#255 Sam Zemurray (Banana King)

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/c318c4672efcbeb2

When he arrived in America in eighteen ninety one, at age fourteen.
Zimmery was tall,
Gangly and penniless.
When he died in the grandest house in New Orleans sixty nine 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's in Central America.
He battled and conquered the
United fruit.
Which was one of the first truly global corporations.
Zamuri'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.
Та да лифов.
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 re emerge.
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 thirty seven.
It's one of the best written books that I've read so far for the podcast, and Sam Zamurie'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 two hundred, almost two hundred and thirty
founder biographies that you and I have gone over since episode number thirty seven. So I wanna jump right into the prologue.
Yeah, at this point in the story.
Uh, Sam Zamur is thirty three years old and he is organizing a coup.
To overthrow the Honduran government.
Samson Marie 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 then with the wingspan of a condor.
He had a crisp.
No nonsense manner.
At thirty three years old, he was already a colorful figure.
After ten years in the south, so he starts out in Alabama and then m uh eventually moves to Louisiana to New Orleans.
After ten 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 traitors dumped into the sea.
We'll talk more about that that idea right there. The idea that he identified a very profitable niche.
They were just hiding in plain sight.
He worked like a dog and defied the most powerful people in the country.
By nineteen oh five he owned steam ships that cross the golf 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.
А Терті тримари вас і на прос.
That is not hyperbolic, that is actually true.
He had been warned by Philander Knox, the US Secretary of State of
Who ordered federal agents to tail him. So there's gonna be more
There's this legendary meeting.
uh that Zamuri has before the events that are taking place right now in the book.
with the Secretary of State Knox.
And there's gonna be a cameo because Knox was working working with uh JP Morgan. So I'll talk more about that in a little bit.
So he'd been warned by the Secretary of State, hey basically told him stay out of Honduras, I don't care about your banana company. We have
There's bigger interests in the US government, so stay away.
Uh obviously Samuri didn't listen.
Uh, 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 gonna wind up being a successful coup. Zumurri recruits General Bonilla. General Bonia had been previously
Being the president of Honduras.
And so this line right here describes Sam's thinking to us with the right kind of help.
Bonia could be president again.
And so he's gonna give Bonia.
Money, ships.
Guns support.
There's all these mercenaries that are there waiting uh to meet up with Zamurie at this point in the story. I just wanna pull out something here because it's fascinating that they uh 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 Zamurie. They told stories about mercenary heroes like Lopez who left New Orleans with a hundred 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 Fifty Five, I read one of the craest books I've ever read.
It's called Tycoon's War.
The subtitle of the book will tell you exactly what the book is about.
А не сез Халис Вандер Билт инвадий А кай.
To overthrow America's most famous military adventurer.
America's most famous military adventure 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. Sir Cornelius Vanderbilt sought to have him killed. William Walker is gonna wind up being killed.
uh he had a lot of enemies not just corneas van der bolt
Uh, but that just gives you an insight of like there's a lot of people who are like you might be able to compare like an entrepreneur
from the past, maybe a hundred fifty 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
uh Zamuri's hiring to overthrow the Hundern 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 Nickawago with eighty four soldiers.
But was later stood up against the wall in Honduras.
And shot full of holes.
And that's interesting'cause the way I remember it, I thought he was shot to death
blindfolded on a beach, but in any case the 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 gonna be Zamuri, 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 a Murray.
He hops on board, he says he led the way to a cabin filled with weapons, grenades, rifles, machine gun, enough anim 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 gonna give
The mercenaries.
The Hornet was a fearsome armor clad cruiser.
That had seen action in the Spanish American War.
Zimurry had brought the ship secretly.
Through a third party.
for his mercenaries.
Then Zimurri jumps off to another boat. Zimmery said goodbye to the man. He then stood deck on his ship,
Watching the hornet past the Barry Ir 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 fourteen years old.
uh from Russia, immigrant, no education, no money, and then
Was that fifteen, sixteen years later?
He's has enough money and he's built up this business where
He decides to overthrow a government because that government is hostile to his business interests. So let's go to his early life.
And the the note on this page is simple. It's he was driven
Ruthless and relentless.
He was born in eighteen seventy seven in Western Russia.
His father died young.
leaving his family penniless without prospects.
Sam traveled to America with his aunt in eighteen ninety two.
He was st this is what his family told him to do.
He was to establish himself and send then send for the others, his mother and his siblings.
He popped up in Selma, Alabama, where his uncle owned a store.
He was fourteen or fifteen, but you would guess him much older. Now this is a crazy
sentence that I've seen over and over again.
over and over again in these books.
The immigrants of that era.
Could not afford to be children.
By sixteen he was hardened.
A tough operator.
A dead end kit.
Cooly figuring out the angles.
Where's the play?
What's in it for me?
His humor was black.
His explanation's few.
And this is another great sentence. 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 push them to the head of the crowd.
Grasper.
Climber.
nasty ways of describing this kit.
Who wants what you take for granted.
From his first month 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 Zemuriisms. 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 essentially 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 b the banana cowboys.
You drink with a man and you'll learn what he knows.
And this to me is the most important.
uh 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 that give you a good idea, like his personality. You get a good idea of who he is as a person or who 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.
Uh 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 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 colour that would later into the reason this is this sentence describes why I'm
Reading the section to you. Much of the color that would later entertain magazine writers

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. Uh the guy combed trash piles on the edge of town, search for discarded scraps of sheet metal.
Then he would pile it on a cart and push it from farm to farm.
Looking for traits.
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.
Cat 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 w 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 a 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
Then the man who owned the hawk.
A series of odd jobs followed.
He was a house cleaner, he was a delivery boy.
Boy.
By eighteen 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 arrive from Central America.
Purchase 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 that's because if I know everything A to Z, I 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 as 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 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 a 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 scarce enough to
To make even a freckled banana.
seem precious as another
uh main theme of 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.
Zimri had saved a hundred and fifty dollars.
That was his stake.
He figured it would go further if it was spent on rapes.
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 gonna
tell you what I thought about the the parag this paragraph after I read it, but I'm gonna tell it before I read it to you.
This is gonna remind me.
of Jay Z.
And I'll 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
We too slow foot 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 two thirty eight. If you haven't listened to yet,
I read Jeezy's autobiography.
You never know when you release a podcast.
Which ones are gonna resonate for some reason, that one resonates a lot. I constantly hear back from people.
that love that podcast. I love the book,'cause I've been a huge Jay Z fan my whole life. There's two things
That came to mind immediately.
uh when I got to that section. And there there's two paragraphs. They're either on uh
one's on page seventy five of Jay Z autobiography, one's page seventy six. I'm gonna read them because this is exactly where I feel the mentality that Jay Z had very similar to the mentality we see from a young Samson 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
the other stories going around. And I'll get to the second paragraph in a minute, but Sir 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 gonna worry about the people that tried this and failed. I'm gonna assume the guy that that
I'm gonna assume I'm the person. I'm the guy that got that get ri 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 hi the early days of his life.
Now you go and you put in you place that in context with the early days
Of Sam Z 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 they use the same word. He uses that as a verb.
Jay Z 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. Zamuri'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 taking 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 fre this is so wild. Since the freight charge used the last of his money, Zamur traveled in the boxcar.
With the bananas.
And this is just fantastic writing. It seems appropriate. Zamuri sleeping besides his first hall, 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 than my mouth my mouth, that's how I get smart, right?
And so he winds up talking to a breakman, just a guy working on
Uh 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 Zamurie went and then we see the relentless resourcefulness that is a
A hallmark of Zimmer's entire life. Zimmery 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 ahead, 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 uh 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 mot money, I ask 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 one hundred ninety dollars, his first real success. After accounting for expans expenses,
Sam had earned
Forty dollars.
In six days.
Earth put another way.
Forty times his weekly earnings just a few years before.
So Murray had stumbled on a niche.
Ripes.
overlooked at the bottom of the trade.
Where the big fruit companies monopolize the upper precincts of the industry.
And to do so you needed capital, railroads, ships to operate in uh 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 and American South.
That Zimmurri first came to be known.
As Sam the banana man.
and more great writing that I think really puts the 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 writer 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

Executives in Boston called him.
But that little fellow
would build a kingdom.
From ripes.
So for the next few years, he's gonna 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. It was remarkable.

You know, you and I have talked about this idea over and over again. I think most people that have ever lived overestimate or underestimate, maybe that's the right word. Uh
A lot can ha change in one lifetime.
Well like I think that's the key r reason to read this book and what I got the most of uh rereading it the second time.
is it completely like takes whatever's in your mind about what one person can accomplish in one li lifetime, takes your brain out of your skull and like stretches it.
It's like oh.
It's like you can do so much more. You 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 f this is just like throwback to what's gonna happen in in the 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 Zamur.
The the the fourteen year old Russiant that came to America with no education, no money.
That is wild.
Uh so it says he had the sort 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 Zamurie as quote
Они на фі Стецмен.
Among businessmen
That I have ever encountered.
He has the qualities.
That one usually finds in a great personality.
That was just remarkable.
So back to this this time in the early career of his
Uh 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 f this this company, the whale and the the fish, right?
In the the title, The Wales United Fruit.
Now the founders of United Fruit, there's gonna be three founders, I'm gonna 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 um than Sam.
Uh they said they're like oh
Like he's he's another me.
right, maybe a 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 wind up 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
Они мост формида зуб.
And they would call him the little fellow. And so that's what the the author's saying. It's 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, all muscle.
You know, he's gonna eat like they're in a office in Boston. He's like hacking a machete and building and and planting banana plants in Honduras.
Uh so it says he moved to mobile. We're not there yet though.
Uh, he moved uh to Mobile, Alabama, soon after he went into Ripes. 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 J C
and Samsamurry 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 gonna bring him to the attention.
of Andrew Preston. Andrew Preston is gonna be maybe the there's three founders in in uh United Fruit. He might be the most important one.
And he's the one he's like, Hey, I wanna meet this kid. And that is Zamuri is a kid.
at this time. It's really hard to understand that.
Uh, because the Murray discovered a patch of fertile ground previously until his business grew by leaps and bounds. So what does that mean? In eighteen ninety-nine, he sold twenty thousand 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 Zamuri, this Russian selling all the ripes.
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 the before the banana trade was it was all local.
They mentioned the seam ship.
that that new technology, the steamship, winds turns it into a global business. That's why the the book starts out with like
You have to understand United Fruit was one of the tr first truly global
Corporations.
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 comp co uh companies that that occur after this. So
I think I bring that up later on, but
I wanna get to what
uh Preston's talking about like how what his impression of Zamuri, which I thought was very interesting.
Uh, so 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 Zamuri with admiration.
He said that
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 gonna do when he comes across somebody like that? He's like oh
I need to g I need to sign this kid. Zumurray signed a contract with the United Fruit that year, putting their arrangement in writing.
And so there's gonna be this dance throughout their entire throughout Samuris entire life,'cause Preston's eventually gonna uh he's he's a lot older than Samur, so he's gonna pass away, but this is like the first
the dance, the first song in the dance that they're gonna have throughout their c tire careers where you have Zamurie's company, which he's gonna formalize here in a little bit.
And eventually like it's gonna have a partnership with United Fruit.
then there's all these anti trust uh anti trust uh allegations from the j justice department in United States.
Causes.

be forced to sell back to Zamuri.
The I think you only own like ten percent of the company, something like that.
Which is gonna lead to Zamur building like the the the most formidable competition that United Fruits 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 docks is what they called him.
Uh, how does he take over
One of the how does he take over and then run for twenty five years.
uh one of the few first truly global corporations. He's gonna wind up taking over Preston's company. He does it after Preston dies, but it's just wild when you think about
Wow, all the way back in nineteen oh three there
Just meeting on the docks in Mobile, Alabama.
And you have pressing be like, Hey, I I 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 Zamuri seemed like a fool buying garbage. Now look what he accomplished. Selling hundreds of thousands of bananas a year, he became 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 grown for him.
I'm like
Prestons.
Harvested 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 g what a fantastic like that
Like when you get to that part, it's like oh
immediately in your mind's eye, you like I picture that.
Uh so it says he was like a bike racer riding the windbreak of a semi truck, the semi truck being united fruit.
By his twenty first birthday.
He had a hundred thousand dollars in the bank.
In today's term in today's terms, he would have been a millionaire.
If he'd stop there.
His would have been a great success story.
But here's the thing, they don't write books about people that stopped there. So we know Zamuri obviously didn't stop there. It's not his personality. In fact, he he starts so he starts working in the trade, what? He's 18, 19 years old?
He has like a few this is such a crazy story. I know I've said that over and over again, but it is really one of the craziest stories I've ever come across. Eventually
He th the United States government's gonna force Zamuri to sell his business to United Fruit because they're about to go to war. The two companies are literally go to war.
in Central America and they had interests. So there's in throughout the life of the Samson Murray, there's times where
The government wants him
wants him and United Fruit to divest and then there's f the then a few years later they force them to partner.
But so he has like a you know, a few year break, like a year two break, I forgot the exact time.
And then
But uh outside of that year or two break where he's forced out of the industry, he works in the banana industry till he's I wanna say seventy four, seventy-six. So starting eighteen.
Seventy six and he dies, I think at eighty four.
So let's go to his next step. Obviously there's a lot more detail. Highly, highly, highly recommend. 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 but if you haven't, you've got to pick it up'cause it's just so crazy. And it's only like
I got a lot of highlights, but you know, two hundred and fifty pages. It's it's just absolutely fantastic. So let's get to the next part in Zamuri's life.
How is he gonna move up the stack, right? He's like all right, well I'm not gonna just stay I'm not content to just stay with ripes forever. I wanna expand
He realizes hey
I gotta take on a partner, even though it kinda goes against his nature.
Samurri took a partner in nineteen oh three. 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 than 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 and 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.
Uh that that happens in the future, though at this point they join 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 Zimmery 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 re read two books or I re read Titan and then read another biography of Rockefeller. We're gonna see that oh
They they think very similarly.
So does Andrew Preston in regard to to Rockefeller.
But that high tolerance for risk.
Makes Hubbard.
in the future extremely
uh uncomfortable and that that's gonna lead to Zamuri buying them out. Zimmer and Hubbard Put
Pertrest.
Thatcher Brothers Steamship Company.
which was in bad financial shape shape. The acquisition ran upwards of ten thousand dollars.
Sam put up some of the money and Hubbard did the same and the balance was covered by the United Fruit.
Uh by United Fruit Company.
at the direction of Andrew Preston. Preston followed Zamuri's progress as a general. This is such a great description of what Preston is doing.
Preston followed Zamuri's progress as the general manager, the Yankees might follow a flamethrower.
Making his way through the miners.
Such partnerships were the way of united fruit.
The style that earned the company the nickname the octopus.
They wrap their tentacles around every startup in the industry.
In those days.
United Fruit either owned a piece of you or was int intent on your destruction.
And then as a result of buying this company, having steam ships, doing a partnership
with both Hubbard and
Uh 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 wanna skip ahead'cause I wanna talk to about the founders of United Fruit, which I thought this section was absolutely fascinating.
And so it says in certain ways Samson Murray 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 Zamuri.
Zimmerism. If 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 studying the history of entrepreneurship.
Of course there was.
There always is.
It's just the same personality type that just keeps appearing over and over again throughout thous 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, Zamuri 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 ban banana company in the world.
United fruit.
The octopus.
Reviled even now.
Decades after its em its empire collapsed in the south.
So the three founders, uh, they're all gonna come together for different reasons. It's Lorenzo Baker, Andrew Preston, and Minor Keith. So Lorenzo Baker
This goes on for quite a bit. So I'm just gonna give you the top level highlights so this podcast to be like five hours long.
Uh, Lorenzo Baker, he's the one he's gonna 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 a hist there's an entire like 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 uh twenty inches in twenty four hours.
all kinds of like mind blowing stats in the book. But anyways, he sees his first banana's 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 gonna buy him. So he bought a hundred and sixty bunches. He's in Jamaica this time.
He bought a hundred and sixty bunches at twenty four cents a bunch.
So he gets back in this s point, I think his destination is Jersey.
He gets there and he sells them. So he paid twenty four cents a bunch bunch. He sold all of his bananas for two dollars 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 docs. This is Andrew Preston, who had just met with Zamurie.
This is obviously, you know, many decades before he met Zimmer. 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 Zamiri after.
He had spotted a niche.
So Preston and Baker are going to team up, they're gonna import bananas, they're gonna sell them.
Eventually they're gonna team up the the well, uh let me just read this to you. So it's actually um
Easier just for me to read it. Preston meant to change uh 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 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 gonna go down. They're gonna meet this guy, Minor Keith, who's in Costa Rica at the time, if I'm not mistaken. This is
In
Incredible.
Writing.
There's gonna be the third party and
Uh the third partner in United Fruit. I'm gonna read
the entire there's like two and a half paragraphs here. There's just remarkable.'Cause what is Winder Keith is not down there.
Uh like bananas was not the w his primary goal.
Minor 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
Uh in 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 three hundred died the first year, and just four miles of track were completed.
Minor Keith is down there with his
Brother Henry.
Halfway through the second summer, Henry Keith was not feeling well.
Feverish.
Hot to the touch.
In his eyes.
My God, his eyes.
Yellow fever.
Minor told his brother to go home to Brooklyn, recover, then return.
But lessen a month later.
Henry was back.
Soon after he was dead.
Minor 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 seventh
eighteen fifty five.
Fifteen years
And at least
Four.
thousand.
Dead.
the best audio book that I've ever heard.
Is similar there's a similar story in here where it's uh 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.
Uh, the book is The Forgotten Highlander by Alistar Urquart.
Uh he was actually uh he g was captured in World War Two by the Japanese and forced
To build
uh road in a jungle by the Japanese imperial army.
Army and he did it mostly butt naked.
The story's incredible.
So let's get into how minor gets in the banana business and then how he p winds up teaming up
with uh 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
There's a uh 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 eighteen ninety four, 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 they're starting
Again, one of the world's first truly global corporations.
The no not much self 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 w 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, et cetera, et cetera.
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 a interesting line there, because that's exactly how 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 eighteen ninety nine exactly.
They were h heavily dependent on
weather for their crop, as you could expect. I think it was a hurricane. I can't remember exactly. I don't I'm surprised I didn't take notes on this, but some kind of climatic event caused them to to not have there was like a a year where they couldn't harvest any of their fruit. And so what happens
Just like Rockefeller ha 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 twenty seven banana companies. Come on.
That's exact like this is crazy the parallel here. We you and I just went over the fact that
Was it twenty two? I can't remember the number. Twenty two, twenty four, something like that.
That Rockefeller swallows up, the Cleveland Massacre, Rockefeller swallows up like twenty two or twenty four, 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 gonna know Zamuri, all of them are gonna respect him, they're much older obviously than he is.
Let's go back to Zamuri. Uh obviously we we're gonna fast forward.
Start when he's fourteen, then he's eighteen, then he's twenty one. Now he's twenty nine. There's a few years before he's gonna do this Hunter and coup. At twenty nine, he was rich, a well known figure in a steamy paradise. Now he's already in uh he's moved his operations to New Orleans.
Uh, 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 circumse 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 s get to the next level, right? Starts out with rapes.
Then he's like, Hey, I wanna import, I wanna own my own chips. Now he's gonna like he get he always takes it like okay, let's that'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's like, I need my own land. I need to like he's vertically vertically integrating, right?
Uh his company was operating as an importer, not growing bananas, but buying them from Central American farmers. Sir Murray's worries were about supply, setting a good price, working out deals with the 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 Zamuri 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.
Uh, so it says when he was in town meeting in New Orleans, he was on the docks trading, questioning, comparing manifesto cargoes, making sure he wasn't getting ripped off.
He knew everyone by name there, but Paice 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.
Zamuri was able to master both the skills. The guys that he's talking to only mastered one. He knew everyone by name. They were but he paid special attention to the old timers who had been in the trade since the days of wind power.
before the steam the technology of the steamship, which I mentioned to you earlier.
Uh 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 twenty nine. 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 sent Zamur 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 what the world was like.
In New Orleans.
and Central America and the Caribbean in the early nineteen hundreds, he sets up shop in Honduras. This is night the year is nineteen ten.
And it says when Miser when Zamuri arrived, it was a kind of frontier town.
It was untouched by government or law.
There was gunplay every night.
The streets were a wash in liquor and gold.
And why is it attracting so many like ruffians, to use the word of Alexander Grimbell?
Because Honduras had no extradition treaty with the United States.
And because of that, it had become a crif 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 Zamuri 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 Samurry to the middle of a river and left him there.
But the point is is that the reason the story's in there is because he's
He has incredible levels of endurance and persistence.
Uh so says Murray was a habitual limit crasher.
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 mule back.
So he could learn the country.
Meet its people and scout his property.
And it says Honduras.
Із Пенся.
And all this research and crossing the land.
is what opens up for his moment. This is what's gonna build
like the foundation of this incredible business that he's uh in the 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.
Zimmer bought his first piece of


On the edge of the north coast of Honduras.
Much of the property ran along the southern bank of the
Of the QML River. That's what his numb his company's gonna be called, by the way.
This was long considered junk land.
For two thousand dollars.
All of it borrowed, he got five thousand acres.
He was soon back in New Orleans wondering if five thousand acres was enough.
And this is where he's gonna have start having beef with his partner. It does not matter if you think it's enough, Hubbard t said to him. We're out of money.
And this is
This is s amazing. I I've re referenced this paragraph.
on past episodes of founders as well,'cause it's just amazing. A way to think about this, right? So he's like, Hey
have this opportunity, no uh no one like there's cheap land, right? No one sees the value in it.
There's no limit to how much I can buy. The only limit being money. What should I do? My partner saying I'm crazy.
And this is uh 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's he gonna do this?
Oh man. Okay. So Murray returned to Honduras in the spring of nineteen ten 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 w 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 in the early days of his occurred, 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 for ever.
In the course of a few months he accumulated the uncleared acres that would constitute his first plantation.
And why is that? Because to go go back to what he said, if you know
your business from A to Z. There's nothing a problem you can't solve. How many of the executives
in later on in 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 a hundred years.
Sam knew better.
Because he was raised on a farm, he realised
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.
Zimri then went a c 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'cause 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 exempt from import duties on all equipment, exempt too from paying property, labor, and export tax. Zimmery'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 Zamurie was so respected by so many of his employees.
And also developing skill set that his competitors are gonna 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 do 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 scor there's a I didn't know scorpions nest.
In banana plants and banana trees.
uh the mosquito swarms that 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.
You're 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, you know, he's in his ear t uh late twenties.
Early thirties. You know, and then he's gonna have to go up against
banana executives who've taken over for the the company founders that have long since died. And it's just like
the the experiences he that Sam endured and then went through just the knowledge that he gets from being
involved in every single step of the process. The idea that you're gonna wind up having some kind of information advantage over this person is just silly.
And not only that, he's clearly d d demonstrated a high capacity to take pain. Zamori worked in the field besides his engineers, planters, and machete men. He was deep in the muck.
Sweat covered swinging a blade.
He helped map the plantations.
Plant the rhymes.
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 it's a it's like a a clone, like a
There's billions and billions of clones of just whatever species of banana reading. 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'em into like pieces and then wherever you plant them, they're just gonna like uh essentially build clones of them. But that's what the rhyme zone is. I didn't I d I didn't remember that the last time.
So it says help map the plantations, plant the rhymesomes, 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 g 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 suite
Where the stock was manipulated to the ripening room where the green fruit turned yellow.
He was contemptuous of banana men who spent their lives in the north.
Far from the
From the plantations. We're gonna see another Zamuriism 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 the gonna lead to his breakup
'Cause his partner thought Zamurie 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.
Uh, but this was too much. Whereas Zamurie 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. Zo Murray 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 Zamurie by a 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 gonna buy them out. What was Sam thinking? Piling debt on debt, risk on risk.
He was taking it all on his own shoulders, but
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 th there's a whole there's an entire chapter has like this backstory here. It's fairly fascinating.
But it's
It's a disagreement between multiple nations, right? And we've seen this play out over and over again.
One nation
Lends another poorer nation money.
high interest rate, they wound 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 hunt and trying to uh there's gonna 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 gonna 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 wanna hear the backstory in the book. The Knox plan was good for everyone, in fact, except the people of Honduras.
And for Sam Zimmer.
whose business could not function without the concessions and sweetheart deals that would be forbidden by Morgan.
Remember previous season Murray had bribed.
for advantageous financial like e economic uh exemptions.
uh year like a few years before this is happening, Morgan's plan is gonna wipe all that out. It would add as much as a penny per bunch
uh to each banana bunch.
Uh, which would drive Samuri out of business. Samuri 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 Zamuri is going to be
summoned to the Washington D C
And it says on what must have been one of the strangest days of his life, Samurry received a message from Washington, D C. He was to report to the office of 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, they're exchanged. This is something this is very similar to what happened.
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. Zamuri.
I'm not bargaining.
I'm telling you the policy 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, mister Zimmery, but my purview is larger than your banana business.
When Zamurri 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.
Zimari nodded and seemed to agree that
But Secretary Knox was not so sure.
Though he tried to put people at ease, the Murray 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 gonna do, forget what he seems to agree.
And figure out what's in his interest.
As soon as the Murray was gone, Knox made some calls, so he winds up having them
The Murray w is wind up being put under uh surveillance.
And so this is just more great writing. Pretend you're Samuel Zamur.
You're thirty two.
You've been in America less than t than twenty 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.
Call 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 Samson Murray.
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 Zamury.
was challenging two of the most powerful people
In America.
The Murray scheme.
Can be described as a q.
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 war ship 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 US ambassador let it be known that the United States could work with Bone. Bonia had had overthrown the government. This is obviously the guy that that Zamuri funded.
In other words, and so why is that important? In other words,
F uh the Secretary of State Knox had switched sides.
His point being I d 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 uh uh this is a result for for to Marie's business though. Bonilla did not forget his benef benefactor, one of the first official
Acts was to Congress
Oh, is to have Congress give Zamurie concessions covering
The next twenty five years.
Uh, Zimmer settlement included permission to import any and all equipment duty free to build any and all this is just a
Corruption.
Right. I mean 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 s as entrepreneurs is more like crony capitalists, but it is the environment that w that we live in. Zamuris settlement settlement included.
permission to import any and all equipment duty free to build any and all railroads, highways, and other infrastructure that he might need. He also got a five hundred thousand dollar loan to repay all expenses incurred while funding the revolution. That is crazy.
As well as an additional twenty four thousand acres of
land on the north coast of Honduras to be claimed at a later date.
No taxes, no duties, and and free land. These were all conditions that would let Sam Zamurie 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 breakfast 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 Murray'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 twenty 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. Okay, so that's something he did.
A lot in his life. For some reason after he'd eat, he'd stand on his head.
Uh and then the then I left myself on here was hilarious. He's the Jay-Z of banana moguls. 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, et cetera, et cetera. Zamuri went through these
Fast
Scanning them, a few mental notes, and he was done. He disdained bureaucracy and hated pap 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 nineteen thirteen, he had saved enough money to buy back the stake that United Fruit owned in his company, a move that would secure Zamuri'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 by outside events. This is when they're getting
the Justice Department keeps bringing all these different um lawsuits against United fruit.
Or the threat of a lawsuit, I guess, is the um they do have it goes up to the Supreme Court, but that happens in a few years from now. But
They're essentially being threatened.
and forced to do this because they're they're like, Hey, we know your monopoly.
Uh the though the Justice Department never filed any charges, the investigation had the desired effect. By forcing Preston to sell his shares back to Zamuri, the government created a competitive market. It did this by assuring the Zamuri the freedom to develop into a genuine competitor.
This is really important because again, I want to ho h ho hound on the fact that like
Founders understand founder mentality. They clearly see it in other people. So d they see this. Preston sees this in Zamuri.
And not only Preston but Keith and everybody else. So says in later years when Zamuri had grown powerful, analysts spoke of the mistakes that United Fruit made. They had underestimated a dangerous rival in Zamur. In fact,
Preston and Keith understood the geniuses of Murray 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 gonna fast forward a few years. This is Zamuri at forty years old.
So now he's got twenty years in the banana trade.
Again, I'm gonna 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 forty, 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 counter.
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
So I talked about on the Rick Rubin podcast I did. It's episode two forty five. 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 core card, which is doing things on what other people might think or feel.
And I said like uh 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 interscore card shit I've ever seen. We're gonna see the exact same thing here, Zamurie. Uh 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 boat yards. 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 Zamurie or knew about Zamurry, that Zamurri could play as dirty as anyone else in the game. And this is coming from Minor Keith. Minor Keith is a dude
That's
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 to make this point multiple times so far. That is why minor keith
Never underestimated Zamuri.
He recognized him as one of his own.
A throwback to the sort of man
Excuse me, the sort of men 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, where it's just 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 ten thousand lives.
The culture of his company.
meaning Zamurie and obviously applies to jobs and everybody else. The culture of his company
Was his personality.
And so it goes up to this point. It's like by nineteen twenty five
It's the it's the biggest competitor of United Fruit.
United Fruit still has way more workers, they have uh a little bit like there are more revenue.
Uh profit margin's a lot higher, though.
And so they just pull out I just want to pull out a couple things as uh the author compares both businesses. See it it was increasingly clear that Sam Zamurri 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 Samuri was made with confidence and authority. Zamori could move fast without waiting for permission or for a committee report. He could take f risks
Essentially they're describing the difference between a founder and executive, right? He could take risk without fear of losing his job. He could hire a fire w 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.
Sir Murray 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 such

I love this guy.
Uh, I I don't like the things he did. Like he was uh I I like his approach to business. I obviously don't like the corruption and you know, all the other stuff. I'm n obviously like and he knows that. Like towards the end of his life, he's like I they I have a bunch of regrets in some of the stuff I did, but
I like his attitude towards business. So Murray was constantly inventing most people looking at a banana see a delicious fruit.
When Zamuri 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 men began to flock
Two Zamuri.
Dozens of them quit United Fruit.
And so this is going to be bring Zamur 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 v that Zamuri's gonna wind up firing when he takes control of the company.
But at this point
They're like, Hey we can't compete with Samari, so we need to buy him buy'em.
And so they it's cut her.
Sends this guy down to one of the company's officers to talk and be like, hey, let's come to agreement here, just sell me your company.
And Zamuris says this, turning down the offer, Zemarie 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 like the my most formidable competitor.
So much so that I'm trying to buy the company and then when he gets turned down, he like he constantly is insulting
constantly insulting Zamurie, Cutter became the first president of United Fruit had not been a founder.
Though pro 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 nineteen twenties, 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 Zamurri.
Who was still being described by Cutter as that little fellow in Honduras.
And so now I'm gonna fast forward. We get into the banana war. This is the war
That's gonna take place between Zamuri 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 there's there's an entire chapter on this. There's a ton of information that's 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 Zamuri, who he was
Uh, from the outside, the banana worms seems unfathomable. Zamurie had taken on an enemy of superior resources in 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 Zamuri, 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 gonna 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 won.
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 sent out in a single
Centered on a single piece of land, five thousand acres that both companies coveted. United Fruit discovered the problem first. The land was on territory claimed 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 of 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, Zamuri meeting separately with each claimant.
S claim the peop the two different people claim they own 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
Uh United Fruit is doing the same.
And so this is where they're gonna have this like the the I'm attentionally telling you like the result of this government mandated merger, but I wanna point out, like
He's aggressive and ruthless, but he's also rich now. And so he actually has something to lose. That means he's got he's he's got a vulnerability that he didn't have when he was young.
And so it says uh Zamuri's fruit company was Zamuri 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 aged Sam could be hurt.
Sick this is such an interesting thought in a s in a short sentence. Check this out.
Success limited options.
And made him vulnerable.
And so he is fifty three years old and this is happening.
This is a result, Sam would receive three hundred thousand shares of United Fruit.
uh his stake after the merger would be valued more than thirty million dollars. A figure worth considering as it would make Zamuri, who had arrived in Alabama with nothing three decades before,
Они тарисмен Америка.
So if you use one of those inflation calculators online, that's like a half a billion dollars today.
As part of the agreement, Zamuri, 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 nineteen twenty nine.
Three months after the stock market crash.
So Zamur's older.
Very rich. Very well known.
He develops a series of enemies, very powerful enemies. One of these is Hu 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 heard let's soak Samuri.
When Huey said let's crush the ring, Sam heard let's crush Samur.
To Long, to Huey Long, Zimmery represented everything that was wrong in America.
the fat cat who had taken more than his share. So what what's happening is Huey Long would go around and he'd make public speeches talking about how evil Zamur is and other rich people.
other rich people. He he compared it, uh h his thoughts was like, Hey
Uh what if we invited ten people to a uh barbecue and we have one guy that took ninety percent of the food?
He's like we wouldn't allow that. We shouldn't allow it in economic terms.
you know, he wanted their redistribution of wealth, he wanted all these other things.
and he made very powerful enemies and unfortunately s one of these enemies and people never found out who

Uh, 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 Zamuri.
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 eighth, nineteen thirty five, Senator Long was approached by a man in the hall of the Capitol building. How crazy is this?
And this his name was Carl Weiss. Weiss shot long in the chest
Then struggle with his bodyguards who knocked the assassin to the ground and shot him thirty times.
Long was taken to the hospital where he died.
He was forty two years old.
And so Rich Cohen did a lot of research and this is what he says. I'm not saying Zamurie was behind the Huey Long assassin assassination.
There was enough doubt to warrant a full scale investigation by the Justice Department in the fall of nineteen thirty five.
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 Zamuri starts.
realizing hey, I'm gonna 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 ninety percent drop in your net worth?
So it says for Zimmer, the collapse of United Fruit
uh stock would have been devastating. Most of his net worth was ti was tied up into it.
The greatness of Zamuri lies in the fact that he never lost faith in his ability to savage a situation. Bad things happened to him as bad things happen to everyone.
But unlike so many
He was never tempted by failure.
He never felt powerless or trapped.
He was an optimist.
He stood in constant defiance 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.
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
In his own agency.
With his fortune fast diminishing.
It was time.
To act.
But how could UF be saved?
Where did Samuri 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 ask, Do 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 nineteen thirty two.
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 ripen during the extra days on the water.
The smuck.
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.
Sameri Zimmery.
Goressus. To him such a debate.
Was simptomatic of a greater problem.
This man in Guatemala.
He's your manager, isn't he?
Zimmer 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 gonna just go away mad. I'm gonna 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 Zamuri 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 Zamurie.
Along with his own shares, these proxies could give Zamurri 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, Zamuri 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 Zimmer finished.
Wing said, Unfortunately, Mr. Zamuri, I can't understand a word of what you say.
The men at the table with wings started to laugh.
Zer Zimmer'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 just mind blow this is just blew my mind this paragraph.
Much later, analysts pointed out the flaw.
in the non compete clause the Murray signed at the time of the merger.
It ba barred Zamuri from working for a rival.
are starting a new frruit company.
Бо ідина форси the outlandish possibility.
of Zamuri taking over
United fruit.
itself.
So he's gonna run this company for another twenty five years, but he saves the company in the first sixty 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 the United Fruit Management had made was to assume it could run its activities in many tropical countries from an office on the tenth floor of a Boston office building, Samurie said.
I should I guess I should have told you I mean it's pretty predictable what his move was gonna be up until before this. He just went straight to
The field.
Uh 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, Zamurie 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 sixty 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 Fruits 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.
Following the
Further decreasing banana supply so he could control the market price.
On some plantations he replaced bananas with sugarcane, 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 twenty five percent of their workforce.
It was not these policies alone that turned things around, і вас 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 uh it had less to do with the tangible results because it was too early for that, than 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.
І на тайокраси.
The mere evidence of activity.
can be enough to get things moving. That's a fantastic sentence. Let's repeat that sentence. In a time of crisis,
The mere evidence of activity can get enough can be enough to get things moving. Those of Murray would stay at the home for another twenty five years, United Fruit was saved in its first sixty days.
So fast forwarding about a decade, World War Two is gonna make the sale of his primary
Product, the banana very difficult.
In fact, like Britain says, Hey, you can't import'em anymore, that's like a luxury.
And so the reason I want to
point like points out to you is because Zamur's reaction to this is just perfect. He chose innovation over despair.
Zimri 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.
Zimmery 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 some banana some countries.
But you you couldn't import any bananas and then other countries said, you know, we have a limit how many we're gonna 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 plans critical to the war effort.
But whose import from Asia had been blocked by the Japanese during World War Two.
So he he grew things like hemp and rubber trees.
And essentially figured hey
We're gonna make America more self sufficient and we're gonna pick things that are in high demand by the military.
By nineteen forty four, Zamuri had thousands of acres bearing strange fruit.
It was among the proudest 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, Zemer's a much older man, his son
Is thirty one years old, he's a pilot and he volunteers to fight in World War Two.
Sam Zamury Junior 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 Junior was attached to the Western Desert Air Force in Northern Africa.
It was extremely dangerous work.
Here's a photo of Sam Junior.
Taken in the fall of nineteen forty three.
He's broad shouldered.
and handsome in his flight suit.
Hands in his pockets.
Smiling.
He flew dozens of missions missions.
On january seventh, nineteen forty three, Sam Junior took off at sundown.
Major Samuel Zamury Junior.
thirty one.
having lost his way in heavy fog,
flew his P fifty one into a mountain.
There was a flash when the fuel tanks ignited.
And then darkness.
I don't know when Zimmeris 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 Zamurie
Told me that the death of Sam Junior
Was the great tragedy.

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 ha have not only a son, but also a daughter, and you immediately start thinking of your kids and like I just
Immediate.
Your eyes fill up.
At least mine did, with just tears. It's just unbelievably
Devastating.
And so a few years later, Zimmer's gonna hire this guy named Edward Bernays. Edward Bernays is considered like the founder of the public relations.
uh industry.
I just ordered a biography on'em just because there's two paragraphs in here and I need to understand how this guy thinks.
This this coup is really taken up by the US State Department, the CIA.

It it's in his interest, it plays a role, but this is not like under his direction like the first one was. And this one actually backfires and causes like public relations disaster.
for the company and eventually the the break the uh United Fruits gets broken up.
And you know, th this like the the apogee of the the company. But I just want to pull out Edward Berney's I'm pretty sure he's
I'm pretty sure he's gonna 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 gonna occur over several pages. Where did the interest of United Fruit end and the interests of the United States began? 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 US government,
Not the interest of the country.
But the interest in the of of the people in charge of the country.
Тен і унидвисло секур миц, со.
Brene's has been hired by all kinds of people.
bunch of like fourteen five hundred companies is an example of that.
Uh he he winds up running the public relations campaign to convince women to start smoking.
Uh, Bernays told Hill that he 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 tabo 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 Bernades 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 ha this is his solution to uh falling book sales.
Rather than fight for a single season of sales, he would make the world more friendly to his product.
In the nineteen fifties, a consortium of publishers hired Bernays.
They were concerned about a dip in numbers.
Did Bernes 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.
In
Direction.
And finally, this is exactly what Bernese's plan

Uh Brnaes 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.
In direction.
And so later on Bernays is describing exactly why his methods are so effective uh effective in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct, or our 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. Uh I'm not gonna spend too much time here.
The CIA eventually selects this guy named Carlos Armas, right? He's a thirty nine year old
Former officer in the Guatemalan
Military.
And there's gonna be a and the end of the sentence of this paragraph is just incredible writing and incredible thought.
So the prehistory of Carlos.
is he was should have he almost died in battle.
But he winds up escaping when he was supposed to be executed.
And the way he escapes is a
Based on a partnership.
between the ages.
Minor Keith.
and Sam Samuri. This will make more sense in a minute.
Carlos was defeated and sixteen 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 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 Zamuri.
Providing the tunnel.
That saves the general.
Who overthrows the president
And restores the banana land.
And that is the apogee of the United Food Company.
It's prosecuted, broken up.
The de the book details more of the like the economic follow from that.
Samurray retires.
So Murray actually retired from the United Fruit Company two years before that.
He was seventy four and he lives till he's eighty four. While no one was looking, Samsur 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.
Seventy eight 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
Columbia.
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.

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 Zimmer.
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 uh Amazon.com forward slash shop, forward slash founders podcast. You'll see every single book. And if you buy on that uh Amazon shop, you will also be obviously being supporting the podcast at the same time. That is two hundred and fifty five books down.
One thousand ago.
And I'll talk to you again soon.