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

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. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Senra?

  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 unquestionable 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.

• 0:44David Senra?

  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

• 1:27David Senra?

  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.

• 1:54David Senra?

  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 Invaded 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. So two quick things before jumping back into the rest of the book. I've replied to everyone who has emailed me a screenshot of their review or of their recommendation. So if you haven't heard back from me yet, please email me at [email protected].

• 2:36David Senra?

  And for those of you that are unfamiliar, I have a private podcast feed for people that leave reviews and ratings for the podcast. So if you want access to my reviewer-only private podcast feed, all you have to do is leave a review or rating wherever you listen to this podcast. And if you screenshot your reviewer rating and then you email me the screenshot at [email protected], I'll reply back with the private link. So far, I've done two podcasts that you can have immediate access to. I'm going to be doing another one in the next week or two, and then I'll do one probably every quarter. So if you take the minute or two it takes to review or leave a rating, you'll get constant updates from me in perpetuity.

• 3:18David Senra?

  Oh, and a lot of people listen on Overcast. So Overcast doesn't have a rating system, but it does have a way to recommend the podcast to friends. So there's a little star. Pick an episode that you like from Founders that you feel comfortable recommending to people. You press the star, it'll turn gold. If you screenshot and send me the gold star, I will send you back that private podcast link. And with instructions, it's very easy to add to your podcast player so it updates like any other podcast that you listen to. And the second thing, this podcast is ad-free. I just have one ask, and that's you join my private email list at foundersnotes.co, or you could just click the link in the show notes.

• 4:03David Senra?

  Founders Notes are my personal podcast notes. In my opinion, it's the best way to know what founders and other entrepreneurs are thinking. When founders appear on podcasts, I take notes of their key ideas, and then I send you an email every Sunday. 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 is, this person was speaking about like 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 to this point. So I'm just gonna read you this

• 4:44David Senra?

  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

• 5:24David Senra?

  companies is currently hidden away in podcasts. So one way to tap that knowledge, in the past, before Founder's Notes came around, was that you'd have to listen to all these podcasts. Now, what Founder's 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

• 6:05David Senra?

  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, the right, proper cadence for that is once a week. So if that sounds interesting, if you're interested in learning more about, from entrepreneurs, about building companies, about how they think, the experiences they've had, the tools they use, the books they read, etc., etc., 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, 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 gonna read where I left off last week, just to bring us up to date here.

• 6:45David Senra?

  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 fifty 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 on, in 1847. This week's podcast picks up right into 1848. Now, what I was doing, right, I reread that paragraph right before I started recording,

• 7:30David Senra?

  the one I just read to you, and I realized I had made a bunch of points, or at least I, this is how, it wasn't 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, 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

• 8:15David Senra?

  outside of war, that it seems kind of curious that one would even mention a fistfight when you have, at the time, a very commonplace 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 the story. So, we're gonna go... The first part, I'm gonna 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.

• 8:54David Senra?

  He is actually just part of the adversary in a war against other shipping magnates that undertake to cheat Vanderbilt. And he's gonna 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 gonna 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.

• 9:38David Senra?

  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 US 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 in 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 have been insane on the subject of money-making all of my life. When gold was discovered in California, Vanderbilt was already a multimillionaire,

• 10:20David Senra?

  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, I found, like I mentioned last week, there's a lot of parallels between Vanderbilt and Rockefeller, in the sense that they were very wealthy by the time they got to their 40s or 50s, but they made, like, almost 10 times, or whatever the number is, a magnitude more of wealth later on in life. They just had to set the foundation.

• 10:47David Senra?

  You know, for the first forty or fifty years of your 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 like, over time, you'll probably find it. But it's a bar graph, and it just grows exponentially after he turns like sixty or seventy. 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.

• 11:29David Senra?

  Like, 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 gonna set up, this is his idea that he wants to do here. "Unschooled Vanderbilt may have been. He left school at the age of eleven to work as a laborer on vessels plying the East River. 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 almost all the ones where I would search for online 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."

• 12:14David Senra?

  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, he would track every single thing, every expense, every, every revenue, everything for Gibbons on this huge, like, 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.

• 12:46David Senra?

  That sentence led me to believe, like, 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 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,

• 13:11David Senra?

  to try to like skirt the law because there wasn't, there wasn't the law, 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, he, this is, we're in a meeting with the Secretary of State. Vanderbilt spoke of California in 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 and covered wagons. So if you remember the podcast I did on Levi Strauss, he takes this route that Vanderbilt's proposing to 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 over the sea, not the one that took six months.

• 13:53David Senra?

  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.

• 14:34David Senra?

  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, oh, I don't, 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 of the 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.

• 15:14David Senra?

  I can make money at $300 crossing my passengers by Lake Nicaragua, a route 600 miles shorter. 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 US mail contracts. So providing the transportation for all the US mail, which is worth over $365,000 a year or several hundred millions in 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.

• 15:56David Senra?

  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 in several days off the journey from New York to San Francisco. Okay. So now we're going to be introduced into to 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.

• 16:38David Senra?

  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 12 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 his MD.

• 17:25David Senra?

  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."

• 17:43David Senra?

  Shortly after practicing law, Walker convinced that the pen could be potentially, 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,

• 18:01David Senra?

  William Walker's Wikipedia page. And they had the summary, that summary right there, where he had a really impressive resume.

• 18:10David Senra?

  You're gonna realize, I mean, we kind of already know this because the people we study. There's little correlation between success in school and success in life, even though I think most people would argue otherwise. And we're gonna see this. There's a, the book does a great job contrasting like what their early life was, or rather, where, you know, while Walker's this little boy genius, his prodigy studying school, Vanderbilt is, is basically doing labor, hard breaking labor from dusk till dawn, or dawn till dusk, I guess, and learning the business of shipping. So they're, they came from very vastly different backgrounds.

• 18:51David Senra?

  Okay, so Vanderbilt obviously gets what he wants. So he, he gets a setup that he has a contract to do, to build this, 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, his personality, his like force of will. So this is giant ship that he's, he's leaving New York, 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,

• 19:30David Senra?

  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 Vanderbilt. 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, a good description of who Cornelius Vanderbilt was. It says Cornelius Vanderbilt would see about that.

• 20:12David Senra?

  "He would not let a few rocks stand in the way of making a fortune in Nicaragua."

• 20:20David Senra?

  Okay, so,

• 20:23David Senra?

  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.

• 21:06David Senra?

  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 is because Graham, or excuse me, Walker is no stranger to violence. He's actually like a master swordsman, got in 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.

• 21:35David Senra?

  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. Um, that was bigger than any other boat in the world. So imagine somebody coming out with like a cruise ship sized 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 interests. A little description of how much money he was making.

• 22:18David Senra?

  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 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.

• 23:00David Senra?

  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 was 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.

• 23:43David Senra?

  He slyly billed, he billed 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 podcast with Michael Ovitz on C A, this is why he started. Now, he would negotiate 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 hun- Some of these movies are making tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. So you're seeing Vanderbilt's doing the same thing 200, 150 years before that.

• 24:22David Senra?

  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 Artist's Stoic Joy. And in the book, Seneca makes the point that vices are contagious. And they would say almost everything are contagious, meaning like you have to be careful what the ideas you expose to yourself to and who you keep around you because you start to, we're just, you know, basically copy machines. And you're gonna 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 gonna see the blueprint for what Walker tries to do later in the book. Walker grew up with Sam Houston as a hero.

• 25:05David Senra?

  Like Walker, Houston had been born and raised in Nashville, then had become a lawyer. He'd gone on to serve as a US congressman representing Tennessee and had also been the governor of Tennessee. In 1833, Houston had settled on 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 Texas was actually a republic at one time.

• 25:42David Senra?

  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 in 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.

• 26:03David Senra?

  So I'm gonna, 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 gonna screw him over here. Says during Vanderbilt's European absence, Morgan and Garrison collaborated to manipulate transit company, transit company's stock in their favor. So one thing I have to say, there's a bunch of company names in here. I don't really worry about keeping track of all the names, just know that Cornelius had an unbelievable

• 26:48David Senra?

  amount of revenue streams and positions and 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's 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, he'd invested them. But then he'd have all these secret deals where he would make money that wouldn't go, that'd 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,

• 27:31David Senra?

  not only bought new company's 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 try, try these things where he'd 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, so but now they're, they're screwing him over, they're gonna cut it all off. And then this comes, this is Vanderbilt's most famous quote.

• 28:07David Senra?

  So he comes back after months, finds out what's happening and he's just livid. He says, "He immediately dictated a short letter to both Morgan and Garrison." These are his two main adversaries. And you could 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's side, he invades Mexico, I think twice.

• 28:52David Senra?

  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 it ends in defeat. So this one, he starts this new company, or excuse me, this new country in California, in what is at the time, Mexico. But now today, I think it's California. He says, "The Republic of Lower California is hereby declared free, sovereign, and independent, and all allegiance to the Republic of Mexico is forever renounced. Signed, William Walker, President." Forever renounced, try like four months renounced. Okay.

• 29:32David Senra?

  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.

• 29:47David Senra?

  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 and 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.

• 30:31David Senra?

  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 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?

• 31:15David Senra?

  Or you want to ride for half the price on mine that's world-famous? What do you think's gonna 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, like, getting the stock to fall and make sure that their revenue dries up. So the stock market price continued to decline.

• 31:55David Senra?

  Okay, and a few pages later, he's picking up this war, and we're gonna get into some numbers here. And the note is just, he's ruthless. This guy is absolutely ruthless, as we're gonna 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.

• 32:23David Senra?

  Okay, so it says...

• 32:28David Senra?

  They're trying to get him off their back. And. Okay, so they 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 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 gonna compete with you, and then you're gonna buy me out, and then I'm gonna use your money to open a different route and do the same thing over and over again." So the deal signaled to Morgan, believed that Vanderbilt had given up on his plan to ruin them. But the Commodore had done no such thing.

• 33:11David Senra?

  Having wrung his outstanding commissions from his enemies, read bribe. Uh, many knew, uh, few observers thought he had any, uh, excuse me. So he he got money, 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.

• 33:50David Senra?

  Now he took money and bribe from them, but because they took a bribe, they're not, uh, 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 the, 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 he got it paid. Chief Chief Judge of the New York Superior Court issued against Morgan and Garrison an injunction

• 34:36David Senra?

  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 parcel here, a parcel there, frequently using friends as buyers, meaning friends as fronts. Month by month, Vanderbilt discreetly rebuilt his stockholding in 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.

• 35:21David Senra?

  And he's doing this in part with their own money. This guy, man. Alright.

• 35:30David Senra?

  So I'm going to skip over, a lot of this is like all these fights that are tapping down. Just know that Walker gets expelled from Mexico twice. He's successful in invading Nicaragua and aligning himself with the government there. He becomes the general of Nicaragua, eventually he's going to become the president of Nicaragua. But I just want to point out that, um, yeah. 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 out 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. And he'll, you basically learn, he's not, I'm not saying he's not principled, because I thought that was the right word. The right word escapes me at the moment, but Walker's just, this is about his personality. He's just foolish.

• 36:14David Senra?

  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 some, in a war with somebody that doesn't respect law. Uh, one of Vanderbilt's famous sayings is,

• 36:53David Senra?

  You know, why do I care about law? Ain't I, ain't I the one that got the power? And so he doesn't realize that, you know, this is 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 I Y I. And so let me just give you one sentence description in case you're not familiar with it. It says, "The I Y I, intellectually yet idiot, pathologizes others for doing things he doesn't understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited."

• 37:37David Senra?

  You see this a lot with like, overeducated people, where they do really good in school and they, they think that, like, means something, in the sense that, like, if you have the choice between doing well in school and doing well in life, everybody would pick doing well in life. But the I Y I optimizes for doing things well in, like, in school, in that sense, or like, things that sound smart but may not be smart. Walker's like that. He has impressive resume, right? Graduated, college at 14, doctor at 18, law degree, writer, and yet, he stood no, zero chance against somebody that's truly intelligent with how humans, how, like, the world actually operates.

• 38:19David Senra?

  And this is Walker's being so stupid here, because he's like, "Oh, well, let me read it and then I'll explain." So there's a boat, it's 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 Lake Nicaragua." The steamboat was making a scheduled run from Virgin Bay, to Virgin Bay from the San Juan River. So, he's the general of Nicaragua at the time. He boards this boat, they present the, 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, no, this is not a smart idea, there's these two guys that work for Vanderbilt."

• 39:04David Senra?

  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 their argument by pointing out that the transit company's contract with the Nicaraguan government..."

• 39:22David Senra?

  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 gonna see a lot of things he does. It's just, it is weird because the author of this book seems to, I don't say, I wouldn't say they portray him in a better way,

• 40:06David Senra?

  but I just, 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 gonna show you, read something to you at the end. It's just, it's mind boggling how you could be so educated yet so silly. Alright. So, um, okay, so now I'm skipping way ahead. I'm gonna, I'm skipping over all the battle stuff, because that's outside of our, um, the, you know, what we try to study on this podcast. But just know that, you know, there's a huge war going on in Central America. There's a, there's a civil war that, that happened in Nicaragua. And then eventually, you know, they're not gonna, other Central American countries are not gonna want an American coming down

• 40:48David Senra?

  and ascending the presidency of Nicaragua, which is exactly what happens. What did you think was going to happen? And so that's gonna 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 said, "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, alright, this is, I've had enough of this guy. So it says, "In the meantime, he's buying up stock to regain control."

• 41:30David Senra?

  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 Garrison." "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 brought, he had bought up floating stock, steadily rebuilding the Commodore's sharehold, shareholding, and that of the men who, whose vote he knew to depend on. So, if you understand, just explain what's going on here. This, this war that Walker's engaged in is actually, at this moment, good for Vanderbilt because people are scared to go down there.

• 42:15David Senra?

  And it's going to cost, like, you're not, 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, this is what I had meant last week when I said that he engages in information asymmetric warfare. He's secretly doing all this, nobody knows, and, but publicly, he's very, he's like shouting from the rooftops and then the press is 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.

• 42:57David Senra?

  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.

• 43:16David Senra?

  So I'm gonna skip to that part. Vanderbilt had regained control. Now the plan worked. So he regained control. It had taken him the best part of 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.

• 44:02David Senra?

  So he wants not only them out of the company, but because they betrayed him, you have to be bankrupt. Now, these are not dumb men, though. Garrison and Morgan. So this is Garrison's countermove. And this is like this huge war going on between these guys while there's actual war going down in Central America. So it said,

• 44:29David Senra?

  okay, so Garrison is gonna... So now that Vanderbilt has control of the company, right? He doesn't want... Garrison is gonna 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 it says, this is Garrison's countermove. 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,

• 45:14David Senra?

  Garrison had 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.

• 45:26David Senra?

  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 and dispute between the government and the company. So what they're referencing here is a little confusing by itself. But remember earlier, 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 the transit company's legal counsel, this is where it gets confusing because there's like the accessory transit company, then there's the 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.

• 46:15David Senra?

  So Walker sends a letter saying, hey, you guys owe us money. If not, we're gonna, we're going to, 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 L. White, the leading mind of the corporation.

• 46:52David Senra?

  No, there's one leading mind of the corporation and that's gonna 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 gonna 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 there's, they're saying, hey, well, this, 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.

• 47:33David Senra?

  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.

• 47:46David Senra?

  And so this is explicitly 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 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 in unpaid commissions.

• 48:29David Senra?

  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 worth close to $1 million in $1,800. 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.

• 49:10David Senra?

  Vanderbilt had worked so long and so sneakily to regain control, and now, just as he reclaimed the property, excuse me, 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 Vanderbilt finds this out, he says, "Okay, well, now Walker's gonna have to be ruined, and I'm not gonna stop until he's done." And so this move, Walker foolishly agrees to.

• 49:51David Senra?

  So here's the weird thing. So while this is hap- he makes this announcement and Garrison and Morgan are not ready. So they're like, "Don't worry, Cornelius is gonna wanna make money. He's still gonna 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 had 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.

• 50:35David Senra?

  And it said Walker was pissed because Walker scowled up at Garrison, this is the son Garrison, in disbelief as he realized that Morgan and Garrison had expected Vanderbilt to keep the ships on Nicaragua 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, Vanderbilt's gonna 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's stock had begun to rise. At that point, Morgan had dumped his entire holding and that of his partner Garrison.

• 51:20David Senra?

  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 gonna happen. "Despite Vanderbilt's best efforts to keep the transit company's 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 off the share price.

• 52:03David Senra?

  By the time Morgan covered his short, his share had dropped to $13. Morgan made $10 a share, walking away with a profit of millions of dollars." Again, it's millions of dollars in 1800 money, so that's a ton of money right now. So, you know, Morgan and Garrison are not dumb, by any means. They, they lose, but they're not, they're definitely not dumb. Okay, um.

• 52:30David Senra?

  What is this? Okay, so, this is a war by proxy, and I'm, I'm flying through the book now, because a lot of the book is just these fights, these battles that, these actual wars. And, um, Walker, again, does not realize the adversary he took on. So, um, all these other countries are freaked out that there's an American now, uh, President Nicaragua, at this time, he's, he's usurped power. And so, they form, uh, they usually, during this time, they would all be at war with each other. Now they form an alliance. Switching all these, like Guatemala, Honduras, all these other countries, uh, Costa Rica, et cetera, et cetera.

• 53:10David Senra?

  Um, and they pledged their countries to an alliance that would not rest until Walker and his Yankees had been ejected from Central America. Well, who do you think organized this, 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, this is a crazy stat.

• 53:54David Senra?

  But, 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."

• 54:12David Senra?

  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, uh, he very much believed in like manifest destiny, thought like America should go and conquer everywhere, and he thought he was good and smart enough that he should be running some of these countries and stuff, so it was like, almost like a religious exercise for him. He mistook his allies to have the same like zeal. Uh, Garrison and Morgan are businessmen. They're not, they're just, they're aligned with you because it's good for their, their, their pocketbooks. And the minute is not going to be good for their pocketbooks is the minute they're going to, uh, to end the partnership, which is, was going to happen, and eventually cuts off Walker

• 54:56David Senra?

  towards the end of the war from supplies, because eventually it's so unstable in Nicaragua, they're like, "I'm not, we're not running ships down anymore, because we can't make any money." And Walker was like, "I can't believe that they're, they're so cowardly." They're not cowardly, they're not, they don't have the same goals you do. So, um, so, again, like you said at the beginning of the book, most businessmen would, if they're fighting a war with Cornelius, they can't win, they're like, "Okay, let's just do a deal, they don't care, it's just business, right?" Uh, so Cornelius Garrison shows up in Vanderbilt, he realizes that Vanderbilt has an upper hand, realizes who he got in a fight with, he's like, "Listen, let's just partner, let's, let's all make money together." Uh, 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."

• 55:41David Senra?

  Excuse me, did I say Garrison or Van? Garrison is across, Garrison's the one that's at Vanderbilt's office, in case I said that incorrectly. "And he was offering Vanderbilt a partnership with Morgan and himself. If the Commodore walked away from the, the company, whose shares were now just worth three dollars, down from twenty-three last year, uh, down from twenty-three dollars last year. This, 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, the, uh, 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.

• 56:29David Senra?

  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 Trent, meaning Vanderbilt's 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.

• 57:14David Senra?

  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 inimitable fashion, Vanderbilt himself had been secretly making a vast profit from his idle steamships because they'd 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 think he should be a monopolist. I don't think he should go to war for people. But this idea that he just was, he would never give up on a problem. And he would constantly look for other ways to solve the problem and very creatively. So this is what he did.

• 57:57David Senra?

  The Commodore had paid a visit to his competitor, William Aspenwall, 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, Aspenwall had paid him $40,000 a month on the condition that he would not put his steamers on the Panama Run in competition with Aspenwall's own vessels. The money had gone to Vanderbilt personally, not the transit company.

• 58:27David Senra?

  And it says, uh, he swore to destroy the... Okay, so he undertook to run his steamers to the Gulf of Mexico. So now he takes the boats. He's not gonna run them in Nicaragua. He's not gonna run them against Asmaul in Panama because Asmaul's paying him. So he's like, you know what? I wanna 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 would net Vanderbilt personally close to a million dollars, meaning the bribes from Asmaul." It goes up from forty thousand dollars a month, I think fifty-six thousand dollars a month.

• 59:10David Senra?

  Okay, and then, um, 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, Vanderbilt had poured money down the drain."

• 59:47David Senra?

  "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 huge army, which is 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 sitting 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.

• 1:00:13David Senra?

  So, oh, I don't know if I took notes on this, but let me... At the time, too, according to this, again, he has, I don't know, maybe ten or twelve different or fifteen different attack vectors on Walker, one Walker's blissfully unaware of. Part of that is going through the US State Department. He goes to the British and convinces them to put one of their warships down there. Uh, he goes to, like I just said, the Central American governments. And then he has other people unsolicited coming in and, um, and offering to help. And he has another plan. And he basically does a plan. This plan that I'm gonna describe to you winds up working. And, uh, he does it at almost no, uh, like no risk to him.

• 1:00:52David Senra?

  So two guys, Spencer and Webster, say, "Hey, I know how to cut off, like, close the back door of Nicaragua and basically surround Walker, and I could do it 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

• 1:01:37David Senra?

  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."

• 1:01:51David Senra?

  Okay, so that plan winds up working. And one thing, I was gonna, I guess, talk about this at the end, but the... One of the lessons I just took away from this book was, um...

• 1:02:05David Senra?

  Like, the power of having a singular focus on a goal and being very, um, flexible on how you accomplish that goal. Because I'm sharing a lot of the different attack vectors that Cornelia's used successfully. But there's a bunch of examples in the book that he just kept trying, just kept trying different things, and a lot of them failed. But he didn't care. He just kept persisting. And, 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 combination to solve a lot of the...

• 1:02:47David Senra?

  I don't know, it's just a lot of, um, like, almost any goal that you could imagine, I guess. So anyways, um, okay, now I'm skipping ahead. I want to, we're getting close to Walker, you know, he's, at this point, the war, um, the Allies get off their butts and they start attacking and there's just huge battles that go on for quite a while. Um, in addition to, um, I'm gonna 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, he's just not, he's not waiting, he's not, he's like, "I have one plan, I'm just gonna see if it works." No, no, he's just gonna launch all these plans at the same time, because he wants the absolute total destruction of Walker. And, this is again, how

• 1:03:35David Senra?

  dumb. Walker is just not,

• 1:03:39David Senra?

  man, it's like he doesn't know he's in a war, a fight to, literally to the life and death. So it says, uh, "Walker fails to realize," this is a note I left 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, uh, 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, uh, uh, resupplies. Uh, Morgan and Garrison have, uh, let's see, I think they've, 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 and his army does something he doesn't like to do, so Walker says,

• 1:04:23David Senra?

  "If this is the way you're going to do business, Nicaragua has no further use for you. We want no, 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."

• 1:04:45David Senra?

  You have 4,000 people surrounding you. You can't, like, you need every single person, like, you don't have time for this, man. Alright. Oh, and here's another, um, another attack vector by Vanderbilt. Um, this guy, man. "The same day, the US Navy's 958-ton 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 US Navy. "He'd come to Nicaragua with express orders from Washington." And this is why, how Vanderbilt continues to, like, hide what the true, like, the true

• 1:05:28David Senra?

  meaning of his, uh, like, hiding, he doesn't want people to know, or Walker to know, like, the true, the 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 the, what they're telling everybody is this ship's going down to, 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,

• 1:06:10David Senra?

  by involving the US Navy, he was, 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 gonna protect American citizens." In reality, it's just another attack from, another veiled attack from Vanderbilt in hopes of getting Walker out of here.

• 1:06:48David Senra?

  Um, so there's this huge battle that happens. Um, and one by one, all of Walker's, uh, like options are whittled away until he has one thing. And it says, "For Walker, everything now hinged on..." There's this guy that, uh, 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 Vanderbilt, by the way. Um, 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.

• 1:07:31David Senra?

  And not, this is not gonna happen if Vanderbilt has his way. And this is really fascinating. Um, so this is another, uh, okay, says, "No more Morgan and Garrison steamers would sail for Nicaragua. No more reinforcements or supplies could be expected." And that's when, when, uh, you know, Walker's like, "These guys are cowards and all this other stuff." Not realizing that they're just businessmen and now you're, you're, you're no longer in alignment of it. And this is, so 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, they stole this, this, um, this boat from Vanderbilt to be used for Walker's army.

• 1:08:16David Senra?

  But Walker had guys down in, um, in Nicaragua, they were mercenaries. And they had this genius idea that, um, part of the assets that were stolen from Vanderbilt were not like, where the boats would go to get fuel. So they would use, um, 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 we're done for." It stops at one of these, what used to be Vanderbilt's assets, and reloads the fuel. They didn't know the fuel was booby-trapped.

• 1:09:01David Senra?

  So it says, "It was indeed the powder that caused the explosion," and George Cotty is the guy that is the mercenary that's working for Vanderbilt. George Cotty immediately realized, once the news of the event reached them, so the news of the event is this giant explosion. 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 Walker was waiting on. So it says, "The name of the boat is Scott. Scott to refuel, she took aboard the pieces of the gunpowder-filled firewood that had been planted at the depot weeks before the disaster.

• 1:09:42David Senra?

  And so, it was Cotty, a wily mercenary in the employ 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, to Walker at Rivas, that's the city he's in. 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, something I could have done about it," not realizing that it was actually an orchestrated attack against him.

• 1:10:24David Senra?

  He severely underestimated his opponent, which you should never do.

• 1:10:29David Senra?

  Okay, so that ends the war. The US 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 gonna... There was no, you're not gonna be a POW. We're just gonna, we won this battle, we're gonna hold you hostage for a day or two, then we're either gonna hang or shoot you. So Central America's like, "No, no, we want to kill this guy." And the US 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,

• 1:11:15David Senra?

  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 concerned, 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 or understand that, but,

• 1:11:58David Senra?

  uh, that, that is what happens. And 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 podcasts, talks about his tools were, were war and law. Um, so he, he goes back, uh, like a year later, he gets a small group of people. They land back in Nicaragua and they're like, "We're gonna take this over." Like, "We're gonna, we're going to, um, I'm gonna become president again." And the warships in the United States are there and they're supposed to stop any filibusters from coming, uh, from coming back, because they thought this was an issue. But the problem was, they had, uh, rules of engagement.

• 1:12:41David Senra?

  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 and then US 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, now they can't touch us, right?

• 1:13:23David Senra?

  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 US 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 US 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, um, 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.

• 1:14:08David Senra?

  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 the, in the third run than he was in the successful, in the second run, rather. This time, the British capture him because they don't want, uh, him messing with, like, their, at their interest, uh, with the Nicaraguan government. And so, uh, uh, 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, as it's stated, they're going to take me back to the United States again. British do not do that.

• 1:14:52David Senra?

  Again, he's dealing with people that have no disregard for rules. They hand him over to the Hondurans. The Hondurans put him on the beach, blindfold him, and shoot him 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's 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.

• 1:15:37David Senra?

  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 is the 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 invest in the 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.

• 1:16:22David Senra?

  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 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 steamships to the United States government, which converted them into warships.

• 1:17:04David Senra?

  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.

• 1:17:47David Senra?

  That's how, um, how like 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/chop/founderspodcast. You can see Tycoon's War, 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. So yeah, if you buy books using that link, the podcast gets a small percentage of sale, so it's a great way to support the podcast if you do enjoy the work that I am doing.

• 1:18:29David Senra?

  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, and 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, like more, 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.

• 1:19:12David Senra?

  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. Uh, 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. Uh, I've been doing essays about entrepreneurship, uh, 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, uh, see, when I'm doing a podcast on just a main person like Cornelius Vanderbilt or anybody else, makes sense to, since we're exploring his life, to, and to put into one podcast, you know, a bunch of different ideas that he had about,

• 1:19:58David Senra?

  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, a, a shorter version of a podcast around that idea. I think over time, what we're gonna have is a podcast feed, it's really a reference. And the titles of the podcasts will be the idea that maybe, uh, 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, uh, 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 used some of the stuff I'm learning from Founder's Notes. So it's basically an accumulation of four or five different entrepreneurs,

• 1:20:44David Senra?

  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, if you want to support this because, you know, I have no ad, so I rely on the people that, that get, that give 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,

• 1:21:07David Senra?

  and keep going. So Misfits is the best way to do that. You just go, you can go to founderspodcast.com and you'll see in, 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, it's interesting because I, I want to experiment with, um, 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, it's a good chance that you would like more, especially if you've listened to almost all the podcasts that I've done.

• 1:21:49David Senra?

  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 of 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.

• 1:22:23David Senra?

  Yeah, so I think that's really it 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 biggest compliment you could give. That the fact that you like it enough that you would tell somebody that you ostensibly care about and want to 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.