#241 The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies

What I learned from reading Birdmen: The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies by Lawrence Goldstone. ---- Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com ---- [1:07] The Wright Brothers (Founders #239) [3:47] Avoid any activity that distracts you from improving the quality of your product and the quality of your business. [5:58] Completely self-taught, he made spectacular intellectual leaps to solve a series of intractable problems that had alluded some of history's most brilliant men. [9:46] The Wright-Curtiss feud was at its core a study of the unique strengths and flaws of personality that define a clash of brilliant minds. Neither Glenn Curtiss nor Wilbur Wright ever came to understand his own limits, that luminescent intelligence in one area of human endeavor does not preclude gross incompetence in another. And because genius often requires arrogance, both men continuously repeated their blunders. [13:38] P. T. Barnum: An American Life (Founders #137) [13:49] John Moisant had three failed attempts to overthrow the government of El Salvador. [17:44] Master of Precision: Henry Leland (Founders#128) [19:32] Sacrifices must be made. [20:18] The science of flight has attracted the greatest minds in history—Aristotle, Archimedes, Leonardo, and Newton, —but achieving the goal stumped all of them. [23:19] If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic-being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago. —Elon Musk [23:57] If the process was to move forward with any efficiency, experimenters would need some means to separate what seemed to work from what seemed not to–data and results would have to be shared. The man who most appreciated that need was someone who, while not producing a single design that resulted in flight, was arguably the most important person to participate in its gestation. [28:46] He found his first breakthrough by doing the exact opposite of his competitor. [30:08] The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst (Founders #145) [39:04] His passion was speed. He had tremendous endurance, he was never a quitter, and he would do anything to win. [42:25] My Life in Advertising by Claude Hopkins (Founders #170) [43:46] No lead is insurmountable if you stop running before you've reached the finish line. [47:03] Reluctant Genius: The Passionate Life and Inventive Mind of Alexander Graham Bell (Founders #138) [47:05] The Hour of Fate: Theodore Roosevelt, J. P. Morgan, and the Battle to Transform American Capitalism (Founders #142) Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt (Founders #156) The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey (Founders #175) [47:40] Never underestimate your opponent. It’s all downside, no upside. Churchill (Founders #225) [57:05] He saw competition as a destructive, inefficient force and favored large-scale combination as the cure. Once, when the manager of the Moet and Chandon wine company complained about industry problems, J. P. suggested he buy up the entire champagne country. — The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance (Founders #139) [1:00:05] Find people who are great at selling your product and hire them. [1:06:55] He was driven by an uncontrollable desire for adventure and wealth, and almost an adolescent need to be seen as a swashbuckling hero. [1:07:45] John was left desperate for an outlet for his obsessive audacity. [1:13:57] The McCormick's were used to making terms, not acquiescing to them. [1:19:15] Wilbur never seemed to grasp that his crusade to destroy his nemesis could destroy him. [1:20:00] I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. —Steve Jobs ---- Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested, so my poor wallet suffers.” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Senra?

  As the saga of early flight becomes more distant, it gains rather than loses fascination. Air travel is now so commonplace, has been so widely experienced, that those who risked their lives every time they took an airplane up, who flew an open aircraft, totally exposed to the elements, and without seat restraints, who took their machines to great heights in freezing cold or in pelting rain, who died and watched their friends die, pushing up against the limits of performance, have become almost mythical figures. They were that, of course, but they were also simply young and eager men and women

• 0:40David Senra?

  embracing a new technology with the breathless zeal of youth. The fear of death would dissuade them no more than it did the first climber to summit Everest. That is an excerpt from the epilogue of the book that I want to talk to you about today, which is Birdmen: The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtis, and the Battle to Control the Skies. And it was written by Lawrence Goldstone. So, two weeks ago, for episode 239, I reread David McCullough's fantastic biography of the Wright Brothers. In that book, Glenn Curtis is mentioned several times. Glenn was the most formidable of the Wright Brothers competitors at the very beginning of the age of flight. And so, I immediately started looking for a biography on him. As I searched, I came across this book. I immediately started reading the sample on Kindle,

• 1:25David Senra?

  and I was immediately blown away by not only the quality of the writing, but just how insane the stories in the first few pages were. I'm going to read something out from the back of the book. It says, "A meticulously researched account of the first few hectic, tangled years of aviation and the curious characters who pursued it." And so, I want to go right to the beginning. This is the part that I read on the Kindle, and immediately ordered the paperback version, which I hold in my hand right now. There are a lot of characters we're going to go over today, and a lot of detail. This book took me well over 20 hours to read and to digest. So, it says, "On May 30, 1912, Wilbur Wright died peacefully in his own bed. Wilbur had contracted typhoid fever one month earlier from," the speculation went, "eating tainted clam broth in a Boston restaurant.

• 2:09David Senra?

  At 5 feet 10 and only 140 pounds, his body had lacked the strength to fight off an ailment that in the coming decades would be routinely vanquished with antibiotics. He was only 45 years old." America had lost one of its heroes, one of the two men to solve the riddle of human flight. Across the nation, newspapers decried the sad stroke of luck that had robbed the nation of one of its great men. The Wright family did—now, this is what immediately drew my attention. I was like, what is going on here? The Wright family did not believe Wilbur's death to have been the result of bad luck. To them, Wilbur had been as good as murdered, hounded to his grave by a competitor so dishonest,

• 2:48David Senra?

  so unscrupulous, so lacking in human feeling as to remain a family scourge as long as any of them remained alive. Glenn Curtis. And so, Wilbur Wright and Glenn Curtis are the two main characters of the book. They're going to be supported by probably a dozen, maybe two dozen other just insanely interesting people that we can learn from. I'm not going to re—anything that I covered on episode 239, I won't cover on this one. It's very much—I think of—I'm going to think of these two episodes as like a two-part series almost. I think it's beneficial to listen to both of them. So, it says, "The bitter, decade-long Wright-Curtis feud pitted against each other, two of the nation's most brilliant innovators, and shaped the course of American aviation.

• 3:30David Senra?

  The ferocity with which Wilbur Wright attacked and Glenn Curtis countered first launched America into preeminence in the skies and then doomed it to mediocrity." So, that's going to be a main theme of the book. I have a ton of highlights on that. I'll just bring it to your attention right now, is the fact that you should avoid any activity that distracts you from improving the quality of your product and the quality of your business. They both spent so much—especially more Wilbur Wright than Glenn Curtis, because Wilbur Wright starts out ahead and then Glenn Curtis actually passes him by a significant margin and is much more successful in the aviation business than the Wright brothers ever were, in terms of building an actual business. But Wilbur stopped working—you know, he was one of the most gifted engineers and had this crazy inventive mind, and all of it was tied up for the last few years of

• 4:15David Senra?

  his life was just fighting lawsuits. And so, the quality of his product and the quality of his company suffered dearly. So, that's what they meant. Like, they launched him into—America took the lead and then doomed it to mediocrity, and a bunch of other companies overtook— The lead from America, it says it would take the most destructive conflict in human history to undo the damage. And so that was actually reversed during World War I, when there was a call to arms by the American government for all, stop fighting. Essentially, they said, hey, stop fighting, guys, not only Curtis and Wright, but all of them. Stop fighting and start working together. We need to have superior air power to help win this war. The combatants were well matched. This is so fascinating, what the author does here. As is often the case with those who despise each other, Curtis and Wilbur were sufficiently

• 4:59David Senra?

  alike to have been brothers themselves. Both were obsessive and serious. Wilbur Wright was the son of a minister, Curtis, the grandson of one. Each came to aviation via the same route, racing, repairing, and building bicycles. And each displayed the collection of analytical instincts and dogged perseverance that a successful inventor requires. And that's one of the things I came to admire most about Glenn Curtis, because I knew how his story ends up. I know that he cashes out, he makes like $30 million, winds up retiring in his late 40s. He comes down to Florida, keeps inventing and starts developing real estate, does all this other crazy stuff. But there are so many times in the book where it just seemed like, oh, this guy's finished. And it's that idea, that's dogged perseverance, just refusal to give up.

• 5:44David Senra?

  Neither of these men would ever take one small step backward in a confrontation. They may have been alike, but they were not the same. Wilbur Wright is one of the greatest intuitive scientists this nation has ever produced. It's also a reason why you should listen to 239 and read the book if you haven't yet. Completely self-taught, he made spectacular intellectual leaps to solve a series of intractable problems that had eluded some of history's most brilliant men. That is an amazing sentence, because it is 100% true. Imagine solving a problem that had eluded some of history's most brilliant people up until that point. Curtis was not Wilbur's equal as a theoretician. Few were. But he was a superb craftsman,

• 6:24David Senra?

  designer, and applied scientist. If this was physics, he would be Fermi to Wilbur's Einstein. Later in the book, the author does a fantastic job. In case I forget to read it to you, he says essentially that Wilbur Wright is a master architect and Glenn Curtis was a master builder. So I think it's a great way to think about the difference between the two. "After Wilbur's death, Orville Wright attempted to maintain the struggle. But while his hatred for Curtis matched Wilbur's, his talents and temperament did not. After his brother's death, Orville was never able to muster the will to pursue their mutual obsessions with necessary zeal." And then we're still in the prologue and we get the introduction to Curtis. It says, "Curtis, who often spoke of his speed craving," that's his quote, "he had craving

• 7:08David Senra?

  for speed, who often spoke of his speed craving, first turned his attention to propulsion. He experimented with motorizing bicycles and in 1907, set a one-mile speed record of 136 miles per hour." So let's just pause there. So not only was he able to build this himself, but he was the one that actually piloted the bike. Think about how insane a person you have to be, or how unusual a person you have to be, to go 136 miles on a motorized bicycle in 1907. That is crazy. And I'm going to repeat the crazy, insane, these kind of adjectives I'm using over and over again. My nose is just, this guy's nuts, this is insane, I cannot believe what I'm reading, just over and over again.

• 7:51David Senra?

  So it says, "He was hailed as the fastest man on earth. Two years later, he would also be the fastest man in the sky. By the time the Wrights, after a three-year delay, finally decided to aggressively market their invention, Curtis was engineering the most efficient motors in the world." So that is his path into aviation. Starts with bikes, starts building motors for bikes, realizes, hey, why don't we put my motor on all these other people? These early aviators, they're doing these glider experiments. Well, let's just put one of my motors on one of those gliders and see what happens. And so Curtis winds up building the best motors for airplanes, early airplanes, than anybody else in the world at the very beginning of the aviation industry. So it says Curtis was engineering the most efficient motors in the world,

• 8:35David Senra?

  that he would mount those motors on aircraft created a threat to the Wright's aspirations of monopoly, and they brought suit to stifle him, the upstart. So in the background of this book, and I'm not going to talk too much about it today, other than Wilbur Wright's preoccupation with it, is this gigantic patent infringement lawsuit. I've read a bunch about patent infringement lawsuits in the past. This is the most unusual because I think the Wrights bring up, I think every single, I think they bring nine total lawsuits against Curtis and other people. They don't lose any of them. But the reason I say it's bizarre is because it never stopped the behavior. People just kept going on building airplanes. So if this preoccupation with winning these lawsuits actually caused Wilbur Wright to

• 9:16David Senra?

  exhaust himself, and then being more exhausted, obviously you're prone for, his brother survived typhoid fever, other people, obviously it was more deadly in their time than it is in ours, but it was a survivable disease. But if you've pushed yourself too far, you didn't take care of your health, you pushed yourself to exhaustion, and you're doing that because of these lawsuits, and then the lawsuits really don't stop anything. It's almost like we lost one of the most important people in American history for essentially no reason. So there's definitely a lot of cautionary tales in this book as well. Back to the prologue. "The Wright-Curtis feud was at its core a study of the unique strengths and flaws of personality that define a clash of brilliant minds." That is the reason you'd want to read this book.

• 9:57David Senra?

  "It is a clash of absolutely brilliant, brilliant minds." Glenn Curtis and Wilbur Wright are these power law people. They are N of one people. "Neither Glenn Curtis nor Wilbur Wright ever came to understand his own limits." That lumines- this is so important, I'd double underline this, check this out. So Curtis and Wilbur never came to understand their own limits. "That luminescent intelligence in one area of human endeavor does not preclude gross incompetence in another. And because genius often requires arrogance, both men continuously repeated their blunders."

• 10:37David Senra?

  Wilbur Wright and Glenn Curtis might have been the principal players in this story, but they were hardly the only ones. Early flyers, birdmen, as they were called, so that's the name, why this book is called what it is. The early pioneers in the aviation industry were called birdmen, as they were called, were pioneers, heading, heeding the same draw to riches, our fame, our illumination of the unknown, that motivated those who had crossed uncharted oceans century before. And so aviation was replete with outsized personalities, brutal competition, and staggering bravery. I am so thankful that the author drew that conclusion. He's like the same kind of person. So, main theme of the podcast, right? History doesn't repeat, human nature does.

• 11:21David Senra?

  And so he is saying, the author is saying, hey, the same kind of personality, these crazy pioneer type, that wanted to say, hey, let's jump in a boat and let's see what happens at the end of the ocean. Or let's explore the pole, the North Pole or the South Pole. Or let's try to solve this ancient problem of human-powered flight. It's all the same personality type. That's why I think, if you go back, there's a lot of parallels. So, if you go back and look in the archive, starting around 118, episode 118, all the way to 130, I did like a 10-part series or something like that, on all the early automotive industry pioneers. And I had to, usually I was doing them in a row. Sometimes I had to wait, because these books were very uncommon, so I sometimes had to wait months for them. So you'll see me do, like, I think I did like a three-part series of Larry Ellison in there, or something like that.

• 12:05David Senra?

  But the same kind of personality, the same person, essentially, that was interested, that was drawn to the very beginning of, they had an inclination, how important the industry was, but it was so tiny compared to how big the automotive industry is today. What I found is the early automotive founders are very similar to the early aviation founders. They're very similar to the personality type that is. They're very similar to the people at the beginning that built the first railroads, the people that first built the first internet companies. And so I think going back and studying these people and all these births, a birth of these industries that wound up becoming foundational to the modern economy, having that knowledge gives you an advantage, because it's not like that's going to stop. Humans are going to constantly discover new things, they're going to constantly create new gigantic industries.

• 12:50David Senra?

  And I think with that knowledge, if that appears in our lifetime, we're able to take advantage of that. But I think the author absolutely nailed it. It's like, listen, it's the same kind of person that was drawn to riches, fame, or illumination of the unknown, that motivated those who had crossed uncharted oceans centuries before. So now he's going to name some of these people. So it says, "There were great designers such as Louis B." So if I can't pronounce a person's name, I'm just going to use their initials. "There were great designers such as Louis B., who flew across the English Channel, the first man to do so with a foot," and he was the first man to do so, "and he had a foot so badly burned that he had to be lifted in and out of his seat." So he's going to wind up surviving. I'm going to tell you, a bunch of the people he's about to list all die. He survives. I mean, he dies of like a heart attack when he's in his 60s. So that's the first guy to fly the English Channel. Then you have Thomas Scott Baldwin.

• 13:35David Senra?

  He was the inventor of the flexible parachute and a showman, very similar to P.T. Barnum, who almost convinced the world that balloons were the future of aviation. He survives. Then you have John M., John Moisant. He's going to die. John M., who, listen to this, "John M., who after three failed attempts to overthrow the government of El Salvador, took to aviation and within months became the preeminent flyer in the world." That sentence is insane because it is true. Harriet Quimby, she's going to die, "an actress and journalist who cajoled flying lessons from her employer to become the first woman to receive a pilot's license and then the first woman to cross the English Channel."

• 14:17David Senra?

  And Lincoln Beechey, he's going to die, "perhaps the finest aviator the world has ever seen, a man who boasted so many firsts and bests and never before done that his exploits would beggar credibility had they not all been documented by eyewitnesses." And the author makes the point that in the first few years of aviation, a pilot would die once, one pilot would die every 10 days, just to give you an indication of how large the body count was at the beginning of the industry. "The saga of the Wrights and Curtises is the story of early flight. There was no one and nothing in the remarkable decade of 1905 to 1915 that one or both of them did not touch or affect.

• 15:01David Senra?

  Their drama was played out on a stage populated by incomparable characters engaged in a pursuit that had held mankind in its thrall from the dawn of civilization."

• 15:14David Senra?

  So that is the end of the prologue. That is the exact moment where I put the Kindle sample down and said, I have to read this book. And I ordered the book. So then we go into the first character. I'm going to weave all these characters as best I can through the story of Curtis and Wright. This one, you've heard me talk about because it was the person that probably inspired Wilbur Wright the most. And it was this guy named Otto Lindenthal. It says, "A wealthy German engineer named Otto Lindenthal." Otto Lindenthal was no amateur. So he starts doing these experiments in the 1800s. So he's about a generation older than Wilbur Wright. Lindenthal was no amateur. He was the most sophisticated aerodynamicist of his day.

• 15:54David Senra?

  For 30 years, he had taken tens of thousands of measurements of variously shaped surfaces moving at different angles through the air. In 1889, he produced the most advanced study ever written on the mechanics of flight. As Wilbur Wright would later assert, "Of all the men who attacked the flying problem, Lindenthal was easily the most important." That is a quote from Wilbur Wright. "He was easily the most important. His greatness appeared in every phase." And to me, that is always very important to pay attention to. When you have a formidable individual, someone who's a flat-out genius, extremely talented, somebody of the quality of person like Wilbur Wright, saying, hey, this is the guy. You need to study him. The most common example I always give you on the podcast is the fact that Steve Jobs

• 16:39David Senra?

  is arguably the greatest entrepreneur ever lived. And all he tells you over and over again, from the time he was in his 20s till right before he's about to die, Edwin Land was the man. He was my hero. He's who we should aspire to be like. If you're an entrepreneur and you have not studied Edwin Land yet, the founder of Polar Right, Steve Jobs' hero, you're really messing, you're making a mistake. But I think anytime you see somebody that you admire, say, hey, this is who I admire, that's a no-brainer. And so we're seeing that right now with Wilbur Wright. I'll look for a biography on Lindenthal because he made a bunch, like, he obviously didn't make any money in aviation. And he, like, made money. Being an engineer, I should actually look for a biography on him. So it says, "Lundthal became a world-renowned figure, but he had little use for popular acclaim. Didn't care about anything. He just kept doing his experiments and documenting what he learned and sharing it with other people."

• 17:24David Senra?

  So he's like a hero to almost every-- the future founder, the future founders of the aviation industry look at Otto Lundthal as like the godfather or the grandfather of the agency, or industry, rather. It's not that different if you go back and study the early American automotive industry. You had this guy, Henry Leland, was a generation older than every other American automotive founder. And Leland founded Cadillac when he was 60. He founded Lincoln Motors when he was 70. He came as a fully grown, fully formed, fully mature man to this new industry. And he had multiple decades of making extremely high-quality products before he even decided, hey, I'm going to jump into the automotive industry. So all of them. Henry Ford would go to Leland when he had a question.

• 18:09David Senra?

  Alfred Sloan, the best well-known CEO of General Motors would go to him. The Dodge Brothers trained under him. And so, of course, I had to read a book about him because you have all these other people that built these gigantic-- Billy Durant, all of them. So the founders of GM, Dodge, Ford are all learning from Leland and then using what they learned from Leland to help build their companies. So back to the book, even though Lundthal becomes world-famous, he didn't care about popular acclaim. He just continued to publish, run experiments, and then publish those results in scholarly papers and articles. He was as sophisticated as anyone living on the vagaries of air currents. Remember, at this point, I shouldn't say remember, you may not know this, but at this point, there's no engines. This is all gliding. They're just trying to figure out, okay, how birds can fly? How can we figure this out?

• 18:54David Senra?

  So it says, for 30 years, he's doing experiments. He's in the air. He's got skin in the game. He's going to risk his life, and he's going to die as a result. So it says, "As sophisticated as anyone living on the vagaries of air currents, Lundthal was aware that luck had played a role in his continued success. And luck, he knew, had a habit of running out." So he's doing this. The problem is so important that he's willing to risk his life for it. And wait till you see what some of his last words are. It's insane. "In 1896, Otto Lundthal's luck did run out. He stalled 50 feet from the ground, fell, and broke his spine. The next day, Otto Lundthal was dead. In his last hours, he uttered one of aviation's most famous epithets: sacrifices must be made." Wilbur had been following Luluthal's exploits with fascination,

• 19:39David Senra?

  and word of his death aroused an interest in him that had existed since he was a child. Luluthal's passing left a void in the struggle for man flight, and on that day, Wilbur decided to fill it.

• 19:52David Senra?

  And then the author does a fantastic job of saying, "Luluthal was just the first of many formidable people throughout history that have tried to attack this ancient problem." "The heavens have been home of the gods in virtually every recorded religion, and not a single civilization from earliest antiquity fails to depict men and women often in flight." So it's essentially saying, "This is an ancient problem." Right? "Achieving flight might well be considered the oldest and most profound of all human aspirations." This is a fantastic sentence, too. "The science of flight has attracted the greatest minds in history." And you know they're great because it only takes one word, one name, and you know exactly who these people are. Aristotle, Archimedes, Leonardo, and Newton. But achieving the goal stumped them all.

• 20:36David Senra?

  "Achieving human flight turned out to be a giant puzzle solved over centuries, piece by torturous piece." So at this point, I'm only seven pages into this book, and I have notes coming out of my ears, right? And so I'm thinking about, okay, saying, let's go back to one page. It says, "Since earliest antiquity, people have been thinking about this." Right? And so I want to, I was thinking about, like, what other problems? I'm going to pause here, and let's just try to think together real quick. Like, what other problems can be described as this? Right? "It's achieving human flight, essentially solving the problem of human flight, turned out to be a giant puzzle solved over centuries, piece by torturous piece." So when I came to this part of the book, I wrote inside the book, "What else can be described in the same way?

• 21:21David Senra?

  Like, what are we working on right now? It's a giant unsolved puzzle. The solving it would be a huge benefit to all of mankind, just like powered flight has been a huge benefit to all of mankind." Right? So the three things I wrote down that just came to mind was: energy, housing or shelter, and aging. And these things are the things that I'm worried about the most, especially for like, as my kids go older, is energy costs are right now, and as I'm recording this, are spiking, and housing costs are getting more and more expensive. But housing is shelter. It's like, it's an ancient problem. Every single human, both of those things, if you think about it, every single human's ever lived needed shelter and needs some form of energy. So it says achieving human flight turned out to be a giant puzzle solved over centuries, piece by torturous piece. We have still not found a way to shelter all of humanity

• 22:06David Senra?

  and to produce energy, like to have an abundant energy policy. And then something else that humans, that came to mind that humans have been trying, because I sat on this page for a while, like I didn't just skip, I thought about that sentence for a good amount of time. And I was like, all right, what else have humans been trying to solve that haven't, like we've just, we've made a lot of progress and that's aging, or that's the reduction of disease, or whatever you want to call it. And I think really the benefit of that sentence, or reading books like this, is it's like, all right, the Wright brothers, and then Curtis obviously extends on it, but like, they solved a problem that humans had struggled with for 500 years, for 1,000 years, for 1,500 years. I think this is our benefit to understand that every single problem that we have in the world right now, can, there is a solution. We might not solve it in our lifetime, but I think the worst we can, the worst mindset we can have is, oh, this is just the way things

• 22:50David Senra?

  are. No, absolutely not. If the Wright brothers just said, you know, at the time of the Wright brothers doing the experiments, you have people like the major newspapers today saying human flight is impossible, won't be solved for 1,000 years. Like, what if they actually listened to that? And I think that's just one of the benefits of reading a ton of history. It's just like, oh, okay, at their time, they thought this was impossible too. And yet I live in the reality that they thought would never happen. And the best way to describe like this thought that's percolating in my mind right now is Elon put it, Elon Musk put it in the best words. He says, if you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic. Being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, assessing vast amounts of data, like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago. So anyways,

• 23:34David Senra?

  these are just the things that popped in my mind as I'm reading the book. So obviously I'm going to share those thoughts with you in case they spawn any thoughts in your own mind. So now we go to Octave Chanute, who I talked a little bit about. He was like Wilbur Wright's mentor, again, another, about a generation older than the Wright brothers. And it's really interesting, if you think about the role he played. He never built his own flying machine, but he organized the information of everybody who was doing that, and then shared the data across everybody. And that actually sped up progress, right? So it says, if the flying process was to move forward with any efficiency, experimenters would need some means to separate what seemed to work from what seemed to not. So what are they talking about? They're talking about data, right? Valuable information. Data and results would have to be shared. The man who most appreciated the need was someone who, while not producing a single

• 24:15David Senra?

  design that resulted in flight, was arguably the most important person to participate in its gestation. That is a crazy sentence. So he's saying not, the most important person might not be the Wright brothers, might not be the Curtis's, might not be the Lenathals. It's the person that organized all the information and acted as a catalyst of thought and action for the people that actually solved the problem. Would the Wright brothers have solved the problem without Octave Chanute? That is not at all clear. And so it talks about that here. It was not his intent initially to design aircraft, but rather to serve as a catalyst, a focal point for the growing streams of theory and data then being generated about what they used, what everybody used to call this problem, the flying problem. That's exactly what they say. It's a flying problem.

• 25:00David Senra?

  It's a problem. That's a great way to think about it. It's like, this is just a problem. All problems have solutions. It may take five lifetimes to get the solution, but there is a solution here. And so Octave is going around, he's going to, he's seeing experiments happen in Africa, seeing experiments happen in Europe, seeing experiments happen in America. And he's going around and collecting the data. He's like the central, like the main node, if you want to think about that, in the network of all these other people. And most of these people did not know each other. They didn't talk, they didn't communicate, they didn't even know, they weren't even aware of their, of each other's existence before Chanute. And so he's like this master networker. Chanute proceeded to correspond with everyone who he could discern was working seriously on heavier-than-air flight and thus thrust himself into the forefront of the ongoing research. And then what does he do here?

• 25:44David Senra?

  He does something that's genius. He takes all his learnings and then produces it into a format that makes it other, easy for other people to download these ideas into his brain. He compiled all the information about the historical experiments of flight and he put it in a book. And he wrote a book called The Progress in Flying Machines, was read by virtually everyone who was experimenting in flight and anyone who was considering it. Its publication in many ways marked the beginning of aviation as a rigorous science and fertilized the soil from which the Wright Flyer sprung nine years later. So in the beginning of any industry or any new business, you're going to have a ton of really serious people that are interested in solving the problem, and then you're going

• 26:26David Senra?

  to attract a lot of scammers and liars and just people essentially like rat poison, to use Charlie Munger's term, of just low-quality people. This is one of them. This guy's name is Augustus Moore Herring. So it says, "The second assistant came with a reputation for brilliance, and he would become one of the most controversial figures in the annals of early flight." His name was Augustus Moore Herring. Audacious and deceitful as he might have been, he did not lack intelligence or talent. So remember his name. I'll reference him many times throughout the book. He's essentially like the biggest scam artist in the early aviation history. The Wright Brothers identify immediately. They just see, hey, none of the stuff the guy says is actually true. Because there was, there's like a, sometimes something that you do can be simultaneously

• 27:11David Senra?

  like an asset and a liability. So something about the Wright Brothers is like they closed themselves off from everybody. They didn't want partners. They were extremely skeptical of other human beings. So that caused them not to be taken advantage of by people like Herring, where Curtis actually winds up getting taken for a ride by Herring, but also closing yourself off, can close yourself off to the bad, but also the good ideas. And so there was innovations happening after the Wright Brothers' successful flights. Kitty Hawk and others, especially made by Curtis, said they were just essentially, no, they didn't believe anybody else was as talented as them. And because they weren't really paying attention to what other people were doing, they wind up losing their lead. They took the foot off the gas and then were quite, actually, quickly outpaced and overtaken and then never, they never caught up again.

• 27:57David Senra?

  Now they jump into Wilbur Wright getting ready. And some of these things, I'm just going to pull out real quick. Wilbur Wright began by reading everything on the subject. So, reading everything is just part of a job. You do that because then you can combine, once you download into your brain what everybody else has learned, then you can combine their ideas with your ideas and you come up with unique ways to create something new, right? Which is exactly what Wilbur did. He read everything on the subject. After three years of self-education, Wilbur had gained some theoretical knowledge of aviation and was ready to move on. That Wilbur devoured the literature and became thoroughly versed in the principles of flight as they were understood there is no doubt. And then he talks about what he did after the fact. So he combines that knowledge with his own thoughts and then trial and error. And he says, this is the result, his insights were fresh and groundbreaking. And also, he was the only one that arrived at his unique conclusions.

• 28:42David Senra?

  And his first big breakthrough comes to using a method that is available to you and I. He found his first breakthrough by doing the exact opposite of his competitors. So I just downloaded into my brain every single thing other people have been doing to try to solve the problem of flight, right? And he realized they're all doing the same thing, which is they're trying to avoid, they're trying to be too stable and they're avoiding for the plane to roll at all. But Wilbur also spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours observing birds in flight. And he realized that's not what they do. And so he says, "Within weeks, Wilbur had his first great epiphany, a counterintuitive deduction. He came to understand that the best way to achieve stability in flight was to make an aircraft inherently unstable."

• 29:27David Senra?

  Langley had employed, so now he's talking about, they're comparing what Wilbur saw, what Samuel Langley was doing. I talked a lot about him on the last Wright Brothers podcast. He's like, "All right, I'll just do the opposite." Langley had employed wing arrangements to prevent his plane from dipping to one side. Instead of avoiding roll, Wilbur embraced it. Similar to the way he surmised birds twisted their wingtips to maintain lateral control rather than by shifting their weight. And so I really want to pause here on this idea because I think it's a powerful idea, that you can find a breakthrough by doing the exact opposite of your competitors. The greatest example, the one I always reference, is the fact when William Randolph Hearst,

• 30:11David Senra?

  he built one of the biggest media empires the world's ever seen, at his apex, he's worth like 30, the equivalent of like 30 billion dollars. That started from one newspaper in San Francisco. And so what he realized is like, all right, well, I'm just one of like six other newspapers in San Francisco. So he analyzed like, what do we do for customer acquisition? Well, we do for customer acquisition what every other newspaper does. What do all newspapers at that time do? They hire newsies, which were like underage boys, seven years old, 10 years old, to go on the street and to sell my newspaper as people are walking by, you know, on the street. They're sitting in their car, whatever the case is. And so at first, Wilber Randolph Hearst, or excuse me, William, Wilber, William Randolph Hearst did the same thing. He's like, all right, well, I'll just have more newsies and maybe I'll just compete and maybe I'll hire just more people. And he's like, this is stupid.

• 30:56David Senra?

  What are my competitors not doing? And he had his first gigantic breakthrough, which is exactly what's happening with Wilber right here. He's like, all right, well, what do I write about? I write about news events, weather, things that happen in the city, things that happen in the world at large. He's like, are the only people interested in what I'm doing just happen to live in the city of San Francisco? Probably not. So then he combined that idea with the new technology of his day, which was railroads. He's like, well, there's all these railroads that they're not within the confines of the city of San Francisco, but they have people in them, just like, and the people that are in these little, small towns are the same, very similar to the people that are in this big city. So instead of me competing where everybody else is going, what did he do? He put his newspapers on railroads.

• 31:41David Senra?

  And he started selling into small towns where none of his competitors were. And almost immediately, his circulation surpassed—I haven't read the book in a while, but I thought I remember they said that his circulation surpassed all of his other competitors combined. And I think this works extremely well, especially in the customer acquisition domain. It's something I've been thinking about lately. It's like, OK, what I would do is like, and what I did, take, write on a piece of paper, every single thing that you know, people that are doing something similar in your business, like, how do they find customers, right? Do a thorough study of your industry, write down, this is how all my competitors find customers, right? Then draw a circle around everything you know, draw an X to it. I am not allowed to have any idea that has anything to do with that.

• 32:21David Senra?

  I must come up with some unique method of looking for customers where no one else is, which is exactly, in his day, what Hearst did. So now I'm going to draw a big X. I can't do any of that, so now I have just this white space. It's much harder because there's no one for me to copy. But that also means I'll be the first one to discover this, and if I'm the first one to discover it, I'll have no competition. So back to the book, just going to fast forward a little bit. This is where Herring—Augustus Herring pops up again. He's going to pop up over and over again. This guy just won't go away. And Chanute—you know, Chanute's a lot nicer than Wilbur Wright is. And so he gives people multiple chances because he's interested in—like, he's very passionate about this. He's also older, and he wants to see this problem solved before he dies. So it says Chanute showed up at Kitty Hawk, and he brought Augustus Herring with him.

• 33:04David Senra?

  And this is where the Wright brothers realize this guy's full of shit. And so this winds up being beneficial to them because—not that they would ever agree to have any partners anyways. But it says Herring had been unsuccessful out of aviation. Once again, out of money, he contacted Chanute, and he asked for patronage. Chanute agreed and suggested Herring test his design at Kitty Hawk where great things were afoot. Herring's glider failed. The Wright's glider did not. More significant, Herring saw why the Wrights had been so much more successful than he. He left after 10 days, but he left with a notion of what it would take to successfully fly a heavier-than-air aircraft.

• 33:39David Senra?

  So it's at this point in the book where the author actually talks about, hey, and this is something you also see, is like, there's, at the very beginning of an industry, you'll have, it's not at all clear which technology's going to win. So there is a ton of people trying to do gliders, trying to build what eventually becomes an airplane. But there is an entire section of the aviation industry where it's like, no, that's the wrong thing. Clearly, hot air balloons, which they call gas bags at this point in history, which is hilarious, it's like one of the worst product names you could ever come up with. They thought gas bags were the future. And so eventually, all the guys that are making innovations in gas bags, spending all this time in this early technology, they realize, hey, we're in the wrong, we need to apply our talents, we got to, this is a dying industry, this is not going, our dead end, rather.

• 34:23David Senra?

  We need to apply our talents, and all of them jump out and then jump into building airplanes. So this is the first guy I wrote. This guy is both really smart and completely nuts. He survives, though. His name is Thomas Scott Baldwin. "The fascination with balloons was largely the work of one man with the courage of a tightrope walker," which he was, "and the audacity of P.T. Barnum, whom he rivaled." That's Thomas Scott Baldwin. "Like most daredevils, Baldwin rigorously tested his theories before risking his life on them." So he literally was a tightrope walker. Eventually, he's going to start jumping out of gas bags for money. And he's, this is also the person that invented the parachute.

• 35:06David Senra?

  So again, completely nuts, but really, really smart. "I studied the matter for months. I experimented with sandbags of my own weight and did not venture a jump until I had the feel that it could be safely done. I had made most of my jumps in water, and if it had not been for that, every particle of my body was hard as iron. From former training as a gymnast, I would not have lasted through these early experiments." He was ready for a public expedition. Baldwin offered to prove the efficacy of his invention, which is the parachute, assuming, of course, that someone would pay him to do it. So he wants to do a public test jump. He goes to all these business owners, says, hey, what if I jump and you put on the show? Right? Like, essentially what Red Bull does for marketing today. And so these businesses are like, yeah, I'll do it. So he finds some guy.

• 35:50David Senra?

  He says, I told him I would jump for a dollar a foot, and he answered, okay, go jump 1,000 feet. Baldwin did precisely that, floating gently to the ground below and claimed his $1,000 prize. So this is his business at this point, finding more business owners and going higher and higher up and jumping for a dollar a foot. Then he took his parachute on the road. He would venture higher and higher for greater prize money, eventually getting to like 5,000 feet. Imagine jumping out of a hot air balloon at 5,000 feet. Now, this is what's interesting. Baldwin is credited as the inventor of the flexible parachute, but he never bothered to take out a patent. And he did this on purpose. He wasn't a fan of patents. And this is where it gives the Wright Brothers so much, so many people in the industry wind up disliking them because they were trying to build a monopoly and they're trying to

• 36:34David Senra?

  prevent other people from the continuation of their work. So Baldwin wasn't with that. He's like, listen, I'm taking a patent for this, a practice he would continue in his research with his airships. Now, one thing this book does a fantastic job of is it shows how all of these people wind up being connected and knowing each other. This is the exact same thing that I discovered when I did all, when I read 12 or 15 books, whatever it was, about the early automotive industry. And so Baldwin's like, hey, I have a gas bag. What if, he has the same thought that Curtis had. He's like, well, what if I just put a motor on this thing? Then maybe I can steer it, maybe I can like, it could be, we can, we can transport people in it and do all this kind of stuff. So he's trying to find, he has that idea. He's like, all right, where do I find a motor?

• 37:17David Senra?

  And he, this is how he meets Glenn Curtis. And so Baldwin is a generation older than Curtis. And so he winds up seeing a motorcycle. Baldwin sees a motorcycle and he's like, okay. And he looks at the motorcycle and on the engine of the motorcycle says Curtis Manufacturing Company. So then he's like, okay. He sends a telegraph and he asks to purchase a motor that's not attached to a frame. The message was received by the owner of Curtis Manufacturing Company, which at the time was a 26-year-old mechanical whiz named Glenn Curtis.

• 37:49David Senra?

  And then we start getting an introduction to Curtis, and I just found him extremely, extremely fascinating and somebody I want to read more about in the future. His father died when Glenn Curtis was four. In school, he completed only the eighth grade. Now, think about this. He's going to be an aviation industry pioneer. He is going to be fabulously wealthy. Wait till you see all the stuff this guy invents. It's insane. Not only invents the first airplane that takes off and lands on the water, invents the throttle for motorcycles, holds, at some points in history, the fastest speed record on land, fastest speed record in the air, makes the best motors in the world at the very beginning of the industry. And again, his dad died when he was four, only has an eighth grade education.

• 38:32David Senra?

  I find these stories extremely inspiring. He showed high proficiency in mathematics. He was a tinkerer. At 10, he made a camera out of a cigar box. What? At 12, he built a telegraph out of spools, nails, tin, and wire. He was often hired to wire neighbors' houses for telephones or electric light when he was in his early teens. Like Wilbur Wright, Curtis was always thoughtful and analytical when taking on a mechanical problem, and even as a young boy, seemed very serious. He had a sharp, biting wit, and his passion was speed. He had tremendous endurance. He was never a quitter, and he would do anything to win. And so, just like the Wright brothers, his first business that took off was building bicycles.

• 39:16David Senra?

  By 1900, he was building bicycles, and his designs were superior to most other machines on the market. Curtis decided to mount a gasoline engine on one of his bicycles. He then took this proto, like, think about it, like, one of the first motorcycles, right? Took it to a nearby fair to race his own machines, and as a result of winning these races, orders began to roll in. He opened a factory to keep up with demand. But no matter how big the business got, Curtis never ceased being a fixture on the factory floor. So one of the reasons he was much, much, much more innovative and invented a ton more things than the Wright Brothers did after they invented powered flight is because all the time Wilbur was focused on lawsuits, Curtis was still, he was, he never stopped tinkering his entire life till he died.

• 40:01David Senra?

  He was just a tinkerer. So he's not going to be in the office. He's going to be in the factory floor. He's going to charge, essentially like an engineer and inventor first, entrepreneur and businessman second, even though, if you think about it, his company, imagine selling a company for $30 million. And I think he did that in the 1920s, maybe 1930s. So an insane, insane amount of money. So there's probably a lesson there. If you're constantly improving your product and focus on that instead of being distracted, you actually will wind up having a better economic outcome than letting yourself be distracted by other things. So Baldwin goes to meet Curtis and it says, remember Baldwin is the PT Barnum kind of older guy that wants to motorize gas bags. Baldwin said afterward that he expected to encounter a stuffy businessman in his 40s or 50s.

• 40:44David Senra?

  Instead, he found himself opposite a quiet, painfully shy young man dressed in overalls who had to wipe his hands free of grease in order to offer a handshake. This unlikely pair struck an instant friendship, each drawn by admiration to qualities in the other that he lacked. So in the introduction, they talk about maybe the greatest aviator to ever live. He's this guy named Beechey. Beechey starts out working for Baldwin. See how all this is connected? It's wild to me. So it says Baldwin winds up at this point. So again, he used to be a tightrope walker. He's older now. He's too fat. He realizes, I'm too fat to pilot my own balloon, so I gotta hire a pilot now. And so it says, he needed a replacement pilot. He's too fat. Early in 1905, a brash, fearless teenager named Lincoln Beechey walked into his office

• 41:27David Senra?

  and within minutes Baldwin knew he had struck gold. So this guy is going to put on these crazy feats in a gas bag and then eventually jump into and learn how to fly airplane and become, they said he might be the single most famous person. In the United States, after the president at this point. At the time, population of the United States was 75 million. 20 million Americans had seen Lincoln Beechey in person. That's crazy. So it says, at this point, he was not yet 20 years old. "The boy aeronaut," as he called himself, "became a regular feature in newspapers and magazines. In between mishaps, Beechey set records for altitude and speed, astonishing the thousands who regularly came to see him perform." So the way to think about Beechey is he's a daredevil and he's constantly pushing the limits.

• 42:12David Senra?

  And that's obviously going to lead to his early death. So we see a bad decision here from the Wright brothers. We know if you read the book or listened to the past podcast, that they reversed this decision. You have to demo your product. This is what they're about to do here. This is the opposite advice that Claude Hopkins, I think it's founder's number 170, if I remember correctly off the top of my head. Claude Hopkins is probably the greatest copywriter that ever lived. Literally spent 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, sitting in a room by himself, writing copy that sold other people's products. He wound up writing that book Scientific Advertising, wound up selling 8 million copies. I bought 2 copies so far. And just with his own research and his talent and a typewriter sitting in a room by himself, he made the equivalent of like $4 million a year, right? And he says, "Listen, I spent my entire life thinking about persuasion and human quirks

• 42:56David Senra?

  and words that persuade people to hand over money for products." And he's saying, "The single best thing you could do," he's like, "All the words in the world will never beat one dramatic demonstration of your product." And so the Wright brothers were not letting anybody else see them fly. Giant mistake. Increasingly concerned that their design would be stolen, they decided to do no more public flying. A signed contract would be a prerequisite to a demonstration. The Wrights were willing to forego payment if the machine did not perform as advertised. But anyone who bought either an airplane or the design would be forced to do so without having first seen the airplane in flight." And remember, they compound this mistake by thinking they're so far ahead that no one can catch them. We're going to get a great line here. "The Wright Flyer remained the only successful airplane, and the brothers' technological

• 43:41David Senra?

  advantage was vast, but neither Wilbur nor Orville seemed to grasp that no," this is a great line, "that no lead is insurmountable if you stop running before you've reached the finish line." So eventually, the Wright brothers are going to reverse this decision. They start doing these fantastic demonstrations in Europe and America, literally 200, over 200,000 people at a time. So you can imagine, if somebody's paying tickets to watch you demo your product and there's 200,000 of them, how many of your product are you going to sell? A ton. But then we go back to this idea that they all knew each other. Here's when Glenn Curtis and the Wright Brothers meet. At this point, they're not enemies yet. Glenn Curtis wrote to the Wright Brothers in an attempt to persuade them to mount a Curtis motor on the Flyer. Although the light and powerful Curtis motor would make the Flyer more attractive, the brothers were not about to deal with outsiders.

• 44:26David Senra?

  So that's, again, their standard MO. They don't trust anybody. No. It's a mistake. Again, if he can make a motor better than you can, like, that makes your product better, right? The Wrights and Curtises were each impressed with the intelligence. They went a meeting, but they just won't do business together. The Wrights and Curtises were each impressed with the intelligence and acumen of the other. Wilbur and Orville invited Curtis to visit their shop. What followed was the most important and controversial meeting in aviation history. The three had a long and amicable discussion in which they exchanged a good bit of expertise. And then, so, the problem is, depending on how you view this meeting, depends on what side you fall on with this gigantic patent infringement case that goes on. So it says, one says, "Was Curtis pumping the brothers for technical information that

• 45:09David Senra?

  he could then use to create his own airplane?" None of those questions have ever been definitively answered. And in that dispute that followed, the fault line runs directly through whichever interpretation of that meeting one ascribes to. And so Curtis doesn't wind up linking up with Wright Brothers, but he winds up linking up with Alexander Graham Bell. And I'm sorry to say this a few times, but I know myself on this page, it's just amazing how all of these people were connected. So it says, "In 1906, Alexander Graham Bell decided to assemble his own team of talented young men to attack the flying problem." So again, you have this smart, very successful inventor, very rich, he's a generation older, and he realizes innovation usually comes from the young. One of those young people he's going to recruit is Glenn Curtis. So it says, "His first recruit came from an unlikely source.

• 45:54David Senra?

  He received a letter from a young Army Lieutenant named Thomas Selfridge." So I was reading that word, I'm like, "Why do I know Thomas Selfridge? Why do I know Thomas Selfridge?" And then I realized that is the guy that winds up being the first fatality ever. He's the one that crashed with Orville Wright. Orville almost died. Thomas Selfridge dies. So it says, before communicating with Alexander Graham Bell, Selfridge had solicited the Wrights. Now, we see, you already know what's gonna happen if you send a letter to them, right? He asked permission to come and work as a mechanic under supervision and instruction. I'm pretty sure the Wright brothers never even responded. Selfridge then met with Bell, met with Bell in Washington, where Bell was at the time. Bell was so impressed that he wrote to President Theodore Roosevelt and asked for, remember,

• 46:37David Senra?

  he's in the, so Selfridge, the reason he's, the reason Bell was writing to Roosevelt is because Selfridge is in the army. And so he says, and he asked Roosevelt for the young lieutenant to be assigned to him. Roosevelt was an old friend of Alexander Graham Bell, so he agreed. Bell then met Glenn Curtis, and Bell asked Curtis to join him as well. And again, it's just amazing how everybody knew each other. And not only that, like, if you think about the history of, how interconnected the history of entrepreneurship is, like, I've done podcasts on Alexander Graham Bell, a bunch on Theodore Roosevelt, the Wright brothers, now we're doing, now I'm doing one on Glenn Curtis. Like, it's just, it always fascinates me. And so Bell has now had this formidable team. You got people all over the world, making experiments. This is after the Wrights have already solved the problem, and they're so focused on trying

• 47:22David Senra?

  to build a business and protect their patents, they're not innovating. And Chanute knows, he's like, listen, you're messing up, man. I am like the main note here. I'm seeing what everybody else is doing. You're falling behind. And something I learned from the Churchill biography I read, probably like, what, a month or two ago, is something, there's a line in there where Churchill would, he never made the mistake that so many other leaders did, especially during World War II. He's like, never underestimate your opponent, because it's all downside and no upside. Like, you underestimate your opponent, what is the benefit if you're right? Nothing. What's the, what's the, like, the consequences if you're wrong? Everything. You don't engage in something where you have limited upside and uncapped downside. You literally should be doing the reverse of that, right?

• 48:06David Senra?

  I wanna cap my downside and leave my upside unlimited. So again, never underestimate your opponent, it's just really, very stupid. There's smart people everywhere, and you just can't underestimate them. And so, and a lot of them, the smartest ones, don't want you to know they're smart. So we see that here. Chanute tried to warn Wilbur that the French were making great strides and might soon produce machines to rival his. Wilbur replied, I hold I still hold to my prediction that an independent solution to this problem would require at least five years. If anything, Chanute had understated the case. French designers had been experimenting furiously and the gap was closing. So again, Wilbur right, profound self-belief, profound stubbornness that he can solve this problem, those are all good things. Then after you solve the problem, to think that, oh, no one else can do it, that's where you take a form of strength and you turn it into a weakness.

• 48:51David Senra?

  He was absolutely wrong about that. That's something we should look out for in our own lives, right? Let's not underestimate, let's not think that we are prognosticators. Human beings are terrible at prediction. Eventually, though, they smarten up, they realize, hey, we should actually cultivate the press, they're gonna help us sell our products, and we do that through the power of demonstration. So they go to Kitty Hawk again, this is years later, I think we're in like 1909 still, 1908 there about, and this time they're like, hey, let's bring a bunch of reporters with us. And this is the result of the power of a demo, which is exactly what we learned from Claude Hopkins. After years of disdaining the media, Wilbur and Orville had finally learned that perception could not be ignored. They encouraged a number of reporters to follow them and report on their progress. And this is the result. One of the journalists who had witnessed all these flights, they're killing it over

• 49:34David Senra?

  there, who extolled in a long laudatory piece about the Wright brothers. He said, "I did not believe that they had made progress in sustained flight, and I did not believe they had made a record of 24 miles as they had claimed." Right? Before, they're like, yeah, we flew 24 miles, but no one saw each other. And so this is the punchline. "I believe all these things now and more." Something smart that Wilbur does here. He talks, and he's pointing out after the fact that it's extremely dangerous to allow yourself to be distracted. It's really a reminder for us to maintain our focus. And this is, he's writing a letter after his brother has that crash where Selfridge dies and Orville's in pain, he almost dies, but he's in pain like the rest of his life. He has, the crash is like the turning point in his life, he's gonna have to deal with

• 50:19David Senra?

  ramifications forever. And so Wilbur says, "I do not mean that Orville was incompetent to do the work itself, but I realized that he would be surrounded by thousands of people who, with the most friendly intentions in the world," that's important, it's like they're not wanting him to crash, they're not wanting to distract him, "but even if they're friendly, their intentions are positive. If you allow them to, if you allow other people to distract you and to change where your focus goes, there's consequences to that." And in his case, these were dire physical consequences. "I realized that he would be surrounded by thousands of people who, with the most friendly intentions in the world, would consume his time, exhaust his strength, and keep him from having proper rest. When a man is in that condition, he tends to trust the carefulness of others, instead of doing everything and examining everything himself."

• 51:02David Senra?

  So Wilbur, before he did a demo, he wouldn't, like, he checked literally every single bolt himself. "If Orville had not delegated the fastening of the screws, but had done it himself, he would have noticed the thing that made the trouble." So he was flying, one of the parts wind up breaking, and that's what caused the crash. So that's what Wilbur is referring to there. So now we have the scumbag Augustus Herring popping up, and I'm gonna read, he winds up really taking advantage of Curtis here, and it's just a reminder of what Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett have taught us over and over again, you can't make a good deal with a bad person. You can't make a good deal with a bad person, you can't make a good deal with a bad person. It's important to repeat that so we get in our brain. Like, there's gonna be bad people that are just

• 51:45David Senra?

  like, "I can make you rich." Just don't believe them. It's not gonna work out, man. This mistake winds up costing the heirs of Glenn Curtis $500,000, because the lawsuit's gonna go on between Curtis and Herring, isn't resolved, and both of them are dead. So think about that, how long this goes on. So it says, "Curtis proceeded to take steps to exploit aviation commercially and in exhibition, so he's making money both trying to produce airplanes, and also, at this time, millions of Americans and millions of people all over the world have proven that, hey, I will pay to watch you fly." Okay? "Having been repeatedly shown by the rights, Augustus Herring persuaded Curtis that he held patents on airplane stability that preceded the rights." He did not, that's

• 52:29David Senra?

  a lie. "He also said he had financial connections in New York who were itching to capitalize on commercial possibilities of airplane production." Also a lie. "The deal seemed too good to pass." It was. So they announced the new formation of the Herring-Curtis Company. It was a colossal blunder. Curtis put up almost all the money, Herring ended up with almost all the stock. Curtis wasn't alone in his stunning gullibility. Before the ink was dry on the agreement, Herring was off, supposedly dividing his time between preparing his airplane and rounding up customers and investors. Also a lie. As Curtis would later learn, he was doing neither. So let's go back to this mistake that the Wright brothers are making, that, hey, we're so far ahead, no one's going to catch us. No benefit, we've already discussed, no benefit to underestimating your opponent.

• 53:14David Senra?

  And really, it's just a reminder to you and I, there's smart, dedicated people everywhere, all over the planet. Some have access to resources now, some don't, but will in the future. Even if it's a small percentage of overall human population that are smart, driven, dedicated, won't give up, it's still a small percentage of a giant number. It's still a lot of people, right? So says this example of that. Before Wilbur could sit down with the generals, he's trying to sell some planes to the military, the Wright's dream of dominating aviation had been smashed. An event occurred whose immense significance not even the Wright brothers could deny. In a plane of his own design, and with a foot so badly burned that he had to be helped into the cockpit, Louis B. flew across the English Channel.

• 53:57David Senra?

  So again, Wright brothers, very arrogant, underestimating competition, saying, no, we're so far ahead, no one is going to catch us. That's assuming that you could possibly know what every single person on the planet is actually doing, and you don't. These people come out of nowhere. I think about, back to the Michael Jordan biography, where, you know, he's dominating in North Carolina, his coaches convince him, they're like, hey, we need to send, this kid is good, this guy has unreal talent. They send him to some kind of basketball camp, I think it was in the Northeast, and we're just going off memory here, and the people at the basketball camp see him, and he starts just completely taking over, and they, the scouts and the coaches and everybody out there, like, we thought we knew, we knew of, we knew all the best basketball players in the country. Well, they wind up thinking wrong. And so Michael Jordan, later in his career, after he retires, as a matter of fact, says

• 54:40David Senra?

  that, he's like, listen, you don't have to worry about finding the next Michael Jordan. That will happen. And he's like, first of all, you didn't find me. And his point was, like, these people are special. They're N of one individuals. They will, they will present themselves. You will see, you will find out about them somehow. Just like, very few people, Wright brothers might not even known who Louis B. was. He's like, all right, well, you're going to know now, because I'm going to break this. I'm going to put my name in the history books and there's nothing you can do about it, Wright Brothers. So really, for me, the lesson I'm taking from that paragraph is like the combination of those two ideas. Like, there's smart, dedicated people everywhere and it's just really foolish to think that, to underestimate people that you don't even know. Like, you can't possibly know that exist or what they're capable of, what they've already been, not only what are they working on, but what they've already been able to accomplish.

• 55:24David Senra?

  And so the Wright Brothers had a massive head start and advantage over Curtis. But Curtis might not be the architect, but he's the builder, right? So he winds up, within two years, it says in two short years. So for two years, he was like, hey, I'm going to put one of my motors on this plane. I offered my motor to you, you said no. Okay, I'll put my motor on my own plane. And so now, and I don't know if you know this, but what makes this even more tragic, the death of Wilbur Wright fighting Curtis, is the two companies are going to wind up merging much later on, right? After, the Wright Brothers have nothing to do with their own company. But that company that merges in 1929 still exists to this day. It's publicly traded. It's Curtis Wright. It's this gigantic aviation company. I'm sure if Wilbur Wright knew that, he'd be spinning in his grave. So anyways, it says in two short years, Curtis had gone from an obscure fabricator,

• 56:09David Senra?

  right? No one's really paying attention to him, he's building bicycles and motorcycles, to now Wilbur Wright's most loathed and formidable competitor. He's making some of the best planes and engines in the world. So this is the point where the Wright Brothers actually capitalized their company. And so it says, "The financial arrangements were immensely favorable to Wilbur and Orville. The Wright company would be capitalized at a million dollars. The Wrights would receive $100,000 in cash, one-third of the stock, and a 10% royalty on sales." And this is where I also think they might have made the mistake, because if you've listened to the podcast I did on JP Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, you realize, and all the robber barons back in the day, they did not view competition as you and I might in today's age. They viewed it as something to get rid of. Like, they don't want competition, they'll just buy the entire, like, they'll buy up

• 56:53David Senra?

  every single company in the industry. I remember there's a fantastic quote where JP Morgan is talking about, I forgot who it was, it might have been the guys that started Moet and Chandon, the champagne company, and he said something that just gives a great illustration into his mindset. He's like, oh, you know, they're like, hey, maybe we should buy our competitor. He's like, why don't you just buy up the whole champagne region? And so they want to do the exact same thing with the Wrights that they did in their career. It says, "The primary goals of the new company was to permanently neuter competition."

• 57:23David Senra?

  So you have the Wrights, just raised a ton of money. They have these very formidable people on their team now. And at the same time, you have the Curtis and Herring partnership. Curtis is realizing Herring's a scumbag. And so this is what I mean, where there's just so many times where Curtis is on the floor. You're like, how is this guy going to survive? Much less surpass the Wright brothers. Even worse for Curtis, at this very moment, that the Wrights solidified their business, his partnership was descending into chaos. The board at the company was like, we need to see the patents, Herring. Where are they? And he's like, okay, I'll be back. And then he disappeared for a month. And then he'd come back like, where's the patents? I'll be back. And he just went over and over again. So it says, "Herring could not comply because there were no patents to produce. The company had almost no money now. Herring and Curtis had only sold one airplane and the purchaser was being sued by the Wright

• 58:07David Senra?

  brothers, which made further sales in the immediate future problematic." So that's the start. It's already now, I think we're like two years into this gigantic patent war. So not only are the Wright brothers suing Curtis, but they're suing anybody that's trying to do business with Curtis or any other, in their opinion, patent infringer. And the Wright brothers were kind of laughing at this because they knew Herring was clearly a liar. "The Wrights merely watched with amusement and satisfaction. The contrast between the elite qualified partners they had taken and the shady self-promoting confidence man with whom Curtis had thrown in with could not have been more acute." So Curtis does do something smart here. And the lesson here is find people that are great at selling your product and hire them.

• 58:49David Senra?

  So the main way to determine, okay, do I want a Wright flyer? Do I want a Curtis? Do I want any of these other ones? It's through these demonstrations, these races. It's very similar to, if you remember, when we went through Enzo Ferrari. The reason Ferrari is, the brand it is today, is because of all the races, the Le Mans they won back in the 50s and 60s, and maybe even the 40s. It's like, you win race after race after race. It's like, oh, I want that. I want the very best. They were attracted, the Ferrari name came synonymous with victory. And so that, again, then that brand equity compounds decade after decade after decade. And now you have, you know, people paying 200 or 300 or 400 dozen dollars for one of your cars. Curtis's flyer was Charles Hamilton. I want to tell you about this guy. "Hamilton demonstrated a remarkable ability to survive crashes."

• 59:35David Senra?

  He would have 63 of them. He showed up to Curtis's factory and pestered him into submission. He wouldn't leave until Curtis taught him how to fly. Curtis finally agreed to teach Hamilton to fly and he discovered that he had stumbled on a natural. A man capable of wowing audiences and keeping Curtis airplanes in the headlines. Curtis signed Hamilton to an exhibition contract and then turned Hamilton loose on an eager public. And this is the punchline here. The crowds, which began in the hundreds, grew to the thousands and they loved him. So again, find people who are great at selling your product and then hire them. And so then I want to bring something to your attention because it's one of my favorite Henry Ford stories. And it's about how there were so many corrupt judges and how the car patent cases affected the Wright brothers' strategy.

• 1:00:19David Senra?

  And there's this guy that's infamous in the early automotive history. He's called George Selden. And essentially, he was just a guy that had, he had no ambition to or nor qualification to build an actual car of his own, but he patented his invention and then said, hey, I'm going to get rich by suing anybody else that tries to make a car. And so, again, I think in hindsight, the Wright brothers, if they knew, if they knew what you and I know today, I don't think they would have pursued the same, like the same path. And so the author talks about what happened with Selden and the automotive industry happened about 25, 20 years, about, nah, started in 1878 and then lasted for about 20 years, maybe 25 years, actually a little longer than that.

• 1:01:00David Senra?

  And so, this, this knowledge of history that came before them affected, impacted the way the Wrights thought about this. So this is why I want to read it to you. Selden, George Selden was fully aware that his patent had no immediate application. And so without ever attempting to have built an automobile himself, he repeatedly filed amendments to his patent, still with no intention of ever building an automobile. And so the same judge that held up the Wright brothers' patent wound up holding up Selden's patent many years before. And it said, despite grounds that many experts in the field thought dubious at best, the guy's name is Hazel, the judge upheld Selden's application of his patent to every internal combustion engine. And so immediately the patents upheld, other people in the automotive industry, including people like Billy Durant, the founder of GM, start paying Selden a royalty because like,

• 1:01:45David Senra?

  oh, we thought like this is what we had to do. Henry Ford, not the kind of person you're gonna, like, he's very similar to Wilbur Wright in his stubbornness, the love of stubbornness he had. So it said, some independents, however, refused to knuckle under. One of those was Henry Ford, who at the time was a small operator. That's extremely important. I double underline that part. At the time, Ford was a small operator. Ford is eventually going to be the richest man in America. Not yet. So at the time, he was a small operator with a vision of affordable, mass-produced machines. Where most of the others tried to keep a low profile, Ford openly flaunted the ruling. He went so far as to take out advertisements promising to reimburse anyone who purchased a Ford product if the higher court's decision went against him, for which he was widely

• 1:02:27David Senra?

  hailed as David, as a David standing up to a Goliath. That is a bold, bold decision by Ford. Everybody else is like trying to run away from Selden. He's putting ads in the newspaper, saying this guy's trying to crush everybody, that I am David standing up to a Goliath. There's a fantastic quote from the book I read a long time ago. The book's called, I Invented the Modern Age: The Rise of Henry Ford. In the book, there's a story where Ford is having a meeting with a bunch of other auto manufacturers, and they're all saying, hey, let's just band together, see if we can get a license cheaper for bulk. And Ford's the only one saying, no, I'm not gonna do this. And so the guy running the meeting is this guy named Smith. And he said, you men are foolish, said Smith. The Selden crowd can put you out of business, and they will. And Ford's response? Let them try it.

• 1:03:12David Senra?

  So why is that important to our story? Because that circuit court decision broadened the principle, the pioneer principle, meaning gives greater patent protection to other people that have patents, okay? And so the Wright brothers' attorneys saw that as a positive sign for their case. And so this is the first time where Wilbur Wright, Wilbur Wright respects Octave Chanute, right? This is his mentor, as much as he could respect anybody else. I mean, they are, like, they went up having a falling out or whatever, but he does respect him, and he's probably one of the only other people that he'll somewhat listen to. And so really, there's a letter that Octave is gonna write Wilbur. He's like, what are you doing here, man? Like, you went from trying to solve this problem and to advance power to fight for humanity to now trying to build a monopoly. That's not good. That's only good for yourself.

• 1:03:56David Senra?

  And so he's going to speak to Wilber frankly. And the note of myself here is it's good to have people that can check you in your life, people that you respect, even if they're harsh with you. You understand that their motivation is not, they're not trying to peg you down or trying to diminish you, or they're not trying to hurt you on purpose, but they're legitimately love and care for you and want to see you succeed, and they think you're making a drastic mistake. That's what I mean by it's good to have people in your life that can check you. And this is what he says, "I told you, New York, that you were making a mistake by abstaining from prize-winning contests while public curiosity is so keen, and by bringing so many lawsuits to prevent others from doing so. This is still my opinion, and I am afraid, my friend, that your usually sound judgment

• 1:04:37David Senra?

  has been warped by your desire for great wealth." And I just want to pull out one thing that has nothing related to the story, other than that books are the original links, and they're constantly introducing us to new, interesting people. This guy I've come across before, and I actually have his biography on my wishlist, so I got to actually order it. But his name is John "Bet a Million" Gates. John "Bet a Million" Gates. And I just want to read a paragraph that gives you an idea of why I want to read a book about this guy. "Gates made a fortune selling barbed wire in the dying days of the open range, parlayed that into a bigger fortune in land speculation, then in 1902 struck oil in Texas and founded the company that would become Texaco. Gates' penchant for wagering enormous sums on horses prompted newspapers to refer to

• 1:05:22David Senra?

  him as 'Bet a Million' Gates. He had been an early investor in United States Steel and came to know Albert Gray, who let him in on the Wright Company incorporation." How is that possible, that it all happened in one lifetime? Made a fortune selling barbed wire, made a fortune in land, founded Texaco, bets millions of dollars on horse races, early investor in United States Steel, and then early investor in the Wright Company? Incredible. Okay, so now the author introduces us to just some insane characters. I want to pull out, I have a bunch of highlights on this guy named John Moisant. So I'm going to call him John M. because I'm most likely butchering his last name. John M. was something of an international celebrity.

• 1:06:05David Senra?

  He had narrowly evaded capture and possible execution after a third failed attempt to lead an invasion of El Salvador. And so what was he doing in El Salvador? So he is part of this remarkable family. They're essentially building a giant business empire together. So it says, "By any standard, the Moisant family was exceptional. They left Illinois for California in the 1880s and within 10 years had amassed a fortune in lumber, real estate, and mining." The oldest son in the family, this guy named Alfred, so John's brother, bought a sugar plantation in El Salvador that was so vast, it would take an entire day to ride from one end to the other. And so eventually, the government in El Salvador, not going to like these gringos coming down

• 1:06:49David Senra?

  and essentially making a ton of money on natural resources. I'll get there in a minute, but it says, "This is a description of John. He was driven by an uncontrollable desire for adventure and wealth, and almost an adolescent need to be seen as a swashbuckling hero." So there's like this, three separate countries are after him, including his own family, or his own country. So El Salvador, Nicaragua, and then the United States. Essentially, they're like, hey, on his third and final attempt, the people that stopped him was actually gunships from America. They're like, "If you don't turn around, we're going to fire on you. Go home." And so the book goes into more detail, but that's, I'm just giving you the high level highlights here. John Moisant was a plantation owner, a gunrunner, a mercenary, an impeccable dresser, was

• 1:07:34David Senra?

  allowed to return home a free man if he forswore Central American politics. So he goes home, and he never visits Central America again. Forced to shoo leading invasions of foreign nations, John was left desperate for an outlet for his obsessive audacity. These are just such great descriptions. Obsessive audacity. And it says, "An uncontrollable desire for adventure and wealth, and an adolescent need to be seen as a swashbuckling hero." This is just a mastery of language. You read this, and you get a good idea of who this person was, right? And so he instantly turns his attention to aviation, which is obviously the thing that's drawing so many people's attention at this point in American history, in world history, really, if you think about it. John might have been headstrong and narcissistic, but he was far from stupid.

• 1:08:19David Senra?

  His plan was to become the world's greatest exhibition flyer in an aircraft of his own creation. So usually you do one or the other, right? You either make airplanes, or you become famous by flying them in these exhibitions. So John's like, I'll do both. He makes a couple of airplanes. They don't really do well, but he's one of the first people to use aluminum, if you think about how important that was. So he gives up, he's like, wait, making planes is way too hard. Flying them, like, he wants to be famous and world renowned, and he's like, that seems to be a better path to my actual goal. And again, just great, great writing here. So it says, "John gave up on that portion of the plan," meaning producing airplanes, "and turned his attention solely to flying. Aviation had acquired a comet."

• 1:09:04David Senra?

  And so he also, he has a very strong personality. He does not take no for an answer. He tries to, he starts, even though he's a French, he's French, like, his French last name, his family was originally from France, he thought of himself as American, but he couldn't break in, so he goes to Europe, tries to enter these races that are happening all over Europe, and they say, no, you can't enter. And he's like, alright, well, I'm just gonna show up, so what are you gonna do about it? John had burst onto the scene at an event in which he had been refused entry. When the French declined to allow the crazy American kid to fly in the world's first long-distance air race, John packed up his friend into his passenger seat and flew 37 miles across Paris, and then landed on the field, where a quarter million people had shown up to see the event. And so he winds up competing, becoming one of the best aviators.

• 1:09:46David Senra?

  He winds up also taking a lot of risks, and so he wins this race back in America, this is like, a year later. And he does it because it's just a timed event, so you take off, you have to complete this course, and then whoever lands under the best time wins. And he was able to win because the person that was supposed to come in first wouldn't take a path, take a route that wouldn't allow him to have an emergency landing if he needed to have an emergency landing. And John realized, well, I'll take this other path, it's shorter, therefore it should take me less time, but it has to work out. There's no margin for error, and this is just a fantastic line, it gives you an insight exactly who this person was. Later, when his sister, Matilda, was asked about John having chosen a flight path without any chance of emergency landing, she replied, "My brother doesn't fly to land, he flies to win."

• 1:10:30David Senra?

  And so you can imagine you have that attitude, but you're also applying that attitude into such a dangerous profession. The crazy thing is, he's gonna die. I think he starts flying in 1907. He's dead by 1910. And the way he dies is because he actually falls out of his airplane. And that also shows like a blind spot to humans that humans have. You have some of the smartest, most interesting people to ever live, working in this field, and nobody thought that you should have a seatbelt or a harness? And the book talks about it. Many people just were flung out of the airplane. There'd be a draft, or a turn, or something would happen. And it's not that he even crashed. They literally flew out. And in some cases, they fly out, they die, and the plane glides and lands without any damage. But it's just astounding.

• 1:11:13David Senra?

  It's like, how many times do people have to die that somebody say, hey, we should maybe stay, maybe attach the pilot to the seat? So let's go back to the Wilbur-Curtis conflict. Wilbur or the Wright-Curtis conflict. So not only is Glenn Curtis having to fight the Wright brothers, he's also having to fight his partner. He realizes, hey, I partnered up with a scam artist. So he's got two battling lawsuits. One from his former partner, one from his most formidable adversaries. Here's a quick paragraph about that. "Wilbur and Curtis continued to battle each other. The puncher stalking the boxer. Wilbur attempting to land a crushing body blow to a weakened opponent. And Curtis, his resources depleted, dodging, feigning, and trying to survive. Curtis relied almost solely on revenues garnered by the exhibition company."

• 1:11:58David Senra?

  Why is that? "Because he could not even use the factory that he had built with his own hands." Again, going back to that, it's so important to think about that. You cannot make a good deal with a bad person. This guy built up his own factory, this scumbag, weaseled his way in there through a series of lies. And now, the business, the factory that Curtis gave his life energy to, he can't even access until the bankruptcy proceedings are finished. So it says, "A factory he'd built with his own hands, without permission of the receiver, until the Herring-Curtis bankruptcy was resolved." And so while Wilbur Wright is viciously attacking anybody that dares infringe on his patents, he's gonna run up against people that are not Glenn Curtis. And this is really a lesson that there are a series of formidable adversaries out there

• 1:12:42David Senra?

  that you're better off avoiding. And if you choose to compete in industries like this, especially the birth of something that's gonna be extremely valuable, you're gonna run up against people not only that they're super intelligent, they have a lot of access to a lot of assets, they have very sharp elbows. And what I'm about to read to you, so one of my favorite movies, probably my favorite movie is The Godfather, there is a scene where Michael Corleone, his father's already died, so he's the godfather, and he has a senator that is trying to squeeze him, essentially blackmail him. They're like, "Oh, you want a gaming license to run casinos? That's fine." That normally this is the price, it's gonna be much larger than that. And if you've seen the movie, you realize the senator's making a gigantic mistake. And it's one of the best scenes in movie history because Michael says, "Well, you know, the senator's about to leave, he's like, 'I want your answer on the money by tomorrow.'"

• 1:13:27David Senra?

  And Michael's like, "You can have my offer now." He's like, "What's your offer?" "My offer is nothing, not even the fee for the gaming license, which I'd appreciate it if you put up yourself." And so the Wrights are gonna be hit with like a Michael Corleone offer here. So it says, "Harold Fowler McCormick was the youngest son of Cyrus McCormick, and thus a scion of one of the richest families in America. To add even more heft to his bank balance, he was married to Edith Rockefeller, the daughter of John D. Rockefeller. The McCormicks were used to making terms, not acquiescing to them." And so they wanna put on, the McCormicks are gonna put on the world's largest flying exhibitions ever seen. And once the Wright brothers realize what they're doing, they say, "Hey," like, they

• 1:14:12David Senra?

  hit him with like, "You gotta pay us 20%. We want the profits, you need all this written permission." And McCormick's like, "Okay, you can have my offer now," which is nothing. And so Orville's the one having to deal with this. And it says, "The McCormicks were used to making terms, not acquiescing to them, and the committee rejected the Wright proposal out of hand. I then asked the committee if I was to understand that the committee refused to pay the Wright company, our company, a license. And the reply was made by their attorney." That's what it looks like. McCormick's committee then made a counter offer, this is the Michael Corleone aspect of it, "Wilbur and Orville could join as competitors, just like everyone else."

• 1:14:53David Senra?

  It gets worse. And it says, "Lest there be any doubt of our resolve, they leveled, the McCormick's leveled an ultimatum to their own." So remember, at this point, the Wright brothers are used to filing lawsuits to everybody, winning the lawsuits. They're like, "Go ahead and sue us." And then we'll ruin your entire, now we'll ruin your entire business. So it said, "They leveled an ultimatum of their own. They told me that the Wright company could bring suit if they saw fit. And in that case, and in case they did, the members of the committee, all very wealthy men, would finance whatever the cost would be to fight against such an action and then make every effort to invalidate all of the Wright brothers' patents." They didn't stop there. This is why it's just better in life to go around collecting friends instead of enemies. Because you're gonna run against people that don't play.

• 1:15:38David Senra?

  And the Wright brothers just ran up against people that don't play. And we'll see again, it keeps getting worse. They did not stop there. "This committee is composed of the heads of the various newspapers in this city, and if the Wright, if the Wright brothers should bring any action, these newspapers will publish all facts in the case and do everything within their power to embarrass the Wright company in such proceedings." So let's review. Not only are we not gonna pay you, if you decide to continue this, we're gonna, we're extremely rich, we're gonna use all of our resources, and we're gonna invalidate all our patents. And if we invalidate all your patents, that means your company goes bye-bye. And if you wanna press this, guess what? Not only we have a ton of money, but we also run all the newspapers. And so we have media attention.

• 1:16:20David Senra?

  And we will drag you in the press. So Orville obviously agrees. He's like, "Oh, crap, okay." Here's the problem. Wilbur gets back, I think he was in Europe or something like that, and he disagrees. And so then the author says, this is like, this is what I was mentioning earlier, how stubbornness can be both an asset and a liability. So Orville agrees, Wilbur overturns that decision. And so it says, "Of all the Wright's legal actions, this one seemed the most ill-considered. The defendants were wealthy, powerful, and influential men being sued in their own backyard." Orville's initial willingness to enter Wright aviators, which he said, "Okay, I'll agree to your terms," is going, would work against them as well. What's more, seeking a share of the proceeds, so they're suing to get a percentage of the profits, right?

• 1:17:03David Senra?

  That's what Wilber is doing, because that's what he feels is his right to do as the patent holder. What's more, seeking a share of the proceeds, proceeds were pointless. These are rich dudes, they're already independently wealthy, they put it on for attention and prestige to their city, not because they were trying to make money. And so their point was, you're suing them for a share of the profit was pointless because there is no profit. The meat had brought in $150,000 in revenue against, let's say, $200,000 in expenses, leaving only red ink for the rights. And so what is the point there? Like, you're not going to get any money, then you just created more enemies. Like, Wilber had this religious zeal to defend his work, and like, his life's work, and there's not like, that in itself is not negative, but you have to pick your spots.

• 1:17:47David Senra?

  Like, this was not a smart move. And when you think about this, like, it's, Wilbur Wright lost the point of all this, right? Because this is happening about a year before he's going to die. And so I write on this page, because we're a few pages later, and this is a year before he dies, "We want to avoid this fate. Although Wilber continued the fight with unbroken ferocity, he was beginning to despair of the business." And so he's writing, he's like, "I hate my life, I want out of this." "My position for the past six months," he wrote, "has been that if I could get free from the business with the money we already have in hand, I would do it, rather than continuing a business at considerable profit." So he's like, "If I could just take the money I've already made and not have the headache, I would do that, instead of having this fight, just in the hopes of making a vast sum in the future.

• 1:18:32David Senra?

  Only two things lead me to put up with the responsibility and annoyances. First, the obligations we are under to the people who put money into our business." So now it's not just him and his brother's business, they got a ton of investors, right? "And second, the reluctance a man naturally feels to allow a lot of scoundrels and thieves to steal his patents." Yes, I don't think you should let people steal your work, whatever the case is, but at the detriment of your health and the foreclosure of multiple decades of your life as a result of that? And I don't mean that, like, he could have predicted he was going to die, but if you're completely miserable, you're exhausted, you're getting sick, like, what is the point of running your own business? And so the author hits the punchline right here perfectly. Wilber, and this is really, he says it better words than I was trying to grasp at.

• 1:19:16David Senra?

  Wilbur never seemed to grasp that his crusade to destroy his nemesis could destroy him as well. And so he's writing this letter right before he dies, and think about how crazy this is. This is kind of eerie, what he says. "But so far as making money is concerned, I'm going to quit worrying myself to death in order to get more than I've already got." And this is why reading biography is so powerful, because you find very, very smart people making very, very dumb mistakes over and over and over again. It's foolish to think that we are not prone to do this as well. And so, reading these stories, learning from their experiences, like, "Oh, I'm going to avoid this in my life." I love what Steve Jobs said, and this is something that I use in my life, and I think other people should look. He's like, I've looked, this is Steve Jobs talking, "I have looked in the mirror every

• 1:20:01David Senra?

  morning and asked myself, if today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I'm about to do today? And whenever the answer has been no for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something." So imagine if Wilbur Wright knew that. He's been saying no for years up until this point. And there's no way he would have made that mistake if he knew he was literally in the last months of his life. There's no way. And so, we can't predict if we're in the last months of our life, so let's act as we are. So this is what I mean about a very smart person making a very dumb mistake. Wilbur's frustrations had begun to gnaw at his health. He had, by his own admission, worked harder and for longer hours pursuing the case against Glenn Curtis than he had in developing the Wright Flyer. He drove himself to exhaustion and grew so thin as to appear cadaverous.

• 1:20:45David Senra?

  Family members began to express concern about the crushing pace he insisted on maintaining. Wilbur wrote a letter saying, "Most of my time has been taking up with lawsuits," expressing a hope that he could be freed from this kind of work, and that it was more pleasant to go to Kitty Hawk for experiments than to worry over lawsuits. That is one of the last letters he wrote, and that is where Wilbur departs this story, because this is when he dies in bed at the age of 45 from typhoid fever. And then I want to bring something to your attention that has happened over and over again. At this point where I got to the-- this is like the fourth time I read a situation like this. I was like, alright, there's some kind of weird dark side to human nature that is causing this to happen over and over again. So there's a ton of these exhibitions

• 1:21:28David Senra?

  where people-- where the pilots are going to die, right? The response by the spectators is almost always the same. And so it says, "As had been customary, spectators rushed to the crash scene, the scene of the crash, to fight for souvenirs." "In a few minutes, the field was cleared of every bit of wreckage. Eli's collar, tie, gloves, and cap disappeared." So they go even before the body is removed from the wreckage. They'll grab pieces from the plane. They take off their gloves. They'll take the guy's watch. In one case, there's like a piece of wood that broke off from the plane and is inside of one of the bodies of the pilots. And somebody yanks it out of the body while

• 1:22:11David Senra?

  the blood's still dripping and takes it home as a souvenir. What is that? Explain that to me. What-- why were people doing this?

• 1:22:20David Senra?

  And so the chapter I'm in is all about just death after death after death of these pilots. Really, I'm trying to figure out the lessons that you and I could take away from this, and that overconfidence can be deadly. In the games that we play, it can obviously cause the business failure, which is catastrophic, but it could also cause the death, like, physical death. And so it says, "Rogers had become known for his reckless flying, ignoring friends who urged him to be more cautious." And this is what he said, "The air is nothing to me now. I've conquered it." So he gets in his plane. He says, "At one point, he saw a flock of seagulls. Rogers turned and dived down into them, scattering the birds in all directions. He then immediately went into a steep descent. He was seen desperately trying to pull back from the descent. The airplane did not respond, and Rogers, who

• 1:23:03David Senra?

  just said he'd conquered the air, crashed into the ocean and was crushed beneath the engine." They found the body, so they wind up taking the-- looking at the plane to see what went wrong. And they found a body of a seagull tightly wedged between the tail and the rudder of his airplane. The goal had rendered-- the body of the seagull had rendered the rudder immovable and snapped the control wire. He's literally into a descent. A bird that he went out of his way to run into literally snaps the wire. It's essentially like driving a car if your steering wheel doesn't work.

• 1:23:35David Senra?

  And so, once Wilbur dies, Orville keeps himself for a little bit, but then he winds up selling the company. Essentially, like, what I kept trying to describe to you is like, you have the rights in a position of power, Curtis in not a position, but Curtis keeps going, he keeps persevering, and eventually, these roles switch. Orville never had the intensity that Wilbur did, so he winds up selling the company. But even before he did this, this is a perfect question. Moreover, Orville was showing signs of wearing down. Curtis was not. He pressed on with his counterattack. And so, that reminds me of one of my favorite quotes. It's the Shackleton family motto, "By endurance we conquer." Curtis just absolutely refused to give up. He kept pushing, he kept innovating. This is, at this point, he's designed one of the most successful planes for World War I.

• 1:24:18David Senra?

  He designs the world's first airplane that could take off and land on the water. He's designing all kinds of things, and Orville's just distracted. He's not, he doesn't have the love and the fire and the push that his brother did. And so, Orville cashes out. He makes about $1.5 million. I think in today's dollars, it'd be like 10, somewhere between 10 and 15 million. And it says, "Orville's departure effectively ended the patent wars. Although the litigation continued, it was largely on its own momentum and bore little resemblance to the ferocious legal wrangling of previous years." So, that's in 1919. 10 years later, the two companies actually merge. And then Curtis has this huge tailwind of World War I that winds up causing his company to just completely surpass the Wright company.

• 1:25:03David Senra?

  Mint him a fortune, a fortune much larger than Wilbur and Orville were able to accumulate. It says, "The war," this is World War I, "was a boon to Curtis. Orders came in from all over the world in much volume." Curtis opened a second factory, he opened a second factory and then took on a group of financiers. The two factories hummed along, turning out more than 10,000 planes before the end of the war. By this time, Curtis employed an entire engineering department to put his ideas to paper and then test them out. He created the NC-4. It was the first aircraft to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. The NC-4 was Curtis's finale in aviation. The following year, he liquidated his interests and then retired and moved to Florida, leaving behind an extraordinary record.

• 1:25:45David Senra?

  The list of his inventions and achievements is immense and includes the seaplane, retractable landing gear. Twist grip throttles for motorcycles, the enclosed cockpit, the airboat, and a number of machines to manufacture airplane components. He created the first civilian flying school and the first military flying school, conducted both the first simulated bombing run and first use of firearms from an aircraft, and delivered the first radio communication from the skies. Curtis may not have been an intuitive genius, but he was a prolific innovator, and he would constantly improve any product. Wilbur Wright was a visionary architect, but Glenn Curtis was a master builder.

• 1:26:28David Senra?

  Progress unquestionably demands both.

• 1:26:35David Senra?

  And that is where I'll leave it. There is so, so much more in this book. If you enjoyed the podcast, you'll love the book. Highly recommend reading it. Take your time with it. There's just so many amazing stories in the book. If you want to buy the book and support the podcast at the same time, there's a link in the show notes in your podcast player. You can also go to amazon.com/shop/founderspodcast and buy the book there or buy any of the books. You can actually see all the books I've done in reverse chronological order at that link. If you want to further support the podcast and give a gift subscription to a friend or coworker, that link is down below and is also available at founderspodcast.com. That is 241 books down, 1,000 to go. And I'll talk to you again soon.