He was the son of a Toronto barber, still broke at 40 after failing at business after business. Then he bought a small-town radio station and a small-town newspaper with $200 down.

By the time he died at 82, he owned more than 200 newspapers, including The Times of London, and held the Scottish TV franchise he famously called "a license to print your own money." Today, the Thomson family is the richest family in Canada.

This is the story of Roy Thomson, and we have a lot to learn from him.

Source for this episode:

• Roy Thomson of Fleet Street by Russell Braddon

Links:

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The greatness of Zemurray lies in the fact that he never lost faith in his ability to salvage a situation. Bad things happened to him, as bad things happen to everyone, but unlike so many, he was never tempted by failure. He never felt powerless or trapped.

He was an optimist. He stood in constant defiance. When the Secretary of State teamed up with J.P. Morgan and the Honduran government in a way contrary to Zemurray's interests, he simply changed the Honduran government. When United Fruit drew a line at the Utila River and said, "You shall not cross," he crossed anyway. When he was forbidden to build a bridge, he built a bridge but called it something else.

For every move, there is a countermove. For every disaster, there is a recovery. He never lost faith in his own agency. With his fortune fast diminishing, it was time to act.

This is the story of Sam Zemurray, and we have a lot to learn from him.

Source for this episode:

• The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King by Rich Cohen

Links:

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The company she started in 1946 is today worth more than $30 billion. Her story? It's one of obsession and persistence, and one I thoroughly enjoyed reading about.

This is the story of Estée Lauder, and we have a lot to learn from her.

Source for this episode:

• Estēe: A Success Story by Estēe Lauder

Links:

• Ambition website
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In 1968, a thirteen-year-old kid in Cupertino was building a frequency counter and needed parts. So he opened the phone book, found the home number of Bill Hewlett, the founder of Hewlett-Packard, and called him. Hewlett talked with him for 20 minutes, got him the parts, and gave him a summer job.

More than four decades later, when HP abandoned its Cupertino campus, that same kid quietly bought the land, a hundred and fifty acres. By then, his company had passed Microsoft to become the most valuable technology company in the world. But he admired the way Hewlett and Packard had built a company that lasted, and he prided himself on having done the same.

In June 2011, he stood before the Cupertino City Council and unveiled the plans for what would become his company's new home on that ground. It was one of his last public appearances. Four months later, he was gone.

This is the story of Steve Jobs, how he built Apple, and what we can learn from him.

Source for this episode:

• Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Links:

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At 38, Dietrich Mateschitz was a burned-out toothpaste salesman staring at the same gray airplanes, gray suits, and gray hotel bars, wondering if the next decade would look like the last one. Then he found a strange Thai energy drink, bet everything on it, and built Red Bull into an empire that paid him a record $865 million dividend months before his death and helped him amass a personal fortune worth more than $20 billion.

This is the story of Dietrich Mateschitz, the founder of Red Bull, and we have a lot to learn from him.

Sources for this episode:

• The Red Bull Story: The Unbelievable Success of Dietrich Mateschitz and His Energy Drink Empire by Wolfgang Fürweger
• Red Bull's Billionaire Maniac by Duff McDonald
• The Soda With Buzz by Kerry A. Dolan

Links:

• Ambition website
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They were two bicycle mechanics from Ohio with no formal engineering training and no funding who set out to solve a problem that had stumped the best minds in the world.

It took them four years of learning, experimenting, and overcoming numerous challenges, but they accomplished what many people around the world thought was impossible.

This is the story of the Wright Brothers, and we have a lot to learn from them.

Source for this episode:

• The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

Links:

• Ambition website
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He dropped out of school at 13 to support his family. His father abandoned them. He worked full time for a decade before buying his first newspaper. By the time he died at 84, he had built the greatest publishing empire in American history.

This is the story of S.I. Newhouse Sr., and we have a lot to learn from him.

Source for this episode:

• Newspaperman: S.I. Newhouse and the Business of News by Richard H. Meeker

Links:

• Ambition website
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Ambition is a podcast about history's most ambitious people and the lessons their lives can teach you. Each episode goes deep on one person (or two), built around hours of research into a biography of that subject, covering what they built, how they thought, and the struggles they overcame along the way.

We're kicking things off with two stories: S.I. Newhouse, who built one of the most powerful media empires in America, and the Wright Brothers, two bicycle mechanics from Dayton who flew before anyone believed flight was possible.

New episodes drop every 1-2 weeks. Subscribe to the show in your favorite podcasting platform and follow along at ambition.fm.