SPECIAL: The Rothschilds (Part 1)

**Ben Wilson** (0:15)
All right, today we have a special episode. It is the biography of the Rothschilds family, which, if you're not a history buff, that doesn't sound interesting right off the bat, but I'm gonna explain to you why we're doing this. So Ben, who's our producer, he has this podcast called How to Take Over the World, and it is a historical podcast, but it talks about the biographies of people. So we're talking history as in like Alexander the Great, but also recent folks like Walt Disney is coming out soon. Then he has Steve Jobs, that's out now. And it's kind of like listening to a biography, but over the course of two episodes, amazing. And all of the episodes are about basically business people or people on achieving great things. So Napoleon, things like that. People who are great leaders, people who are great inventors like Thomas Edison. It's amazing. You're gonna dig it. This one's about the Rothschild family.
I wasn't eager to listen to this when I first got into it. And then I got 10 minutes into it, I was like, oh my God, I'm hooked. And I could not stop listening to it. Basically, we hear about the Rothschilds now. They're some secret family that controls the world's banks or some crazy conspiracy theory like that. But they started in the 1800s in Europe, but they were eventually all over Europe. And they started a bank. They were mostly honest people. And it's just a crazy, fascinating story. So give this a listen. This is Ben from How to Take Over the World. This is a two-episode podcast. And we're dropping them both at the same time. Part one and part two. Check it out. And if you want more, let us know. The Sam Parr on Twitter or a Sean VP on Twitter. And then look up Ben Wilson from How to Take Over the World.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:48)
I'm going to show you how great I am. I just want to say from the bottom of my heart, I'd like to take this chance to apologize to absolutely nobody.

**Ben Wilson** (2:09)
Hello, and welcome to How to Take Over the World. This is Ben Wilson. So, I was thinking of doing an episode on the richest person of all time, because being really rich sounds nice, and I would like to learn how to do it. But first I had to figure out who is the richest person of all time. And as I was reading up on different arguments for different people, I read this really interesting story. And the story goes something like this. It's the middle of the 1800s, and clouds of war are forming over Europe. France and Germany are at each other's throats once again, and people are just braced for war, waiting for it to break out at any moment. In the middle of this situation, there is an old grandma sitting in her attic on her rocking chair. A friend comes to visit her, and they're chatting about the news, and the friend says, you know, this situation is so horrible, I'm so worried, it looks like war is gonna break out again. And the old grandma says, oh, don't worry, war won't break out, my sons won't allow it. And she's right, despite everyone's fears, the year comes and goes without a war. Now that's pretty impressive. Obviously, my ears perked up when I heard that, because if you're interested in people who have taken over the world, that sounds like it fits the bill. Apparently, these sons were so powerful that they could control nations. They could decide who went to war and who didn't. So who were these guys? Well, they were the Rothschild sons. And the Rothschilds are a family of Jewish bankers who originated in Frankfurt, Germany in the late 1700s and spread out across Europe and eventually into the United States. And they were very, very wealthy. And some people argue they were the wealthiest family of all time. You can make a pretty good case for that. And whether they were the wealthiest family of all time or the second or third wealthiest family of all time, they're up there. Now, that story that I shared about old grandma Rothschild, it's apocryphal. In all likelihood, it never actually happened. And in all honesty, the story is an exaggeration. They couldn't really stop two world powers from going to war. But while maybe it wasn't impossible to make war without the consent of the Rothschild brothers, by the mid 1800s, the Rothschilds were making decisions on a geopolitical level. At least one country owes its existence to the Rothschilds, arguably two. And you could make the case, and many people have, that in the early 1800s, the Rothschild family decided the outcome of the greatest war the world had ever seen up to that point, the Napoleonic Wars. You could say that it was really the Rothschilds who beat Napoleon. Obviously, I have profiled Napoleon on this podcast, and the volume of his accomplishments is astonishing and impressive. As a military commander, he went 54, 8 and 2 And of those 8 defeats, only 2, Waterloo and Leipzig, were real defeats, the kind that he so often inflicted on his opponents. But we also know he died completely defeated and out of power. So how do you win that much? How do you basically win 54 times, only suffer two big losses and then still lose the war? Well, Rothschild is a big reason why. Their financial capabilities were just as important to that war as the strategic abilities of any general, including Napoleon. We'll get into the details of all that later, but that to me is power. So I wanted to study the Rothschild family for two reasons. One is because they were extravagantly wealthy, perhaps the wealthiest family of all time. And so I want to discover the secrets of that wealth, how you do that. And secondly, because they were able to turn that wealth into real power. And as I read the story of the Rothschild family, it became very clear that the strategies to becoming extremely wealthy haven't changed a whole lot over the last 200 years. And the strategies for turning that wealth into power have not changed either. You can see a lot of similarities between them and the great financiers and great wealth generators of our day. And I'll point out those similarities as we go, but suffice it to say, if you're looking to be the world's first trillionaire, this is a pretty good story to learn from. Now, before we start, one disclaimer. The Rothschilds were powerful, so powerful that they have sparked the imagination of conspiracy theorists all over the world then and now.