YouSaid · the spoken record

Daniel Ludwig

lines on the record: 24
first: 2019-04-21
most recent: 2019-04-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So there's a lot to admire and learn from Ludwig, his sense of efficiency, his hard work, him identifying opportunities that were where other people were maybe scared or unwilling to do. But we can't paper over the fact that he got wealthy from legalized corruption. And so here's an example of that. Okay, so he owns a shipyard called Wielding. So there's a 1943 Wielding Shiplark built three more ships. All were contracted by National Bulk, his other company, using the maritime commission as middleman, and all were requisitioned by the WSA when built, which would then assign them to national bulk to operate. So he's basically getting paid in both sides of his pocket. The financial involvement involved in this roundabout scheme are worth examining. National bulk, in effect, was buying ships from itself and laying in profit at both ends, all with the consent and cooperation of the maritime”
2019-04-21 · Founders · #68 Daniel Ludwig: The Invisible Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know how we talk about books as visual links, all these different entrepreneurs that he either does business with or is mentioned in the book. A lot of them have done podcasts on. So we talked about Malcolm McLean did a podcast on him. Ludwig sold something to Howard Hughes, did a podcast on him. Ludwig invested in a Kaiser aluminum, which was started by Henry Kaiser. That was a couple weeks ago. H. L. Hunt, John Getty, or Jay Getty, Aristotle Anassis, Strabos Niccros. It's just amazing how I keep being exposed to more and more people I can find books on. And I'm searching because these Greek guys are kind of crazy.”
2019-04-21 · Founders · #68 Daniel Ludwig: The Invisible Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so one reason Ludwig was so secretive. Remember at the beginning of the book, it talks about most people hire PR firms to get their company's publicity. He hires them to keep his name out of everything. And he does this because he's in a lot of the business he's in is like unchartered territory, kind of markets of one that he's kind of making himself. And why would you want publicity on that? Like you want to keep that advantage as long as possible to pull as much profit out as possible, right? And some of the auctions, in this case where he's buying boats from the maritime commission, some of these auctions had no other bidders. So people didn't even know that you could buy these assets for so cheap. Daniel figured it out and he just kept his mouth shut. So he says, and this is, again, his modus operandi uses over and over again in different domains. One of the main reasons he had been buying old chips was to salvage and sell the parts during renovation.”
2019-04-21 · Founders · #68 Daniel Ludwig: The Invisible Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everybody goes through bad times. I know social media makes it portrays it like none of us do, but we all do. And just I love these reminders from history that, hey, everybody has to deal with this kind of shit. But you just keep persevering. You have a positive mental attitude. Keep moving forward. And eventually, the bad times are not going to last forever. Let's see. I wrote on this page, I chuckled”
2019-04-21 · Founders · #68 Daniel Ludwig: The Invisible Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These people are dead. And again, if that's happening in the 1930s, 1940s, what's the chance it's not happening right now? The probability it's not happening right now is zero. We just don't, we won't know about what that is until later on. But it is definitely happening now. It happened in the past. It'll happen in the future. Okay, reminder that tough times don't last, but tough people do. It says during the depths of the depression, Ludwig was mirrored deep in debt, saddled with do-nothing partners, desperately pressed to keep the shipping board and the banks from foreclosing on his few ships, and burdened with an unhappy marriage. Now, five years later, DK was in good financial shape, the owner of a growing fleet of ships and corporations out of debt and enjoying a profitable relationship with the government, the banks, and the oil companies. Moreover, he was building a reliable staff, and he had a happier marriage. So again,”
2019-04-21 · Founders · #68 Daniel Ludwig: The Invisible Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'm only talking to you really about the parts that I feel like are useful in running companies, but there's so much information here about, I mean, these shipping and oil companies, they have incestuous relationships not only with other shipping and oil companies, but with state governments, with intelligence agencies, which it's just, there's just so, so many crazy stories that I'm not even going to get to a chance to talk to you about that the book covers. So if you're into history like I am, especially like things that people might consider conspiracy theory, like the rigging of the oil market at the time people are like, oh, no, that's not happening. We found out 25 years later, oh, it's happening. I just find that interesting how so little of the important things, not the important things in life, but yeah, so little of things that really fundamentally changed the world we live in are observable.”
2019-04-21 · Founders · #68 Daniel Ludwig: The Invisible Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See everything, you know, the author, it's not, you know, we're not idolizing him here. For our purposes on this podcast, we want to learn the ideas that he had that were good and that lead to success. But we also want to study his failures on the part of his personality. Maybe that wasn't as good. So we can kind of avoid making those same mistakes. Let's benefit from his experience. Okay, so the note I left myself on the next page was most of what happens in life is out of your control, but you can't control how you respond.”
2019-04-21 · Founders · #68 Daniel Ludwig: The Invisible Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So not only are they shipping petroleum and products like that, but it says during the mid to late 1920s, Ludwig was more involved in buying and selling ships than he was in operating them. So this is kind of, if you remember the podcast I did on Kirk Acorian, how he got started. He started a charter airline. But in the process of starting a charter airline, he got really good at buying undervalued airplanes and then reselling them for a profit. Since he was already doing that for his own company, like why not make it a second business? I mean, that's exactly what Kirk did. And you're seeing that again here that Daniel's doing the same thing, but he's doing it in chips. And so, yeah, they're making a little bit of money chartering out their boats, but he's like, I can just make immediate profit. I can find a boat for, let's say, $200,000 and sell for $400,000. Like I'm making way more money doing less work. So I'm going to go ahead and do that. I had to learn the skill for myself. I can then do it for other people.”
2019-04-21 · Founders · #68 Daniel Ludwig: The Invisible Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The company, however, was able to buy two more ships. So DK's like, listen, I'm not going to sit in an office anyways. I'm not going to pay money for an office space. Later on in life, of course, he's going to. He doesn't have the assets at this time. But I will spend and will leverage myself as much as possible to buy assets that can actually make me more money.”
2019-04-21 · Founders · #68 Daniel Ludwig: The Invisible Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most of them were just, they were just investors, basically. But it leads us to the point where this is a fundamental part of his personality and something that he carries in all of his company. And that's these two things. And it's only spend money on what's important and then sell your byproducts. If you can find undervalued ships for yourself, then you can do so for your others. So it says the name of the company they make is called Amtanker. So Amtankers was operating on a shoe.”
2019-04-21 · Founders · #68 Daniel Ludwig: The Invisible Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After this William Thomason, a shipper DK had met during the war, offered to put up the rest of the front money in exchange for 51% of the venture. Soon, Thomason wanted it all and asked his junior partner to get out. Ludwig settled for $40,000 in cash, plus a few old tugboats, and his greedy partner got the rest. But still, so he was upset that the business ended, but he goes from not having $5,000 to now having $40,000. So he's just leveled up a little bit and it gives him a little bit access to more opportunities in the future. Accepting the settlement, he used the money to go into another partnership with a group out of New England that owned a chain of filling stations in Boston. Together, the three formed a new company. And so they're going to be hauling petroleum. This is another example. So actually it says, so even though there's three of them, DK was the chief, he was a CO. He's the one running it. His job was keeping things going.”
2019-04-21 · Founders · #68 Daniel Ludwig: The Invisible Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The boat wasn't big enough to allow DK to fulfill the charter agreement he had made with Fall River. So he found a larger ship in Baltimore. This one's called the Wico. The Wico had already many years past her prime. In fact, she was the fourth or fifth oil taker ever built. And since her maiden voyage in 1888 had hauled many a barrel of crude for standard oil. So this is what, 40 plus years after that? Close to 40 years after that. Standard had decided to scrap her and sold her to a scrap dealer. Learning of this, Lugwood traveled to Baltimore and after looking her over decided that the Weco was good for a few more trips. The scrap dealer was willing to let her go for $25,000, $5,000 up front, and the rest over time. Even the down payment, according to Ludwig, was more money than he had on hand. In order to raise it, he had to take on a partner. So this is important because he hates, he learns that he doesn't want partners.”
2019-04-21 · Founders · #68 Daniel Ludwig: The Invisible Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is something that Lugwood definitely shared with some of the other entrepreneurs we covered. And this is an example that he wasn't even sure how to pronounce her name, but because it would have cost him $50 to paint it out and put on a new one, he decided to leave it as it was.”
2019-04-21 · Founders · #68 Daniel Ludwig: The Invisible Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Assets like this it needs two percent completion and I get in a brand new tanker. He says since then there had been no incentive to finish her but Ludwig could lease her cheaply if he was willing to put on the final few touches which of course he was. Selling some of his old tugboats he got enough money to complete the vessel, then talked the Coast Guard into giving him a certificate of seaworthiness. He wasn't even sure how to pronounce her name. Now this is so important because we've talked about this idea of frugality that just like you should watch where your expenses are in your personal life companies most successful people at entrepreneurship like they understand that little cost compound, right? And anywhere from Jeff Bezos to John Bogle to anybody that we've covered on the podcast knows that, hey, you just don't mess around with this. And frugality and paying attention and making sure that he's being productive with his money.”
2019-04-21 · Founders · #68 Daniel Ludwig: The Invisible Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's like, I've been getting 10 or 15 cents to haul cargo, that's per 100 pounds, right? So 10 or 15 cents to haul cargo and lumber. I saw the tanker boys getting three or four times as much for oil. So it's like, why am I doing the same amount of work? Why don't I try to make four times the money? So his first experience of patrolling hauling came in 1921. He had heard a small refinery in Fall River, Massachusetts that had a contract to haul fuel oil for the Navy. If he could find any vessels, he'd be able to charter them to the refinery. In a long island shipyard, he found a little tanker that had been started under government contract during the war and was 98% complete when the armistice was declared. This is kind of crazy. This happens not only in World War I, but World War II. You have these huge infrastructure machines building everything that countries need for the war and then as soon as it's over that work is stopped almost immediately and you see”
2019-04-21 · Founders · #68 Daniel Ludwig: The Invisible Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But he gets caught up and actually arrested when he's still a young man because not only does he have his own boats he's doing the running molasses and other things he hasn't gotten to oil yet but he does like repair work and works on other boats and one of the boats he's working on gets busted because they're carrying like liquor that they're carrying liquor from from Britain and from the Bahamas and they're trying to sneak it into the United States during prohibition but the charges are eventually dropped okay so this is how Ludwig starts more shipping companies after his breakup with Kaplan he did general hauling with a few broken down tugboats until the bottom fell out of the shipping market in the early post-war years that's World War I at this time most of his cargoes consisted of lumber and barrel staves before he decided to switch to oil transport and why did he switch to oil transport just because he was paying attention”
2019-04-21 · Founders · #68 Daniel Ludwig: The Invisible Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He'd take it off from New York to up to Canada. So he says that the Toronto Distillery, it was turned into rum and brought back across the border into those states which had already outlawed the importation and sale of liquor. Since he was merely hauling molasses to Canada, DK was doing nothing illegal, but he was an important part of the process and stood to make money from it. After two years, the charter agreement was broken off, so it's basically he had a misunderstanding with this guy Kaplan, and he feels he kind of got cheated by him. But later on, he tells Fortune magazine, he says, he ruefully credits Kaplan with giving him a sort of postgraduate course in shrewd trading. The relationship was terminated, though the two men do business in friendly fashion to this day, and that's about 60 to 50 years later. They're still doing business together, so it's interesting. And so I'm going to skip over major parts of the book like I do for every time.”
2019-04-21 · Founders · #68 Daniel Ludwig: The Invisible Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And why not stay in Detroit? He decides to go to New York. He says, in Manhattan beat the heart of the world of commerce. Goods and money flowed in and out of New York Harbor like lifeblood for the rest of the globe. So he's going, he's identified this opportunity at a really young age. He's like, hey, his grandfather tried to build a shipping empire in Michigan, wind up going bankrupt. And he's like, this is not, there's not opportunity. Like my ambitions are much larger. I need to go to where that is. So he goes to New York. So he says the ad drew a response from this guy named Kaplan, a New Yorker who had virtually cornered the market in blackstrap molasses. So Kaplan is the guy who's going to give him the postgraduate course on true trading. Again, Ludwig does not waste any time. He's constantly learning. So I had heard this before. I was like, why the hell were these people making so much money in molasses? But it's because of prohibition. So we're going to go into that a little bit here. So the molasses DK was hauling was not intended to go on biscuits.”
2019-04-21 · Founders · #68 Daniel Ludwig: The Invisible Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sell and it basically recoups my cost for the actual vehicle. So he almost immediately recovered the purchase price by gutting, selling off her machinery and boilers, and turning her into an iron hold barge. Okay, so that right there, what he's doing at 19 years old for $5,000 is basically the foundation of his most profitable business. He would buy these tankers. In a lot of cases, he'd buy them from the U.S. government because there's these boom and bust cycles that happen in shipping before, during, and after wars. So after the World War I, and he does the same thing in World War II, he's buying up ships and in some cases he gets like, let's say a ship is worth $250,000. He'd get it for about 10%, like $25,000. And then they'd have so many equipment, like he'd sell the engines and everything else that he's essentially getting.”
2019-04-21 · Founders · #68 Daniel Ludwig: The Invisible Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So since he was about to become the owner of a vessel for the first time since his salvage effort at the age of nine. He was a decade older now and much better equipped to handle the responsibility. So he identifies this, it's called an old side wheel lake steamer. And it's called the Idlewild. So the old sidewheel lake steamer was up for sale through a Detroit bank, which had gotten her through foreclosure. She could be bought for a mere $5,000. And then this is something that he's going to do for his whole life. So he winds up barring the money. He's getting a boat first of all worth much less than it should be, like for much less than it's actually worth because it's a foreclosure. And then he realizes, hey, since he knows a lot about shipping and the equipment that it takes and he does a lot of work himself, he's like, there's a lot of supplies and equipment in the book, like in the boat that I could then scrap out.”
2019-04-21 · Founders · #68 Daniel Ludwig: The Invisible Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Engine plan is definitely an example of that. Okay, so it says he was evidently a fest learner and a good worker. After a little more than a year at Three Rivers, he was considered competent enough by company officials to be sent to the Pacific Northwest and Alaska to do installation work. Shortly after his arrival in the Northwest, he started moonlighting. This is the start of his very first business. This is, again, what I was just referencing, like he just doesn't waste any opportunities. So shortly after his arrival in Northwest, he started moonlighting, installing ships, engines on his own time as well as for the company. So the company pays to train him to learn the skill. And then he's like, oh, well, now I have a skill that's rather in demand. Like, why don't I just cut the company out of this? He found the work so profitable that he soon drew his last wages. And at 19 went permanently into business for himself. It was a profitable time to do so. The year was 1916.”
2019-04-21 · Founders · #68 Daniel Ludwig: The Invisible Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Being a ship channeler's assistant was an education in and of itself, and the boy was learning much that he was to use later. After a year or so in Port Arthur, DK returned to Michigan. So then he gets a job and he tells later on in his life he's reflecting on this. He says he's working for 20 cents an hour at a marine engine plant at Three Rivers, Michigan. The job at the engine plant was another educational experience. It gave DK a thorough knowledge of marine mechanics and helped him to complete the work requirements for his engineer certificate. So let me pause right there. extreme sense of efficiency in not only how Daniel would run his business, but how he ran his life. So every experience he had, even that first experience at nine, then this other experience were introduced at 15 and so on and so forth. He never wastes anything he learns. That information and that knowledge just continues to compound throughout his life and he uses it to spot opportunities that eventually help him build his massively successful company. And these experiences that he's having at the”
2019-04-21 · Founders · #68 Daniel Ludwig: The Invisible Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And makes Daniel come with him down to Texas and separates him from basically everything he knows, including his mom. We're not too sure why that happened. But it says once in Texas, DK found himself more or less on his own. His father had other things to do and could spend little time with the boy. A thousand miles from home taken away from family, from school, from friends, the fifteen-year-old must have felt miserable and frightened. So he starts working, says DK was a runner for a company that basically there are dealers and marine equipment. So DK was a runner going out in small boats to sell supplies to the ships that anchored in Port Arthur's, Port Arthur, Texas. At the same time, he went to night school to get the math he needed for marine engineer's degree. had finished only eighth grade in Michigan before being taken to Texas, and so that then he gets a job being a ship chandler's assistant.”
2019-04-21 · Founders · #68 Daniel Ludwig: The Invisible Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It says, even as a boy in South Haven, young Daniel exhibited a strong drive towards the acquisition of money. He worked at a dance pavilion. He shined shoes, and he sold peanuts and popcorn. He saved most of what he had made. Some of this money he invested in what he termed his first venture into shipping and other sequo from Daniel. At nine he scraped together $75 to buy a sunken 26-foot boat that seemed beyond salvaging. But he raised her, slaved all winter on repairs, and chartered her out the following summer for more than twice her cost. He did not act as crew since he was too small to crank the massive one cylinder engine. Okay, so a few years later, for reasons really unknown, his dad moves him. He's around 15 years old the time, takes him from Michigan.”
2019-04-21 · Founders · #68 Daniel Ludwig: The Invisible Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source