Founders: Sam Zemurray (The Fish That Ate the Whale)

Sam Zamuri, the subject of this episode, may be the highest agency person that I've ever come

across and that's saying a lot because every single person that you and I study on Founders

Podcast is high agency. The way I think about a high agency person is the world doesn't happen

to them, they happen to the world. I made this episode over a year ago and I wanted to republish

it so you can listen to it again. I think this story is that important and actually tell you

what reminded me of Sam's incredible life story in a minute. First, I want to tell you about

AteSleep. One of the most unique things about this podcast is that I know the founder of every

company that advertises on Founders. All of them listen to Founders so it makes building a relationship

a lot easier. And the reason I do this is because I only want sponsors of the podcast that live

and breathe their product. In every case, we share the same obsession for the quality of the

products that we're making and the businesses that we are building. And so AteSleep is one of the

sponsors of this episode and the founder Mateo and I actually live in the same city. A few months

after I started to use AteSleep, I randomly ran into Mateo at a restaurant. I went over to say

hi. When I got back to my table, my friend asked me who I was talking to. And I said,

oh, that's Mateo, the founder of AteSleep. And then my friend said the funniest thing ever.

He replied, he goes, oh, he looks like he gets good sleep. Mateo is living and breathing his

product. I never, before I had any sleep, ever, ever had the ability to change the temperature of

my bed before I got an AteSleep mattress. I had no idea how much that would improve the quality

of my sleep. I keep my AteSleep ice cold. It is cold before I get into bed. That one feature

helps me fall asleep faster and wake up less during the night. That is feature alone, in my opinion,

is worth 10 times the price. My wife and I were just away for a few nights at a wedding in rural

Canada. They barely had Wi-Fi, so you know they didn't have any AteSleep. And she said on the way

back as we're flying back, she said, I cannot wait to get back to our AteSleep. AteSleep is such a

game changer that you immediately notice its absence. There are very few no-brainer investments in

life and AteSleep is one of them. You can get yours by going to atesleep.com, forward slash

founders. You can get $150 off if you use that link. Go to atesleep.com, forward slash founders.

I want to tell you about another product that several of my founder friends are also using,

and that is Vesto. You can check out Vesto at getvesto.com. Vesto makes it easy for you to

invest your business's idle cash. Vesto can help businesses of all sizes with their treasury

management. When you own treasury bills, the US government actually guarantees your cash,

and you earn interest on the cash while it sits there. I have one founder friend who raised a

bunch of venture capital money, and he uses Vesto as a way to extend his runway. And I have another

founder friend who actually bootstrapped his company, and he uses Vesto to get a better rate

of return than if his idle cash was just sitting in a bank account. If you are not already doing

that, say, how do you recommend you go to getvesto.com and check out what they have to offer? I know

the founder, Ben, I've spent a bunch of time with them. If you schedule a demo, if you go to getvesto.com

and you schedule a demo, you actually speak directly to the founder, Ben. I think he's

incredibly impressive, and I think if you speak to him, you'll be impressed too. Make sure you

tell him that David from founders sent you. Now, back to Sam's and Murray. He was on my mind

because I just was interviewed on Invest Like The Best for the second time. I assume that if

you're listening to this, you already follow Invest Like The Best on your favorite podcast

player, if you don't, make sure you go follow it. It's going to be, it's not out yet. I think it's

coming out tomorrow. It is episode, it's going to be episode 343 of Invest Like The Best. I didn't

know the questions that Patrick was going to ask me in advance. And one question that he brought up,

and this is why I wanted to republish this episode now, is because he talked about this very important

concept of the high agency founder. And when he asked me that question, immediately Sam's and Murray

comes to mind. And if you haven't listened to this episode or read the book yet, you'll clearly,

by the end of the episode, you'll completely understand why he popped my mind. But essentially,

I told, retold like the outline of his story, what I learned from him and how Sam's and Murray

has personally inspired me. And then after the podcast was over, I went through and reread all

my past highlights of the book. That made me fall in love with the story all over. And that made me

realize, hey, I should publish this, I should republish this to the podcast feed. I'm sure there's

going to be some people are going to listen to it twice and some people that miss it the first time.

I think the story is incredible. And I hope you enjoy this episode.

When he arrived in America in 1891, at age 14, Sam Murray was tall, gangly and penniless. When

he died in the grandest house in New Orleans 69 years later, he was among the richest, most powerful

men in the world. In between, he worked as a fruit peddler, a banana hauler, a dockside hustler,

and the owner of plantations in Central America. He battled and conquered United Fruit,

which was one of the first truly global corporation. Sam Murray's life is a parable of

the American dream, not history as recorded in the textbooks, but the authentic version,

a subterranean saga of kickbacks, overthrows and secret deals, the world as it really works.

This story can shock and infuriate us. And it does. But I found it invigorating too.

It told me that the life of the nation was written not only by speech making politicians,

but also by street corner boys, immigrant strivers, crazed and driven, some with one good idea,

some with thousands willing to go to the ends of the earth to make their vision real. It meant

anyone could write a chapter in that book, be part of the story, vanish into the jungle,

and reemerge as a figure of lore. If you want to understand the spirit of our nation,

the good and the bad, you can enroll in college, sign up for classes, take notes and pay tuition,

or you can study the life of Sam the Banana Man. That was an excerpt from the book that I'm going

to talk to you about today, which is The Fish that Ate the Whale, The Life and Times of America's

Banana King, and it was written by Rich Cohen. I had originally read this book many years ago,

it was originally Founders episode number 37. It's one of the best written books that I've read

so far for the podcast, and Sam's and Murray's life story may not have an equal. And so I wanted

to reread it again and then put it into context with everything else that we've learned over the

last, what, 200, almost 230 founder biographies that you and I have gone over since episode number

37. So I want to jump right into the prologue. At this point in the story, Sam's and Murray's 33

years old, and he is organizing a coup to overthrow the Honduran government. Sam's and Murray spoke

in no accent, except when he swore, which was all the time. He was a big man, six foot three, nothing

but muscle and bone, and with the wingspan of a condor. He had a crisp, no nonsense manner.

At 33 years old, he was already a colorful figure. After 10 years in the south, so he starts out in

Alabama and then eventually moves to Louisiana to New Orleans. After 10 years in the south, he was

known by a variety of nicknames. Z, the Russian, Sam the banana man, El Amigo, the gringo. He arrived

at the on the docks at the start of the last century with nothing. In the early years, he had

to make his way in the lowest precincts of the fruit business, peddling ripes, bananas, other

traders dumped into the sea. We'll talk more about that that idea right there, the idea that he

identified a very profitable niche that was just hiding in plain sight. He worked like a dog and

defied the most powerful people in the country. By 1905, he owned steamships that crossed the

Gulf of Mexico, heading south empty and returning with bananas. He had traveled the width of Honduras

on a mule, because he wanted to know the terrain, get his hands in the black soil. At 33, Zemuri

was in the process of overthrowing a foreign government. That is not hyperbolic. That is

actually true. He had been warned by Phil Lander Knox, the US Secretary of State, who ordered

federal agents to tail him. There's going to be more. There's this legendary meeting that Zemuri

has before the events that are taking place right now in the book with the Secretary of State Knox,

and there's going to be a cameo because Knox was working with JP Morgan. I'll talk more about that

in a little bit. He'd been warned by the Secretary of State, he basically told him,

stay out of Honduras. I don't care about your banana company. There's bigger

interest in the US government, so stay away. Obviously, Zemuri didn't listen. But he didn't

care. If Sam failed, he faced ruin. But if he succeeded, he would become a king in banana land.

And so the prologue talks about the beginning of what is going to wind up being a successful coup.

Zemuri recruits General Bonilla. General Bonilla had previously been the President of Honduras.

And so this line right here describes Sam's thinking to us, with the right kind of help,

Bonilla could be President again. And so he's going to give Bonilla money, ships, guns, support.

There's all these mercenaries that are waiting to meet up with Zemuri at this point in the story.

I just want to pull out something here because it's fascinating that they actually mentioned

this guy that I did a podcast on a long time ago. So these are the mercenaries they're meeting

around, they're drinking, they're waiting for Zemuri. They told stories about mercenary heroes

like Lopez, who left New Orleans with 100 men, landed in Cuba, and nearly reached Havana before

he was caught and hung in a public square. They talked about William Walker. This is the guy

all the way back on Founders Number 55. I read one of the craziest books I've ever read.

It's called Ty Coons War. The subtitle of the book will tell you exactly what the book is about.

And it says how Cornelius Vanderbilt invaded a country to overthrow America's most famous military

adventurer. America's most famous military adventurer is William Walker, which is the guy that

these guys are sitting in the bar toasting to. William Walker made the fatal mistake of confiscating

some of Cornelius Vanderbilt's company property, so Cornelius Vanderbilt sought to have him killed.

William Walker is going to wind up being killed. He had a lot of enemies, not just Cornelius Vanderbilt,

but that just gives you an insight of like, there's a lot of people were like, you might be able to

compare like an entrepreneur from the past maybe 150 years ago to somebody today, but you can't

really do that with Cornelius Vanderbilt. The only person in present day that reminds me of Cornelius

Vanderbilt is I would say he's like more like a Vladimir Putin than any other founder that's alive

today. Just his that he had like nation level wealth and he was also completely ruthless. In fact,

the opening line of that podcast I did was unlike Vanderbilt's other adversaries, William Walker was

not afraid of Cornelius when he should have been. So it's interesting how this all ties together

because the mercenaries that Zemuri's hiring to overthrow the Honduran government are looking up

to William Walker and they give a description of him here, which is really weird why you'd look

up to somebody who actually, well, this is what it says, William Walker, who captured Nicaragua

with 84 soldiers, but was later stood up against a wall in Honduras and shot full of holes.

And that's interesting because the way I remember it, I thought he was shot to death,

blindfolded on a beach, but in any case, that the end is the same, they caught him and they

killed him. So these mercenaries are waiting on a boat, they're waiting for another boat,

which is going to be Zemuri, they're right off the coast of New Orleans. So let's go right there.

They're talking to each other, what now we wait for El Amigo, a boat appeared on the horizon,

it was Zemuri. He hops on board, he says he led the way to a cabin filled with weapons,

grenades, rifles, machine gun, enough ammunition to fight a war. Then he stood in the galley cooking

breakfast, steak and eggs, a bottle of whiskey. He drank a shot for himself. He told the captain

to raise anchor and motor over to another ship, which is called the Hornet. So this is the boat

that he's going to give the mercenaries. The Hornet was a fearsome armor clad cruiser that had seen

action in the Spanish-American war. Zemuri had brought the ship secretly through a third party

for his mercenaries. Then Zemuri jumps off to another boat. Zemuri said goodbye to the men.

He then stood deck on his ship, watching the Hornet pass the barrier islands and sail into the open

sea. Okay, so from there, the book starts telling the story, like how do you get to that point?

You just said he arrived at 14 years old from Russia, immigrant, no education, no money, and then

was at 15, 16 years later, he has enough money and he's built up this business where

he decides to overthrow government because that government is hostile to his business interests.

So let's go to his early life. And this page is simple. He was driven ruthless and relentless.

He was born in 1877 in Western Russia. His father died young, leaving his family penniless

without prospects. Sam traveled to America with his aunt in 1892. This is what his family told him

to do. He was to establish himself and then send for the others, his mother and his siblings.

He pops up in Selma, Alabama, where his uncle owned a store. He was 14 or 15, but you would guess

him much older. Now this is a crazy sentence that I've seen over and over again, the idea behind

this sentence over and over again in these books. The immigrants of that era could not afford to be

children. By 16, he was hardened, a tough operator, a dead end kid, coolly figuring out the angles.

Where's the play? What's in it for me? His humor was black, his explanations few.

And this is another great sentence. The writing, I just ordered another one of Rich Cohen's books.

He just actually published a biography of his father, but this is, he's one of the best writers

I've ever come across in terms of just making a founder biography. Not only is there like a ton

of interesting lessons in here, but it's hard to put down the book. It's just absolutely fantastic

writing. He was driven by the same raw energy that had always attracted the most ambitious to

America, then pushed them to the head of the crowd, grasper, climber, nasty ways of describing

this kid who wants what you take for granted. From his first months in America, he was scheming,

looking for ways to get ahead. You did not need to be a Rockefeller to know the basics of the dream.

Start at the bottom, fight your way to the top. Over time, Sam would develop a philosophy best

expressed in a handful of phrases. So these are what I would call the Murray isms. They're spread

throughout the entire book. Here's a few here. You're there. We're here. Go see for yourself.

That's like the most operandi for management. Don't trust the report. And we'll get into that

more of this later, but he kept his entire business inside his head. He did not like writing things

down. Though immensely complicated, he was in a fundamental way, simple. He believed in staying

close to the action in the fields with the workers in the dive bars with the banana cowboys.

You drink with a man and you'll learn what he knows. And this to me is the most important

sentence in the entire book. There is no problem you can't solve if you understand your business

from A to Z, he said. And there's a few more highlights to give you a good idea as like his

personality. You get a good idea of who he is as a person or he was as a person. And then we get

into like some of the first jobs. He just did anything he could for money. Sam did not care

for crowds and parties. He had a restless mind and a persistent need to get outside. He liked to

be alone. So he starts out stacking shelves and checking inventory in his uncle's store.

He dealt with the salesman who turned up with the sample cases he stood in the alley amid the

garbage cans asking about supplies and costs. There was money to be made he realized but not

here. He interrogated customers he was looking for different work and would try anything.

His early life was a series of adventures with odd job leading to odd job much of the color

that would later do the reason this is this sentence disguised why I'm reading the section to

you much of the color that would later entertain magazine writers because Sam's life had the

dimension of a fairy tale were accumulated in these first few years in Alabama. He was employed

by an old timer. Now and then the old timer would offer Sam some wisdom banks fail women leave but

land lasts forever. So this guy's job well this is what this guy did for a living and what he's

hiring Sam to do the guy comb trash piles on the edge of town searching for discarded scraps of

sheet metal. Then he would pile it on a cart and push it from farm to farm looking for trades.

I'll trade you some wire for a chicken coop in return from one of those pigs that you got in

the pen. After the particulars were agreed on Sam was told to get moving catch and tie that animal

boy. It was the Murray's first real job. Remember the sentence for later he was paid a dollar a week

a dollar a week and then this next part demonstrates at least this is what I wrote to

myself when I got to the section. He may be young and poor but he's got a brain and you clearly see

that now. He kept the job long enough to know that he would rather be the man who owned the hog

than the man who collected the junk and he'd rather be the man who discarded the sheet metal

than the man who owned the hog. A series of odd jobs followed. He was a house cleaner. He was a

delivery boy. By 18 he had saved enough money to send for his brothers and sisters. But his real

life began only when he saw that first banana. He devised a plan soon after he would travel to

Mobile, Alabama where the fruit boats arrived from Central America purchased a supply of his own

carry them back to Selma and go into the business. So he goes down to the dock and he's looking for

opportunity. There's a line here that just is really a main theme of the book. The main theme

of the book is that you should learn every detail of your trade. He just said the reason he's doing

this because if I know everything he does, there's no problem I can't solve. He wanted to learn every

detail of the trade. The bananas that did not make the cut were designated as ripes and they were

heaped in a sad pile. A ripe is a banana you have left in the sun that has become freckled.

These bananas, though they're still good to eat right now, would never make it to the market in

time. In less than a week they'd begin to soften and stink. As far as the banana merchants were

concerned before Sam that's the important part. These were trash. So they're telling us Sam's

essentially spotted an opportunity where others saw nothing. Sam grew fixated on the ripes. He

recognized the product where others had seen only trash. It was a world it was the worldview of the

immigrant understanding how so called garbage might be valued under a different name. Seeing

nutrition where others only saw waste. He was the son of a poor Russian farmer for whom food had

once been scarce enough to make even a freckled banana seen precious. That's another main theme

in the book that'll pop up over and over again. That is the primary way he viewed himself as just

a farmer. Sam walked down to the pier to talk to the company agent. Zamuri had saved $150.

That was his stake. He figured it would go further if it was spent on ripes. He was no fool.

He knew what this meant that he'd have to move fast that he was entering a race with the clock

as far as he was concerned. Now keep in mind I'm going to tell you what I thought about the

the paragraph this paragraph after I read it but I'm going to tell you it before I read it to you.

This is going to remind me of Jay-Z and I'll explain why how where that connection is coming

from as far as he was concerned. Ripes were considered trash only because Boston fruit

and similar other firms were too slow footed to cover ground. It was a calculation based on arrogance.

I can be fast where others have been slow. I can hustle where others have been satisfied

with the easing pickings of the trade. So all the way back on Founders 238 if you haven't

listened to yet. I read Jay-Z's autobiography. You never know when you release a podcast

which ones are going to resonate for some reason. That one resonates a lot. I constantly hear back

from people that love that podcast. I love the book because I've been a huge Jay-Z family all

life. There's two things that came to mind immediately when I got to that section and

there there's two paragraphs. They're either on one's on page 75 of Jay-Z's autobiography

once page 76. I'm going to read them because this is exactly where I feel the mentality Jay-Z had

very similar to the mentality we see from a young Samza Murray. And this is what Jay-Z says.

This is the kid on the street. The kid on the streets is getting a shot at a dream.

He sees the guy who gets rich and thinks, yep, that'll be me. He ignores the other stories

going around. And I'll get to the second paragraph in a minute, but Samza Murray's making that same

calculation. There's a ton of people getting rich in the banana trade, right? There's a bunch of

people and he winds up hiring these people that were at one point rich or one point successful

and then fell off. And so he hires them to make sure that he avoids their fate, which is actually

really smart that he does that later on. But this idea is like, yeah, okay, I'm not going to worry

about the people that try this and failed. I'm going to assume the guy that I'm going to assume

I'm the person. I'm the guy that got rich and thinks, yep, that'll be me. The second paragraph

that I think also illustrates Sam's thinking here. There's no, and this is so dead on with what's

happening in the book. There's no way to quantify all this on a spreadsheet, but it's the dream of

being the exception. The one who gets rich and gets out before he gets got. That is the key

to a hustler's motivation. And that's mind blowing to me because Jay Z is describing

hid the early days of his life. Now you go and you put in you place that in context with the early

days of Sam's and Murray's life and it's the exact same thought applied to a different domain.

It was a calculation based on arrogance, I can be fast where others have been slow,

I can hustle, it's interesting to use the same word. He's using that as a verb, Jay Z is using

it as a noun, I can hustle where others have been satisfied with the easy pickings of the trade.

Let's go back to the book. Sam Murray's first cargo consisted of a few thousand bananas.

He did not spend all his money but retained a small balance, which was used to rent a box car

on the railroad. The trip to Selma where he's taken the bananas was scheduled to take three days,

meaning he would have just enough time to get the fruit to market before the sun did its worst.

Since the fri- and this is so wild, since the freight charge used the last of his money,

Sam Murray traveled in the box car with the bananas. And this is just fantastic writing,

it seems appropriate, Sam Murray sleeping besides his first haul, attending to his

product like a baby in a nursery. And so we see another trait that Sam has his whole life,

he's always listening, he wants the information that you have, because that information, if I

shut up, if I use my ears more in my mouth, that's how I get smart, right? And so he winds up talking

to a breakman, just a guy working on the railroad that gives him a great idea. And this is what

the guy said to him, you got a good product there. If you could just get word ahead of the

towns along the line on the railroad, I'm sure the grocery owners would meet you at the platforms

and buy the bananas right off the box car. During the next day, Sam Murray went in and then we see

that relentless resourcefulness that is a hallmark of Sam Murray's entire life.

Sam Murray went into a Western Union office and spoke to a telegraph operator,

he had no money. So Sam offered a deal. If the man radioed every operator head asking each of

them to spread the word to local merchants, dirt cheap bananas coming through for merchants and

peddlers, Sam would share a percentage of his sales. When the railroad arrived in the next town,

the customers were waiting. He sold the last banana. Then he went home in the dark,

where he tallied his mother money. I asked you to remember that he was making a dollar a week

chasing pigs, right? This is just a few years before this is happening. It came to $190. His

first real success. After accounting for expenses, Sam had earned $40 in six days.

Earth put another way 40 times his weekly earnings just a few years before.

Sam Murray had stumbled on a niche. Ripes overlooked at the bottom of the trade,

where the big fruit companies monopolized the upper precents of the industry.

And to do so, you need a capital, railroads, ships to operating in the greens, which is

like you're essentially farming your own bananas. So when you think about that,

the world of Ripes was wide open. It was in these months on train platforms all in the

small towns in American South, that's the Murray first came to be known as Sam the banana man.

And more great writing that I think really puts it puts the image in your mind

of Sam the banana man at this point. As a salesman of a perishable product,

he was skirting the line between wealth and oblivion, health and rot, a rider of railroads,

a chaser of time, it was life, move the fruit now or you're ruined forever. He became a gambler

by necessity, a risk taker, a salesman, a brawler, that little fellow as the big executives in Boston

called him, but that little fellow would build a kingdom from Ripes. So for the next few years,

he's going to focus on this profitable niche that he identified and he realized, oh, I can grow

fast and wait till we get to how fast he grew. It is remarkable. Some more background here that

just talks about the, you know, you and I have talked about this idea over and over again that

I think most people that I've ever lived overestimate or underestimate, maybe that's the

right word. A lot can change in one lifetime. I think that's the key reason to read this book

and what I got the most of rereading at the second time is it completely takes whatever's

in your mind about what one person can accomplish in one lifetime, takes your brain out of your skull

and stretches it. It's like, oh, you can do so much more. And as long as you don't limit your

options, cap your upside by any means, which Sam obviously never did. This is what I mean. So it

talks about you have a Supreme Court justice. This is this is just like throwback to what's

going to happen in in in his life a few decades from now. You have a Supreme Court justice writing

a letter to the President of the United States about Sam Zemuri, the 14 year old Russian immigrant

that came to America with no education, no money. That is wild. So it says he had the sort of Sam

was big, deliberate, strong and slow. He stood out from the beginning. He's also quiet. He had

the sort of calm that cannot be taught. Years later in a letter to FDR, Supreme Court Justice

Felix Frankfurter described Zemuri as quote, one of the few statesmen among businessmen

that I have ever encountered. He has the qualities that one usually finds in a great personality.

That is just remarkable. So back to this this time in the early career of his

in his early career rather, he was a kind of Colossus dismissals of him as a little fellow

were comical. They're referencing. So you have the this this company, the whale and the fish,

right? And the title, the whale is United Fruit. Now the founders of United Fruit,

there's going to be three founders, I'm going to introduce you to them in a minute.

They're all they all was fascinating to me is like they saw they were much older than than

them than Sam. They said they're like, Oh, like he's he's another me, right? Maybe younger version

of me, they never ever ever underestimated him. In fact, they did the smart move and they partnered

with them. Now, when they die, and this gigantic company they went to building from nothing is

taken over by these executives, they're they do the exact opposite. And you and I have talked

about this over and over again, it pops up in the book, there is no upside, never underestimate

your opponent. It is all downside and no upside. And that's exactly what they do. They underestimated

one of the most formidable individuals to ever live. And they would call him the little fellow.

And so that's what the author saying is like the idea that you call him a little fellow was comical,

not only because he was gigantic in size, you know, six foot three on muscle,

you know, he's gonna like, they're in an office in Boston, he's like hacking a machete and building

and planting banana plants and Honduras. So he says he moved to mobile. We're not there yet,

though. He moved to mobile Obama soon after he went into rights better to live near the docks.

If business was slow, he took a job. He worked, he would work on a ship as part of a cleaning

crew scrubbing decks. He had soon made his name as a uniquely resourceful trader, this crazy Russian

who bought all the freckled bananas. He was pure hustle. There's that word again,

used by both JC and Sam Zemuri and the author. He purchased every ripe and overripe and about

to be ripe. He could lay his hands on the importers were happy to get money for what in other towns

was considered trash. This is going to bring him to the attention of Andrew Preston. Andrew Preston

is going to be maybe that there's three founders in United Fruit, he might be the most important one.

And he's the one he's like, Hey, I want to meet this kid. And that is Zemuri is a kid at this time.

It's really hard to understand that because Zemuri discovered a pasture fertile ground

previously until his business grew by leaps and bounds. So what does that mean in 1899?

He sold 20,000 bananas. Four years later, he sold half a million. Within a decade,

he'd be selling more than a million bananas a year. Andrew Preston, the president of United

Fruit and one of the founders asked to meet Zemuri, this Russian selling all the rights.

No photos of this meeting were taken, no minutes recorded, but it was significant.

The titan who began the trade, that is not hyperbolic either. And we'll get into like how

technology unlocks it before the banana trade was, it was all local. He mentioned the seamship

that that new technology, the steamship winds turns it into a global business. That's why the

book starts out was like, you have to understand United Fruit is one of the first truly global

corporations. In fact, there's like this antitrust suit that gets taken against United Fruit all the

way up to the Supreme Court of the United States. And that decision affects the future of all these

international companies that occur after this. So I think I bring that up later on, but I want to

get to what Preston's talking about, like his impression of Zemuri, which I thought was very

interesting. As it says, but it was significant, the titan who began the trade shaking hands with

the nobody who would perfect it. Preston later spoke of Zemuri with admiration. He said,

the kid from Russia was closer in spirit to the banana pioneers than anyone else working.

He's a risk taker, Preston explained. He's a thinker. He's a doer. And so what do you think

Preston's going to do when he comes across somebody's like, oh, I need to get I need to sign

this kid. Zemuri signed a contract with United Fruit that year, putting their arrangement and

writing. And so there's going to be this dance throughout their entire throughout Zemuri's

entire life, because Preston's eventually going to he's he's a lot older than Zemuri. So he's

going to pass away. But this is like the first dance, the first song in the dance that they're

going to have throughout their career is where you have Zemuri's company, which he's going to

formalize here in a little bit. And eventually, like it's going to have a partnership with United

Fruit, then there's all these antitrust, antitrust allegations from the Justice Department of the

United States causes Preston to be forced to sell back to Zemuri, that I think only like 10% of

the company, something like that, which is going to lead to Zemuri building like the most formidable

competition that United Fruit's ever seen. And then eventually, there's what the entire book's about

is how the hell does this fruit jobber, right, this little guy from the Docs is what they called

him. How does he take over one of the how does he take over and then run for 25 years?

One of the first truly global corporations, he's going to wind up taking over Preston's company,

he doesn't after Preston dies, but it's just wild when you think about, wow, all the way back in

1903, they're just meeting on the Docs in Mobile, Alabama. And you have Preston be like, Hey, I need

to be on this guy's team, I see me in him. So let's go back to the book a few years before Zemuri

seemed like a fool buying garbage. Now look what he accomplished selling hundreds of thousands of

bananas a year, he become one of the biggest traffickers in the trade. And he'd done it without

having to incur the traditional costs. What does that mean? His fruit was growing for him,

unlike Preston's harvest stayed and shipped for free unlike Preston's. He was like a bike

racer riding in the windbreak of a semi truck. That's a really in what a fantastic like that,

like you get that part is like, Oh, immediately in your mind's eye, you like I picture that.

So it says he was like a bike racer riding in the windbreak of a semi truck, the semi truck

being united fruit by his 21st birthday, he had $100,000 in the bank in today turn in today's

terms, he would have been a millionaire. If he had stopped there, his would have been a great

success story. But here's the thing, they don't write books about people to stop there. So we

know Zemuri obviously didn't stop there. It's not his personality. In fact, he started so he

starts working in the trade what he's 18, 19 years old. He has like a few such a crazy story.

I know I've said that over and over again, but it is really one of the crazy stories

I've ever come across. Eventually, he the United States government is going to force

Zemuri to sell his business to United Fruit because they're about to go to war. The two

companies literally go to war in Central America and they had interest. So there's

throughout the life of the same Zemuri, there's times where the government wants him,

wants him and United Fruit to divest. And then there's the in a few years later,

they force them to partner. But so he has like a, you know, a few year break,

like a year to break, I forgot the exact time. And then, but outside of the year to break where

he's forced out of the industry, he works in the banana industry till he's I want to say 74, 76.

So starting in 1876, and he dies, I think at 84. So let's go to his next step. Obviously,

there's a lot more detail, highly, highly, highly recommended. If you haven't read the book, and

I know a ton of people listen to founders have because I've talked to them about it.

But if you haven't, you got to pick it up because it's just so crazy. And it's only like,

I got a lot of highlights, but you know, 250 pages, it's just absolutely fantastic. So

let's get to the next part in Zemuri's life. How's he going to move up the stack, right?

He's like, all right, well, I'm not going to just stay, I'm not content to just stay with

Ripes forever. I want to expand. He realizes, hey, I got to take on a partner, even though it kind of

goes against his nature. Sam Zemuri took a partner in 1903. This was out of character. He was a

solitary sort, a late night walker and a party avoider. He liked to make decisions on his own,

better to ask forgiveness and permission. But he had gone as far as he could with Ripes,

he wanted to move into the more respectable precincts of the trade. That was where the real

money was. For this, he would need capital and help. So he takes his partner, it says Hubbard,

that's the guy's name, is gone now, dead and buried and forgotten. He was a poor bastard who

lacked the nerve, who sold out too early, who quit the game a minute before the number came in.

That happens in the future. At this point, they joined with an ambitious goal to traffic yellows

and greens. This meant they'd have to contract Central American farmers for a percentage of each

harvest, which Zemuri and Hubbard would then import. For Sam, who had always kept costs down,

this meant assuming a new level of risk and that risk, his high tolerance. There's a lot of echoes,

because I just reread two books, or reread Titan and then read another biography of Rockefeller.

We're going to see they're like, oh, they think very similarly. So does Andrew Preston in regard to

Rockefeller. But that high tolerance for risk makes Hubbard in the future extremely uncomfortable,

that's going to lead to Zemuri buying them out. Zemuri and Hubbard purchased Thatcher Brothers

Steamship Company, which was in bad financial shape. The acquisition ran upwards of $10,000.

Sam put up some of the money, and Hubbard did the same, and the balance was covered by the United

Fruit Company at the direction of Andrew Preston. Preston followed Zemuri's progress as the general,

this is such a great description of what Preston's doing. Preston followed Zemuri's progress as the

general manager of the Yankees might follow a flamethrower makings way through the miners.

Such partnerships were the way of United Fruit, the style that earned the company the nickname

the octopus. They wrapped their tentacles around every startup in the industry. In those days,

United Fruit either owned a piece of you or was intent on your destruction. And then as a result

of buying this company, having Steamships doing a partnership with both Hubbard and Preston,

this is a great way to think about this. His field of operations suddenly expanded.

The entire Gulf of Mexico was now open. So I want to skip ahead because I want to talk to about

the founders of United Fruit, which I thought this section was absolutely fascinating.

And so it says, in certain ways, Sam Zemuri was without precedent. The push cart nebish,

the fruit jobber from the docks, he came from nowhere to create not just a fortune, but an

archetype. He was the gringo in platonic form. He seemed to strive for the sake of striving

to hustle to prove it could be done. Swinging his machete as the sun beats down,

face bathed in sweat. You see him astride his white mule. He's in the doorway of the cantina.

His voice is gruff, saying, if you're on a man's side, this is another Zemuri, Zemuriism,

you can think about it that way. If you're on a man's side, you stay on that man's side,

or you're no better than a goddamn animal, he would say. Was there a precursor? And we know,

we already know the answer to this question because that's a major point of setting the

history of entrepreneurship. Of course there was. There always is. It's the same personality type

that just keeps appearing over and over again throughout hundreds of years of history. It's

remarkable. Of course there was. The world is a mere succession of fortunes made and lost,

lessons learned and forgotten and learned again. In truth, Zemuri was following a path

blazed by three men who had gone into the jungle a generation before. Here I speak of the Titans

who built the greatest banana company in the world, United Fruit, the Octopus,

reviled even now, decades after its empire collapsed in the South. So the three founders,

they're all going to come together for different reasons. It's Lorenzo Baker,

Andrew Preston and Minor Key. So Lorenzo Baker, this goes on for quite a bit. So I'm just going

to give you the top level highlights of this podcast to be like five hours long. Lorenzo Baker,

he's the one, he's going to buy the ship. And so he's making money because gold prospectors are

saying, hey, will you take us down to somewhere? I think this might be in Bolivia. I can't remember

exactly. And he's like, yeah, I'll take that. That's fine. And so on his route back up to America,

he's at a bar in the Caribbean and he sees his first bananas. And he's like, what are those?

And there's an entire history of the banana in this book, which is also fascinating.

I found out a bunch of things, things that were surprising to me like a banana is not a fruit,

it's a berry technically, it's not a tree, it's the world's tallest grass, it can grow a banana

plant can grow 20 inches and 24 hours, all kinds of like mind blowing stats in the book. But anyways,

he sees his first banana is like, what are these? And he didn't even know how to open it. And so

then he's like, oh, this is delicious. I'm going to buy him. So he bought 160 bunches. He's in

Jamaica this time. He bought 160 bunches at 24 cents a bunch. So he gets back in this point,

I think his destination is Jersey. He gets there and he sells them. So he paid 24 cents a bunch.

He sold all of his bananas for $2 a bunch. He's like, oh, this is extremely profitable. So then

he makes this trip a few times. In July 1871, he sailed into Boston with the biggest load of bananas

the city has ever seen. Why is that important? Because his soon to be co-founder is on the docks.

This is Andrew Preston who had just met with Zemuri. This is obviously, you know, many decades

before he met Zemuri. Andrew Preston was on the docks that afternoon, the load came in. Preston

took a special interest in perishables. He had made a career of recognizing a prize at a distance.

He bought Baker's entire hall and then he starts making a lot of money on bananas. This is a fantastic

sentence I think describes why this is so important. Andrew Preston would not stop talking about

bananas like Baker before him and like Zemuri after he had spotted a niche. So Preston and Baker

are going to team up. They're going to import bananas. They're going to sell them. Eventually

they're going to team up. Well, let me just read this to you. So it's actually easier just for me

to read it. Preston meant to change the model of the business. It had been low volume, high price.

He would make it high volume with cheap bananas sold up and down the economic scale, which is the

world that we live in now, right? To achieve this, Baker and Preston had to increase supply

and control quality. And so they're going to go down. They're going to meet this guy,

Miner Keith, who's in Costa Rica at the time, if I'm not mistaken, this is incredible writing.

There's going to be the third party and third partner in United Fruit. I'm going to read the

entire there's like two and a half paragraphs here. There's just remarkable because Miner Keith

is not down there. Like bananas was not his primary goal. Miner Keith is trying to build

the first railroad in the area. Building a railroad in a jungle is not easy and not safe.

It is not clear when he realized the work was going to be a lot harder than he imagined.

A few days into the job is my guess. Laying track in a jungle is a nightmare. There's no

bedrock in the jungle. As soon as a section of rail had been laid, it would begin to shift.

Now and then after a big rain, an entire stretch would slide into a valley. Weeds wrapped around

the ties, roots buckled the beds. The workers were tormented by heat and disease. More than 300

died the first year and just four miles of track were completed. Miner Keith is down there with

his brother, Henry. Halfway through the second summer, Henry Keith was not feeling well, feverish,

hot to the touch and his eyes. My God, his eyes, yellow fever. Miner told his brother to go home

to Brooklyn, recover them return. But less than a month later, Henry was back soon after he was

dead. Miner moved into his brother's tent and carried on. He sent for his little brother, Charlie,

as he had been sent for. When that brother died, he sent for his younger brother, youngest brother,

John. When John died, he continued alone. This made him a hero in Costa Rica, a man whose commitment

could not be questioned, who fed his own brothers to the jungle. The railroad made its first run

on December 7th, 1855, 15 years and at least 4,000 dead. The best audio book that I've ever heard

is there's a similar story in here where it's called The Forgotten Highlander. If you have an

extra credit on audible, highly recommend you picking it up. It's like a long podcast. I think

it's three hours and 14 minutes long. The book is The Forgotten Highlander by Alistair Urquhart.

He was actually, he was captured in World War II by the Japanese and forced to build a railroad in

a jungle by the Japanese Imperial Army. And he didn't mostly butt naked. The story is incredible.

So let's get into how Miner gets in the banana business and then how he winds up teaming up

with Andrew and Baker. So it says Keith thought that bananas would serve as a cheap food for

his own workers. So that was his original intent. But then he has a realization. He's like, wait,

there's a tremendous market for bananas in the north. And that's where Preston and Baker find him.

In 1894, Keith signed a contract with Boston Fruit. He agreed to sell the company's entire

banana harvest. And so think about the next page, they talk about how they're starting,

again, one of the world's first truly global corporations. The note off myself on this page

is just a way to think about them. They're the Rockefeller of the bananas. Everything was settled

in less than an hour. There would be no, there would be neither loan nor temporary arrangement.

The men would merge companies instead, a permanent solution to perpetual problems.

It would give money to Keith fruit for Preston and Baker, the new enterprise would be called the

United Fruit Company. And so they go around all the Caribbean, the Dominican Republic, Cuba,

Jamaica, Costa Rica, Honduras, Colombia, etc, etc. And they're buying land with this in hand,

Preston put the second part of his plan into effect. This is like the Rockefeller of bananas,

a cunning way to bring order to a chaotic industry. What an interesting line there,

because that's exactly how the Rockefeller thought about what he was doing with Standard Oil.

He traveled from port to port, stopping in every city where bananas moved in numbers,

he took aside dozens of importers, giving them each the same pitch, join us, get big, survive,

in return for shares in their small companies, these men would receive United Fruit stock.

This is the Rockefeller of bananas. It's so wild to me. After the year without bananas,

most of the traders who survived were willing to swap independence for security. So what does that

mean? I think it was 1899 exactly. They were heavily dependent on weather for their crop,

as you could expect. I think it was a hurricane. I can't remember exactly. I'm surprised I didn't

take notes on this, but some kind of climatic event caused them to not have, there was like

a year where they couldn't harvest any of their fruit. And so what happens, just like Rockefeller,

who was always operating from a position of financial strength way greater than his competitors,

he just waited for a downturn and he just buy up your property. That's exactly what Preston's

doing here. After the year without bananas, most of the traders who survived were willing to swap

independence for security. In the first six months, United Fruit merged with 27 banana companies.

Come on. This is crazy, the parallel here. You and I just went over the fact that,

was it 22? I can't remember the number, 22, 24, something like that, that Rockefeller swallows

up, the Cleveland Massacre, Rockefeller swallows up like 22 or 24, something like that, other

refineries in like a few month period in Cleveland. We're seeing the exact same thing here. Six months

later, or, excuse me, within six months, United Fruit merges with 27 banana companies, Rockefeller

bananas. Okay, so that's the background with the founders. All these guys are going to know Zemuri,

all of them are going to respect him. They're much older, obviously than he is. Let's go back to Zemuri.

Obviously, we're going to fast forward. Sterbin's 14, then he's 18, then he's 21. Now he's 29.

This a few years before he's going to do this Honduran coup. At 29, he was rich, a well known

figure in a steamy paradise. Now he's already in, he's moved his operations to New Orleans.

His friends were associates, his mentors and enemies the same. He was a bachelor and alone,

but not lonely. He was on a mission. He was in quest of the American dream and was circumspect

and deliberate as a result. He never, so this is more about how he operates his business.

He never sent letters or took notes, preferring to speak in person or by phone. He did not want to

leave a record or draw attention. And so we already talked about how he's trying to get to the next

level, right? Starts up with rapes. Then he's like, Hey, I want to import, I want to own my own ships.

Now he's going to like, he always takes it. He's like, okay, let's step one,

took step one as far as I can go. Now we got a step two, let's take step two as far as I can go.

And now he's going to go to step three. He was like, I need my own land. I need to like,

he's vertically, vertically integrating, right? His company was operating as an importer, not

growing bananas, but buying them from Central American farmers. So Murray's worries were about

supply, setting a good price, working out deals with exporters. His firm was grossing several

hundred thousand dollars a year, most of which went to pay farmers and sailors and local officials

who had to be bribed. If you had looked into his eyes, you would see the machinery turning.

That is what Frank Brogan told me. It's just the sort of person he was, explained Brogan,

who had worked for Samurai in South America. He was one of those guys, part of him is always

figuring things out. You listen to a man like that, he knows something that can't be taught.

So he's going back and forth between Central America and New Orleans at the time.

So it says when he was in town, meaning in New Orleans, he was on the docks, trading, questioning,

comparing, manifest the car goes making sure he wasn't getting ripped off. He knew everyone by name

there, but Pates, oh, this is what I mentioned earlier. This is really smart. If you think about

what he's doing, like you study those that came before you so you can avoid their fate. Getting

rich is one skill, staying rich is another. Samurai was able to master both those skills,

the guys that he's talking to only mastered one. He knew everyone by name, but he paid special

attention to the old timers who had been in the trade since the days of wind power before the

technology, the steam ship, which I mentioned to you earlier. They were grizzled and tobacco

stained as sunburned as pirates. They were former big timers now just trying to survive. He winds

up giving a bunch of these guys jobs. Again, he always wants to know what you know. And so we get

into his thinking at this part when he's 29, the only way to do this was to expand. And the only

way to do this was to plant his own bananas. It was a realization that sends a Murray down the

path he would follow for the rest of his life, a tortured path that led him into the jungle.

So not only is this a fascinating biography of a formidable individual, but it's also a really

interesting story about what the world was like in New Orleans and Central America and the Caribbean

in the early 1900s. He sets up shop in Honduras. This is the year is 1910. And it says when

Samurai arrived, it was a kind of frontier town. It was untouched by government or law. There was

gunplay every night. The streets were washed in liquor and gold. And why is it attracting so many

like ruffians to use the word of Alexander Grimbel? Because Honduras had no extradition treaty with

the United States. And because of that, it had become a criminal refuge filled with Americans on

the lamb. So this is where he becomes famous because he crosses the entire country by mule. I

mentioned this earlier. His first time on a mule, Samurai was thrown to the ground. The second time

the animal bit his toe. The third time the mule dropped and rolled. The fifth time the mule carried

Samurai to the middle of a river and left him there. But the point is, is the reason the story's

in there is because he's he has incredible levels of endurance and persistence. So says Samurai was

a habitual limit crusher. He loved feats of endurance, proving himself by watching his

companions flag, throw up their hands and say, let's take a break for a beer. He crossed Honduras

on muleback so he could learn the country, meet its people and scout his property. And it says

Honduras is the size of Pennsylvania. And all this research and crossing the land is what opens up

for his moment. This is what's going to build like the foundation of this incredible business that

he's in the process or in the middle of building. And this is just a great line. So he's going around

obviously looking for for land, right? He kept quiet because talking only drives up the price.

Samurai bought his first piece of parcel of land on the edge of the north coast of Honduras.

Much of the property ran along the southern bank of the QML river. That's what his

company is going to be called, by the way. This was long considered junk land for $2,000.

All of it borrowed, he got 5,000 acres. He was soon back in New Orleans wondering if 5,000 acres

was enough. And this is where he's going to start having beef with his partner. It does not matter

if you think it's enough, Hubbard said to him, we're out of money. And this is this is amazing.

Reference this paragraph on past episodes of founders as well, because it's just amazing.

Oh, wait a think about this, right? So he's like, Hey, have this opportunity. No, no,

like there's cheap land, right? No one sees the value in it. There's no limit to how much I could

buy the only limit being money. What should I do? My partner saying I'm crazy. And this is just

fantastic writing. There are times when certain cards sit unclaimed in the common pile, when

certain properties become available, that will never be available again. A good businessman feels

those moments like a fall in the barometric pressure. A great businessman is dumb enough

to act on them, even when he cannot afford to. And so how is he going to do this? Oh man. Okay,

so Murray returned to Honduras in the spring of 1910 with a plan that was very simple and

beautifully effective head north beyond the last paved road into the delta of the river,

flash a bankroll and buy as much land as as he could until his cash ran out. He was playing

with borrowed money. Having tapped out every line of credit in New Orleans and mobile,

he had gone to the banks in New York and Boston, whoever was lending, he was accepting. This is

very similar to what we just learned about Rockefeller on the early days of his career too.

He was out there overextended and vulnerable. He might he must have worried about the risk,

but had to know this was his moment. This land would not be this cheap forever. In the course

of a few months, he accumulated the unclear acres that would constitute his first plantation.

And why is that? Because to go back to what he said, if you know your business from A to Z,

there's nothing you can't solve. How many of the executives later on in the United Fruit Company,

which is headquartered in Boston, are going to be scouting land by mule? None. He had superior

information, understood something important, loss on Hondurans to the peasants that he was

buying the land from. The land was swamp and disease, nothing that will be that will still

be nothing in 100 years. Sam knew better, because he was raised on a farm, he realized

the meaning of all that black soil beneath the weeds, because he worked as a jobber,

he realized the worth of the fruit that would thrive in that soil. This land picked up for a song

was in fact the most valuable banana country in the world. Zemuri then went all across Honduras

meeting government officials for that. So he needs a ton of money, right, that he's got to borrow.

He needs it to buy land from people that don't think it's valuable. And then he needs it because

he's going to pay off every single politician that he ever comes across. Flat out corruption,

not even trying to hide it. This is a result of this corruption. His company would be exempted

from import duties on all equipment, exempted to from paying property, labor and export tax.

Zemuri's bananas would arrive in the United States unencumbered by such fees.

This meant he could sell his product just as cheaply as United Fruit. If asked to sum up Sam

in these early days when he was building his first first plantation, I would use the word drive.

And then a few sentences later, the author does my job for me. Why bananas? Because it was the

nearest product at hand. If Sam had settled in Chicago, it would have been beef. If he was in

Pittsburgh, it would have been steel. If he was in LA, it would have been movies. In the end,

it does not matter what you're stocking. Selling is the thing. And then we get to the part why

Zemuri was so respected by so many of his employees and also developing skill set that his competitors

are going to lack because he's the one, he's with his workers in the field. He liked doing physical

labor and he talks about why he likes that later on. But this is a description of what they're

doing. It was the hardest work in the world. If this is the kind of book I want it to be,

it will leave you with a sense of the fields, the heat and the fear, the snakes in the brush

that have to be killed with a single blow, the sting of the poison that makes you want to lie

down just for a minute, the scorpions that drop into your shirt in search of exposed skin. So

I didn't know scorpions nest in banana plants and banana trees. The mosquito swarms that deliver

yellow fever, the malaria dreams, the swamp land and broken tools and arsenic trees. The way your

health is destroyed, your hands blistered, your back ruined, the way the world appears when you

have forgotten to drink enough water. And just keep that in mind because that's what he's experiencing

in his early 20s, early 30s, you know, and then he's going to have to go up against banana executives

who've taken over for the company founders that have long since died. And it's just like,

see the experience Z that Sam endured and that went through just the knowledge that he gets from

being involved in every single step of the process, the idea that you're going to wind up

having some kind of information advantage over this person is just silly. And not only that,

he's clearly demonstrated a high capacity to take pain. So Murray worked in the field besides his

engineers, planters and machete man, he was deep in the muck, sweat covered, swinging a blade,

he helped map the plantations, plant the rhinosomes, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly,

but every banana comes from the banana came before it, they said essentially like the banana

that we eat is just like a billion, it's like a clone, like a, there's billions and billions of

clones of just whatever species have been animating, they're all exactly the same. They describe the

process in the book, but like, there's this thing on the plant that you cut, and then you, you can

cut them into like pieces and wherever you plant them, they're just going to like, essentially

build clones of them. But that's what the rhyme zone is, I didn't, I didn't remember that the last

time. So it says help map the plantations, plant the rhinosomes, clear the weeds, lay the track,

he was a proficient snake killer, he shouted orders in dog Spanish. And this is why also what

he liked about it, he believed in the transcendent power of physical labor, that a man can free his

soul only by exhausting his body. And then the author makes the point, I guess just the point

I was trying to make to you, his years in the jungle gave him experience rare in the trade,

unlike most of his competitors, he understood every part of the business from, from the executive

suite, where the stock was manipulated to the ripening room where the green fruit turned yellow,

he was contemptuous of banana man, who spent their lives in the north, far from the,

from the plantations, we're going to see another Zemuri is here, those schmucks,

what do they know, they're there, we're here. And so this plan, this mass expansion on borrowed

money makes this is going to lead to his breakup. Because his partner thought Zemuri was too bold,

just like Rockefeller's early partners in the oil business thought he was too bold, Hubbard had

agreed to the first round of bank loans and land purchases, then he agreed to the second.

But this was too much, whereas Zemuri thought everything should be risked now,

while the opportunity presented itself, Hubbard believed the business should be given time to

become established. First plant the land we've acquired, pay off our loans, and then we could

think about acquiring more acres. Zemuri must have realized the business had to get big to

survive. Go all in or get out, Sam said, Sam was young and wanted to bet everything. Hubbard

did not have the fortitude for such risks, asked to describe Zemuri by New Orleans newspaper

reporter after they broke up, this is fantastic. The best Hubbard could say was he's a man with

big ideas. So he's going to buy him out. What was Sam thinking piling debt on debt risk on risk,

he was taking it all in his own shoulders. But what did it matter? If he failed by himself,

he would lose the exact same amount as if he failed with a partner, everything.

So now we get to the coup. And there's a whole, this entire chapter has like this backstory here,

it's really fascinating. But it's a disagreement between multiple nations, right? And we've seen

this play out over and over again, one nation lends another poor nation money, high interest rate,

they went up defaulting, there's all these things that happen as a result of that. But the United

States government is trying to step in because there's, and trying to, there's going to be

Secretary of State Knox and then JP Morgan makes his cameo here, where he's going to refinance and

cash out these British bankers and get their railroad bonds that are taking place, I think,

in Honduras. But I'm going to give you like the high level, like what's going on here and why Sam's

doing what he's doing, right? And there's more, obviously more detail if you want to hear the

backstory in the book. The Knox plan was good for everyone, in fact, except the people of Honduras,

and for Sam Zemuri, whose business could not function without the concessions and sweetheart

deals that would be forbidden by Morgan. Remember, previously, Sam Zemuri had bribed for advantageous

finance, like economic exemptions year, like a few years before this is happening, Morgan's plan

is going to wipe all that out, it would add as much as a penny per bunch to each banana bunch,

which would drive Sam Zemuri out of business. Sam Zemuri went to work as soon as he learned

the terms of the Knox plan, his goal was simple, undermine, overturn, undo and kill it dead. And

so this is where Zemuri is going to be summoned to the Washington DC and says, on what must have

been one of the strangest days of his life, Sam Zemuri received a message from Washington DC,

he was to report to the office of the United States Secretary of State. He had been in America

less than a generation and here he was embroiled at the highest level of national affairs.

And so the author says, I've pieced together from various sources, their exchange, this is

something this is very similar to what happened. It starts with Knox and then you'll understand

who's saying what Knox says, you've been you've not been brought here to haggle, sir.

Then why have I been brought here to be told that I'm finished? That's not my concern.

Look, Mr. Secretary, if a few simple accommodations could be worked out,

I'm not discussing this Mr. Zemuri, I'm not bargaining, I'm telling you the policy of the

United States. Now that you know the policy, I'm advising you as nicely as I can to go home

and stay out of it. Do not meddle in Honduras. It is not your concern.

But it is my concern, Mr. Secretary, the treaty will mean the end of my business.

That's unfortunate, Mr. Zemuri, but my purview is larger than your banana business.

When Zemuri stood to leave Knox warned him a second time, don't meddle, stay out of it.

I better not hear you've got yourself mixed up in the politics of Honduras.

Zemuri nodded and seemed to agree, but Secretary Knox was not so sure.

Though he tried to put people at ease, Zemuri often struck those in power as a man who could

not be controlled. Yeah, that's an understatement. If you want to know what he's going to do,

forget what he seems to agree and figure out what's in his interest.

As soon as Zemuri was gone, Knox made some calls. So he winds up having them.

Zemuri is wind up being put under surveillance. And so this is just more great writing pretend

you're Zemuri. You're 32. You've been in America less than 20 years. You lived in Russia

before that in a poor farming town. Now you're here, an entrepreneur of considerable means,

but still somewhere in your mind, the little guy who snuck in the back door,

you're a husband and a father with a young daughter and another child on the way.

You've been summoned to Washington called to account by the Secretary of State.

Warrant, what do you do? Put your head down? Shut up? Sit in a corner and thank God for your

good fortune? Well, maybe that's what you would do, but not Sam Zemuri. Don't get involved.

How about I overthrow the fucking government? Is that too involved? You made a deal with the

president of Honduras. Well, what if he's not president no more? Consider the audacity in defying

Knox and JP Morgan. Sam Zemuri was challenging two of the most powerful people in America.

Zemuri scheme can be described as a coup disguised as a revolution. So that brings us back to the

events that were taking place in the very beginning of the book, where he's giving them weapons, money,

an old warship that was that served in the Spanish American War. And so the book goes into

more detail. I just want to give you the results of the coup. And it's just fascinating. Says the

U.S. Ambassador, let it be known that the United States could work with Bonilla. Bonilla had

overthoned the government. This is obviously the guy that Zemuri funded. In other words, and so why

is that important? In other words, the Secretary of State Knox had switched sides. His point being,

I don't really don't care who the president is as long as I can control him, which is obviously

the unfortunately history of Central and South America to a large degree. So he's like, all right,

fine, we'll deal with that guy. As long as we can control the person, it doesn't matter. And so

it says this is a result for Zemuri's business, though. Bonilla did not forget his benefactor.

One of the first official acts was to have Congress give Zemuri concessions covering

the next 25 years. Zemuri settlement included permission to import any and all equipment,

duty free to build any and all. This is just corruption. Unfortunately, this takes place

back then, takes place today all over the world. It's not what you and I want to see as

obviously as entrepreneurs is more like Crony Capitalists, but it is the environment that we

live in. Zemuri settlement included permission to import any and all equipment, duty free to

build any and all road roads, highways and other infrastructure that he might need. He also got a

$500,000 loan to repay all expenses incurred while funding the revolution. That is crazy.

As well as an additional 24,000 acres of land on the north coast of Honduras to be

claimed at a later date. No taxes, no duties and free land. These are all conditions that would let

Sam Zemuri take on United Fruit. So he's gonna spend years down in Honduras. He goes back and

forth, but he spends a lot of time in Honduras. This is a little bit of his routine at this point

in his career. He's up early each morning and eats breakfasts of raw vegetables and bananas.

In other cases, I might not linger on what a man had for breakfast, but such details

fascinated and confused Zemuri's competitors. Executives at United Fruit were bewildered by

reports of the jungle-dwelling Russian who had been living for weeks on nothing but figs,

or who was taking a fast cure and not eating anything for 20 days, or who had been standing on

his head besides a shade tree in the process of proving or disproving that inversion benefits

the digestion. So that's something he did a lot in his life. For some reason, after he'd eat,

he'd just stand on his head. And then the note I left myself on here was hilarious.

He's the Jay-Z of Banana Mogul. He writes nothing down and keeps it on his head

because Jay-Z's famous on not writing his raps. He just does it all on his mind.

As for the reports, sales figures and yields, the length of the average banana,

the market rates per stem, etc., etc., Zemuri went through these fast scanning them. A few

mental notes and he was done. He disdained bureaucracy and hated paperwork. So seldom

does he dictate a letter that he requires no full-time secretary. He will telephone division

managers in a half a dozen countries, correlate their reports in his head,

and reach his decision without touching a pencil. In the years that followed the coup,

Sam spent most of his time in Honduras. By 1913, he had saved enough money to buy back the steak

that United Fruit owned in his company, a move that would secure Zemuri's independence.

This is how the fish and the whale become competitors. Preston did not want to sell

back his stake. Selling back these shares was unusual for United Fruit, but the company was

forced to buy outside events. This is when the Justice Department keeps bringing all these different

lawsuits against United Fruit, or the threat of a lawsuit. They're essentially being threatened

and forced to do this because they're like, hey, we know you're a monopoly.

Though the Justice Department never filed any charges, the investigation had the desired effect.

By forcing Preston to sell his shares back to Zemuri, the government created a competitive

market. It did this by assuring the Zemuri the freedom to develop into a genuine competitor.

This is really important because again, I want to hound on the fact that founders understand

founder mentality. They clearly see it in other people. They see this. Preston sees this in Zemuri,

and not only Preston, but Keith and everybody else. This is in later years when Zemuri had

grown powerful. Analysts spoke of the mistakes that United Fruit made. They had underestimated

a dangerous rival in Zemuri. In fact, Preston and Keith understood the genius of Zemuri from the

beginning. They had long been dazzled by his rise from the docks, but it was a matter of triage.

They had to cut off the leg to save the body, cut free the banana man to save the company.

And so we're going to fast forward a few years. This is Zemuri at 40 years old. So now he's got

20 years in the banana trade. Again, I'm going to read this whole thing to you because this is

just incredible writing about an incredible founder. He was respected because he understood

the trade. By the time he was 40, he had served in every position, from fruit jobber to boss.

He worked on the docks, on the ships, on the railroads, in the fields and the warehouses. He

had ridden the mules. He had managed the fruit and the money, the mercenaries and the government men.

He understood the meaning of every change in weather, the significant significance of every

date on the calendar. There was not a job he could not do nor a task he could not accomplish.

He considered this is so important for us to internalize in our own careers.

He considered it a secret to his success. He was up every morning at dawn, having breakfast,

standing on his head, walking in the fields. As far as possible, he refrained from giving

interviews, addressing shareholders or attending functions, all of which took him away from his

work. He was one of those men who toiled every day, all day, every day, until they had to be

rolled away in a chair. When he failed to appear at a reception in Havana, Cuba, which had been

thrown in his honor, a lieutenant tracked him down to the, this is, so I talked about in the

Rick Rubin podcast I did, it's episode 245. I was like, listen, this is the most inner scorecard

shit I've ever seen. Inner scorecard, obviously, being Buffett's idea that you should be doing

things based on what you feel is right, not an external scorecard, which is doing things on

what other people might think or feel. And I said, like, the fact that Rick Rubin was such a

recluse and so such a workaholic that he didn't even pick up his Grammy. He was too busy working.

I was like, that's the most inner scorecard shit I've ever seen. We're going to see the

exact same thing. It was Murray. When he failed to appear at a reception in Havana, Cuba, which

had been thrown in his honor, didn't even show up to a party in his honor. His lieutenant tracked

him down to the wharf where he was going over manifest documents with a ship's purser. Come

on, man. That's the exact same thing. He was wildly ambitious and innovated like mad. As soon

as he had full control of his company, he began to visit boatyards. He wanted to build a fleet,

so he would never again be dependent on another company to haul his product. And then this is

what the founders, one of the founders of UF said about Samurai or knew about Samurai, that Samurai

could play as dirty as anyone else in the game. And this is coming from Minor Keith. Minor Keith

is this dude that they said that the locals in Costa Rica said he fed his brothers to the jungle.

Like, imagine the kind of person you have to be to build a railroad in a jungle. And then as a

side hustle, wind up starting, that's not enough, wind up starting the largest banana company the

world has ever seen. And so this is perfect. This is exactly what I've been trying to make this

point multiple times so far. That is why Minor Keith never underestimated Samurai. He recognized

him as one of his own. A throwback to the sort of man, excuse me, the sort of man who built the

industry, who went into the jungle with nothing but trinkets and came out with a million dollars.

And this is like where we're in the peak of his career, which is saying, there's just like some

highlights, like something that you and I have talked about over and over again. One of my favorite

quotes I've ever read about Steve Jobs was that Apple was just Steve Jobs with 10,000 lives.

The culture of his company, meaning Samurai, and obviously applies to jobs and everybody else,

the culture of his company was his personality. And so it goes up to this point is like by 1925,

it's the it's the biggest competitor United Fruit, United Fruit still has way more workers,

they have a little bit like they're more revenue, Samurai's profit margin is a lot higher though.

And so they just pull out, they just want to pull out a couple things as the author compares

both businesses. It was increasingly clear that Sam Samurai had built a better business.

His company was superior to United Fruit in a dozen ways that did not show up on the balance

sheet. So it talks about the fact that UF is a conglomerate, there's a lot of redundancy,

duplication of tasks, I'll skip over this part. But at this point, the founders are not longer

there. So it says every decision for Samurai was made with confidence and authority. Samurai can move

fast without waiting for permission or for a committee report. He could take risks, essentially

they're describing the difference between a founder and executive, right? He could take risks

without fear of losing his job. He could hire a fire with sureness because he actually lived in

Honduras and knew the situation on the ground. It was a contrast to styles. The executives who

ran United Fruit had taken over from the founders and were less interested in risking than in

preserving. Samurai was the founder forever on the attack. I love that line forever on the attack

at work, in progress, growing by trial and error. He was constantly inventing. Most people, this is

I love this guy. I don't like the things he did. I like his approach to business. I obviously don't

like the corruption and all other stuff. Obviously, and he knows that towards the end of his life,

he's like, I have a bunch of regrets and some of the stuff I did. But I like his attitude

towards business. Samurai was constantly inventing. Most people looking at a banana see a delicious

fruit. When Samurai looked at a banana, he saw room for improvement. And so the result too is

the people inside United Fruit can see the difference, right? So it says the most ambitious

banana man began to flock to Samurai. Dozens of them quit United Fruit. And so this is going to be,

brings Samurai into war with the guy that succeeded Andrew Preston as president of United Fruit.

It's the guy, Victor Cutter. They hate each other. And this is the guy that Samurai is going to wind

up firing when he takes control of the company. But at this point, they're like, Hey, we can't

compete with Samurai. So we need to buy him buy him. And so they, Cutter sends this guy down to

one of the company's officers to talk and like, Hey, let's come to agreement here. Just sell me

your company. And Samurai says this, turning down the offer, Samurai said, hell, I'm having so much

fun and I'm a young man. Why should I quit? And so this is where we see a conflict in Cutter's

own psychology. Because he's like, at the same point, he realizes, Hey, this is my most this is

my most formidable competitor, so much so that I'm trying to buy the company. And then when he

gets turned down, he like constantly insulting, constantly insulting Samurai, Cutter became the

first president of United Fruit had not been a founder. Though, though he was probably the best

of the second generation, Cutter was simply not made of the stuff of the old time banana men.

During the 1920s, death had taken the two great leaders of the trade, Andrew Preston and Minor

Keith, a few of the more perceptive students of the trade asserted that the most likely contender

for leadership was not these new UF men, but Sam's a Murray, who was still being described by Cutter

as that little fellow in Honduras. And so now I'm going to fast forward, we get into the banana

war. This is the war that is going to take place between the Murray and Cutter. And this is the

war that the United States government has to step in and end and they do that through by forcing

them to merge. And so this is this entire chapter on this is a ton of information is happening here.

I just want to tell you like broad strokes like what is the banana war about? And there's just

again great writing about the Murray who he was. From the outside, the banana war seems unfathomable.

So Murray had taken on an enemy of superior resources and size over a few thousand acres

that would only add only marginally add to his wealth. Why would he do this?

To colleagues who knew the Murray, his motivation was clear. He wanted to win

and would do whatever it took. He was a self made man filled with the most dangerous kind of confidence.

He had done it before and believed he could do it again. This gave him the air of a berserker

who says, if you're going to fight me, you better kill me. If you've ever known such a person,

you will recognize the type at once. If he does not say much, it's because he considers small

talk a weakness. Wars are not one by running your mouth. I'm describing a once essential American

type that has largely vanished. Men who channeled all their love and fear into the business,

the factory, the plantation, the shop. And so this is what they're fighting over. The banana war

was centered on a single, centered on a single piece of land, 5000 acres that both companies

coveted. United Fruit discovered the problem first. The land was on territory claim by Guatemala

and Honduras. And it seemed to have two separate legal owners. And in a paragraph, the author

does a great job giving us a metaphor from the way a big company thinks and the way an

entrepreneur thinks two different approaches to acquiring disputed land. When this mess of deeds

came to light, this is one of my favorite paragraphs in the entire book. When the this mess of deeds

came to light, United Fruit did what big bureaucracy heavy companies always do. They hired lawyers

and investigators to search every file for the identity of the true owner, owner. This took months

in the meantime. Oh, I love this part so much. In the meantime, the Murray meeting separately with

each claimant claimant, the two different people claim the land simply bought the land from both

of them. He bought it twice, paid a little more. Yes. But if you factor in the cost of all those

lawyers, he probably still spent less than UF and he came away with the prize. And so the government

actually catches Sam importing weapons. United Fruit is doing the same. And so this is where

they're going to have this. I'm essentially telling you the result of this government mandated merger.

But I want to point out, he's aggressive and ruthless, but he's also rich now. And so he

actually has something to lose. That means he's got a vulnerability that he didn't have when he was

young. And so it says, Zemuri's fruit company was Zemuri in the shape of a corporation. His

personality made manifest his home and his love, where he tested his theories and formed his philosophy,

get up first, work harder, get your hands in the dirt and blood in your eyes. But he had since

become a man of means. Whereas the young Sam was reckless and immune from nowhere with nothing,

there were all sorts of ways the middle age Sam could be hurt. This is such an interesting thought

in a short sentence. Check this out. Success limited his options and made him vulnerable.

And so he is 53 years old when this is happening. This is a result Sam would have received 300,000

shares of United Fruit. His stake after the merger would be valued at more than $30 million.

A figure worth considering as it would make Zemuri, who had arrived in Alabama with nothing

three decades before, one of the richest men in America. So if you use one of those inflation

calculators online, that's like a half a billion dollars today. As part of the agreement, Zemuri,

who would now would now become the majority owner of United Fruit stock, agreed to retire

from the banana trade. And so this is happening. The deal was actually approved in December 1929,

three months after the stock market crash. So Zemuri is older, very rich, very well known.

He develops a series of enemies, very powerful enemies. One of these is Huey Long. Huey Long

is going to be the former governor of Louisiana and a sitting US senator when he's assassinated.

It's not clear who killed him, but he also had a bunch of enemies. So it says when Huey said,

let's soak the rich, Sam Hurd, let's soak Zemuri. When Huey said, let's crush the ring, Sam Hurd,

let's crush Zemuri. To long to Huey Long, Zemuri represented everything that was wrong in America.

The fat cat who had taken more than a share. So what's happening is Huey Long would go around

and he'd make public speeches talking about how evil Zemuri is and other rich people,

he compared it. His thought was like, hey, what if we invited 10 people to a barbecue and we have

one guy that took 90% of the food? He's like, we wouldn't allow that. We shouldn't allow it in

economic terms. He wanted the redistribution of wealth. He wanted all these other things.

And he made very powerful enemies. And unfortunately, one of these enemies and

people never found out who is going to have him killed. On foreign policy, Long seemed to have

just one concern. He did not want US troops sent to Central America, where Long claimed they would

protect the interests of Zemuri, who Long denounced on the floor of the US Senate.

It seemed the conflict would turn into something truly ugly. Then it did. Or maybe it didn't.

But on September 8, 1935, Senator Long was approached by a man in the hall of the Capitol

building. How crazy is this? And his name was Carl Weiss. Weiss shot Long in the chest, then

struggled with his bodyguards who knocked the assassin to the ground and shot him 30 times.

Long was taken to the hospital where he died. He was 42 years old. And so Rich Cohen did a lot

of research and this is what he says. I'm not saying Zemuri was behind the Huey Long assassination.

There was enough doubt to warrant a full-scale investigation by the Justice Department in the

fall of 1935. I once knew one of the investigators. When I asked him about the killing, he said,

it's Louisiana. You never know. So let's get to the part where Zemuri starts realizing,

hey, I'm going to have to take over this company. He's not the type to persist in a flawed situation.

That's very obvious about him. So you could think of this section as like, how would you respond

to a 90% drop in your net worth? So it says, for Zemuri, the collapse of the United Fruit stock

would have been devastating. Most of his net worth was tied up into it. The greatness of Zemuri

lies in the fact that he never lost faith in his ability to salvage his situation. Bad things

happened to him as bad things happened 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 JP Morgan and the Honduran government in a way

contrary to his interest, he simply changed the Honduran government. When United Fruit drew a line

at the river and said, you shall not cross, he crossed anyway. When he was forbidden to build

a bridge, he built a bridge and called it something else. For every move, there is a counter move.

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. But how could you FB saved?

Where did Zemuri go for answers? Did he meet with the economic experts and college professors?

Did he call the chairman of the board? Did he talk to the president and asked you have a plan?

And even if they did have a plan, so what? These are the same men who had run the company into a

ditch. He went to the docks instead, where he spent the winter of 1932 walking through warehouses

and standing on decks of banana boats, talking to fruit peddlers and captains and loaders and

the people who really knew. And so the first problem he realizes, he learns that the banana

captains were on orders from Boston to lay off the throttle and cross the gulf at paddle speed

because they were interested in saving gasoline. But a man focused on the near horizon of costs

can sometimes lose sight of the far horizon of potential windfall. By his quick calculations,

Sam realized that whatever money was being saved on fuel was being lost on the higher

percentage of fruit that ripened during the extra days on the water. These smucks,

they're losing more than they're saving, he said. So he goes next year to the board of directors

and he goes to the meeting. At this meeting, they were discussing a request from plantation

managers who wanted $10,000 to build an irrigation disk ditch in Guatemala. The executives called

on experts who detailed the cost and benefits of the project. Samarie Samarie grew restless to him

such a debate was symptomatic of a greater problem. This man in Guatemala, he's your manager, isn't

he? Samarie asked. Yes, they said, then listen to what the man is telling you. You're here. He's

there. If you trust him, trust him. If you don't trust him, fire him and get a man you do trust in

the job. So the summary here is he's offering all these suggestions and they're not being listened to.

So he's like, okay, I'm not going to just go away mad. I'm going to solve the problem. He goes around

and he remember he's the largest shareholder. So he goes and has these secret meetings with

all these other shareholders. And he's like, Hey, give me your proxies. He spent the following

weeks on the road, sitting in the offices and living rooms of shareholders. He made the same

case over and over again. The current management is not up to the task. When Samarie spoke to the

board again, several months later, he had with him a bag full of proxies. So those are the voting

rates turned over to him by other stockholders. So they are lining up behind Samarie. Along with

his own shares, these proxies could give Samarie control of the company, though he kept their

existence a secret. And this is wild. This is when the fish is going to eat the whale.

The chairman of the board was Daniel Wing, the president, he was also the president of the

first National Bank of Boston. To him, Samarie was still Sam, the banana man, the fruit

jobber from the docks. He already knew what Sam could teach him about the business. Nothing.

When it was Sam's turn to speak, he chose each word carefully, explaining his ideas in a thick

Russian accent. When Samarie finished, Wing said, unfortunately, Mr. Samarie, I can't

understand a word of what you say. The men at the table with wings started to laugh.

Sir Samarie's hands turned into fists. He went to the other room to retrieve his bag of proxies.

He came back, slapped him on the table and said, you're fired. Can you understand that?

You gentlemen have been fucking up this business long enough. I'm going to straighten it out.

And this is just a fantastic mind blowing. This is blew my mind this paragraph.

Much later, analysts pointed out the flaw in the non-compete clause Samarie signed

at the time of the merger. It barred Samarie from working for a rival,

are starting a new fruit company, but it did not foresee the outlandish possibility

of Samarie taking over United Fruit itself. So he's going to run this company for another 25

years, but he saves the company in the first 60 days. This is what happens. He overlooked nothing.

Whenever he found a man who could not act or was slow to decide, he replaced him. He said,

I realized the greatest mistake that United Fruit management had made was to assume it could run

its activities in many tropical countries from an office on the 10th floor of a Boston office

building, Samarie said. I guess I should have told you. I mean, it's pretty predictable what his

move was going to be up until before this. He just went straight to the field. So that's where

that's where it's saying he overlooked nothing. Executives on the spot were treated like messenger

boys. I completely reversed that policy. I laid down what might be called a constitution for the

company, Samarie said. It was established as a fixed policy that if a plantation manager could

not handle his difficulties, we would appoint some man who could. And so over the next 60 days,

he's just going through every single, he's doing an inventory of every single part of the company,

and he's there in person talking to the people actually doing the work. He saw the problem of

half empty ships, selling some ships, renting out space and others. A United Fruit ship did not

leave the port until it was packed. He had United Fruit's holdings reappraised the value of the

machines and the land had collapsed during the Depression, which saved the company millions

in taxes. He left fields, follow further decreasing banana supply, so he could control the market

price. On some plantations, he replaced bananas with sugar cane, a staple that was always in

demand. He looked for other crops to plant like coconuts and pineapples. From Boston to Bogota,

he weeded out superfluous employees until one of every four was gone. So he lays off 25% of

their workforce. It was not these policies alone that turned things around. It was also the energy

behind the policies. The six week tour, the fire, the hiring and the firing,

the tough decisions made about the fleet in the fields. A firm hand had taken hold of the company.

The stock price doubled in the first two weeks of Zamuri's reign. This had less to do with tangible

results. It was too early for that. Then it had less to do with the tangible results because it

was too early for that, then the confidence of investors. If you looked at the newspaper,

you would see the new head of the company landing his plane on a strip in the jungle,

anchoring his boat on the north coast of Honduras, going here and there and working and working and

working. In a time of crisis, the mere evidence of activity can be enough to get things moving.

That's a fantastic sentence. Let's repeat that sentence. At a time of crisis, the mere

evidence of activity can be enough to get things moving. Those of Murray would stay at the helm

for another 25 years. United Fruit was saved in his first 60 days. So fast forwarding about

a decade, World War II is going to make the sale of his primary product, the banana, very difficult.

In fact, like Britain says, hey, you can't import him anymore. It's like a luxury.

And so the reason I want to point this out to you is because Zamuri's reaction to this is just

perfect. He chose innovation over despair. Zamuri was never heard to bitch or justify.

He was a member of a generation that lived by the maxim, never complain, never explain. What do you do

when your product rots? You find something else to sell. Zamuri began to look for other

crops he could grow on his plantations, crops that could be classified as necessities, meaning

they would not have a quota, right? Like some countries, you couldn't import any bananas. And

then other countries said, we have a limit of how many we're going to import. So that's obviously

not good. If you can, if countries are limiting how much of your product can sell, he sent agents

in search of plants and trees that grew in the tropics on other parts of the globe. So around

the equator, right? He was especially interested in plants critical to the war effort, but whose

import from Asia had been blocked by the Japanese during World War II. So he grew things like hemp

and rubber trees, and essentially figured, hey, we're going to make America more self-sufficient,

and we're going to pick things that are in high demand by the military. By 1944, Zamuri had thousands

of acres bearing strange fruit. It was among the prized achievements of his life. He was a farmer

at heart. And here he was behaving like a farmer in the midst of a locust blight. He was innovating

his way out of ruin. So by this point in his life, Zamuri's a much older man. His son is 31 years

old. He's a pilot, and he volunteers to fight in World War II. Sam Zamuri Jr. enlisted shortly

after the attack on Pearl Harbor. In those days, when the fighting started, you went. If you didn't

go, there was something wrong with you. Sam Jr. was attached to the Western Desert Air Force

in Northern Africa. It was extremely dangerous work. Here's a photo of Sam Jr. taken in the fall

of 1943. He's broad shoulder and hands him in his flight suit, hands in his pockets, smiling.

He flew dozens of missions. On January 7, 1943, Sam Jr. took off at sundown. Major

Samuel Zamuri Jr., 31, having lost his way in heavy fog, flew his P-51 into a mountain.

There was a flash when the fuel tanks ignited and then darkness. I don't know when Zamuri's

senior got the news. It's impossible to express the horror he must have felt. One moment,

there was a world full of people and markets. The next moment, there was nothing.

It was the blackest period in his life. Historic events transpired. The invasion of Normandy,

the dropping of the atomic bomb, but he did not notice. The war ended. The squares filled with

sailors. The men got drunk. The mothers wept with joy. Sam did not know what they were celebrating.

The first peacetime shipment of bananas arrived soon after. He did not care.

Everyone I spoke to who knew Zamuri told me that the death of Sam Jr. was the great tragedy

of the man's life. He came out of it and got back to work, but he was never the same.

And that part was really hard to get through because you're almost at the end of the book. You

feel like you know who this person is. And then obviously, I'm a father. I had not only a son,

but also a daughter. And you immediately start thinking, you're kids. And I just immediate

your eyes fill up, at least minded, with just tears. It's just unbelievably devastating.

And so a few years later, Zamuri's going to hire this guy named Edward Bernays. Edward Bernays is

considered the founder of the public relations industry. I just ordered a biography on him

just because there's two paragraphs in here and I need to understand how this guy thinks.

This coup is really taken out by the U.S. State Department, the CIA. Zamuri, it's in his interest.

It plays a role, but this is not under his direction like the first one was. And this

one actually backfires and causes public relations disaster for the company and eventually the

United Fruits gets broken up. And this is like the apogee of the company. But I just want to

pull out Edward Bernays. I'm pretty sure he's going to be the next episode of founders because

he's just the way this guy thinks is very unusual. And so there's just a few paragraphs that are

going to occur over several pages. Where did the interest of United Fruit end and the interest of

the United States begin? It's impossible to tell. That was the point of all Sam's hires. If I can

perfectly align the interests of my company with the interests of top officials in the U.S.

government, not the interests of the country, but the interest of the people in charge of the

country, then the United States will secure my needs. And so Bernays has been hired by all kinds

of people, a bunch of like Fortune 500 companies as an example of that. He winds up running the

public relations campaign to convince women to start smoking. Bernays told Hill that he should

instead link his private interest, which is to get women to smoke more to a public cause.

With this in mind, he planted newspaper articles that challenged the taboo,

the taboo against female public smoking, arguing that cigarettes were neither a dirty habit nor

a weight loss tool, but a symbol of empowerment. So his whole thing is indirection. That is

everything that Bernays does, or at least in this book, and I'll learn more when I read his

biography. It's all about indirection. Here's another example. And this is his solution to

following book sales. Rather than fight for a single season of sales, he would make the world

more friendly to his product. In the 1950s, a consortium of publishers hired Bernays. They

were concerned about a dip in numbers. Did Bernays go to school into schools and make the case for

books? No, he did not. He talked to architects and contractors who were designing the new suburban

homes and convinced them a house is not modern if it does not include built in bookshelves,

indirection. And finally, this is exactly what Bernays' plan to help is a Murray.

Bernays would not make the world better for bananas. He would make the world better for

American politicians who would make the world better for the CIA, which would make the world

better for bananas, indirection. And so later on, Bernays is describing exactly why his methods are

so effective in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business,

in our social conduct or ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of

people who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses, who harness old

social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world. He is obviously a master at that.

So Bernays gets the CIA to run this, this coup. I just want to pull out one thing. I'm not going

to spend too much time here. The CIA eventually selects this guy named Carlos Armas, right? He's

a 39 year old former officer in the Guatemalan military. And there's going to be the end of

the sentence of this paragraph is just incredible writing and incredible thought. So the prehistory

of Carlos is he should have, he almost died in battle, but he ends up escaping when he was

supposed to be executed. And the way he escapes is based on a partnership between the ages of

minor Keith and Sam Samurai. This will make more sense in a minute. Carlos was defeated and 16 of

his men were killed himself among them. Or so it seemed. While being dragged across the field to the

cemetery, he moaned. He was taken to a hospital and put back together. He was tried for treason and

sentenced to death. He escaped six months later, just two days before he was about to be executed.

He slipped out of prison through an abandoned tunnel of the international railways of Central

America, which had been founded by minor Keith. That's one of the founders of United Fruit. Think

about it. Here was Keith, the former vice president of UF collaborating through the ages

with Samurai, providing the tunnel that saves the general who overthrows the president and restores

the banana land. And that is the apogee of the United Fruit Company. It's prosecuted, broken up.

The book details more of the economic fallout from that. Samurai actually retired from the

United Fruit Company two years before that. He was 74 and he lives till he's 84. While no one was

looking, Samurai had grown painfully, shockingly, bitterly old. It's like this. You leave the house

in the morning and you're young and fit and strong. And you whistle as you walk down the street.

Then you turn a corner and bang, you run right into your own decrepit 78 year old self going the other

way. He retired from the banana trade for the last time. He left Honduras, Costa Rica, Guatemala,

Cuba, Ecuador, Colombia forever. At a certain age, no matter which direction you walk,

you're walking away. Sam Z, Sam the banana man, El Amigo, the big Russian, the gringo. He was not

an easy person, nor is his biography without controversy. To some, it is the story of a great

man, a pioneer in business, a hero. To others, it's the story of a pirate, a conquistador who

took without asking. Sam's defining characteristic was his belief in his own agency, his refusal to

despair. No story is without the possibility of redemption. With cleverness and hustle,

the worst can be overcome. I can't help but feel that we would do well by emulating Sam's Murray,

not the brutality or the conquest, but the righteous anger that sent the striver into the

boardroom of laughing elites, waving his proxies, shouting, you gentlemen have been fucking up

this business long enough. I'm going to straighten it out. And that is where I'll leave it for the

full story. Highly, highly recommend reading this book. I think every founder should have it in its

library. Talk to your friends that have read the book. I have never come across anybody that has

not done anything else, but enthusiastically recommend reading the book. It is fantastic.

This is the second time I've read it. I'm sure in the future, maybe a few years from now, I'll read

it again. If you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes to your podcast player,

you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. If you want to see every single book in

reverse chronological order, you can order them. It's amazon.com forward slash shop,

forward slash founders podcast. You'll see every single book. And if you buy on that Amazon shop,

you will also be obviously being supporting the podcast at the same time. That is 255 books down

1000 to go. And I'll talk to you again soon. I'm glad you made it to the end. Founders, listeners,

are not quitters. If you have not already signed up for the founders AMA private feed,

I highly recommend doing that right now. I will leave a link down below, but it's also always

available at founders podcast.com. Because the insane amount of research that I have done over

the last seven years for this podcast, I have a very unique set data set that's available nowhere

else. There's over 20,000, I've read over 100,000 pages where I like 300, what 15 books something

like that. I have somewhere between like 20 and 21,000 highlights and notes from this project,

90% or probably over 90% of my highlights and notes never make it onto the podcast. Yet the

information contained in them is excessively valuable. So what I did is like I constantly

getting questions all the time, right? And I look at them like they're unique prompts to try to get

some of this information out of my head and out into the world. So it's actually useful to you.

And one way to do this. So everybody benefits is by actually making a private AMA feed. So if you

become a member, you'll be able to ask me questions directly. There's a private email address that you

get in the confirmation email after you sign up, do not share that email address, because I read

every single one of these emails myself. I don't have an assistant doing it. I'm the only one that

has access to that email. So I read every single one myself. Now the questions that I get from

these emails, I turn I answer, and I turn them into short AMA episodes. So that allows other

members to learn from the questions of other members. You can also add a name and link to your

website with your question so that other members can check out what you're working on. I've already

got I've already heard from subscribers to the AMA feed that they've actually got new paying customers

from people that discovered their business from an AMA question. I plan on making several new

episodes every week. If you are an enthusiast of Founder's Podcast, I highly recommend that you

become a member. You can join by using the link that's in the show notes on your podcast player,

or by going to FoundersPodcast.com.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.