SPECIAL: The Rothschilds (Part 2)

**Sam Parr** (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.

**Ben Wilson** (2:09)
Hello, and welcome to How to Take Over the World. This is Ben Wilson.
So let's just get right to it. How did they do it?
How did the Rothschilds become the richest family in the world? That's why I started studying this, is what I wanna know.
So let's explain how they did it. And let's say that you lived in El Paso, Texas. For my non-American listeners, El Paso is a city that is right on the border with Mexico.
I lived in El Paso, I guess that's why it's the border city that comes to mind. Honestly, it's not as bad as you think. In fact, that should probably be their motto, El Paso. Not as bad as you think.
But let's say you lived in El Paso and you knew that gold was selling for $100 an ounce or a pound or I don't know how much gold costs. I don't buy a lot of gold. But let's say that it costed $100 an ounce in the United States and it cost $90 an ounce in Mexico.
And you know this is constant. What would you do? If you're even somewhat smart, you would go to Mexico, buy a bunch of gold for $90 an ounce and then come and sell it in the United States for a 10% profit. And you just keep going back and forth and doing this over and over again.
And this is called arbitrage, okay? Arbitrage is when you take advantage of price differentials to turn a profit.
And that's what the Rothschilds did.
They used arbitrage. Obviously, it's a little more complicated than that. And we'll get into it a little bit more. We'll get into some of the complexities. But I wanted to start off talking about this idea of arbitrage because you have to understand it in order to understand how they were able to do what they did, how they became the wealthiest family of all time. Now, before we get into it, let's go back a little bit and recap what happened just for a minute last episode. So we talked about Mayer Rothschild, who was the founder of the Rothschild dynasty and the guy who started it all. As a brief refresher, he was born in Germany. He's a Jew, born in the city of Frankfurt, and he starts out as a small time lender and merchant of metals and rare coins, but slowly makes his way up as he starts doing business on a larger and larger scale. And eventually he's able to take over as the steward of the fortune of Wilhelm, land grave of Hesse.
This happens because the French invade Hesse, forcing Wilhelm into hiding. The French also import liberal ideas about religious tolerance, and they emancipate the Jews from many of their previous oppressions that they had suffered in Frankfurt, which allows the Rothschilds to move more freely and conduct more business. Mayor puts Wilhelm's fortune to great use and starts to make real money for his family. And he does this in part by sending his five sons out to establish new branches of the family business in London, Paris, Vienna, and Naples. And one brother stays home with him in Frankfurt. Together, they make it pretty big. Mayor teaches his sons the three cardinal Rothschild virtues of concordia, integritas, and industria, harmony, integrity, and industry.