Founders - #55 Tycoon's War: How Cornelius Vanderbilt Invaded a Country to Overthrow America's Most Famous Military Adventurer

Episode Date: January 14, 2019

What I learned from reading Tycoon's War: How Cornelius Vanderbilt Invaded a Country to Overthrow America's Most Famous Military Adventurer by Stephen Dando-Collins----Unlike Vanderbilt's other adversaries William Walker was not afraid of Cornelius when he should have been [0:01]Setting up the war between Cornelius Vanderbilt and William Walker [7:32]William Walker's impressive resume [16:44]Betrayal: "Gentlemen, You have undertaken to cheat me. I won't sue you, for the law is too slow. I'll ruin you." [27:04]Walker takes Vanderbilt's property. Walker thinks the law protects him. Vanderbilt doesn't care about the law [39:27]Garrison's counter move against Cornelius Vanderbilt [44:36]Vanderbilt funds several Central American governments to destroy William Walker [52:51]The power of having a singular focus on a goal but remaining flexible on the tactics to get there [1:02:10] ----Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Vanderbilt was only interested in two things, making money and winning. Often he temporarily subjugated the need for the former to achieve the latter. Vanderbilt had an unquenchable thirst for conquest. There was nothing he could not do, short of outright murder, to conquer. Vanderbilt and Walker were alike in several respects. Both were opportunists and both were prepared to suffer through short-term adversity to achieve long-term victory. Both Vanderbilt and Walker were loyal to those who were loyal to them, attracting lifelong allegiances from their closest associates. But there the similarities ended. Walker, because of his limited resources, was prepared to give his trust too readily to achieve his ends,

giving that trust to men who turned out to be liars, braggarts, and fools. The cunning Vanderbilt was a much better judge of character, and here is where the two men differed most. If you crossed Walker, he would banish you from his world. If you crossed Vanderbilt, he would set out to conquer you no matter how long it took. Ultimately, that conquest would be signified by a surrender, and that surrender would usually take the form of a deal. At one time or another, Vanderbilt got into bed with all of his enemies, if they were prepared to submit to him, and most, being businessmen, were. The exception was William Walker. He was not a businessman. He achieved his short-lived successes

using war and the law as his tools. And unlike Vanderbilt's other adversaries, Walker was not afraid of the Commodore when he should have been. Okay, so that is from the epilogue of the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Tycoon's War, How Cornelius Vanderbilt Inv a country to overthrow America's most famous military adventurer. So as you could probably guess, America's most famous military adventurer at the time is this guy named William Walker. And we're going to learn a lot about him and some of the mistakes he made going up against the ruthless Cornelius Vanderbilt.

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And the reason I'm doing this and the reason I think it's so important is because I just want to read you a quote that I took from another podcast last year, or I guess seven months ago. Technically, it's last year. But this person was speaking about what podcast means to them, and I couldn't have said it any better. And I believe this to be true, at least in my own person, in my life, and I think a lot of people empathize with this point. So I'm just going to read you this quote. And he says, there is a technological revolution. It is a deep one. The technological revolution is an online video and audio

immediately accessible to everyone all over the world. And what that's done is it's turned the spoken word into a tool that has the same reach as the printed word. It's a Gutenberg revolution in the domain of video and audio. It might be even deeper than the original Gutenberg revolution because it isn't obvious how many people can read, but lots of people can listen.

So the reason I bring that up is because I think that one of the greatest untapped repositories of knowledge in terms of building companies is currently hidden away in podcasts. So one way to tap that knowledge in the past before Founders Notes came around was that you'd have to listen to all these podcasts. Now what Founders Notes is doing is I'm compressing 10, anywhere from 8, 10, 12 hours of audio every week into key ideas that you can read in about 15 minutes. So there's two versions. You can sign up real quick. That'll put you on the free list. If you stay on the free list, I'll send you two of the notes that I make every week.

And then I have the upgraded paid version, which is seven. So I only send it out one week, once a week, but the reason I picked the number seven is that means you're hearing from a different entrepreneur every day. But I don't want to email people every day. So I think the right proper cadence for that is once a week. So if that sounds interesting,

if you're interested in learning more from entrepreneurs about building companies, about how they think, the experiences they've had, the tools they use, the books they read, et cetera, et cetera, join the email list. So far, the feedback has been amazing. People seem to really like it. In fact, I've gotten zero negative feedback, which is kind of weird, but great. Okay, so I want to jump into

the book. So like I said last week, hopefully you listened to last week's episode. If not, I mean, you don't have to listen to them in order, but I'm going to read where I left off last week just to bring us up to date here. And it says, an observer on December 31st, 1847 would have found it absurd to think that all of this would one day be half forgotten. That arbitrary writers would dismiss in a few sentences these 50 years of fistfights and Supreme Court cases, steamboat races, and stock market machinations, but already forces were in motion that would upend the population of the continent, launch the nation towards civil war, and unleash an ambition in Vanderbilt greater than anyone could have ever imagined. So we stopped last week's podcast in 1847. This week's podcast picks up right into 1848. Now what I was doing, I reread that paragraph right before I started recording, the one I just read to you. And I realized I had made a bunch of points, at least this is how it was in my memory, it might be faulty, but that I was like, you know,

this is just a different time. So the book talks about, you know, there's tons of fistfights between businessmen at the time. That's how they would settle disputes. And I was just, you know, there's tons of fistfights between businessmen at the time. That's how they would settle disputes. And I was just, you know, kind of referencing that as something curious to us nowadays. But then I read this book and I realized, oh, wait a minute. Like fistfights is one thing. A lot of people settled their disputes at this point in American history with duels to the death with guns. So in light of that, after reading this entire book, which is basically about war, but I'm going to focus on Vanderbilt's strategy, which I think is applicable to other domains outside

of war, that it seems kind of curious that one would even mention a fistfight when you have at the time a very common place for all sorts of people to settle disputes with violence to the death if need be. So I want to jump into the book and I want to start, I need to set up this story. So we're going to go, I'm going to, the first part I'm going to tell you a little bit about what Cornelius is up to at this point. And then I want to introduce you to this William Walker because this book, it's called Tycoon's War, right? But Walker is not really a tycoon. He is actually just part of the adversary in a war against other shipping magnets that undertake to cheat Vanderbilt. And he's going to do a lot of, like the epilogue said,

he wasn't smart enough to realize that he should have been afraid of Commodore. So let me set up the story. It's going to tell you what exactly Cornelius is up to. And so he's going up and it's 1848 and he is meeting with the Secretary of State of the United States. And he's got a lot of, well, he's got a lot of business he wants to attend to. So it says, hard swearing, frugal living Cornelius Vanderbilt, the descendant of poor Dutch immigrants, would die in 1877, possessing more money than was held by the U.S. Treasury. That's insane. Far and away America's richest man, he built his massive fortune on steam.

First, his fleets of steamboats and ocean steamers plying North American rivers and the world's oceans. And later, after the American Civil War, steam trains on his ever-expanding network of North American railroads. And this is a direct quote from Vanderbilt. He said, I've been insane on the subject of money-making all of my life. When gold was discovered in California, Vanderbilt was already a multimillionaire. But the immense wealth he would amass by the time he died was then still only the stuff of dreams so this is kind of interesting um i saw i found like i mentioned last week there's a lot of parallels between vanderbilt and um and rockefeller in the sense that they were very

wealthy um by the time they got to their 40s or 50s but they made an unbelievable like almost 10 times or whatever the number is a great a magnitude more of wealth later on in life. They just had to set the foundation for the first 40 or 50 years of their life. There's a meme that always pops up on Twitter that shows the cumulative net worth of Warren Buffett. And this shows something very similar. If you just Google Warren Buffett's wealth over time, you'll probably find it. But it's a bar graph and it just grows exponentially after he turns like 60 or 70. okay so vanderbilt had figured out another way to make a fortune from the gold rush and that's what was why he'd come to washington ironically this washington meeting would create the circumstances that would within seven years bring vanderbilt to

the brink of financial disaster and send him to war to save his business empire. And that is not hyperbole. He actually funded a war, a war he did not start, by the way, which is even more silly when you think about it. Okay, so we're going to set up. This is his idea that he wants to do here.chooled vanderbilt may have been he left school at the age of 11 to work as a laborer on vessels on vessels plying the east river uh but he was notoriously street smart and more direct quotes from vanderbilt most of the direct quotes from vanderbilt in this book are like there's not a lot because he didn't really leave a lot of written records but um almost all the ones where i would search for online are appear in this book and this is one of his most famous quotes and he says

if i had learned education i would not have had time to learn anything else vanderbilt wrote nothing down reportedly keeping every detail of his business dealings in his head and at any given time knew his income and expenditures down to the last cent. So I found that actually sentence a little curious. Because if you remember when he was working for Gibbons, he would track every single thing, every expense, every revenue, everything for Gibbons on this huge, I guess, their version of a spreadsheet. I don't know what changed. I'm assuming that this author did his due diligence and that sentence is correct.

That sentence led me to believe, I wonder what changed. I'm assuming that this author did his due diligence and that sentence is correct. That sentence led me to believe, I wonder what changed. Other than I knew he was very sensitive about giving information to other people, he would rather collect it. So maybe this is a strategy he used later on in life that he realized, hey, I'm not going to write anything down because I don't want to leave a trail. And a lot of the stuff he did would be illegal now, even though they didn't have the laws at that time in place. So I don't even think it was – it could have been to try to, like, skirt the law because there wasn't many laws against what he was doing. People certainly thought it was immoral, unethical, but it wasn't illegal. Okay, so Vanderbilt spoke – now he's talking, we're in a meeting with the Secretary of State. Vanderbilt spoke of California and the gold rush.

Only a small percentage of the thousands of Americans and immigrants from Europe flooding west with the hope of making their fortunes in California made the journey over land in covered wagons. So if you remember the podcast I did on Levi Strauss, he takes this route that Vanderbilt's proposing to create. Their route cut through dangerous Native American homelands and clawed over treacherous mountain passes and took as long as six months. I mean, the route I see, not the one that took six months. Hundreds of travelers died each year as a result of accidents, exposure, starvation, or Indian attacks. Several American shipping companies had spotted another way to cash in on the California gold rush. They would run steamer services to and from the United States and Panama. It says, and then this is what they were paying at the time.

$600 would take you via Cuba from New York to the east coast of Panama, put you on a horse or mule, take you over a week-long trek across the Panamanian Isthmus along muddy tracks and over flooding rivers, hopefully avoiding local bandits, and then on the Pacific side, put you aboard another steamer, which conveyed you up to San Francisco. This is where Cornelius Vanderbilt would come in. He'd run ferries up and down the Hudson River and across New York Harbor to Staten Island before graduating to— I said that wrong. They're describing now what he was doing.

So he's running ferries. We knew this from last week, so I'm going to skip that part. Let's see. He could easily put existing ships onto the California trade. So he was uniquely positioned to take advantage of this new route right away before most other people could. But he told Secretary Clayton he would not use the Panama route, and he scoffed at the $600 being charged by the operators who did use panama i can improve on that vanderbilt assured clayton clayton's the secretary of state spreading a map of central america in front of them i can make money at 300 crossing my passengers by lake nicaragua a route 600 miles shorter um he also

had another idea that he wants to, remember he started out as an anti-monopolist and then turned into maybe the greatest monopolist of all time. It wasn't just California passengers the Commodore was after. Vanderbilt wanted the U.S. mail contracts, so providing transportation for all the U.S. mail, which was worth over $365,000 a year, or several hundred million dollars in today's money. So remember, this is in the 1800s.

Okay, so that's what Vanderbilt, oh, I'm sorry, I left off this part. Vanderbilt told Clayton he wanted exclusive rights from the Nicaraguan government to build his canals across Nicaragua. In the meantime, he said, he would run steamships to and from Nicaragua, from New York and San Francisco, conveying his passengers up to San Juan, that's a river, and across Lake Nicaragua, and he'd use river and lake steamers.

So it says, okay, this would cut hundreds of miles and several days off the journey from New York to San Francisco. Okay, so now we're going to be introduced into William Walker, who I think is about 20 years, maybe 25 years younger than Cornelius Vanderbilt. So let's learn a little bit about his early life. It says, devoted to his mother, his mom had this mysterious, like lifelong chronic illness,

and local physicians could never diagnose her. So it said, devoted to his mother, William determined to become a doctor and cure his mother's mystery illness. He had started reading and writing while very young and consumed books from the family's well-stocked bookshelves, often reading aloud to his bedridden mother. By age 12, William had mastered Greek and Latin, and his father took him to the University of Nashville,

proposing the boy to be admitted. He was admitted. Twelve-year-old William was admitted to the university and two years later graduated. At 14, William enrolled at the medical school of the University of Pennsylvania, and by 18, William Walker had his MD. Walker then learned French, German, and Spanish to the languages in which he was already fluent.

His mom died, so then he says, with his faith in medicine destroyed by his mother's death, Walker threw himself into legal studies and obtained a law degree within two years. Shortly after practicing law, Walker convinced that the pen could potentially be mightier than either the scalpel or the gavel. He became a newspaper editor. So before I started this book, I read through William Walker's Wikipedia page and they had that summary right there where he had a really impressive resume.

You're going to realize, I mean, we kind of already know this because the people we studied, there's little correlation between success in school and success in life, even though I think most people would argue otherwise. And we're going to see this. The book does a great job contrasting what their early lives were, where while Walker is this little boy genius, this prodigy studying at school,

Vanderbilt is basically doing hard-breaking labor from dusk till dawn, or dawn till dusk, I guess, and learning the business of shipping. So they came from vastly different backgrounds. Okay, so Vanderbilt obviously gets what he wants. So he gets a setup that he has a contract to do to build this new route in Nicaragua with the Nicaraguan government. But he runs into some issues. And now I just include this part because this is another demonstration of his personality.

He's like force of will. So there's this giant ship that he's leaving New York. It's called the Prometheus. And apart from her crew, she carried just a single passenger her owner cornelius vanderbilt the purpose of the voyage was so secret that not even vanderbilt's wife sophia knew that her husband had left town let alone where he was going so this is more of his secret his secret nature vanderbilt was on a mission the news from colonel david white in nicaragua had not been good so this is somebody that works for day uh for for vbilt. The steamer, meaning the boat, that he went down there, had wrecked on the rapids in

San Juan River. The rapids were impassable, said a frustrated Colonel White, who declared that the Commodore's dream of conveying passengers up the river to the lake was unrealizable. And this one sentence, these two sentences is going to give us a good description of who Cornelius Vanderbilt was. It says, Cornelius Vanderbilt would see about that. He would not let a few rocks stand in the way of making a fortune in Nicaragua. Okay, so while this is happening,

Walker has moved from Tennessee down to New Orleans, and now he's made his way to San Francisco, and he is a newspaper editor there. He writes some unflattering things about a guy named Graham, and Graham challenges him to a duel. And Walker gets involved in several of these duels. So I just want to tell you about this one. Up came the two heavy revolvers. Both men fired at the same time. Walker missed with his round but immediately took a.44 slug in the leg. Walker staggered then straightened. He refused to go down. Steely-eyed again he raised his gun. Graham cursed. Again, both men fired. Walker was hit a second time in the leg, which collapsed under him.

He went down. The referee called to Graham to put up his weapon, and Graham turned and walked away. So I bring that point in because Walker is no stranger to violence. He's actually like a mastered swordsman, got a bunch of duels. I don't know. It's unclear to me how successful he was at duels, but he was like most people at the time, very familiar with firearms. Okay, so this is very interesting because the book starts out calling Vanderbilt frugal.

I spent a lot of last week's podcast talking about how frugal he was. And then all of a sudden, Cornelius Vanderbilt builds a private pleasure ship that was bigger than any other boat in the world. So imagine somebody coming out with like a cruise ship size boat this time. But instead of having thousands of passengers, it's just him and 20 of his relatives on it. And he decides, hey, I'm going to take a four-month cruise to Europe. And this is actually his first vacation. So this note is selling off his shipping interest, a little description of how much money he was making, his first vacation, and then the first vacation leading to betrayal. As Vanderbilt prepared to embark on this luxurious excursion,

the first vacation he had ever taken in his life, he was asked by Jacob Van Pelt, a friend of 50 years, if he had everything fixed, meaning were his investments in good enough shape to allow him to turn his back on his business for such an extended period. Vanderbilt had nodded. I've got 11 million.

It's funny how he talks. He says, I've got 11 millions is how he wrote, how he says it. I've got 11 million invested better than any other 11 million in the United States, he told his friend. It is worth 25% a year without any risk. The Nicaraguan transit business proved hugely profitable for almost all concerned. It delivered Vanderbilt a personal profit of a million dollars, which is tens and tens of millions in today's dollars, in just the first 12 months of operation. One party not making a large profit from the deal was the Nicaraguan government. Remember, he basically has a monopoly on this,

that he negotiated in part by Vanderbilt and the State Department of the United States. It was receiving its annual fee of $10,000 as provided by the contract with Vanderbilt. But Nicaragua hadn't seen a penny of the specified 10% of profit. That was because Vanderbilt claimed there was no profit. He slyly bill every uh he built everything against like

his expenses so basically he was hiding it and again another example that history doesn't repeat human nature does if you remember the the podcast with michael ovitz on cea this is why he started um that he would negotiate with his with his actors no no, we don't want, we're not taking points of net because the studios would do the same thing. We want points of gross, gross receipts because we know what you do. You make it seem like you're not profitable when you're making,

some of these movies are making tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. So you're seeing Vanderbilt's doing the same thing 150 years before that. Okay, so now back to, this is why I was just reading this book I'd recommend. It's called A Guide to the Good Life,

The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy. And in the book, Seneca makes the point that vices are contagious. And I would say almost everything are contagious, meaning you have to be careful what the ideas you expose yourself to and who you keep around you because you start to, we're just,

you know, basically copy machines. And you're going to see that William Walker starts copying, this is his idol, this guy named Sam Houston, which I assume the city in Texas is named for. And we're going to see the blueprint for what Walker tries to do later in the book. Walker grew up with Sam Houston as a hero. Like Walker, Houston had been born and raised in Nashville, then had become a lawyer. He had gone on to serve as a U.S. congressman representing Tennessee and had also been the governor of Tennessee. In 1833, Houston had settled in the Mexican state of Texas, and two years later, he became the general of the army of the Texas settlers that defeated Mexico's presidents and created the new Republic of Texas. So I always see this, like people, Texans are, I guess, proud of this.

And I see shirts and stuff online where it's like, oh, I didn't know that Texas was actually a republic at one time. So I'm ignorant about a lot of things, apparently. In 1836, Houston had become the first president of the Republic of Texas. Eventually, later on the book, I guess it was folded back into the United States, obviously. If General Sam Houston could carve a new nation out of Mexican territory, so William Walker believed could he. So I gonna skip the book again is treating these as two main characters so they're gonna go back and forth so I'm gonna go back to the betrayal that happens while Cornelius is on vacation and this is where the book

gets its title from there's other tycoons Morgan and Garrison and they're gonna they were partners with Vanderbilt and they're going to screw him over here. It says, during Vanderbilt's European absence, Morgan and Garrison collaborated to manipulate transit company stock in their favor. So one thing I have to say, there's a bunch of company names in here. Don't really worry about keeping track of all the names. Just know that Cornelius had an unbelievable amount of revenue streams and positions in all kinds of different companies.

So keeping track of them is basically an exercise in futility. So in this case, they're fighting over this specific transit company stock. And it says, the board had also voted to cease Vanderbilt's 20% skim of company revenue So he'd also had not only did he own a lot of these companies founded these companies that he'd invested them But then he'd have all these secret deals where he would make money that wouldn't go that go directly to him and not the company Again, that would be illegal today, but at the time it wasn't And this is one of them that he would just he would skim 20 right off the top even vanderbilt's attorney

and business partner joseph l white who sold his stock and resigned from the board at the same time that vanderbilt had not only bought new company stock on the cheap in vanderbilt's absence but accepted a transit company directorship from morgan and garrison vanderbilt's cash flow from the transit company was choked off so he would also would also try these things where he would sell his assets. Remember last week he talked about like they couldn't tell who actually owned the companies? Similar situation here. He would divest his stock holdings, and yet he'd have these agreements where he's still getting paid from it. So he'd make money both ways.

Okay, but now they're screwing him over. They're going to cut it all off. And then this is Vanderbilt's most famous quote. So he comes back after months, finds out what's happening, and he's just livid. He says, he merely dictated a short letter to both Morgan and Garrison. These are his two main adversaries. And you can think of Walker as basically just a proxy between, even though he probably didn't know at the time,

between these two warring factions. And this is the quote. Gentlemen, you have undertaken to cheat me. I won't sue you, for the law is too slow. I'll ruin you. Yours truly, Cornelius Vanderbilt. Okay, at this time, Walker is trying to follow in the footsteps of Houston. He has, before he becomes the president of Nicaragua and starts to become a thorn in Cornelius' side,

he invades Mexico, I think twice. This is the first one. He invades, I don't even, I thought not even putting in the podcast because he has these like successful quote unquote invasions and they last like a few months each and then he just and it ends in defeat so this one he starts this new company or excuse me this new country in

uh california and what is at the time mexico uh but now today i think it's california says the republic of lower california is hereby declared free sovereign and independent and all allegiance to the republic of me Mexico is forever renounced. Signed, William Walker, President. Forever renounced? Try like four months renounced. Okay, so now I'm going to skip back to, at this time, Vanderbilt is really, he's not at war with Walker, but he's starting his war with Morgan and Garrison, and we're going to see his same MO that he uses constantly.

So it says, Commodore Vanderbilt's assault on Morgan and Garrison and the other rogue directors of the accessory transit company had gathered pace. A new steamship operator, the combatively named Independent Opposition Line, so he starts a new company here, was advertising in the New York press for $150 in a cabin and $75 and below. Commodore Vanderbilt's new line would take you to California via Panama, which is exact.

So he's going in direct competition to Morgan and Garrison. On the run from New York to Panama, the independent line was using the North Star. So the North Star is what I said was the act of non-frugality for lack of a better term that Vanderbilt had, where he built something the size of a cruise ship for his own self. So he says Vanderbilt had stripped his beautiful private yacht and fitted her out to carry 600 passengers. He would never again trifle with such a fabulous toy and would never again take an extended vacation. Okay. So down here it says Vanderbilt had half the fare offered by all his competitors,

including the transit company. He was also offering private travelers a chance to sail on his world famous former private yacht, plus the fastest trip to California available. So that's actually smart because he got a lot of press at the time about, wow, this is the best boat in the world. He took it, he cruised over to Europe and even the European press was amazed. And now he's saying, okay, do you want to ride on their boat or you want to ride for half the price on mine that's world famous? What do you think is going to happen? Okay. He was determined to put the transit company out of business and ruin Morgan and Garrison. So he's not stopping there. He still owned some stock in this particular company.

And he offered a block of 5,000 accessory transit company shares for sale at $25 each. The stock had recently been selling for above $30. So you see what he's doing here. He's trying to basically ruin them on getting the stock to fall and make sure that their revenue dries up. So the stock market price continued to decline. Okay. And a few pages later, he's picking up this war and we're going to get into some numbers here. And this is the note. It's just, he's ruthless. This guy is absolutely ruthless, as we're going to see in this book.

Vanderbilt's other measures were biting, but by the fall of 1854, the price of transit company stock had dropped to $21. So we're starting at 30, now he was selling at 25, now it's down to 21. Okay, so it says they're trying to get him off their back.

And, okay, so they wind up trying to buy him out and just offering him what essentially is a bribe. And it says the proposal was put to Vanderbilt, and to the surprise of many, he accepted. And he's doing this to throw him off his true intentions. So he says, this deal signaled, so Morgan and Garrison believed, that Vanderbilt had given up on his plan to ruin them. Remember, his MO was, hey, I'm going to compete with you, I'm going to compete with you, and then you're going to buy me out, and then I'm going to use your money to open a different route and do the same thing over and over again.

So the deal signaled, so, believe that Vanderbilt had given up on his plan to ruin them, but the Commodore had done no such thing. Having wrung his outstanding commissions from his enemies, uh, read bribe, uh, uh, many new, uh, few observers thought he had any, excuse me. So he, he. They're basically saying he got money that very few people thought he had any chance of recovering. Vanderbilt would embark on a fresh campaign to ruin the pair, cashed up with their own money. That's what I mean by ruthless. For two months, nothing was heard from Vanderbilt.

Meanwhile, the hard-pressed accessory transit company failed to deliver a dividend in January due to the cost of the settlement with Vanderbilt. So remember, he wants to ruin the company before he was competing with them, then trying to get their stock to grow lower. Now he took money and bribed from them, but because they took a bribe, they can't deliver a dividend. So he says, transit company issued, and they don't even see it coming. So this is their viewpoint.

Transit company issued an optimistic forecast for the coming year's earnings. Then in March, Vanderbilt's son-in-law, Daniel Allen, a former transit company vice president, launched a legal action against the current directors. Who do you think was behind this? Accusing them of incompetent management, misappropriation of funds, and the illegal issuing of 40,000 new shares in the company

to finance the purchase of Vanderbilt's seven ships. So that's how he got it paid. Chief Judge of the New York Superior Court issued against Morgan and Garrison an injunction that prevented them from issuing more stock or entering into new contracts with the company. This uncertainty caused shareholders to dump transit company stock. Its value plummeted to $15. Now remember, Vanderbilt unloaded a bunch of his stock to drop it. Now look what he does here. With the share price down, Vanderbilt began to acquire accessory transit company stock, a partial here, a parcel there, frequently using friends as buyers, meaning friends as fronts. Month by month, Vanderbilt discreetly rebuilt his stockholding

and the company he tried to destroy, working toward the day when he could then boast a controlling interest and kick Charles Morgan and Cornelius Garrison out. And he's doing this in part with their own money. This guy, man. All right. So I'm going to skip over a lot of this, like all these fights that are happening down. Just know that Walker gets expelled from Mexico twice. He's successful in invading Nicaragua and aligning himself with the government there, becomes the general of Nicaragua and aligning himself with the government there becomes a general of Nicaragua eventually he's going to become the president of Nicaragua but I just want to point out that

one thing about Cornelius he's very pragmatic like the book said at the beginning listen he's going to ruin you but he's not going to turn on a way to make money so if you if you give up and say hey I'll buy you out he'll do a deal with you you. And he'll basically learn. He's not, I'm not saying he's not principled because I thought that's the right word. The right word escapes me at the moment. But Walker's just, this is about his personality. He's just foolish. He's very egotistical. Like he says, Walker never took advice, but always gave commands and they must be obeyed. So that one sentence is like a big problem with his personality. He's not willing to learn from other people.

And this is the way I would describe him, Walker, and we're going to see this here because we're now at the stage, he's in Nicaragua. Walker takes Vanderbilt's property and relies on law. Okay, this reliance on law, you're going to see come back and bite him because he doesn't even, he's engaged in a war with somebody that doesn't respect law. Okay. There's reliance on law. You're going to see, come back and bite him because he doesn't even, he's engaged in some, in a war with somebody that doesn't respect law. One of Vanderbilt's famous sayings is, you know, why do I care about law? Ain't I the one that got the power? And so he doesn't realize that, you know, there's just, to Vanderbilt, it's just

words written on paper. And I would describe, after reading this book, I would describe William Walker as an intellectual yet idiot, which if you just Google and read about, it perfectly describes him. And it's also known, like, you'll see it written on the internet as IYI. And so let me just give you one sentence description in case you're not familiar with it. It says, the IYI, intellectually idiot, pathologizes others for doing things he doesn't understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited.

You see this a lot with like overeducated people where they do really good in school and they think that means something in the sense that if you have the choice between doing well in school and doing well in life, everybody would pick doing well in life. But the IYI optimizes for doing things well in school in that sense or things that sound smart but may not be smart. Walker is like that. He has an impressive resume, right? Graduated college at 14, doctorate at 18,

law degree, writer, and yet he stood zero chance against somebody that's truly intelligent with how humans, how the world actually operates. And this is Walker's being so stupid here because he's like, oh, well, let me read it and then i'll explain um so there's a boat to down in nicaragua because that's where vanderbilt's part of his business is at the time brought to nicaragua by cornelius vanderbilt to operate on the uh the lake uh nicaragua the lake nicaragua uh the steamboat was making a scheduled run from virgin bay uh to virgin bay from the san juan river so uh he's the general of nicaragua at the time he boards this boat they present the uh the people operating the boat it says it presented him with written notification from cronal walker that's his own title by the way that his steamboat was

being commandeered until further notice so they're like no this is not a smart idea there's these two guys that work for vanderbilt and they're like listen The lake and river steamers were owned by a US company The US government considered them to be sailing under the US flag. That was actually not true It says Walker a trained attorney among other things Dismissed her argument by pointing out that the transit companies contract with the Nicaraguan government Specifically stated the vessels were to operate under the Nicaraguan flag, which meant Nicaraguan authorities could requisition them if need be. So even though Vanderbilt owns them, it is technically a Nicaraguan company.

So again, this is him relying on law. She said, no, no, of course, the law is written down. Silly, you know, what are you talking about? I get to commandeer them not realizing vanderbilt doesn't care about the law and so this right here is going to start the war that is going to lead to walker's destruction because he's dumb he's not smart that's the problem okay and you're going to see a lot of things he does it's just it is weird because the author of this book um seems to i don't say i wouldn't say they portray him in a better way,

but by the time I got to the end of the book, I just was shaking my head at this guy's ignorance. And I'm going to read something to you at the end. It's just, it's mind-boggling how you could be so educated yet so silly. All right. So we're, okay, so now I'm skipping way ahead. I'm skipping over all the battle stuff because that's outside of our – what we try to study on this podcast. But just know that there's a huge war going on in Central America.

There's a civil war happening in Nicaragua. And then eventually they're not going to, other Central American countries are not going to want an American coming down and ascending the presidency of Nicaragua, which is exactly what happens. What did you think was going to happen? And so that's going to wind up leading to his downfall.

And a lot of those armies, the other Central American armies that wind up overthrowing Walker eventually are financed by Cornelius Vanderbilt because this guy was taking Vanderbilt's property. And he knew who Vanderbilt was, why he would think that like, he's like, well, this is the law. Of course I can do this. Okay. So in the meantime, Vanderbilt is not even really aware. He's kind of aware of Walker, but he's like, he's not, it doesn't, you'll see, I'll read to the part where he's like, all right, this is, I've had enough of this guy. So it says in the meantime, he's like he's not it doesn't you'll see i'll read to the part where he's like all right this is i've had enough of this guy so it says in the meantime he's buying up stock to

regain control and it says cornelius played cards the same way he did business slyly expertly and for keeps the commodore was in good spirits for vanderbilt was close to pouncing on the men he'd promised to ruin charles morgan and cornelius gison. The war in Nicaragua had been good news to Vanderbilt because it had depressed the price of accessory transit company stock. Quietly, remember it's still going down, discreetly he had bought up floating stock, steadily rebuilding the Commodore shareholding

and that of the men whose vote he knew to depend on. So if you understand, just to explain what's going on here, this war that Walker's engaged in is actually at this moment good for Vanderbilt because people are scared to go down there. And it's going to cost, if you're a transportation company and you don't have people to transport, your revenue goes down, your revenue goes down, your stock goes down. And it says, as the month continued, more transit company shares would hit the market and more shares would be snapped up by Vanderbilt. With the Commodore publicly focused on launching a trans, oh, this, and this is what I meant last week when I said that he engages in information asymmetric warfare. He's secretly doing all this, nobody knows, but publicly he's

shouting from the rooftops and in the presses about what his actual plan, what people actually think his plan is. With the Commodore publicly focused on launching a transatlantic ocean steamer service to France, Morgan and Garrison did not see him coming. At the same time, unlike Vanderbilt, they did not have sufficient faith in the future of the transit business to buy up the cheap shares themselves vanderbilt was only weeks away from winning the larger game by completing his overthrow of morgan and garrison and resuming control which is exactly what he does okay um so i'm going to skip to that part uh vanderbilt had regained control now this the plan worked so he regains control it had taken on the best part of a a year, but by the end of 1855, he and his friends had acquired a controlling shareholding of the company. At the company's January board meeting, Vanderbilt would be elected a director once more,

along with several of his sons-in-laws. It's very interesting. He didn't really trust people, but he employed a lot of his sons-in-laws. The directorships of Charles Morgan and Cornelius Garrison would be terminated. Morgan and Garrison, overwhelmed by Vanderbilt's covert assault, remember they didn't see it coming, were out the door, and Vanderbilt was back in control of the company he founded. The Commodore had not yet ruined his enemies as he promised,

but there was enough time for that. So he wants not only them out of the company, the company but because they betrayed him you have to you have to be bankrupt now they're not so these are not dumb men though Garrison and and Morgan so this is Garrison's counter move and this is like this this is huge war going on between these guys while there's actual war going down in central america so it said uh okay so garrison is gonna so now that okay so now that vanderbilt has control of the company right he he wants he doesn't want garrison is going to petition Walker to actually cancel the contract with the country of Nicaragua now that he has actually influence on the president because he's like the president's, before he takes the presidency of Nicaragua, he's like the president's right-hand guy. So he says, this is Garrison's counter move.

Garrison was as intractable as a crocodile and as slippery as an eel. Even a friend and admirer declared that Garrison was so tricky, his competitors should assign 20 men to watch him. Not content to sit back and let Cornelius Vanderbilt beat him, Garrison has sent his son down to Nicaragua. So he's sending his son down to do a deal with Walker. To see if a deal could be done with Walker over the transit route, a deal that would shut out Cornelius Vanderbilt.

So he says he wants to write the president of the accessory transit company in New York. The letter required that the company to appoint commissioners to settle the outstanding financial matters in dispute between the government and the company. So what they're referencing here is a little confusing by itself. But remember earlier, the Nicaragua was only making $10,000 a year and they wanted their 10% profit. Well, they know that Cornelius is making money. So Garrison's like, listen, Cornelius is making money. He's screwing you guys. Why don't you use that as a way to cancel the contract and give it to me?

So it's the transit company's legal counsel. This is where it gets confusing because there's like the accessory transit company then there's a transit company there's all these different companies so just don't it's not important the name it's important who's actually controlling at the time um so walker sends a letter saying hey you guys owe us money if not we're gonna we're going to um we're gonna cancel this so he writes a letter to cornelius's vanderbilt's company that cornelius is in control of and it goes to cornelius's legal counsel who is now repaired repatched things with cornelius and that's that guy joseph l white and this is where walker again is so silly he thinks that well the legal the legal counsel must be, let's read this. He goes, Walker considered, meaning Joseph O. White,

the leading mind of the corporation. No, there is one leading mind of the corporation, and that's going to be Vanderbilt. So it says, White had immediately replied. He said that the company had previously appointed two commissioners to deal with this other faction. It's going to be confusing if I introduce it, so we'll just skip over that. The matter lay in the hands of those

four gentlemen, not with the company. And so they're saying, hey, well, this faction had to deal with the previous government. That government doesn't exist anymore. So Walker was aware that White had subsequently also written to the transit company's manager in Nicaragua, telling him that the company would make the Nicaraguan government suffer if it did not settle the dispute on the company's terms. This was a veiled threat to pull out of Nicaragua. In theory, the company, which means Vanderbilt, had the whip hand in this affair, but slippery Cornelius Garrison was about to tilt the balance of power Walker's way. And so this is explicitly what the, what this deal means.

And it says the deal was this Garrison and his partners would guarantee to operate a shipping line to and from Nicaragua and the United States Walker for his part must guarantee that the government would revoke the Cornelius. I'm going to skip that name. The Cornelius' company's contract with the Nicaraguan government on the grounds that the company was in breach of its financial obligations. In turn, it would assign the transit route rights to Garrison and Morgan. William Garrison proposed to Walker that the government seize all transit company assets in Nicaragua as part payment for the hundreds of thousands of dollars that the Nicaraguans contended were owed to them

by the transit company and unpaid commissions those assets included the company's lake and river steamers lighters depots accommodation buildings employees houses etc etc etc we skip over all that in Commodore Vanderbilt's own estimation those assets were close were worth close to a million dollars in 1800 dollars. From the time being, the Nicaraguan government would lease the seized assets to this guy Randolph, and then Randolph would in turn lease them to Morgan and Garrison, so they have like another front man. Ironically, if this deal came off, it would be swift and sweet revenge for Garrison and Morgan, having been so recently outwitted by Vanderbilt and losing control of the company.

Vanderbilt had worked so long and so sneakily to regain control, and now just as he reclaimed the company, William Walker was about to make it worthless. It looked as if the Commodore had been outsmarted by competitors Garrison and Morgan and by a Tennessee adventurer with not the slightest interest in making money meaning Walker so that this action right here causes as soon as um uh Vanderbilt finds this out he says okay well now Walker is going to have to be ruined and I'm not going to stop until he's he's done and so this move, Walker foolishly agrees to. So here's the weird thing. So while this is happening, he makes this announcement

and Garrison and Morgan are not ready. So they're like, don't worry. Cornelius is going to want to make money. He's still going to run his ships until we go down there. And Cornelius is like, no. He's like, I don't care about the money. I'm pulling out. Remember at the beginning of the book, it says sometimes he would forgo making money just to win. So it said, Cornelius Vanderbilt struck a first blow in this war against William Walker. All services to Nicaragua had been terminated, which means William Walker can't get weapons. He can't get new recruits from America. He can't do anything. There's no ships down there.

And it said Walker was pissed because Walker scowled up at Garrison. This is the Sun Garrison. In disbelief as he realized that Morgan and Garrison had expected Vanderbilt to keep the ships on nicaraguan run until they could put their own ships on the route morgan and garrison it turned out did not yet have a single ship to allocate to the pacific route walker through morgan and garrison's lack of foresight was now cut off from supply okay so this is also in addition to remember he's fighting, Vanderbilt's going to fight this war on multiple fronts. He says, once the market knew that the Commodore was back in charge of the transit company, the price of the company stock had begun to rise. At that point, Morgan had dumped his

entire holding and that of his partner Garrison. In a bid to prevent the share price from dropping as a result of this, Vanderbilt and his friends had brought up every dump share. So now the roles are reversed here. Morgan had invested heavily in share. And so Morgan actually does something smart. He starts shorting the stock because he knows what's going to happen. Despite Vanderbilt's best efforts to keep the transit company share price up by buying the dump stock, his determination to keep his fleet of ocean steamers tied up so to deprive Walker of his seaway lifeline only served to panic the market.

So Morgan actually shorts the stock. He says when Morgan sold his shares in February, they were trading at $23. When the news hit in New York the next day that the Nicaraguan government had annulled the contract, the bottom fell out of the share price. By the time Morgan covered his short, his share had dropped to $13. Morgan made $10 a share, walking away with profit of millions of dollars. Again, it's millions of dollars in 1800 money. So that's a ton of money right now. So Morgan and Garrison are not dumb by any means. They lose, but they're definitely not dumb. Okay. What is this? Okay, so this is a war by proxy.

And I'm flying through the book now because a lot of the book is just these fights, these battles, these actual wars. And Walker, again, does not realize the adversary he took on so all these other countries are freaked out that there's an American now president of Nicaragua at this time he's he's he's usurped power and so they form they usually during this time they would all be at war with each other now they form an alliance switching all these guatemala honduras all these other countries uh costa rica etc etc um and they pledged their countries an alliance that would not rest until walker and his yankees

had been ejected from central america well who do you think organized this ally from now on the central american states and parties participating in the coalition against walker would be known to friend and foe alike as the allies it was the first time in two decades that the countries of Central America had stopped fighting each other and come together in a joint cause, thanks to William Walker. Thanks also to Cornelius Vanderbilt, for it had been his money that helped arm the troops from Guatemala and El Salvador, money received by those countries' ambassadors in Washington. Not only had the allies gone to war with Walker, but more important, Vanderbilt, who had more money than all Central American governments put together, had gone to war with Walker. For Vanderbilt, this was not business.

It was personal. Okay, so during this time, so something important, again, where I say that Walker is a very foolish man is he, for this, for him, it was like a lifelong dream to like, he very much believed in manifest destiny. He thought America should go out and conquer everywhere.

He thought he was good and smart enough that he should be running some of these countries. It was almost like a religious exercise for him. He mistook his allies to have the same zeal. Garrison and Morgan are businessmen. They're aligned with you because it's good for their pocketbooks. And the minute it's not going to be good for their pocketbooks is the minute they're going to end the partnership, which is going to happen, and eventually cuts off Walker towards the end of the war from supplies

because eventually it's so unstable in Nicaragua, they're like, we're not running ships down anymore because we can't make any money. And Walker was like, I can't believe they're so cowardly. They're not cowardly. They don't have the same goals you do. So again, like we said at the beginning of the book, most businessmen, if they're fighting a war with Cornelius, they can't win. They're like, all right, let's just do a deal. They don't care. It's just business, right? So Cornelius Garrison shows up in Vanderbilt.

He realizes that Vanderbilt has an upper hand, realizes who he got to fight with. He's like, listen, let's just partner. Let's let's all make money together. Vanderbilt's not going to this time, he said. And now Garrison was standing across the long, wide, wide table that served as Vanderbilt's desk. Excuse me, did I say Garrison or Garrison is across? Garrison is the one that's at Vanderbilt's office, And he was offering Vanderbilt a partnership with Morgan and himself. If the Commodore walked away from the company, whose shares were now just worth $3, down from $23 last year. This way, by making Vanderbilt their partner in the Nicaraguan operations,

and by default also making him a partner with President William Walker of Nicaragua, Morgan and Garrison would make an enemy an ally, and would no longer have to watch their backs in dread of Vanderbilt's next assault. Vanderbilt, sitting on the other side of the table, didn't even have to think it over. He shook his head. He'd been fighting Garrison and his crony Morgan tooth and nail for years. In the past, Vanderbilt had gone into partnership with steamship rivals, but this had been different.

So he's not going to do it. The shareholders had supported his policy of keeping company steamers tied up, even though the vessels could be making money in other routes, like going to Panama, for instance. The New York Times had been scathing in its criticism of Vanderbilt's bloody-minded strategy. And this is a quote from the New York Times. The Times says,

Commodore Vanderbilt should consent to a line from his high horse and resume the practical business and good sense which characterizes management of his steamboat jobs. But here's the thing, the Times didn't know this, Morgan didn't know this, Garrison didn't know this, and Walker didn't know this, what I'm about to tell you. So it looks like Vanderbilt's doing something stupid. He's on the precipice of financial ruin.

That's not accurate. But he said that the company's steamers had continued to lay idle for months yet in his own in indomitable fashion vanderbilt himself had been secretly making a vast profit from his idol steamships because they had been tied up okay so everybody thinks you're losing money because you're tying them up he found a way okay how can i make money when they're tied up this is what i think we should learn from vanderbilt not this other you know i don't don't think you should be a monopolist. I don't think he should go to war

for people. But this idea that he would never give up on a problem and he would constantly look for other ways to solve the problem very creatively. So this is what he did. The Commodore had paid a visit to his competitor, William Aspinall, the head of the Pacific Mail line, and made a deal with him. So people are like, hey, if you're not going to be running these steamers down in Nicaragua, why don't you go to Panama? Well, why didn't he go to Panama? For two months, Aspinwall had paid him $40,000 a month on the condition that he would not put his steamers on the Panama run in competition with Aspinwall's own vessels.

The money had gone to Vanderbilt personally not the transit company and it says he swore to destroy them okay so he undertook his to run his steamers to the Gulf of Mexico so now he takes the boats he's not going to run him in Nicaragua he's not going to run him in against Panama in Panama because Aspinwall is paying him so he's you know what? I want to screw with these guys a little bit more. So he takes some of these steamers and runs down to the Gulf of Mexico in competition with Morgan because Morgan owns this other line to put even more pressure on his adversary. This guy is ruthless. Over the next two years, this deal with Net Vanderbilt,

personally close to a million dollars, meaning the bribe from Aspinwall. It goes up from $40,000 a month to, I think, $56,000 a month. Okay, and then this is another example of just the persistence of Vanderbilt. It was Vanderbilt who had armed the conscript soldiers of the Allied armies that had blossomed from nothing. So these are people that he's hoping the other four or five countries to put an end to Walker. He had sent the allied government's money. He had purchased weapons and ammunition and shipped them to Central America. The invasion of Nicaragua by the allied armies had been motivated, financed,

and equipped by Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt had poured money down. They're saying if the allied armies continue to sit because they haven't attacked yet,anderbilt had poured money down the drain as far as the commodore was concerned there had to be another way to beat william walker and by hook or by crook he would find it so he's financed all these this this huge army which we're gonna he's gonna outnumber walker's army by like four to one but they haven't jumped on anything yet so he's like all right well i'm not one that's just sit around and do nothing so he's got all these other attack vectors that i want to describe to you and here's one of them right here um he so oh i don't know if i if i took notes on this but let me at the time too um cornelius again he has i don't know maybe 10 or

12 different or 15 different attack vectors on walk, one Walker is blissfully unaware of. Part of that is going through the U.S. State Department. He goes to the British and convinces them to put one of their warships down there. He goes to, like I just said, the Central American governments. And then he has other people unsolicited coming in and offering to help. And here's another plan. And he basically does a plan. This plan that I'm going to describe to you winds up working and

He does it at almost no Like no risk to him So two guys Spencer and Webster say hey I know I know how to cut off like close the back door of Nicaragua and and basically surround Walker and I could do it with if you With using Costa Rican soldiers. He said he would authorize them to recover transit company steamers, meaning his assets, on the San Juan River and its tributaries

and to close the river to communication by Walker, meaning cut off one of his routes. To facilitate that recovery, he would provide them with arms and ammunition for the Costa Rican army. However, he would not give Spencer or Webster a penny. If they succeeded in engineering Walker's removal, then once Walker and his filibusters, filibusters is the name of Walker's army,

had left Nicaragua, Spencer and Webster could come back to Vanderbilt in this very office and each receive $50,000 in cold hard cash. Without hesitation, Spencer and Webster agreed, and the three men shook hands on the deal. Okay, so that plan winds up working. And one thing, I was going to, I guess, talk about this at the end, but one of the lessons I took away from this book was, like, the power of having a singular focus on a goal and being very flexible on how you accomplish that goal.

Because I'm sharing a lot of the different attack vectors that Cornelius used successfully. But there's a bunch of examples in the book that he just kept trying different things. trying different things that a lot of them failed, but he didn't care. He just kept persisting. And I, you know, he's applying this to something that I would not recommend engaging in, but we can apply it to any kind of goal that we have. Just the idea of, you know, persistence, frugality, and pragmatism. Like, I think that it's a good accommodation to solve a lot of the, I don't know, just a lot of, like almost any goal that you could imagine, I guess. So anyways, okay, now I'm skipping ahead.

I want to, we're getting close to Walker. You know, he's, at this point, the war, the allies get off their butts and they start attacking and there's just huge battles that go on for quite a while. In addition to, I'm going to get to in a minute, but Cornelius also hires a bunch of British missionaries, or not missionaries, mercenaries to go down there. Again, he's just not, he's not waiting. He's like, I have one plan. I'm just going to see if it works.

No, he's just going to launch all these plans at the same time because he wants the absolute total destruction of Walker. And this is, again, how dumb Walker is. It's not, man, it's like he doesn't know he's in a war, a fight literally to life and death. So it says, Walker fails to realize. This is a note out of myself Walker fails to realize he's at war with someone who has No regard for rules So at this time he's getting his him and his his troops are getting their ass kicked He's got 900 troops left. He's getting cut off from all different directions. He stopped getting

resupplies. Morgan and Garrison have, let's see, I think they've stopped resupplying at this point. Yeah, they stopped resupplying at this point. And he's still trying to be like principal. And so this captain in his army does something he doesn't like to do. So Walker says, if this is the way you're going to do business, Nicaragua has no further use for you. We want nothing of this sort done here, sir. The acutely embarrassed captain departed without a word and was never heard of again.

So you let him go. Even though he was surrounded, Walker was prepared to let officers go if they broke his rules. You have 4,000 people surrounding you. You need every single person. You don't have time for this, man. All right. Oh, and here's another attack vector by Vanderbilt. This guy, man. The same day, the US Navy's 958 ton uh warship saint mary dropped anchor at san juan del sur a little distance from walker commander davis commander davis is the one in charge of this giant ship from the u.s navy he'd come to nicaragua with express orders from washington and this is why how he uh, Vanderbilt continues to like hide

what the true, like the true meaning of his, like hiding, he doesn't want people to know or Walker to know like the true truth behind these attacks. So it says, officially he was to take such steps

as circumstances required for the protection of American citizens in Nicaragua. So what they're telling everybody is this ship's going down there to protect American citizens that may be in harm in this giant Central American war going on. In reality, the Navy secretary, at the request of the Secretary of State and the urging of Cornelius Vanderbilt,

had given Davis the job of ending this war by removing William Walker from Nicaragua. While Vanderbilt had been confident of Spencer's ultimate success in the San Juan River, by involving the U.S. Navy, he was writing himself a little insurance. One way or the other, the Commodore was determined to get Walker. So just to clarify what's happening here, Cornelius has influence with the Secretary of State. Secretary of State has influence with the Navy Secretary. The Navy Secretary then in turn sends Commander Davis down there.

So they're saying, hey, we're going to protect American citizens. In reality, it's just another attack from, another veiled attack from Vanderbilt in hopes of getting Walker out of here. So there's this huge battle that happens. And one by one, all of Walker's options are whittled away until he has one thing. And it says, for walker everything now hinged on there's this guy that in his army called lockridge for walker everything now hinged on lockridge is retaking the san juan river and bringing his 500 men to join his general so these 500 men are on a ship a ship that was taken from vanderb by the way and now they have one option Walker needs he's

gonna lose unless these 500 men are use a ship to get to Walker's position and not this is not gonna happen if Vanderbilt has his way and this is really fascinating so this is another okay says no more Morgan agaric and steamers would sail for Nicaragua no more reinforcements or supplies can be expected. And that's when, you know, walkers like these guys are cowards and all this other stuff. Not realizing that they're just businessmen and now you're no longer in alignment of it. And this is another Vanderbilt attack and another example of how silly Walker is. And it's just a reminder that Cornelius Vanderbilt seems to trap his adversaries like a

mouse in a maze. So they stole this boat from Vanderbilt to be used for Walker's army. But Walker had guys down in Nicaragua. They were mercenaries and they had this genius idea that part of the assets that were stolen from Vanderbilt were not like where the boats would go to get fuel. So they would use like logs and firewood to throw into the engines. Well, Vanderbilt had his mercenaries go down there and they'd hollow out the wood and fill them with gunpowder okay so this boat that they stole that walker's sitting there waiting for he's like okay i need these 500 guys or what i'm done for it go it stops at one of these uh these what used to be vanderbilt assets and reloads the fuel they didn't know the fuel was booby trapped so it says it was indeed the powder that caused the explosion

and the george cotti is the guy that um is the mercenary that that's working for vanderbilt uh george cotti immediately realized once the news of the event reached them so the news of the event is this giant explosion they put they wind up putting it into the fuel and just like we talked about last week when these steam engines explode they turn into like basically shrapnel and it destroys not only the boat but most of the 500 men that uh that that walker was waiting on so it says um the name of the boat is scott scott to refuel she took aboard the pieces of the gunpowder filled firewood that had plant that had been planted uh at the depot weeks before the disaster and And so it was Cotty, a wily mercenary and the employee of Cornelius Vanderbilt

that finally sealed the fate of the San Juan Riverbusters with an improvised explosive device and brought to a close the last attempt to reclaim the river and sent hundreds of desperately needed men to Walker at Revis, that's the city he's in. Walker was now cut off from the cities and Walker was now Cut off from the Atlantic and Gulf states and then again seeing how silly

Walker is Walker put it down to ill luck So he's just like oh, you know, this is just bad luck So I think I could have done it about it not realizing that it was actually an orchestrated attack against him He could he severely underestimated his opponent, which you should never do. Okay, so that ends the war. The U.S. Navy that's down there brokers a deal with the Central American allies and says, hey, listen, if we can get Walker to,

they want Walker to surrender, but they want to kill him. Because something I learned in the book, that in Central America, there was no, like if they took prisoners, they'd kill them all. There was no, like they're not going to, there was no, you're not going to be a POW. We're just going to, we won this battle. We're going to hold you hostage for a day or two.

Then we're either going to hang or shoot you. So Central America's like, no, no, no. We want to kill this guy. And the U.S. Navy says, no, no, he's an American citizen. you hostage for a day or two then we're either gonna hang or shoot you so um central america's like no no we we want to kill this guy and the u.s navy says no no he's an american citizen we're gonna listen we're gonna make sure that he that he um that he surrenders but you have to let us agree to take him take him to the united states so they're like you know what that's fine just take him and so uh the war is lost and at this point uh vanderbilt destroys defeats um morgan garrison and uh and walker so the the war with walker as far as vanderbilt's concern is over because he now gets his assets back he gets the route back uh he gets everything back but i that i don't want to leave off there because how silly

and stupid walker is and um so he comes back to the united states weirdly he's like gets a hero's welcome i'm not entirely sure the the context there i understand that but uh that that is what happens and he goes back and he goes back twice and the first time he goes back, and he goes back twice. And the first time he goes back, again, he still, remember at the beginning of the book, they talk about, or at the beginning of the podcast, talks about his tools were war and law. So he goes back like a year later. He gets a small group of people.

They land back in Nicaragua, and they're like, we're going to take this over. Like, we're going to, I'm going to become president again. And the warships in the United States are there and they're supposed to stop any, uh, filibusters from coming, uh, from coming back. Cause they thought this was an issue, but the problem was they had, uh, rules of engagement and the rules of engagement was, listen, you stop them if they're at sea, but if they get, if the filibusters, once they're on land in Nicaragua, since it's a sovereign nation, you can't do anything about it. So Walker knew that, but again, he's fighting battles with people that have no regard for rules. So there's a British warship at the time, then u.s marines that are also there and the guy uh the guy uh running that

was in charge of the american warship at the time was this guy named paulding so uh walker manages to to slip past paulding and get onto nicaraguan soil so walker's like oh this is great we we now they can't touch us right and so he's drilling on the beach. He's doing all this other stuff. But Paulding doesn't care. He doesn't care what his rules of engagement are. So he says, without authority from the U.S. government to land armed forces on foreign soil, Paulding sent 350 Marines and sailors ashore and surrounded Walker's soldiers, something Walker had not anticipated for it had contravened U.S. policy. In other words, Walker thought the law, words just written down on paper, was going to protect him.

They surrounded him. Walker responded, I surrender to the United States. So he goes back to the United States. About a year later, he tries this again. And this time he's like 35 or 36 years old at the time. And, um, and I'm going to go ahead in the story, uh, just to tell you. So, um, he does the same thing. He invades Nicaragua. He does some fighting. He actually a little bit more successful in this, in the third run than he was in the second run. This time, the British capture him because they don't want him messing with their interest with the Nicaraguan government. And so Walker's like, hey, okay, I surrender again. And he's like, okay, that's fine.

I'm going to surrender to the British. They're just going to take me back. You know, the law, law as it's stated they're going to take me back to the united states again british do not do that uh again he's dealing with people that have no disregard for rules they hand them over to the hondurans the hondurans put them on the beach blindfold them and shoot them to death and so walker dies at 35 or 36 years old on a Honduran beach. And they won't even let the United States get his body because Walker is still an American citizen. And he's buried to this day in Honduras. So that is the end of William Walker. And then I just want to close this book out with Vanderbilt. And it says, now while Vanderbilt was determined to continue the fight

even after the war in Nicaragua, the first one, Morgan and Garrison were tossing in the towel. So they show up at his business, they do a deal with him. And it says, Vanderbilt may not have ruined Morgan and Garrison as he once famously promised to do, but he had beaten them

just as he had beaten William Walker. And then this description, he said, what happens now, this is what Vanderbilt sets his, once he beats, oh, let me actually tell you this, what happens. So Vanderbilt's going to invest in railroads. Charles Morgan, Cornelius Garrison also invests in railroads. Garrison winds up over-leveraging himself. They basically go to work for Vanderbilt, and then Vanderbilt sidelines them. So he gives them no power, so they leave. Garrison gets involved in a Missouri Pacific Railroad.

He lost over $5 million, and he dies without assets and heavily in debt. So Garrison's done. Morgan stayed out of that. He owned railroads in Texas and Louisiana and dies a rich man, but never with wealth nearly in the same league as Vanderbilt is what the book says. And then this is just closing on Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt had seen the future of railroads well before many others. Despite having been nearly killed in a railroad accident in New Jersey night in 1833 he would accumulate controlling interests in 16 key lines during the Civil War which this is happening years after the events in this book he chartered a number of his steam ships to the unit to the United States government

which converted them into warships. But after the war, he consolidated his shipping interests and concentrated on the iron rail, which means he just sold everything off, buying up railroad after railroad. His crowning glory was the construction of New York City's first Grand Central Terminal. His statue stands outside Grand Central Station to this day. Steamships had made Vanderbilt wealthy, but railroads made him the richest man in America. So if you could imagine, after two books and two podcasts, maybe, I don't know, three hours worth of talking about Cornelius Vanderbilt, I never even got to the part of his life that made him the most money. That's how all-encompassing this guy's life was. It's just

really amazing. So if you want to read the book and help out this podcast and support the podcast at the same time, you can go to amazon.com forward slash SOp forward slash founders podcast you can see tycoon's war the uh the first tycoon the book i did last week and all the other 50 plus books that i've done in reverse chronological order it's kind of interesting seeing them all on one page um so yeah if you buy books using that link um the podcast gets a small percentage of the sales. So it's a great way to support the podcast if you do enjoy the work that I am doing. So if you've made it this far in the podcast, I just want to tell you about another way to support the podcast. I have a private podcast feed, another one.

How many podcast feeds can you have, David? Apparently a lot. So not only do I have this main feed, which is free to everybody to listen to and ad-free, I also have the reviewer podcast, which I mentioned to you at the beginning of this podcast, where you can leave a review and get more podcasts that I make. But the one where I make, probably now I'm making more podcasts more frequent. So I do this podcast, the main podcast feed, what, once a week, right?

Misfits podcast feed is, if you want to hear more from me more frequently, then sign up to be a Misfit. For a small monthly fee, you get access to an exclusive podcast feed available nowhere else. I think I have now 20 done, if not more. I'm doing a few a week. Sometimes there's books, complete books that will never appear on this podcast feed. Sometimes it's ideas that came from past books or books

I've done recently. I've been doing essays about entrepreneurship from company builders, ideas that I come across. It's all centered around the same thing. It just allows me to experiment with a format. And so what I've been working on, what I said, told the misfits this week was, see, when I'm doing a podcast on just a main person like Cornelius Vanderbilt or anybody else, it makes sense that since we're exploring his life, to put into one podcast, you know, a bunch of different ideas that he had about how to build businesses, personality traits, tactics they used, right? But what I also want to experiment is like, what if I just took one idea

and focused a shorter version of a podcast around that idea? I think over time, what we're going to have is a podcast feed. It's really a reference. And the titles of the podcast will be the idea that maybe was learned from a company builder. So this week I did one based on what David Packard of Hewlett Packard learned, that more businesses die from indigestion than starvation.

And then I tied it together with this other essay that I read that kind of expounds on that. And I even use some of the stuff I'm learning from founders notes. So it's basically an accumulation of four or five different entrepreneurs, all centered around the same idea with kind of varying different takes around that idea. So I think that's a really good way, especially in podcast form, if you want to support this because, you know, I have no ads.

So I rely on the people that get value from my work to be able to continue to create this kind of content that, that, um, if you like that, you'd want to support, um, and keep going. So Misfits is the best way to do that. Um, you just go, you can go to founderspodcast.com and you'll see in every single podcast where to sign up for Misfits. There's links down there. It's really fast. You can use Apple pay super fast. You can also do it right directly in your podcast player. And I leave the links in the show notes. It's interesting because I want to experiment with, I like the idea of doing one long podcast a week, which I do for founders, and then doing other ones that like fill the gap in between week to week. So if you made it to the end of this podcast and you're actually hearing me say this, there's a good chance that you would like more, especially if you've listened to almost

all the podcasts that I've done. So Misfits is definitely a way to do that. I'm going to be publishing on that feed much more frequently than anywhere else. A couple times a week is what I'm going for. And if you sign up right now, you unlock not only do you get like all the stuff I do every week, but you unlock like the 20 past ones I've done, which is the one I just did on Steve. I read this book, Insanely Simple, which is all about how Steve Jobs thought about company and product design.

I just think the ideas in there alone are worth way more than you'd pay on a monthly basis. Yeah, so I think that's really it that I need to talk about. If you don't mind, think that's really it um that i need to talk about if you don't mind something that's been really helpful is if you enjoy this podcast and you want to support it in other ways that don't cost anything tell a friend tell two friends or three friends share it on social media whatever the case is i'm starting to get messages from people that are hearing about it from friends and to me that's like the the biggest compliment you could give.

That the fact that you like it enough that you would tell somebody that you ostensibly care about and wanna see do well. So I really appreciate that. Other than that, my voice is taxed. Thank you very much. And I will be back and I'll talk to you next week.