00:16:11 (someone): And I tried to let this rest. I decided that when I started doing this episode, that I wasn't going to bring it up anymore. Even if it did turn out that Edison was a light eater, because I'm starting to sound like a freak who's weirdly obsessed with this one little thing, which is kind of true. But then I started reading the Edmund Morris biography. And this is the second paragraph of the entire book. Okay. He said, quote, from earliest youth, he had half starved himself. Even in early middle age, while earning big money and enabling two successive wives to fatten on haute cuisine, he would eat no more than six ounces a meal, generally only four, and drink nothing except milk and flavored water. A man can't think clearly when he's tanking up, he would say. Okay, so rant over, but I do want to make the point that Edison, it was commented by a ton of people, by his friends and associates, this was something really remarkable about him, that he ate hardly anything. And so with all these things put together, he's becoming sort of an invention junkie. He's obsessed with it, barely eating, barely sleeping. He loves it. He can't get enough of it. And then he has like an episode. He has a moment that almost eerily parallels an incident from Julius Caesar's life. He's studying Michael Faraday's book, Experimental Researches, to try and figure out a solution for one of his telegraphic inventions. And Faraday was a very famous English scientist.

00:21:39 (someone): Rapid fire. A few other small observations about Napoleon's work habits. He drank coffee and took a pinch of snuff, tobacco, but was not excessive in either. He took naps, especially in the summer. He slept seven to eight hours a day, but spread it throughout the day. Like I said earlier, he would usually have a period of night that he would wake up and work and then sleep again in the late morning. And then during the summer, he would sleep in the mid day, sometimes for an hour. he liked seeing things completed so rather you know if he was doing a public works construction rather than working on a 100 mile road for 10 years he wanted to see 10 mile portions of that road completed each year if that makes sense so If he was building a fortification, rather than working on an entire fortification for three years, in the first year, he wanted a ditch dug and wanted it completed. In the second year, he wanted a wall built and have it completed in the second year. And then in the third year, you know, guard houses built and supplies gathered so that the whole thing was completed after the third year, but something was completed each year. So he really liked that, breaking things up into smaller tasks and completing them. And that's it. That's basically all my notes. The thing that really stuck with me is just how obsessed with efficiency he was in maximizing what he was best at, thinking and deciding and building this machine, this operation around him to to keep him working at his optimal state at all times, and I mean at all times, from the moment he woke up to the moment he fell asleep.

00:13:08 (someone): So, uh, that's, so he'd certainly be a big one.

00:13:13 (someone): So there you go. I do think that Elon is probably the closest living thing that we have to Edison. And, you know, he acknowledges that he takes some inspiration from Edison's 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 or drink that he would consume. So that's, again, kind of a weird similarity between the two. They also had this flair for showmanship 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 perfected it and made it this new mass market thing with the iPhone. And when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, he did so with a commercial called, 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. Uh, other notes. Um, okay.

00:15:02 (someone): But Edison wasn't just innovating with his practical jokes. He's also starting to invent. The first thing he comes up with is a clever device that records incoming transmissions so that they can be played back slower. And soon, inventing becomes an obsession. Like, a real obsession. Like a borderline unhealthy obsession. In fact, Edison starts to take on an appearance of a junkie, basically. He sounds remarkably like a drug addict. He's well paid, but he's always broke because he's spending all his money on spare parts and extra batteries. He barely sleeps. He was notorious his whole career for pulling all nighters and only sleeping when he absolutely had to. He would sit at his work bench and invent and tinker and work until he just, you know, passed out or lay down and sleep for an hour or two. And they get right back at it. He always looked disheveled and dirty because whenever he did sleep, it was usually him falling asleep in his work clothes at the workbench. And so he also rarely changes and almost never buys new clothes. He also takes on a really gaunt appearance because he's barely ever eating. And if you listen to this podcast, you know, this is one of my hobby horses, um, that all these great men were light eaters, Caesar, Napoleon, Putin, Steve Jobs, all of them that we have covered so far, at least. And I tried to let this rest. I decided that when I started doing this episode, that I wasn't going to bring it up anymore.

00:10:04 (someone): Which is true. He's got a group of workers that are referred to as the insomnia squad. And people refer to this bizarre situation that you'll visit the lab in Menlo Park, and it looks like, like a homeless shelter. There are just people fully clothed, sleeping all over the place, under benches, under tables, in random corners and closets. And that's because Edison was completely obsessed with figuring this out. He had all the pressure of the world on his shoulders, and he expected his employees to feel the same way about it that he did. So there was no regular sleep schedules. You came into the lab, you worked on finding a working light bulb until your body just couldn't take it anymore. At which point you curled up and grabbed an hour or two of shut eye under some bench somewhere. And then you got back to work. There were no other priorities and there were no distractions. Well, actually, there was one minor distraction for Edison. When a minor scientist by the name of Clarence Blake gives a lecture in which he pays tribute to Alexander Graham Bell for inventing the telephone, without mentioning Edison, Edison goes berserk. He considered himself essential to the creation of the telephone because of the transmitter that he had invented. And it was a really big deal. It made the telephone much more usable over much longer distances. And so Edison kind of had a point when he said that he was one of the fathers of the telephone. So for someone to give a big public speech where they only mentioned Bell as the sole inventor of the telephone, that insulted Edison and he felt slighted.

00:16:00 (someone): I think I mentioned this at the beginning, but he was essentially an email addict. If he were alive today, he for sure would have used superhuman. I don't know if you guys know what superhuman is, but it's this app that all these executives use because it helps increase the efficiency with which you can answer emails. So sales guys, CEOs, these people who are just. crushing hundreds of emails per day, they use this app. That's the kind of person that Napoleon was, right? He was very efficient in how he dictated his letters because we know of at least 40,000 letters that he wrote in his lifetime. And those are just the ones that we know about and have been published in the Napoleon papers, but he probably wrote many more. So tens of thousands of letters that he wrote over his lifetime. And that goes back to this Napoleon optimization thing. He's thinking and deciding. And so he needs to write so much to see that his decisions are carried out and get more information in order to make more effective decisions. So, um, after, you know, doing a little bit more work, like I said, he would generally go to bed by 10 PM, a little bit between nine 30 and 10, he would, he would retire to bed. So that's his schedule. Uh, let's talk about a few other little things that I picked up about his work habits from this book. One thing that I found really interesting is that he designed his own desk and it was roughly in the shape of a violin or like a sideways eight. So it was skinny in the middle and then had two round circles on either side.

00:33:06 (someone): Well, since 2012, it hasn't been all roses for the royal family. Her son Andrew was implicated in the sex trafficking ring of Jeffrey Epstein. Meghan Markle, who was her son Harry's wife, maintained that she was mistreated by the royal family. Her son William married a commoner, Kate, although to be honest, that wasn't much of a controversy outside of the firm. But through all these controversies, Queen Elizabeth, in her old age, has managed to stay above the fray. A symbol of unflagging duty, stability, loyalty. A symbol, really, of Great Britain itself. Her husband died in 2021 of old age at the age of 99. And the queen reportedly said that it quote, left a huge void in her life. I know that I talked about his indiscretions as a young man and his dustups in the Royal family, but I don't want to give the wrong impression because they really did develop a happy marriage and were good companions for one another throughout their lives. I mean, you know, obviously at the beginning, Those problems were what they were, but I still think they loved each other throughout that, and that love only grew, and their partnership grew over the decades. She, of course, followed him to the grave a little more than a year later, also dying of old age. So, what are we to make of this woman, of Queen Elizabeth II? What is her legacy? She was someone who was intensely committed to tradition, loyalty, and duty. She was clever and tough, a hard worker, and a very private person, perhaps bordering on remote or emotionally distant. She is sort of an odd character in terms of where she falls in history.

00:21:10 (someone): No one really knows why he gave her that, you know, haunting, enigmatic smile. That's part of the thing that makes it so great is we don't know what it is that she knows that we don't know why she's smiling like that. A few other things about Leonardo that I didn't have a chance to mention. He was a vegetarian and he hated hurting animals. So he tried to wear clothes that were made out of, you know, plants rather than skins or wool even. So he was a vegetarian. Um, you know, he's just one in a long list of great and successful people who had kind of odd limited diets for whatever reason is a, is a common attribute. You know there are Rumors about Putin and his habit with I think it's like hard-boiled eggs He'll only eat a hard-boiled egg for breakfast and that's it And of course Steve Jobs was always going on these weird diets of eating only apples and he was vegan I think for most of his life Thomas Edison would sometimes only drink milk. He'd go on these all milk diets and And I have tried that recently, by the way, for a couple of days. I just did an all milk diet with raw milk and I actually liked it. Maybe I'll talk about that on another episode, but it's very focusing to know what you are going to eat or in this case drink for every meal. I had to put zero mental effort into thinking about food. I was just drinking milk. If I was ever hungry and thinking like, oh, I need a snack, just drink milk. And it frees up a lot of mental capacity to think about work and other things.

00:14:44 (someone): Uh, just like the other guys, he dressed remarkably simply with a one light touch of originality. So if you thought that when I did those, uh, taft ad reads that I was just making that up for the sake of the ad reads, it is actually true that all of these guys have the same way of dressing, which is very plain, very simple. Um, something that won't stand out to everyone except for one light touch of originality. And for Napoleon, apparently that was his hat. Okay, that was a light digression. Let's return to his schedule. After an afternoon of deep work, he would go to dinner. Dinners at the palace were state affairs, so there were multiple tables with lots of courtiers and important people. At his own table, Napoleon would eat just, just with the Empress. So he and the Empress were kind of at the head at this one little table. And then there were other tables in this banquet hall with lots of other people. And so, as we know, Napoleon was a light eater and a fast eater. He would usually finish his dinner in about 15 minutes, 20 minutes max. And then he would spend the duration of his dinner period engaged in important conversations with people who were there. After dinner, he would sometimes take a stroll or spend a night at the opera, but more often he spent time back in his office dictating more letters or in more meetings. If he didn't have anything else to do, he was always writing letters. I think I mentioned this at the beginning, but he was essentially an email addict. If he were alive today, he for sure would have used superhuman.

00:41:31 (someone): Edison was portrayed as a plain-spoken, approachable, normal-seeming man who nevertheless possessed an almost god-like ability to create technology that revolutionized human life out of thin air. He was usually portrayed as dirty and grimy with grease, chewing tobacco, and speaking plain, unaffected language. And though Edison was definitely trying to portray a certain image, he liked playing up this folksy inventor, the appearance that was in these reports was, for all intents and purposes, correct. He did kind of look like that. He did love to chew tobacco or chomp on a cigar. He did, in fact, do a lot of the work himself at this time, and could often be found at the workbench with dirty shirt and greasy hands. And he was often found in unkempt conditions because he had, once again, slept at the office. So he is kind of playing up his celebrity, but, you know, it's based on a truth about who he really was. But this article spurs even more people to come and see him. Menlo Park started to turn into a zoo where he's the main attraction. And at the same time, pressure is mounting from creditors and business associates to find more profitable uses for the phonograph. So Edison decides that he just needs to get away for a while and takes a trip to the Western United States. He starts in Wyoming, where he goes to observe a solar eclipse, and he then proceeds to go even further west to California before returning home, making a stop at St. Louis on the way. When he gets back, he tells reporters that the trip was a lot of fun, but he hadn't come back with any ideas for new inventions.

00:16:11 (someone): And I tried to let this rest. I decided that when I started doing this episode, that I wasn't going to bring it up anymore. Even if it did turn out that Edison was a light eater, because I'm starting to sound like a freak who's weirdly obsessed with this one little thing, which is kind of true. But then I started reading the Edmund Morris biography. And this is the second paragraph of the entire book. Okay. He said, quote, from earliest youth, he had half starved himself. Even in early middle age, while earning big money and enabling two successive wives to fatten on haute cuisine, he would eat no more than six ounces a meal, generally only four, and drink nothing except milk and flavored water. A man can't think clearly when he's tanking up, he would say. Okay, so rant over, but I do want to make the point that Edison, it was commented by a ton of people, by his friends and associates, this was something really remarkable about him, that he ate hardly anything. And so with all these things put together, he's becoming sort of an invention junkie. He's obsessed with it, barely eating, barely sleeping. He loves it. He can't get enough of it. And then he has like an episode. He has a moment that almost eerily parallels an incident from Julius Caesar's life. He's studying Michael Faraday's book, Experimental Researches, to try and figure out a solution for one of his telegraphic inventions. And Faraday was a very famous English scientist.

00:29:59 (someone): He says, I don't know. People are packaged deals. You take the good with the confused. In most cases, strengths and weaknesses are two sides of the same coin. Strength in one situation is a weakness in another, yet often the person can't switch gears. It's a very subtle thing to talk about strengths and weaknesses because almost always they're the same thing. My strength, probably, is that I've always viewed technology from a liberal arts perspective, from a human culture perspective. As such, I've always pushed for things that pull technology in those directions by bringing insights from other fields. So I don't know if you caught that, but they say, what's your greatest weakness when it comes to management? He says, I don't know. Strengths and weaknesses are basically flip sides of the same coin. So here are some of my strengths. a genuinely like he was a great leader and I have loved reading even more about him, but it's genuinely like a little bit sociopathic for someone to ask you what your weakness is and to say my weaknesses are basically my strengths. So here are my strengths and he had this pattern of not being very self-reflective at all. You can tell that he just thinks it's like a little It's wasteful. It's almost masturbatory to talk about, Oh, what makes me a good or a bad leader? He's just thinking about how to get things done. Uh, there's someone asked him a similar question and they say, you've talked about being tough to get along with having a rough edge personality.

00:33:04 (someone): But because he is spending all his time with Marion Davies, this actress, in the late 20s and 30s, Hearst Castle is the place to go for the who's who of Hollywood. So Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable, Cary Grant, all the big actors, actresses, and directors are coming up on the weekends to go to Hearst Castle. And it's not just Hollywood. He was also visited there by Winston Churchill, Calvin Coolidge, Charles Lindbergh, and other public famous dignitaries and politicians. So it was a truly amazing, amazing place. But as you might imagine, it cost a fortune to build and maintain. And he's constantly building, you know, he'll have a fireplace built and say, actually, I think it should be on the other wall. So they completely demolished the fireplace, put in a new fireplace on the other wall, move the chimney. He comes in a month later and says, I think I was wrong. Can you move the fireplace back to the original wall? And he just loved to always be working on, always improving and working on these estates. And in addition to all this building, he's got an addiction for collecting. He would look through catalogs and buy European art every single day. Every day, he set aside time to look through these catalogs. And it's not so much paintings, although he did have some very famous paintings. Most famously, he has Napoleon Looking at the Sphinx, which is one of my favorite paintings ever. But he's not big into collecting paintings. He's mostly into decorative art and antiquities.

00:19:17 (someone): I think Moses did the same thing. And this is a practice in many religions that is supposed to bring you closer to God and help you have religious experiences abstaining from food. So Joan ate very little, very light eater, and fasted very frequently to the point where some people read backwards and think that she had some form of anorexia. Now, again, I don't think this is a good explanation at all for the voices that she heard because people don't talk about her as low energy or delirious in any other sense of her life. On the contrary, she was described as a very energetic person who always wanted to be moving and doing. So, you know, I doubt she was an anorexic, and I doubt that she was experiencing these things because she was delirious. But I do love that this theory hits home, the fact that she was such a light eater, which is, of course, a common attribute with many, many other great people. A couple other things to address. One is, why is she called Joan of Arc? So she actually never called herself Joan of Arc. The reason that people call her this is she always called herself Joan La Pousselle. She said she had no last name that she knew of. She was just Joan, which is, you know, typical peasant life at the time. Most peasants did not have last names. They're just, you know, Joan. In fact, in her local village, they called her Jeannette, which I think is like a diminutive. It's like a familiar version of the name. But so why Joan of Arc?

00:25:27 (someone): One other thing to note about this time in Caesar's life is the way he dressed. Everyone in his social class wore the same thing, and that was a basic short-sleeved toga. Well, Caesar wears a long-sleeved toga that has a little bit of fringe on the sleeves. It's not too different from what people normally wear. People can still pick him out as a member of the ruling elite. but it's just different enough that it makes him stand out and marks him as special. It reminds me a little bit of Steve Jobs with his jeans and black mock neck. Again, it's not something wildly different from what a Silicon Valley executive might wear, but it's enough to be distinctive. Both of these guys wanted to get attention and set themselves apart without being ridiculous or distracting from what they actually had to say. And both of them did that masterfully through what they wore, among other ways. One other thing that is kind of random but just struck me is that Caesar was a light eater. And when I read this, I remembered that Napoleon, especially when he was young, was also really known as a light eater. And Steve Jobs through his whole life was a vegan and also known for being a very light eater. So then of course I had to go back and look up Putin's eating habits, the only other person I've covered in this podcast. And yep, turns out that all four of them were known as remarkably light eaters, especially early in life. And I find that so interesting. I think part of it is that they all grew up without much money, so they needed to save money, and one of the first things that they cut was excessive food.

00:22:03 (someone): So anyways, 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 this out, Samuel Insull in the movie, they make this like meek little secretary who is Edison's pawn and does whatever Edison wants. Edison actually at various times felt very betrayed by Insull 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 kind of took no prisoners. And so it's funny to see him portrayed as this, like, yes, sir. Yes, Mr. Edison, whatever you want, sir. And just on the nature of personality, like, I just think they make Edison in the movie seem too adept at social situations. I don't think they quite got right. The like addictive nature of Edison's 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 their insistence that no one died from alternating current, except for people who were executed in the electric chair. It's just not true at all. I mean, in the early days of electricity, when they were stringing up wires, people died relatively frequently. People died all the time from electric power. It was a new and dangerous technology. So 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 Westinghouse and Edison, which was a patent lawsuit.

00:18:42 (someone): So, the option was there for her to take a new name, but Elizabeth decides to take her own name. And this could be seen as grandiose, since the first Queen Elizabeth was one of the most powerful and important British monarchs ever. But I don't think it came across that way, and I don't think she intended it that way. When her secretary asked what name she would rule under, she replied, quote, my own, of course. What else? And I think that's how she meant it. I think what it actually communicated was a lack of pretension, a sort of groundedness that I'm going to rule under my own name. Elizabeth is my name, and I'm still Elizabeth. I'm still Jenny from the block. She also needed to decide on her last name. She belonged to House Windsor, and her husband belonged to House Mountbatten. Now, there was some precedent for a queen taking her husband's name. Her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, married a German prince, Albert, who was of House Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. And their children were of house Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, which changed to Windsor in World War I because it sounded too German while they were fighting a war with Germany. So the question was, would her children stay house Windsor, or would she be like Queen Victoria and become house Mountbatten? And she decided that they would stay house Windsor. Philip considered this another slight, and he complained, quote, I'm the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his own children. But Elizabeth is someone for whom history was always very important.

00:21:39 (someone): Rapid fire. A few other small observations about Napoleon's work habits. He drank coffee and took a pinch of snuff, tobacco, but was not excessive in either. He took naps, especially in the summer. He slept seven to eight hours a day, but spread it throughout the day. Like I said earlier, he would usually have a period of night that he would wake up and work and then sleep again in the late morning. And then during the summer, he would sleep in the mid day, sometimes for an hour. he liked seeing things completed so rather you know if he was doing a public works construction rather than working on a 100 mile road for 10 years he wanted to see 10 mile portions of that road completed each year if that makes sense so If he was building a fortification, rather than working on an entire fortification for three years, in the first year, he wanted a ditch dug and wanted it completed. In the second year, he wanted a wall built and have it completed in the second year. And then in the third year, you know, guard houses built and supplies gathered so that the whole thing was completed after the third year, but something was completed each year. So he really liked that, breaking things up into smaller tasks and completing them. And that's it. That's basically all my notes. The thing that really stuck with me is just how obsessed with efficiency he was in maximizing what he was best at, thinking and deciding and building this machine, this operation around him to to keep him working at his optimal state at all times, and I mean at all times, from the moment he woke up to the moment he fell asleep.