#422 Joseph Pulitzer

What I learned from reading Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power by James McGrath Morris. Made possible by: Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com⁠ Applovin: ⁠https://www.applovin.com/⁠ Vanta: ⁠https://vanta.com/founders

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  Joseph Pulitzer is better known today for the prize that bears his name than his contributions to history. That's a shame. In the 19th century, when America became an industrial nation and Carnegie provided the steel, Rockefeller the oil, Morgan the money, and Vanderbilt the railroads, Joseph Pulitzer was the midwife to the birth of the modern mass media. What he accomplished was as significant in his time as the creation of television would be in the 20th century, and it remains deeply relevant in today's information age. Pulitzer's lasting achievement was to transform American journalism into a medium of mass, consumption, and immense influence. He accomplished this by being the first media tycoon to recognize the vast social changes

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  that the Industrial Revolution triggered and by harnessing all the converging elements of entertainment, technology, business, and demographics. This accomplishment alone would make him worthy of a biography. His fascinating life, however, makes him an irresistible subject. Ted Turner-like in his innovative abilities, Teddy Roosevelt-like in his power to transform history, and Howard Hughes-like in his reclusive second half of his life as a blind man tormented by sound. Pulitzer's tale provides all the elements of a life story that is important, timely, and compelling. That is an excerpt from a book that I recently reread and the one I'm going to talk about today, which is Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power, and is written by James McGrath Morris.

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  And I wanted to start there because I think the framing of putting Pulitzer alongside of these other robber barons is really important and really anchors the immensity of his accomplishment. And if you take into account where he started, his life story is both one of the most inspiring life stories you can read about, but also, if you think of the second half of his life, he goes blind at the apex of his power. He's in like his early 40s when he goes completely blind, lives for another 20 years, and descends almost into madness. So it is both one of the most inspiring life stories, but also this cautionary tale. I want to jump into the fact that he was born in Hungary, and by the time he's 17 years old, he's had to endure the death of his father and seven out of his eight siblings. Pulitzer's father is going to die of tuberculosis when he's 47 years old. But while he was alive, his father was a very successful merchant,

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  and he insisted on hiring tutors to educate his children. And in this story, we see two of Pulitzer's personality traits that are with him forever. The first one being he's incredibly industrious and loved to read and to learn, but he had to select what he was learning. And two, he had a furious temper. He was a difficult pupil and displayed a volcanic temper. Joseph once chased a tutor out of the window when the tutor made the mistake of insisting on teaching mathematics rather than entertaining the youth with war stories from history. Joseph didn't take well to formal instruction, but he did love the pleasures of reading. Their house was filled with books. Joseph favored works of history and biography. And a short while later, his father's gonna die, and this plunges the family into poverty. Only 47 years old and at the peak of his business success, he had contracted tuberculosis.

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  Joseph understood more fully the extent of the calamity. He had been nine, listen to what he had experienced when he was a kid. He had been nine when his older brother died, 10 when his younger brothers and sister died, 11 when his father died, and 13 at the death of his last sister. The deaths of his family led to an obsession with his health that would remain with him until the end of his life. Every ailment, no matter how small, was accompanied by an underlying fear that he was dying. His father's death created a financial nightmare. It was only a matter of time before the enterprise went bankrupt. Within six months, their property was seized by authorities for failure to pay taxes. The family limped along. Years later, Pulitzer conveyed the toll from the deaths. He described himself as a poor orphan

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  who had never even enjoyed as much of a luxury as a father. And so at 17 years old, Pulitzer escapes to America, and this is how. His only path forward is to risk his life fighting in the American Civil War. Events in the United States presented him with another opportunity. The American Civil War was in its third year. Soldiers were dying at a rate of 13,000 a month, and the government had instituted a draft to meet the insatiable demand for more men. To meet the quota, a group of wealthy Bostonians looked eastward for able bodies. They wagered that there were thousands of young men in Europe who would join the American military, provided their passage could be paid. This scheme became Pulitzer's escape route. And then there's just a great description of Pulitzer at this point in his life.

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  Pulitzer had no money, so his options were limited. It was not military life that Pulitzer sought, but the escape that it offered. So the deal is, we will pay to get you to America. You'll fight for us. If you survive, we'll give you a little money after the war ends. So this is Pulitzer's life at 18. He's alone in a strange new land. He doesn't speak the language. He has no money. At the end of the war, they pay him $135.35. And so he's released into American society and is looking for a job at the same time that thousands of soldiers are doing the same exact thing. So there's record high unemployment at this point. And so he goes to New York. He looks for work during the day, and at night, he has to sleep on the streets.

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  And so we see some of his innate intelligence at this point because he's like, well, everybody's in New York doing the exact same thing that I'm trying to do. I should find a different city to go to. And because he speaks German and he knows there's a large German population in St. Louis, he decides to go there. And so, as you can imagine, he will take any possible job he can get. One of the first jobs he gets is to take care of a bunch of mules. And he has a hilarious way to describe this later in life. He says, "Never in my life did I have a more trying task. The man who has not cared for 16 mules does not know what work and trouble are." And over the next few years, he takes any possible job he can get. He'll do a lot of physical labor. He'll work on a riverboat. He'll get a bunch of jobs in construction. And he even tried working as a waiter.

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  And again, this goes back to something that reappears throughout his life story. He's got a fiery temper. On multiple occasions, he gets into arguments. Once he's a newspaper publisher, and literally draws a gun and shoots at people. There are multiple fistfights in this book as a result of the stuff that is published in his newspaper. But we're half a decade before the first time he tries to shoot somebody, and he's a waiter, and so it says, "When a beefsteak, having been rejected in a rather impo..." This is hilarious writing. "When a beefsteak, having been rejected in a rather impolite manner, found itself, after an exchange of words that quickly developed into personal affronts, dropped onto the head of the guest, rather than onto his plate, thereby bringing an end."

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  Thereby bringing an abrupt end to his time as a waiter. And then Pulitzer has this intense drive for self-improvement and a voracious appetite for information that'll help him in his life. And so, one of the best things he does is he's able to save a little bit of money. He's working all these jobs. And he takes some of the little bit of money that he has and joins the subscription libraries that are very popular in America at the time. And anytime he's not working, he essentially just spends his entire time. I think there's like 27,000 books in this library. And so, here's a description of this. "The library held a large collection of books, carried newspapers from all over the country, and was open each day of the week from the morning until late at night. Pulitzer spent every free moment he had there, often bringing a pair of apples for

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  sustenance so as to not waste a moment leaving the library for a meal." And so, something you see in the life and the career of Pulitzer is like he's always, whatever his task is in front of him, he takes it very, very seriously. He's trying to do the best job possible. I think he's a great example of this idea that Charlie Munger would repeat that he calls Carlisle's prescription. So, the idea is essentially you put almost all of your attention on the job directly in front of you, and you don't waste your energy staring at these vague future possibilities. So, the direct quote from Munger is, "98% of our attention was devoted to the task at hand." And he said, "The job a man is to do is to do the job at hand, not look at what lies dimly in the distance." And so, he's going, Pulitzer goes to this German aid society, and they're helping a lot of these German immigrants find jobs.

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  And the president of this German Immigration Aid Society also owned a newspaper. And so, he observed how hardworking and industrious Joseph Pulitzer was. And this is how Pulitzer's going to get his start in the newspaper industry. It says, "Pulitzer learned about a job opening at the West Lisch Post." Keep in mind, these are German names, last names, newspaper names. There's no way I'm pronouncing them correctly. So, this German newspaper is owned by two of the city's most eminent Germans. Both of these are going to be mentors of Joseph Pulitzer. And they're looking for a reporter. And so, it says, "For Pulitzer, the timing was fortunate. Not only did Pulitzer know Praetorius, but in recent months, the elder man, as president of the German Immigration Aid Society, had observed his diligence." So, Joseph is offered the job.

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  "I could not believe it," Pulitzer recalled. "I, the unknown, the luckless, almost a boy of the streets, selected for such a responsibility. It all seemed like a dream." And so they're taking a risk on this young kid that has no experience, but they think he's a hard worker and they immediately realize they even underestimated how hard he works. Says it took them, took no time to confirm that they'd made the right decision in taking a chance on the 20-year-old. What he lacked in experience, he more than made up for with raw, resolute effort. Again, at 20 years old, he's going to have this until he dies. He essentially had one love in his life, and that was his work. His time for work, and this is how they're describing him again, at 20, his time for work seemed to be all the time. I never called on him at any hour that he did not immediately respond.

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  For a beginner, he was exasperatingly inquisitive. This is such a wild sentence that's coming next. He worked so hard that the people around him were annoyed at how hard he worked. He was so industrious that he became a positive annoyance to others who felt less inclined to work. Pulitzer was unwilling to put forward anything but his best effort. And real quick, before we get back into the story, I want to tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp. One of the main themes in the history of entrepreneurship is constantly attacking and questioning your costs. As you'll see in this episode, when Pulitzer's running his newspapers, he demanded detailed

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  reports of his company's expenses every day, and he did this decade after decade. And Ramp helps many of the most innovative businesses in the world do exactly that. The median company running on Ramp cuts their expenses by 5%. A religious dedication like the one Pulitzer had to controlling your costs also helps increase revenue because you can pursue opportunities you couldn't otherwise. And we see that in the Ramp data, too. The median company running on Ramp also grows their revenue by 16%. So when you're running your business on Ramp and your competitors are not, you have a massive competitive advantage that compounds over time. Ramp is the only platform designed to make your finance team faster and happier. Many of the top founders and CEOs I know run their business on Ramp. I run my business on Ramp, and you should, too.

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  Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to ramp.com today to learn how they can help your business save time, save money, and grow revenue. That is ramp.com. And again, it goes back to this fact that he had innate intelligence. He had a lot of drive. He spends all his time when he's not working. He's reading. And so this reminded me a lot of, if you read biographies of Ben Franklin. When older, more successful people met a young Ben Franklin, they were incredibly impressed with the conversations they could have with Franklin and with the way his mind worked. And it's the exact same story is happening in Joseph Pulitzer's life. And again, I would say that he almost immediately discovered that, oh, this is my calling. This is the trade I'm going to do until I die. The world into which Pulitzer peaked seemed to be one with limitless possibilities.

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  To be a newspaper editor was to do more than report on the world. It was to shape it. It was not long before all the visitors, again, to the newspaper, took an interest in Pulitzer. That young fellow possesses great dialectical ability. "I know it, for I have felt it." That is the description of an older, more successful person talking about what it was like to speak to Joseph Pulitzer, to have a conversation with Joseph Pulitzer at this point in Joseph Pulitzer's life. The amount of times over the next four decades that he lives where people talk about his intense personality, his conversational skills, the quick wit of his mind, the energy you feel when you're in his presence. He's a very formidable individual. And so now Joseph gets to work hand in hand with two very successful, much older people, and he is studying them just like he studies other newspapers, just like he studies all the books in the library.

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  He says, "None of this was lost on Pulitzer," who had now spent two years working at the paper. He's describing his mentor here. "He was my chief. We often traveled together, yet in all that time, I never saw him pass an idle moment, either in the office, or on the road, or anywhere else." Pulitzer's ambition did not go unnoticed. There never seemed to be any doubt in his mind that he would succeed in something. And so here's a description of Joseph Pulitzer as a young reporter. "He wandered around St. Louis at all hours, visiting schools and public institutions, attending public meetings and ward meetings, knocking on doors of lawyers and politicians, and opening those doors that didn't yield to a knock. His thirst for news was unquestionable." In addition to writing an endless stream of local news, Pulitzer wrote pithy,

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  cogent stories on St. Louis politics in an inimitable style that stood out from his competitors. It was not an uncommon thing for him to use language in a heated controversy dispute that went far beyond the limit. Again, this is, people are seeing that he's got this hot fiery temper. I would describe his personality as aggressive, argumentative, very hot tempered, and this is just a great sentence and a warning to what he's likely to encounter later in life from an older, wiser person. He says, "In fact, I cautioned him that he must become more conservative and forbearing for fear that he might someday meet a person like himself, and then there would be trouble." It's also important to note, think about the subtitle for this book. It says, "A Life in Politics, Print and Power." So at this time, politics and journalism, there were two sides of the same coin. So out of work politicians would become newspaper editors,

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  and then newspaper editors would become elected politicians. There was no such thing as an objective newspaper at this time. And in fact, many times in the names of the paper, it would talk about the political party they had allegiance to. And so even though he's in his early twenties, he's actually nominated by other people to become a congressman. He winds up running against the novice and then using his paper as a tool to help himself get elected. And if you think of everything that has occurred in Pulitzer's life in the last five years, I think this sentence is a great description of that we're not dealing with a normal person here. In only five years, he had grown from a bounty hunting Hungarian teenager to an American lawmaker. And again, he saw no reason why he couldn't do both jobs at the exact same time. In assuming his new post, Pulitzer did not give up his old one as a reporter. In his singular position as both a legislator and a journalist, he

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  used his reporting to advance his political work. In Pulitzer's eyes, the lobbyists descending on the Capitol were an army of darkness. And so he was, he's very anti, at least publicly, very anti-corruption. I would describe him as a moralist. He's constantly criticizing other, the behavior of other people. And in many cases, especially later in life, he will publicly criticize a certain behavior and then engage in that exact same behavior privately. Which I think a lot of people who are obsessed with the behavior of other humans do this exact same thing, by the way. And so Pulitzer was not shy about attacking lobbyists and talking about how corrupt they are. The problem with that is he runs into people that he attacks in his newspaper in person, and it almost always ends in violence.

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  There are multiple people killed in this book because they wrote a story, or a book, or published something about another human, and then that person chose to respond in violence. And so in this case, Pulitzer's attacking a lobbyist, calling him a liar. The liar in turn calls Pulitzer a liar. They meet in a bar and then this is what happens. This is Pulitzer speaking now. "Mr. Augustine, just one word and I hope that it'll be the last word that I ever speak to you. I would like to explain to you that I'm no longer inclined to associate with you. And I also do not wish that you speak to me again. Should you, however, persist in insulting me, you will, despite your great physical advantage, find that you have come to the wrong man." So this guy's a giant. I think they said he was like 300 pounds or something like that.

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  And so Augustine's response to this is, "I want to tell you in clear and understandable English that you are a damn liar." And at that point, words ceased. Augustine moved towards Pulitzer. Pulitzer retreated. When Pulitzer had completed about 10 to 12 paces of his retreat, Augustine had raised his fist. Pulitzer withdrew a pistol and fired. Incredibly, he missed his massive target. Pulitzer then pulled the trigger again, but the barrel of the gun was deflected downward and the bullet only grazed Augustine in the leg. The wound in his leg enraged Augustine, who charged Pulitzer like a bull. And then this is Augustine's description of what happened next. "I mashed his head against the wall and tried to get the pistol out of his hand." And so Pulitzer is going to be indicted for felonious assault.

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  There's a trial. He's saying that Augustine had brass knuckles in his hand and he was just defending himself. He gets off with a small fine. But what was very interesting is Pulitzer's innate understanding of media, even at this point. He's just a few years into his media career. And so when he wants to get attention on something, every single day, he will bring it back up in the newspaper. And in some cases, when he's attacking an issue or a politician, there's times where he does something like 112 straight stories. And what he knows is if he wants to get attention, he has to keep putting pieces of media out and then those pieces of media will be commented on the readers of the newspaper. And you know he knows this at this point because when he doesn't want attention on something, he does this.

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  Pulitzer knew he had little to gain by mentioning the shooting, since that would give his critics another opportunity to comment on it. So when he wants something to go away, he doesn't try to explain, rebut, debate. He meets it with silence, knowing that the public's attention will move forward quickly. Now, another important thing to point out is the hypocrisy that you see throughout his life story, where what he publicly says and his private behavior in many cases do not match up. So, he says over and over again in his writing that he's against corruption. But then, a few years later, he accepts a high-paying job from a political ally. So, he is going to get a seat on the St. Louis Police Commission. It requires very few hours

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  of work and it pays $1,000 a year. Why is that important? So, for a few hours of work a year, he's going to get paid nearly twice the amount of money that the average skilled worker would earn in a year, working six days a week. So, at this point in history, if you're the average skilled worker earns less than $600 a year, working six days a week. And we see this later on in his life, too, because he's very pro-union in his paper, but when he has the most successful newspaper in the world, and his own employees try to unionize, he's against it then. And so, then I want to get to the beginning of his media empire. So, he's still working for the newspaper, says some of the proprietors of the Wishless Posts became nervous and wanted to retire. They approached Pulitzer to see if he would like to buy into the paper. Pulitzer was

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  the most valuable member of their staff, and he had toiled for them for five years. This is now Joseph describing this. "They thought I was necessary to the paper. They probably would have done the same thing to any other man who worked 16 hours a day as I did for them." Thus, seven years after reading his first copy of this paper in hopes of finding employment in St. Louis, Pulitzer was an American newspaper publisher. He is 25 years old. It costs him about $5,000 to buy into the paper. He doesn't have that money, so he goes into debt. Buying into this newspaper was one of the best decisions he ever makes, because the following year, he actually has a falling out with his two mentors. It says the editorial office had grown too small for all three men, and so

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  they offered to buy him out. And so it says, "The price they proposed was cosmesmuret with the desire to be free of him." Pulitzer walked away with about $30,000, six times his original investment. That is, six times in one year. And so think about what just happened. He works for the newspaper for five years. He is by far their most valuable asset. He borrows $5,000 to buy into the paper. A year later, he has a falling out. They then buy him out for six times that amount, so that's $30,000. $30,000 at this point in history, when the average skilled worker makes $600 a year. That means in 12 months, he made the equivalent of half of a century worth of wages for a skilled worker. And then almost immediately, he does another clever move. So it says, "Pulitzer spotted a journalistic business opportunity.

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  The collapse of the banking firm J. Cook & Company started a severe national depression. Among the victims of the economic downturn was a small German-language newspaper in St. Louis. The paper was put on the auction block. Pulitzer saw value where others didn't. He won the auction, paying a modest sum, and announced that it was his intention to start a German evening paper." That was a lie, by the way. This was a smokescreen. The newspaper he bought had far too few subscribers to make it viable as a business. What the corporation owned was what caught Pulitzer's attention. This German newspaper was a member of the AP, the Associated Press. Because the AP restricted its news items to its members, a membership in AP was a valuable asset.

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  Those that were not members were excluded from a vast source of national and international news. Membership in AP gave a newspaper a tremendous competitive advantage. In St. Louis, all the major German newspapers were members of the AP, except the St. Louis Globe. And so he goes to the owners of the St. Louis Globe with this proposal. If they bought the entire corporation, they would gain membership in AP. They agree in less than 48 hours after he buys this small, useless, German-language newspaper at auction, he makes about $20,000. So now he's got about $50,000 in savings and time to figure out what he's going to do next.

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  And interesting enough, this next like five-year period of his life is one of the most depressing because he's got a lot of money, but he has no purpose. He has no job. And so the first, his first idea, again, speaks to this like unlimited ambition that he had from a very young age, is he wanted to buy a newspaper in New York. He's going to be unsuccessful doing so for quite a while. He's actually has to start by buying a newspaper in St. Louis, which he's going to do in a few years from now. But I want to point out that he's studying every single thing that's going on in his industry. He's reading every single newspaper. He's seeing all the different approaches. And so one of the ones that he studied the most was the New York Sun. The New York Sun is very different from the newspapers that Pulitzer worked at, which was really heavily focused on politics. The Sun took a different position. It said, "Instead of reporting on international and national events of limited interest to the masses, it focused on city news, violence being its favorite topic, and presented this

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  news in a highly readable, though sometimes flippant, style. In comparison with the stodgy journals favored by the city elite, the Sun was a blast of fresh air. It was compact, always four pages long, and as the nation's first penny newspaper, it was cheap. The Sun would sell more than 100,000 copies every day. It was an irresistible feast of information that won wide attention in an era of generally dull journalism." And this is what Joseph Pulitzer said about the Sun. "I read the Sun regularly. It is the most entertaining and, without exception, the best newspaper in the world." And so as he's looking for newspapers to buy, he has a reason to be so confident. He has an edge here, and he knows it.

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  And the edge is that he actually could do every single job inside the newspaper. He came from inside. So he says, "Those who own newspapers scarcely ever make them. The persons who do own them are scarcely fit to write the smallest and most unimportant part of the paper." When I got to this part, I thought of James J. Hill. So I found James J. Hill because Charlie Munger listed him in the book Poor Charlie's Almanac as one of his, what he thought was one of the best business operators of all time. James J. Hill is the only person in American history to found a railroad and not go bankrupt. And he said the same thing about his edge when building railroads as Pulitzer is talking about his edge when buying and building newspapers. And so let me read you this note about James J. Hill's advantage. It's the exact same thing that's going on here.

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  "James J. Hill's advantage was that he understood the railroad as an operating business, not as a financial instrument. Most of his competitors came from finance or speculation. They were often trying to build railroads to capture land grants, sell bonds, manipulate stock, or reorganize bankrupt systems. Hill came from freight, warehousing, and transportation logistics. So when he finally got control of a railroad, he understood the customer, the cargo, the routes, the costs, the bottlenecks, and the economics from the inside. Hill had a priceless advantage because he came from inside the world of freighting and transportation, while most 19th century rail titans came from the outside world of finance. But newspapers worth buying rarely appear at regular intervals, so he's essentially like wandering in a professional desert.

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  He says at this point, he was professionally rudderless. So it says, "After years that had promised success in journalism and politics, Pulitzer entered a barren stretch, compounding his aimlessness. He was 28 years old. He had no definitive profession. A sense of failure hung over him." And so at this point in his life, he's telling a friend, "I am almost tired of this life. I am aimless, homeless, and loveless." He also has no wife and family, which he wanted as well. And so he winds up meeting a woman. He's eventually going to marry her, but I thought it was very interesting how he kind of warns her, is honest with her upfront about the fact that he is just unbelievably dedicated to this pursuit, his professional pursuits. It says, "Pulitzer was driven by speculative impulses. Up until now, his life had unfolded as an undirected but singular pursuit of his own

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  goals with no care for others. And on the evening of their wedding, he's working like mad," and this is what he says to her, "it is an important opportunity. This is perhaps a fortune, and you ought not to expect me to neglect it. I must have business to occupy my mind and heart." She realized her husband's attention would never be hers alone. Even on their honeymoon, his mind would constantly churn with political and business schemes.

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  And so finally Pulitzer hears about a paper that's going to be auctioned off. It was called The Dispatch. It's a struggling evening paper in St. Louis that is going to be auctioned off at bankruptcy sale. And then Pulitzer does something very clever. He hires somebody else to do his bidding. Remember, last time he bought a paper at an auction in St. Louis, he was able to flip that paper for a $20,000 profit in 48 hours. And so this is why he hired what he called a Trojan horse. Pulitzer knew that if he were to openly join the bidding, others would assume that he had seen in that paper something of value that had escaped everybody else's attention, and then the price would soar. So Pulitzer's able to get a newspaper for only $2,500. The problem is not the $2,500, it's the fact that this newspaper is losing so much money. And so Pulitzer does the math.

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  He figures out how much money he has left, how much the paper's losing every week, and he says if he can't turn it around, he's going to run out of cash in 17 weeks. And so immediately, he does something really smart. There's three evening papers in St. Louis, and immediately, he convinces one of the other papers to merge with him. So it says, "His business acumen drove him. Although he was at times an innovative journalist, that was not his strength. Rather, he possessed remarkable foresight and an uncanny ability to recognize value where others didn't. He was willing to take risks based on his insights when others remained timid." So the other paper is called The Post, and it is run by this guy named Dylan. Dylan agreed to merge his paper with Pulitzer's. A merger made good sense. Pulitzer and Dylan shared essentially the same political views.

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  For Dylan, the merger would prevent a potentially disastrous circulation fight. For Pulitzer, it would bring readers, and most important, time. And yet Pulitzer's never going to do a deal that he does not benefit more than the other party, and somebody that is a mentor to Dylan, who knows Pulitzer, warns Dylan about this. Anyone who knew Pulitzer knew that power was something he did not share. McCullough foresaw trouble for his protege Dylan. To succeed, Dylan would have to tone down, quote, "the crude products of Pulitzer's fiery and untamed brain."

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  And so Dylan is not going to last long. Eventually Pulitzer buys him out and we see why Pulitzer can't share power. Very few people can match his work ethic. He is by default all in. Despite the paper's progress towards financial stability, Pulitzer did not relax or let up. He practically lived in the office, staying late into the night. I would pass by on my way home between 11 and 12 o'clock at night and he was always there. No matter how late he worked, Pulitzer always arrived at the office in the early morning to examine the paper's vital signs. He demanded precise information and these are the questions that he would ask every single day and that he would demand answers for. Exactly how many copies were printed the day before? How many were sold? How many were returned? How many lines of advertising had run in that issue? How many lines of advertising ran last week?

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  How many lines of advertising ran since the beginning of the year? How much money was spent on the staff? How much money do we spend on paper? How much money do we spend on telegraphs? How much money did we bring in? His thirst for details was insatiable. In these first days of running the post dispatch, which is the name of his St. Louis paper, feeling the sharp anxiety of potential failure, Pulitzer learned to ask questions that provided him with the most realistic take on the financial health of his paper. He honed his questioning down to a precise mix of queries, yielding a statistical portrait that revealed in a single glance where things stood. Until the end of his life, and no matter how far he wandered from the office, or how

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  much he delegated to others, which was not a lot by the way, he would never give up this habit. And real quick, before we get back into the story, I want to tell you about AppLovin'. One of my all-time favorite quotes I read in Peter Thiel's book Zero to One. In that book, he writes, "The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas." As you see, as Pulitzer continues to build his media empire, he does this, and that is exactly what AppLovin' has done with their advertising platform. AppLovin' connects you with over a billion potential new customers in mobile games. AppLovin' allows you to capture undivided attention. AppLovin' ads are full-screen video ads that are watched for an average of 35 seconds.

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  That is retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water. And you can launch on AppLovin' in minutes. You set the goal and AppLovin' achieves it. No complex setup, no expertise needed, and AppLovin' scales quickly. They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers. Other businesses have seen immediate results, scaled to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day and increased their revenue by millions. So you want to get started quickly before all your competitors are on AppLovin'. And you can do that by going to applovin.com. That's applovin.com. And then finally, I want to tell you about Vanta. Vanta, Vanta, Vanta. Vanta helps your company prove you're secure so more customers will use your product or service. Vanta is an AI-powered security expert that scales with you.

• 30:47Speaker 00

  The more your business grows, the more complex your security needs get, and that can turn into chaos. Vanta tames that chaos for you. Vanta automates compliance, continuously monitors your controls, and gives you a single source of truth for compliance and risk. Many of the top companies in the world use Vanta. In fact, Ramp uses Vanta, which was a huge positive indicator for me because Ramp is so stringent on buying software instead of building it themselves. Vanta helps you build a company that your customers can trust. Many companies will not sign contracts unless you're certified, and this is causing you to lose out on sales. That is why the average Vanta customer reports a 526% return on investment after becoming a Vanta customer. Vanta will help you win trust, close deals, and stay secure faster and with less effort.

• 31:30Speaker 00

  Go to vanta.com/founders and you can get $1,000 off. That is vanta.com/founders. And then when they talk about the breakup of the partnership, I think there was a great description of why this didn't work out and really tells us a lot about Joseph Pulitzer and who he was. She said they attributed the breakup to, quote, "incompatibility of temper, super induced by an excess of talent." "The truth of the matter was that one did not work with Pulitzer. For him, surely, against him often, but not with him." And then again, goes back to, "He just had an excessive confidence in his own judgment." "He thought he knew a lot about the industry, maybe more about the industry than anybody else, and so he's willing to make bets that other people simply were not." And at the time...

• 32:13Speaker 00

  People were like, "It's a waste of time trying to do an evening newspaper. All the money is made in the morning, dummy. What are you doing?" Pulitzer saw that that was going to change, and he made a big bet. The flagging fortunes of the three evening papers discouraged other people from venturing into the business. Pulitzer, however, was undeterred. He was convinced that evening papers had a great future. He was right. The advent of the telegraph and faster printing presses made it possible to publish an afternoon newspaper with news as fresh as that day, making morning papers look as if they were publishing yesterday news, which they were. Furthermore, gaslight and then electric light also made the newspaper an important evening pastime.

• 32:55Speaker 00

  In a few years, evening newspapers would outsell morning ones. And another important part of differentiation that Pulitzer understood is that he was excessively self-promotional, and he realized that if he promoted his newspaper inside of his newspaper, that it would lead to larger circulation and more readers. Pulitzer was convinced that news reporting could be combined with promotion, and he pushed his staff to do both. A typical headline would invariably include a subhead that says, "Another exposure by the Post and Dispatch." Pulitzer's goal was to publish every day at least one article so intriguing, so unusual, and so provocative that would cause people to talk about it at the dinner table. And then it goes back to this idea that one of the edges he had is he knew the business from A to Z. He could do every single job. He did the job.

• 33:39Speaker 00

  He owned the paper, but also was a reporter, would write editorials. So it says, "After concluding his business duties," Pulitzer would then turn to editorial work. He worked side by side with the reporters and editors, just as if he was one of them. And then, I love this, a few sentences down, "The people working for him described him as intensely enthusiastic." He also understood that the best ad is a story, and that you should make an ad interesting to read, just like you do a news story. Pulitzer also recognized that many people read the advertisements the way others read the articles. "It is our object to make the advertising columns of the Post-Dispatch not less varied and interesting than the news columns themselves." And then he's so good at his job that eventually he drives his one other competitor to bankruptcy. And then we see he does the exact same thing that he did when he bought The Dispatch to begin with.

• 34:23Speaker 00

  So this newspaper was called The Star. The owners of The Star decided to throw in the towel. It was now their turn on the auction block. The usual crowd gathered on the courthouse steps. Pulitzer joined in on the bidding, which started at only $100, but rapidly devolved into a three-way match. When the bids reached the $700 range, Pulitzer dropped out, and one of the remaining two men prevailed with a bid of $790. As when he had bought The Dispatch at auction, Pulitzer had fooled the crowd. The man who had placed the winning bid was working for him. The evening field now belonged solely to Pulitzer. And so there is a lot of benefits to owning a newspaper. It obviously shapes public opinion. It makes you excessively powerful. But at this time in history, they were phenomenal businesses. Pulitzer's going to be one of the 20th richest people in America.

• 35:07Speaker 00

  And even this small newspaper in St. Louis, who he has no partners, he owns all of it, is generating, even now, at the beginning of his career, is generating an income of $88,000 a year. Put that into context at a time when the average skilled worker makes $600 a year. When he has the most successful newspaper in the world in New York, he'll make millions a year. And that's what I meant earlier, if you think about where he started. So he describes like the way he came to America. He's like, "When I came to the United States, I was friendless, I was homeless, I was tongueless, and I was a guideless." He didn't know anybody, didn't speak the language, didn't have any money, and lived on the streets. And in two decades, becomes one of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country. And so even before he gets to New York, his workforce tries to unionize, and this is

• 35:51Speaker 00

  what I meant earlier about the hypocrisy, the difference between what he publicly pronounces and what he privately does. Pulitzer was sympathetic to the aims of the labor movement. But this was different from writing an editorial dictating the behavior of others. Pulitzer would not abide anything that challenged his rule within the paper. We have a "rules for thee, not for me" situation here, and this is what Pulitzer does. The printers were fired. The Post Dispatch Pulitzer declared declines to be told who it shall and shall not employ. It refuses to be instructed as to how to measure its type, feed its press, or be limited to the number of apprentices that it should take into the office. Simply put, Pulitzer was a Democrat in politics, but a despot in the office. And so it was never Pulitzer's intent to stay in St. Louis.

• 36:35Speaker 00

  He knew that New York was the center of the world, it's the capital of the world. He wanted to compete on the biggest stage. He was just biding his time until he could buy a New York paper. Now, Jay Gold, at this time, who's another robber baron, one I've done multiple episodes on, and will do multiple episodes on in the future, accidentally owns a newspaper. Jay Gold had unintentionally acquired the paper when he purchased the assets of another corporation. And so it says Jay Gold decided to rid himself of the Burdison New York World, which is the name of the paper. An even greater sin in the eyes of a railroad industrial baron was that it had never made a dime since he acquired it four years earlier. "I never cared anything about the paper," Gold said. "The world had an anemic circulation of 15,000 and was losing money every week. And yet it was still a very valuable asset, one that Pulitzer's going to go half a million

• 37:19Speaker 00

  dollars into debt to acquire." Signing the contract put Pulitzer nearly $500,000 in debt. Less than five years after spending his last few thousand dollars to buy the bankrupt Dispatch, he was betting he could repeat his success on a far grander scale. And the reason he was able to do this and to move to New York is because he realized he could manage his existing newspaper remotely, says the Post Dispatch practically ran itself. But to be sure that it remained on track, Pulitzer received daily pre-printed one-page reports that showed him at a glance all the essential information, such as circulation, advertising expenses, and the times when the presses started and ended their runs. He was forever asking the man who managed the business side of his operations to be brief in responding to his ceaseless queries.

• 38:02Speaker 00

  In his words, he wanted the information in a nutshell. And so now he's half a million dollars into debt and he's talking to his wife. He says he confessed his anxiety to Kate. Five years being married to Joseph had convinced her that it was no use trying to restrain his ambition. He was driven by an insatiable need to be occupied, to have meaningful work and to keep moving. He's also incredibly ruthless. So a few years earlier, his younger brother had moved to New York, started a small paper. It's more like a tabloid gossip rag kind of thing. And as soon as he closes this deal with Jay Gold, he tries to do what he did in St. Louis, where he's like, I'm going to convince another existing paper to merge with me so I can immediately increase my circulation and buy myself more time. And so it says Pulitzer proposed to his brother that they consolidate their papers into a new

• 38:47Speaker 00

  one to be called The World Journal. Albert's paper had three times the circulation of the world and was acquiring thousands of new subscribers each month. If Albert agreed to the merger, Joseph promised him a profit of no less than $100,000 a year. And he told his little brother, you don't even need to come to the office at all. If you like, you can stay at home in bed all day long. In hoping to combine the papers, Joseph was following the game plan he had used in St. Louis. But this situation was different. Albert was making money on his own and lots of it, and his paper was not threatened by Joseph. He declined the invitation. So Joseph responds, "Don't be so cocksure of your success. It is the men you've got and who get the paper out every night that are making it what it is. What are you going to do if they're all gone?" Joseph says that to his brother in the morning. And by nighttime, that's what Albert says.

• 39:28Speaker 00

  "My whole staff, my three most valuable men, had gone over to a rival newspaper. This was a blow that was intended to kill me," he said. Of course, that rival paper was The World. In a city teeming with editorial talent, Joseph had chosen to raid his brother's shop. And then I thought this was important to understand, Joseph Pulitzer. Pulitzer made one alteration to the look of the paper that hinted at his ambitions. He dropped "New York" from the name. Now the paper is just called "The World." And again, he uses a lot of the same ideas that he used in St. Louis. In New York, Pulitzer took to reprinting all the press comments on the world's change in ownership. He took every occasion to blow his own horn and tell the public what a good newspaper he was making.

• 40:11Speaker 00

  However distasteful this might seem to others, it worked. He's also excessively hands-on. No detail was too small. He loved debating with his staff, usually provoking the arguments himself. He said, "It is by argument that I measure a man, his shortcomings, his possession or lack of logic, and above all, whether he has the courage of his convictions. For no man can long work for me with satisfaction to himself or myself unless he has courage." It wasn't long before the old timers couldn't take it anymore and new faces, often younger, appeared. And these new, younger, more excited workers knew they were working for a formidable individual. There was a sense that Pulitzer was pushing the world forward. We in the office felt, from the first, that this remarkable personality, which had so

• 40:52Speaker 00

  impressed us upon its arrival inside the building, would soon make its impress felt on the greater cosmopolitan public of New York. And in time, the country. The world began on its path to becoming the most widely-read newspaper in American history. Joseph would say that the headline was the lure and the copy was the hook. He admonished his staff to write in a buoyant style comprising simple nouns, bright verbs, and short, punchy sentences. If there was a Pulitzer formula, it was a story written so simply that anyone could read it, and so colorfully that no one would forget it. Pulitzer was obsessed with details. I love this part. He says that vagueness was a sin. So this is what he means by that. A tall man was not just referred to as a tall man.

• 41:37Speaker 00

  He was six foot two inches tall. A beautiful woman wasn't referred to as a beautiful woman. A beautiful woman had auburn hair, hazel eyes, and dimore lips that occasionally turned upward in a coy smile. Vagueness to Pulitzer was a sin. Pulitzer practically lived at the office Kate and his children hardly ever saw him. When he was not writing or editing, Pulitzer studied all New York papers as well as more than a dozen British, German, and French ones. He demanded a great deal from his staff, but even more from himself. If the paper was dull, he would head home feeling sick. If it met his standard, he would be elated. And then it goes back to this reoccurring theme of this hypocrisy that he had. Pulitzer may have taunted the wealthy and attacked their political power and criticized

• 42:19Speaker 00

  their sense of entitlement, but he planned to be one of them. And again, this is remarkably how talented Pulitzer was. This is not St. Louis. He has a ton of competition and he has a very distinct perspective of how he's going to win. In an era when the printed word ruled supreme and 1,028 newspapers competed for readers, content was the means of competition. The medium was not the message. The message was. And this is where Pulitzer started. And Pulitzer does a really smart move here. He understands that you can't stand out by looking the same. So at the time, the newspapers were all gray and they were all just full of text. Pulitzer finds a very gifted cartoonist, hires him to make pictures for the newspaper, and pays him more than twice the salary that he paid his reporters.

• 43:02Speaker 00

  So that gives you an insight to how important images were to Pulitzer. And it says Pulitzer had wanted illustrations in the world since he bought the paper. On newsstands and in the arms of newsboys, the gray, unbroken front pages of the city's newspapers were indistinguishable from each other. Pulitzer found every excuse possible to add illustrations to make his paper stand out. It also greatly increased his circulation because at the time, he says, "A great many people in the world were required to be educated through their eyes." Pulitzer was mindful that many of the readers who pursued were struggling to learn English. He also had a bunch of unusual ideas that his competitors not. He said that newspapers should make enemies constantly, that the more enemies we have, the better.

• 43:44Speaker 00

  And he says the most valuable and most successful paper will generally be that which has the most enemies. And then he was really good at doing two things simultaneously, which is getting attention that would then increase the circulation of his paper. So at the time, which I didn't even know this, he's responsible for raising the money so the Statue of Liberty could be erected in New York. So at the time, the Statue of Liberty was becoming a major embarrassment because France paid for the statue itself, but the United States was supposed to be responsible for paying for the pedestal that the statue rests upon. And by the time Pulitzer gets involved, the fundraising had essentially died out. They were short by over $100,000. And so he does an early version of essentially mass crowdfunding. So he launches this nationwide campaign through his newspaper. And so the way he does this, he says, "Hey, it doesn't matter if you give a penny."

• 44:29Speaker 00

  If you give two pennies to this, every single person that donates, I will print your name in my newspaper. Over 120,000 people donate, and in less than five months, Pulitzer raises all the money required. And the book says, "The public service also turned out to be good for business. The world circulation soared." And so now he has the most successful newspaper in the world. And as a result of the success that he's enjoying, it starts to spawn imitators all throughout other cities. It says his formula worked even for a young dropout from Harvard. And so this is when you have this massive competition between the next Joseph Pulitzer, somebody that takes Joseph Pulitzer's ideas even further than Joseph Pulitzer himself did. That is William Randolph Hearst, who at the time in this story is only 24 years old.

• 45:12Speaker 00

  And his father is unbelievably wealthy and owns the San Francisco Examiner. He convinces his father to give the newspaper to him with the explicit goal of saying, "I'm going to set about transforming the Examiner into a West Coast version of Joseph Pulitzer's The World." For years, Hearst had read, studied, and cut out articles from The World. And so eventually, years from now, William Randolph Hearst is actually going to use Pulitzer's ideas against him. And they engage in this decade-long fight and feud and circulation war in New York City. And so then again, we were reminded of this kind of hypocrisy he does. He attacks the rich and the wealthy and the powerful in the papers. And yet, he deeply desires to be them. In private, he's doing business deals with them. It says Pulitzer did not object to wealth. In fact, he coveted it. However, the kind of wealth mattered.

• 45:57Speaker 00

  Inherited fortunes were a social evil, according to Pulitzer. But earned wealth was not. He was moved by quite strong hunger for wealth, luxury, and power. Pulitzer did not simply socialize with those he attacked in the pages of his newspaper. He also became their financial partner. And so for the last decade and a half of his life, and at this point in the story, Pulitzer is in his early 40s, he's been pushing himself so hard. He has insomnia. He has indigestion. He has terrible anxiety. He has depression. He's also likely a hypochondriac. But he worked so much that he had reached the limits of his physical and psychological endurance. And then the most devastating thing happens to him. He is going to go blind at the apex of his power. He is in his early 40s.

• 46:42Speaker 00

  This is devastating because he would insist on reading every single line of copy before it was published. She says, "When I picked up the newspaper, I was astonished to find that I could hardly see the writing, let alone read it." It was as if a dark curtain had been pulled entirely across his right eye and partially across his left. Having long suffered from bad eyesight, frequently aggravated by reading late into the night under harsh gaslight, Pulitzer decided that it was simply a temporary affliction. But by the next day, when it didn't improve, he goes to see the doctor. When the doctor peered into Pulitzer's eyes, it was clear in an instant what had gone wrong. The retina in the right eye had become detached, and the left retina was in danger of detaching. The prognosis was grim.

• 47:26Speaker 00

  In a great majority of cases, the natural course of the disease is slowly but surely progressive, leading finally to total blindness. Now, the crazy thing about this story is he's going to spend the last two decades of his life battling these serious health problems. He's going to go blind, he's going to be in chronic pain, he's going to suffer from insomnia, and then he develops this extreme sensitivity to noise. But despite this, he remained actively involved in running his newspaper. And looking back on this point of his life, when he starts to go blind in his early 40s, as a much older man, this is what he says about this time. He says, "That was the beginning of the end." And this is the period of Pulitzer's life that was referenced at the very beginning

• 48:09Speaker 00

  of the book, where he's like this Howard Hughes recluse for the last two decades of his life, just essentially wandering the globe. He has no friends. Everybody around him is paid to spend time with him. And there's a great sentence that's just devastating. And so this sentence describes the torment that he experiences for 20 years. "A giant intelligence eternally condemned to the darkest of dungeons, a caged eagle furiously belaboring the bars." So even though he never works in the office again, he's just wandering the earth, he's essentially running his business through all these hundreds, maybe thousands, of telegrams that he's sending every week. And even though he can't see and he has to have all of them read aloud, so he has to dictate the telegrams, obviously, and then the ones that he receives, somebody has to read aloud to them. He's able to keep all this information in his head.

• 48:54Speaker 00

  And there's a great paragraph that describes, like, a new hire for the world, what they would experience. "The new hires quickly learned that Pulitzer intended to manage them as if he were in the office rather than simply the source of telegrams piled thick on their desk." This is what he says. "Never fear of troubling me with any suggestion concerning either the welfare of the paper or your own. Nothing, looking to the elevation and improvement of our paper, is too small to mention." And then I just love this part because it just describes this drastic change in his fortunes and his life. When he was younger and he was homeless, he used to get kicked out of this hotel lobby. He would, like, sleep outside. 23 years later, he bought the hotel. It says, "The former derelict getting kicked out of the lobby now own the place." And because most of the last two decades of his life play out in writing in these telegrams,

• 49:38Speaker 00

  we have all this detail, maybe more detail than we want, about this just dysfunctional relationship, family life he has. I think he's got six or seven kids. Unfortunately, two of them pass away at rather young ages. Him and his wife stayed married for like 30 years, but they barely spent any time together. Joseph is working all the time. His wife spends a lot of time in society. She makes a lot of news about, like, consumption and buying jewelries and houses and stuff like this. But I did think, there's a bunch of these newspaper reports that we have that are in the book, too, that I thought were very interesting because it just describes just how unique of a life trajectory that Joseph Pulitzer experienced. And so she's basically getting criticized because she has some of the most expensive jewelry in the world. And one newspaper is actually defending her and, as a result, gives you and I insight into Joseph Pulitzer. It says, "30 years ago, her husband was shoveling coal and driving drays,

• 50:23Speaker 00

  but his indomitable energy and active brain have placed him where he can afford to buy out half a dozen royal families." And then we're also privy to all these descriptions of what it's like. You lived most of your adult life with sight. He spent eight, 10, 12 hours a day reading. He loved it and he can no longer do this. And he describes this. He says, "This represents more suffering than all the rest of my life brought me. 10 times as much. I honestly think 50 times as much, to the point where I cannot even finish this sentence." And so I would say for the last third of the book, when you're just reading these stories about Pulitzer's descent into darkness and madness, you realize one of his greatest

• 51:03Speaker 00

  failures is his inability to ever enjoy his life. And so much so that his son, who is named after him, writes to his father, "One of the strange differences between us two is the fact that you have never come near learning how to enjoy life." And so the book ends as a cautionary tale. Pulitzer was bereft of friends, and the companions with whom he spent his days were paid to be with him. His most important connections to his beginnings in St. Louis were dead. He was estranged from his only living sibling, who was also his last tie to his childhood in Hungary. Joseph's children were a disappointment, and his family provided no comfort, broken up as it was on two continents. His wife, Kate, remained willing at all times to fill the void, but Joseph had spurned her offers

• 51:48Speaker 00

  of companionship so frequently that she ceased to ask. Writing to Joseph, Kate marked the moment of their 25-year wedding anniversary. "25 years married. How strange it seems," she wrote. "When we think that 100 years hence, not one of us now living will be alive to care, or to know, or to enjoy, or to suffer. What does it all amount to? To a puff of smoke which makes a few rings and then disappears into nothingness. And yet we make tragedies of our lives, most of us not even making them serious comedies."