Hello and welcome to how to take over the world. This is Ben Wilson.

It is Halloween season and I wanted to re-release this episode that I put out last year on Grigory Rasputin, the Russian mystic and advisor to the Tsar.

Rasputin is usually considered a kind of spooky figure, right? Um, he's considered someone who is kind of sinister, I guess.

And while the truth is maybe a little bit more nuanced,

he wasn't really such a bad guy, as you'll soon hear in this episode,

I still think it makes a good Halloween episode,

has maybe like some of that ambiance.

And last year, I released this as a subscriber-only episode

after the first 20 minutes.

So only the first 20 minutes were free.

So this time I'm making it free and available to everyone.

And this is, yeah, my Halloween present to you.

I just re-listened to it before coming on to record this.

And I like it.

So that's good.

I'm proud to be releasing it.

And the main thing that I took away from this listen to it was differentiation and belief.

Rasputin was not the smartest guy. He wasn't dumb necessarily, but he wasn't brilliant. He was not

the most charismatic. He was certainly not the most handsome. But what he had was a commitment,

a total commitment, like all-encompassing commitment to a form of simple peasant spirituality that people found very attractive at that time in Russia.

And I think that's the whole key to his success.

It reminds me of this quote from the Chernow biography of George Washington that I have highlighted.

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