SPECIAL: Thomas Edison (Part 2)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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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. 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.

**Sam** (1:06)
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. This is a three-part series on Thomas Edison. He's allowed us to air it on our feed just because we like it. 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. We have this topic or this 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.
It's called How to Take Over the World. This episode is on Thomas Edison. He's got 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 2 and part 3 on our feed.
Check it out.

**Ben Wilson** (2:52)
Hello, and welcome to How to Take Over the World. This is Ben Wilson. And this episode is the second episode about Thomas Edison covering his life from the invention of electric light until his death. And I'm gonna do something a little bit different in this go-around. I'm gonna do this episode two, and then next week, I'm gonna do something called End Notes, where I'm just gonna record sort of my thoughts that didn't fit neatly into the narrative that I laid out in part one and part two. So it'll just be kind of some ramblings and some extra notes, and you guys can let me know what you think of that. So for this episode, where we're starting is, if you remember, Edison invented the phonograph, and then he went out west, he took this big vacation, and he came back with ideas about electric light, and this was in 1878 when Edison was 31 years old.
And when Edison invented the phonograph and with it the entire idea of recorded sound, it was basically by accident, if you remember. He was working on a different problem, and it just kind of came to him all at once. And his invention of the light bulb could not have been more different. Electric light was something that dozens of people were working on, everyone kind of knew it was the future. It was just that no one could really figure out how to make it work. And so when Edison starts working on perfecting the light bulb in 1878, it's the ultimate heat check. Dozens of other men with more impressive academic credentials than him have been working on it for years, and he thinks he can just come in and figure it out, no problem, right?