ANNOUNCEMENT: A Special Series Drops Tomorrow

so so of all i wanna say very excited about this this new deal and i was already a big fan of of my first million so very ser that that we found each other like this i feel like i could rule the world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a goal travel never looking back alright we have a special episode by ben wilson this is a three part series on thomas edison we discovered this podcast about two or three months ago and freaking loved it it it had very small listeners leadership both sean and i binge listened to all of them his name ben wilson the podcast is called how to take over the world ben has allowed us to air this episode and the next two so this is a three part series on thomas edison he's allowed us to air on our feed just because we like it so his podcast it only had a few hundred listeners at the time but we thought this was so cool sean and i and it's about a similar topic that we talk about so we have a topic called or the segment called billy of the week billionaire of the week this one is on thomas edison we loved ben's podcast so much we just said hey man let us just air this on our feed because it's so good so it's called how to take over the world this episode is on thomas edison he's got a few other episodes or a few other folks on his feed he's got thomas edison i believe he as alexander the great the roth charles family really really cool i'm a history buff and so i'm happy that he was cool unless air this we're doing it none other than just we think it's good and we want you guys to check it out so here it is enjoy the episode there's part two and part three on our feed check it out sean we have something special what is it i'm just gonna let him talk because his mic is so damn good so ben why don't you why don't you say a few words to that to the people but let him hear that silky smooth voice yeah this is me i'm ben wilson thanks for having me on guys i appreciate it so about eight weeks ago or ten weeks ago maybe i think i messaged sean i go sean i've been listening to this podcast called how to take over the world i think i randomly discovered it because i typed in like napoleon on the apple podcast and i saw this one does yeah as one does because i'm weirdo of and ben you had like no reviews i think and i clicked that one episode in your intro music was amazing and sean and i sean in particular is a fan of conor mcgregor and i sent it dick sean and i go dude you gotta listen to this this is amazing and i binge your whole episode and that we actually talked about you on our podcast and i think your listeners like shot up how many listeners did you have before we discussed you yeah it was a it's was a handful of thousand and i at least two x so so thank you for that i appreciate and i have you're downplay it you i thought you told me you were have you had hundreds a day and then you got many thousands a day yeah yeah if you're looking at where from a daily perspective yeah that's right it was about two hundred per day to to many thousands per day so that was that was basically sam was road tripping across america so i think he was just listening to a bunch of audiobooks books and then podcasts and sam you don't listen to a ton of podcast podcasts normally you're you only listen like true crime type stuff so you like the story story style podcast and i you had you're a big biography guy i always love when you tell me like oh dude i read this biography about like henry ford and did you know and i'm like no dude i didn't know any of this i don't read these books like i want to yeah but like you know i want an extra eight hours in a day and once i get that i'm gonna totally read all these books and so you've always been a pretty v reader and you love biographies let's just call what it is biographies of great men mostly it's like peep people have done amazing things either good or bad whatever it is and so you were saying oh dude i listen this thing and i don't know what you said but i think you might have mentioned the intro music and i was like let me just go listen to this and so i had to go drop somebody off at the airport and you know so i turned a task that's i kind of a pain in the ass errand of like an hour drive second traffic drive back so like okay this is two hours of listening time and i listened to the episodes you did ben about thomas edison and so we should say the name of the podcast is how to take over the world baller name second thing intra baller and then the first ones i listed this edison one was so good i literally kept driving so i had done the two hours but you have a it's a three part of so it's three hours so i just went i was like let me go run an errand and so i went to the grocery store so i could just finish it in one go and i wanna say two things so there's a bunch of stuff about edison that i didn't know that's kinda crazy i kinda wanna talk about some of those things but the important part for people listening to this is we made a deal with you we said look this content is amazing we we loved it and we think our fans are gonna love it so we're gonna cherry pick our favorite episodes from your feed and we're gonna play it on our feed which is gonna be for our audience it's gonna be an easy way to listen to it but then second thing is it's gonna get you a whole bunch of new people and so that's what i guess like that's an announcement that we're making here today is that that's what to expect we're gonna put the edison episodes up next all three that you can binge netflix style and then based on how people feel about that we might do more of this in the future so that's the big news and what did i miss nothing ben we've been rambling for four minutes what how do you come up with all this stuff are you just like reading biographies and then just like taking notes and reg yeah so so first of all i wanna say very excited about this this new deal and i was already a big fan of of my first million so very ser that that we found each other like this in terms of and one thing i have to correct you on sam is you said i had no reviews and when you said that my mom actually called me and she was like okay so i really thought that i had given you a review on i have a podcast but sam said you didn't have any so i what did i do wrong can you walk me through this and i had to tell her like no he didn't mean literally zero like i i had reviews how many did you i i guess i don't wanna play it up too much i kinda wanna the storyline i'm going here is is that we discovered to you i don't i don't know yeah if that's the title let's that's that's fair it is there that's the truth we run with that is fair and it and yeah so i had under a hundred of reviews no i think i've got over two hundred so so i think it it's it's fair sam you get all the credit you discovered me absolutely take it you do all the work and we get all the credit what i was for in terms of my process yeah so this thing kinda started out as a hobby just because i like sam like reading biographies like learning about these great people throughout history and kinda how they did what they did so i decided early on i didn't wanna just read one biography for each person because then you're getting someone else's perspective so i decided i always want at least two data points and if i can i want one of those data points to the auto so that i can see what they thought about you know themselves so i read at least a couple biographies and usually some it's usually like three or four books for for each major biography that i do and then i'm just taking notes the whole way through at the end of each chapter and then adding some of my own thoughts at the end in terms of analysis and what i what i took away from it and when i think people can learn from it one one thing i love with this is so i like audio because i can do it while i'm going out on driving i'm doing other things but i audio books kinda put me to sleep like i don't know how you do it sam but audio books themselves it really depends on how the person reading it is and even then reading a book is sort like this like kind of h agnostic thing that happens but when what you did was nice which is that you read the books but then you told a story and it's like audio first it's like you you're not just reading off of a page what was meant to be like red silently in somebody's head you're actually just like kind of doing the summary yourself so it saved me the time but it didn't bore me which is like the sweet spot i think yeah and there's always that push and pull right between trying to give enough detail that people can like make their own takeaways by i try and keep it short enough that that it's audio first and that it's engaging the whole time and i'm glad to hear you say that sounds like i'm doing an okay job at least and let no you're you're doing a good job let's talk about some of the things from the from the edison episode so some of the takeaways we had mentioned a little bit of this before but after after going and listen to here are some of the things that i thought were pretty baller okay so here's my i'm gonna give you three of my little favorite nuggets from it the first one is this like train story so young edison was a hustle and i i always thought edison this kind of this einstein genius just like a guy in a lab you know and he never leaves the room as just piles of books all around him that's all he ever experiences but actually edison was kind of a businessman hustle in addition to an inventor so he he as a kid i think a teenager maybe i know how old he was but like he gets on the train and he's basically does two things first he notices an arbitrage she's like oh i can buy fruits in one area was it fruits i don't remember what it was he's a fruit in yeah i'm gonna buy berries in one town i'm gonna come back and sell it a profit on the other side and then i'm gonna give free barriers to the driver so i don't have to pay the fee or whatever i'm like i'm allowed to do this like smuggling operation and i was like oh that's cool i didn't know he had that like hustle to i mean that's that's like the original arbitrage right then the second thing he was doing was like he he starts printing newspapers he brings he's a printing press on the train and like eventually like blows up the his all setup up on the train so he's kind this like mad genius and he literally blows it up like there's an explosion an explosion exactly so i thought the train thing was cool because i didn't know we had that kinda like what seems like just like a a a street smart kid you know hustle mentality not just high iq super genius yeah and the thing from the episode from the train that i really love is the battle so people were following the civil war at the time that was like the gossip call like everyone want to know exactly what's happening in the civil war and so the battle shiloh happens which is a huge battle in the civil war and everyone is waiting to hear how it went and so he gets he gets the idea that like oh people are really gonna want these newspapers and so he buys up the entire stock he walks into newspaper offices and like hey i want them all and then he he was like a real black market guy so he bribe someone to telegram ahead to all these cities on his train stop saying battle news from the battle of shiloh is coming on the evening paper but i'm not we're not gonna say what happened so people really want these newspapers and so he buys all the newspapers for five cents the entire stock and sells them for like a couple dollars and in one day makes like a mini fortune right for a twelve year old which is how old he was so yeah he he was this little like mark twain type type character gangster still yeah so so i like that one the second one i liked was the the the story of how he created the photograph face i i i i don't know if it's the the photograph but basically he was hard of hearing right so he's like partially deaf is that right from an explosion in this last thing that he was doing right didn't he like when he he had an experiment and it blew up and it made him deaf so that's not confirmed no one knows exactly what made him that's kind of my con i think all these like explosions he experienced in his childhood probably had something to do with it though yeah and so he he's and you described i forgot i called the insomnia crew what's the name of his crew basically it's yeah group of out of like inventors and they're kinda like hackers of today right but they're and they're they're like nocturnal so they're just like working all night every night and it's sort of like a little bit of a party and they're like they kind of work till they're sort of like you know you get a little delusional at night and they're like yeah that's when our creative juice start flowing and they're all just like working on their projects late at night this insomnia crew and from what i remember in the episode was like because he was hard of hearing to to like kinda hear music better or he was like kinda like sensing the vibrations and as brain sort of worked out oh if if vibrations let me feel the music then what if i created vibrations would i create music and that was look sort of the the aha moment where in sort of like the epiphany where he realized you know created what eventually became kinda like a record player right which is like let's scratch this vinyl and then that vibration will create a sound and that sound will be can be like printed basically as as the music yeah i you know that creation of recorded sound i like to think of inventions in terms of how far forward does it pull the future right so like if you think about steve jobs and and the iphone the smartphone he probably pulled the future forward like five ten years right if steve jobs had never existed the smartphone was still gonna happen at some point right i think with the pho graph with recorded sound he pulled the future forward like fifty years and so you see it in their reaction when they do it for the first time his chief engineer his reaction says my god in heaven like he's just shocked like he just like can't believe they have no way to like even process what they just discovered it that is one of if favorite resorts from his life yeah so there's a there's a bunch of these sam what what was your kind of favorite one from this milk what was the milk thing the wait what did you oh he only ate milk and bread right yeah for long yeah that's it he would just drink milk and he would only eat like four ounces per meal he he was psycho like that yeah and then there was another story where he basically right around where i'm staying in new york he wanted to have a power grid he he invented electricity and he invented or he invented the light bulb and he's like but in order for the lights to work we need electricity and so he brought all these politicians in the mayor and a couple other their folk into a dark room at night and then he flips a switch and he goes and then it was like a full buffet there and like a beautiful dinner i think and he goes now do you see how we could see at night everyone in the the city should feel this way but they could only feel this way if we have the power grid and so he was a show in right did i tell that story correctly that's exactly it and and like for six months they had basically been lobbying to let them build this power grid and nothing had happened and then in one night the next day everyone's was like okay yep go ahead yeah in this so so you have this person who's yeah as a youngster sort of like a scheme and a hustle he's basically wants make him and elon are similar and yeah exactly and so then he then he he's gonna a big inventor so it creates some like game changing inventions whether it's recorded sound the light bulb you know basically like the also the telephone like ally alexander instagram bell gets a lot of credit for the telephone but it seemed like from what you were saying like edison really made the the phone like usable like he was he wasn't necessarily the inventor but he's the one who made the the kind of the the phone that actually worked that we all liked that's right and that was like a key key inventor so let's just game game changers and then as a business person you know the company he created essentially became general electric right ge and so so you know pretty prolific life lifespan and of course invented the word hello which is fur you know brought the the phrase hello into into pop culture so i think you know that was really really impressive to me yeah he he he did it's in crazy the volume of the stuff he did and as you said elon i think is a good comparison and you know it's funny because people set up this rivalry between tesla and edison and so it's funny that elon musk named his company tesla when he himself has admitted said an interview was like yeah you're right i'm i'm a lot more like edison than i am like tesla and they are very similar in a lot of ways and it's kind of the cool thing to say like oh tesla was the the real the real inventor he was the better event was the greatest inventor all time and what you kinda said no i don't i don't i don't i think that's i think you said your quote was that's laughable so yeah i tesla has one really great invention to his name which is alternating current which was a biggest discovery but like three other people discovered it independently in the next year so like when you talk about how far forward you're pulling the future it was like a year was like six months for tesla i i don't wanna like bag on him but it's just he wasn't nearly the inventor that the edison was i i think if you really stack it up so when is this when is this people are listening to this today let's say they're listening this episode right now when it came out when's when are the edison episodes going live the next day we let's push them out the next day if you're listening to this now the next day the edison warren put all three out you can binge it like a netflix show see if you're like it we're me and sam both into these like odd ball prodigy ph type sam likes to historical i specifically love young people who did who kinda like or you know excel in their field that's like my thing i i love to like go on youtube rabbit holes for that and so if you like this kinda like odd ball greatness i would definitely i would definitely be definitely check it out let us know what you think you could tweet at me or sam and let us know it'll be like yay or nay if you guys want more or less of these and yeah let's see what happens but i i i dig good job with these who's the next person you're gonna you're gonna feature well i think we're both lobbying for you to do roth a bright right yeah what do you think of that idea we we texted you this yesterday yeah i yeah absolutely i will so i should say i already have a couple scripts in production so he's not gonna be next so next is a guy by the name of las po who this is like a selfish episode for me because i i just had a a kid i just had a daughter nine months ago and so this guy las po claims claimed to that he came up with a a strategy a technique by which you could a proof way to raise a genius right so he had three kids he's like i'm gonna raise him multi geniuses and he had three daughters and they were the three greatest women's chess players of all time and so it's like oh seems like this might work so i kinda break down his life his technique how he raised his his daughter's to be geniuses so that's the next one that's coming out but ross we're gonna make it happen soon alright so alright we will we'll get you out of here people be hearing more from you so this is ben not the ben i'm normally referencing that's my right hand man ben that's ben levy this is ben wilson so so two ben's in my life now and glad to have you doing this with us man i'm here's my prediction i'm gonna go on the record and say this now i believe and i will also make my best effort i believe your podcast is gonna be twice as big as ours within two years that's my prediction for this thing i think we we we discovered you sam discovered you i think we're giving you the boost we're sling slingshot you but your content and the the niche is so good that i think when people get this is gonna it's gonna fly so i predict in two years actually bigger than us i agree with you except i think six months oh nice okay he he ups the annie yeah i think yeah the thing is is that okay the history cat ben his shit is amazing and also the cat his category is so big like how how big is this category right because history seems like a niche thing right like who you know history boring class in school but give us some idea how how big is you think you think the the appetite for this i i know there's hardcore history i know any of his numbers do you know any of his i don't know his numbers i just know that his episodes like will regularly do dan carlin amazing by the way he's one of the my big inspiration but his episodes regularly get ranked in the top one hundred i think even the top ten for podcast episodes which means doing over a million downloads per episode as is if you're in the top ten as mike but i don't think that this is gonna fall con entirely into history i think it's gonna this is like a stuff you should should know territory right so maybe that's pop culture i don't know what's going well in my frustration with a lot of history podcasts is that and and i'm gonna get a lot of hate mail for this but it's a lot of history nerds talking about history and like i just don't think that's what people want you know like they don't wanna get bogged down in those details like you were saying sean like they wanna know what do i need to know how does it apply to me why is this interesting to me so that's why i try and on and yeah i think i hope it has some crossover overview i wanna know here's what i want i wanna while i'm listening to it i wanna feel completely inadequate with my life right so i wanna be so inspired that i feel like everything i've done is a tiny speck of well i'm a fart compared to this this person and by the way there's actually a quote in this where edison feels that way he's like oh i'm what did he say he's like i'm already twenty five and like all i've done is this and like they're like dude you fucking like invented the light but what are talking about he's like no my life my healthy life is half done and i've only done whenever you know he was looking at i think was tesla who he who is he looking at michael far who's an inventor before with meredith yeah fair the physicist and he's like far has already done x y z oh my god i'm so behind and it's like ironic right you're edison and then he was talking about or you i think you were talking about caesar how's julius caesar once like saw a statue of who was it alexander the great yep and and had the same thing he's like oh you know like what am i just the emperor of rome like alexander the great by my age was ruling you know like the the the universe basically and it's like oh okay you know lesson learn no matter who you are no matter how much you've made it you sort of you can always it's all relative you'll always find the bigger batter faster you know version of even if caesar and if caesar and edison hasn't felt it you know it's not completely normal for you as a product manager at facebook to feel same yeah that's how i feel oh go ahead i say what you're gonna say and then we're gonna wrap up cool i i just gonna say that that's actually the reason i started doing this is because i would read these these biographies that i come out of it just feeling like i've been injected with bold testosterone or something and gorilla testosterone and just like ready to to take over the world you know the name of the podcast and i i'm glad to hear that the other people get that same feeling when when they listen we're gonna i'm happy i'm happy we did this this is gonna go live like the next day if you're listening to this just give it twenty four hours it'll be live awesome okay see you ben alright thanks guys yeah i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a travel never looking back