with anyone.
He just went out and built it.
When I came to him and I say hey I have an idea.
He would offer no more advice than to say
You know where the workshop is, go and do it.
But I would say but we need to weld this thing.
Well then get a welder and weld it.
When I asked if we shouldn't talk to someone about, say, hydrodynamics, he would say
The lake is down there, the land rover is over there.
Take a plank of wood down to the lake, tow it behind the boat and look at what happens.
Now this was not a modus operandi that I had encountered before.
College had taught me to revere experts and expertise.
Fry ridiculed all that.
As far as he was concerned, with enthusiasm and intelligence anything was possible.
It was mind blowing.
No research, no workings, no preliminary sketches. If it didn't work one way, he would just try it another way until it did.
The root principle was to do things your way. It didn't matter how other people did it.
As long as it works and it is exciting, people will follow you.
And so those last few years
at Molsheim were really the peak of his life.
And over the next ten years he has to endure
Unbelievable tragedy.
Until he dies.
The first thing to fall is the economy.
the Great Depression causes Bugatti to have to look for other ways to make money.
So he has to actually travel away from the place that he wants to be most.
'Cause he's gonna be designing
uh rail rail cars for the French government.
In nineteen thirty one, faced with a precarious financial situation, Bugatti had to turn to rail locomotion.
The development and production of these rail cars resulted in Bugatti being absent
From Molchim for long periods, for he was obliged to maintain close contact with the engineers and administrators of the French railways.
His son Jean thus became gradually responsible for
for the Mol shim factory.
So his son Jean was supposed to be his successor.
The management of the Molchine Factory passed from father to son.
So the depression causes a terrible financial situation.
He then is forced to spend time away from where he wants to be. His son has to run the factory. Then there's a bunch of labor unrest spreading throughout France.
All these other factories were being shut down completely by strikes.
This is where Bugatti's actually like superhum level of confidence actually plays against him because he thought it would never happen
He's like, Oh, my employees love me.
One big factory after another was affected and brought to a standstill. Bugatti thought
His factory was saved from trouble. I've got nothing to worry about, he kept saying. My work people know me. They're part of my family.
But the impossible happened, the men stopped working and there were protest marches.
The factory was occupied.
It was a terrible shock, and Bugatti was embittered by what he took to be so much ingratitude.
And an attack on him personally.
That is in nineteen thirty six. This is nineteen thirty nine, the death, the tragic death.

and success so this young life
was so rich in promise.
and yet so abruptly ended.
Jean met with a fatal accident on august eleventh, nineteen thirty nine, while testing the car which had just won the Laman twenty four hours. He went out after dinner with the family saying
I'll be back in fifteen minutes.
In answer to our warnings to be careful. Remember, this is his sister writing this book. He went out after dinner.
With the family saying
I'll be back in fifteen minutes in answer to our warnings to be careful.
He was test driving a Bugatti at high speeds.
On a country lane, a cyclist pops out.
begins to cross the road.
Gene breaks hard.
swerves and hits a tree, killing himself immediately.
Bugatti is devastated, breaks down, sobs uncontrollably, as you can imagine.
When he hears about the death of his son.
Less than a month.
Later.
The second world war begins.
and Bugatti loses his business again. The German invasion and subsequent capitulation of France
Brought an end to his business for the factories taken over by the Germans.
His life's work was gone after the war in order to have the business and premises restored to him.
A court action became necessary.
I wanna pause and review before we get there.
Nineteen thirty one, Great Depression happens.
He has to go work for the railways, right?
Nineteen thirty six, there's a strike at his factory. Nineteen thirty nine, his son dies in a car crash. A month later
Start of World War two, Germans invade, he loses his factory and his home.
nineteen forty four, his wife dies.
Of a painful illness.
Nineteen forty five he has to fight.
the French government to try to get Molchim back.
He loses the first court case.
Which causes him a great emotional shock.
And caused a nervous breakdown.
During the appeal, he's has a nervous breakdown, he's depressed.
He gets influenza.
Then he has a stroke that leaves him half paralyzed
Slips into a coma for four months.
and dies on august twenty first NT forty seven
At the age of sixty six.
Ten days before he dies and while he's in a coma.
He wins the appeal on the French government give him back.
His factory and his home.
He was thus deprived of the joy of seeing his factory returned to
to the Bugatti family.
The official cause of death may be a stroke.
But I think he died of a broken heart.
I wanna end
by reading from the epilogue goes back to the importance of friendship throughout the life of Bugatti.
There is a letter called My Friend Bugatti.
written by a famous French aviation pioneer
Gabriel.
Voice in.
It's written about twenty years after
Gugati died.
And I think it's a great place to end this conversation about a great man.
There can be no better ending to this book than the moving testimony of friendship.
that the famous aircraft constructor Gabrien has written.
We were both more or less the same age.
But God was by his cradle.
On September fifteenth.
eighteen eighty one.
And bestowed all her gifts on to him.
I do not remember our first meeting.
I seem to have known this amazing engineer all of my life.
Bugatti was already one of us in the pioneering days of aviation.
In nineteen oh eight
Our laboratory was in Paris.
And there he used to visit us once a week.
I always kept our mechanical problems for that friendly occasion.
There seem to be no snags or obstacles for this extraordinary man.
One had only to state the problem.
For it to be soft.
Many writers have written
about the productions of the Molsheam factory.
But none of these writers have given us a faithful picture of the real Bugatti.
Some have recalled his charm.
Others have disclosed his whims.
None of them has seemed able to bring to life this great man.
The immense talent of this born engineer
Was concealed beneath a clock of fun and gay.
And he gave the impression
Of never taking himself seriously.
I am now eighty six years old.
And in these last years of my life.
I can look back and measure the worth of the men I have known in the course of a career
Full of surprises.
Most of my contemporaries were incapable of making an effort
beyond what was required of them.
I have therefore very vivid recollections of those few who
У капа в акцію.
An initiative.
In his book, The Revolt of the Masses.
Jose Ortega Igacet wrote these inspired words.
This is one of my favorite paragraphs in the entire book.
A human life
By its very nature.
Has to be devoted to something or other.
To a glorious or humble enterprise.
An illustrious or obscure destiny.
This is a strange but inexorable condition of things.
Ortega Ega set.
Must have known Bugatti.
At the time of writing those lines.
The production of cars at Molshe was really just a game to my friend.
And his successes came easy to him.
He was one of the last car manufacturers to
Able to imagine whole.
To assemble in his mind.
The most varied and complicated mechanical constructions.
Effortlessly.
Yet with exactness.
In a word.
Itori Bugatti was one of the last mechanics truly worthy of the name.
A larger volume would be needed.
In order to give a full and clear account
of his influence.
After the war, this truly French technician was the victim of
Of regrettable incidents.
and his health was thereby affected.
He passed away in nineteen forty seven.
In nineteen thirteen.
I lost my brother Charles.
In a car accident.
For which a third party was entirely to blame.
He was only thirty.
Yet he must have found death to be kind.
He was at the wheel of a Bugatti.
And that is where I'll leave it for the full story. I highly, highly, highly recommend
Buying the book if you can. I think there's only a few copies available.
I'm so glad this book came into my life. It was the perfect vehicle.
to learn about the genius that was Bugatti.
I will leave a link down below. If you buy the book using that link, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time.
That is three hundred and sixteen books down.
One thousand ago.
And I'll talk to you again soon.