SPECIAL: Thomas Edison (Part 1)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (0:31)
All right, so last month, Sam went down to Nashville for the Podcast Movement Conference, and he did a fireside chat with John Lee Dumas. You might know him as the host of the Entrepreneurs on Fire podcast.
And if you like My First Million, you might like the Entrepreneurs on Fire podcast. It's the same, it's like inspiration and strategy around your entrepreneurial journey, and helps you create the life you've always dreamed of. Wow, that doesn't sound too bad, does it? All right, well guess what? It's also part of the HubSpot Podcast Network. That's who brings you our show and other great business shows. So if you want to listen, learn and grow, go listen to Entrepreneurs on Fire. It's on the HubSpot Podcast Network.
You can find it at hubspot.com/podcastnetwork.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:08)
All right, we have a special episode by Ben Wilson. This is a three-part series on Thomas Edison. We discovered this podcast about two or three months ago and freaking loved it. It had very small listenership. Both Sean and I binged, listened to all of them. His name is Ben Wilson. The podcast is called How to Take Over the World.
Ben has allowed us to air this episode and the next two. So this is a three-part series on Thomas Edison. He's allowed us to air it on our feed just because we like it. So his podcast, it only had a few hundred listeners at the time, but we thought this was so cool, Sean and I, and it's about a similar topic that we talk about. So we have this topic called, or the segment called Billionaire of the Week. This one is on Thomas Edison. We loved Ben's podcast so much. We just said, hey man, let us just air this on our feed because it's so good. So it's called How to Take Over the World. This episode is on Thomas Edison. He's got a few other episodes, or a few other folks on his feed. He's got Thomas Edison.
I believe he has Alexander the Great, the Rothschild's family.
Really, really cool. I'm a history buff. And so I'm happy that he was cool and let us air this. We're doing it none other than just, we think it's good and we want you guys to check it out. So here it is. Enjoy the episode. There's part two and part three on our feed.
Check it out.

**Ben Wilson** (2:54)
Hello, and welcome to How to Take Over the World. This is Ben Wilson. It's good to be back. Today, I'm going to be talking about Thomas Edison, the world-renowned inventor and businessman. I'm really glad that I chose to do this episode about Edison because honestly, he's underrated.
I learned a lot while doing this one, and I think you will learn a lot listening to it. He was an unbelievably prolific inventor, filing 1,093 patents in his lifetime. Among those are two of the most important inventions of all time, the light bulb and recorded sound. Thomas Edison is interesting because he is in many ways the original inventor-entrepreneur celebrity. There is sort of a playbook now. If you think about someone like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, and that playbook for how to be a famous inventor originated with Thomas Edison. He was really the first one to do it. In fact, Edison's celebrity really surpassed any of those guys. I mean, yeah, Bill Gates and Elon Musk, they are famous nowadays, very famous. But Edison was literally the predominant celebrity of his day, the most famous man. And celebrity is almost kind of underselling what he was. He was viewed in these almost mythic godlike terms. After he died in the USA, there was an effort made to extinguish all the electric lights in the entire country for a minute as a tribute to Edison. He seemed to represent progress itself and the idea that man had mastered the elements and could do anything now. Edison was born in this era of incredible change and he wrote that to levels of celebrities previously only enjoyed by kings and conquerors. So what I want to study on this podcast is two things. One, Edison the businessman and inventor and how he was able to achieve success in those domains to the extent that he did because it was truly remarkable. And then secondly, Edison the celebrity and how he was able to spin the perception of his success into nearly unparalleled fame and influence.