Lessons from Napoleon, Steve Jobs, Joan of Arc & Other Leaders | Ben Wilson

Summary

• Ben Wilson, creator of How to Take Over the World, says he has stage-four metastatic neuroendocrine carcinoma. His initial prognosis was one year, and the five-year survival statistic he read for his cancer type and extent of spread was zero percent. Chemo pushed the disease back; he’s starting tarlatamab. A subset of people with his cancer has been on it for two years, though it’s unclear how long it will keep working. If it stops, clinical trials may be an option; he’s also looking at a custom mRNA vaccine to enhance the drug. His stance: “live two lives at once. One in which I die sometime in the next year, and one in which I’ve got twenty years.”
• The episode’s most portable framework is breaking trade-offs: great outcomes come from deciding what does not matter. Jobs at NeXT answered “all of the priorities” and shipped a late, over-budget, over-engineered flop; ten years later, he accepted an iPod deficient in some ways because “I don’t think any of that matters” except user experience. The Wright brothers made control their focus rather than lift, the more obvious problem.
• Wilson’s distilled through-lines of great leaders across conquerors, artists and entrepreneurs: vision, communication, focus — with Senra adding obsession as the fourth leg. Wilson’s favorite vision quote is Genghis Khan’s: “Without the vision of a goal, a man cannot hope to manage his own life, let alone the life of others.” Wilson’s proposed obsession litmus test is food: Napoleon, Jobs, Putin and Joan of Arc were all described as light eaters, and “it’s obviously not about the food.”
• Zeal — Aristotle’s “type of pain” — can motivate achievement: 21-year-old Edison stayed up all night with Faraday’s biography and declared, “I am going to hustle.” Wilson hopes his show’s range of stories will help listeners find someone who feels like a historical mirror: “that person is like me. I could accomplish what they did, but I haven’t yet.”
• Determination and sincere belief matter. Ben says Musk and Jobs weren’t the smartest people at their own companies, but were exceptionally determined: “Optimism, pessimism, screw that. I’m going to get it done.” Phil Knight struggled to sell encyclopedias and mutual funds but sold Tiger shoes successfully: “Belief, I decided. Belief is irresistible.” Senra describes lukewarm believers as “double-minded”; Ben says people need genuine belief to accomplish great things.
• Clarity of vision makes you easy to help — Daniel Ek on Senra: “You’re very easy to understand, so therefore you’re very easy to help.” Goethe’s line, which Ben connects to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s story, is: “At the moment of commitment, the entire universe conspires to assist you.” Once Arnold declared his goal, people at lunch offered help, including their milk.
• The ask: sponsors Ramp, AppLovin and Deel donated to Wilson’s GoFundMe in lieu of ads, and Senra is asking for medicine, introductions or donations — “we just need to buy more years.” Wilson credits the Huntsman Cancer Institute with his remarkable care and asks listeners to think of other people who may need help more than he does.

Deep dive

1. Zeal is Aristotle’s “type of pain” — and part of why the podcast exists

• Wilson’s definition, straight from Aristotle: zeal is “a type of pain” felt when you see someone like you in nature who has accomplished admirable things you are capable of but haven’t achieved. His favorite example: 21-year-old telegraph operator Thomas Edison reads Michael Faraday’s biography all night, slams it shut and declares, “Faraday accomplished so much. I am already 21 years old. I might live to be 50. Can I accomplish as much as he did? I am going to hustle.” The same pattern appears in Caesar looking at Alexander and Rockefeller aspiring to be like Amos Lawrence.
• Senra’s corroboration: asked which dead figure’s voice he’d resurrect with the phonograph, Edison skipped Jesus and chose Napoleon — “I like the hustler.”
• Why Ben built the show this way: zeal requires likeness. He feels none for da Vinci — “It’s like studying an alien” — so he hopes How to Take Over the World’s range of stories will help a listener find one that resonates: “No, that person is like me. I could accomplish what they did, but I haven’t yet.”

2. Empires of the mind: why Wilson identifies with Disney, not da Vinci

• Walt Disney “created empires of the mind” — an okay illustrator but a creative leader who got people to buy into an aesthetic vision. Ben’s example of his own creative ability: his show’s intro music, made himself in GarageBand — “60 minutes of magic.” The split: da Vinci was curious about things as they are; Walt, and Ben, about “things as they could be and never have been before.”
• On process, Newton’s “waste book” — literally his trash book — as advice for everyone: an unpressured place to dump thoughts can lead to insights. Rick Rubin on Eminem, via Senra: hundreds of notebooks, “almost none of it” used. Ben’s blank-page hack is writing a deliberately terrible intro (“Leonardo da Vinci was an artist”) and fixing it later.
• Senra’s anti-intro-music aside uses Jobs rejecting netbooks as “shitty laptops” and redirecting resources toward the iPad as an analogy for avoiding unnecessary products. Ben’s intro is “the lone example where I’m like, ‘This is excellent.’”

3. Two podcasts born of the same realization: “Tim Ferriss for dead people”

• In 2018, reading Andrew Roberts’ Napoleon during a run of Tim Ferriss interviews he wasn’t interested in, Ben realized, “I could be Tim Ferriss for dead people.” He searched for the show, would’ve been content just to listen to it, found nothing, and built it — Napoleon first, Steve Jobs second, and “the formula was set for the next 8 years of my life.”
• Founders’ origin rhymes: a 2012 Musk clip — Senra recalls Musk saying he had no mentors and looked for them in a historical context. Senra’s compression math: a 40-year career, years of a biographer’s documentation, read in 40 hours and delivered in 45 minutes — “insanely valuable” for people whose time is scarce.

4. Breaking trade-offs: the most important realizations are negative

• Jobs at NeXT is the cautionary example: at the Carmel retreat, his founding team debates five priorities and he rules “the answer is all of the priorities.” The machine ships late, over budget and over-engineered; it nearly puts NeXT out of business, and Jobs eventually sells the hardware division. Senra calls it “13 years of struggle.” Both recommend Steve Jobs in Exile.
• Ten years later, the mindset inverts: the iPod is deficient versus rival MP3 players on storage and file formats, but Jobs says, “I don’t think any of that matters” except making it easy to get to your music — and it becomes one of the most successful products of all time. Musk made the opposite trade on the original Roadster: go upmarket rather than prioritize range and affordability; make it fast, cool and “sexy.”
• The Wright brothers’ story gave Senra the original idea: flight was “the AI of the moment,” with dozens of teams attacking lift and propulsion. Wilbur, watching birds make micro-adjustments every second, decides control is the hard problem. The brothers spend years working on gliders in windy North Carolina; then, Senra says, “he basically slaps an engine on it, and it’s done.”
• Why it’s profound: follow all the wellness advice on offer — yoga, weights, journaling, meditation — and “your morning routine would go until 1:00 in the afternoon.” Ben’s own trade-off, quoting Jobs’s “focus means saying no”: he stopped producing other people’s podcasts, including My First Million, shut down his agency and focused on his own show.

5. The through-lines of great leaders: vision, communication, focus — plus obsession

• Across conquerors, artists and entrepreneurs, Ben says there aren’t many universals, but three hold: vision, the ability to communicate it in whatever medium suits them, and focus. His favorite vision quote is Genghis Khan’s, which “sounds like Silicon Valley guru advice from 2010”: “Without the vision of a goal, a man cannot hope to manage his own life, let alone the life of others.” Ben sees the same trait in Edwin Land and Jobs.
• Senra proposes obsession as the fourth leg; Ben agrees: “they just don’t write books about normal, well-adjusted people.” A fifth emerges later: evangelism. Senra says Rockefeller wanted to impose “order on chaos” and could persuade successful founders in the same industry to sell and join his mission.

6. Edison ≈ Elon, light eaters, intense stares: the corkboard patterns

• Musk drew the Edison parallel himself — “The car company is called Tesla, but in many ways I’m more similar to Thomas Edison” — and Ben stacks the coincidences: both were considered dumb as kids (Edison was mostly deaf; Ben speculates that Elon may be autistic and have trouble communicating). David recounts a story that Edison’s father posted a notice inviting the town to watch him beat his young son; Elon’s father, according to the account discussed, screamed at him for hours when he was about ten. Their preacher-grandfathers also had strikingly similar stories, fleeing across the US-Canada border in opposite directions — a connection Ben says “makes you believe in reincarnation.”
• The light-eater pattern made Ben feel like “a person with a corkboard who’s connecting all the strings”: Napoleon’s “If you want to dine quickly, dine with me” (he ate dinner in 15 minutes), Jobs eating only apples for months, Putin’s boiled egg as his entire diet, and Joan of Arc fasting — about 20 stories. Ben’s conclusion: “it’s obviously not about the food”; forgetting to eat is “a really good litmus test” for obsession.
• A matching tell: intense eyes. Paul Johnson notes how often the New Testament describes where Jesus looked; Ben connects the same kind of remarkable stares to Jobs and Alexander Hamilton. (Also, oddly: massive heads — Oprah included.)

7. Arnold, commitment, and making yourself easy to help

• The book Ben rereads every year is Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder — only the first 120 pages; the rest are workouts — because, unlike retrospective biographies, it’s written “right in the middle of” the obsession. At 30, Arnold describes using the playbook that took him to the top of bodybuilding to build a business empire and succeed in movies. Senra says Arnold recalled that there were five bodybuilders in all of Austria when he started. Ben later notes that Arnold became governor of California, which he calls basically the highest office someone of his foreign-born background could achieve.
• The mechanism, per Goethe: “At the moment of commitment, the entire universe conspires to assist you” — once Arnold articulated his goal, people at lunch offered help, including their milk.
• Senra’s complement, from Daniel Ek: “You’re very easy to understand, so therefore you’re very easy to help.” Jobs had one legible message from age 19 to 55; the lone sticky note on Senra’s recording desk reads “Insanely great products.”

8. Joan of Arc, Brigham Young, Jesus: clarity, relentlessness, compounding

• Joan of Arc is Ben’s example of clarity: a malnourished girl of about 15 in the sword-swinging Middle Ages, with one priority — “God is on our side. Follow me. We will be victorious” — while France’s king, dukes and field marshals had competing priorities. Once the French start following her, they have success: she “lacks literally everything else except for focus and clarity of vision,” and that is enough. Ben says her story can “make you start to believe in the divine.”
• Determination over intelligence: Senra invokes Paul Graham’s thought experiment (max intelligence without determination yields someone “brilliant yet ineffectual”; the reverse could end in someone rich running trash-hauling businesses). Ben says Musk and Jobs weren’t the smartest at their companies, but were exceptionally determined — “Optimism, pessimism, screw that. I’m going to get it done.”
• Brigham Young — Ben’s great-great-grandfather — embodied “unceasing action,” illustrated by The Strokes’ singer talking about Mormon teetotaler Brandon Flowers: while other bands were partying, The Killers put out another album — “Will you please calm down?” Ben says that kind of plea from competitors is a tell of relentlessness.
• Jesus taught Ben about compounding: there’s no “big break” in early Christianity, just about 50 percent annual growth for centuries — like Nike’s pattern in Shoe Dog. Senra says he wanted a biography that would convey what is known about Jesus without relying on supernatural claims, and recommends Paul Johnson’s biography.

9. Conquerors sit atop the hierarchy; sincere belief is non-negotiable

• Forced to study one category, Ben picks conquerors: life is stacked hierarchies, and “the highest hierarchy… is the hierarchy of violence.” Conquerors commission great art, and even great merchants ultimately answer to politics. “That is the pinnacle of human achievement.”
• Annual rereads beyond Arnold: Ender’s Game for fun, and Mind of Napoleon. Senra says Napoleon treated destiny like God; Ben quotes him: “Destiny must be fulfilled. That is my chief doctrine.” Senra also says Jobs sincerely believed in his California Buddhism and that sincerity of belief was part of what enabled their success.
• The negative case is the “double-minded” (“a double-minded man is unstable in all his ways”), like the Protestant French king who converted for the crown — “Paris is worth a mass” — and was not a great conqueror. The positive case is Phil Knight, who struggled to sell encyclopedias and mutual funds but sold Tiger shoes exceptionally well: “Belief, I decided. Belief is irresistible.”

10. The diagnosis: stage-four neuroendocrine carcinoma, found almost too late

• Ben, who didn’t even have a primary-care doctor, went in after months of unexplained weight loss; the doctor poked his liver — “What’s that?” — and sent him for scans right away. He’d lost 40 pounds, and oncologists asked how he’d kept functioning. His answer: aches and pains had always gotten better on their own — plus the warning: “that’s true of a lot of men… go get checked out if something feels off.”
• Claude gets explicit credit for triage: Ben entered his symptoms, and it said not to wait a week — go now, or to an ER. “Claude was right”: untreated, he probably would have been dead within a few months. The numbers as Ben read them: initial prognosis one year; five-year survival for his cancer type and extent of spread, zero percent.
• The specifics: primary neuroendocrine carcinoma, stage four and metastatic — it began as a nonaggressive cancer in the lungs, then spread to the liver and became aggressive. It is also in the lungs, spine and brain (“the brain is maybe the biggest issue right now”). Chemo pushed back some of the cancer and is finished for now; Ben feels far better and is starting tarlatamab.

11. Buying years — and why he’d choose this life again

• Tarlatamab — technically not an immunotherapy but similar — extended life expectancy by about six months to a year for people with small-cell lung cancer. A subset of people with Ben’s cancer type has been on it for two years and it’s working; it could stop working at any time, but it might not. His insurance initially didn’t cover it, but after a new study got a positive indication this month, it will be covered. If it fails, he may pursue clinical trials; he says his marker is called “SMARCA or SMARCA4” and that there aren’t many therapies for it yet. He’s also looking at whether a custom mRNA vaccine can enhance tarlatamab. Senra’s framing: “we just need to buy more years.”
• Ben’s stance: “live two lives at once. One in which I die sometime in the next year, and one in which I’ve got 20 years” — prepare the family and live fully, simultaneously.
• History as consolation: Napoleon’s armies were eventually replenished with 15- and 16-year-old conscripts — “children running around on chickens” — sent into battle on horses not trained for combat. “You can’t study history for long without realizing I’ve had an amazing life… I would choose this life again.” The caveat he insists on: “I have bad moments… people can get the wrong impression” from the cancer episode’s positivity.
• The close: Ben credits billionaire Jon Huntsman’s world-class cancer institute in Utah with the remarkable care he received. He redirects generosity toward others who may need it more and asks listeners to consider Huntsman Cancer Institute or other cancer research. Senra’s sponsors Ramp, AppLovin and Deel donated to the GoFundMe in lieu of ads; his sign-off: “You’re a good dude. You got a bad hand.”