#163 Alfred Nobel

What I learned from reading Alfred Nobel: A Biography by Kenne Fant. ---- [16:24] The self-awareness that would become so characteristic of him was awakening and with it the determination to be the master of every situation. He was not going to throw himself into the world and let luck or chance lead the way. [26:26] When it comes to serious matters, I have adopted the rule of acting seriously. [28:09] Alfred never forgot poverty. [30:04] Financial pressure was accelerating his development as an inventor. [39:15] Alfred asked her what she wished as a wedding present. The quick-witted young woman astonished him by replying without hesitation, “As much as Monsieur Nobel himself earns in one day.” Impressed and amused, Alfred agreed. The girl received a monetary gift of such size that she and her husband could enjoy it as long as their marriage lasted. The bank draft Alfred signed was for $110,000. [47:33] It would take many years for Alfred to accept the idea that sometimes business failures were inevitable, that steps forward in one market were very often followed by a decline in another. Alfred learned to steel himself so that the disappointments would not depress him into inaction. [51:18] Never do yourself what others could do better or equally well. [57:26] Nobel had a soul of fire. He worked hard, burned with ideas, and spurred his collaborators on with his contagious energy. [58:04] When he went somewhere he liked to get there fast. [59:17] Whatever a human being manages to accomplish during his or her lifetime, there are so utterly few whose names will remain on the pages of history for any extended amount of time. Rarer still are those whose renown grows after their death. Alfred Nobel belongs among these. ---- 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

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• 0:00David Senra?

  Alfred Nobel honestly felt that his life was so commonplace as to not deserve profound reflection, much less publication. Trying to sum up his life in one terse sentence, he offered the following: "I am a misanthrope, and yet utterly benevolent; have more than one screw loose, yet am a super idealist who digests philosophy more efficiently than food." Given Nobel's strong distaste for blowing his own horn, when he was confronted with spontaneous expressions of admiration, he actually experienced a sense of shame, as if a feeling of unworthiness had taken possession of him. His reflections might then take on a tone of sarcasm.

• 0:41David Senra?

  He wrote: "How pitiful to strive to be someone or something in the motley crew of 1.4 billion two-legged, tailless apes running around on our revolving Earth projectile." But Nobel did strive to be someone. His workdays were absurdly long. He would frequently work for 15, even 20 hours, without rest. It was as if he wanted to exhaust himself in order to ward off melancholy. Since he detested meetings, he often put his orders in writing. He could write 20 to 30 letters a day, and he seldom went to bed before midnight. He had an aversion to publicity.

• 1:23David Senra?

  When the publisher of an illustrated book listing famous and outstanding Swedes wrote him, Nobel replied courteously but firmly: "I will with pleasure subscribe to this interesting and worthwhile project, but I request that my portrait be omitted from this collection. So far as I know, I have not earned any renown." Nobel found it impossible to maintain his self-esteem if he had to seek the esteem of others. His letters are particularly invaluable to our understanding and appreciation of him. The private correspondence allows readers to locate the undercurrents in his life: his self-absorption, his loneliness, and his belief in the absurdity of existence.

• 2:07David Senra?

  Many of the private letters seem to have been written during those moments when the demons of melancholy were on the offensive. When they attacked, work was his only escape. Its soothing effect was immediate: chest pains, difficulty breathing, and the headaches that haunted him his whole life would disappear as if by magic. Actions are the yardstick by which values can be measured. And Alfred Nobel left a legacy of lasting importance. Through his prizes, this restless, eternal wanderer, whom the writer Victor Hugo termed "Europe's richest vagabond," has forever etched his name in human memory. That was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Alfred Nobel: A Biography.

• 2:52David Senra?

  And it was written by Ken, maybe Kenne? Kenne Font. Okay, so before I jump into the rest of the book, I'm going to tell you why I'm reading this book. So ever since, there's a series of last names that are just so famous that I want to investigate who the people were behind the names. So the first demonstration of this is all the way back on Founders, number 135. I read the biography, or a biography, of Joseph Pulitzer. And obviously Pulitzer Prize, and I think the Nobel Prize might be the two most famous prizes that I could think of in modern day, right? And Pulitzer's story is one of the most inspiring stories I've ever come across. By the time, I think he was 17 years old. Seven, I want to say seven of his siblings and his dad are dead.

• 3:35David Senra?

  The only people left in his family were his mother and his younger brother, if I'm not mistaken. He winds up emigrating to the United States because there's a group of businessmen and investors in Boston that realized, hey, the American Civil War's going on at this time. They said, hey, the Union needs a lot more fighters. Let's see if we can pay, basically offer rewards, financial rewards, for young Europeans to come and fight in this war. And so Pulitzer's, that's how he gets to America. He arrives, I think he's 17, maybe 18 years old when he gets to America. He does not understand the language. He says, I think the phrase he used was, "He was tongueless, friendless, and penniless." Meaning he didn't speak the language, had no friends, and had no money. And yet, through, I mean, he's obviously genius, and through hard work and dedication,

• 4:20David Senra?

  he winds up building this gigantic media empire. And just the story is just remarkable. So that, once I read that book, I knew I was going to eventually figure out, I had to find out, who is the Nobel behind the Nobel Prize? And I'll just tell you upfront, one of the most interesting, or surprising things, rather, that I learned, I was like, this can't be real. Like, you know, you think of the Nobel Peace Prize. And Alfred Nobel, the reason that he became such an infamous or famous and wealthy inventor and entrepreneur is because he's the inventor of dynamite. And that just struck me as odd, that the inventor of dynamite, and this book makes

• 5:03David Senra?

  the argument that the inventor of the modern explosive industry, leaves almost all of his fortune at the time of his death to this propagation of the Peace Prize. So I wanted to find out, okay, who is this strange character? And so that's where we're going to get into today. As a reminder too, before I jump into this book, if you look in, in case you haven't listened to the last few episodes, there's a new private podcast feed, I call it Founder's Postscript. The link for that feed is in the show notes. If you haven't yet installed it on your podcast player, I leave the link and the series of instructions on how to do so. It's really simple, takes less than 30 seconds. But the reason I'm telling you that is because I just finished recording the third episode for that feed, and it's based on this book written by James Dyson. And that book is called A History of Great Inventions.

• 5:48David Senra?

  It's Dyson and a series of other writers going over 500 of the most profound human inventions spanning several thousands of years. So anyways, that'll be out on that feed in the next 24 hours. Okay, let me jump right into this book. Let's not delay any more. I want to give you an insight into what it was like to talk to Alfred Nobel. So he has a rather prickly personality. I mean, think about the way he describes himself. He described himself as a misanthrope. The definition of that word is a person who dislikes humankind and avoids human society. So what makes this biography so unique is that a large part of it is a collection of letters that Nobel wrote himself. And by reading these letters, we see that he has a personality that not many other humans would find attractive. But he was capable, he was a brilliant person.

• 6:32David Senra?

  So this person is describing what it was like to talk to him. So it said, "Nobel could talk and philosophize in such an entertaining manner that it was pure pleasure and delight to his rapt audience. To spend an hour chatting with him was both a remarkable joy and a challenging exercise, because you had to stand your toes to follow his unexpected turns of thought and startling paradoxes." It's funny that she's using the word paradox, because that's the way I would describe him as well. This brilliant mind that is hidden under this prickly, he's just kind of an ass and a jerk. They call him, a lot of his workers call him a task masker. Taskmaster, excuse me.

• 7:14David Senra?

  And so this paradox, you know, he spent a large part of his life running experiments, working, building his own base of knowledge. He'd read constantly, so he would accumulate all this interesting information. And he's able to, in private conversations, kind of like, get you excited about all these different ideas, and yet he detested his fellow humans. He said, "He would soar like a wind-driven swallow," some kind of bird, "from one subject to another, as seen against the rapid flight of his thought. Our globe would shrink and its distances melt, becoming trivial." Okay, so let's go to his early life. I want to tell you a little bit about his personality. And I think a large idea that we need to understand, to understand Nobel and why he

• 7:58David Senra?

  was the way he was, is he tried to learn from the mistakes of his father. And his father was also an inventor and an entrepreneur. He also built weapons of destruction. But he was not, he was not able to maintain success over a long period of time. So I guess that's another thing I should tell you right up front. Nobel was, not only was he a gifted chemist and brilliant and able to invent things that he was able to patent and build his business empire, but he's also extremely gifted entrepreneur. Not only did his main business produce, gave him a net worth in his day of like, equivalent to hundreds of millions of dollars, his brother starts one of the largest, or the largest, oil company in Russia.

• 8:41David Senra?

  I think at the time, at their peak, they were producing, I think, 80% of all oil in Russia, and I think 50% of all oil throughout the world. And his brother relied heavily on Alfred as not only an advisor, but also an investor as well. And so at the time of his death, I think 25% of Alfred's net worth was tied up in oil. But not only that, right before his death, he also takes, he also takes over and completely turns around. A company that's still around. It's been in the business for 350 years. It's this company called Bofors, I think is how you pronounce it. He reshapes the company from an iron and steel producer to making cannons, manufacturing cannons, and then also producing chemicals.

• 9:25David Senra?

  And the reason I'm telling you all this, the reason I'm bringing it to your attention is because it's just remarkable. His main focus was his business, his dynamite business. And somehow, in his spare time, he wound up being invaluable to two other gigantic companies. He was the definitely gifted entrepreneur. And we're going to see a lot of that comes from just learning from the mistakes of his father. So this is how we get to where we are in the book. One thing to know about him first is that he was sick his entire life, kind of like a sickly child. It says, "Alfred's constant ill health kept him from taking part in his siblings' and other children's games. In a way, Alfred remained a pensive looker-on," I would write "pensive onlooker," "his whole life. His parents' social disgrace was the foundation for his bitterest childhood memories." So what are they talking

• 10:07David Senra?

  about that? His father had a series of booms and then following busts throughout his life. He went bankrupt twice. And so Alfred thought that his father was very frivolous when it came to the financial aspects of his business. He said, "Yes, you can invent things. You can, in some cases, you have thousands of people working for you, but you don't know how to maintain your success because you're not paying attention to the finance, financial part of the business." And that's where the role he helped his brother play in the oil company, but also in the Bofors company as well. The dynamite company was just profitable constantly, which we'll see. So it says, "Alfred's growing bitterness derived in part from a sense that people around him did not measure up to his standards." This is where it comes really. He's kind of like a snob. "That they were driven by

• 10:52David Senra?

  greed exacerbated his suspiciousness and his disgust. His way of honoring his mother was by remaining scrupulously honest." And so his letters are full of being disappointed in partners, in vendors, in employees, and just this habit that he has of feeling that people are not living up to standards is something that stays with him for his whole life. Alfred would later criticize both his father and his brother, this is his brother Ludwig, the one that's going to run the largest oil company in Russia, "for thinking the financing of a project secondary."

• 11:26David Senra?

  To Alfred, solving the matter of financing was primary. That is one of the most important sentences in the book. And this is another idea that we've seen expressed in many different other examples. The one that comes to mind is that book, I think it's called The Empire of Light. This is the difference between Alfred and his brother and his father is the same difference between Nikola Tesla and Edison. If you think about the same idea. Let's go back over that sentence again. He would criticize both his brother and his father for thinking the financing of our project secondary. To Alfred, solving the matter of financing was primary. So we'll go into more detail on that later. This is a description of a young Alfred. And these are personality traits I think he has his entire life. Brains, discipline, and enterprise.

• 12:11David Senra?

  He is, let's see, how old is he? Eight years old at the time. His teacher's praise made Alfred feel special. The frail boy who had such difficulty asserting himself among his older brothers and their friends was now suddenly distinguishing himself. Diligence and talent had already set him apart. This is his father talking about, he's comparing all his, he's got three boys. Actually, these are the three that survive. He's telling us, he's very, like, he's predicting the future here, I guess is what I'm saying. According to my evaluation, Ludwig has the most brains, Alfred the greatest discipline, and Robert the greatest sense of enterprise, but also a perseverance that amazed me several times last winter.

• 12:53David Senra?

  Ludwig went on to become a highly successful entrepreneur in St. Petersburg, and Robert would reach success as an oil exporter. It was Alfred's combination of all three qualities that took him the furthest. So that's a good way, like, a good shorthand to, way to think about Alfred Nobel. Brains, discipline, enterprise. Okay, so at this point in the story, his father is back up. So he had, he had been previously successful, then went bankrupt. Then he starts developing underwater mines for Russia. So he moves the family to Russia. He's having success because the czar of Russia at the time is taking interest in saying, hey, we need a way to defend Russia's waters without manpower and a lot of money. And so that's what Emmanuel Nobel, that's Alfred's father, is doing at the time.

• 13:38David Senra?

  And so in this story, we see Alfred's hunger for knowledge and then the importance of teachers to cultivate that knowledge, which winds up changing the path of his life. Okay. Immanuel Noble's experiences had taught him that knowledge is the most valuable of all assets. One might lose one's money, which he had already previously done, but never what one knows. As soon as his personal finance improved, he was therefore eager for his sons to receive the best education available. So he starts hiring all these private tutors for his three boys. Immanuel's thirst for knowledge was inherited by his sons, who were not only trained as engineers, but exceptionally well-read men. That's another thing about Alfred. Anytime that he's not working, he's reading. From the very first, Alfred was fascinated by the speculative and experimental elements of chemistry, and this became his favorite subject.

• 14:22David Senra?

  So he winds up getting a chemist, yeah, a chemist tutor, essentially. The teacher Alfred grew most fond of was the wise Petarov, is this guy's name. Petarov showed fatherly concern toward Alfred. His favorite student drew immense strength from Petarov's praise, which spurred him to redouble his efforts. Alfred quickly and effortlessly caught up with his older brothers, and his teacher sensed his pupil's genius. During his, during his life, Alfred found only a handful of people with whom he could speak openly and honestly, and one of them is Petarov. So at this point, the author gives us some background about what, what it was like living in Russia at this time. This is this crazy story about Dostoevsky. I can't, never pronounce this guy's name correctly, but it said, "Police surveillance

• 15:05David Senra?

  and censorship were constant realities in SARS, Russia." Alfred turned 16 the year Dostoevsky was imprisoned and sentenced to death, a sentence that was later commuted to four years in the penitentiary in Siberia. The czar had toyed with him in a cruel fashion. Dostoevsky and others were condemned to be shot. They were dressed in white shirts and taken to a place of execution, and then they were pardoned. Do you imagine living through that? And then this is a little bit about, in the same paragraph, we get a great sentence into the personality of Alfred. "He was repelled by the collective and could never bring himself to go along with the pack." So this entire time during this childhood, he's working in his father's factory.

• 15:49David Senra?

  He's running, he's doing chemistry experiments, and he's just soaking up as much experience and knowledge as he can. And so it says, "The transformation Alfred underwent during these years was remarkable. Out of a shy, brooding, sickly childhood arose an efficient and tough entrepreneur, interested in everything and surprised by nothing. His contributions were critical, and in just a few years, the small workshop company developed into one of Russia's largest. With time, the assortment of products for the civilian market expanded to include heating units and piping conduits. Emmanuel had invented and was now manufacturing Russia's first central heating system as well." More about his personality as a result of all the experiences he's going through. "The self-awareness that would become so characteristic of him was awakening,

• 16:31David Senra?

  and with it, the determination to be the master of every situation. He was not going to throw himself into the world and let luck or chance lead the way." So a really good idea from him. Also, this idea about, hey, I'm determined to be the master of every situation. He saw financial strength as a way to be the master of every situation. He set up his business so he would not, he avoided having to rely. Once his business was up and running and it was profitable, he wanted to avoid relying on other people's money. And he did that for his entire life. We also see young Alfred doing something that he does his entire life. This is, he's around 21 years old at the time, and he works himself to exhaustion constantly. Alfred worked with such enthusiasm that by summer of 1854,

• 17:15David Senra?

  he became ill from overexertion. By this point, his father's company employed more than 1,000 men, and during the Crimean War, the work pace was relentless. So a lot of the revenue, this is the dangers of having one large customer be responsible for the majority of your revenue, because the majority of the company's revenue at the time is coming from the Russian government as they're fighting this war after the war. So they make his father, Emmanuel, Buy a bunch of equipment. He spent hundreds, the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars on new equipment. And then after the war, Russian government just refuses to pay him. And so this is going, and his dad's not good with money to begin with.

• 17:54David Senra?

  And so this is going to lead to the second bankruptcy of Alfred's father. First, I'm gonna, I'll get there in one second. This is a little bit about the beliefs of a young Nobel at the time. This did not stop him from believing all inventions as symbols of progress belong to all of humanity. He felt, as many artists do, that the work itself is the reward and that wouldn't, and that one shouldn't count on any other. It was a belief that Alfred had held on to as a very young man. He had not forgotten the humiliation of poverty. So this, this idea, they repeat over and over again. He never forgot the humiliation of poverty. He never forgot what it was like to become poor. This causes him to beef. He beefs with his dad's reckless ways.

• 18:36David Senra?

  And the way he talks to his father is very similar to the way he's gonna talk to his brothers or other people that, it's business partners, anybody that disappoints him when he feels they're being sloppy on the financial aspect of the business. It's funny, I just went through, I reread yesterday my highlights for the book, Meet You in Hell, which is about the partnership that eventually fractured between Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. I think it's founders number 73. It's somewhere in there, might be 74. But the reason I bring that up is because what surprised me is how much of that book is just Carnegie and Frick and probably why they agreed to work together. At the very beginning, you know, the relationship, the partnership wound up being very beneficial to both of them.

• 19:19David Senra?

  But anyways, part of the reason they, I think they wanted to work together is because they both constantly talk about cost, cost, cost. Watch your books. Frick was trained as a bookkeeper. That was his first job. And that's the, no matter what, what business he was involved in, he always controlled the flow of money and always looked at, he's, I forgot what he said. It's like the language of capitalism. I forgot the exact term he used. Basically, the numbers would tell you everything you need to know about a business. And in that book, they're just constantly talking about, it's like, listen, revenue is cyclical, profits are cyclical, the cost savings you get, the savings you get on, on accounting for your costs is permanent. Focus on that aspect of the business, which is very counterintuitive, I feel, to a lot of people, surprising. Very similar

• 20:01David Senra?

  to, the reason I bring that up is because Nobel echoes that a lot. He hates the amount of debt that his brother takes on when he's expanding the oil company later, and just his father's inability to reconcile the finances of the business. And then, the reason I think he's so obviously passionate about that end is because his father's inability to master this causes great pain for the family, right? So he says, "There were other disagreements. Alfred worried about his father taking out large loans." This is so funny, this is happening now, because I didn't know this at the time I'm doing these highlights, but you know, let's say 15 years in the future, he's having the same disagreements with his brother. "When the Crimean War ended in 1856, the Tsar Alexander II was forced to sign a humiliating peace treaty in Paris. The Russian government stopped fulfilling its obligations. The situation became critical. Orders from the civilian market couldn't compensate for the loss of

• 20:46David Senra?

  income from the military sector. And soon Emmanuel was threatened by bankruptcy for the second time. Desperate, he tried various ways of keeping the family company afloat. Alfred, now 25, was sent to visit bank presidents in Paris and London. They turned him down. With the war over, Nobel and Sons, which is the name of the company, was no longer considered a good risk. Bankruptcy was becoming hard reality." Now, around this time, the brothers are still working, they get back in touch with some of their former teachers, their tutors, right? And one of this, one of them is called this guy named Zinnan, and he introduces Alfred and his brothers to the inventor of nitroglycerin. So think of nitroglycerin as the main explosive that Albert quote unquote "masters," he controls.

• 21:31David Senra?

  So let me give you a little bit about the background, because this, this, this introduction to nitroglycerin is a turning point in Alfred's life, that's why I'm explaining it to you. So they had already told him about Ascanio Soborero, who used to work with one of their other professor friends, so don't worry about that. So this guy, Ascanio, had observations regarding a liquid that had been shown to be a powerful explosive, nitroglycerin. So this is the inventor of nitroglycerin. Later in his life, after Alfred expands the market for nitroglycerin with the invention of dynamite... Ascanio says, given all the death and destruction that his invention caused, he wished he never invented it. So he had a series of depression and melancholy towards the end of his life because of,

• 22:16David Senra?

  he thought his life's work was corrupted, essentially. So it says, "Despite warnings from Sobrero," I don't know how to pronounce his name, "regarding any attempts to find any practical..." He says, "Despite warnings from the inventor regarding any attempts to find any practical applications for the discovery, Alfred became fascinated by the substance and its remarkable and seemingly inexplicable behavior." So that inexplicable behavior leads to a lot. They didn't understand it at the beginning, so there's a lot of explosions. Even the inventor, who was mixing a little bit, thought it was perfectly safe. The glass that he's holding his hand explodes. He ends up getting shrapnel and having scars in his face.

• 22:56David Senra?

  The amount of people that die in the development of the dynamite industry is remarkable, including Alfred's little brother. And I'll go into more detail about the gruesome accident that happens. So it says, "He became fascinated by the substance's remarkable and its inexplicable behavior. In front of his amazed students, the professor Zenin had poured a few drops of the fluid on an anvil and then struck it with a hammer. The liquid exploded, but not the matter on which it was poured." So Alfred thought there's some great mystery that he had to find out. "How? What is this thing?" For Alfred, this was the greatest challenge he'd ever faced. How to detonate this explosive and liberate its awesome power. He carried out one risky experiment after another.

• 23:38David Senra?

  One day, it occurred to him to mix black gunpowder with nitroglycerin and light the mixture with a regular fuse. That is, think about what he just discovered as the prototype for dynamite. Now, once word gets out on what he's able to do, he has this essentially, quote-unquote, "controlling of nitroglycerin," is the way to think about dynamite. A lot of people, there's going to be a huge demand for controlled explosives. Think about the time they're in. Now, there's obviously military applications of this, and there's a lot of different European governments that use it for that. But this is the expansion of the railroads at this point. So there's a ton of private, non-violent industry that needs a way, you know, they're building railroads through mountains, through all kinds of different geography, and they

• 24:21David Senra?

  need a way to move rock, essentially. And that's what dynamite is used for. Now, his father... Very vain person starts claiming credit for Alfred's invention. And so he's trying to take credit for Alfred's work. And this, I'm going to read to you the end of a letter that Alfred wrote his father. And we see just his prickly, his determination to be the master of everything that he's involved in. And he's not, he won't let even his father, and I don't think he's wrong in this case. I think his father is in the wrong in this situation. He's just not allowing, even his father, he's not, he's not willing to defer to his father here.

• 25:02David Senra?

  And he says, "Rather than regarding this idea as your own, far from it, you made a bit of fun of it at my expense. I decided then to take off the leash and find another way of reaching my goal without conflict or unpleasantness." So he's going on into like what, he's describing in the letter what he did differently than his father, because his father was also doing experiments in nitroglycerin, but Alfred was the one that arrived at the invention of dynamite, not his father. Okay. So he says, "I would scarcely serve to deny the credit, I would scarcely serve to deny the credit I deserve in the matter. I can hardly make myself believe that such would be your serious intent, but can only ascribe it to bad humor or ill health." So he's saying like, "The only reason I'm going to give anybody else in the family credit

• 25:45David Senra?

  besides me is just because that's the nice thing to do. It's like family and love, right? So he says, "The only reason for indulgence on my part would be family love. But in order for that to be maintained, it has to be mutual and requires at least the same consideration as one owes to strangers. Your sudden departure from Petersburg at the moment when I..." He was very, very sick. He was sick all the time through his life, but in this case, they were worried that he was going to die. So he says, "Your sudden departure from Petersburg at the moment when I, as you yourself expressed it, was on my deathbed, was probably less a proof of love than of fear. But in you, fatherly love seems to run aground on complacency or vanity.

• 26:26David Senra?

  It should not seem strange that I, at the age of 30, will not allow myself to be treated as a schoolboy. It pains me to have to provide this whole long explanation, which ought to have been unnecessary. But when it comes to serious matters, I have adopted the rule of acting seriously." So he winds up, think about, he winds up building a prototype is the way I would describe it. Okay, he has a prototype, he raises money, he gets a loan. Things are still tight though. His business is not on solid footing yet. He's going to get it there and in large part, he does almost everything himself, which is remarkable. But the reason that I'm making the point and letting you know that his business is not on solid financial footing is because this next section really demonstrates that the knowledge that things

• 27:09David Senra?

  can turn very bad, which happened to him now twice in his life, can be highly motivating you to stop that from occurring again in the future. And we see that he's got this just determination to not be poor. On several occasions, Alfred was so short of money, he was forced to consider giving up. Instead, he took upon himself the entire responsibility of his family's finances. His dad has no money. This is after they've moved back from Russia to back to Sweden, which is where their family is originally from. And so Alfred's now this, he's the one that's going to lead his family out of poverty. Okay. Alfred's private correspondence indicates that he was constantly on edge during this period. His father's bitter fate was much on his mind. Every member of the Nobel family was acutely aware of how sudden

• 27:53David Senra?

  poverty could kill dignity. But Alfred especially was haunted. Alfred always seemed, he's around 30 years old at this time, by the way. Alfred always seemed to find a way out. He was driven not by desire for fame, but by fear. His feelings of responsibility toward his parents, his determination that they should not want for anything was a powerful force. Alfred never forgot poverty. There is variations of that sentence. Alfred never forgot poverty. There is, there's got to be half a dozen different variations of that sentence throughout this entire book. It was clearly one of his motivating factors in life. In fact, it was a lot of people, you know, I kept hounding on the fact that he was gifted on the financial

• 28:35David Senra?

  aspect of business as well. He would constantly be able to read companies' books and discover if there was like fraud going on. He just had a very good natural instinct for numbers. But what was also interesting in the book was that He would, um, he carried around a little book with him and he wrote down every single expenditure. And even later in his life, there's, there's a, like a, they reprint one of these, one of the pages in this like, this diary of numbers. You could think of it in that way, right? And at the time, he's worth the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars. Uh, there's no way he's ever going to be poor again. And yet you see it's like, he buys like a hat and you know, say it's like $6. I'm using dollars. He, he dealt in all kinds of currencies.

• 29:18David Senra?

  He had businesses all spread throughout like multiple countries in Europe. But anyways, let's say hat, $6, uh, lunch, $15.

• 29:27David Senra?

  Then I say like, he sent Ludwig $2.3 million. So it was just like this, everything was like, whether it was a business expense or a personal expense, it was in the same book. And it was just hilarious to me to see that. It's like, okay, I bought a hat. Oh, I also gave my brother $2.3 million for his oil company. So anyways, the reason I bring that is long, way past the point where he could spend all his money. He was still down to the, the, the dot, like down to the very last accounting for every single expense, no matter how small or how large. And I think that's tied into this Alfred never forgot poverty, that the author's constantly reminding us over and over again. A little bit more about the early days of his, of his company. And this is really a celebration of sentences.

• 30:10David Senra?

  Uh, this is one sentence that tells an entire story. Financial pressure was accelerating his development as an inventor.

• 30:21David Senra?

  And this is a little bit more about what Alfred, Alfred again notices in his father. This is a main idea that we see constantly over and over again in these books, that you can learn, a great way to learn how to do something is seeing it done the wrong way first, right? So this is what he notices about his father and what he wants to avoid. Alfred could not have failed to notice his father's helplessness and self pity. It was clear that both as an entrepreneur and an inventor, Emmanuel's desires exceeded his abilities. He was increasingly unable to sift through the unrealizable ideas for the viable ones. So this is a great description of the importance of Alfred's invention. And we can think about this, how important his invention was as the foundation that he builds his very successful business on. Okay, so it says Alfred had joined that group of human beings who extend the boundary

• 31:06David Senra?

  posed to progress. His creative energy defined the development of the explosive substance industry. Time and time again, he bridged the gap between theory and application, thought and action. He was proving to be the inventor of the impossible. Scientists in the field had declared his work on initial ignition to represent the greatest progress in explosive substance technique since the invention of gunpowder. "The introduction of a detonating cap," which is what Dynamite has, writes the British historian F.D. Miles, "is without a doubt the greatest discovery that has ever been made in the theory and practice of explosives." This is a hell of a sentence. Check this out. "On this discovery, all modern application of explosives is based."

• 31:51David Senra?

  So in addition to reading this book this week, I also read James Dyson's book, The History of Inventions, I was mentioning earlier, and it reminded me how much Dyson idolized Edison. He called him the "Doian," which is a new word for me, the Doian of inventors, which was the most respected or prominent person in a particular field. "This is Nobel and Edison expressing the same idea. If I can come up with 300 ideas in a year," he wrote, "and only one of them is useful, I am content." That's Nobel. "These words were echoed in Thomas Edison's comment on the praise he received for inventing the light bulb." And Edison said, "It isn't the discovery of the filament that is so important, but the 10,000 other things that I tried that didn't work."

• 32:32David Senra?

  And so the very next page, we find out more about how Nobel worked. One, he liked to work alone, but he also used the Edisonian principle of experimentation, although he didn't call it that. Dyson explicitly calls it that in his autobiography. Alfred's method of research was helped by a well-developed intuition. The more than 50 experiments that preceded his invention of the patented igniter did not involve teamwork. Alfred rarely included colleagues in the preliminary work. He would grab people when it was time to produce his experiments into commercial products, but not when he was doing the actual experimentation. He does, towards the end of his life, he meets, actually, the executor of his will, winds up being a young chemist, and they start working together, him and a couple of other people.

• 33:15David Senra?

  But for the most part, he worked alone. Alfred rarely included colleagues in his primitive work, so in all probability, the direction of his project remained secret until the very end. He was a stranger to the kind of teamwork that modern research tends to favor. He liked to work alone in his laboratory. And I think one of the reasons he liked to work alone is because he saw himself as a bit of a pioneer, as somebody that's at the very edges of scientific knowledge and experimentation, someone doing chemistry that no one else is doing in the world. And there's also, so there's an upside to that. He obviously was able to patent his work, he was able to build a large empire on top of that. But the author does a great job of talking about the downsides to being a pioneer. He also discovered that the cost of being a pioneer could be tragically high.

• 33:59David Senra?

  There's this giant explosion that kills his little brother, and there's a description of this. "The yard outside the main building was deserted when catastrophe hit. The laboratory and the shed exploded with a thunderous roar." So now it's an eyewitness description of the aftermath of this gigantic nitroglycerin explosion. "Most ghastly was the sight of the mutilated corpses strewn on the ground. Not only had their clothes been torn off, but on some, the head was missing and the flesh ripped off the bones. These formless masses of flesh and bone bore little or no resemblance to a human body. The effect of the explosion could be judged by the fact that a nearby stone house, the walls facing the factory had split open."

• 34:42David Senra?

  So this is just somebody that happened to live in the same neighborhood. "The walls of the factory had split open, and a woman who had been standing by the stove cooking had part of her head crushed, one arm torn off, and one thigh terribly mauled." That is on the other side of a giant stone wall. And his brother Emil dies, I think he's 24 years old at the time. He actually caused the accident. Alfred never remarks on it in any of his letters, so we don't know how he truly felt about it. Obviously, we can imagine what would happen if your brother, your little brother dies at your factory. But it winds up being that you have to be very careful with how much nitroglycerin you're working with, you have to measure it out.

• 35:26David Senra?

  And they were cleaning up and kind of in a rush, and just wind up accidentally causing a giant explosion. Okay, so a little bit more about his, the early days of his company. Eventually, he's gonna have factories. I don't even know what, 10, 15 factories all over the world manufacturing dynamite. But this is not, he's not there yet. And because of this explosion, there's all these laws being passed about how you can't manufacture nitroglycerin in a city. And so we see a very smart move by young Alfred Nobel, how to get around this regulation so he can still build his company. Another problem was that filling the company's orders for explosive oil was hindered and nearly prevented altogether by a prohibition against the manufacturing story of nitroglycerin within a residential area.

• 36:09David Senra?

  Backed into a corner, Alfred proved his abilities as an entrepreneur. He found and bought a covered barge, which he anchored in the bay. Using primitive equipment, he manufactured what he's calling Nobel's patented explosive oil onboard, selling it for 50 cents a pound. The industry that within a few years would span the world was started on the water outside of Stockholm. And it's around this time that we also see his propensity for doing everything as much as he can himself. He did not like to rely on the good graces of other people. So it says Alfred had less than $25,000 in working capital and thus forced him. Now, now remember this, I'm gonna get to how, how much money dynamite made him, which is insane. At the beginning, his company is 25,000, less than $25,000 total.

• 36:54David Senra?

  Total, okay? Remember that number. Alfred had less than $25,000 in working capital and this forced him to do the most, do most things himself. He did all of the work of a managing director, as well as that of head of production, financial manager, and not least of all, director of publicity. He mailed advertisements to prospective buyers that included detailed instructions for use. That part reminded me, again, people always look at Alfred Nobel or anybody else. Later, like, once they become, like, they're, we, we think of people in their finished factor, right? We think of Jeff Bezos now, today, as one of the wealthiest people in the world, or Bill Gates, or anybody else, right? But What I'm most interested in is the person they were before they become famous,

• 37:37David Senra?

  infamous, notorious, whatever term you want to put onto that. So this part here, sitting there putting together detailed instructions. Larry Ellison did the exact same thing in the very beginning of Oracle. And so in the span of one lifetime, again, I use this point just to illustrate how much can change over multiple decades is Larry Ellison goes from having to go home, before he can go home every night, he's got a, he's filling out all the marketing material. Anybody he talked to, he sent them a package saying like what his product can do, to now being able to retire on an island in Hawaii that he bought the entire thing for himself. Like that happened in one life, that drastic change, right? Happened in one lifetime.

• 38:18David Senra?

  And so this drastic change of doing everything himself, having less than $25,000, having a product that he knows is working, it will work. Can he get there before he reaches financial insolvency? We don't know yet, right? He doesn't know yet. We obviously know that he did, rather. I just, I can't emphasize that enough, that the amount of progress you can make in one lifetime is just astounding. So let's go back to this. Alfred traveled to, this is about his, being the director of his own publicity, how he sold his product. This is how he sold his product. Alfred traveled to stone quarries and mines, demonstrating the superiority of his manufactured nitroglycerin compared to the old powder. Because of its greater explosive power, he could, he could promise and deliver substantial savings.

• 39:02David Senra?

  So this is his pitch, this is his value proposition, right? Blasting work could proceed faster and require fewer workers. Alfred dominated the activities of the company during the first few months. Now, he's eventually awarded a number of patents. That allows him to have this, you know, reap these monopolistic profits. And this is going to give you an idea, I'm fast forwarding several years in the story, by the way. This is going to give you an idea of the financial success of Dynamite, okay? When a woman who took, when a woman who took care of his household was getting married, Alfred asked her what she wished as a wedding present. The quick-witted young woman astonished him by replying without hesitation. As much as you make, as much as you earn in one day. Impressed and amused, Alfred agreed, without giving the matter further thought.

• 39:47David Senra?

  The girl received a monetary gift of such size that she and her husband could enjoy it as long as their marriage lasted. The bank draft Alfred sign, signed was for $110,000. So at this point in his life, he's making $110,000 a day. Now here's the interesting part. He's still a misanthrope. He's still a, when you read his letters, uh, he, he is clinically depressed. Um, is, the letters are the most interesting part of this book and it's also the part where it's like, there's a cautionary tale. Yes, he's a genius, uh, gifted inventor, gifted entrepreneur, gifted at finances. But he also could, I don't know if it's genetic. I have no idea.

• 40:30David Senra?

  Maybe it's self-induced because he, like, sometimes you read too much philosophy and you think that life is not worth living or whatever the case is. It, I don't want his life. That's the cautionary tale. There's very, he, reading his letters, it's like, why, there's no point in living if you're miserable all day long. Um, and I don't, again, I don't know the cause. I'm not going to speculate on the cause, but he never solved the problem of being a miserable person, which again, see, so his life also serves as a cautionary tale. So this is an example of money not buying happiness. His letters give testimony to growing melancholy. I am two steps ahead of my competitors, he writes, but the accumulation of money and praise leaves me totally indifferent. Whatever his tendency toward misanthropy, misanthro, misanthropy? I don't know how to pronounce that word either.

• 41:15David Senra?

  However, he refused to give up his hope for a better future. Increased wealth, he felt, could be accomplished by spreading knowledge and information. Uh, he also talks about, he has a big problem with the press, bureaucrats, but he also had, he was very concerned about, uh, concentrated power. So he says, uh, "In Alfred's eyes, the guardians of law and order were ambitious and corruptible. Their authority had to be limited. That would only be possible through the education of masses." Another interesting, um, observation about the life of Alfred Nobel, and what brings your attention, this is an example of the, the main idea, uh, behind, behind founders, I would say, is like, history doesn't repeat, but human nature does, right? And we see Alfred making the same mistake that other people throughout history, weapons

• 41:58David Senra?

  manufacturers, people that invented new ways to kill other humans, make the same mistake over and over again. And it says, "He's told her that the art of war was just beginning. Only when it had reached its completion would the deterrent elements be such that all nations would be forced to live in peace." On another occasion Alfred expressed something similar, so this is my main point here. "I would like to invent a substance or a machine so frightfully effective and devastating that it would forever make wars altogether impossible." He thought the invention of dynamite, the fact that it was so good at killing massive amounts of people so rapidly would lead to eternal peace. That's the exact same thing. If you remember back on Founder's number 147,

• 42:41David Senra?

  Sam Colt, when he invented the revolver, right? Sam Colt built a business empire solving a 400-year-old problem, which is how do you shoot more than one bullet without reloading? And he said, "It's so effective, such an effective killing machine, that it's going to end all wars." Nobel's saying the same, exact same thing here. And other scientists, I forgot who they, I can't remember the name at the moment, that developed on the Manhattan Project said the same thing with the invention of the atom bomb. "Okay, now we invented this, war will forever cease to be a memory." That we're so effective at killing each other now, that we're going to, that wars are going to end. And in every single situation, it was a miscalculation and misunderstanding of human nature. I'm just gonna read a couple quotes from his letters. His letters really do make him seem like not, make him seem like an ass.

• 43:26David Senra?

  He's just not a person that I'd want to, there's a ton of people throughout history are like, "I would love to have dinner with them, or have coffee with them, or whatever." I don't want anything to do with this guy. He's, I don't, I'm not, he says he kept, he keeps saying he's an optimist. He doesn't seem, read like an optimist to me.

• 43:41David Senra?

  Most of his letters in this book, he has, they call her a mistress. She's like 20 years younger than him, he never gets married, never has kids. I don't even know if they have like a sexual relationship or not, because she wants to getting, she wants to getting pregnant by somebody else. And the very fact that she was pregnant, he knew it couldn't have been his. I don't, I don't know if they ever consummated their marriage, or they never got married, but consummated their relationship at all. It's very, very bizarre, but the reason I bring that up is because when you're reading his letters, 90% of his letters are the letters that are reprinted in this book are to his mistress Sophie. That's what they call her mistress. I don't even know, again, what, it's not at all clear to me what the extent of their relationship was, right? And 10% of the letters are

• 44:28David Senra?

  Letter she wrote back to him, okay? And so for the vast majority of this book, our point of view is that of Alfred writing to his mistress. We are in the perspective of Sophie. And this is not, he had a problem, he wanted to have like a deep relationship with a woman, but the way he talks to her and the way he talks to other people, it's just like, this is not the way to do it, man. She says, "I'm spending almost the whole day at home, working. Time passes slowly because I feel very lonely. I have gotten out of the habit of participating in society life and am more and more shying away from contact with people." The reason I bring that up is because, he reminds me of kind of an Ebenezer Scrooge from Christmas Carol by Dickens, right? His letters are full with just complaints about his health, about his business.

• 45:13David Senra?

  He's just whining over and over again. And at some point, I was like, I don't even want to read these letters anymore. You're depressing me. And if you're sending these letters to a woman that you're trying to seduce or trying to engage in a relationship, this is just not the way to do it, man. Like, you sound like a, just a whiny brat, like an immature brat, which is really weird when you think about how gifted a mind he had. But again, gifted in business, gifted in numbers, but gifted with people? No way. So he says, "I can clearly," I'm just reading quotes from a couple of different letters. "I can clearly read between the lines that you're going well, that things are going well for you, and that my absence seems to give you more happiness than sorrow." See, he's just got a tendency to complain constantly. It's very, again, I shy away from pessimistic, negative people.

• 45:58David Senra?

  Life's too short. Jeff Bezos has this great line, says, "Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful." My version is, "Life's too short to hang out with negative people, I'm just not interested in them." "For me, it's the other way around. Life here seems very dismal to me, and I feel more lonely and abandoned every day. My brother-in-law and my sister-in-law's family have arrived. I think I have to undergo the torture of having them stay with me. There is nothing more repugnant on earth than uninvited guests." I want to go back to his smart idea he has, right? Everybody has good ideas, everybody has bad ideas. He's human, just like we are, but he was the good ideas. He optimized for independence. The original proposal, so a lot of people, he has patents in all these countries. He'll take on partners, right, in different countries.

• 46:42David Senra?

  And, you know, they can, they can start to produce dynamite under his patent. He's usually involved somewhat in the management of the business, but he also would not let people take advantage of him. So it says, "The original proposal also contained a passage Alfred found unacceptable." This is in Scotland. "The Scottish financiers wanted to place an embargo on Alfred's future patents that had nothing to do with explosives. Annoyed, Alfred wrote, 'Why not on the patents of my children also? Of course, I would not dream of doing business on such terms. Such declarations of independence were becoming a common theme in Alfred's financial negotiations. He wanted at all costs to avoid becoming dependent on other people's money.'" And so he would turn down bad business deals.

• 47:24David Senra?

  He wanted to make more money, but not at the expense of people having control over what he invents or what he's going to spend his time on. This is a little bit about Alfred experiencing the entrepreneurial emotional roller coaster and then seeking deeper into depression. "It would take many years for Alfred to accept the idea that sometimes business failures were inevitable. That steps forward in one's market were often followed by a decline in another. Alfred learned to steel himself so that the disappointments would not depress him into inaction. He thickened his skin to the fallout from each new accident." These are, in some cases, people dying, just in some cases fatal accidents. "But he was beginning to experience mental blocks as an inventor, and this, more than

• 48:06David Senra?

  anything else, was at the root of his growing melancholy. He felt he was getting old before his time." And so this is where people are thinking that, after the fact, that he was, he lived his life as a, experiencing clinical depression. The writer Robert Musil once declared that "some wealthy people experience their fortune as an extension of themselves." "Nothing could have been more foreign to Alfred. Each new million contributed not one inch to his mental and spiritual growth." Cliched as it might sound, what he was seeking could not be bought for money. The letters he wrote later in life bear the imprint of a severely, even clinically depressed human being. In his solitude, he counted how many real friends he had, and he didn't think he had any.

• 48:51David Senra?

  Every year, their number declined in his calculations. He felt nothing but loneliness and was waiting for him at the end of the road. So, again, he doesn't like other humans, but he clearly wants to have deep relationships. I think everybody does, right? We're social creatures, even the people that are extremely introverted, which Alfred definitely was. Yet, he didn't go out, he didn't try to maintain these relationships. And so, the note I left myself is like, every old person, when they talk about the list of regrets, not every, but a lot of them, they talk about they wish they made more time for friends, that they didn't lose relationships, that they, basically, they should have prioritized maintaining friendships even into old age. This is a very common regret for human beings. And so, if you have the choice between, you're already fabulously wealthy, like you're gonna try to get another million dollars, you're gonna try to spend some time with friends,

• 49:34David Senra?

  like clearly, if you want to be satisfied at the end of your life, you should optimize for friends over, again, not if, it's completely different if you need the money to live. But Alfred, at this point in his life, he'll never be able to spend all the money he already has. And yet, he's becoming more and more reclusive and becoming more and more depressed. He gets in this vicious cycle. It's like, why don't you step outside and realize what is causing your unhappiness? Yes, you don't like a lot of humans, but you also crave intimate contact with, at least, a small amount of them. And again, another example of an absolutely brilliant person failing to see that connection. And I think that's a good lesson for us to heed, to be like, hey, if he made the mistake, I could be prone to that mistake. So, maybe I should pick up the phone and call a friend I haven't talked to in six months

• 50:17David Senra?

  and make sure that I have people that I can rely on and talk to and experience life with even as I get older. So what's interesting, I'm going to tell you some advice that, some smart advice, in my opinion, that Alfred gave to his brother Ludwig. Ludwig is the one running the oil company, this giant oil company. It's really interesting. The book goes into, he eventually gets into a war with John D Rockefeller, Standard Oil, and then the Rothschilds put together this oil company. And this is the part where Ludwig is constantly asking Alfred for strategic advice. Alfred looks at his books. He basically tells him like who to hire. He's integral in making sure the oil company survives and thrives, right? And

• 51:00David Senra?

  so eventually, he's going to tell him, you've got to make peace with the Rothschilds. They're just too rich, and you've got to make peace with Standard Oil. And they wind up, these three companies come together. They do what would be illegal today, but they essentially divvy up almost the entire world market for oil and all the things you could produce from oil between the three companies. It was very fascinating. But anyways, let me get to the point, what he's saying. This is smart advice that Alfred gives to his brother. Never do yourself what others could do better or equally well. Anyone who tries to do everything himself would become worn out of body and soul. And again, I don't want to confuse that with what his own approach for his company at the very beginning. At the very beginning, he has to, because he doesn't have resources. Eventually, the company's going to get too

• 51:42David Senra?

  big, and Ludwig is trying to micromanage it. And he's like, this is gigantic. I'm going to get into how large the company was. It'll blow your mind here in a minute. But it's like, this is more than any one person can manage. So you've got to find people that can, where you're weak, they've got to be strong. And that's what, another thing Alfred was gifted on. He found partners that had strengths that he did not possess. And we've seen that idea as well. Like, go back to the man for all markets, Ed Thorp. You know, he's really gifted, credited for being the first quantitative hedge fund, but there was still a salesmanship aspect to the investment industry back then. And so he found a partner that would go out and, you know, smooth, go to lunches, and have drinks, and do all that stuff that Thorp had no interest in. Nobel had the same idea.

• 52:26David Senra?

  He's like, I know where I'm gifted. I'm gifted financially, I'm gifted in invention, but I'm not gifted in the actual management of other human beings. So he found people to do that. This is where Alfred, I just ran over my own point. This is where Alfred tells his brother to make peace with the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers. He says, they also, there's this meeting that's happening, he says, they also warned Ludwig courteously, but firmly, on this, he's having a meeting with the Rothschild, his brother's having a meeting. They warned him courteously but firmly of the Rothschild's very considerable financial power. Ludwig's representatives responded as curtly. There would be no question of their relinquishing control over Brand Noble. That's the oil company's name. So they're not giving you... Basically Rothschild's saying, hey, we're only going to make investment. We can own the majority of the company. They want control.

• 53:09David Senra?

  And on the Nobel side, they're like, no, we're not doing that. And with an average production of... This is insane. With an average production of 32 tons of oil per day, they had little reason to fear the Rothschild financial power. Now, that's their opinion. Eventually, they go back to Alfred, and Alfred, he dissuades them of them. He's like, no, it's better to make peace with these guys. The tremendous pressure under which Ludwig had lived during the two years had seriously affected his health. Alfred noticed for the first time that his brother seemed vacant and dispirited. And the reason I bring up his brother's poor health is because his brother winds up dying, right? And why is this important? Because this is the why behind the Nobel Peace Prize.

• 53:54David Senra?

  Alfred experienced something very rare in life. He got to read his own obituary. When he dies, the newspapers confused him with his brother. So his brother Ludwig dies, and they think it's Alfred. And so they start calling him. The obituary characterized Alfred as a merchant of death who had built a fortune by discovering new ways to mutilate and kill. When he read this, it pained him so much that he never forgot it. Indeed, he became so obsessed with his posthumous reputation that he rewrote his last will, bequeathing most of his fortune to a cause upon which no future obituary writer would be able to cast aspersions. So that's a very convoluted way of saying that his last will and testament is the one

• 54:38David Senra?

  that began the Nobel Peace Prize. And that came as a direct result of realizing, oh, my God, if I don't do something to fix my reputation, I'm going to die, and people will think I was miserable, and that I became rich by finding ways to mutilate and kill other human beings. And just a few more things from Alfred. His advice is, don't do anything by half. He's writing his brother, Robert, who's still alive. "I am too much of a philosopher to think of anything as truly all-important. But if you enter the ring, and if you have even a trace of that perverse quality called a sense of duty, you slave until you drop." And this is an example of Alfred living up to that even though he didn't want to. This is him writing a few years before his death.

• 55:20David Senra?

  "I am totally sick and tired of the explosive substance field in which one is forever stumbling around in accidents, preventative clauses, red tape, acts of villainy, and other unpleasantness. I long for peace and quiet and want to devote my life to scientific experiments, which is not possible when every day brings new problems. I wholeheartedly wish to retire from the business in any kind of business." Dream as though he might, might have days far from stressor of the financial world, Alfred discovered that he could not let the Nobel companies drift aimlessly. He continued to put his personal stamp on them until the very last day of his life. So after he dies, there's this huge fight between his family, because he didn't leave much money to his family, left it all to try to carry on and build up his reputation

• 56:04David Senra?

  and hopefully bring around world peace, right? And so his mistress winds up having a baby by somebody else, gets married to somebody else, but she's still constantly, Alfred tries to like cut her off, but he still sends her a little bit of money. So he leaves a very small amount of money for her in his will. She didn't think it was enough. And this is just, this is another idea that I think, I think I got it from Ed Thorp, it might have been Warren Buffett, but it talks about the need for both good offense and good defense. Good offense is making, the ability to make money, and a good defense is making people, having a good defense, making sure other people can't take your money. So this is a reminder to have good defense too. And this is just a terrible, terrible human being we're talking about here. She turned to a lawyer in Vienna, who in turn contacted the executor of Nobel's will

• 56:49David Senra?

  to ask for more money. "Please soon devolved into threats." If she did not get more money, she would publish the more than 200 letters that Alfred had written to her. You know, he wrote to her more than anybody else in his life. Who knows, this might have been what he felt was his closest relationship in his life. And for her to do that after he dies, say, you know, to hold his estate, like, "I need more money, I'm going to publish his private thoughts to me," and embarrass him, this is a terrible, terrible person. And so we gotta keep that in mind that some people are capable of inhumane things and have good defense to keep them away from us. Personality is one of my favorite sentences in the entire book. "Nobel had a soul of fire.

• 57:31David Senra?

  He worked hard, burned with ideas, and spurred his collaborators on with contagious energy. At the same time, he wanted to appear as an unpretentious man and like to emphasize that he was not soft, underlining that his needs were no greater than anyone else's and that he would have been content with a doghouse." So his wealth, largely he bought like nice houses, but he wasn't into, he didn't really care about anything else. Didn't buy nice clothes, nice food, none of that. He just, he had a nice house where he could live and then invest a lot of his money into his experiments and into his companies. And that seemed to be what he wanted to do with the fruits of his labor. More about his personality. "When he went somewhere, he liked to get there fast." And before I close, I want to read you a part of his eulogy, and this is just a reminder

• 58:15David Senra?

  that don't forget, we're all human and we're all more similar than we are different from each other. And we all usually want the same things. "When Alfred Nobel allowed someone to look beyond his multifarious interests and discussions and into his inner soul, one would find new proof of the perpetual truth that more remarkable than all daring thoughts and significant inventions, and beyond all the fortunes and excitement, is the spirit of a human being who lives, struggles, and suffers, who loves, and hopes, and believes." And believes, excuse me. "There was without a doubt a great measure of loneliness and suffering in his life. And in the eyes of his fellow human beings, he was considered by too many as rich and

• 58:58David Senra?

  a remarkable man, and by too few, as a human being. Let us not perpetuate this error now that he is dead. For to the land beyond the grave we can neither take acquisitions, nor reputation, nor genius."

• 59:16David Senra?

  And I'll close on this, whatever a human being manages to accomplish during his or her lifetime, there are so utterly few names who will remain on the pages of history for any extended amount of time. Rarer still are those whose renown grows after their death. Alfred Nobel belongs among these. If Alfred kept at a distance from his fellow human beings, this was in part the self-protecting instinct of a hypersensitive man. His keen sense of betrayal rendered him depressed and recitant. As an expression of his nearly uninterrupted melancholy are two lines that he seems to have jotted down hurriedly on a piece of paper found in a pile of unsorted newspaper clippings in November of 1956.

• 1:00:00David Senra?

  He wrote, "Then the reality of life is bared, and of the dream of happiness only the ghost of memory remains." From his dream of happiness remains more than a ghost of memory, however. Every year on December 10th, when the Nobel Prizes are awarded in Stockholm and Oslo, the world, the whole world, is witness to Alfred Nobel's dream. In accordance with his express wishes, the prizes are awarded independent of ideology, race, sex, or nationality. They have become an enduring monument to a brilliant inventor, a visionary empire builder, and an unprejudiced humanist. And that is where I will leave the story.

• 1:00:44David Senra?

  If you want to buy the book, if you use the link that's in your show notes, available on your podcast player, you'll be, you'll be supporting the podcast at the very same time. Something else people have been doing on their own and also asking me about, there's a lot of people that want to buy gift prescriptions to founders, for friends, coworkers, maybe a lover. So I will leave a link in the description on your podcast player if you want to buy a gift prescription for anybody else. I thank you in advance if you do decide to do that. And a reminder, grab the Founder's Postscript podcast feed that's in your show notes as well, if you haven't done so already. Next 24 hours, you'll have a bonus episode for me. And again, it's just a way to thank you for supporting me, extra benefit.

• 1:01:26David Senra?

  There's also, if you haven't yet grabbed a copy of the two, I have notes on 285 podcasts and lectures on entrepreneurship, the notebook, the link to my Evernote notebook is also in the show notes. I've talked enough. I gotta rest my voice. Thank you very much for listening, and I'll talk to you again soon. Oh, actually, I forgot something. That's 163 books down, 1,000 to go. I'll talk to you again soon.