Roy Thomson: Billionaire Media Baron

The driving force in my life was poverty. That's Roy Thomson at 70, explaining himself in one sentence. The son of a Toronto barber, failing at business after business into his 40s. At 17, working as a clerk, he'd already told everyone around him, I'll be a millionaire by the time I'm 30. It didn't happen until his 40s. Then at 59, he moved to Britain, starting over again, and he built one of the largest media empires the world has ever seen. Today, the empire he started lives on as Thomson Reuters, and his descendants are the richest family in Canada, worth somewhere between $70 and $90 billion. This is the story of Roy Thomson. Welcome to Ambition, a show about the most ambitious people in history and what we can learn from them. I'm your host, Justin Gordon, an entrepreneur based in Los Angeles. My main source for this episode is Roy Thomson of Fleet Street by Russell Braddon, published in 1965. Quick note before we get into it. I'm hosting the first Ambition Summit on September 24th, 2026 at a private venue in Santa Monica. 8 speakers, 150 founders, operators, investors, one day in this intimate setting, a lovely theater in Santa Monica. I have a few tickets still available. Link is in the show notes below. And if you're listening after September 24th, there's a very good chance we're already working on the next one. Let's get to it. People assured me that Thompson's great virtue, his only virtue, some claimed, was his honesty about everything. And in this story that comes across repeatedly, he's just brutally honest about everything and actually mostly helps him out in his career and how he builds his empire. Most people, he said, don't like me for myself, but for the newspapers I own. To be honest with you, I guess I'm a bit stingy and boastful. I talk too much, and my only 2 loves are my family and my business. If I had to choose between the 2, well, I don't know. I'd probably choose my business because my family can now look after itself. So where does a man like that come from? It starts in Toronto in a house run by women, mortgaged to an aunt and filled with books. Roy is born on the 5th of June, 1894. He can't see very well, so thus bespectacled, he became more withdrawn than ever, in complete contrast to his cheerfully extroverted brother Carl. He retired from the active life of small boys into the more satisfying world of books. So he is obsessed with books and reading, and this also becomes his career, which is interesting to see how we go from what we are interested in when we're young than what we end up doing as adults. Not that he was timid. On the contrary, he stubbornly refused to practice the piano, although his mother insisted that he take lessons. He climbed other people's fences to raid their gardens. When his neighbors first began to make toffee in their basement, attracting hordes of children who hung around caging, it was Roy who negotiated a 2-bags-of-toffee-a-week contract to keep them away. Again, Roy's gonna negotiate many deals later on in his career. He's already doing this as a young kid, and we see how he just takes it to the absolute max with the ambition he has. And it's this interesting thing of if you wanna understand someone, understand this entrepreneur, understanding how he operated as a child and as a youth is very telling. He was a rebel and a leader early on, which he would carry throughout his life, and just having this incredible self-confidence about what he could accomplish. His youth also brings to life the idea that media diet matters, especially today with all the different influences we have and content that's really like candy and not really nourishing to our souls. He reads a ton of books, and I think that impacts him tremendously. And it's important to note what he was reading. He was reading Horatio Alger stories of these youthful heroes becoming rich because he never seemed to lose faith he was going to be rich himself. He had this belief early on and worked on it. And again, I think this stems from that media diet I mentioned. He is reading the right things that got him inspired. You're doing the same thing listening to this podcast right now of stories like these people. And he fully believed that he was going to be rich. But at 12, he also began with Carl, his brother, to buy and pore over the Weekly Sporting News of St. Louis, which tediously tabulated the massive statistics of all league baseball players. This is important because later on he would do this with advertising in newspapers. He would literally measure out the column inches of the newspapers to see how many ads they had versus the editorial. And just like Cy Newhouse, who we talked about in episode 1 of the podcast, he also goes to work very early. So Roy Thomson at 14, school's over and the work begins, and almost immediately so does the boasting. He's very confident. Early on, his family had a mortgage on their house from his aunt. She kept no ledgers. She simply bought crops of second mortgages at a discount from Toronto's suburban builders, kept the documents in a bank, and made a note of each deal in a little black book. Roy suggested that he could bring some sort of efficiency into this chaos, and Aunt Hislop good-naturedly agreed. His passionate devotion to money, even when it was only figures in a ledger— and someone else's figures at that— Touched a chord in her frugal soul. Such a respect for money deserved reward. So she offered her 15-year-old great-nephew an unusual opportunity. She would stake him half a share in the purchase of some discounted second mortgages. When repayments were made on them, she would deduct the amount she had advanced to him, plus a reasonable rate of interest, and then share the balance with him. With no hesitation at all, her nephew accepted the offer immediately. So this is just an example of taking all of your work seriously because it does not go unnoticed. And also he has a single-minded focus on being very helpful because he knows he's going to become successful over time. And Roy goes on to work for a man named Ardor Skyes, who was first amused by the rawness and brashness of this spectacled clerk who had only one suit of clothes and took his job with such passionate seriousness. But realizing that the boy was well-behaved and unusually hardworking, he soon came to like and even to confide in him. After work, Roy who did not smoke or drink and who seemed unaware of the fact that there were girls in the world, regularly patronized Toronto's vaudeville theaters. His brother Carl was an ideal companion at the theater and an even better bookkeeper than his brother Roy, but less ambitious. And that part's important. They both are doing kind of the same things. They're doing bookkeeping, him and his brother, but he's more ambitious. And it's this idea that you can be as ambitious as you want and that will determine your ceiling. You're gonna see the story play out with Carl and Roy, and Roy is just way more ambitious, continues to work hard, but has a bigger vision for what he wants to do. And he keeps building and building and building. And also there were people that made fun of Roy early on, especially his, his big glasses on, like he's kind of in his books all the time. It's just like Sid Newhouse, who we talked about in episode 1. Sid Newhouse was too busy to care what other people thought of him cuz he was too busy trying to get his family outta poverty. This is kind of the same type of thing with Roy Thompson. He knew he wanted to be rich. He knew he wanted to get out of this poverty and the situation he was in with this kind of mortgage weighing over the family all the time. And they were trying to pay it back, obviously, to pay off the house. But he knew he wanted to be rich. And he startled his fellow clerks at the company he's working at by announcing as a 17-year-old, I'll be a millionaire by the time I'm 30, which is very serious for a guy. Who's 17 years old. And in contrast to his brother Carl, who was all good fellowship and quick-spoken, easygoing and fun, Roy was definitely about work. Apparently it did not occur to Roy to consider whether his colleagues at work liked him or not. He felt secure in the affections of his family, and outside of his family, he was too busy planning his future to care what other people thought of him. The people he admired were not those who gambled on the unpredictable and won, but those who confronted life with determination and prospered. Those are the people he's following an example of, and he's going to become one of them over time. Probably some of the admiration for toughness began to show by 1912. Certainly his employer found him at this time obsessed with the idea of making money. Not secretly obsessed, but publicly so. He's telling everybody what he's going to accomplish. And all the while, with Roy Thompson working as a branch manager for Skyes, the man I told you about before, He's getting paid $25 a week. All of that money is going towards the mortgage. He goes to his mother, pays off the mortgage of the house. That's what it's going towards. And his mom led by example and she worked her ass off, which is a good lesson for parents. He saw her working all the time to build a life for their family, and Roy contributed how he could. And in 1912, the mortgage on the house was paid off. His mom decides to sell up, buy a better house on a better street. And here, for the first time, Roy has his own room. But his mom made it very clear this was not a time for relaxing. And so Roy is 18 years old, and his mom is growing restless at him not finding a potential bride yet. And he wasn't even looking for one. So she began to hurl at him any suitable girl or all available girls. And there's a quote from the book that says, but nothing happened, Roy having become less than ever interested in the opposite sex because at last His investments with Aunt Hislop were yielding a return. Spent all his leisure time deciding where to reinvest his profits. He finally decided to buy shares in Size and Company Limited. That's the company he was working for, of which he now had become branch manager. And we see with his career early on, he's taking on responsibility that helps him learn more and develop more skills, which is incredibly important. And here's how it happened. So He was having to go out and sell to construction companies, lake shipping companies, marine suppliers, and that transformed his life. Gradually, he lost his shyness. Gradually, the introvert became less introverted, and gradually, more important than anything else, he developed a passion, a genuine, unquenchable passion for doing a deal, for horse trading, for making a quick buck. This is something he's going to use for decades later, decade upon decade upon decade. is built off of the skills he starts developing at 18 years old. This is a theme I'm going to repeat again and again of how careers are long, and if you stay at it again and again, develop more skills, try different things, you're going to be successful. He has to go through a lot of failures first, though. But back to his mom trying to find him a bride. He eventually finds a lovely lady, and one of the things she says is he's going places, which is— she was trying to choose between 2 people. One being Roy, it brings to mind that ambition is very attractive, and that was what attracted her to him. She said— her full quote was, they're both nice, but you watch this Roy, he's going places. Roy would say about that, one of the best-selling jobs I ever did. And the comment was as typical of the man he was to become as was his purchase and reading each day in the honeymoon bedroom of every New York newspaper sold by the Astoria Hotel. So he marries his wife Edna. In the honeymoon, he's just reading every paper he can. He's an insane human being in that way. So branch manager, married, secure, which for an ambitious man is exactly when the itch becomes unbearable. At 24, Roy Thomson blows it all up. It was just after his second daughter Irma was born in October 1918 that Thomson seemed suddenly too wary of picnics in the country. cards with the girls, singing songs with Kip, and life as branch manager to Ardath's sides. To a startled family and employer, he announced his firm intention at the age of 24 of giving it all up and heading west to the prairies of Saskatchewan to farm. Not unnaturally, his announcement was greeted with dismay. This brings to mind a question: are you willing to blow up your life, take a risk, and pursue what you really want? It is quite admirable for someone to be able to do that at any age. And he's doing this at 24 years old. I think it was 25 by the time he buys the— actually buys the farm. He does this again at 59 and then does it throughout his life. Yes, we're gonna see here, but it does bear in mind the question, are you willing to do the same thing to pursue what you really wanna do? But farming was not what he expected at all. Thompson began constantly to mutter to himself, what a fool I am, but he labored desperately to make his folly profitable and to make his wife's exile endurable. For him, the one pleasure to be derived from this self-imposed purgatory was to let his horses, who knew the way once he had crossed the rail tracks, have their heads on the road home for Holdfast, where he had collected stores and supplies, while he himself lay in the bottom of his grain wagon and read newspapers. Always, he bought all the newspapers he had missed since his last visit. And he clearly loves reading. He loves newspapers. Brings to mind the question, like, what do you enjoy? Roy showed his responsibility in having a farm once he moved out west, even if he hated it. So he still had to do the work. But the thing he loved most was reading those newspapers in his grand wagon. And this is just like foreshadowing of what's to come for him and his, his life and his career. He's obviously interested in this. But farming doesn't work out. He agrees to sell and get out. He recovered more of the $15,000 than he feared. He rented out the 640 acres to a share farmer, and he returned to Toronto where he bought a small auto parts business, and that fared a little better. Because what Thompson really wanted was independence. It wasn't farming. It was the idea that farming would give him independence. It wasn't that he actually loved farming. Which was an important distinction at the time. And so he says to his brother Carl, let's go into business together and make a million, which Carl agrees. It's now 1920, and they decide to sell and distribute spare parts for motor cars. This was also because Roy had to have a business where he could go out and sell. That was his strength. So that's what he decided to do. They bought a machine shop and manufactured flywheel ring gears. They moved into large quarters, they traveled their salesman routes tirelessly, and by 1924 they had built up their business to an annual turnover about $700,000, at which point another disaster struck. Thus, in 1924, they had found that they had sold tens of thousands of dollars worth of parts and machinery to garages that could not pay for them, while the manufacturers from whom they themselves had purchased those parts and machinery were demanding punctual payment. So this is just a massive cash flow issue, which they learned about very early on. And by 1925, they basically faced bankruptcy, which obviously is terrible. They're struggling. But even with that, briskly, as if he had never known a failure, Roy opened up a new company, Service Supplies Limited. This was 1925, and in 1925, a new wonder, which was radio, arrived in the 20th century scene. And manufacturers of radio sets who were looking to open shops of their own We're looking for energetic automotive salesmen who, as well as selling spark plugs to garages, might sell radios to everyone, including the garage proprietor. High on their list of energetic salesmen was one Roy Thompson. So Roy Thompson is about 31 years old this time, and he's offered and accepted the franchise to sell DeForest Crosley radios. And this unlikely sidetrack to his career, 'cause he's also doing a service supply company as well. Eventually leads him to Fleet Street, and he continues to find the struggles of trying to make this thing successful. It says in the book, but twice already, at Holdfast and in Toronto, he had shown that obstacles did not halt him. Like water, he merely swirled around whatever blocked him and surged ahead on a new course, almost always to his ultimate advantage. That point in the book is something that's very inspiring. He deals with challenge after challenge after challenge. And knowing the outcome that his family ends up, you know, years and years later being worth $70 to $90 billion. This is how all of that starts with Roy Thompson. And he just overcomes challenge after challenge, even though he said he'd be, you know, a millionaire by 30, which he was not. He just pushes ahead. I think he just has a self-belief and self-confidence that he's gonna make it happen. And it really brought to mind this quote from, it really brought to mind this quote from Giannis Antetokounmpo, who was with the Bucks. God, just got traded, which is sad. It was on April 26th, 2023, after the 1 seed Bucks lost to the 8 seed Heat. And this is after, you know, a reporter asked him a question and he says, do you get a promotion every year in your job? No. Right? So every year you work is a failure? Yes or no? No. Every year you work, you work towards something, towards a goal. It's not a failure. It's steps to success. There's always steps to it. Michael Jordan played 15 years, won 6 championships. The other 9 years was a failure? That's what you're telling me? It's the wrong question. There's no failure in sports. There's good days, bad days. Some days you're able to be successful. Some days you're not. Some days it's your turn. Some days it's not your turn. And that's what sports is about. There's one more quote that reminds me of this situation by Winston Churchill, very famous. It says, if you're going through hell, keep Going. Roy Thomson knew where he wanted to go. He knew, he knew there were steps towards success. So his only option when dealing with failure after failure, as he's in his 20s and 30s, is to keep going, which is exactly what he does. And we see, because he has this vision, the difference between him and his brother. So Carl, determined to look after a family which eventually included 8 children, was to plump for a life of security in Ottawa. Roy, sacrificing his family's comfort and security as ruthlessly as he did his own, was to prowl, bear-like and myopic, from one barren hunting ground to another, endlessly searching for the biggest pot of honey in the world. So an idea of a secure and profitable future, you already know Roy Thomson isn't taking that deal. He's not about to remain comfortable because $80,000 a year is not $1 million, and he knew he wanted to be a millionaire. Roy was restless. For two years, he had traveled the whole of Eastern Ontario with determination and apparently passionate conviction that no one could afford to be without anything he sold. Yet eighty thousand dollars was Service Supply Limited's optimum turnover, and eighty thousand dollars annually was not nearly enough for him. He began to discuss what new territories might yield him a better return. He told everyone exactly how much his Ottawa business was worth. And declared that he wanted more because he intended on being a millionaire. Again, this is this idea of self-awareness of your own ambitions. How much is enough? What level do you want to play at? You have to be truthful with yourself here. Everyone has different variations of this and different levels of what they want to be, but you have to be truthful with yourself. And one thing I love about this story— there's many things— is that Roy was very truthful about himself. He knew exactly how ambitious he was. Incredibly. And would never stop the rest of his life working towards what he wanted. So someone Roy meets, remarking on the prosperity created by the gold fields of Timmins and Kirkland Lake, suggested Ontario's north. A little later, Thompson accepted the Major's advice. Edna and her 3 children, who were just becoming used to life in Ottawa, uprooted themselves and moved to the bleak north. Carl was entrusted with responsibility for Service Supplies Limited in Ottawa, and in 1928, Roy started a new life in a town called North Bay. He's around 34 years old at this time. In their first home, the Thompson family that winter froze. The house had no central heating, and nothing Edna did could raise the inside morning temperature to anything that approached comfort. This is the beginning of 1929. Having employed someone to look after his Oak Street warehouse, he now set out by train to sell automotive parts, radio sets, washing machines, and refrigerators. So he's a traveling salesman now. In the north of Canada. No matter what time his train drew into a township or a city, Thomson would have telegraphed ahead for the local dealers to meet him, even at 2 in the morning. So keen was competition then that the dealers would be there at the station waiting. Gradually though, it was with the selling of DeForest Crosby's radios that he became obsessed. Here he realized what the new status symbol was, especially since Rogers had just invented the set that needed no batteries but simply plugged into the household supply of electricity. If ever he was to get his money back, he realized he must also help the dealer to sell to his customers. In many areas where there was almost no reception except static, it was not easy. And no matter how many radio sets he sold, like his distributor essentially like was like, hey, you need to sell more radios. So he always had to sell more and more. He would get freight carloads and have to sell those as well. And at this time, he was driven by an oil salesman through a particularly wild reserve. When he looked out and mused, you know, Jack, one day, if we live long enough, we'll be able to sit here right by these lakes and listen to music from all over the world. And this just reminded me of the amazing technology we have available today. We totally forget about how amazing it is. All he wanted to do at the time, his vision at the time, I should say, was to listen from— was to listen to music from all over the world. And the episode we did on Steve Jobs, obviously, They brought that to life with the iPod and then the iPhone and iPad, all these things, technology that is almost unimaginable back then. But at this time, Roy just has to sell, sell, sell. But the timing is not exactly great because by this time, America's Depression had reached Canada's north. As winter approached and potential customers prepared to store their food in the snow rather than buy his refrigerators and continue to boil their laundry rather than buy his washing machines, And refused even to discuss buying a radio set because reception was hopeless, Thompson announced that he would overcome this lack of reception by the most obvious means of all. He would open a radio station right there in North Bay, whose transmissions everyone would be able to receive. He had no license to do so, no technical knowledge of how to do so, no equipment, and no capital with which to do so, but this was his plan. While those in whom he confided, which was everyone who would listen to him, Mocked, he himself became absorbed in the exercise of figuring out how to put his plan into effect. And this is part of the reason why I love this dude. Like, he doesn't care at all about what skills he currently has or what people say. He doesn't care. He wants to be successful. He keeps pushing. He is full of self-confidence and pursuing these new ideas that have potential. There's just— he finds a way to make things happen. Like, just think of the audacity. He's trying to sell radios. Oh, they're not getting good reception? Well, what do most people do? Try to find like a way to sell to someone else who has good reception. But what does Roy do? He's like, okay, cool, let's just make a radio station in town. Like, it's this audacity and this ambition that gets rewarded over time. His ambition comes first. He was 17 years old when he said he wanted to be a millionaire by 30. So the ambition comes first. And then knowing that when opportunities come forth like this where he can't make sales because they're not getting transmission, they're not getting any reception. Okay, cool. I'm gonna make a radio station instead. Like, this is how you become a multi, multi, multi-billionaire. So the first thing he has to do is get a license. There's this company, the B2B company in Iroquois Falls that held the only license that would serve his purpose. So he had to get that or abandon his idea of broadcasting from the North Bay. And in consideration of the payment of only $1, the loan of their license for a year on condition that at the end of the year, they could either ask for it back, or by not asking for it back, it would automatically and in perpetuity vest to Thompson. So then he's permitted under the code letters CFCH to broadcast. But of course he needs a place to be able to broadcast from. So then he approaches the management of North Bay's Capitol Theater and pointed out that backstage there was enough room. To set up a broadcasting studio. If they would give him the space for free, he would give them free time on his proposed radio station. Time to advertise their films and their dance hall. And the Capitol management agreed. I just think how smart this is. Imagine you want to make this happen, have a radio station, you know nothing about how to make a radio station. You have no location, you have no capital. But he just finds a way because there's always deals to be made. He can make promises, he can take one step after another, and I just love this so much. I got so hyped reading this. It's like, you can make things happen with nothing. If you have the ambition, you will find a way. Another thing he needed was a speed track. Having never heard of a speed track, Thompson asked what this was and how much it would cost. They also need a transmitter. And he ends up getting a transmitter, but it was like useless. So he returned to the place he got it from, he's like, hey, will you folks trust me with a couple of $80 tubes? Realizing that without the tubes, the transmitter would not transmit. And without transmission, Thompson could earn no money and that without earnings, their promissory note would never be redeemed. And this is the Carbon Company, by the way. This is where he got the transmitter from. They happened to have this old one laying around that wasn't being used. And he had no money, so he gave them the promissory notes to be able to get the transmitter, and they obviously had to fix it for him. And the guy he gets to help him with all of this, it's a guy named Barnaby, and he convinces Barnaby to join him. Because he would have more autonomy and flexibility and be able to kind of get a fledgling radio station off the ground, even though Roy Thomson was going to pay this guy Barnaby much less than he was making at his other company. Which also brings to mind the company, the carbon company. They're driven by incentives, and understanding that is why Roy knew they would pay for these $80 tubes, because these people were obviously incentivized to give him the credit and pay for these tubes so they could get paid back. It's just super smart all around. And even to set up the Capitol stage to be the studio, they— to get some sort of like acoustical effect, Barnaby knocked down the walls of the small offices in this— on this floor and making one large studio. He then roofed it over with old chicken wire and even older mattresses. This is the first radio station. that they're going to create. This is the place where it happens. This place with old mattresses put together with, with chicken wire to make the acoustics better. It is a cheap operation, to say the least, but it is a starting point. While Barnaby thus battled with worn-out equipment and an almost complete lack of funds, Thompson was down on Main Street selling advertising for his new station. He offered 100-word spots for the princely sum of $0.35 each. And having successfully extracted this 35 cents worth from Sol Weiser, the doyen of North Bay's traders, he soon got orders from most remaining stores and dealers. So his strategy was going to the key people first and then going to every other store, because once they saw that this store was advertising on the radio, they would also advertise on the radio. And I mentioned this guy Barnaby, so Jack Barnaby, he Is working on Thompson to get this all set up, but he doesn't actually join him until a little bit later because he's working full-time for their company. Jack is what Roy Thompson says. Why don't you stay with me? You stay with me and you'll do all right. Confidently, he outlined his plan, and frankly, he explained that at the moment he can only pay Barnaby $25 a week, whereas the Canadian National Carbon Company was paying him $45 a week. Stay with me, he urged. At the height of the Depression in Canada, Barnaby gave up his $45 a week job with a massive national company in Toronto to join Thomson's puny radio station in North Bay at a drop-in salary of $20 a week with the promise that it would increase to $45 as soon as possible. And finally, on March 4th, 1931, the much-publicized day of the opening CFCH station arrived. And on the day of the launch, Roy Thomson was undoubtedly the most popular man in town. And he always seemed cheerful. He'd say, I wish I could get paid some money. I got a carload of radios to pay for. I got bills. I reckon I must owe maybe $30,000, but no one ever pays me a cent. Still, I'll come out of it all okay. How's the radio station going? People would ask him. Good, he would reply. It's gonna be real good. It needed to be real good. For his consignments of DeForest Crosby's radios alone, His unpaid accounts were beginning to be frightening. But of course, Roy Thomson just keeps pushing forward. So suddenly, even the system burnt out, burnt itself out essentially. And for the next 9 days at like a ruinous cost, it was kept on air by using every 45-volt battery in town. And realizing at last that he had to have efficient machinery, Thomson raised a $1,000 loan from the Bank of Nova Scotia, which still remembered his scrupulous repayments of his 1925 debts. And bought a reliable 100-watt transmitter to replace the now useless 50-watt. Again, what choice do you have? Keep pushing forward. Desperately, Thomson set off to sell these sets, eventually reaching Shaplow, about 300 miles west of North Bay. He made his way direct to the leading store, Smith and Chapel's. There, he mesmerized a young employee, Arthur Grout, into ordering 3 times as many sets as the store needed. And when he ends up having to talk to Grout's boss, An hour and a half later, Thompson returned, the order initialed and doubled. So he got an even larger radio here. And Grout protested, we'll have radios sticking out of our ears. Most important order of my life, Thompson told him, waving the piece of paper. This guy can sell. That is a key piece of Roy Thompson. He could sell. On the strength of that order, he himself would now get enough credit to pay for the whole of DeForest Crosby's latest consignment. And so keep his head clear of the rising tide of bankruptcy. He returned to North Bay more cheerfully than ever. More cheerfully not only because he had landed a good order, but because he had a new plan. The council elections were soon to be held, and he, Roy Thomson, radio benefactor of the North in general and North Bay in particular, had decided to run for alderman. Thomson's history, having been on the brink of bankruptcy in 1925, chronic insolvency since 1925, and the imminent collapse of Modern Electric that year, Yet very soon, so convincingly he did sell himself that he became head of the finance committee. I mean, you can just do things. This is my, my interpretation of all this. He was the head of the finance committee at this place after all of this stuff happened with bankruptcy and like insolvency. You could just do things. He's the head of the finance committee because he wants to be. He convinces them because he can sell himself, which is maybe one of the most important skills you can have. And at this time, His wife Edna reacts to her husband's first and recent press interview in which he blandly asserted that he would soon become a millionaire. What a crazy thing to say, she sobbed. We can't even pay for the milk. Just think about that. Can't even buy milk and he's saying he's going to be a millionaire. He has this belief and this ridiculous self-confidence that he's going to do it, and that drives him repeatedly. But just think of that audacity. You have to think you can do it. And this time I was reminded of a Derek Sivers post. It's called There's No Speed Limit. And in it, his teacher compressed 2 years of Berklee music theory into a few private lessons and told Sivers the standard pace is for chumps, that the system is designed so anyone can keep up, but a driven person can go way faster than anyone expects. And Sivers graduated Berkeley in 2 and a half years because of these lessons. It's a great blog post. There's No Speed Limit. If you search for Derek Sivers, There's No Speed Limit, you'll see it. It makes you think a bit different about what you're capable of and the timeline on which you can do it. And around this time, the state of Roy Thompson's finances were precarious at best. While Edna sobbed that it was crazy of her husband to envisage To envisage himself a millionaire. The bailiffs moved in on Modern Electric. Thompson was even unable to pay the installments due from him as agreed on Jack Barnaby's car, and DeForest Crosley was arranging to tidy up his accounts. And so because of this, Thompson in the future made it so most of his family's household necessities would be paid for with advertising time on CFCH. Which above all he was determined to keep alive. So obviously he has a couple businesses going on. He's doing a couple things at this time, but he decides that he's going to keep the thing alive with the most potential. So he's keeping the business alive that has the most potential, which for him was this radio station. That was the thing that he thought had tremendous potential. So he kept that alive. This reminded me of Dave Portnoy, Barstool Sports. A lot of people have strong opinions on him, but In the early days too, he was in so much debt, he couldn't pay for anything. He struggled to get advertisers. And eventually what happens is they do a bunch of events and the events start taking off. They make some real money from events. And then it's just a combination of them doing some events and then them doing so many blog posts. I think they were doing like 12 blogs a day that he was writing. He had a group of writers as well that was also doing that just to stay alive. And obviously this grows into a company that's worth millions and millions of dollars today. And an important thing happens after this first year. So the deal with Abitibi, this company that gave him the license, it became his then. After this time, they didn't, they didn't ask for it back, essentially. 1932's profits have been swallowed up by payments due to the carbon company and the Bank of Nova Scotia. 1932's profits looked like being inadequate even to cover those amounts due to DeForest Crosley, but he did not falter. CFCH, he determined, would stay on the air. In doing so, he consciously accepted the possibility of bankruptcy for his family as well as for himself, which possibility was stronger than ever now. For when he asked Carl to join him in the broadcasting venture, Carl, choosing security for his family, had declined. Thus, CFCH had become Roy Thomson's first solo venture since his farm at Holdfast, and often his employees were convinced that it was doomed to the same dismal end. And just take note of this struggle after struggle after struggle, knowing how massive this empire becomes, because this is the beginning of it all. Even at the station, Barnaby has this assistant, and in the absence of cashable paycheck and therefore money, which was to buy anything, was sleeping in the studio. All supplies were purchased with studio time. Everyone did every job there was, from announcing to selling time to writing copy. And CFCH somehow survived. So his radio station just— they find a way to keep it on the air. Because even as he's trying to pay them— Fortunately for Thompson's employees, close to the Capitol Theater was a coffee and food stall run by a European immigrant called Phil the Greek. Phil was Thompson's own age and inexplicably sympathetic toward the big man with the thick glasses. Also, since people must eat and since food is traditionally paid for, even during depressions, Phil always had money in his till. Good-naturedly, he began to cash CFCH's salary checks, sticking the checks on a hook at the end of his soda fountain, and so became Thompson's unofficial backer in North Bay. Tommy Darling, who was one of the people working for Roy Thompson, noticing how thick was the wad of checks impaled on the hook, asked, aren't you worried about all that dough? Nope, replied Phil. They'll be good one day. So Roy has one station, it's barely alive, held together by a soda fountain hook full of uncashed checks. Naturally, Roy decides it's time to expand. Thompson restlessly set his sights higher and decided that however remote his millionaire-dom might be, there was no reason at all why this year at least he should not become North Bay's mayor. But thankfully for Thompson, it does not work out. He'd say, I couldn't have won, the other guy's been there since 1905. And he divested his hopes of civic prestige at North Bay, forgot politics, changed his course entirely, and decided that a better objective would be more radio stations in Northern Ontario. This is a freaking godsend for him. And it's just like Cy Newhouse. So Cy Newhouse in episode 1, we talked about, he did not win his early case as a lawyer. So he ends up, he's basically doing 2 things. He's being a lawyer and he's doing newspaper stuff. And he ends up instead sticking to newspapers. And he prospered so tremendously because of that. You just never know when your break is gonna come from something that doesn't work out for you, which is important for people to remember as they're going through their career. Years later, Thompson would say, I was lucky to get defeated, which in the moment, of course, it doesn't feel good, but how do you turn those losses and those failures, those challenges into wins later on is the most important part. Thompson told everyone else his plans too. He told them how he intended to open radio stations in the gold mining towns of Timmins and Kirkland Lake, and spoke with such confidence that many, in spite of the fact that he still wore patched pants, believed him. To his engineer though, Jack Barnaby, at the very end of 1932, Thompson spoke soberly. He was now nearly 39 years old, and— For all his soaring ambitions, a realist. Jack, he warned, if we don't get our license for a station at Timmins soon, you're going to have to look for another job. And for context, all who came to Timmins from 1911 onward were either looking for gold or planning to siphon off some of the earnings of those who already had found it. And so on the ground floor of Bartleman's building were the relics of printing works, an old flatbed press and crates of disused type, which once had printed Bartleman's defunct newspaper, The Citizen. Thompson gave the dead press barely a glance as he ran upstairs. A fat 200-pound man in his 40th year, still chasing the millions he had promised himself by the time he was 30. He approved the space offered to him and agreed on a rental. And by the way, Barnaby, as we're going to see here, is clearly like a 10x employee, a good example of one at least. You need to find these types of people. He did so much for Roy Thompson that It was tremendously important. So like saving his employer an estimated $7,000 of good money in 1933, Barnaby built first the news station's speech rack, and then from crystal to antenna, its entire transmitting unit. So he saved him thousands of dollars by being creative with how he could solve these kind of early problems of getting radio stations off the ground. And so his second station, CKGB, opened to a captive audience and was blessed at the very first newscast By the sensational announcement of a local murder. Following this up swiftly, Thompson bearded Sam Bukovetsky, the owner of the biggest general store in town, and sold him some time that obliged Bukovetsky's greatest rival in the clothing business, Sam Fishman, also to buy time. So he pits advertisers against each other, showcases one, which then the other wants to buy, and obviously they're both advertising. So guess who wins? Roy Thompson. And just at that time, Roy decides that he's gonna raise his advertising rates at once, and all the town's traders met and appointed a spokesperson to go to Thompson and tell him that the rates were too high. But not only did Thompson not lower his advertising rates, he sold the spokesman a year's time signals at the new high rates as well. This dude can sell. It's just so impressive that you hear about this over and over again. He's clearly a phenomenal, phenomenal, phenomenal salesman, and That helps him in making deals. That helps him in selling advertising. It's a skill he has that serves him incredibly well. And anyone in Timmons was a potential customer in Thompson's eyes. He'd say, my name's Thompson, call me Roy. And he would beam his wide smile at them, confident that he could sell them. All that was needed was the right line, the right argument. Thompson would figure out how to— Thompson would figure out how a drugstore had been able to afford a new electric sign. Whether a business might be worth buying purely for the property in which it stood, how much another business should be able to earn, and what made a certain trader tick. All of this was purely academic, a mere extension of the long-ago habit of compiling baseball statistics and figuring out which players should be bought by which team. But to Thompson, it was fascinating. And this actually reminds me of a crazy story. When I was little, I used to play Madden, the football game. I didn't play the game, Like, as in, I didn't play the football game typically. I would manage the team. I wanted to run the team itself and be the GM in the draft. I would literally have notes taken down for the draft on pieces of paper for this football game, literally a video game, of who the best prospects were every year for the draft. I would feel like I would even save it after the fact and I think know who got drafted and what their rating was and then go back and make the best draft choices. All that to say is it just reminded me of that story and like, what things are you interested in? Pursue that. You just never know where that can lead you. And obviously I'm not really pursuing it in this way, but I have been fascinated by research. And even back then, the research was the Stack magazine. I was researching how the greatest athletes of the time, like, like LaDainian Tomlinson and Drew Brees, like all these NFL players, it had their workouts. And I was researching what they did and keeping tabs on that and how they were training and looking at this and getting inspired. And it did a lot to build not only my ambition and work ethic back then, this was back in high school, but especially now I have that work ethic, but also this research capability and muscle that I now use for the show, which has served me well. Let's see, probably 20 years later, which is pretty crazy. And Thompson at this time was obviously not going to rest, not going to stop. He was preoccupied at the very moment with figuring out whether or not he should start a newspaper. How he was to become mayor of North Bay and how and when to start a 3rd radio station at Kirkland Lake. Again, his ambition is ever expanding, always a new project, always something else he could start or he could buy. He could make a deal. That was his role. He was not operating the businesses. He always hired very capable people for the most part, as soon as he could, to operate the businesses. And these competent people allowed him then to take on some of these other things, do his figuring as he would call it. Where he's like trying to figure out different businesses. I think that's important, the self-awareness in deciding what kind of entrepreneur or businessman or businesswoman you want to be. What part of the business do you actually want to be working on? And now it was time that Kirkland Lake got a radio station. And so Thompson's friend was O.J. Thorpe, who's a furniture dealer. And as was the custom, also Haley Burries' place, undertaker. The store, I should say, their undertaker. And so Thorpe's friend was the Honorable Wesley Gordon. Thompson had persuaded Thorpe to apply for the license on their joint behalf and to seek all possible assistance in this application from Wesley Gordon. So Thorpe's application, backed as it was by Wesley Gordon, had been successful, and Thorpe and Thompson now needed only funds, studio space, equipment, and staff to begin broadcasting. Thompson wasted no time, and this is always how he operates. He never wastes time. He is so fast about executing. There's a short time between him thinking of an idea and him taking action on the idea, and he keeps moving forward, and I love it so, so much. Then he visited old Joe Edwards, who apparently would take a chance on anything, and asked him to take a chance on leasing out part of his sprawling 2-story corner building as a radio station. Edwards agreed at the ridiculous rental of $75 a month. Thompson asked Thorpe to introduce him to such townsfolk as had money to spare, and Thorpe, naturally enough for a local undertaker, introduced him to the local doctors. Nevertheless, to the surprise of all, most particularly of Jack Barnaby, enough money was eventually raised for the purchase of entirely new equipment. CJKL was on the air in much less time than had seemed possible, almost at once. Brian Shallon became its manager at a salary of $18 a week, Plus a small apartment beside the studio. And again, taking a step back, we realize that Roy's abilities at persuasion saved him. Little money, he finds a way. Always. And he's very high agency and resourceful. There's just always ways to make a deal and create opportunities. And you realize this from him buying radio station after radio station, starting different companies. He just finds a way to make a deal. And on this new radio station, the Ford Company had been persuaded to sponsor For those who had actually bought a radio set, these broadcasts alone justified the price. CJKL thus became instantly enormously popular, and with the recruitment of a young, clean-cut hockey player called Jack Davidson to sell time, it quickly began to make money. Thompson now had, working for him in the persons of Darling, Shellen, and Davidson, an executive nucleus around whom could be clustered a larger staff and more diversified holdings, whilst he himself, Was adventuring into the unknown wilds of journalism, as represented by his acquisition of Bartleman's Citizen. This is a newspaper. And this highlights the lesson: put people in places that allow you to do what you are best at. He needs to be adventuring, creating new ventures, expanding, finding opportunities. So he puts these 3 executives in place that he can build this company off of. And that dead flatbed press on the ground floor of Bartleman's building, the one Roy barely glanced at on his way up the stairs, that's about to change everything for him. So Thompson's only association with the paper, on the other hand, had been that it had bought time for CKGB for a daily newscast. So Bartleman thereupon named $6,000 as a selling price, and Thompson agreed to the price as so long as Bartleman could achieve a position where he could legally sell. So he's going to buy his newspaper, which then has this like Where's your money? the lawyer asked briskly. I haven't got cash, Thompson replied equally briskly. Tell you what I'll do though. I'll give you $200 down and 28 promissory notes of $200 each, repayable over 28 months. That's a hell of a deal! Barrowman protested. Look at it, Thompson pointed out. I'm going to make a good newspaper out of the Press. Now, if I go broke, you get the paper back. And if I don't, You get your money. Either way, you can't lose. So no money, but he makes a very compelling can't-lose deal. So he de-risks it for the person he's selling to, which is just so freaking smart. How do you make deals with no money but lots of ambition? This is how you do it. You find partners who are incentivized to make it work. You try to find ways to de-risk things for them. You take properties that are not being used, like the license for the radio that he got early on. And you make them into something. This is how you get deals done with no capital. And this is a big theme of Roy Thomson's early life and this whole entire podcast episode. Thus, each man was pleased with the deal, each thinking that he got the better of the other. But certainly, once the press became his, Thomson must have wished a thousand times it had never left Bartleman's hands. Thomson could afford neither Canadian Press nor any other press service, and news came mainly by telephone and telegram. At least the newspaper, now renamed the Timmons Press, did not offend, and from the beginning it made an impact. Although he worked desperately hard managing the press, selling time for CKGB, supervising the opening of CJKL, and being a controversial North Bay alderman, Thompson still found time to figure. And by figure, that's just working on the business. So Roy sent a dime to a newspaper office in each such town These were 100 cities in America. They're approximately the same size as Timmins, asking the publisher to mail him back a copy of his journal. Then, on the floors of his lodging room in Timmins, of the Spruce Street office, and of his North Bay homes, he went about the systematic task of measuring, analyzing, and charting— most particularly charting— all his conclusions about the makeup and earning power. With irresistible logic, he decided to make the press read more than the The Advance— this is his competitor— by publishing more often. He would start by publishing twice as often. No sooner, however, did the Press start publishing twice weekly than The Advance followed suit. Quite undeterred, Thompson called his editor to him and announced, we're going daily, at which point George Lake of The Advance decided that enough was enough. And so Thompson asked Abitibi, in view of his now much greater newsprint orders, for 15 days credit rather than strict COD terms, so cash on delivery terms. Abitibi, who had for some time began urging upon George Lake the idea of a daily newspaper, replied that they would not offer Thompson 15 days credit. They would offer him 30 days credit, which was their usual practice with publishers. Thus, an 8-page daily newspaper suddenly arrived on the Thompson scene. And this just highlights how people like to support other ambitious people. They gave him this 30 days credit because they wanted a daily newspaper to exist in the town. And Thompson took it on and was rewarded with more credit. And this reminded me of this line, uh, from Tim Ferriss, the author of The 4-Hour Workweek, angel investor. And he got this from David Schwartz's The Magic of Thinking Big. And here's a quote: It's lonely at the top. 99% of people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things. So they aim for the mediocre. The level of competition is thus fiercest for realistic goals, paradoxically making them the most time and energy consuming. The fishing is best where the fewest go. That point is so important. Most people aim for mediocre, so it's actually more competitive at the mediocre level. Because Roy Thomson was going to make this daily newspaper, he actually has less competition for that. in the industry, in this small town, I should say, at least because he's going daily and doing the hard thing. There's less competition and people are willing to help him because he's incredibly ambitious. And so when at this time Lord Rothermere, the distinguished Fleet Street proprietor and guest of the ABDB company at Iroquois Falls, visited the press offices, he was so startled by the fact that a daily newspaper could come off such archaic machinery that he invited Thompson to dine with him in his private car on the train to North Bay that night. And also at this time, instead of the $5,800 worth of promissory notes that Bartleman and Ryan had been given, they instead take directorships and shares in Northern Broadcasting and Publishing instead. And also this happens with Roy basically being bravado in a small lie to get the cash he needs to buy them out. Eventually he'd say, you got the cash to buy me out? Bartleman flashed. Yes, Thompson lied. You want to get out too, Max? No, Ryan said. I'm sticking with you. Then I'm staying too, Bartleman growled. But yeah, of course Thompson did not have the cash to actually buy them out, but instead they take the shares. Instead they stay with him. Roy finds a way to finance this business however he can, and this is exactly what we need to do. Find a way to finance your business however you have to. Start with the preferred sources, the people of town, friends and family, and then banks as needed. And also Roy is just so determined. It reminds me of Rockefeller getting loans. and he continues to get loans. And same with Zamori, getting as many loans as possible to get as much land as possible so he could get big and compete with United Fruit. We talked about that in the Sam Zamori episode. You just had to have more loans 'cause he needed money to compete. He understood the business and that's what he needed. You just have to do what you have to do to get the capital. It's the same with How to Get Rich, the book by Felix Dennis. We'll cover that eventually on the show. I love the book. Terrible title, but great book. And talks about swimming with the fishes. Or the sharks? And he— it says, I'm raising capital. The sharks and dolphins are the big investors in VCs. The fishes are everyone else. Having avoided the sharks and perhaps swum with the dolphins, we turn to the fishes. How I love the fishes. How you will learn to love them too. It was via the fishes that I made my own first money, the seed capital which ensured that I retained control and ownership of my own business. Fishes come in all shapes and sizes: friends, acquaintances, Relatives, business colleagues, small investors, friendly bank managers of the old school, professional advisors, ex-employers, suppliers, and vendors are among them. Thompson raised money from exactly these fishes: Timmons' doctors, the theater, his suppliers, Phil the Greek. So that's how Roy Thompson gets the money. He swam with the fishes. And slowly, from the first daily issue in September of 1935, As the months passed, Thompson's staff learned to overcome the disadvantages of inferior machinery and youthful inexperience, and the people of Timmins grew to enjoy their own daily newspaper. More than that, the press began to attract talent. Remember, this is 1935, so Roy Thompson is 40 or 41 years old at this time. I always just love that context because we see from Many of these stories that entrepreneurs are not successful as early as people always make them out to be. It takes time, often years of time, and way, way, way beyond what we see as like the 20-something-year-old making millions of dollars. That's not the case normally. And so Roy acquires another radio station, CJCS, in Stratford, Ontario. But mainly it was Timmins that occupied his attention now. Timmins, where shrewd men like Sisson and Leslie and young recruits were slowly building the Press into a popular paper. And the entire staff became accustomed to Thompson working 16 or 17 hours a day, figuring ways of keeping everything going, and at the same time paying off bank loans for 4 radio stations, dividends on shares, salaries, and expenses. To them, the ordeal seemed hardly worthwhile. But what the hell was Thompson's attitude? I'm being such a nuisance to the Advance, they'll have to come to me soon for a merger. That's what he thought at the time. And now it's 1936. Thompson was leaving North Bay. He was 42 years old, 12 years beyond the point at which he had boasted he would be a millionaire. And still he gave no indication that millionaire was what he was to become. Think about this. His family, a couple of generations later, will be worth $70 to $90 billion. And he's 42 years old. He's still not a millionaire like he said he would be 12 years earlier. Think about that, how much his business grows. But what has he done in this time? He has showcased his ability to build things, his ability to manage people, to put people in places. He's shown his ambition, and he definitely has a foundation built for much, much more growth. And he also had learned a few lessons. He had lost a marked degree of intimacy with his family. He was not, at 42, a millionaire, but already he had learned the lesson that makes millionaires: that neither leisure nor pleasure is as important as doing a deal, were as enjoyable as making a buck. He did not even approve of saving money, which he regarded as a commodity to be used, stretched, augmented, and multiplied, but not to be locked up. A dollar to Thompson was merely the security he could offer for another dollar. With $2, he would buy. With what he had bought, he would raise more credit and buy more and put it in pawn to more credit endlessly. And that part is a very important line in the life of Roy Thomson and how he gets to where he is. Reinvesting, reinvesting, reinvesting. He's not saving this money. He's reinvesting it to build bigger. So, 4 radio stations, 1 paper, 0 savings, endless credit. What he needs next isn't money. It's a partner who can sell like he can. He needs to multiply himself. Enter Jack Kent Cooke. It was a meeting on November 13th, 1936 that eventually brought Jack Kent Cooke into the orbit of Roy Thomson. Although on that day, he met not Thompson himself, but Brian Shalin. Jack was a salesman of almost supernatural persuasiveness. He was completely disenchanted with life as a traveler for Colgate-Palmolive, and had only one ambition in life, which was somehow to get into radio. And he agrees to join Roy Thompson. No salary had been mentioned. He cannot imagine how he'd come to resign a perfectly good job. This is Jack. Abandon a comfortable home, forsake a beautiful wife, and drive 120 terrifying miles in a blizzard. Was a myopic man to a post that was someone else's anyway, without first even discussing a salary. But he had. And this is Roy Thomson's ability to get someone to work for him. He's always able to get talent to work from him, to work for him repeatedly with basically no money. But he offers experience and he showcases the vision. That's how he does it. Here, get all this autonomy. You're going to get all this experience. Maybe not as much money as you want right now. But here's a vision for where we're going. That's how he sells his talent. It's very impressive. Meeting Jack Kent Cooke was a tremendous— was a godsend. So he works harder than ever. By the middle of the year, he had transformed the fortunes of this hitherto troublesome Thompson property so greatly that it was even making a profit. And this is CJCS. What do you want to do now? Thompson asked him, pleased with him because his efforts had transformed a money-losing lease into a property that had just fetched $10,000 and made an overall profit of about $6,000. Stay in Toronto, Cook answered, and Thompson agreed. He appointed Cook his national sales representative in Toronto and installed Cook in his Toronto office. And these 2 people compare Roy with Jack. There's the 25-year-old good-looker, who's Jack, and the 43-year-old myopic bear, who are identical in their ambitions, absorbed in their work, and unable to distinguish between the fun they got out of work And the fun they shared after work. And I love this. You got, you gotta find people you enjoy spending time with, whether work or play, whatever. And when you can do this, when you're building things together, you're having fun building and you're having fun afterwards. That's the mentality you need. You need to find the right thing to work on and the right people to work with. Thompson soon came to realize that Cook, his favorite, sold everything that needed selling so brilliantly That he himself could now virtually abandon selling and confine his energies to figuring, which really means that Roy Thomson can now work on the business and expand because he has someone who's so good at sales. And he does these founder-led sales first until he got a killer salesman in Jack, and that was very helpful. Watching Thomson thus, looking at the envelopes and the scribble pads, Cook learned the lesson of the older man's life, that it was not money that made you rich, But the instinct to acquire it, the willingness to risk it, and a miser's awareness as to how each cent of it was being spent. Not that Thompson was rich in 1937. On the contrary, in terms of money in the bank, he was poor. He was as poor as ever. But nobody who watched him eternally scribbling could doubt that soon he would own more. And then someone else who Thompson knew would say, you can do that? Leslie muttered, bewildered. Yet you'll spend hours talking to any salesman who wants your ear. Sure, Thompson told him. They all teach me something. There's always something I can learn. You could learn the day's takings in advertising from me, Leslie pointed out, just by asking. More fun this way, Thompson grinned, and 25 years later was still to prefer his 3-finger technique to the simple one of asking. So Thompson always wants to learn from everyone. That's one thing is incredibly important, and he likes some of the manual work of figuring things out and understanding businesses from his own perspective. And then on April Fools', he does like some pranks on April 1st, but then in the early hours of April 2nd, the phone rings and Timmons is on fire. Thompson and Cook reach Timmons. They only find ashes and blackened machinery everywhere, twisted metal and lumps of molten glass and lead. Almost at once, Bill Mason of the Nugget, which is another newspaper, Was on the phone. He had never liked Thompson as a newspaperman because no good newspaperman could also be a radioman, which is blasphemy. I think it's dumb, but, but that was, that was besides the point. And at the moment, he rang simply to say that the Nugget Works in North Bay were available. They could print the Timmins Daily Press until Roy could make other arrangements. Cook borrowed $2,000 and gave it to Thompson, who was underinsured. Of course, the limits of Thompson's ambition are Endless. Thompson decided to build a combined broadcasting station and newspaper office such as the North had never seen before, and to begin the new project now. He eventually, though only with great difficulty, obtained the money he needed through the goodwill of a local mine owner, Jack Bickel, who took considerable pride in Timmins and believed that its prestige demanded a daily newspaper. Bickel persuaded the Montreal Trust Company to advance Thompson the money he needed on good terms, A block of land was obtained, plans were drawn up, and soon Thompson's dream began to take shape. And seeing that 1940 would boom, he sent Cooke and Leslie to buy back nearly every outside share of Northern Broadcasting so that the wartime profits would be his, not casual investors. The war brought the good things wars always bring a businessman. Some 1940 buys grew beyond anything he could ever known. And when Senator Rupert Davies wanted a station in southeastern Ontario, Thompson became his partner. All that was now needed to channel the combined energies of Cook and himself into a torrent of profits, Thompson realized, was a man in Timmons who could put onto the balance sheets all the figures for each of his possessions so that he could compare them like with like, rationalize them, and budget for each separate business as accurately as Nolan Sisson had always budgeted for the press. So young man Sid Chapman, he ends up hiring him. He demanded $45 a week. And the right to buy stock in Thompson's business. When Thompson was indecisive, hating the idea of anyone but himself owning stock in this company, it was Chapman who coolly ended the interview, giving Thompson his telephone number to call if necessary. And this is just like, again, reminds me of Felix Dennis with his book, How to Get Rich. He says, because ownership isn't the important thing. If you want to be rich, it's the only thing. Ownership is not the most important thing. It is the only thing that counts. Nothing else counts in the getting of money. Nothing counts but what you own in the race to get rich. And because Thompson wants to get rich, he understands this fully. He maintains as much ownership as possible. And because he had hired people like Cook, Cook also had a grasp for understanding where to invest money. After a trip east into Quebec, he suggested that the radio station at Rouyn, which is another place, be acquired. Thompson already owned the license for that. Thompson already owned the license for the station at Val-d'Or, and a second French-speaking station seemed sound policy. Okay, said Thompson, we'll go in as partners. You raise a third, I'll raise two-thirds, and we'll go in as partners. For $21,000, the station became theirs. Another Quebec station at Amos soon followed, and you can see just Thompson building this. Empire. But Thompson is still treading this line very carefully, walking a deliberate tightrope across the abyss of bankruptcy, his eyes set unwaveringly on expansion. His balancing pole, Chapman's skills with the books. And this lasted for years, constantly walking this fine line and going bigger and bigger and wanting to expand. And then in the years of 1941 to 1944, this was a period of enforced Thompson consolidation. Consolidation because newsprint rationing forced metropolitan advertisers to seek space in provincial newspapers like the Timmins Press, observing which Thompson decided that somehow he must buy more provincial newspapers, but was frustrated to discover that there were no sellers. And then Chapman, having raised yet another bank loan, Steadily bought back stock in this company held by anyone other than Bartleman, Ryan, Cook, Chapman, or himself. So they're just reinvesting back in the business, buying more of their own company essentially. And Thompson's expansion goes beyond businesses he typically knows. However much of a something his balance sheets may at last have become, the hard-learned habits of poverty and economy did not die. When he was talked into providing backing briefly for a baseball team, He used to watch in anguish as balls hit out of the ground were promptly replaced, each at the cost of $1.20. Geez, he would invariably mutter, isn't anybody gonna go look for that ball? I find this hilarious, but it is just how much of a stickler for cost. He's trying to constantly watch his cost because he knows all those savings can be reinvested. That $1.20 on each ball could have been spent somewhere better and could have been reinvested in the company somehow. That is his mentality. And when you combine that mentality that he has from a young age and you compound that for decades, you get a business that ends up being worth tens of billions of dollars. And so the end of 1943 approached. It was a year that had enriched all of Thompson's assets and seen the flowering of Jack Kent Cooke's talent for program planning as well as selling. It was also the year in which his expansionist tendencies blocked in the realm of broadcasting. Thompson at last saw the way to expand as a publisher. So he's blocked from buying, like, radio stations, flush with wartime profits, and hungry. Which brings us to a park bench, a nearly million-dollar deal, and the moment Roy Thompson became a newspaper chain. As Thompson raged at the stupidity of anyone taking weekends off, it was decided that there was nothing they could do till Monday. But then he moved very fast. He persuaded his bank to give him credit. He ordered his lawyers to draw up an agreement that would satisfy not one but 6 vendors selling not one but 4 newspapers. And he offered to pay the vendors almost their full asking price of $888,000 by means of a loan of some $375,000 from his bank and a mortgage from the vendors for the balance. But then suddenly they all wanted more than Thompson was offering, and it looked as if the deal was off. Thompson comments to Chapman as they sat side by side on a park bench. I could go broke here. If this deal goes sour, it could finish us. Chapman encouraged. At least it's nice sitting out here in the sun. We can't lose everything. An hour later, Roy Thompson owned the Canadian Observer of Sarnia, the Evening Tribune of Welland, the Evening Reporter of Galt, and the Daily Sentinel Review of Woodstock. The balance of his small empire had changed dramatically from 8 radio stations and 1 newspaper to 8 radio stations and 5 newspapers. Nobody believed his papers could keep running as before, and they did. Newsprint rationing pushed national advertising into his small papers, turning the Sarnia price into a bargain. He knew his cash needs. He borrowed money, and every newspaper recorded its own economics from day 1 so he could compare all of these things. And around this time, his wife Edna says, we don't need any more money. She objected, but Thompson, who owed $750,000 to the bank and whose properties were slow to earn the repayments due, did not agree. He needed plenty more money. Otherwise, as he said to Chapman, he could lose the lot. And he'd say shortly after this, every man in Canada has a chance to amass a fortune, and I see no reason why I shouldn't get my share of it. I agree that money isn't everything. It may not buy you immunity from death, but having the funds to buy top-notch doctors certainly helps delay it. And around 1940, something happens. After 1940, he became a businessman purchasing and running newspapers for profit. And this is, this is regards to him intervening with newspapers, like the actual content of it. Before 1940, he did use some of the content to, for his own Benefit, but after he doesn't. He intervened a little bit in the early days, but he hadn't really since after that. And then around this time, he helps his son Kenneth get into a school he wants to get into. And like, there's an interesting lesson in this. Finally, he was told that he would be given a decision as soon as possible. Instead of accepting this polite formula, Thompson replied that he had had to know the answer that day and grandiosely explained that Kenneth As heir to a publishing empire, needed a British education, just as Britain herself might one day need Kenneth. That same afternoon, his son was admitted to St. John's College to complete the studies the war had interrupted in Toronto. And this whole thing, it's a small thing in the life of Roy Thomson, his son getting into school, him helping him out when he first kind of heard no initially. It's just reminding me this question, like, when you hear no or faced with it, what do you do? And it reminded me of this quote. I found the quote from George Mack's essay about high agency, but it's actually a quote from Eric Weinstein. It says, when you're told that something is impossible, is that the end of the conversation? Or does that start a second dialogue in your mind? How to get around whoever it is that's just told you that you can't do something. Thompson clearly does not take a no at face value. He finds a way around it. And this is a small version, but it applies to everything he does. And around this time, because he's about to expand rapidly, wherever he went from now on, or whichever publisher he met, Thompson always asked the same blunt question: do you want to sell? He asked it and was to continue asking it his entire life. And by the time this book ends, he has like 200 newspapers, an absurd amount. And we're definitely not gonna get into all of them. And the author even mentions that in the book saying there's so many acquisitions that they can't even cover all of them. And just makes notes at the start of each chapter of how many acquisitions that year that he made. It's insane. And he does this with unorthodox methods, which he has a funny quote, which he has an interesting quote about it, which he has a great response. So there's these people who criticize him for these unorthodox methods. And he retorted abrasively, what are orthodox methods? They're rules adopted by old established outfits to prevent young new outfits from making money. Well, I couldn't afford to be orthodox when I was young. I had to make money. Now, of course, it's different. I can afford to follow the rules. Now I've made a lot of money and I'm hell-bent on convention. Which is also just funny. And he's a rebel. He just does his own thing, does what he feels like, and Can't really think of what others think about you. As you said earlier, earlier in the episode, you gotta build your own thing, man. And he remained mentally restless and continued, in the absence of newspapers available for purchase, to flirt frighteningly— so at least his accountants considered— with other wild projects like buying a steel mill as an outlet for his impatient energies. Daily, he could be found devouring the balance sheets of this company or that. His head close to the figures, his thumb jabbing and tracing and leaping to the figure that signified. He already owed the Bank of Nova Scotia $500,000, but that did not deter him from asking for $750,000 more. The president refused to approve the loan. Following the precedent he had set years ago in Timmins, he simply crossed the road to another bank, to the Royal Bank of Canada, and asked urgently to see Burnham Mitchell. Who had more than once expressed interest in his business and deals. The Royal Bank of Canada did lend Thomson $750,000 as well as take over the existing Bank of Nova Scotia loan of $500,000. The $1.25 million was a colossal piece of credit for a new customer, and its very size ensured that credit in the future, which meant deals in the future, would remain colossal. Thus, 2 more newspapers became Thomson's. And these impatient energies, let's discuss. He has to be expanding in some way always. I think we have to all feel like we're growing, like we're progressing. And if you're ambitious, you need to feel like you're making forward progress above all. And it reminds me of this line from one of my favorite shows, which is Billions, where Wendy Rhoades says to Axe, talking about Taylor Mason, with someone like Taylor, what they need is forward momentum above all things, even money. And that is what Thompson needs. Yes, he's making a ton of money. But he really needs forward momentum. I think that's what he strives for constantly, is this like forward momentum well beyond when he has the money itself. He still just wants forward momentum and whatever the next thing is, he wants that more than anything else. And with now the credit he has, it's basically limitless credit from the Royal Bank of Canada and the confidence of the money-lending public as well. And with this, he could rampage through the weary and Duty-depleted ranks of his country's small-town publishing families. He's just buying up all the newspapers he can, and he does this methodically. So in the budget which he imposed on each of his papers, there was a salary for every job, and this salary could not be exceeded. But his budgets did not stop at salaries. They covered everything. So he just has all the numbers down to a T. The playbook is set, the credit is flowing, and then the closest partnership of his life Falls apart over one lunch. Cook invited Thompson to lunch. Cook told him that he had acquired a massive contract from Southam's, the publishers, to manage their radio station, CKCO. Thompson was delighted, and so Cook hurriedly added that it was a personal deal. You mean I'm not in on it? Thompson asked. No, said Cook, and related that it had been a stipulation in the offer that Thompson should have no part of this $100,000-a-year deal. Cook had accepted the stipulation even though their longstanding agreement was that they split everything. In his enthusiasm for so exciting a challenge, Thompson did not remonstrate. All right, Jack, he said, if that's the way you want it, and accepted from that moment onwards that Jack Kent Cooke was no longer his boy, that he was not even, in fact, any longer his friend. I find this sad, but there's also a lesson to be learned. If you have a good thing going, why would you take that deal? It seems dumb on Cook's part, honestly. And they could have done so much more together, which they talk about right now in the book. That deal, Cook subsequently confessed, was one of the great mistakes of my life. And there you go, a massive mistake. If they had stayed together— if you'd stay with me, Thompson was to charge him 10 years later, we could have conquered the world together. There was nothing we couldn't have done. But I don't want to conquer the world, Cook objected. I want to do what I'm doing. If it makes me millions, more than I'm worth, that's fine. But most important is doing what I'm doing. Important to understand people's incentives, their level of ambition, what they want. Cook took the deal and they are not the same afterwards. They met therefore at the National Club, and in words they both remember, Thompson finally tersely dissolved their partnership. Look, he said, our deal hasn't worked. I reckon we should split. Each then divested himself of all shares that he had held in any property belonging to the other and headed off alone on his own course. Thompson was now 55 years old, the solitary head of a growing empire. With ferocious energy, he set about being just that. And I just find this— I say the, the number as far as how old he is throughout this, and at the time of this recording, I'm 35 years old. This is 20 years ahead of where I'm at in life. I just think of other people and like what age they are at, and it's helpful to know the timelines. I just find this very curious. It's helpful to know timelines. I think you should enjoy your youth, but when you think about business, it is a long game. Like, you can play a very long game. There is decades to this. You have to be doing what you want to do, understand people's incentives, but there are decades to this. You're gonna be doing deals the rest of your life. Like, you have to enjoy what you're doing now at this age, at this health level. Everything. But how are you going to do what you're doing now and enjoy these things that you can't do later and yet still set yourself up for the future? That's what I think is important. Setting foundation for future success and wealth and life you want to have, but also doing things at the age you're at now that you maybe can't do later on. I think that's very important. So Roy Thompson is 55 years old. And yet he's somehow just getting started, it seems. And you're going to watch this machine really turn on and ramp up tremendously. Thompson, this time, he just cannot help himself in terms of buying more and more businesses. Again, he promptly asks everybody at this conference he's at, got any newspapers to sell? And he asks literally everybody. He always is doing this, but then people know, like, they may at the moment kind of brush him off, but they know he is buying newspapers, which only helps him to buy more newspapers. And it's interesting how he does these deals because Thompson regarded himself as having somewhat failed at one point in time. He like says he's failed almost to the point of rendering his contract unenforceable if the vendor did not feel pleased, because Thompson wanted people to feel like they got a good deal, or at least be like happy with the deal, with any deal he does, which is very interesting because there's another train of thought of people saying like they definitely do not think anyone's happy in a deal. Both people are a little bit pissed off, but they land in the middle. He wants kind of both sides to be happy, which is interesting. And he also, by the way, embraces new technology repeatedly, which is an important piece of this. So when there is new technology, Thompson invests in it. Anything that can help him more efficiently produce his papers or save money, he will invest in it and buys new machines available and commits to it, which is very important. One example of that Was, it's one part in the book where it says, nor was he ever guilty of lack of foresight and enterprise. Advised by the much younger Richard Malone of Winnipeg that there were some marvelous new machines called teletypesetters at the Chicago Exposition of Graphic Arts, he at once flew to Chicago and bought all the teletyping equipment available. So this also goes back to the fact of the Charlie Munger idea of take a simple idea, take it very seriously. He did not only move fast and invest in new technology, he bought all the machines available. He goes all in on things. And that mentality for decades again allows you to compound at just an incredible level. And he does all these things because he's clearly obsessed. He's clearly obsessed with newspapers and he clearly enjoys the business of it. Like when you read this book, I highly suggest reading it, it comes across as him having a lot of fun with everything. Like there's always more work to do. There's always more projects to start. And I think he just genuinely enjoys all of it, which is why he's doing it and why he's working so much. Because he's kind of just like, what else would I do? This is fun for him. And even when people ask him to explain his success, Thompson used to always say, no leisure and no pleasure, just work. But I think the work is what he enjoys most. So it's just like the Naval Ravikant quote about like, do work Work that feels like play to you, but work to others. His work kind of seems like it feels like play to him. And at 57 years old, the tempo of his work and his ambitions only grow larger. It has to highlight the point that careers are long. This guy is 57 years old at a point, and he's continued to compound and grow faster and faster. And Time magazine summed it up on the 11th of December. Some publishers resented upstart Thompson's frankly commercial attitude and freely predicted that his chain store method would ruin his individual papers. In practice, it has not worked out that way. All of his newspapers have improved under Thompson's ownership. Profits have gone up, and Thompson has plowed all of them back into the business. The tempo of Thompson's activity, acquisitiveness, and ambition in no way diminished as 1951 succeeded 1950. And he meets another person, which is important, Sinclair McCabe. Very soon McCabe was to become the mastermind behind the choice of each newspaper that Thomson sought to purchase. A little later, he was to be made responsible for the actual negotiations of each purchase, whereupon Chapman, now transferred from Timmins to Toronto, would work out how much credit had to be raised. And throughout all of this, they had this like superior informational advantage, and that's what won. This superior informational advantage that they leverage to buy more and more newspapers. And then Roy hires great people who could sell constantly. And also this mirrors the Si Newhouse and vice versa. It's interesting how close together they are. They're probably learning from each other, honestly, um, which we again, we covered in episode 1, which I love that book, The Newspaperman, about Si Newhouse, because Advance Publications again becomes another company where the family is worth billions and billions of dollars. They have so many parallels, which is not limited to them bluntly asking relentlessly, do you want to sell? Newhouse would walk into publishers' offices asking, how much will it take to buy your paper? They're the same way. Both valued papers on potentialities rather than current earnings. Both were fanatically cost-conscious with standardized weekly department statements. Both pit advertisers against each other to make More money. Both bought monopoly positions in mid-sized towns, and both kept buying into old age because the papers were, in Newhouse's words, my passion, my delight. There's so many parallels between these 2 men. And that informational advantage I mentioned, that really stems from McCabe, who had this like encyclopedic knowledge of every English-speaking newspaper in a land 25 times the size of Great Britain. And these other people just could not compete in the race to expand. And when Roy Thomson was asked how many papers he wanted altogether, he like replies provocatively, 52, one for each week of the year. Which of course only makes people attack him further and hate him. And he even says then very shortly after this, I love big figures, as he's expanding and buying more and more newspapers. Personally, I love it. I think the ambition him going after what he truly wants in life is, is great. And then because of these attacks, in September 1951, suddenly irritated by the incessant attacks of other papers on his own group, Thompson publishes his creed as an advertisement in the Toronto Globe and Mail to share his side of the story. And it's just this idea of going direct. We hear about that now, about founders going direct, sharing your story, your beliefs, and how to operate. And how it allows you to control the narrative. This is what he was doing even back in 1951. He was going direct. So he's like 70 years ahead of the times. He's going direct. But sadly, that same year and that, that summer, late summer 1951, Edna, his wife, has cancer. And then in early 1952, his wife dies. And not long after, Roy, a widower at 58, richer than ever and restless, finds that Canada is starting to feel small. His mind turns to Britain and he starts again. Needing new territory in which to prospect, his mind turned to Britain, and needing advice on the subject, his mind turned to Lord Beaverbrook. Beaverbrook questioned Thomson about newspapers and business in Canada, and equally insatiably, Thomson questioned him about newspapers and business in Britain. After lunch, as instructed, Hamilton showed Thomson around the grounds, during which tour the Canadian ignored the magnificence that surrounded him and instead broached the subject of his buying Kemsley's Aberdeen newspaper. So clearly Roy Thomson is obsessed, and he will end up buying many newspapers, many prestigious newspapers and beyond in Britain. And he'd say, there's no reason why we shouldn't do business in Britain as well as in Canada. On an impulse, he telephoned Colin MacKinnon of The Scotsman, whom he had last met in Toronto in the 1950 press conference. Colin, he said, do you know of any newspapers for sale? MacKinnon did not. Don't suppose there are any Scotsman shares for sale? MacKinnon thought not. Well, if ever there are, let me know. MacKinnon said, all right, but added as he hung up that Thomson would never get any of The Scotsman. Which is important to remember because he ends up buying the Scotsman. Of course he does. And I say that, of course he does, because when you read this book, Roy Thomson, like some other ambitious people, you've probably met them, you probably know them, obviously you're one of them, seem to have success, seem to, for them, have success be inevitable. Nothing can stop them, only delay them. Sure, Roy Thomson wasn't a millionaire by 30, But it always seemed inevitable that he was going to be incredibly successful. And this is just an example. He's 59 years old starting over. And they would say he wanted to buy his, obviously, newspapers and gets rebuffed. But say like all the other failures, this one merely blocked him and then diverted the swirling waters of his ambition and energy. And this is, again, of him also trying to get back into politics. He gets defeated again in like 1952. And this is pretty crazy, the timing of this, because, okay, so a registered letter had reached him from Edinburgh. It had come from the Scotsman, and it had told him that a majority, a majority shareholding in that newspaper might be available if he cared to negotiate. His wish to go to Ottawa denied, checked in the course that he had set for himself, age 59 and quite alone, Thompson decided to leave Canada and start again in Great Britain. Thompson was defeated at York Centre on Tuesday, and by Friday morning Was ready to leave for Scotland. I mentioned going from idea to action. He gets defeated in this, yeah, like politics basically, and he wastes no time. Gets defeated on Tuesday, and by Friday he's gone. He's like onto Scotland, onto the next thing. He's just bold, like very bold, even at 59. It's never too late to restart. It's never too late to do something differently at any age. I got chills reading this part. It's just so incredibly inspirational. At any age, you can restart. At any age, you can build yourself again, do something different, change locations. It's so incredibly inspirational and impressive that he did this after the defeat in politics, after his wife passed away at 59 years old. He's not stopping and quitting and retiring. He's just moving on to something else, a new adventure that gives him energy. It's just phenomenal. I love it. And so he talks to the Scotsman's financial advisor, and Thompson and Whitten, his name is Whitten, met to discuss the purchase of Scotland's oldest and most esteemed newspaper. Because of the current losses and the possibility of crushing death duties if and whenever Sir Edmund died, he had advocated selling the Scotsman as soon as possible. And of course Roy ends up buying it, and then once he does, he insists on meeting absolutely everybody there. And now that he had committed himself, the Canadian was exultant. At last, he owned a great national paper, and the fact that it was running at a colossal loss worried him not at all. He knew how to fix that. You'd have to be crazy not to make money on this deal, he explained back in Toronto. The real estate and buildings alone are worth £1 million, which was a quarter of a million more than he had laid out. My God, you'd wonder how they could run a business like that. They wouldn't last 6 months in Canada. Well, we're playing for keeps now. In the past, he admitted, he had bought and fought for profit. Now in Edinburgh with the Scotsman, so long as there was no actual loss, he would, he declared, be happy with prestige. Uncharacteristically, for once, he had lied, if only to himself, because no sooner had he stepped inside the doors of the Scotsman's office than his energies exploded as noisily as ever. Remember, he's 59 years old at this point. I'm going to make— I'm going to make any number of mistakes, he warned his new employees. I want you guys to tell me. My door is always open. At lunchtime, he rushed down to the canteen, stood in line for his meal, ate alone and at a table by the door, and within 15 minutes was back at his desk. With disconcerting speed, he grew to know all of his employees' Christian names. Within a week of his arrival, everyone knew him better than they had known the previous chairman, Sir Edmund Findlay. After 7 years. Here now, Roy Thomson, aggressive, dynamic, teetotal, and utterly confident. There was not much about him that his staff, as good Scots, could like, for he was wholly Canadian, which in Edinburgh is as bad as being Bulgarian, but they did begin to suspect that he would save the Scotsmen and their jobs on it. Thomson's problems were not only that an excess of staff had to be pruned, but also that the uncooperative or incompatible members of the staff had to be fired. Gradually, heads began to roll. Thompson prowled endlessly from editorial to machine room, watching and asking questions. Tell me anything you know, he said. Give me all the ideas you got. I'm a sponge for ideas. That actually reminds me a lot of Elon Musk, where I think in one of the books, it might've been a recent book by Walter Isaacson, him just like walking the manufacturing line and just trying to cut things or Reduce costs or question everything and also get information is doing like the same type of thing. Like he's just trying to learn and understand everything about the business possible and meet all the people so that he can make improvements across everything, which then compounds over time. In those first few weeks, indeed, it had been his candor that had helped him most. He had not pretended. Not knowing how to address people with curious Scottish or aristocratic titles, he simply asked, say, what do I call him? Not knowing what the best whiskies were, he had asked before he bought the bottles he himself would never touch. Not knowing about distribution techniques or railroad systems or even all the rules of Scottish accountancy, where entries are made on the opposite side from Canada's, he had simply asked, and Edinburgh had liked him for it. Then Thompson announced that he was going to sell that part of the property, the back block he owned, which was not related to his publications. Mr. Noble, his company secretary, led the protest, and Thompson asserting blandly, I didn't come over to this country to get into the real estate business. I came to go into the newspaper business, ignored their protest and sold the block. And then this hilarious story that also reminds me of Signing Newhouse. There's just way too many parallels. When it was suggested to him that he should go salmon fishing, he asked, was he certain to catch a salmon? No, he was told. Then I guess I'll leave it to my friends, he replied. It wouldn't interest me because Cy Newhouse like went, and as soon as he caught a fish, he left. Similar type of deal. They have no time for that. They have no patience for that. And at no time in that first year of his ownership of the Scotsman was he reticent. So he never was reluctant to speak, always spoke his mind. And then with the circulation manager, he toured the whole of Scotland examining every detail of transport and paper deliveries. Everywhere he talked shop. Wherever there was a local paper, he offered to buy it. When he was shown national landmarks like the Forth Bridge, he was bored. When he could examine comparative cost of newspaper distribution by rail or by road, he was engrossed. Again, he is obsessed. And when you're in business competing with people like this, it's important to know how obsessed they are. He's willing to do whatever. All he does is think about this business constantly. Not for everybody. It's certainly not for everybody to live this way and to operate at this level. But if you want to be the best and operate at his level, it's obsession that fuels him. And he continues to buy more and more newspapers. It was not only in the Canadian newspaper field that 1954 saw Thomson advance. In December, in partnership with Senator Davies, he acquired a television station at Kingston, and in the following March, they acquired another station at Peterborough. And now for the bet everyone in Scotland told him was insane. He wants Scotland's first commercial television license, and nobody— I mean, like, literally nobody— believes in it except for him. And there's reasons why no one believes him. Other television stations in, like, England had lost a ton of money, so they're very hesitant. His bankers hesitated. Sir Alexander King called it a failure in advance. And even Beaverbrook, who's a friend of his, told him no, like, he wouldn't invest. He applied anyway for the license to be able to do this, spent 19 months on letters, hearings, and financing, won the license, and on May 24th, 1956, converted the Theatre Royal, sold the airtime himself, and launched STV on August 31st, 1957, with the words, this is Scotland. Within months, it became a license to print money. It was so incredibly successful. Of course, this took a ton of effort and came with its own challenges and took a lot of time as well, by the way, but it worked. And on the growth of his empire, he eventually is able to acquire the Kemsley Papers, which is an interesting thing to note because the way he does it. And the Kemsley Papers, by the way, there's 18 of them, all of them important. They include the Sunday Times, which is very important here. He'd had to pay out millions and millions of dollars, obviously, to be, to acquire them, but it was worthwhile. And it's worthwhile to chat about why, how this kind of happened, because his, his little STV company could never afford to buy the giant Kemsley Press. The solution they used worked out with Henry Grunfeld. of SG Warburg flipped it. The big company bought the small one. So Kemsley Press acquired STV, and instead of cash, it paid Thomson and Kemsley shares with so much voting power that Thomson ended up controlling the combined group. Controlling the group meant he could now raise the roughly £5 million to buy out Lord Kemsley's own 40% of the ordinary shares. And because a straight purchase of STV would have voided STV's broadcast contract with the Independent Television Authority, These shareholders legally had to keep control of the license. They created a new holding company, Scottish Thomson Associates, that controlled STV but drew its money from the earnings of the whole combined group rather than from STV directly. It's a reverse takeover. They use the earning power of the asset you built to swallow the empire you couldn't afford. This structure, or close variants of it, is still how small companies acquire big ones today, and it It's very interesting. If you wanna get into more of the details, you should definitely read the book. I think it's on page 254 about this whole thing. And Roy is doing this, and it's funny, this small little note that says that Roy Thomson, empire builder, 7.5 hours of sleep is what he needed each, each night. Just to take note for people who try to like skip on sleep, he was getting 7.5 hours of sleep. But he does this, does this reverse takeover, is able to get another big company basically. And it's very, very impressive. Everything comes together and it reminds me of just how much you can accomplish if your ambition is high. You're only limited by that, the ambition, the self-confidence, and the persistence that you have. Roy Thompson has obviously his candor as well. He just tells people how he thinks about things and He's able to do things that people repeatedly doubt him about. He just is able to make it happen. And the book says, starting from nothing but an electoral defeat in 1952, Thompson, in 7 short years, was about to make himself one of the greatest press barons of the United Kingdom. Roy would say about this time, I'm not convinced that there's any such thing as high finance, he replied comfortingly, except you're adding a couple of zeros to the figure Which makes most people's knees shake and their brains seize up. I used to be like that. I used to think, oh geez, what have I done now? But I don't any longer. Those early days in Northern Ontario where business was simple and a dollar was what $10,000 is today, they're what made me what I am now. Asked whether he thought it difficult to make one's fortune in Canada, he replied that he thought it easy, reminded that he had built a second empire in Britain between His 59th and 65th birthdays, he commented wistfully, if only I was 25 years younger. Asked what he wanted— asked what next he wanted now that he had reached his target of one newspaper for each week of the year, he responded with terrible flippancy, I want one for each day of the year. He would assume control of the Kemsley Press on Monday, the 23rd of August. In all humility, Thompson shortly afterwards Confessed, I really wanted to succeed. Everybody wants to make money, but how many want it enough to work for it? Preach, my dude, preach. That piece is so important. How many want it enough to work for it? This applies to every domain of ambition, whether this is sports, whether this is anything. It's not just business. Everyone wants to succeed. Everyone wants to have money, whatever. How many want it enough to work for it? Such an important note from Roy Thomson. And so he owns the Sunday Times. He owns 52 newspapers. Now watch how differently he runs an empire than the lord he replaced. Kemsley had been almost incapable of delegating. Thomson did it easily and, having delegated, had a marvelous capacity for worrying no more. Kemsley had acted the part of an omniscient autocrat. Thompson endlessly asked questions and sought advice at conferences. He did not say, would you agree that, or am I right in thinking? He simply asked, Jim, what do you think about this? Or Mickey, will this be okay? Or Harry, how does that work? And this is important— how you phrase questions not leading the witness so you can actually get good answers. Thompson proclaimed editorial and executive independence and concentrated all his energies not upon directing, but upon expanding his vast organization. Though he was said to be worth, in England alone, some £32 million, Thompson still hated to spend money. I am not, he admitted handsomely, open-handed. However much he owned, however rich he had become, he remained voracious, according to Canadian editorials, and ambitious, according to himself. And then from an interview with Randolph Churchill: It's a TV interview. He says, if I was as rich as you, I'd spend all my time gardening, he asserted. This is Churchill. I wouldn't be mucked up with television and that sort of stuff. I want more newspapers, Thompson objected, appalled at the notion of gardening. This is a man who does not stop. Of course he's going to keep expanding. And so Thompson went on acquiring any journal that came up for sale anywhere, like Any of them. He constantly is looking for these, and he continued to meet the successful, the famous, the titled, and the influential. In fact, from this time onward, he met only the successful, the famous, the titled, and the influential. He met all of them, from Ian Fleming to Cyrus Eaton, from the Prime Minister to the Aga Khan, from the Lord Chief Justice to Lord Morrison of Lambeth. He met them all. He continued uncingingly to give dinners. So he would host these dinners. He was building his network of investors or potential people to find deals from or people he could work with. In other words, he was building relationships, which is funny enough, this is exactly what I'm trying to do with the LA Grind and the SF Grind, these 2 newsletters I run in LA and SF, and also through the Ambition Summit, like trying to help people build relationships. This is what he was doing because all these people could help him in some capacity, in some way. And he wastes no time. This is a purposeful act for him. And in wasting no time with his new property, he just does what has to be done, making cuts, making adjustments. And he ends up, for one of these properties, turns this £6,000 a week loss of the Empire News and Sunday Graphic around, and then killed the Graphic outright once the Thompson House presses made it unnecessary. So he just finds ways to move these different properties around to either sell them if he has to, if they're not actually money winners, money printers, or combine them or cut staff as needed that had got bloated. He just finds ways to rework all of them. Of course, not all things go well. In 1961, the purchase of the Belfast Telegraph dragged him into a court fight that enraged him like no failure ever had. That's just one of different challenges he continues to face. Of course, he doesn't win all the deals. And to understand his rage and mortification, one must understand Thompson's attitude to people. I've got faults. I'm boastful and I'm stingy, but I like people. All people. Some, of course, more than others, but all people. Look, you can't really dislike a whole person. I feel if you meet a person you don't take to, probably this fellow has some terrible personal situation in his mind. Like cancer or something, and that's spoiling his whole life. That's the thought that comes to me. I'm being absolutely honest, and I'm glad it's the case. I think this is a great perspective to have on people, and I really like this, by the way. And even when he loses, he's just on to the next thing. Like when he loses a deal, he's just like, cool, because there's always another deal to be made, and there's always ways to build or change the empire he's building. He's creating over time. Thompson quickly forgot the might-haves of the Odoms' plan and switched to the ifs and buts of his next and current plan, which was that the Sunday Times should carry a color supplement. It would lose money, he was told, and he agreed that it would at first, but in the end, he declared it would not only make money but also set the Sunday Times way ahead of all other quality Sunday papers, which is why he wanted it. It would be too expensive for the ordinary advertiser even to consider. But he observed only that he was not interested in the ordinary advertiser. He wanted the rich advertiser, the brewer, the cigarette manufacturer, the maker of cars, who in his turn would want to reach the type of person who read the Sunday Times. And again, many people tell him this is a terrible idea, but Thomson refused to abandon his idea. In any project, he could generate his own instant enthusiasm triggering it off and sustaining it with frequent charges of optimism and remaining always so devoid of fear and pessimism that no one dared accuse him of mere stubbornness. Now, against all the evidence, he chose to be optimistic about the potential of a color supplement and enthusiastic about starting one. And because advertising was a risk early on for these agencies, in view of this, He decided that Color Supplement would have to start its life without adequate advertising revenue and then perhaps for as long as a year be run at a loss until, by proving that it would survive, it attracted both the agencies and their advertising clients. And throughout this, he's making deals left and right. I mean, he can't stay away from work for long. He took a taxi into Jerusalem to the Jerusalem post office and there inquired, is your paper for sale? And he was depressed to find it was not and appalled at the idea of being taken by his IPI hosts On a long-conducted tour of Israel, which would keep him away from work for another 4 days. So he cut the tour short and returned to London. Like, anywhere he goes, he's just making deals and like turns it all into a business thing. And he likes to do that. That's what he enjoys doing. So he continues to make it happen. And all the while, kind of blurring the line of business and pleasure, he's meeting with more and more influential people, which he likes to meet with, and who subsequently he can do deals with or find deals from. He's very well connected and he puts a lot of effort into maintaining those relationships and building them, which really does help him acquire more and more newspapers and radio stations, et cetera. And he's obviously a workaholic. It being a well-known fact that even bank holidays, religious festivals, and weekends would be worked if Thompson had his way, which I find hilarious. And final arrangements were made to launch this color supplement in February 1962. And so on February 8th, 1962, Britain's first Sunday color magazine appeared in the Sunday Times. Beaverbrook, whose capacity for intrigue was not low-powered, had done all that he could to kill it. Expert opinion had prophesied for it nothing but disaster. It was not even a very good first issue, but it had appeared, and having appeared, it was to take root until eventually, after terrible losses, it would flourish. And this is the case with many such ventures of Thompson. He makes a bet that will eventually pay off. It's always these long-term plays, which is why you can see early on him struggling financially because they just haven't had time to play out yet, but they will eventually. And he just stays alive, keeps building, keeps growing them. And they do. So many of these bets pay off even against many people mocking him and many people doubting him. He just doesn't care. He believes in it. He's done the numbers. He's looked at the industry. He's looked at the market. He believes in it. And by February 1962, he's on TV and he's asked, Mr. Thompson, how many newspapers or papers of all kinds all over the world do you own? Which elicited the answer, I think it's 95 newspapers and 72 magazines. And in Great Britain, I would say 40-odd newspapers. So that's his empire by 1962. He's like 68 years old at this time, maybe 67. And those 40-odd newspapers in Britain, like, remember, he only moves when he's 59 years old. Like, he builds it up in not that many years past 59 years of age, which is insane. And the color supplement, of course, pays off. It achieved 2 things. It boosted the circulation of the Sunday Times most markedly. So 150,000 more people than usual had bought it in the first week out of curiosity, but 80% of those who bought once, just to look, had continued buying. It had begun to interest the big advertisers. On the other hand, it was costing an enormous amount of money to produce, and practically nothing was coming back in advertising revenue. It is not money lost, Thompson commented calmly. It's an investment. If he doesn't go broke first, Fleet Street admitted, this can make his paper completely dominant among the Sundays. And we talk about newspapers a little bit later. He says, I buy more newspapers in order to make more money to buy more newspapers, to make more money to buy more newspapers. But if I try to make money, it is not for my personal needs. I have all the Rolls-Royces and Cadillacs I can use. I don't smoke. I drink very little. And it's years since I gave a mink coat to anyone except a member of my family. But if the newspapers and magazines and television stations which I own or control are making money, then I know that they are rendering a social service. The bigger the operation grows, the greater the service being rendered. A little bit later, There are a lot of reasons why people may choose to run newspapers, including the desire for personal prestige, a lust for political power, and other forms of megalomania. I run newspapers because this is the job I know best. Of his Color magazine, he declared, My contribution, which I think was not a small one, Has been to perceive that the idea would work in Britain, to force it through in the teeth of all difficulties, and to be prepared to sink $2 million in putting it over. It is the sort of thing which I conceive to be the role of what you call a communications magnet. At last, Fleet Street and the world knew what Thomson's brainchild, the color magazine, had cost him— $2 million in less than a year. But there was no room here for gloating because at the same time as he was freely admitting his losses, He also confessed that as of this month, it had passed the break-even point and was now racing ahead on a profitable basis. The empire is built, the money is made. There is exactly one thing left on Roy Thomson's list, and it is the most unreasonable goal of his entire life. Before we get to that, Thomson said to his son Ken, If you're going to run this business one day, you've got to give up almost everything else. You've got to go to parties you don't want to go to, meet people you don't want to meet. You're going to have tremendous responsibilities to live up to. You've got to be a slave to your business. I am, but I like it. It has compensations, even though the business runs you, not you it. And then a top executive teases Thompson, saying like, what use was this money to him? You can't take it with you, he observed. Then I'm not going, Thompson retorted to the vast amusement of his host. It's just, I love that so much. I find it hilarious. And his last ambition, which of course he's endless ambitions, at least in this book, is that Roy Thomson wants to be a lord. He wants to be a lord, but he currently has Canadian citizenship. Because the first alternative was unthinkable, he adopted the second and took out United Kingdom citizenship in June 1963, thus removing himself from the prerogative of Ottawa. And by this time he's like, what, 68, 69 years old? He's done everything else he could. He just wants to become a lord, which at the time and for him is an outlandish, outlandish proposition. But at the moment, even though he owned a vast publishing empire and had 17,865 men working under him, even though his newspapers, which his enemies derided, won prizes that his enemies coveted— his Scotsman gained the year's top morning newspaper award and his Belfast Telegraph the top evening newspaper award— Even though his massive possessions were worth £45 million, Thomson, who for almost two-thirds of his life had owned little but optimism, dreaded the possibility of this final personal and irrevocable failure of not becoming a lord. On the subject of his peerage, he confessed, This title has always been an even greater ambition than owning 100 newspapers because it seemed such an unreasonable one. A 100 million to 1 chance. And for a man like Roy Thomson, he needs unreasonable, unthinkable, impossible goals to get him energized. And this is one of them. And of course, he accomplishes it, becoming Lord Thomson of Fleet and achieving his greatest ambition. And that is where we're going to end today. There are so many more Deals he made in this book and insights he provides us. It is a phenomenal book. I, I highly recommend it. It is very old, as I mentioned, from 1965, and it definitely smelled like it was from 1965, but I enjoyed it thoroughly. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this, please leave a rating review in your podcast player. Share this episode with a friend of yours or on social media. I would appreciate it so much. We're early on this thing, but it's gonna become much, much bigger. And if you want to attend the Ambition Summit on September 24th, 2026 in Santa Monica, check out the link below. And I'll talk to you in the next episode.