SPECIAL: Thomas Edison (Part 3)

alright so last month sam went down to nashville for the podcast movie conference and he did a fireside chat with john lee du you might know him as the host of the entrepreneurs on fire podcast and if you like my first million you might like the entrepreneurs fire podcast it's the same it's like inspiration and strategy around your entrepreneurial journey and helps you create the life you've dreamed dev wow sound too bad does it alright well guess what it's also part of the hubspot podcast network that's who brings you our show and other great business shows so if you wanna listen learn and grow go listen to entrepreneurs on fire it's on the hubspot podcast network if you can find it at hubspot dot com slash podcast network 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's 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 this 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 podcasts 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 it's really really cool i'm a history buff and so i'm happy that he was cool and loves 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 and we'll show you how beta then but have high power just one second let me hunt i'd like to take this chance to apologize absolutely nobody hello and welcome to how to take over the world this is ben wilson before we get into the episode today i do wanna say a big thank you to everyone who has left reviews on apple we just got over a hundred reviews and the do a ton to surface the podcast and help other people find it so thank you i really appreciate the support also all of you who've been sending me emails to support and letting me know how much the podcast means to you it means a ton to me to hear from you when you send me those emails and those messages so thank you i appreciate it and it really does help fuel me and keep this going this is a new kind of episode it's going to be a little bit more free flowing a little more relaxed a little more loose where this came from was i was looking at all of my notes that i had written for the thomas edison episodes and i realized that i had about sixty pages of notes and i had used about thirty of them for the two episodes which meant i had nearly half of my work go unused so i thought to myself why not use that in some former fashion so the these are notes this is stuff about edison that didn't really neatly fit into the narrative but i still thought was interesting so it's going to not have the same structural flow it's not necessarily gonna follow his life in chronological order it's literally just kind of a a stream of consciousness of some things that i thought as i was studying the life of thomas edison so i wanted to start off talking about what is by far one of edison most underrated inventions and that is the word hello if you think i'm joking i'm not i double and triple check this just because it seems so unbelievable to me but it's true thomas edison invented what is now one of the most fundamental words in english language before thomas edison when people saw each other they would say greetings good day sal i i don't know they said other things they generally did not say hello it did exist as a word it was pronounced differently it was pronounced usually hall and it was usually used as an expression of surprise so you can hear that still sometimes that someone i don't know for whatever reason i think that in a british accent someone saying hello you know like they get surprised by something and that was the way that this word hall was used as an expression of surprise but then in the old old days of telephones when they were essentially still used as a tool for telegraph operators they needed a way to get each other's attention because they didn't have ringer yet so really they just had open lines between telegraph stations so if you needed to get in contact with someone you just shouted it and so they needed something to shout alexander graham bell suggested the word a h it's i would love to live in the alternate universe where that becomes the standard greeting between people but edison suggested that they used this word hall but that was you know the vowels are kinda soft it didn't carry that well so he changed the vowels to hello because you can shout back really easily and be heard really easily so telegraph operators start using this when they want to be heard from station to station so hey i've got a message for someone i pick up the telephone and i yell hello hello low until someone picks up and then i give them the message of course when telephones made their way to the general population then people started using that in their homes when they picked up the telephone hello and then it just made its way into the language as the default greeting hello and so that word traces its roots directly back to thomas edison i think that's just indicative of the way that edison has had a huge impact on all of our lives in a way that we don't necessarily think about and we often take for granted okay let's talk really quickly about the edison versus tesla en something i've received a lot of questions about as i mentioned in the last episode tesla started working for edison in eighteen eighty four he got right to work on a problem on a d on a boat that edison had been having a lot of problems with and he stays up all night and he's able to figure out the problem and solve it edison supposedly remarks the bachelor this is a damn good good man so he had good things to say about him then he had good things to say about him throughout his career they respected each other as geniuses of course tesla was very inspired by edison as you might recall from last episode they did have a falling out when tesla stopped working for edison there's a disagreement about money essentially tesla thought that edison had promised him fifty thousand dollars tesla is this new immigrant he's just off the boat he goes in for his first meeting with edison and you know they're talking about stuff and tesla says well what happens if if i invent something that even you can't invent and edison goes look buddy if you can invent something that i can't invent you can have fifty thousand dollars edison is is joking he you know he was not flush of cash at this time he didn't have fifty thousand dollars to give but tesla is a very recent immigrant his english is not great and he doesn't get the joke right he thinks that edison is serious all he hears is well if i end invent something that edison can't then or hasn't then i get fifty thousand dollars so when he does because he you know he's a genius himself he invent something that that edison didn't ind invent he goes and says where my fifty thousand dollars and edison says you know there are no fifty thousand dollars that that was a joke and tesla leaves in a hu but they they didn't exactly reconcile they were never like friends but they were cordial throughout their careers and i think tesla came to understand that edison wasn't serious in misinterpreted this because tesla did have kind things to say about edison which you wouldn't expect if he felt like he was truly ripped off by a a dishonest man they did have tremendously different approaches which they talked about sometimes and look they were rivals they were both competitive guys who took a lot of pride in their work tesla said of his approach quote i did not need any models nor drawings or experiments i could do it in my mind the way i unconsciously developed a new method of for material inventions and ideas is exactly the opposite of the purely experimental method of which undoubtedly edison is the greatest and most successful exponent i liked one quote that described their differences that said quote tesla's was a more original genius than edison he surrounds himself with a halo of electric light and calls purple streams from the soil his aim is to hook man's machinery directly to nature and i think that statement that tesla was a more original genius than edison is is certainly accurate from a certain viewpoint i think tesla was probably smarter from a pure iq horsepower standpoint than edison was but you know obviously had the more successful career had more inventions which is why always say the energy and work ethic matter more than intelligence in the long run i also think that edison approach which was this experimental method rather than tesla's more theoretical way of doing things is a better approach and i think that's another reason why edison had more success despite probably on an objective level being less intelligent than tesla is i think one thing that kinda demonstrates the difference between them is an incident in eighteen ninety five nikola tesla saw his entire lab burned down much as you'll remember edison did and edison was very his sang about seeing his lab burden down tesla was not he said and i quote i am in too much grief to talk what can i say the work of half my lifetime very nearly all my mechanical instruments in scientific apparatus everything is gone i must begin over again so you can see from that that tesla even though he was his genius probably didn't have quite the same grit and the determination that edison did not quite he did start over again and and so i would say he did have a lot of that but you know edison a was sort of extraordinary in that regard and to speak to the relationship a little bit tesla also said after this you know great fire at his lab quote i have received a letter for mister edison offering me the use of his workshop in which to continue my experiments he has shown me the greatest kindness and consideration do not think however that i will accept the offer so anyway it was sort of it was a competitive but you know also sort of friendly relationship i like to think of it as like professor x and magnet or something like that speaking of tesla i find it hilarious that elon musk named his company tesla because elon is so much like edison in big ways and in like funny little ways as well both spent time in canada and their teenage years but then became successes in the united states both are known for their tireless work effort and a demanding leadership style both are known for wanting to control every aspect of sourcing and manufacturing both made meaningful contributions to battery technology one of edison biggest dreams actually that he never got to see through was he wanted to create an electric car a mass market electric car of course elon did popularized the electric car both are definitely experimental rather than you know theoretical guys the story about elon that reminds me most of edison was when elon started the boring company i don't know if you've heard this but the boring company is elon company for digging tunnels he one day has to go into work and is just so frustrated by the traffic in los angeles where his company is based and so he decides you know what would be logical rather than having to compete with all this traffic just having tunnels so that we could go underground and and avoid all that traffic so what does elon do when he has this idea he starts the boring company and literally just starts digging the hole in the parking lot and then starts digging and digging and then they start digging over and they just kinda as they go start figuring better and better technology for digging these holes and digging these tunnels and that's kinda how edison would do it too you know first just start experimenting start figuring it out and eventually you'll figure it out rather than you know sit down with some textbooks and try and figure from a theoretical standpoint what would be best it it also their similarities get down to smaller stuff too you know i mentioned their time in canada also you know in contrast to tesla's very well known ce both edison and elon have had multiple children by multiple women both even kinda look alike if you ask me so anyway i thought least similarities are too much i'm sure someone has to have asked elon about it right and so i went googling i looked and sure enough elon didn't an interview and here's what he had to say about his relationship to edison in an interview as far as role models i think know some of the the obvious role models i think edison was certainly a role model pro probably one of biggest role models did you study life yeah i read books about him absolutely and and it's an interesting contrast like edison versus tesla interesting you know the the car company called tesla and the reason called tesla is because we use an ac induction motor which is architecture that tesla developed and the guy probably deserves a little more play than he gets in current society but on balance i'm a bigger fan of edison than tesla because edison brought his stuff to market and made those inventions accessible to the world whereas tesla didn't really do so that's so he he certainly be a big one so there you go i do think that elon is probably the closest living thing that we have two edison and you know he acknowledges that he he took take some inspiration from edison life which is not surprising to me speaking of comparisons obviously another easy comparison to make is with steve jobs both had a propensity for starving themselves and for weird diets steve jobs would have periods of his life where he would only eat apples and edison had a period in his life where he would only drink milk that's the only food drink that he would consume so that's again kind of a a weird similarity between the two they also had this flare for show ship that was very akin and then another connection that i just think is funny is that you know edison did not invent but he did perfect the telephone and similarly steve jobs did not invent the smartphone but he kind of perfect it and made it this new mass market thing with with the iphone and when steve jobs introduced the iphone he did so with a commercial call what else hello this commercial featured famous movie moments where people answer a phone and say hello and then it shows the iphone and just says hello on the screen and i'm sure that it was unintentional to pay tribute to a word that edison invented but i find it meaningful in a cosmic sort of way that he did kind of accidentally pay tribute to edison okay other notes okay so edison was like a classic mad scientist he was always blowing himself up poisoning himself he nearly killed himself all the time so he nearly choked himself on poison gas he nearly radiate himself to death with x rays he nearly blinded himself by staring at lights he electro executed himself multiple times he sat himself on fire burned himself with acid he held things that blew up in his hands including tons and tons of light bulbs in fact it's my conspiracy theory that he probably made himself death with an experiment gone wrong you know the famous quote that he had about when he went deaf is he said that he hadn't heard a bird trip since he was twelve and i find it odd that he targeted it to that exact date and in the story about what did make him deaf was kinda always changing right there there there is no good answer different diseases different conditions were put forth and edison himself said different things but you know he said i haven't heard a bird church since i was twelve years old and that's right when he was starting to get all these chemistry experiments and experiment in his basement and there are reports he said his mother said that he blew out the windows in the basement multi times he was always blowing stuff up and and blowing out the windows and of that's what he did on the train that got him kicked off the train so it's my i i think it's kind of a conspiracy theory i guess because i haven't heard anyone else say this but i think it's possible that he at least made his deafness worse by blowing out his eardrum in an experiment when he was a young boy when he was twelve or thirteen years old so there you go but i just find it funny that he was like this classic mad scientist who was nearly always killing himself his hair was always you know sing and standing on end and he was that like classic mad scientist experimenting blowing stuff up some of my favorite quotes that i didn't get to put in a famous edison quote that he would say all the time is all things come to him who hustle while he waits which i think is something good to remember all things come to him who hustle while he waits a quote from someone else an mp from ireland named t o'connor said quote he's like a great school boy the simplicity of genius was never before so remarkably illustrated and i like that the simplicity of genius and i i like to think about that sometimes that genius does not come from being involved in all these things and being able to be everyone everywhere no genius comes from simplicity comes from focus on a single thing and becoming the best at that one thing one other quote that i liked was from francis upton who said the one great impression of my years in men park was how imp the veil of the future seems to be when new problems are to be solved and how simple the old often is when the darkness of ignorance is lighted by the genius of one man one story that i had to cut that i really liked and actually probably wish i had left in is from the time when he was demonstrating his light bulb in new york city and it's in this great concert hall and the d was not yet perfect protected there's no power grid so how is he powering this thing well next door they literally have a coal burner that they're using to generate electricity and so at some point during the demonstration the lights start to go a little bit dim and so edison going oh no what's going on so he goes next door and the guy who was on the job had fallen asleep who was supposed to be loading coal to keep this thing fired to keep this thing powered to keep the lights on next door and so as you know it takes off his jacket and starts shoveling coal to keep the lights on i like that story just it demonstrates kinda how hands on and how basic the technology was right and i just think it's cool to think about that era of technology and everything was so tactile and and kinda hands on the average podcast listener has six shows in their rotation so you're most likely not just listening to my first million if so i wanna make another suggestion i wanna share podcast podcasts that i've been listening to the show is called the jordan harbinger show so jordan is my homie he's a great friend of mine jordan is one of the guys who helped encourages us sol launch his podcast he's giving us a ton of feedback on how to grow how to make the content amazing and his show is awesome i became friends with them because i started listening to show and it reached out and it's very fascinating he dives into the minds of some very very interesting people so authors scientist ceos mobs he's got a gift kinda like sean does to be honest i'm getting guests to share never heard before stories very cool very fascinating a few of my favorite episodes are episode one seventeen with robert greene i've talked about robert greene books all the time in this podcast is one of my favorites and then episode four ninety eight with rob du who's coming on our podcast actually a month so you can't go wrong with adding jordan harbinger showed your rotation check it out search for the jordan harbinger show that's h a r b i n g e r on apple podcast podcasts spotify wherever you get it check it out he's awesome i love him one other kind of small story speaking of tactile and hands on that i didn't get to mention was you know edison is doing all this work on the pho photograph and he can barely hear and especially late in life he's working on perfect the pho photograph and coming out with new versions of it and at this point this guy is really deaf i mean really cannot hear much people have to shout into his ear in order to be word so how does he hear the music that's coming out of his pho photograph how does he know if it sounds good or not and so what he would actually do is they had you know wood casing and he would bite the wood and the sound would vibrate through teeth into his skull and that's how he would hear and the the consequence of this was that's a different way of hearing right it just sounds different and so the decisions that he made about the pho photograph and about the music that was being played on it were were kinda bad but he was so confident that he understood he knew what was what sounded good and what didn't sound good but he insisted on making those decisions even though he had this really weird way of listening to the pho photograph of of biting pho photograph of biting the wood around it next my review of the current war oh which is a movie that came out last year i think it came out late two thousand nineteen that is about the rivalry between edison and west house and features tesla very heavily so it's supposed to be kind of historical fiction right and so i guess i'm not going to discuss every historical in inaccuracy of the movie because i just don't wanna get that guy there are a lot so just know that so that if you're watching it and you say whoa it says that edison wife died of an incur brain disease but i heard on how to take over the world but she died suddenly of a morphine overdose i'm right the movies are wrong they just i don't beg grudge them that it's a movie they have to make it an interesting narrative so they deviate a lot a lot of the dates are wrong a lot of the people are kinda they have to mash them together and all sorts of stuff right so i'm not gonna correct every single historical accuracy but just some things i guess overall some thoughts i had number one they make edison this amazing family man and as i've told you he was really dot and loving towards his wife and children wives and children but he was never home i mean he was at the office he was at the workstation all the time and so especially you know second wife men would talk about how she bring her children and go in into to see edison and she'd be so mad at him but he had this like charm thing that if you hear people talk about really charismatic people i've heard people say this about bill clinton who's a former president of the united states that he would he can turn this charm on and he just focuses all his attention on you like a laser beam and people who hate him who hate his guts just find themselves instantly one over and edison had this too mina would go in and she's mad because she hasn't seen him in like two weeks he's been sleeping at the office he just hasn't come home she's mad and she walks in there with her kids say hey look at your children say hi spend some time with him and he just shifts all his attention to her is men i'm so happy to see you and immediately the anger is gone he melts her and so he was this like really super loving dot husband and father when he was around which was like never so anyways i i think the movie probably makes him seem a little more present than he actually was another thing that's funny to me i just have to point out samuel ins in the movie they make this like meek little secretary who is edison pawn and does whatever edison wants edison actually at various times felt very betrayed by ins insult because he became this mega millionaire in part by doing some stuff some business decisions that probably had to be made but he cut edison out of a lot of the decision making at general electric and he was like a very strong personality who kinda took no prisoners and so it's funny to see him portrayed as this like yes sir yes mister edison whatever you want sir and just on the nature of personality like i i just think they make edison in the movie seem to adapt at social situations i don't think they quite got right the like addictive nature of edison personality if he was doing anything except for inventing he was just he wanted to get it out of the way he wanted to get back to inventing another weird thing about the movie is there insistence that no one died from alternating current except for people who were executed in the electric chair just not true at all i mean in the early days of electricity when they were streaming up wires people died relatively frequently and people died all the time from electric power it was a new and dangerous technology so i'm i'm not sure why the movie went that direction and they also don't get into what was a huge part of the war between west house and edison which was a patent lawsuit west house lost the patent lawsuit and had to pay edison fifteen million dollars for violating the basic light bulb patent which essentially took the the current wars as they call them this war between edison electric and west house west house was destroying edison and then edison wins this patent battle edison has paying fifteen million dollars which just ton of ton of money which kinda of turns it into a draw so i find it funny that they didn't mention that patent lawsuit but that was also an important part of it one thing that they do demonstrate i didn't talk about was edison assistance in developing the electric chair william ke was the first man given the electric chair and it was a disaster they thought it would be like this quick painless thing flip the switch and boom he's dead instant painless great what actually happened was they flipped the switch and it took two minutes to to kill the guy the body hair on his body was sing off and it was making people sick spectators were starting to throw up who had come to watch and observe the execution and it just like it was gruesome some the way that he eventually died like essentially they fried him that's how he died from like being cooked from being heated up from the inside out so really really gruesome some they they kinda worked on it they got higher voltages electric chair did eventually i guess get a little more humane but but not much there's a reason that people don't die really from the electric chair anymore it was not a great form of execution probably not exactly a a proud moment of edison life that he that he worked on that one question that people have asked me a couple times was about his marriages and his marriages were not the happiest because he was around so infrequently his wives sometimes felt a little bit abandoned which is obviously very easy to understand i would say that his first marriage was worse because mary didn't know what she was signing up for right edison wasn't famous at the time so he kinda charmed her she said yes she mar this guy and all of a sudden she's thrust into the spotlight of being married to this world famous man and he's never around and she didn't know that was gonna be part of the equation whereas men when she married edison he was already famous and she knew what she was signing up for maybe not the extent of it she was certainly still annoyed frequently that he was not around as much as she would like and it's just difficult to deal with celebrity and she was in the spotlight a lot but you know i think she dealt with it better than mary for that reason she kinda knew what she was getting into his children his sons from his first marriage william and tom were they were a thorn in his side for his whole life they were always making trouble they embarrassed him they married kind of dis women they would make all these claims that you know especially tom thomas edison junior would sell the rights to his name because you know then people would just take any old attention and say hey you know this is the thomas edison and then very little letters junior this is the thomas edison lamp this is the thomas edison whatever and trying scam people buying it and these kinda low quality products so tom was going around selling his name edison had to like threaten to sue his son to get him to stop so yeah william and tom trouble makers never really made much of their lives his sons from his other marriage were much more helpful so charles was one of those sons he was like the most interesting man in the world he was not only a very successful business executive he wrote poetry and composed songs and was was kind of a ladies man early in his life he eventually became the governor of new jersey and he was the ceo of edison inc for a while and was a very successful ceo did well and had a working relationship with his father his other son theodore was the only son who really followed his dad's path in becoming an ind inventor and theodore while not as prolific as his father was a a very gifted inventor mentor had over eighty patents i think in his life so he did well for himself as well in terms of the daughters marion who was a daughter from his first marriage married a guy in germany and that marriage didn't laugh so eventually she came back to the united states never had children never had a career so her life was was a little bit sad and then his daughter madeline from his second marriage was very intelligent very was actually probably most like thomas edison frankly did not have a career decided to get married instead she married a very successful airplane manufacturer successful businessman and she had four children of her own she's actually the only edison grandchild to have children which is kinda funny to me that five his six children did not have children of their own but but madeline did another similarity to elon musk thomas edison was interested in solar power and figuring out how to harness it and store it and edison was something of a environmental they didn't really have environmental back then in in the same way that we do now it was kinda just emerging as a school's thought but listen to this quote medicine i i think it's interesting he said quote someday some fellow will ind invent a way of concentrating and storing sunshine to use instead of this old absurd prometheus scheme of fire i'll do the trick myself if someone doesn't get at it this scheme of combustion in order to get power makes me sick think of it is so wasteful we should utilize natural forces and thus get all of our power sunshine is a form of energy and the winds and the tides are manifestations of energy do we use them oh no we burn up wood and coal as renters burn up the front fence for fuel we live like squat not as if we owned the property there must surely come a time when heat and power will be stored in unlimited quantities in every community all gathered by natural forces electricity ought to be as cheap as oxygen it cannot be destroyed end quote one other thing that i thought thought interesting someone has a quote they mentioned the peculiar nocturnal brightening of the human owl and yeah i like this idea of referring to edison as a as a human owl only did he work really weird hours really late hours but he actually did some of his best work between the hours of like ten pm and six am and i don't know particularly why that is but i do think that he got some sort of high off of working when other people were not working there's a famous quote i've heard that i like i've heard it various attributed to so i don't know who who really said it first but the quote is when you are not practicing remember someone somewhere is practicing and when you meet him he will win and so i i think that edison probably felt that way it sure seems like it that any moment he wasn't inventing someone else was and so he wanted to make as few of those moments as possible he wanted to be there at the bench when no one else was and if that seems totally unsustainable it is if you don't do it right remember edison didn't just work all the time he did work all the time for long stretches but then he would also take these multi week vacations out west or down to florida and so i do think it's important to think about that of meta balance you know i think that probably balance in any given day is overrated you don't necessarily need to eat a balance breakfast and work out every day and do yoga and meditation and all these things that people tell you you should do every day i don't think you necessarily need to but it's important to balance it out over time so if you're gonna be a work a for a week or two which is something i'll often do especially when i'm turning out these episodes i just will will not sleep much and i'll do my day job and then i'll straight go to working on this and go to bed really really late wake up really really early but then i'll spend the weekend sleeping a lot of a lot of lot and just relaxing and doing nothing and edison kinda did this in the most maximal sort away he just worked all the time all the time and then when he went on vacation he went for weeks and sometimes months one one small note edison went on a grant tour of up with his family and one of the things that he commented was that europeans were were too fat he was disgusted by half you know g half at all these people were which to me is just so funny that americans were criticizing how that europeans were a hundred years ago oh how the times have changed one other kind of small note i guess i wanted to make is that thomas edison mother home him educated him and somebody he was kind of the perfect example of a p woman so if you don't know p were this religious sec that came from england settled in new england the area we now know was new england gonna started in massachusetts and spread out from there and they were very very religiously ob absorbent extremely strict and very highly educated you you can look them up there the pilgrims that you hear about sometimes if you if you live in america the people that were there at thanksgiving right those are the p and edison comes from very very p stock and his mother was the daughter of a methodist minister so yeah like very very p and i commented this to someone that you know edison his mom was like the perfect p women super educated i you know teaching him and they went well p women were educated i thought that they were like super oppressed and under lock and key because of handmade stale i guess they use kinda like p imagery in handmade that i don't know i haven't seen the show so i'm gonna criticize it too much but i do just want to comment that if this is something that is portrayed in handmade sale that p were somehow extremely oppressive of women mean pure p were just like oppressive right they were super super strict in in a lot of different ways but it was one of the peculiar of their culture that p and women were highly educated it was very egalitarian society and so that's just not accurate i think that's a misconception that a lot of people have and the other only thing about p i mean i think edison is like the end result of a couple hundred years of like p inter reading because p were obsessed with working these people just thought that was how you demonstrated you know your faith in and belief to god was was hard work and they really valor that in their culture in periods and heidi it was a crime to do nothing like literally you could just be doing nothing and that was a crime because you weren't working right so you get a couple hundred years of p inter marrying and hand having this culture and then you get the daughter of a methodist minister you know from p stock she mar a another p and she has a son and then you have this guy who is completely obsessed with working right he's a completely he's a work alcoholic and invent his whole so you know i i don't think it's an accident that the edison was like this when you take into consideration where he came from and the the culture and the history of of p people and if you wanna learn a little bit more about this and how kind of p culture in in some way still shapes america a really interesting book is called a seed that talks about that i highly recommend it but yeah thomas edison super p even though he wasn't religious super p a couple other things one is industrial sabotage industrial espionage both were extremely common during addison time so you know amending the light bulb especially when he's having public demonstrations people from west house people from other companies are just walking into men park and just un unscrew light bulbs and taking them and in fact it gets it gets really bad they have these public demonstrations and they can't tell the difference between west house people who are stealing them for for espionage purposes and just you know bystanders standards who want souvenir and take the chance to to lift a edison light bulb but this is a big problem it was it was a different time like during the current wars when west house and edison are both trying to elect electrified new york city you know it got really it got dirty you know with people intimidating each other and and beating each other up and you business was really like bare knuckles back then that that's not something i talked a lot about because edison himself didn't had a lot of involvement in it but i do think it's a really interesting aspect of of that time period and if you want to learn more about it the book the current war is is good and so is last days of night is another interesting book about that time period the last thing and then i'll end on this even though it's kinda early from his life is a quote for edison so his very very first you invention the first thing that he successfully patents is the electric vote recorder and so edison is a nobody right so how are you gonna make an electric vote recorder to show off for the patent office he has to make it and so he literally has to you know the casing for the thing of course he can do the electronics he's the telegraph operator he's working with electronics all the time but he has to like carve the casing for this thing so he does eat carve the wood and makes the casing for this thing and he has a quote like he said later in life he said to become a good inventor you must first know how to use a jack knife in other words like you gotta know how to do the nitty gritty dirty details of inventing you can't just sit there with your head in the clouds and and think up new things right get out the knife and start carving wood and that reminded me a lot of a quote from pablo picasso he said quote when art critics get together they talk about form and structure and meaning when artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap tu time and i think that's very true so if you want some parting advice on the life of thomas edison i think it's you know make yourself useful don't be one of those people who thinks about forum and structure and meaning and i always have my head in the clouds because i am a big thinker you know learn a skill be useful to other people and and build off of that build your way up okay that's it this was a little bit rambling a little bit different let me know what you thought in terms of the future we've got some catherine the great episodes coming i'm i'm finally turning that into a full series and then alexander the great after that until then thanks for listening