Welcome to the Nobody Knows podcast with Callile Zamzow. Join us for conversations with local changemakers and hear the stories that don't always get told. It'll be honest, messy and beautiful. Touching and humorous. Slow down for a glass and pull up a chair. This is the Nobody Knows podcast. Welcome to Nobody Knows. I'm your host. Callie Zamzow, and Jody. I, I feel accomplished today already. You do? Yeah. Yeah, I won a I won a race this morning between me and another walker in downtown Boise. Nicely done. Yeah, yeah, she was wearing heels, so I think I had the upper hand, but, I don't know. I've seen some ladies that can get it done in heels. Well, here's the thing. So impressive. Like, so I got in my car and I start forward, and she was already walking. Yeah. So. But she quickly like, got up next to me. And then there's always that kind of uncomfortable. So I kind of backed a little bit off. But she kept her current pace and it wasn't fast enough. So then not today. Exactly. So then I had to overtake her and it was on. That's awesome. Is this. Were you also carrying the box of donuts? Oh, no, I wasn't it was not my little little traveler bag. I know this, but do you do this kind of stuff? Like, I don't know why. Like be competitive. Yes. Over stupid things. Like, there's no reason to do it, but always. Yeah. Over the ridiculous things. Yeah. I'm also competitive with myself. Yeah, I can, I can be like, I've got the little gauge in my truck of like the gas mileage, and I try and hit certain numbers and yeah, I'm kind of weird like that. I'm weird in a lot of ways. That's just one way. Well, I, you know, this is it's bittersweet today because this is the last episode of this season. So there's a part of me that's like, oh, we're going to take a little bit of a break, which is nice. But then I'm also like, I'm looking back and sort of nostalgic about what we've accomplished over the last year, which is really kind of cool. It's a big deal. It is a big deal. A culmination of season one. Yeah. Well done. Like what? Yeah. And thank you. Thank you to my producers. Guys are awesome. All right, so let's start with the tip of the day, shall we. Do our tip of the week, boy. Tip of the day. Tip of the week. Weeks are made of days. This is true. This is true. It all. It all counts. So we're going to talk about weeds today. This is this is the tip of the week because it is that time of year where people are concerned. They've got their you know the spring brings these beautiful green lawns out. And then all of a sudden here come mostly like dandelions, Clover, for those people who think that that's a clover. Yeah. And various other things that grow in your lawn and you kind of want your lawn to be well, depends on how competitive you are with my home. Wants it to be real nice. Yes. The house is really want that. And then, you know, depends if you're competitive, you know, you want your lawn to look good. As a Zamzow I get you know, my neighbors will absolutely call me out if I've got something going on in my yard. So I definitely feel that, although I will tell you that I do let the dandelions go. And here's why. I don't have a lot of them. Because when you have a really healthy lawn, you don't have a lot of those. The lawn will outcompete and win. But when you do have a weed or two, we we have a product called ultimate and it will you can spray it in your lawn and it will not kill the lawn. It will only kill the broad. Leave weed. Easy for me to say. Say it five times. Not a chance. Not today. I'm not going to get competitive on that one. So yeah, you can you can come in to Samson's. We can help you with that. It's pretty easy to go down. And there's actually different versions. There's a ready to use if you just want if you have a few of them, you just want to, you know, grab the little bottle, you can spritz it. You can also do a hose end if you've got a major situation. I don't recommend that because that's just it is a chemical. And so we we try not to overdo that. So if you can just spot spray that's your better choice. But we do have a hose end and we do have a concentrate. If you've got a very very large area dandelion tree. But the big thing is and please this is the more important thing you can get. It will take care of those weeds. No problemo. The thing you want to think about is how now am I going to build up the soil and make sure that that lawn is going to be healthy moving forward so that it will outcompete those weeds? And then you can just spot treat moving forward. And that's where you want to get to. Yeah I like that plan. Yeah. You can tell a lawn that is really healthy. You know, that there's soil that the soil is very healthy. That's the little game my husband and I do when we walk in the morning, we're like, oh, that one. And then lawn judges and it's a little bit it's funny because sometimes they'll be like a it'll be a lawn company and they'll have like a thing sticking and we're like, oh, they should wait to put that in there until that lawn green stuff. Just a little advice for you guys. It's a that's a good thing to do. You know I'm going to I'm going to tap in with our guest here before actually introducing him to see if he has anything to weigh in. So my dad or two, he does. Our guest today is my dad, Jim Zamzow. Hi, dad. Hello, Kelly. I'm so glad to have you here. Thank you. It's nice to be here, actually. It's fun listening to you. Well. Thanks, dad. So, do you have any any weed advice for for our listeners? I like to not put chemicals down if at all possible. So I always take the direction. Let's improve the soil. Let's raise our lawn mower height. Let's get thick turf so we don't get good competition from the weeds. But we always have to use rescue chemistry. And if we've got weeds we don't like, or crabgrass or things like that, we need to deal with it. Yeah, I was going to add to that. We sometimes will we'll add a surfactant or like a sticker. So not not like a fun scratch and sniff sticker. Different. It's a it's a product. And we actually have one that's called Safur Step. And the fur part is f-u-r, as in for your pets. And it's blue. So you can see not only does it help the the product actually work better, but it turns it turns the plant blue where you've sprayed it. And then you can you can come by with a like a napkin or a paper towel, and you can run it across the top of the of the weed. And if it if blue comes up on your, on your whatever you've wiped across it, then you know that it's not ready. You can't have your kids or your pets come out there yet. So it's kind of a safety, you know, sort of thing you can do. So yeah, it doesn't take long to dry, really. No, it really doesn't. And the other thing that's really good about it is you can see where you've been. You don't have to treat the same weed twice. That's that's that's true. That is true. Well, here was a story that I was going to tell to lead into my dad before I had him jump right in here. So when I was in elementary school, I went to Kelch Elementary. And my dad, my dad worked a lot when I was a kid. He he was running a business. And so he had between he and his brother, they were very, very busy people. He had everybody had Sundays off because we were closed on Sundays back then. And then his second day off was Tuesdays, and every once in a while I would, you know, again went to Kelch Elementary and it was a closed campus. You're not ordinarily allowed to leave, but every once in a while, my dad would sign me out and take me out to lunch. And when he would do that, we would go just up the street onto Fairview to the skippers. Remember the old skippers? Yeah. So we'd go to skippers and we ordered the same thing. I think we were both the fish. We might have gotten chicken strips on occasion, but always the fish. Sometimes a mix of the fish and and the chicken strips. But here's the most important part you order. Like you kind of go down the line, place your order, and then you sit and wait. But my dad and I would put our little number on the table, and then we would go to the order bar, which was really just the sources. And so we would go and we'd have our little paper containers, and we would fill them as full as we could with tartar sauce and cocktail sauce, bring them back to the table. And of course, we had our silverware at that point to it, and we would literally eat cocktail sauce and tartar sauce as our order. And it was so wonderfully just, you know, there was no way we were going to be able to do that with the rest of the family. Their mom would have said, you know, you two heathens knock it off. But but it was our little thing and it was fine. We have a little lunch and you'd get me back to school. And it just those days were. It's a bright spot in my childhood. They were wonderful. And one on one time with your dad, you know, that's you don't owe. We got a phone ringer. Doesn't happen. Has that happened? That's the first, dad. That is the first phone ringer. That's your brother. He wants to know where we are. Tell him you're at skipper's. We would be. Somebody shut it down. And now it's a car lot sad, I know. Anyway, I what are your memories about that? Was that a was that as fun for you as it was for me? I really did like it. Well, we and we did call it the order, but we did. We did. I can still actually making my mouth water a little bit thinking about it. Pretty good stuff was it was really good. Well then of course the fried fish may not was always good to the whole thing was in the French fries. It was fun and a good break in my day. It was kind of nice to get away from the elementary school. Those are. Those are good memories. I didn't have a lot of time to take you guys, so. No, but it was. But those were fun. The other thing about Tuesdays, Tuesdays with Jim was that you. It was always work. So when we would get out of school, you had been working all morning on your own cut, you know, cutting limbs, you know, pruning whatever. And when we got home, I was like, oh, no, dad's been pruning. We have to go put the drag those limbs to the burn pile. And, you know, and I am notoriously the family does kind of. So just my brother and I and then my mom and dad and and I was always balking about the yard work. I was I wasn't necessarily the easygoing one of the group with that. Well, you know, little kids aren't the greatest at doing that stuff anyway. You do pick up a little bit and then you get. Then you start fighting and playing, and pretty soon you're. It's true. Yeah, but it was it was good. Yeah. Okay. So let's let's dive into this. Let's dive into this podcast. I am hoping that maybe you'll just give a maybe just because obviously you're you're the owner of Zamzows and so can you kind of give us and our listeners a quick just a quick in your version history of the company as far as who owned it or just, well, whatever part you want to share. Okay. Well, you know, there's there's quite a bit of history before the, the start of the business. Yeah. Let's talk about that. No, let's talk about the start of the business. Right. Go ahead. So after renting and raised getting kids and all this type of thing by this time they're they're what five kids? I think they finally bought a 40 acre farm which is at the corner of of Franklin Road and Cole. And you're talking about. So this is your grandparents, my great grandparents, August and Carmel. Right. Exactly. And thank you. Yeah. The corner where the Boise Motor Village is. The house was right about where Lyle Pearson's Mercedes parking lot is, big two story house, and that's where they were pretty much raised. But they bought that place in 1928. 1929 was the crash. Yeah. And they they had their cattle. They had hogs. They had the typical 40 acre farm which did a little of everything, but they couldn't make the mortgage payment because there was no money during the depression. So grandpa decided that we have to sell the stock and get off the farm, because I'm not going to be in the whole. So much to grandma's dismay, she did not like that at all. She wanted to keep it, but we heard about that the rest of their life. But they they did a deal with the bank and they bought what was called the old Snodgrass Mill, which is where our Fairview story is today. And I think it was the same banker, and he kind of did a little bit of creative financing and basically got their their mortgage payment downgraded to a smaller one and bought the feed store. So that's how they ended up in the feed business. Then they started selling coal. And that that was the start of the business. My grandparents had it until after World War two when dad and my uncle Stan came home from the war. They started running it and and bought it eventually. And then my brother Rick and I bought it in the 70s. And then over ten years or so ago, I bought my brother out. So that was kind of the evolution of the store. Yeah, it's it's quite a history. I have my kids running it. Yeah. You do you say that with the trepidation? No, actually, no, I don't I, I sometimes wonder how you even deal with it. It's gotten to be so big. But it it's interesting how it's morphing. And it's also interesting how the valley has changed so much over time, you know, and especially since the Covid, like the mass pretty short period of time recently. Think about it. Yeah. It's been it's been on the traffic I guess. Yeah. Okay. So when you stepped into the business and I kind of say that lightly because you, because I think when you're a Zamzow like, you kind of start early, like, Jos and I were sweeping warehouses when we were little kids, I do remember. Do you remember we would sleep the sweep, the warehouse, and we got paid hourly. Literally. You would pay us every hour. Yeah. And then we put the we'd put the money in the candy machine, we'd eat some candy, and then we'd work for another hour. If I didn't pay you by the hour, you'd quit. Yeah. We joined the union just a little. That was. We were very little. Yeah, but you did the same thing. You were. You were working as a very young person. Well, you know, we sold about 100,000 baby chicks back in those days. And when Rick and I were little, you know, when you've got that many chicks in a brooder, they get pasty rear ends and they, you know, they you've got to teach them to to drink water, and you show them the food and you get them underneath the heater and, and you kind of get them going. And that was kind of our job. Dad knew we could do it. We knew we loved little, little animals, which we did. And so we would come over and that's that's what we do. The thing that I didn't like the most was pulling the shelf out where the poop was, and happened to fold up all the newspaper and then put new newspaper down. That was the least fun job for us. Funny how we remember these things, right? But yeah, that was probably our first thing and we were away preteen. I'm, you know, I'm three and a half years older than Rick. So you know he was probably six. I was probably around nine. So you did a lot of work in the feed mill too. As a young person. You were you were working in the feed mill as a teenager. Okay. We after we turned 12 and we were old enough to shoot a shotgun, we we got to go pheasant heading on the opening day. But dad would say, all right, opening season starts at noon, boys. If you get all the windows washed in the mill by noon, I'll take you pheasant. So we, you know, back in those days, it was, you know, they were like a dozen guys, huge plate glass windows, like six by six that we had to wash perfectly inside and out. And, you know, my dad, if he'd come out, if there was a streak going to have to do that one over. You know, when you say that so cheerfully, he, he I mean, he was he was a cheerful guy, but he also if you if, let's say you had to go back a second time and say you still didn't get it, then you were like, oh, it was very strict, very strict. Even with us grandkids. He was pretty strict. Yeah. Well, by by today's standards it could be considered abuse. Right? I always think about this time that we were he was working on the lawnmower and he said, James, run, get me a common screwdriver. So I turned and I started walking towards the garage to get the common screwdriver. And I found myself flat on my face on the, on the concrete. And I turned around. I couldn't figure it out, and he had kicked me in the rear end so hard that he knocked me flat on my face because you weren't going fast enough. Not apologize, he said. And I went. I turned around and got up. What kind of stunned he said, when I tell you to run, I don't mean what learn that lesson after that, when he would say, James, will you? And I'd go, I got your mark. My he put my feet in the blocks, you know. Yeah. I mean, you know, he was he was a captain in the Army Air Corps during World War two. And he didn't put up with a lot of nonsense. So yeah, it was. But, you know, for my personality, I think it probably was good. I think when I look back, you know, I used to get mad, like, you know, why would he do things that he did? But I think back now, I think for my personality, I probably needed that. And I think he knew that. He probably thought, you know, you loafer, you not on my time. Get going. You're not moving fast enough, you know. Well, and in some ways, I think that that prepares us for life when our parents, you know, make us pull limbs and whatnot after they've cut them down, it builds character. We had to do that same thing, you know? Yeah. Dad would get up in the tree and cut all those limbs down, and my brother and I would have to call him. Well, I guess let me just thank you for parenting me differently than your dad parented you. You never once did that to me. They didn't. You never physically. You know, there was one time that you very switch. There was one time when I was mowing the lawn and I got willy nilly with it. I was, I was, I thought I was being creative, but instead of just mowing in, in lines and it was a writing lawnmower was a big orchard we had. And instead of just doing the the way I was supposed to go up and then turn and come back down again, I was kind of getting a little crazy with it, like an all like driving around anyway. Then he came. He came out to holler at me, and I pretended like I couldn't see him. So I kept driving and I kept just driving away from him. And that did not make him very happy. Well, you know, I. I always believed you. Spare the rod, you spoil the child. Yeah. So I always thought, you know, the a bit of a spank. Never heard anybody. Well, your mother on the other side said you will not hit my children. Yeah. She was a parenting teacher. Like she would teach parents how to parent, so. Yeah. So you remember I called you and your brother together, and I said, your mom said I can't spank you. So my words are going to have to work. But if my words don't work, then I'm going to pick a switch and you're going to get it. And don't you remember that time I went out and picked a switch and chased you kids around the man? So they they're just squealing and crying and and pretty soon out comes. Well, I think you went and got I think I did, I think I remember because we had that that screen door that would slam. And I remember running through it and it slamming and mom being like, what's going on? And I was like, dad's trying to spank us. Oh boy, did I have trouble. Oh the memories. Okay, let's go back to the mill really quick. I, I, I love the story and I think it's very interesting. And I think our listeners might find it interesting. You you were asthmatic as a kid. Yes. And one of your jobs, jobs was to clean out, like where the soybean meal was kept. Right? We had the big silos. Yeah. And where we stored grain and bean meal and things like that. And then every season, they had to be cleaned out, and then they had to be sprayed down inside with DDT to keep the weevil and stuff out. And yeah, it's awesome. One of my favorite jobs. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and that probably contributed to the asthma, I'm sure. No, I already had the asthma, but I think dad just figured, well, if that kills him, I won't have him. Glad it didn't kill you. But, you know, there was a hole about ten feet up so you would climb up the ladder, and then they would put you in a harness and lower you down, and then they would go on about their business. And then your job was to clean up all the the grain and get it out of there. And then they would lower down a pump sprayer with DDT in it, and you'd spray the walls and spray it and it was all closed in. So of course, yeah, you're breathing, there's no fresh air and you're breathing it and and of course there's no way to get out. They had to come when they figured you were about done. They would come and and then they would pull you back up out of the and pull you out the whole out the side of the silo. 40. That wasn't good for my asthma. No, no. Well, let's talk about that. So soybean meal is something that we have used. And by the way, this is the mill that is still in existence. It's in downtown Meridian right in front of City Hall. You can't miss it has a big mural on it. That's that. Yeah. Sector 17 painted on there anyway. Tell us about that kind of the the evolution where you used to clean out the soybean meal and then something changed. You got a new shipment of soybean meal and you knew instantly that something had changed. Can you talk about that? Okay. When the soybean meal used to come in on, on by rail and it was bulk, we would open the, the car door and then we had a big it was a giant vacuum cleaner called evacuated. We had a big 50 horse electric motor and it would suck the meal out and then up above through the head house and then into the bin, whatever bend you directed it into. So my job was to vacuum out these cars, and I was just loved it. It smelled just so, so great. Unless I was in there and it was 115 degrees, it was a little different, but which it often was. By the time we got to the afternoon, our job was of course, if it load of grain came in or a load of soybean meal or something, and if there was something wrong with it, then I would go in and tell dad and then they would reject it. So one day I got in a load of what I thought was bad soybean meal, and I went in and I told that. I said, dad, this is spoiled. He went out and checked it, and then he checked with Walt Shepherd, his his man that did the buying. And he said, well, Jim says this is spoiled. And he said, no, it's not spoiled. It's no longer explorer type soybean. It's now solvent extracted. So what what they when they process soybean meal, they, they grind the soybean and they crush it and spin it around real fast. And the oil comes out. Well, that still leaves a couple of percent of oil in there. So they came up with a method of putting a solvent in there, actually a petroleum solvent that would dissolve all the while and they could extract it out and then sell the rest as soybean meal. But there's still always a trace of the solvent in the soybean meal. So that's what I was smelling. And it's not good. But they actually were stopping because it was a much cheaper process to extract it with solvent than it was to accelerate. So. So soybean meal has gotten a real bad name because of that. Don't don't feed soybean meal because it's bad. It's it's bad if you're using solvent extracted soybean meal, but not if you're using cold pressed or expel or type soy, right. Then it's the real deal and it doesn't have any chemical in it. So it wasn't the soy itself that was causing the problem. It was actually the solvent. Yeah. Is that the story? You want it? It is. It is a story. And that is when people ask, because we do use soy in some of our products. And, and so we very often will get the question about that. What's so bad? It's so bad. And we have to tell them that story again. It's one farther than that. We use mostly full fat soy, which which means we don't even extract the oil and the lecithin out of it, which are those were two things that are sold separately when they process. So. But soy that's full fat means you got everything that's in the soybean, but it's been processed with a temperature so that the, the trypsin and the, the hormones that are are considered to be harmful in soy when they're prostate out processed, added a certain temperature. Yeah. So but the full fat and the lecithin and then the, the amino acid profile in soybean is just wonderful. There's just a couple that you need to fortify a little bit and that's it. Yeah. People who people rave about the, the dynamite products but that's that's for our listeners. That's one of our brands separate from the brand. But that's a lot of our products there use that full fat whole extruded soil, soybean. And yeah, the animals do amazingly well. We've got some great turnaround stories over the years with that. So let's talk about the fact that because you just kind of get science-ey on us, you kind of at least obviously my whole lifetime I've always noticed that about you. But even as when you tell stories about, you know, your history and and things like that, I science is sort of woven through the whole story. You have the scientific mind and you have a and I lovingly call you my mad scientist dad. When people ask about what, you know, who would tell us about your dad? He's you're a mad scientist. You and not maybe not mad, but you are a scientist. Crazy and mad, I guess. In that sense. Well, yes. Like almost anything that you are working on, you're looking at it from a scientific bend. Do you remember when in your life that started? I do, but that reminds me of a story. Oh, good. So my junior year at Borah High School, I had chemistry lab, and we had, of course, the Bunsen burner. And we had flowers of sulfur. And I thought, I wonder what would happen if I poured out some sulfur and lit it on fire. So which I did. And of course, it puts off. That's just so for gas. And the alarms went off and we had to evacuate the whole wing of the science portion of school. Boy. And that's when I realized I was allergic to sulfur. My I could hardly breathe. I mean, literally almost gassed myself by doing that. But but I'll tell you what. It's very interesting how sulfur burns. It just kind of it doesn't flame up. It just kind of like a volcano. It just kind of works and lets off this toxic smoke while recommend you do it. So anyway, I, I've just always been really curious. And when I was probably 7 or 8, my mom got me a chemistry set for Christmas. Well, I started reading in my encyclopedia about how to make gunpowder, so I needed some things. I needed salt, pepper, and I saltpeter as they call it. It's a potassium. I think it's potassium nitrate. And but they didn't come in my chemistry set. So I would tell mom, mom, I need a refill of, of this chemical. And she would go over to Potter Drug and get it for me. And then I would literally make dynamite, you know, I'd make gunpowder. And unfortunately, I, you know, we used to have these little paint bottles that we would paint our model airplanes with, and they were a little glass tester's bottle. And I stuffed that full of my homemade. It was actually gunpowder, but I added a few other things in there just to see what might happen. And then I poked a hole in the lid and put a firecracker fuze in it. Well, the neighbors had a little apricot tree that was about an inch in diameter and up in the crotch of the tree. I put this little tester's bottle and I lit the fuze and I didn't. I thought it would go pop, you know. Right. I didn't realize it would blow the tree in half. So I get it comes out in the statesman, Vandals, Vandals, dynamite, apricot tree. I can remember my friend friend and I were just we kind of quivered because he thought, oh my God, if they ever find out who did that. We were ashamed by it, but we certainly didn't want to admit we did it. Dad would have beat me to death. Oh my gosh. Yeah, you tell these stories about when you were a kid. It was the wild, wild West. Truly like you. I was telling somebody the day I'm like, my dad has still has a pellet in his fanny from being shot because they would use real guns with pellets and they would shoot at each other. Well, we didn't really shoot at each other. Well, I mean, clearly somebody did. Well, I actually Kenny just decided it was a good idea to see what would happen if you shot somebody in the. But I said, don't aim at at me. And then he started aiming at me. I took off running and he shot me anyway. But it's still there. I remember as a kid, and it's not like fully it's kind of in your hip area, but you as a little kid, you could you, you would kind of figure out where it was in your hip. And then as little kid, you okay, put your finger here and you can feel it. And we would like push in and be like, oh, you can feel it in there. Yeah. That's crazy. Did it show up on an x ray recently or something and or no. You were going to get an MRI and they were like, do you have any metal in your body? And you're like, well, I've got this. Yeah, that's that's still in my bed, lad. So it's not wasn't a problem okay. Yeah. That was not a good experience. Let's go back to the science thing. This could get real crazy if we talk about all the I mean, they're wonderful stories, but let's let's talk about the science thing. So. So I will tell people I'll be like, you know, I've got your dad up to him. Like, he spent a lot of time in his lab. Sometimes you'll go through these periods of time or he's working on something as lab or, you know, what are you doing today? I'm going to go out, and dad wants to show me some things that he's got going in his lap. And then people are like, wait a minute, who does that? And I'm like, well, my dad, because because you're always you'll think of something and then you run. You have you have constantly have experiments going on right now. I'll bet if we went in your lab, you've got several jars that smell atrocious. You've got some couple of plants that are, you know, some seedlings that are growing. And and if we go back there, you'll you'll ask us. Okay. Which one, which one do you like? But no, not necessarily like. Which one's bigger but which one looks healthier. And then we'll have to. I always feel like I'm on trial. Like I got to make sure I stick the right one. That's always been interesting to me to figure out what makes things grow, you know? And it's not always as you might think. It's not just about chemical fertilizer and that type of thing. It's about getting the bacteria, the microbes in the soil functioning, getting a balance of the nutrients and carbon in the soil. Yeah. You know, that's been kind of my mantra for the last 40 years is do you have enough carbon in your soil? Are you putting enough compost on your soil and etc.? But you've invented a lot of products and you've I think you've invented more products that you didn't take to market that would be hugely not only viable, but probably make you a ton of money. But when you get to and you've described this before, like once you've figured something out, it becomes less interesting to you and you got to move on to the next one. Once I've figured it out, I'm no longer interested in. Yeah. One time my brother said, would you quit inventing something and sell something? Well, you certainly have invented plenty of things that sell like crazy. That, and they sell because they work and they're, you know, generally speaking, you're always trying to do things with Mother Nature. So a lot of what you are inventing is, are things that just work alongside to give Mother Nature a little boost up. Well, and it's because I was trained conventionally. Yes. So I, I learned about chemicals. Dad had farm chemicals in the feed store all the years as I was growing up. But I became and my brother, we became what was called lawn pros. Scotts company taught us how to how to manage turf and that type of thing back in the day. And then we would we would use all their products. Scotts Turf Builder and Turf Builder plus two to kill Weeds and and Turf Builder plus Insect control and Turf Builder plus fungus control and all those types of things. And they worked really, really well. But after about the third year, we started kind of going, something's going on. And one day I had the customer come in, I called them, I called them pet customers because they wouldn't come see anybody else. You know, if I had my group of people that trusted me, they would come to me and my brother did the same thing, and they would wait in line to to have his weight on him because they just got to where they trusted us. Anyway, this guy came in and he said, Jim, will you come over to my place? I'm just over in the Weaver subdivision, just down the road from the Fairview store, which is what I was managing at the time. And I said, well, I don't really have time. And he said, please, I really want to show you something. So I went over there.

00 and Saturday morning before we started getting busy, and he said, I want you to look at my lawn and I want you to look at my neighbor's lawn. And I said, okay, I got down. I couldn't buy every disease and every insect and every weed. And and this guy had them all. And I said, well, you know, you need to put on Scotts Turf Builder plus two to get rid of the weeds. And then you need to put on Scotts Plus Insect control a few six weeks later or so and get rid of the insects. And then you need to and you got some crabgrass, you've got all these things, he said, I know I've got all those things. I'm not blind, he says. I want to know why I have them. And I said, well, you know, the seed comes in and the dogs run across it and they bring the disease and and stuff like that. And he said, you know what? I'm not buying it. I said, why? And he said, well, look at my neighbor's line. They didn't have a fence. I went over and looked. And now it wasn't a perfect lawn, but he didn't have all the problems, he said. And it was a reasonably healthy lawn compared to to my customers alone. There's something going on here and I don't know what it is. But he said, tell me why that is. And I couldn't tell him. So I went home and I went back to my office and I started calling. The next week I called the big turf companies. I called Michigan State and Cornell and anybody that had a turf program. I called and I told them the story and they would tell me the same thing. Well, you've got diseases. You got a spray for disease, you got insects, you got to spray for the. I said, well, why is it that sometimes lawns don't have it? They say, well they will have it because it's once it gets over there. They'll contaminate it and grow. And I said, boy, I'm not buying it. But I didn't have an answer. Finally, one day, my accountant called me and said, you know, I've got a big ag customer that's retiring here. I was from the Midwest and he said, he's really got some interesting stories to tell. He used to be in the chemical business, and then he went more natural. And I said, well, introduce me. We used to have a restaurant in downtown Boise that they would open for coffee. I sat down, this guy's name was C.J. Finzi, and I was there. They ran us out of there after dinner that night. Wow. I sat there with him all day long. I was so he became a very important mentor to me. And he taught me. When you put nitrogen fertilizer on the soil, your soil will try to maintain a balance of nitrogen to carbon of 1 to 20. And when you put a pound of nitrogen on, you'll actually burn out 20 pounds of carbon. Then that's your humus. That's the dark part of your soil. That's where all the microbes live. That's where that's what holds water. That's all that stuff. So you start off with about a 3% organic matter in your soil, and by about the third year of a chemical lawn program, you've burned out all your carbon. And so we'd start coming in. Your plants get weak insects and disease move in. Your soil won't hold water, so you have to use more. So that was that was really the thing that kicked me in the fanny. To go more natural, I started studying natural processes. My employees used to laugh at me because I would be out in back with a 55 gallon drum and a canoe, or I'd be mixing up some kind of something to try, you know, and somebody's lawn. And as you know, every soccer field in Boise had stripes in it because I was doing testing on. It's been such an interesting journey. And I think about a key component with all of this. You've got the science, but you're always trying to help. And I'm going to say people, but it's people and really animals or anything else that's living. Do you? Is there where did that come from? Do you think is that. Well, I'll tell you what my theory is. I've got German, Scots-Irish and Cherokee blood. I've got about half as much Cherokee blood as you have, because your grandparents on the other side also had Cherokee been. So I have those three. I know when my German comes out, I do too. And and I know when my Scots-Irish comes out for sure because that's, you know, I'm like a badger. I don't nobody wants to corner me. But the Cherokee in me is the environmentalist. That's where my kindness to animals, my my love for the soil, my I think I think so, I just I just call that my my charity, my Cherokee part. Yeah. So I just think it's a natural thing. And when you study epigenetics, which I think you have a bit, you realize that it's it's really about the evolution of the family. It's it's not only about genes, it's also about the nutritional levels of your grandparents and so on that affect you. Yeah, I remember you were the one who taught me that. So technically speaking, when a woman is born, when a baby is born, a girl is born. They have all of their eggs in them already. Exactly. Which means there's the DNA in there is like that was like. So if you're if you if you go upwards, then you really have to look at your grandmother and how healthy she was, because she's the one who created your mother, who had all those eggs that had you in there somewhere. So, like, it's kind of amazing. So if there was malnourishment, you know, if you were deficient and if your grandmother was deficient in a specific mineral that may manifest in a deficiency or a chronic degenerative disease in you. Yeah, but you can correct that. That's what we've learned about epigenetics. You can correct that. We I was reading research in India about little boys that were not developing properly, and that was because there was a zinc deficiency there. But once they started fortifying their their zinc in the proper form, then they did develop properly. In other words, they didn't develop reproductively. I remember you teaching me that when I was in my 20s, and I came up with the to remember to remind myself of that zinc for your dink, because. Such so good, good stuff. Do you remember that time I did the lecture up at McCall and embarrassed you so much? Yeah, let's not talk about that. Let's not. Well, the thing is, and we can tell this part of the story, dad, as a scientist, everything is just, you know, a body is a body, and body parts are just body parts. And how we use those body parts are just how we as humans use those bodies. So it was a it was actually a sexual conversation. And that's what had both Josh and I mortified. We're like and because you're so scientific, you're like, you know, you're just you're you're you're given the details of what's happening. And Joss and I were like, Holy cow, it wasn't just you. I could tell I embarrassed all the employees. I think everybody was like, yeah, it's pretty, pretty good. So I think this is kind of an interesting segue into the fact that Samsung's we people know what we sell, but that's not what people rave about. And they do like, oh, the lawn programs. Awesome. But the vast majority of our like our Google reviews and people who will take the time to sometimes they'll come in the front doors of the home Office and just tell us what a great experience they had. Almost always, it has to do with a person that works in the store who helped them, help them find the right product, help them solve a problem, help them, you know, figure something out, find something, whatever is that? Has that always been the case? Like, and how did that stem what has always been the case? But that reminds me of a story. So when my brother and I were we sat down one time, we decided we need to have a mission statement. So we wrote down everything we did. We had good quality products. We wanted them to be environmentally sound. So we made we tried to supply things that were as environmentally sound as possible. We wanted to service our customer. We needed to teach our customer how to use stuff and how to be more successful. And every other word that came out was service. So I'm not going to say it naughty word. But so at the end of the day, we wrote down our new slogan was At Samsung. When it comes to serving you, we don't screw around. And they didn't. We didn't use screw. And so we got a good laugh out of that. Of course we couldn't use that, but that was the slogan. It was all about service. So we end up our slogan, just as it is today, to provide the highest quality, environmentally sound products at a service level beyond our customers expectations. Absolutely. That's why we spend so much time and energy and training our employees. Yeah, we start with good people. I mean, I get because you have to have that service mindset to begin with. You got to you got to like people. So yeah, it's it's an interesting taking over the reins, how central that has been for for both Joss and I, for my brother and I. That's a very in every training that we have, no matter what we're teaching lawn program stuff. You know, any of the things that we teach, we're always sprinkling in how you even get to the point where you get to use that information and it's relationship building. It's treating the customer like your friend, you know, remember their dog's name. You know, those kind of things that are, I don't think are probably very typical for most places. I'm going to guess that that I won't even name other competitors, but they're not training people to try to remember at somebody's pets name, you know. So do you know what the three critical factors in sales are? You can never have make a sale if you don't have these three factors. The first one is you've got to sell yourself your credibility. You have to prove that by it's your first contact usually. Second, you have to prove the your customer is your customer. I mean you're pardon me your company. Pardon. Is your company legitimate. Have are you going to be here when when we need you to to solve our problems. And lastly is your product. And they will not even look at your product until you have introduced it yourself properly and your company. Yeah. That's that's good. That's a good reminder. So you've said this a few times. That reminds me of a story. And you have a book that's called that reminds me of a story, and it's filled with some of the stories that you've just told, but a whole bunch of other ones, they're wonderful. We talk about that just briefly. And the the origin of that and, well, you know, when I was recording commercials with Art Gregory Art would write in commercial and record those for us, and we should have taken about 20 minutes, but it always took hours because we would get in there and have a conversation, and I'd end up telling him these goofy stories. Well, you know, after about 20 years, Art decided to go back and get his master's degree in communication. And so for his thesis, he wrote, basically wrote all of these stories down that I had told him and that he'd gotten from my brother and from grandma Z and so on. That's what he used for his thesis. Well, then a few years ago, I just decided to pay to have it published, so we edited it. Thanks to your mother, we we headed out all the bad things and the bad words and all that kind of stuff. And so then we published the book, and so but I wanted, I thought, who's going to teach my grandchildren all of these stories? And I thought, I really need to to get these things written down and get them published. So, you know, when I'm gone, they will be able to kind of know what what went on in the 50s. 60s, 70s, 80s and maybe beyond. Well, I don't for our listeners who watch the videos, I don't know how much they pay attention to the studio and how it was set up, but your book is always right here. It's been here from the from the very first podcast, and it will remain here. It's it's part of along with pictures. I think you might be in more of the pictures than anybody else on these walls. There's one with a groundbreaking over there and there's, you know, some some back here. You probably recognize yourself, younger versions of yourself. And anyway, it's it's kind of fun. I like being in this room because of the nostalgia. It's a it's a good thing. Okay. So I always like to think about our listeners and what they are getting out of this and who they might be. And I'm wondering if we have a younger listener who is there, like, gosh, that Jim Zamzow is cool. He's he's I like I like how he does things. I like how he thinks I want to be like him someday, or I want to own a company like Samson someday. What would be some advice that you would give to a young person who is thinking that they might want to do something like that? First of all, I would say by the book, because Art put down our ten principles that we felt made us successful. And every one of the stories in my book has some aspect of those, those rules, some things in the book, you know, they teach you good lessons and some things that I did, they teach you what not to do. Yes, because it's not I'm not I didn't print those stories so that people would replicate them or do what I've done. But to learn sometimes what you shouldn't do. Sure. You know, and I did a lot of dumb things. We all do. I think that's youth. Like, I think if you don't do some dumb things and make some mistakes, that sometimes you don't learn those lessons, sometimes you have to learn them the hard way. So you might ask me, what's the what in that book would I want to have carried on? Or what do I think would be a good message for people? I think every story in there has some message, good or bad. Yeah. But ultimately I think the book itself is the message, and I would suggest that people record their stories. We've all got stories, just as many as I've got. We've all got stories. But if you don't somehow remember them and then and tell your children, your children are probably not going to carry them on to your grandchildren. So you probably should record those stories so they know about your life. My mother was a storyteller. You know, her family coming from East Tennessee. That's that's how they pass things on. Most of them couldn't read or write and probably didn't have any teeth either. But they they passed on stories, you know, and played the banjo. Yeah. And made a little bit of white lightning. Now, I think that's one of the, one of the reasons why I love this podcast so much is that we're featuring people in the Valley who and they're just telling us their stories. And it's so fun, especially when somebody thinks of a story. They're like, gosh, I haven't thought about that in a long time. And then it comes out on the podcast. It's kind of fun. It's like college jokes. One joke reminds you of another, and you can spend all night long drinking beer and telling the story. But I thought we were going to have to censor that. I wasn't sure where you were going. Oh, I never know, I never know. All right. Well, this is the part in the podcast where I give a shout out to our sponsor. You're going to recognize them. This episode is brought to you by Zamzows your local source for garden, pet and planet friendly products. As a thank you to our Nobody Knows listeners, use code Zamzow at checkout on to receive 10% off your online order. The discount applies automatically and is valid online only and excludes lawn programs, and it runs through August 31st, 2026. You can even buy online and pick up in store at any of our 12 Treasure Valley locations, so visit Zamzows.com and let's grow something good nobody knows like Zamzows hay on that, I don't know. We haven't got it put together yet, but for fun you know, I grew that giant tomato one year. Yeah. And I thought it would be fun for people that by and use some of our products to have a contest to grow the best tomato, to be judged by someone other than us in store. And I'm going to offer $1,000 for the winner of that. Nice. And I think that would be a fun, fun thing to do because people in this area love to grow tomatoes and we grow good ones here, whether you use our products or not. But if you want to enter the contest, you have to use our product. Yeah, I was going to say if you want to win, you want to use our products. Well, that's actually probably true. It's absolutely true. There's a there's a picture of you standing on a ladder with a giant tomato plant. And I think sometimes people think we photoshopped it. We didn't. First of all, it was before you could. That was before photoshopped that actually happened. I remember I was in a photography class and I took the picture. I was laying on the ground and I took the picture up and you're on the ladder and almost to the top rung, trying to, you know, get to the top of your. But I mean, how tall was that? Well, the frame was 17ft, but remember, it grew out the side. And dude, you're down about a quarter of the way on the put the guide wires so that it didn't fall over. Your mother got mad at me because the UPS driver couldn't get to the house. We had to put the guy wires up because it was, you know, that was got so heavy that the little breeze would make it blow over. Right? Right. So we had to guide up. Well, it's legit in case people think that that wasn't real, I was I witnessed it. Okay. So we're going to enter a separate second part of this episode. And it's called Sharing is caring. It's kind of rapid fire questions. So you ready. I don't know I guess we'll find out. Okay. So how about a lesson or a piece of advice that stuck with you over the years? I had I had a lot of messages from a number of different people. My grandfather, August Jack Simplot, to name two. And that is, you know, if you're going to make a good bye bye, it as low as you can buy it. And if you're when you're ready to sell it, sell it for as much profit as you as is reasonable. Right. So I asked Jack Simplot when one time he, I was at one of his lectures, we'd go for lunch sometime and he would speak to us and and I said, Mr. Simplot, how did you make so much money in the cattle business? He said, well, that's easy, son. I bought when everybody was selling and I sold when everybody was buying. And I said, well, how do you know? And he said, if you've been in the cattle business very long, you know, when it's low and you know when it's high. But he said, the problem, of course, is when the price of cattle goes up, everybody thinks that's when you should get in. But that's then. Then the market gets overbought and then the market goes down. Like right now there are not many cattle. The price of beef is outrageous. You know, if you're going to be in the cattle business right now is when you start buying first calf heifers and you start building your herd. Right. But nobody does that because they only want to get in when it's high. Right. So that that would be buying high and selling low right. Right. So the opposite. So you know and I've always been somewhat of a contrarian anyway. So you know I don't go along with with what everybody else is doing usually I usually try to take the opposite approach. That seems to serve you. Well. It has. All right. Another question. A local place in the Treasure Valley that feels special to you. Or let's just say the state of Idaho. Let's spread it out. Maybe it's not Treasure Valley, maybe it's the state of Idaho. I guess the state of Idaho. That's fair. There's this to me. This is. This is the land I love. You know, I went up to Garden Valley a couple of days ago with my old friend Liz Jenkins, and got out of the car. My first breath was the pines, the bitter brushes blooming, the smell, the flow of the Payette River. It was just it was magnificent. It was. We just sat there on an old park bench, just and looked at the river for an hour. Oh my gosh, the white clouds in the Sawtooth and Lake, Court Lane and Lake Ponder and look at all the lakes we water skied on when you were a little. Yeah, it's like glass, you know, Cascade and McCall and I don't think I have a favorite place in Idaho. I think I could say my favorite place in Idaho is I don't. That's a great answer. That's a great answer. And you do find beauty. And there have been times that we've we've gone on trips and we pull over to the road and I've looked around at that, well, this is hell and you'll find something pretty about it. Oh, look at this. It's a it's a there's a flower blooming out here in the desert. And come here kids. And we'd be like, oh, dad, do you remember the temple of something? You remember the time we took took Joshua to the University of Arizona, and we stopped at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. We we drove all the way. First of all, we were teenagers and kind of assholes. But keep going. So. So we go all the way down there and we go up to the rim and we get out, and your mom and I are looking down at this fantastic canyon, and you and your you and your brother scrapping and poking each other and causing trouble. We said, kids, come over here and look at this. And you walked over and you looked at and walked away and you said, what's the big deal? Yeah. Teenagers. Yeah, exactly. You know, it's funny, as I was thinking about the fact that I don't I haven't taken Rafi there and I'm now I'm at that age where I'm like, well, she needs to see that. She needs to see the glory of it all. And don't be ashamed when she says, what's the big deal? She probably wouldn't, though. She know. Yeah, she's definitely I should. She's a good human. All right. How about how about a book or a story that has influenced how you think? Now you're a huge reader. The listener should know this. You read all the time. You're like, you're like Warren Buffett that way. Like you spend most of your time reading anymore. So this is this is interesting. Probably two that really stick in my mind that we're a start of. I was trying to figure out how the mind works. And two, two books that really help our thinking grow rich and psycho cybernetics. Kind of help understand how the mind works and how it relates to the physical and that type of thing. But of course I would. I studied all the millionaires I could find, no J. Paul Getty and and Jack Simplot and many I can remember calling Jack simply at one time because I wanted to ask him. I wanted to meet with him, literally, and I wanted to ask him, how do you think? It was kind of crazy, because I remember I was in my car and I dialed up the number. That was when he lived up here on the hill. And oh yeah, and really, it's kind of like the phone just ringing and I'm just driving along, not even thinking about it. But all of a sudden, after about 15 rings, Jack grabs the phone and says, hello. Like, what in the heck are you? I was actually embarrassed and he said, well, who is this? And I says, It's Jim Zamzow. And he said, Jim who? I said, Zamzow, you know the Zamzow story. Remember, remember you tried to buy us one time and he said, oh yeah, why didn't we. And I said, I guess you didn't have enough money. He laughed about that. And I told him, he said, well, what do you want? And I said, you know, I'd really like to meet with you and talk to you just to find out how you think. He said, what are you talking about? How you think, you know, he was just like I said, well, success comes from how you think. He said, you just work hard, son, and you'll you'll eventually make it. Just work hard. But don't ever sell a piece of property. They're not making any more of it. I had some very interesting conversations with him over the years and and other people that, you know, Willie Schreyer was a good friend. And of course, all the governors did business in the stores. I got to know them and I got to know about some of the actors locally, Paul Revere and the Raiders and people like that, that I got to be personally acquainted with, that you always learn something from, you know. Yeah. You've never been afraid of of meeting people. You're somebody who well know. I remember when we were at at the World's Fair in 1986 up in Vancouver, and you saw Red Skelton. And, you know, that's a funny side story he's about to tell you. And it's going to shame. Shame he has a shameful story. But and I'm going to let you tell it. But first things first. You were like, let's go say hi now. Now here's the here's again. Remember, my brother and I were teenagers, so we were the same. These are the same two kids that were not impressed with the Grand Canyon. So go ahead. So Red Skelton at it at the day. A lot of people don't know who that is, but he was a comedian and very, very famous actually. Well, we went to the World's Fair and he had done a skit or some kind of a presentation, and he was out walking around on the docks, and we just happened to be walking, walking by. And I said, there's Red Skelton to your mother. And you said, who's that? And I said, he's really a great he's a famous comedian. I mean, we really used to laugh. He used to he asked to hell. All these characters and stuff like that. I said, come on, we'll introduce you. So I went up and I introduced myself and shook his hands. I said, we've been great fans of yours for years and Fay was very impressed. Well, you and your brother got around behind him and started making faces and and and doing false laughter. Like, like you said, he was so funny. Really? Well. We were just so funny. We were just ashamed that it was terrible. Well, anyway, that was that's. I'm appropriately shamed now. So there's. All right, dad. Well, this is this is the. We're coming to the tail end here. There's one more question I have to ask you. It's a question we ask everybody on the podcast at the end. Oh, are you ready? I guess. Okay. The question is this what is something that nobody knows? Well, when I was young, I always wanted to be a rogue elephant hunter. Wow. Yeah. Did you know that? You know, I, I feel like you've. I feel like you've told me about what a rogue elephant hunter does, but. Well, like, is that a is that a career? Well, it was we used to watch. We used to watch something called bring Him Back Alive, Buck and Jungle Gym. When I was a kid, there was a two movies about Africa. Well, if a if an elephant or a rhinoceros were wounded, if someone were hunting them, which they did back in those days and awful lot, I'm sorry to say, if they got wounded, they went rogue, and a rogue elephant would go into a village and completely annihilate it because they were so smart and they knew it was a human that caused them the injury. They would go in and just level a village, and of course the natives couldn't do anything about it, so they had to hire a hired gun. Somebody that had the cajones to to face a rogue elephant because. So I always, I always could imagine a rogue elephant with his ears flaring and him trumpeting hard and rushing towards me. And I wanted I wanted to believe that I had the courage to to aim a rifle at the very. There's only one particular place that you can hit an elephant in the head to kill him instantly. If you hit him anywhere else, you're just going to run over you and kill you. If you hit him in this place, it will kill him instantly and they'll just fall at your feet. So I always wanted to have that kind of courage and the stamina to be able to hold my bead on that elephant until it was time to squeeze it off. And I studied those rhinoceroses and grizzly and Kodiak bear, which are which are real, real fun. And that reminds me of a story, but it's probably don't have time to tell it. I tell it real quick. All right. So we were my brother and I were going to go float the night talk in Alaska, and we knew there were a lot of grizzly bears in that area. So they said, you know, you've got to take something to defend yourself against these bears. Well, being an old 44 Magnum shooter, I thought, well, I'll take my 44 Magnum. I was in Cascade and there was a gun store there, and I went in and I asked the guy and he said, well, you know, I'm actually from Alaska. What's on your mind? I said, what kind of a load? Because I loaded my own shells. What kind of load should I put in a 44 magnum for a grizzly bear. And he told me, you know, you need a 500 grain bullet and you need blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But he said, really? You shouldn't use the 44 Magnum or any kind of a pistol like that. You really need a shotgun that with slugs in it. And I said, okay. And he said, now when you get that shotgun, it's going to have a little bead on the end of it. That's a sight. He said, make sure you get a file and file that off. And I said, why? And he said, because when you shoot that bear and he takes that gun away from it and shows it up, your but it won't hurt quite so bad. And and he said, son, don't shoot a bear. Get up, get a horn or get get osprey. And that'll discourage, that'll get him away from you. But don't. He said nobody ever is accurate enough to hit a grizzly bear to kill him. And they'll they'll just kill you. So don't do that. Oh, dad, I love your stories. They're wonderful. Thank you for sharing today. Thank you for being here on on our our final episode of of season one of the Nobody Knows podcast. It's an honor to have you here. Love your stories. I hope that we will have you on again, because I think there are many more that we could probably get out of you guys. That's fun. Thank you. You're doing a very nice job, Callie Thanks, daddy, I appreciate that. All right. If you enjoyed today's episode and this first season of Nobody Knows. Be sure to follow the podcast and leave a review. We'll be taking a short break before season two, but we can't wait to bring you more conversations with the people shaping the Treasure Valley.