What starts as a fun fact about Walmart's best-selling product turns into one of the wildest business stories you've probably never heard — corporate espionage on banana plantations, a homemade coup in Central America, and a Russian immigrant who took over one of the most powerful companies in America by dumping a bag of proxy votes on a boardroom table.

In this episode:

• Walmart's single best-selling item every year — and why every one of them is genetically identical
• The Cavendish vs. the Big Mike: what happened to the banana we used to eat, and why history might be repeating itself
  • Also, Shane called it 'Gros Miguel' instead of 'Gros Michel' 😅
• Samuel Zemurray — the immigrant who bought rotting fruit off a dock in Mobile, Alabama and turned it into a banana empire
• Plantation wars: the corporate violence between Zemurray's operation and United Fruit Company
• The origin of "Banana Republic" — and how Zemurray invented the CIA's Central American playbook before the CIA existed
• How Zemurray pulled off a coup using a surplus Navy ship, a soldier of fortune, and a pirate radio broadcast
• The boardroom scene that might be the greatest power move in American business history

Research rabbit holes to explore:

• The Fish That Ate the Whale by Rich Cohen — the book Zemurray's story comes from
• Samuel Zemurray — Wikipedia
• Cavendish banana — Wikipedia
• Panama disease — Wikipedia — (the blight threatening the Cavendish
• Gros Michel ("Big Mike") banana — Wikipedia
• United Fruit Company — Wikipedia
• The United Fruit Company building, New Orleans — Atlas Obscura — still standing at 321 St. Charles Ave.
• Zemurray's mansion, now the Tulane University president's residence — 64 Parishes