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Ludwig Nobel

lines on the record: 34
first: 2024-08-07
most recent: 2024-08-07
sittings or episodes: 1
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“Thousand rubles of it, a sudden decision taken without consultation with either Ludwig. After all, it was Ludwig's money, or Alfred, the family expert in matters of finance and investment. When he returned to Petersburg, he would have to convince his brother that he had found a much better investment for the money than rifle stocks. And this is the remarkable thing about business. You only have to be right once. Up until this point, Robert had failed repeatedly. He just needed to wait until he found the right opportunity. So it says his two brothers looked upon this scheme with as much enthusiasm as they had viewed Robert's other projects. First, it was fireproof bricks, then kerosene, iron, glycerin, and now petroleum. What next? But here is one of the most important things in this book. Robert had an innate talent for this opportunity, and they're going to target a market full of second-rate talent, second-rate competition. And what he realized is like these refineries, these are...”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Achievers. It says the standard set by two such overachieving brothers would be hard for anyone to match. And so Robert is working for Ludwig. Ludwig is making all these rifles and rifle stocks for the Russian military. He's like, hey, can you travel to this section over here because they're known to have phenomenal supplies of like walnut wood? And Ludwig gives Robert 25,000 rubles to buy up the whole stock of walnut wood. Robert is going to travel to this place called Baku. Baku is going to be where they build their giant oil company. So we can call this section Robert's Pivot. In all his travels, he had never seen anything like Baku. And in all his dreams for personal enrichment, he had never seen greater potential. There were parcels of oil rich land and baku along with a small refinery. So he goes, he's like, I'm not buying your walnut wood. I want your refinery. His offer was the walnut money. All $25.”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Alfred is doing his demonstrations the first time he successfully detonates what's going to turn into dynamite, his brothers Robert and Ludwig are there observing. And then this next sentence is something that's really important. It's not the first person to invent something that gets rich. It's the first person to match that invention and build a phenomenal business around that invention. Alfred was not the first to experiment with nitroglycerin, but he was the first to combine successful experimentation with a genius for business organization and financial management. I double underline financial management. He is probably the shrewdest person in his entire family when it comes to managing the money, watching the costs of the business. He was very conservative. He did not want to expand faster if it meant putting the survival of his business at risk. What did Steve Jobs tell us a few weeks ago? Victory in our industry is spelled survival. All the money.”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Twin success of Ludwig and Alfred are happening at the exact same time. So by the time that Ludwig is going to start building in the oil industry, by that time, Alfred already had a dozen dynamite factories all over the globe. And how that came to be was fascinating because he got the idea from his former chemistry tutor. Remember going back to what I said about what his father did that was so brilliant for his sons that he's like, we're going to hire tutors. You know, you guys are going to start engineering. You're going to do chemistry. You're going to learn all these languages. So his former chemistry tutor had told a manual, his father, okay, about these Italian experiments with nitroglycerine. That's going to be the active ingredient in dynamite when Alfred tames this and had recommended it for use in making more powerful land in sea mines. Emmanuel had no time for such research, but his son Alfred did. And this is what I mean about how the family is constantly supporting them.”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Manufacturing. A fanatic for work. He was constantly in the plant to check on the operation of some machine he had designed to supervise insulation, to oversee repair. There was no facet of production or distribution or direction that escaped his attention. He had demonstrated that whatever was produced in the Nobel factory was worthy of comparison with any competing product from abroad. So that is an overview and an introduction into Ludwig. We will return to him in a second. I need to get to Alfred because the brothers are constantly involved in each other's businesses. There's so many letters between the brothers. I wish there was some kind of book where you could just see their correspondence back and forth, considering that the Bolsheviks invade and kind of take over everything. I bet you a lot of that correspondence was destroyed, but it's just fascinating. So let's get to Alfred. This is such a fascinating family. There's twin success.”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and as a result over time they were able to build this incredible brand based on quality the Nobel name meant something in fact later on as they dominate the Russian oil industry you know they talk about their employees were proud they wore the fact that they were nobleites that they worked for the Nobel family as a badge of honor because I meant they were the best now I need to the reason I'm also telling you this is because one he's learning from his father but two this is like Ludwig's MO for everything he wants to control everything from the invention to the manufacturing to the sales to everything And so they invent the wheel, they manufacture it, then they set up all the sales organizations all over, like all over Russia. Recruitment of the sales force, establishment of the sales districts, the administrative and financial direction all were planned and implemented in Ludwig's office. This goes back to he's much more of like a micromanager involved in every single detail, like more like a Steve Jobs and a Walt Disney than his brother Alfred Nobel, which I'll get to. He was interested in these administrative details as he was in engineering, design, and processes.”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the description of just this remarkable inventor in entrepreneur and genius that Ludwig was, there's a million things that he's going to, different things that he's going to work on. But I want to go back to this idea. It's really important. Learning from mistakes is changing your behavior, right? So he realizes we need a bunch of just consumer products. We can't just rely on the military. And so at the time, you have carriage drivers. You know, these are horse-drawn carriages. The roads in Russia shouldn't even be called roads. It was hilarious. They said that the roads were so bad in this area where they are. that the coach drivers would sit sideways with their legs hanging off the carriage so they could jump off easily when they hit the inevitable like giant hole in the road in the road so Ludwig makes the Nobel wheel this carriage wheel that can actually withstand and not break and the result was a monopoly on the market this is also going to tie to this idea that the Nobel family had excessively high standards”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He refused to employ children he reduced a workday from the usual fourteen hours to ten and a half hours and instituted the first profit sharing plan in Russia. He also started a series of free educational courses for his workers, decades before the business world discovered that overall efficiency and productivity are promoted by generous and concerned attitude towards employees, Ludwig Nobel was doing it.”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This up yet, and I showed up from the very beginning, so I apologize. What's fascinating to me is Ludwig and Alfred. They're going to have this dual success at almost the exact same time different industries. They have wildly different approaches. Alfred is like a delegator. He has essentially a monopoly. Ludwig is operating in an intensely competitive industry and he does everything himself. But again, I think this is just one of the greatest things that you learn from reading all these biographies of entrepreneurs. It's like there's not one path. And now reading about both of them and their personalities is like, it's very obvious that they built businesses authentic to their true self. So I should have said at the beginning, but keep that in mind. I'm going to go into what he did for his employees. And at this time, nobody was doing this. Ludwig made certain that his workers' accommodations were adequate and well maintained. He built new housing. He encouraged them to save a portion of their wages and establish a savings banks for his employees. He regularly added substantial sums from his own profits into the employee bank.”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And not only is, you know, he's a great manufacturing genius, he's a great entrepreneur, but he also always is capable of like thinking for himself and making his own decisions. And he was one of the, he had the best reputation, I think in all of Russia, for actually giving a shit about the well-being of his employees at a time when that was just unheard of. In many cases, I'm going to get to this. They talked about, well, I guess Ludwig is the first person or one of the first people to realize increased care of your employees actually leads to increased productivity. And it's describing the, you know, all these people are coming in from the countryside. Sometimes they're emigrating from other countries. They're working in inhospitable factory environments. And they said that cattle in many cases would have resisted the cramped quarters that they put humans in. And so Ludwig innovates in every single aspect of his business. I don't think I've brought.”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Position to influence the decision. Carl was the liaison officer once assigned to Emmanuel his father. He was also the chief inspector for the rifle and ammunition factories. He had previously had served as the head of armories and lieutenant general. Carl was also the person that arranged the financing for Ludwig. So it says in the early eighteen seventies, Carl had loaned Ludwig his securities, his Carl securities, to use as collateral for bank loans to expand the factory. Ludwig had to pay five percent interest for the securities and six percent on the borrowed cash, but these were bargain rates in a country where bank loans were not easily procured. Such support, relationship, and encouragement was a most valuable asset for Ludwig's industrial enterprises. Sorry, I already said Ludwig is the most fascinating character in this entire book, and there's a ton of interesting characters in the book.”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he's got this very successful and expanding manufacturing business, and he's got all these factories. Where did he get the money to do this? His dad was bankrupt. They were not a rich family yet. And this is another example of this maxim that I just see over and over again in the biographies that relationships run the world. So not only are contracts are coming from relationships that he had and friendship city had, but also the financing. So there's a captain in the artillery, this guy named Bildering. He had been a close friend of Ludwig's. He needs 200,000 rifles. And so he goes to the war ministry and he says, hey, Ludwig should be the one that makes this for us. Another one of his friends, and this guy was also friends with his dad's, was one of the people that made this was influential making this actual decision, like being an actual decision maker for this. This guy's name is Carl. I'm not even going to try to pronounce his last name. So it says it's undoubtedly to Ludwig's benefit that one of his best, oldest and truest friends was in a keep.”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talent. So, this idea that he keeps having to import Swedish talent to build the Russian manufacturing and weapons industry. And then he's going to do the same to build the oil industry. It's something that pops up over and over again in the book. So it says the task of finding talent was just as difficult for Ludwig as it had been for his father. And the solution for both men was to recruit as many Swedes and Finns as were willing to work in Petersburg, as factory orders increased so did the size of the factory and the number of workers this meant additional Swedes, Finns, and an occasional Norwegian on the payroll. And another phenomenon that he is surfing is the fact that the entire continent, the entire European continent, was engaged in a giant arms race. So keep in mind, this is two years after the American Civil War.”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To move is a gun carriage. That is what Ludwig's making. He's also going to make rifles and rifle stocks for the Russian military, which inadvertently, or accidentally, leads to his discovery of this giant and brand new indiched oil industry inside of Russia. We'll get there in one second. But this is the important thing. I always say learning is not just memorizing information. Learning is changing your behavior. He is changing. He's actually learned from his father. He is changing his behavior. More than a third of the state budget went to the military. But Ludwig was careful to avoid total dependence on such contracts and to rely on the spoken or even written word of government ministries. He had no intention of repeating his father's costly mistake. So Ludwig's factory becomes the country's largest manufacturer of gun carriages, rifles, and here's what happened. He's expanding so rapidly. He cannot find the”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was the Emancipation Act of 1861 which was the liberation of forty million Russian peasants that are now flocking from the countryside into these news like city centers and then the areas that are springing up against these around these giant factories? All these people are coming into the cities and they need jobs. And so within 20 years, there's going to be 250 new factories that pop up. They said they call this a belated awakening to the opportunities of the Industrial Revolution. So he's going to start making weapons and things that support weapons. So he started making cast iron artillery shells and then gun carriages, which he gets, I think he builds the best gun carriage in the world. So a gun carriage plays the same role that like a carriage does for a human. A carriage carries a human. This is a carriage that covers this giant piece of artillery. The thing that would pop to mind is if you think about like a civil war.”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sons work harmoniously and carry on the work that I have begun, I believe that they will never want for their daily bread, for there is still much to be done here in Russia. So it is shortly after this where Ludwig opens his own factory. And so something that's been implanted, or I guess a habit that's implanted in my mind from Charlie Munger, is like when you're analyzing somebody's business success, you try to look for waves that they were able to surf. And so Ludwig is actually going to surf this idea of surfings in Port Charlie Zomac. I think I covered it back on episode 329. But Ludwig's going to surf a change, and they're going to be beneficial government policies from the government of Russia. And then this explosion in population growth and new industry development, essentially an industrial revolution comes to Russia at the time. And so it says Ludwig took full advantage of the recent reversals in government policy, in contrast to Emanuel's last year's in Russia, the ministries, the war ministries that is, it's insane. I think we're going to get to it, but I think more than a third of Russia's budget at the time went to military. The ministries were once again beginning to encourage domestic manufacturing. The greatest stimulant to this new industrial initiative”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Factory director than he was an inventor. He was simply not the man to manage an enterprise that had grown to the size, and his tremendous talents lay in fields other than management. He was more inventor than entrepreneur, his two sons will be both. And this had to happen. I think this leads directly to their success because they are capable of learning from their father's mistake. Robert Ludwig and Alfred would never forget the bitter lessons of their father's failure. For Emanuel, then 58, there would not be another chance. It was all over 22 years after he had sailed from Stockholm as a bankrupt man, he returned again bankrupt. But what I love about him is he's relentlessly optimistic and he has faith in his sons. So he says his dreams are going to have to be realized by the next generation of Nobels, and he was not pessimistic about that next generation. This is what he said.”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not in a secure financial position. His entire business depended on the contracts that he was getting from Nicholas, the Tsar at the time. Nicholas is going to die. The new czar takes over. This is Alexander II. And suddenly those contracts, those promises mean nothing. There's a, I think it was the Navy Sales that said two is one, one is none. You cannot only have one customer. Your business cannot depend on a single customer. The many pledges of contracts made to Emanuel by the ministers of Nicholas were ignored by the ministers of Alexander. His pleas and protest that he had expanded his payroll and factory in order to honor those contracts went unheeded. By 1857 he had a surplus of labor, a surplus of supplies, and no orders. For Emmanuel, the decline was a disaster without his government contract, he could not keep the factory running. There was also the problem of Emanuel himself. This is what I mentioned earlier. He's less of a businessman and”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, Emmanuel is going to have about a 20 year period of relative prosperity before he goes bankrupt again. How could that possibly happen? There's two issues here. He's much more of an inventor, not an entrepreneur. He has two really big mistakes. One, he's got one customer, which we'll get into a minute. And two, he doesn't have the financial discipline that his son Alfred will have. He expands too fast. He's not conservative. He's not really paying attention to his costs. Alfred was probably the most gifted entrepreneur of the family. And so his dad didn't have that. But his dad did have a lot of success inventing and producing. And so in addition to the success of his underwater mines, he's also manufacturing marine engines. And then he's steadily expanding the factor until had about a thousand employees. His reputation as an inventor in one of Russia's leading engineers and industrious were all striking indications of Emmanuel's success. The ultimate rewards for his diligence, his persistence, and his genius, despite the achievements and the recognition Emmanuel's”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we see in this story the early days of what's going to turn into the Nobel family dynasty sustained by the young kid. I mean, these are young kids. They're probably seven, eight years old at the time, selling matches on street corners in Stockholm. And so once he has his family back together and he has all of his sons in Russia, he does a brilliant thing. This is the phenomenal education that he sets up for his sons. He says they were instructed solely by tutors. Robert and Ludwig primarily in engineering, Alfred in chemistry, which is hilarious because you could think of Ludwig as an engineer, and Alfred's empire is going to be in chemistry. And all three in Swedish, Russian, German, French, and English, they were also put to work in the factory, moving from one position to another, learning the business of running a business as a great line. Learning the business of running a business, acquiring from direct on the job exposure practical lessons in the problems and challenges of management, execution and administration.”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I could not imagine being away from my kids and my wife with this song. It's incredible. For the first time in his life, he enjoyed a certain prosperity, a comforting, an encouraging feeling of success in the summer of 1842, he sent for his family. Now this is wild. He was gone for five years, okay? During his five-year absence, his wife and his three sons had scraped out a simple existence that at times bordered on poverty. Their only source of income came from a little milk and vegetable store that she operated. The boys now check this out. This is wild. The boys Robert and Ludwig, so Robert's the older brother, Ludwig's the middle and Alfred's youngest, okay Robert and Ludwit to survive had to sell matches on the streets of Stockholm. Now how crazy is that? A couple episodes ago on episode 348. I covered the book The Match King, which is about the founder of the Swedish Match Company, which still exists to this day, by the way.”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of his descendants' lives forever, wind up working out because the Swedish military was not interested in Emmanuel's underseen mines, but the Russians were enthusiastic, so I'm going to skip over a big part here. He does a demonstration, and this is what I mean about how enthusiastic the Russian military was. The mine exploded when it was struck by a small boat. The general was ecstatic. He rushed over to Nobel and kissed him and then started to dance. The general had been under considerable pressure to find a successful underwater mine which Nobel is the first person to invent. This is september eighteen forty. He is thirty nine years old. This is a remarkable description. It was the first sizable subsidy Emmanuel had ever received, and he uses that money to establish a factory. Two years later, he's making enough money to actually send for his family. Can you imagine?”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unique phenomenon in Stockholm at the time. But Emmanuel was never one to let frustration block his path or force him to resign and accept his fate. When he met a visiting Russian emissary at a party in Stockholm he was suddenly confronted by a crossroads, another new arena to seek fame and fortune. Now remember that line Alfred Nobel never forgot poverty. The decision was as difficult as any Emanuel would ever make for he had to leave Andrietta, that's his wife, and their three sons behind. Can you imagine put yourself in his shoes? You are 36 years old, you have a wife, you have three sons, you are bankrupt, you are in debt, you have no track record to indicate that you are capable of bringing a successful, you invent a lot, but you have no track record to show that you can actually bring successfully one of your inventions to market and you get on a boat and you wave goodbye to your family.”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the Nobel family's fascination with explosives. So Emmanuel is Swedish. He's trying to sell his invention to the Swedish military. A main theme of the book is the fact that for a very long time, there's been a huge number of Swedish immigrants into Russia. And it is during this next generation of the Nobel family that the Swedish actually build the Russian oil industry. And so here's a little bit about the troubles that he's having. In Sweden of the 1830s, Emmanuel was alone in recognizing the value of this new weapon. Financial security continued to elude him. Creditors continued to hound him. Now they're going to describe Sweden at this time. In an agricultural country in which poverty was thought to be a national characteristic, Emmanuel was beginning to believe that he would not have the chance to make the kinds of success he felt he could with the proper opportunities. His frustration was not a unique”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wife also understood that. The previous year, a fire had destroyed most of their home and possessions. Emmanuel still faced with deaths from his abandoned building projects saw no alternative to the humiliation of declaring himself bankrupt, but he refused to be discouraged or defeated. He was determined to find practical applications for some of those ideas that never stopped swirling in his head. And so not only has he inventive, but he's also very persuasive. So he's able to raise money multiple times even after multiple failures. And so he starts setting up and he does these experiments with subsurface charges of gunpowder to destroy an enemy on land or on sea. What he is thinking about becomes underwater and underground mines. This is really important because it's going to lead directly to some experiments that his son does which builds the empire and the monopoly that he built around dynamite. He says it was the beginning.”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Idea in her husband's brain. She talks about the fact that she saw him stressed. She saw him lying awake in the middle of the night and she said something that was very, very, I think, profound. She said, my most valuable contribution to his success has been my silence. What does that mean? This is what she says in his autobiography. Early on, he made some audacious statements that sounded like pipe dreams. He told me once that his aim was to make the name Four Seasons a worldwide brand, synonymous with luxury like Rolls-Royce. Sure, I thought, with only about ten hotels hardly likely, but I didn't let on. My most valuable contribution to his success has been my silence, and I think she's picking up on a very important idea. Entrepreneurs are going to get enough doubt from the external world. They can't have it when they come home. They can't have it with the most important relationship they have in their life. And you see that just like Isidore Sharp's wife understood that, Emmanuel Nobel's.”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is marriage brought him some measure of success, and it talks about the role that his wife and then the mother of Ludwig and Alfred, just how important she was to the family's success. Her patience, endurance, even her faith in her husband were sorely tested during those first years of marriage as one after another of Emmanuel's dreams turned into nightmares. They moved from house to house on the outskirts of Stockholm needing but not being able to afford larger quarters for their growing family. Alfred was born just ten months after his father had declared bankruptcy. Nobel's wife was the strong support of pillar upon which he's going to build his business. This reminded me of when I read the autobiography of the founder of Four Seasons Isidore Sharp. There is a bunch of times where his wife is kind of commenting commentary to the book about what it was like, not four seasons now, but when four seasons was just an”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In fact, the reason I bring this up is because in Alfred Nobel's biography it says that he never forgot poverty. And he never forgot poverty even after he was one of the wealthiest people on the planet. Keep in mind, this guy lived in the 1800s. And so there's a line in his biography that's nuts where he asked somebody what they wish as a wedding present. And the young woman replied, I want my wedding gift should be what you earn in one day. And Nobel, who's usually tight with money, actually agreed. And he wrote her a check, his daily earning for himself was $110,000 a day in the 1800s. And so this poverty that his dad's really an inventor, we're going to talk a lot about this today. It's like, it's not enough to just be an inventor. You also have to be a skilled entrepreneur, which his dad wasn't, but his sons definitely were. And so we're going to go right into Emmanuel's life and says,”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Harbors, freight yards, and marketing outlets from one end of the vast Russian Empire to the other and then across the European continent. Ludwig's father before him pioneered development of underwater mines, designed steam engines to power Russian ships and installed the first central heating systems to warm Russian homes. Ludwig's son after him launched the world's first diesel driven tugboats and tankers while bargaining with the Rothschilds and struggling against the Royal Dutch Shell Company and bartering with standard oil. Okay, so keep that in mind. This entire conversation is going to center around Ludwig. I got to tell you about his father and the fact that they grew up in poverty. I read Alfred Nobel's biography a long time ago. Probably three, four years ago. It's episode 163. There's a line in there because you're going to understand that Emmanuel Nobel, the founder of this dynasty, the patriarch of the family, spent essentially decades in poverty.”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This week, as I've been reading it, because at the time, to give you an overview, at the time that the book takes place, okay, Russia at this point in history is going to wind up producing over half of all the world's oil. The Nobel family produces 30% of that half. One company and that company is founded and created by Ludwig. And so here's just a brief overview of some of his achievements. He designed the world's first oil tanker. He installed Europe's first pipelines. He built the world's first full-scale continuous distillation refinery. He forged gigantic infrastructure on water and land.”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of Ludwood Nobel, I have to tell you the story of his father. A few of his brothers, and then his son. And so I want to start in the introduction of the book to give you an overview of what has to be one of the most remarkable families in human history. So we start with Alfred Nobel. Everybody knows him because he's the one, he dies and his will, he endows the Nobel Prize and then other people knew him as the inventor of dynamite. So it says, Alfred Nobel was only one member of history's most inventive family, and the story has never been told of his father Emmanuel and his brothers Ludwig and Robert, and his nephew Emmanuel, and their own individual entrepreneurial, technological, and financial achievements in the weapons, petroleum, chemical, and transportation industry, so Ludwig Nobel, the reason the book is called the Russian Rockefellers, is because Ludwig Nobel, Alfred's brother, literally created the Russian oil industry. This is nuts. So I've been going around talking about this book to all my friends and really anybody who will listen.”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Played so decisive a role in building an industrial empire in an undeveloped but resource rich nation. Yet, the achievements of the Nobel family are almost entirely unknown. Why? The answer can be found in the official Soviet myth that when the Bolsheviks seized power in november nineteen seventeen they inherited an empty cupboard which they transformed into a corner copia. The truth was the exact opposite. When the Bolsheviks came to power Emmanuel had to flee the country disguised as a peasant can change. He was one of the richest people in the country, has to flee the country disguised as a peasant and two of his brothers were thrown in jail. The family's holdings were confiscated. The Nobel Empire wits its fifty thousand workers lay in ruins, its fleet of oil takers were idled, the fires in its foundries were banked, the oil refineries.”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Into developing the entire Russian oil industry. And Ludwig, who is going to be the majority of what I want to talk about today, this is my favorite Nobel. And Ludwig, an engineering genius and manufacturing magnet whose boundless energy and fierce determination created the Russian petroleum industry. Ludwig's son, Emmanuel, was not only one of the wealthiest men in Europe, but the peer and occasional adversary of some of the most powerful figures in international business circles. He shrewdly bargained with the Rothschilds for control of the Russian markets and did not shrink from head-on competition with standard oil and royal Dutch shell for lucrative world markets. Emmanuel not only helped modernize the Russian navy, he also expanded the Russian oil industry, was a pioneer user of the diesel engine, official of the state bank, and a commander of a fleet of three hundred ships. Perhaps no family in history has”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The name of Nobel usually calls to mind Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite and the Nobel Prizes which he endowed, but other members of the Nobel family were no less creative and innovative. In fact, the range of their achievements in building an industrial empire truly qualifies them to be known as the Russian Rockefellers. The founder of this Russian industrial dynasty was an immigrant from Sweden, Emmanuel Nobel was an architect, a pioneer producer of steam engines, and a weapons maker. Decades before his son Alfred's dynamite began to alter the character of modern warfare, Emmanuel design invented and produced underwater mines. Emanuel's other sons included Robert, who directed the family's activities in the Caspian oil fields, and as you and I will talk about a spur of the moment decision by Robert actually changes to the entire trajectory of the Nobel family from weapon makers.”
2024-08-07 · Founders · #359 The Russian Rockefellers: The Nobel Family Dynasty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source