#143 Alfred Lee Loomis (the most interesting man you've never heard of)

**David Senra** (0:00)
I want to tell you about a one-time only limited event that I don't think you're going to want to miss. I am doing a live show with Patrick O'Shaughnessy from the Invest Like the Best podcast in New York City on October 19th. Patrick has interviewed over 300 of the world's best investors and founders for his podcast. I've read over 300 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs for my podcast. We'll be talking about what we learned from seven years of podcasting, sharing our favorite ideas and stories and doing a live Q&A. There will also be special event-only swag. If you live in New York City, I think it's a no-brainer. But if not, I think it's a great excuse to fly in. I've already heard from a bunch of people that bought tickets, they're flying in from other cities. Some people are flying in from other countries. That's setting the bar really high, so I will have at least four shots of espresso or four energy drinks before or during the show so we can make it a night that you'll never forget. If you're interested in attending this unique live event, I will leave a link down below. I highly recommend you get your tickets today and I hope I get to see you in New York on October 19th. Few men of Loomis' prominence and achievement have gone to greater lengths to foil history. He seemed to stand at the edge of important events, intimately involved and at the same time somehow overlooked. Yet here was a character who was at once familiar, independently wealthy, iconoclastic and aloof. Loomis did not conform to the conventional measure of a great scientist. He was too complex to categorize. Financier, philanthropist, society figure, physicist, inventor, amateur, dilettante. A contradiction in terms.
Although he rose to become one of the most powerful figures in banking in the 1920s, he was not satisfied with the laurels of Wall Street. He felt obliged to strive for a kind of excellence that had nothing to do with the external trappings of success.
Loomis had the foresight to know that science would soon become a dominating force. And he used his immense fortune to attract a gifted group of young physicists to his private laboratory and endow pioneering research that pushed at the frontiers of knowledge.
He created a scientific ideal in the cloistered fiefdom of Tuxedo Park. And in his belief in invention and experimentation, he prepared the way for a series of scientific developments that would not only change the course of the war, but ultimately transform the modern world.
That was an excerpt from a book that a listener recommended. And that book is Tuxedo Park, a Wall Street tycoon and a secret palace of science that changed the course of World War II. And it was written by Janet Conant.
So when I finished reading this book, I put it down and I asked myself, what the hell did I just read? This was probably one of the most insane books that I've read so far for the podcast, because it sounds fictional.
A good way to think about Loomis and the story that takes place in the book, if you're coming to this with no background at all, comes from two blurbs that are actually praise for Tuxedo Park that you find in the beginning of the book. So I'm gonna read both of those to you. The first one says, an examination of the remarkable role of the shadowy, but powerful amateur scientist whose intellect and energy spurred critical scientific research that shortened and helped win World War II. It's remarkable and remarkably told as if F. Scott Fitzgerald had penned Batman. So it's interesting that I saw that, the blurb after I finished reading the book, because I thought of, how could I describe to somebody who doesn't know who Alfred Lee Loomis is? And I was like, he's kind of like this Batman Bruce Wayne figure, where he lives two almost completely opposite lives. And then the second thing, the second blurb I think is really helpful too, because it says, by the time you are finished, you are prepared to bestow on Alfred Lee Loomis the title of most interesting man I never knew anything about. So that was the situation I found myself in. I had this book recommended to me, but I didn't know anything about Tuxedo Park. I didn't know anything. I didn't know who Alfred Lee Loomis was before I started reading. And I think that title, the most interesting man I knew nothing about is a good way to think about him.
Okay, so I want to start with this personality. And there's embedded in this book is one of the author's relatives was a young scientist working and doing experiments at Tuxedo Park. And he winds up killing himself when he was 39 years old. But before he killed himself, he wrote a fictional account of some of the experiments that were done at this hidden laboratory, right? And this laboratory is about 40 miles outside of Manhattan.