I'm going to show you how great I am. This is our sidey tower.

I just want to say from the bottom of me heart, I'd like to take this chance to

apologize to absolutely nobody. Hello and welcome to Take Over the World. This is Ben Wilson, and today we are talking about

William Randolph Hearst. He was really the first media mogul, the first person with a big

multi-million dollar media empire. His was primarily a newspaper business, but he also got into

film, radio, and a number of other businesses as well.

And obviously as a podcaster, media is something that I am interested in.

So this episode is a little bit selfish.

As I was reading the story, you'll hear that I'm kind of reverse engineering in my brain, how to build a really successful media business.

So if that's something that's interesting to you, if you're engaged in media, if you're

an influencer, a producer, a writer, an editor, a celebrity, a media executive, William Randolph

Hearst was all of those things. So this is going to be the perfect episode for you. And it's also,

to me, a really interesting story of power. I'm giving you a little bit of a spoiler here,

but there's this interesting story where in Cuba tensions are boiling between the Spanish government, which owned Cuba at

the time, and the native Cubans who wanted to be independent. And there were some skirmishes,

and it's looking like things are at a boiling point. So William Randolph Hurst, who owns a New York

newspaper, sends a reporter to Havana.

The reporter gets there to Havana, the capital of Cuba, and he writes back to Hirst, complaining,

you know, this is all kind of overblown.

There's no actual fighting going on.

Things have calmed down.

There's nothing really exciting to report on.

...