Behind the Bastards - Part One: Charles Koch: The Luke Skywalker of Rich People
Aired: 2018-08-14
Duration: 01:10:34


=== Mostly Human: The Phantom Con Artist (02:50) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
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[00:00:17]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:00:19]  We always say that.
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[00:00:41]  This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:00:44]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
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[00:01:15]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:01:18]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:01:20]  That's so funny.
[00:01:21]  Share with me each night, each morning.
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[00:01:37]  What's up, everyone?
[00:01:38]  I'm Ego Modem.
[00:01:39]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[00:01:41]  Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:01:46]  He goes, just give it a shot.
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[00:02:23]  Hello, friends.
[00:02:24]  I'm Robert Evans, and this is Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history.
[00:02:32]  Every week, I sit down with a guest and read them an exhaustively detailed story about one of the worst people in all of history.
[00:02:38]  My guest is coming in cold, and this week, my guest is Ever Maynard, star of the fields on Netflix, comedian, writer, improviser, improviser, stand-up, stand-up, performer, performer, actress, actress.

=== Behind the Bastards: Fred Koch's Rise (15:10) ===

[00:02:50]  Yeah.
[00:02:51]  More adjectives.
[00:02:52]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:02:52]  I'm a double actress.
[00:02:54]  Wow.
[00:02:54]  Discussion.
[00:02:55]  Let's talk about someone who's not a hero or a heroine, but who will make you want to shoot up some heroine?
[00:03:01]  Okay.
[00:03:02]  Charles Koch.
[00:03:03]  Cool.
[00:03:03]  Yeah, today's episode is titled Charles Coke, The Luke Skywalker of Rich People.
[00:03:08]  And that's who we're going to be talking about today.
[00:03:11]  Before we get into this, I have some nacho cheese Doritos.
[00:03:14]  Ever, are you a fan of nacho cheese Doritos?
[00:03:17]  I'm not really digging those right now.
[00:03:19]  I go through phases.
[00:03:21]  That's not going to help us getting a sponsorship deal.
[00:03:23]  Oh, I love nacho cheese Doritos.
[00:03:26]  Sometimes I mix nacho cheese Doritos with cool ranch Doritos and really have a party in the mouth.
[00:03:30]  Doritos, the chips for everyone.
[00:03:32]  Nailed it.
[00:03:33]  And oh, and sorry, I'm going to do a sound effect.
[00:03:37]  Ooh, ASMR.
[00:03:38]  I didn't know you were doing that.
[00:03:39]  This is the sound of ever enjoying a delicious Doritos chip.
[00:03:43]  I love nacho cheese flavored chips.
[00:03:46]  So good.
[00:03:47]  Well, now that we're fortified, are you ready to dig into the tale of Charles Coke?
[00:03:51]  Oh, yeah.
[00:03:51]  All right.
[00:03:52]  There's nothing sexier than being a rebel.
[00:03:54]  That's why Hollywood has for decades glorified gangsters and pirates.
[00:03:57]  That's why the lost cause myth of the Confederacy still has traction.
[00:04:00]  That's why people are so eager to identify with the hashtag resistance.
[00:04:04]  There's something deep in the marrow of our nation that makes Americans want to be seen as plucky resistance fighters, each flinging towards our own personal death stars.
[00:04:11]  But what happens when your entire existence is the antithesis of rebellion?
[00:04:14]  What happens if you, through sheer accident of birth, wind up with hundreds of millions of dollars?
[00:04:18]  Oddly enough, that guy can and will find some way to make himself feel like a rebel.
[00:04:23]  Today we'll be talking about the story of one such man, Charles Koch, who despite being born into impossible fortune, came to believe that he and his fellow rich people were the most discriminated class in America.
[00:04:33]  Over the course of a convoluted and bloody career, Charles Koch would become the driving force behind the infamous Koch brothers and build a rebellion with a goal no less extreme than the destruction of the U.S. government as we know it.
[00:04:44]  I don't see a problem so far.
[00:04:46]  You're on board with this guy so far.
[00:04:47]  Yeah, I mean, yeah.
[00:04:48]  You agree the rich people have really taken one from the chain.
[00:04:50]  Sure, man.
[00:04:51]  Fuck those guys.
[00:04:52]  See what I mean?
[00:04:53]  Already getting hated on.
[00:04:55]  I feel you, rich people.
[00:04:56]  What's up?
[00:04:57]  Yeah, yeah, no, they've taken too much.
[00:05:00]  Yeah.
[00:05:00]  Okay.
[00:05:01]  So I should note right now, the tale of Charles Koch is one of those rare stories in journalism where there is a single indispensable reporter behind much of the coverage.
[00:05:09]  If you're going to talk about sexual assault in Hollywood, Ronan Farrow is going to come up a lot.
[00:05:13]  If you're going to talk about Blackwater and Eric Prince, Jeremy Scahill's going to come up a lot.
[00:05:18]  And for the Koch brothers, it's a reporter named Jane Mayer.
[00:05:20]  She wrote a book, Dark Money, in 2016 that delved into their past and the network of billionaire influencers they assembled to change American politics.
[00:05:27]  If you have read a long, scary article about the Koch brothers in Politico or the New Yorker or pretty much anywhere else, there's a very good chance she wrote it.
[00:05:35]  So she's...
[00:05:35]  We owe her a lot on this podcast, and dark money is a big source here.
[00:05:39]  Now, our story today begins back before any of the Koch brothers were born.
[00:05:43]  In 1927, Fred Koch, the patriarch of the Koch family, invented a new way to refine crude oil into gasoline.
[00:05:49]  Alas, this scientific breakthrough made him a threat to the big oil companies.
[00:05:53]  And since this was the 20s, everyone was even more corrupt than they are now.
[00:05:56]  He was boxed out of the industry and sued into oblivion for patent infringement and other nonsense.
[00:06:01]  So far.
[00:06:02]  Not looking good for these guys.
[00:06:04]  No, it seems like there's no way to pull themselves out of this hole.
[00:06:07]  I'm nervous.
[00:06:08]  But just wait.
[00:06:09]  Fred Koch law-battled the oil companies for 15 years, and eventually the court settled in his favor and awarded him $1.5 million, you know, in like 30s money, which is, you know, pretty good money to have a million of.
[00:06:23]  They won because it was found out that the oil companies had bribed one of the judges who'd initially ruled against him.
[00:06:28]  In her book, Dark Money, Mayer quotes a family friend of the Koch's as saying, the fact that the judge was bribed completely altered their view of justice.
[00:06:35]  They believe justice can be bought and the rules are for chumps, which they are.
[00:06:39]  We can all agree the rules are for chumps, but maybe that makes more sense when you're jaywalking and less when you're...
[00:06:46]  So far, I'm still on board.
[00:06:47]  I don't see what the problem is.
[00:06:48]  Yes, I mean.
[00:06:50]  Look, Fred was screwed.
[00:06:51]  Fred Woodscrew.
[00:06:52]  No, this is so far.
[00:06:53]  He's the hero of the story so far.
[00:06:55]  Dang, Fred.
[00:06:55]  What's the problem?
[00:06:56]  He's fighting oil companies.
[00:06:57]  Yeah.
[00:06:58]  I'm on board with Fred Koch so far.
[00:07:00]  Yeah.
[00:07:00]  He just pulled some money out of their hive.
[00:07:01]  And then he went to the dark side because he was like, wait a minute, you can buy justice?
[00:07:06]  Well, that's kind of exact.
[00:07:08]  Well, first off, while he's still admired in this law stuff, he finds himself hard up for some money, you know?
[00:07:14]  Of course.
[00:07:14]  Of course, because he's fighting the oil companies.
[00:07:16]  That's not easy.
[00:07:17]  A guy called J.G. Wentworth.
[00:07:18]  He did call a Jay, but the last name was Stalin.
[00:07:22]  Okay.
[00:07:22]  Or rather, Joseph Stalin called him because the Soviet Union was just starting to be a thing at this point, 1930.
[00:07:28]  And they sent Fred Koch a telegram being like, hey, we could use some help making some refineries and you seem pretty good at refining oil.
[00:07:35]  And Fred was not red, did not like the communists, but he was sympathetic to their money, and they agreed to pay him half a million dollars cash in advance.
[00:07:45]  So he helped them refine a bunch of oil and build like his company Winkler Koch trained Soviet engineers and helped put together 15 new oil refineries inside the USSR.
[00:07:54]  Cool.
[00:07:55]  So yeah, he does this work for the Soviets.
[00:07:57]  It's great.
[00:07:58]  If you hop over to KokeInd.com, K-O-C-H-I-N-D.com, the Koch Industries website, you can find a timeline of the company history.
[00:08:07]  And in the 1920s, 30s section of the timeline, there are two entries, one for 1925 when Koch Winkler was formed, and another for 1929 to 32 when they took on their work for Joseph Stalin and the USSR.
[00:08:19]  Okay.
[00:08:19]  Then the timeline jumps to 1940 in a parade of boring oil acquisitions.
[00:08:23]  Now.
[00:08:24]  The timeline on the company website leaves out a job.
[00:08:27]  Okay, tell me about it.
[00:08:28]  Yeah, yeah, and this job occurred in the mid-1930s.
[00:08:32]  In 1934, Winkler-Koche Engineering won a contract to help design and construct an oil refinery in Hamburg, Germany.
[00:08:40]  Now, the company that hired Koch.
[00:08:43]  Weird that they leave that one.
[00:08:45]  Yeah.
[00:08:48]  That sucks.
[00:08:51]  So, yeah, the Koch industries to this day doesn't really like to acknowledge the fact that they got their start in part by working for the Nazis.
[00:09:01]  Most of the Republican Party doesn't like to acknowledge that.
[00:09:04]  No, you can definitely find some ties to the Bushes as well.
[00:09:07]  So, now in 1934, the company that hired Koch's company was an American company as well.
[00:09:14]  It was run by a guy named William Davis, who was a big-time Nazi sympathizer.
[00:09:18]  And he was trying to help Germany's oil industry get off the ground.
[00:09:21]  Now, back in World War I, Germany had starved halfway to death under a brutal British naval blockade.
[00:09:26]  Germany's inability to feed its people and supply its military without trade was a huge source of concern for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
[00:09:33]  Hitler's goal in the 1930s and the pre-war period was for Germany to reach a state of autarky or self-sufficiency.
[00:09:40]  So they wouldn't need to trade with the world in order to meet their basic needs in case they wound up going to war with the world again.
[00:09:48]  So Hitler was modernizing the German military and buying a metric fuckload of tanks and airplanes.
[00:09:53]  So gasoline factored heavily in his plans for autarky.
[00:09:56]  This was not hidden news at the time.
[00:09:57]  The president of one American bank refused to fund Davis's planned refinery because he didn't want to help the Nazis rearm.
[00:10:04]  Other people eventually did put up the cash, though, and Fred Koch played an integral role in planning and building the new refinery, which would go on to become the third largest refinery in the Third Reich.
[00:10:14]  The factory that Koch built for Hitler didn't just make a lot of fuel.
[00:10:17]  It made high octane fuel, the kind of fuel you'd use to, say, keep the Luftwaffe flying.
[00:10:21]  You would almost compare it to drinking Celsius, but I won't.
[00:10:26]  No, we can talk shit on Celsius unless they start offering us money.
[00:10:30]  No, I'm talking about being high octane.
[00:10:33]  I'm jet!
[00:10:38]  So Fred Koch went on to loudly regret his work with the Soviet Union in years past.
[00:10:43]  Wink wink.
[00:10:45]  But he never really talked much about what he'd done with the Nazis, at least after the fact.
[00:10:52]  The time that he'd spent in the repressive Soviet regime seemed to have a huge impact on him.
[00:10:56]  He would constantly talk about the dangers of government control and what was bad about having too large of a government.
[00:11:02]  But he didn't hate all governments, just the socialist ones.
[00:11:05]  In 1938, he visited several countries, including Imperial Japan and New Zealand.
[00:11:09]  He described New Zealand as, quote, violently socialistic.
[00:11:13]  But he wrote this in a letter to his mentor about Japan, Germany, and Italy.
[00:11:17]  Quote, although nobody agrees with me, I am of the opinion that the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy, and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard.
[00:11:26]  The laboring people in those countries are so proportionately much better off than they are anyplace else in the world.
[00:11:31]  When you contrast the state of mind in Germany today with what it was in 1925, you begin to think that perhaps this course of idleness, feeding at the public trough, dependence on government, etc., with which we are afflicted, is not permanent and can be overcome.
[00:11:44]  So that's Fred Koch being like, wouldn't it be great if we could get rid of the New Deal and be like the Nazis?
[00:11:50]  That's where his head is in 1938.
[00:11:55]  Now, World War II happened, and Fred Koch.
[00:11:58]  Yeah, Fred Koch pulled away on sympathizing with the Nazis openly.
[00:12:03]  The refinery he'd helped to build was destroyed in June of 1944 after years of being targeted by the Allies.
[00:12:08]  42,000 civilians died in various Allied raids on the city that the refinery was in.
[00:12:14]  Koch stopped talking openly about fascism, but continued to warn the world about socialism.
[00:12:18]  According to the 2014 book Sons of Wichita, Fred became convinced that a global war between capitalism and socialism was inevitable.
[00:12:25]  Well, quote, I think these times are far more serious than even Civil War days, he confided to a friend and retired army officer.
[00:12:33]  That was merely to decide whether we were going to be one nation or two, whereas the fight that is going on now in this country is going to decide whether we are going to be free men or slaves.
[00:12:44]  Maybe the most someone can misunderstand the Civil War.
[00:12:48]  Yeah.
[00:12:50]  Actually, that one was about slaves, Freddy.
[00:12:53]  Whoops.
[00:12:54]  Dude, this Fred dude, man.
[00:12:57]  What's your vibe on him so far?
[00:12:59]  Well, went downhill very fast.
[00:13:02]  Yeah, you're on board with him at first.
[00:13:04]  Yeah, I was like, okay, cool.
[00:13:05]  You're a scientist.
[00:13:06]  You're figuring out what a way to turn crude oil into gasoline.
[00:13:10]  Whatever.
[00:13:10]  You're getting screwed over by the oil company.
[00:13:12]  A lot of people are.
[00:13:13]  All right, on to my boy, Fred.
[00:13:14]  Yeah.
[00:13:15]  He's not my boy.
[00:13:16]  Well, no, he's no one's boy, actually, because Fred Koch does not seem to have had a warm thought for anybody in the course of his life.
[00:13:24]  He did marry a woman, Mary Robinson, in 1932.
[00:13:28]  Okay.
[00:13:28]  He was pretty brutal to her, based on sort of the recollections that we have.
[00:13:33]  I don't think what he did would have been considered spousal abuse in the 1930s, but I think we would consider it spousal abuse today.
[00:13:41]  And ditto.
[00:13:42]  Times have changed.
[00:13:43]  A hit is not a hit in the 30s if it's to a woman, but no, a hit is a hit to a one.
[00:13:48]  And I think he was more of the shouty, emotionally abusive.
[00:13:51]  Well, he was an emotional, okay.
[00:13:52]  He was physically abusive to his kids, too, which we're...
[00:13:55]  We'll get to.
[00:13:56]  Yeah.
[00:13:56]  Yeah.
[00:13:58]  So Fred and Mary had four sons, Frederick, Charles, David, and William.
[00:14:02]  David and William were twins.
[00:14:05]  Mary had an active social life and was gone frequently.
[00:14:08]  Fred was also always on business trips.
[00:14:10]  So the kids were raised largely by an assortment of nannies and help rather than their parents.
[00:14:16]  I wonder what kind of impact.
[00:14:18]  They probably have a lot of abandonment issues and probably trust issues going on.
[00:14:21]  You think so?
[00:14:22]  Yeah.
[00:14:23]  Well, I don't know.
[00:14:23]  I'm just going to read an unrelated passage from the book Tribe by famed war correspondent Sebastian Younger that just happens to talk about what occurs when children are separated from their parents at a young age too often.
[00:14:34]  Okay.
[00:14:34]  Yeah, just an unrelated passage.
[00:14:36]  Sponsored by Doritos.
[00:14:39]  The alienating effects of wealth and modernity on the human experience start virtually at birth and never let up.
[00:14:44]  Infants in hunter-gatherer societies are carried by their mothers as much as 90% of the time, which roughly corresponds to carrying rates among other primates.
[00:14:51]  Meanwhile, Younger notes, over in America, quote, during the 1970s, mothers maintained skin-to-skin contact with babies as little as 16% of the time, which is a level that traditional societies would probably consider a form of child abuse.
[00:15:04]  So 16% is what a normal kid in America is getting physical contact with their parents being raised.
[00:15:09]  The cokes are being raised by a nanny, and dark money does not make this nanny sound like the cuddling kind.
[00:15:16]  So I think these kids are spending pretty much all of their time isolated.
[00:15:22]  Quote, the nanny's iron rule terrified the little boys, according to a family acquaintance.
[00:15:26]  In addition to being overbearing, she was a fervent Nazi sympathizer who frequently touted Hitler's virtues.
[00:15:32]  Dressed in a starch white uniform and pointed nurse's hat, she arrived with a stash of gruesome German children books, including the Victorian classic Der Struhlpeter, that featured sadistic consequences for misbehavior ranging from cutting off one child's thumbs to burning another to death.
[00:15:46]  The acquaintance recalled that the nurse had a commensurately harsh and dictatorial approach to child rearing.
[00:15:50]  She enforced a rigid toilet training regimen requiring the boys to produce morning bowel movements precisely on schedule or be force-fed castor oil and subjected to enemas.
[00:16:00]  So that's the first five or six years of the Koch brothers' lives.
[00:16:04]  Wow.
[00:16:05]  Yeah.
[00:16:05]  I didn't know there were four of them.
[00:16:07]  That's what I take away from that whole thing.
[00:16:09]  Wow, there are four.
[00:16:10]  There are four, huh?
[00:16:11]  Yeah, the Koch brothers that people famously talk about are two of them, Charles and David.
[00:16:15]  The others were not nearly as involved in politics.
[00:16:17]  Yeah.
[00:16:18]  Wow.
[00:16:18]  That's so sad.
[00:16:19]  Yeah, it's a bummer.
[00:16:21]  So it's, I think, important to get that background because we're going to talk about a lot of terrible shit they've done.
[00:16:26]  It's kind of hard to imagine anyone turning out without some weird quirks growing up in that circumstance, can't we?
[00:16:34]  Yeah.
[00:16:34]  So the Nazi sympathizer Fred Koch hired to raise his kids while he was busy doing business, and I capitalized business.
[00:16:40]  It's big B business for sure.
[00:16:42]  Stayed around until about 1940 when she got so excited about Germany's victory over France that she moved back home to be a bigger part of this whole Nazi thing.
[00:16:50]  She said she wanted to celebrate with Hitler.
[00:16:52]  No.
[00:16:53]  Who wouldn't?
[00:16:54]  Dude could party.
[00:16:56]  I wouldn't.
[00:16:57]  No.
[00:16:58]  Because he couldn't.
[00:16:59]  No, I wouldn't want to party with him.
[00:17:01]  Yeah.
[00:17:01]  I mean, on a serious on the record, I do not want to party with Hitler.
[00:17:05]  I want to party with Stalin.
[00:17:07]  Like, he was a bad dude, too.
[00:17:09]  But the drinking bouts that you hear described that the Russian high count sound like something I want to witness.
[00:17:15]  I've never seen that.
[00:17:16]  Oh, man.
[00:17:17]  Oh, it was.
[00:17:18]  We have a whole episode about it, but they were the drunkest people in history.
[00:17:22]  But no, Hitler, not fun to party with.
[00:17:25]  It doesn't sound like this lady was either.
[00:17:26]  No.
[00:17:28]  So when he was home, Fred Koch was a strict disciplinarian.
[00:17:31]  Wow.
[00:17:31]  Yeah.
[00:17:32]  Sorry, I'm really riveted by this story.
[00:17:33]  I'm like looking at you with big dough eyes.
[00:17:36]  Wow.
[00:17:37]  Tell me more.
[00:17:39]  So yeah, Fred Koch was a strict disciplinarian.
[00:17:41]  And in the context of this podcast, disciplinarian means child abuser.
[00:17:44]  Okay.
[00:17:45]  Pretty much 100% of the time.
[00:17:46]  Let's go ahead and say that.
[00:17:47]  He was a child abuser.
[00:17:48]  He abused his kids.
[00:17:49]  One family member recalls him ripping the branch off a tree and whipping the twins, quote, like dogs because they stained the patio.
[00:17:56]  And not stained in the spilled something, yeah.

=== Child Abuse and Strict Discipline (03:35) ===

[00:18:00]  In summer, rather than let his kids play with neighbors, he made them dig holes and shovel manure.
[00:18:04]  His biggest fear was that they'd turn out to be, quote, country club bums like most rich kids.
[00:18:09]  Wow.
[00:18:10]  Yeah.
[00:18:10]  In his own book, Charles Koch wrote, quote, by instilling a work ethic in me at an early age, my father did me a big favor, although it didn't seem like a favor back then.
[00:18:19]  By the time I was eight, he made sure work occupied most of my spare time.
[00:18:23]  Wow.
[00:18:24]  Yeah.
[00:18:25]  Idle hands.
[00:18:26]  It's made me reconsider some of my, because like, I've known some frustrating people who grew up very wealthy and who didn't really have a realistic understanding of hard work or how difficult it is to have to like make rent and pay for your health care and shit.
[00:18:39]  So a lot of me has always thought if these rich parents would instill in their kids some sort of respect for what it takes, maybe they would be better people.
[00:18:48]  And this is proof that you can go way too far in the other direction.
[00:18:52]  Eight-year-olds shouldn't be working all the time.
[00:18:55]  Holy smoke.
[00:18:56]  Yeah.
[00:18:56]  Yeah.
[00:18:56]  It's dark.
[00:18:57]  I mean, I had to do some of that growing up, but nothing too much.
[00:19:01]  I grew up in Texas.
[00:19:03]  Oh, same here.
[00:19:03]  Oh, wow.
[00:19:04]  What part?
[00:19:04]  Dallas, mostly.
[00:19:05]  Okay, cool.
[00:19:06]  Mostly in the Dallas area.
[00:19:07]  Okay, very cool.
[00:19:08]  I'm from a little town off.
[00:19:09]  Do you know where Temple is off Ice?
[00:19:11]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:19:11]  I've spent a lot of time in Temple.
[00:19:12]  I'm near Austin.
[00:19:13]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:19:14]  I'm from a small town outside of Temple.
[00:19:15]  Okay, cool.
[00:19:16]  So a lot of summers were like helping my grandpa on the farm.
[00:19:19]  Yeah, and I spent a lot of time in Oklahoma as a little kid, and we had a farm.
[00:19:22]  Like, it's good to have those experiences.
[00:19:24]  But not all the time.
[00:19:25]  Not all the time.
[00:19:27]  You should be a kid.
[00:19:27]  Come on, man.
[00:19:28]  Be a kid.
[00:19:29]  Have an imagination.
[00:19:30]  Yeah.
[00:19:31]  Okay.
[00:19:32]  It seems like too far in the other direction.
[00:19:34]  Too much compensated.
[00:19:36]  So, yeah.
[00:19:37]  Children being forced to labor will become something of a theme later in Charles' life.
[00:19:41]  Just put a pin in that.
[00:19:43]  So the young Koch boys spent a lot of time boxing each other.
[00:19:46]  This is one of the few non-work activities that their father encouraged.
[00:19:50]  Charles usually won these matches, but once his younger brother Bill was able to beat him and Charles stopped boxing forever.
[00:19:59]  It was not like being beaten.
[00:20:02]  Charles had a somewhat adversarial relationship with his oldest brother Frederick, who was more sensitive than the other boys.
[00:20:09]  He also didn't get along with Bill.
[00:20:11]  David Koch seems to be basically the only person Charles Koch ever sort of liked.
[00:20:15]  Wow.
[00:20:16]  Yeah.
[00:20:17]  And Charles and David are, again, the Koch brothers.
[00:20:20]  The big boys.
[00:20:22]  So in the grand tradition of rich families, Charles Koch was sent away from home when he was 11 to the strictest school possible, mainly because his mother was worried of what he might do to his brother Bill if he stayed at home.
[00:20:33]  He was shifted around several schools, including a public school, but always kept getting kicked out due to bad behavior.
[00:20:38]  He finally wound up in a military academy where he did well until he was expelled for drinking on a train.
[00:20:43]  Alcohol, I assume.
[00:20:46]  Unless trains were, yeah.
[00:20:48]  Charles' behavior was met with correspondingly severe punishments from his father.
[00:20:52]  Eventually, the discipline seemed to take hold and Charles started to do better at school.
[00:20:57]  So we will be getting into the rest of Charles Koch's adolescent gears and his adulthood battles with some of his other brothers, including his brother Freddie, who just take a guess as to what sensitive means in the parlance of, yeah.
[00:21:11]  That was the theory, at least was the idea that the brothers had.
[00:21:14]  So we'll be getting into all of that and as well as how Charles Koch wound up getting some people killed through regulatory fuckery and a bunch of other fun stuff, including some quotations from the Libertarian Reader and some articles Charles wrote for that.
[00:21:29]  So a lot of fun stuff coming up.
[00:21:30]  Cool, can't wait.
[00:21:31]  But before we get onto that, it's time for some ads that actually paid us money.

=== Charles Koch's Regulatory Killings (05:28) ===

[00:21:36]  I love it.
[00:21:38]  I love ads as much as I love the cheesy crunch of a nacho-flavored Doritos chip, which I'm about to eat right now.
[00:21:45]  I love nacho cheese.
[00:21:47]  Oh my God.
[00:21:48]  My favorite is the lingering taste in the tongue.
[00:21:50]  And then when I get to lick my fingers.
[00:21:52]  That's the best part.
[00:21:53]  I love to do that right before I meet people.
[00:21:55]  And then I still have like a little bit of chip in my teeth.
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[00:21:58]  My back teeth.
[00:21:59]  I love it.
[00:22:00]  It's like it's a little bit of extra confidence going on in the future.
[00:22:03]  I'm always confident when I have my Doritos nacho cheese corn chips.
[00:22:07]  It's like there's a party in my mouth and Hitler is not invited.
[00:22:10]  No way.
[00:22:11]  But maybe Stalin is.
[00:22:13]  Not for me.
[00:22:16]  All right.
[00:22:16]  Here's some ads.
[00:22:23]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:22:27]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:22:30]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:22:33]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:22:36]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:22:40]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
[00:22:44]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:22:46]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:22:51]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:22:53]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:22:55]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:22:57]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:23:00]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:23:01]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:23:04]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:23:08]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:23:10]  Trust me, babe.
[00:23:11]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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[00:23:23]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
[00:23:34]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:23:37]  I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[00:23:42]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:23:44]  I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
[00:23:49]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:23:53]  Yeah.
[00:23:54]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:23:57]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:23:58]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:24:07]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:24:09]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:24:16]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:24:18]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:24:19]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:24:20]  Yeah.
[00:24:21]  Listen to Thanks Stad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:24:31]  10-10 shots fired in the City Hall building.
[00:24:34]  A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
[00:24:38]  From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
[00:24:42]  This is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
[00:24:44]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[00:24:46]  Somebody tell me that.
[00:24:47]  Jeffrey Hood did.
[00:24:48]  I love you.
[00:24:49]  July 2003.
[00:24:50]  Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
[00:24:55]  Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
[00:24:58]  And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
[00:25:07]  Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
[00:25:09]  A shocking public murder.
[00:25:11]  I screamed, get down, get down.
[00:25:13]  Those are shots.
[00:25:14]  Those are shots.
[00:25:14]  Get down.
[00:25:15]  A charismatic politician.
[00:25:16]  You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
[00:25:19]  I still have a weapon.
[00:25:21]  And I could shoot you.
[00:25:24]  And an outsider with a secret.
[00:25:26]  He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
[00:25:29]  That may or may not have been political.
[00:25:30]  That may have been about sex.
[00:25:32]  Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
[00:25:36]  Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:25:43]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:25:48]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:25:53]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:25:59]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[00:26:08]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:26:13]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:26:16]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:26:19]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:26:21]  That's so funny.
[00:26:23]  Sherry, stay with me each night, each morning.
[00:26:31]  Say you love me.
[00:26:34]  You know I.
[00:26:36]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:26:46]  And we're back.
[00:26:47]  Now, when we last started off, we talked about Fred Koch, the family patriarch, how he built the family fortune by working with the Soviet Union and the Nazis.
[00:26:55]  We talked some about his parenting strategies and the Koch boy's nanny.
[00:27:01]  And we've just gotten through Charles Koch's kind of troubled time in school.

=== Freedom School and Racist Beliefs (15:15) ===

[00:27:04]  You know, he spent a lot of time getting kicked out of different educational institutions for being too rowdy.
[00:27:10]  Now, a major source for the book Dark Money and for this podcast as a result was an unpublished report about Charles Koch written by a professor named Clayton Coppin.
[00:27:19]  Coppen had been first hired by Koch Industries to write an in-depth history of the corporation, and he got access to a lot of internal family documents.
[00:27:26]  Oh, give me more.
[00:27:27]  Yeah.
[00:27:27]  He was next hired by Bill Koch to basically write an opposition research piece on Charles Koch because the Koch brothers hate each other.
[00:27:35]  I didn't know that.
[00:27:37]  Yeah.
[00:27:37]  Yeah, we'll be getting into that just now.
[00:27:39]  Wow, Bill.
[00:27:40]  Yeah.
[00:27:41]  Hired him and said, Dude, I know you've been digging around our family history.
[00:27:44]  Got all our stuff on the website.
[00:27:45]  That's pretty cool.
[00:27:46]  By the way.
[00:27:48]  I want you to.
[00:27:48]  Here's everything I got on my brother.
[00:27:50]  Oh, let me guess.
[00:27:51]  This dude's dead now, isn't he?
[00:27:52]  Is this dude dead?
[00:27:53]  No, no, no.
[00:27:53]  Coppin's alive.
[00:27:54]  Yeah.
[00:27:55]  Okay, barely.
[00:27:56]  Yeah.
[00:27:56]  Yeah.
[00:27:57]  Okay.
[00:27:58]  Tell me more.
[00:27:59]  Or at least as far as I know, Coppin's alive.
[00:28:02]  Anyway, the report that he wrote was like a book-length report.
[00:28:05]  It's unpublished, but Mayer, the journalist who wrote Dark Money, got a copy of it, and she quotes from it liberally.
[00:28:10]  So here's how Coppin's report describes Charles Koch's late adolescence.
[00:28:14]  Quote: Charles spent little of the next 15 years at home, only coming there for an occasional holiday.
[00:28:19]  When he finally did come back, the first thing Charles did when he came home on vacation was beat up Bill.
[00:28:24]  So.
[00:28:26]  Wow.
[00:28:27]  He's a bit of a dick to his brothers.
[00:28:31]  Yeah.
[00:28:32]  I'm off the train.
[00:28:34]  He just starts punching.
[00:28:36]  Bill!
[00:28:37]  You motherfucker.
[00:28:39]  So in 1958, Fred Koch became one of the founding members of the John Birch Society.
[00:28:44]  Tell me about John Birch.
[00:28:45]  I don't know about him.
[00:28:46]  Oh, it's fun.
[00:28:47]  So the John Birch Society was a far-right-wing conspiracy theory-focused society.
[00:28:52]  Okay, cool.
[00:28:53]  They would be kind of the 1950s equivalent of a group like Infowars.
[00:28:57]  Okay, cool, cool, okay, okay.
[00:28:58]  Yeah, so the society's goal was to stop the spread of communism in America and push back against the efforts of secret communists hiding in the American government.
[00:29:06]  Oh, did they start that witch hunt in the Hollywood?
[00:29:08]  They were a big part of that.
[00:29:09]  Wow.
[00:29:10]  But they went a lot further than McCarthy did because the secret communists they were going after were guys like President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
[00:29:17]  Okay.
[00:29:17]  So Eisenhower was a lefty, according to the John Birch Society.
[00:29:23]  Yeah.
[00:29:23]  The Dwight Eisenhower who had the leader of the Congo assassinated for being a leftist sympathizer.
[00:29:30]  That Dwight Eisenhower is a communist and these guys.
[00:29:33]  Sometimes when you are that deep into deep cover, you have to do things to make it look like you're not.
[00:29:41]  Yeah, sometimes.
[00:29:42]  So I get it.
[00:29:43]  Sometimes you have to overthrow three or four democratically elected leftist regimes in order to further the broader goals of communism.
[00:29:50]  Right.
[00:29:50]  Is that what you're saying?
[00:29:51]  Yes, because you want to throw the people that are on your trail off your trail.
[00:29:55]  Is it possible Hitler was a secret communist?
[00:29:57]  No.
[00:30:00]  I'm going to shut you down right now.
[00:30:02]  No, you should.
[00:30:03]  So the whole John Birch Society was the brainchild of Robert Welch of the John Birch Society, demanded the U.S. retire from the United Nations and ordered flyers circulated in Dallas, Texas the day before the arrival of President Kennedy.
[00:30:15]  The flyer stated that Kennedy was wanted for treason and that, quote, he is turning the sovereignty of the U.S. over to the communist-controlled United Nations.
[00:30:23]  Wow, so this has been going on for a long time.
[00:30:25]  This has been going on for a long time.
[00:30:27]  All of this was more or less in line with the beliefs of Fred Koch, a man who, in publications he wrote for the John Birch Society, stated, quote, the colored man looms large in the communist plan to take over America.
[00:30:38]  Fred suspected that welfare was a conspiracy to fill American cities with black people who would then carry out a race war to exterminate white people.
[00:30:44]  This is where Fred Koch's mind is.
[00:30:46]  Now, the Kennedy assassination was not great for the reputations of the members of the John Birch Society or for Robert Welch.
[00:30:53]  I don't know about this, but maybe did they do it?
[00:30:55]  That's a myth.
[00:30:56]  I haven't heard of this myth, but I'll have to dig into it.
[00:30:59]  If you dig into myths around the assassination of Kennedy, the John Birch Society regularly comes up.
[00:31:05]  Wow.
[00:31:06]  I guess I haven't been Googling that hard.
[00:31:08]  Yeah, they were just a big thing in far-right circles back in the 50s and 60s.
[00:31:13]  So after the Kennedy assassination, obviously, mainstream conservatives denounced the John Birch Society and Robert Welch as crazy and claimed the society was little more than a collection of conspiracy theorists.
[00:31:24]  Charles Koch joined the John Birch Society to impress his father, but he actually hated the John Birch Society because he thought all this conspiracy shit was nuts.
[00:31:32]  Who did this?
[00:31:33]  Charles Koch, yeah.
[00:31:34]  Wow, he really wanted his father.
[00:31:36]  He really wanted his dad's approval because he did not like the John Birch Society.
[00:31:40]  He was impressed by their organization and their fundraising prowess because they raised a lot of money and they had a really good secret sort of political organization going.
[00:31:50]  He thought all the conspiracy bullshit got in the way of what the society should be doing, which was actually conspiring to destroy the New Deal and most of the American government.
[00:31:58]  So that was his issue with the John Birch Society.
[00:32:00]  It's too much time on conspiracy theory nonsense, not enough time dismantling the U.S. government.
[00:32:06]  So in 1961, when Charles was 26, his father's health began to fail, and Charles went back home to Wichita to help run the company.
[00:32:12]  He'd been working as a consultant in Boston, and he hadn't been back in Kansas long when he had his Doc Brown hitting his head on a toilet and inventing the flux capacitor kind of moment.
[00:32:22]  Here's how the Wall Street Journal described it in a fawning 1997 article.
[00:32:27]  Quote, one day in 1962, Charles, a newly minted MIT engineer, pulled down a book on the Austrian School of Economics, which describes free economies as systems of spontaneous unplanned order.
[00:32:38]  I spent the next two years almost like a hermit surrounded by books, he says.
[00:32:42]  So Charles Koch starts running a company for the first time and falls in love with libertarian economic theory and it sort of consumes him.
[00:32:50]  And for the next couple of years, he's just reading, basically.
[00:32:54]  He becomes convinced that, in essence, his company would thrive if it was run on free market principles.
[00:33:00]  So he basically creates a theory for how to manage a company called market-based management.
[00:33:05]  Quote, the free market, best of all, agglomerates local interactions into a whole vastly exceeding the sum of its parts, a phenomenon that Mr. Koch is especially keen to copy.
[00:33:14]  So his idea to copy this seems to have been to have different divisions within his company compete with each other.
[00:33:19]  So if like you need some of your employees to be trained, right?
[00:33:22]  Normally there'd be a chunk of the company that's responsible for training them.
[00:33:25]  Well, in Charles Koch's company, that chunk of the company exists, but they have to bid with outside companies that do training in order to like determine who's going to get to train your employees.
[00:33:35]  So basically every business unit within the company is competing with every other business unit in the company rather than working together.
[00:33:42]  And the goal is that this will hopefully keep costs down and lead to more innovation.
[00:33:46]  It sounds exhausting to me, but this is the idea that he comes up with during this period.
[00:33:51]  This is his big like stroke of brilliance.
[00:33:55]  And then also in the mid-1960s, so that mid-1960s is when he comes up with this idea for market-based management.
[00:34:01]  And it's also when he comes to believe that his brother Freddy is gay.
[00:34:05]  He and a friend even break into Freddy's apartment to try and find incriminating evidence to this effect.
[00:34:10]  Eventually, Charles organized his two other brothers into a coalition against Freddy.
[00:34:14]  This all culminated in a boardroom confrontation with Freddy on one side and Bill, David, and Charles on the other.
[00:34:20]  Now, Charles told Freddy his behavior was inappropriate and warned that if their dad found out, it might kill him, but not before he disinherited Frederick.
[00:34:28]  Now, at some point in this ugly mess, Bill Koch apparently found his sense of basic human decency and started defending his brother and later apologized for being a part of it in the first place.
[00:34:38]  This infuriated Charles.
[00:34:39]  It's hard to say exactly what happened as a result of all this, but Freddy did wind up taking a much larger chunk of his inheritance and cash up front rather than getting as big a chunk of the company that he and his brothers all inherited.
[00:34:50]  It's also worth noting that Frederick Koch says that the rumors of him being gay are untrue and that his brothers were wrong about this.
[00:34:56]  I don't know what the actual case was.
[00:34:59]  He was definitely less focused on business and more of an artist and more interested in that sort of world.
[00:35:06]  It may have just been that, that he was a kid in the 60s who cared more about art than running a company, and that's why his brothers treated him like shit.
[00:35:13]  I don't know.
[00:35:14]  But he never started a multi-billion dollar fundraising enterprise to essentially push America further to the right.
[00:35:21]  So as far as I got nothing against Frederick Koch, but he got a little bit fucked over by his brothers in here.
[00:35:27]  Probably it was just like, I want out.
[00:35:29]  I got to.
[00:35:29]  Yeah.
[00:35:30]  And it seems like that's mainly the case.
[00:35:33]  And Bill and Frederick are sort of the good Koch brothers.
[00:35:36]  Frederick kind of went off on his own and kind of lived on his own and didn't have much to do with the family.
[00:35:42]  Bill started a separate company and dedicated millions of dollars to fucking over his brother Charles, and then Charles and David are the Koch brothers that we all know today.
[00:35:52]  So this is kind of where that schism happens.
[00:35:53]  Cool.
[00:35:54]  Right?
[00:35:55]  So Fred Koch, conspiracy theorist and honorary Nazi, finally crapped out of life in November of 1967, aged 1967.
[00:36:02]  So at least shitty people don't always live to be fucking 90.
[00:36:06]  That's an upbeat aspect of that story.
[00:36:08]  When Fred died, his kids inherited a bunch of money and shares in his company.
[00:36:13]  Like most rich people, Fred Koch wanted to give as little of his estate as possible to the government.
[00:36:17]  He did this by creating a charitable lead trust.
[00:36:20]  For some reason that I have to assume is indistinguishable from voodoo, this allowed him to hand most of his money to his kids without paying inheritance taxes.
[00:36:27]  The only sticking point was that for 20 years, his sons had to take all the interest earned by the trust and donate it to charity.
[00:36:34]  Here's dark money.
[00:36:35]  Quote, to maximize their self-interest, in other words, the Koch boys were compelled to be charitable.
[00:36:40]  Tax avoidance was thus the original impetus for the Koch brothers' extraordinary philanthropy.
[00:36:45]  As David Koch later explained, so for 20 years, I had to give away all that income, and I sort of got into it.
[00:36:50]  So the Koch brothers will become major philanthropists, funding like museums as well as far-right politics and conservative think tanks.
[00:36:59]  In 1968, the year after his father's death, Charles Koch left the John Birch Society over their support of the Vietnam War.
[00:37:05]  He has been consistently an anti-war guy his whole life.
[00:37:09]  He discarded the conspiracy-riddled far-right nonsense of his father for the political theories of Robert Lefebvre.
[00:37:14]  Now, Lefebvre was a libertarian philosopher who supported the abolishment of the state.
[00:37:18]  Because of this, some people call him an anarchist, which is inaccurate.
[00:37:22]  See, when you're actually talking about anarchist political theory, not just the term anarchy as a sim for no rules, man, and stuff scrawled on the bomb of skateboards, but the actual ideology with an extensive philosophical history, you can't get far without discussing the concept of mutual aid.
[00:37:36]  Anarchists do seek the abolition of the state, but it's not an everyone-for-himself ideology.
[00:37:40]  I'm quoting here from a pamphlet you can find online called What the Fuck is Mutual Aid.
[00:37:44]  Quote, through mutual aid, anarchism takes shape as a practice in care, exchanging resources in solidarity, information, support, even comfort, care, and understanding.
[00:37:52]  People give what they can and get what they need.
[00:37:54]  When a group comes together to push for a change, when social outsiders come together to share or explore ideas and new ways of living, these are all forms of mutual aid.
[00:38:01]  In other words, mutual aid is what happens when a group of people embrace their dependence on each other and turn it into a strength.
[00:38:07]  This is exactly the opposite of what Robert Lefebvre preached.
[00:38:10]  Even he didn't like being called an anarchist.
[00:38:12]  He preferred to define himself as an autarkist, which that seems familiar, doesn't it?
[00:38:17]  Yeah.
[00:38:18]  So my only issue with dark money, which I think is a deeply important book, is that it declares Koch and his fellow travelers to be anarchists.
[00:38:25]  They are not.
[00:38:25]  They seek complete independence from other people because their wealth allows them to believe that is possible.
[00:38:30]  Actual anarchist political theory is literally the opposite of autarky.
[00:38:34]  That was just a... Lehman's terms.
[00:38:36]  I appreciate it because I got a little lost.
[00:38:38]  I don't know if you saw my eyes.
[00:38:39]  I went to the bottom of the street.
[00:38:42]  I got off on a little bit of a rant there.
[00:38:43]  No worries.
[00:38:45]  So Charles Koch developed a brain boner for the ideas of Robert Lefebvre.
[00:38:48]  A little bit.
[00:38:49]  Yeah.
[00:38:50]  Philosopher.
[00:38:50]  And Robert Lefebvre, I should note, was not just a philosopher.
[00:38:54]  He committed mail fraud a number of times.
[00:38:56]  He was an FBI informant during McCarthy's Purge of Hollywood.
[00:38:59]  He also orchestrated a movement to purge the Girl Scouts of communists.
[00:39:02]  He established the Freedom School in 1957.
[00:39:05]  According to the Freedom School and its curriculum, the Gilded Age was basically the best time ever in American history.
[00:39:11]  And businessmen we know today as robber barons were heroes.
[00:39:14]  The Freedom School believed that the poor should be helped only by charity, that the Civil War had been a terrible mistake, not because of the Confederacy's support of slavery, but because the Union had conscripted people, and that was a worse thing than slavery.
[00:39:27]  I should note that the Freedom School did not support Confederate-style slavery.
[00:39:30]  The Freedom School actually supported a totally different type of slavery.
[00:39:33]  They wanted free people to be able to sell themselves into slavery.
[00:39:36]  What?
[00:39:37]  Yeah.
[00:39:43]  Now you're pumping the bricks.
[00:39:45]  Whoa.
[00:39:46]  Yeah.
[00:39:49]  I'm like pulling a handbrake on a convertible doing a fishtail right now.
[00:39:52]  Excuse me.
[00:39:53]  Yeah, they're kind of nuts.
[00:39:56]  Hey, dude, how much if you pay me?
[00:39:58]  Yeah.
[00:39:58]  Abuse slave.
[00:39:59]  But then I can't use that money.
[00:40:02]  What?
[00:40:03]  Yeah, it's pretty nuts.
[00:40:05]  And it's one of those, like, obviously there's a lot of different strains of libertarian thought.
[00:40:10]  And I don't think most libertarians, at least that I've met, do not support letting people sell themselves into slavery.
[00:40:15]  But that is a chunk of the movement.
[00:40:17]  And it is the chunk of the movement that Charles Koch starts out in.
[00:40:21]  So he is very drawn to the ideas of these guys.
[00:40:24]  He forces his brothers to attend freedom school seminars, which they mostly seemed to not enjoy.
[00:40:30]  I guess they weren't.
[00:40:31]  This dude is an asshole.
[00:40:34]  It's terrible.
[00:40:35]  This guy sucks.
[00:40:37]  Like, he forced his brothers.
[00:40:39]  Yeah.
[00:40:40]  His brother.
[00:40:40]  Oh, man, this guy sucks.
[00:40:42]  And he's, you know, he's the middle kid, but Freddy is not a very forceful personality.
[00:40:47]  So I think he kind of takes on the dominant role with his brothers for a lot of the time.
[00:40:52]  And yeah.
[00:40:53]  He's just so angry.
[00:40:54]  He's really angry and he's really obsessed with control.
[00:40:57]  Yeah.
[00:40:58]  I have some weird compassion for him, but a lot of it is like, whoa, yeah.
[00:41:04]  It's hard not to have a little bit because clearly nobody would want his childhood.
[00:41:07]  It sounds terrible.
[00:41:08]  But also, his brothers didn't all grow up to be like this.
[00:41:11]  So some of this is just Charles Koch choosing to be a piece of crap.
[00:41:18]  So his brothers mostly did not like the Freedom School because I think they're mostly not insane.
[00:41:23]  Frederick thought Lefebvre was a con man and said this, and Charles threatened to deck him for saying so.
[00:41:28]  You better watch out, man.
[00:41:30]  You better watch out what you say about this guy.
[00:41:32]  He's going to tell me why slavery is okay.
[00:41:34]  Yeah.
[00:41:35]  If people choose it for themselves.
[00:41:38]  Wow.
[00:41:40]  Now, in 1966, Charles became one of the chief funders of the Freedom School because he just thought all these guys needed was a little bit more money to really, really press their ideas home to American society.
[00:41:52]  The country was ready for this.
[00:41:54]  Of course.
[00:41:54]  Yeah.
[00:41:55]  In the 1990s, during a speech, he claimed his life at the all-white pro-segregationist, also the school was all-white and pro-segregationist.
[00:42:03]  They weren't all white as a rule, but Lefebvre said that he didn't think black people would be comfortable there because most of his students were segregationists.
[00:42:10]  Wow, okay.
[00:42:11]  So I guess that's honest.
[00:42:15]  Okay.
[00:42:16]  I don't really know what else to say about that.
[00:42:18]  That makes me feel sick.

=== Funding Far-Right Libertarian Theory (06:54) ===

[00:42:20]  Yeah.
[00:42:20]  Yeah, it's terrible.
[00:42:22]  So in the 1990s, Charles gave a speech where he said that the Freedom School is, quote, where I began developing a passionate commitment to liberty as the form of social organization most in harmony with reality and man's nature.
[00:42:34]  Like the liberty to sell yourself into slavery.
[00:42:38]  I know I keep pushing on that point, but it really like, where is your head where that's an issue for you?
[00:42:44]  Where like you look out at the world and all of the problems and are like, God, it's a shame people can't sell themselves into slavery.
[00:42:50]  It sounds like he found someone or a group of people that accepted him and he's probably was like, they accept me and I'm a big deal.
[00:42:58]  I'm a big dog.
[00:42:59]  Yeah, I guess that's got to be it because they're like part of it.
[00:43:02]  Yeah.
[00:43:03]  I don't know.
[00:43:04]  I'm trying to be nice to him in a, in a like, okay, thing about his childhood.
[00:43:09]  He's fucked up.
[00:43:09]  He's got all these bad things.
[00:43:11]  And then here's this school of thought that's like, hey, I'm a gun, man.
[00:43:15]  I see you're kind of vulnerable in a fucked up kind of way.
[00:43:19]  Come to papa.
[00:43:20]  You know what I mean?
[00:43:20]  Well, and I think maybe it ties in a little bit too, because like he had joined the John Birch Society because his dad was a big part of that.
[00:43:26]  And he clearly didn't feel at home there.
[00:43:28]  But he clearly, I think he wanted something like that.
[00:43:31]  And maybe his thought was like, these guys can be my big fish here.
[00:43:36]  These are his proud boys.
[00:43:38]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:43:39]  So, as the 1970s kick off, the Koch brothers minus Freddie are in charge of the company, which they rename Koch Industries from Winkler Koch.
[00:43:48]  Charles soon becomes the real power.
[00:43:50]  He's working six days a week, 10 hours a day, and sinks himself so deeply into his work that he has to propose to his wife Liz over the phone while looking through his schedule to see when he can pencil the wedding in.
[00:44:00]  Which I don't know if that's literally true.
[00:44:01]  When you read stories about rich guys that they write about themselves, you'll usually run into something like this.
[00:44:06]  Paul Manafort says the same thing about like how his first daughter was conceived in between conference calls.
[00:44:12]  Like, I think it's a thing rich guys brag about like how busy they are that they didn't like, oh, yeah, we had to fit the wedding and in between all these different acquisition meetings and stuff.
[00:44:21]  I think they're proud of this shit.
[00:44:22]  Yeah.
[00:44:22]  Like how little work-life balance they have.
[00:44:26]  Doesn't seem like a healthy thing.
[00:44:28]  Yeah, gross to say.
[00:44:29]  Super gross.
[00:44:30]  You know, it's not gross.
[00:44:32]  What?
[00:44:32]  Products and services that support this podcast and/or program.
[00:44:36]  Tell me some more.
[00:44:36]  You know what?
[00:44:37]  I'll do better than tell you some more.
[00:44:39]  I will pause and wait for us to play some pre-recorded ads.
[00:44:42]  I love pre-recorded ads.
[00:44:44]  Oh, they're the best.
[00:44:50]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:44:54]  Rule one: never mess with a country girl.
[00:44:58]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:45:00]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:45:04]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:45:08]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
[00:45:12]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:45:14]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:45:18]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:45:20]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:45:22]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:45:24]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:45:27]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:45:29]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:45:31]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:45:36]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:45:37]  Trust me, babe.
[00:45:38]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:45:48]  What's up, everyone?
[00:45:49]  I'm Ago Modern.
[00:45:50]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[00:45:58]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:46:01]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:46:04]  I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[00:46:09]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:46:12]  I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[00:46:16]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:46:21]  Yeah.
[00:46:21]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:46:24]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:46:26]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:46:34]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:46:37]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:46:44]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:46:46]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:46:47]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:46:48]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:46:58]  10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
[00:47:01]  A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
[00:47:06]  From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
[00:47:09]  This is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
[00:47:12]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[00:47:13]  Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Hood did.
[00:47:16]  July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
[00:47:23]  Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
[00:47:26]  And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
[00:47:34]  Everybody in the chamber adopts a shocking public murder.
[00:47:38]  I scream, get down, get down.
[00:47:40]  Those are shots.
[00:47:41]  Those are shots.
[00:47:42]  Get down.
[00:47:42]  A charismatic politician.
[00:47:44]  You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
[00:47:46]  I still have a weapon.
[00:47:48]  And I could shoot you.
[00:47:51]  And an outsider with a secret.
[00:47:53]  He allegedly was a victim of flat down.
[00:47:56]  That may or may not have been political.
[00:47:58]  That may have been about sex.
[00:48:00]  Listening to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:48:10]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:48:16]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:48:21]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:48:26]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[00:48:36]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:48:41]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:48:44]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:48:47]  Yeah, it was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:48:49]  That's so funny.
[00:48:50]  Shari, stay with me each night, each morning.
[00:48:59]  Say you love me.
[00:49:02]  You know I.
[00:49:03]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:49:13]  And we're back.

=== Benzene Poisoning in Corpus Christi (14:52) ===

[00:49:15]  Boy, those were some great products and or services.
[00:49:17]  So during the 1970s, the Koch boys are all sort of working at the company.
[00:49:22]  They take it over from their dead dad.
[00:49:24]  Charles is running things and he increasingly takes full control of the operation.
[00:49:29]  And in 1983, Charles and his brother David arrange a $1.1 billion buyout for their brother's shares of the company.
[00:49:36]  This leaves them in control of more than 80% of Koch Industry stock.
[00:49:40]  Now, while Charles and David are equal on paper, insiders report that Charles is the company.
[00:49:46]  Now, I feel like this is a good place to talk about what kind of man Charles is, now that he is a man and not just a kid.
[00:49:54]  Yeah.
[00:49:55]  Not a boy.
[00:49:56]  Not you, the man.
[00:49:57]  Yeah, now he's a man.
[00:49:59]  Now he's a man, and this is the kind of man he is.
[00:50:01]  Because I think that a great way to know someone best, because a lot of people are shitty to their siblings, right?
[00:50:06]  You'd be a good person and terrible to your brother or sister.
[00:50:08]  It's just life.
[00:50:09]  I think a good way to know what kind of a human being someone is is how they treat service industry personnel.
[00:50:14]  So I find this quote from Dark Money to be rather revealing.
[00:50:17]  Quote, a former doorman described Coke as the cheapest person in the building.
[00:50:21]  We would load up his trucks, two vans usually, every weekend for the Hamptons, in and out, in and out, heavy bags.
[00:50:26]  We would never get a tip from Mr. Koch.
[00:50:28]  We would never get a smile from Mr. Coke.
[00:50:30]  For Christmas, which the doorman had anticipated would make up for the year's travails, Coke merely gave him a $50 check.
[00:50:35]  When the documentary aired, this was a documentary where this stuff about how he treated these people came out.
[00:50:40]  When the documentary aired on public broadcasting service in 2012, David Koch was so incensed he resigned from the board of New York's public television station, WNET, reneging on a promise to make a major donation.
[00:50:50]  A spokeswoman at Coke Industries declined to comment on whether the documentary was his reason for punishing the station, but Koch bluntly told one friend about the film it's going to cost them 10 million.
[00:50:59]  Another family friend is quoted as saying, they move in a world with people like them or who want to be.
[00:51:04]  They know no poor people at all.
[00:51:05]  They're not the kind of people who feel obligated to get to know the help.
[00:51:08]  So this is Charles and David Koch.
[00:51:11]  Now, under Charles's rule, Coke Industries expanded from a company worth hundreds of millions to a company worth tens of billions.
[00:51:17]  It's the largest privately owned company in the world right now.
[00:51:20]  In the 1970s and 80s, their business was mostly oil and gas refining.
[00:51:23]  The center of it all was the Pine Bend Refinery, which takes hundreds of thousands of gallons of filthy Canadian crude oil from the tar sands and turns it into usable gas.
[00:51:32]  This process is incredibly wasteful and produces an enormous amount of pollution, but it's also super profitable because you're buying garbage oil from Canada and turning it into primo shit.
[00:51:40]  So, Charles Koch is not just an oil man, he's decided to be like the dirtiest possible version of an oil man.
[00:51:46]  And he does not give one fuck about regulations and rules meant to minimize the environmental harm of his company or do bullshit like protect workers from danger and horrific disease.
[00:51:55]  Starting in the 1970s, OSHA, the organization dedicated to stopping companies from killing their workers, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, put in place new regulations that required companies to give annual blood tests to workers who spent a lot of time around benzene.
[00:52:10]  They're also required to warn these employees if the tests show any abnormalities so that the employees can receive medical treatment before they get full on blood cancer or whatever, right?
[00:52:19]  Coke Refining Company offered these tests, but they didn't do such a good job about letting employees know when they had irregular results.
[00:52:26]  Sometimes they just wouldn't tell them.
[00:52:28]  So Donald Carlson, a dedicated employee with decades in the job, was not informed when his results showed abnormal blood cell counts in 1990.
[00:52:35]  He wasn't warned about this until 1994 when he started to get sick.
[00:52:39]  Yeah.
[00:52:39]  Well, because you want to get those extra couple of years out of them, right?
[00:52:42]  This is disgusting.
[00:52:44]  Yeah, it's pretty bad.
[00:52:46]  It's pretty bad.
[00:52:47]  These guys are disgusting.
[00:52:48]  Yeah, they're really terrible.
[00:52:50]  Now, Donald continued to work after he got sick.
[00:52:54]  So he was doing his job while receiving massive frequent blood transfusions.
[00:52:58]  He loved his job.
[00:52:59]  His job was like scrubbing out these cleaning tanks from a refinery and stuff.
[00:53:03]  Like he was doing dirty work, but he was just a working-class guy who wanted to do his job and take care of his family.
[00:53:09]  He took pride in it.
[00:53:10]  He took pride in it.
[00:53:11]  He was the best case scenario.
[00:53:13]  If you're like a big capitalist boss, he was your best case scenario of an employee.
[00:53:17]  But in 1996, he got too sick to work anymore.
[00:53:20]  He was immediately fired and given six months severance pay, which almost sounds generous, given the Koch brothers being the Koch brothers.
[00:53:28]  But it turns out this was just his accumulated sick pay leave that they were legally required to pay out.
[00:53:32]  They gave him nothing that they weren't required to give him.
[00:53:34]  Now, Carlson filed for workman's comp, which seems like a jab-related illness, getting blood poisoning from horrific benzene exposure.
[00:53:43]  But Coke Refining refused.
[00:53:44]  They weren't about to pay his medical bills or give benefits to his wife and daughter.
[00:53:48]  They denied that his illness had anything to do with the fact that he'd been covered in poison for years.
[00:53:53]  He died in 1997, leaving his family destitute.
[00:53:56]  His wife continued to fight the company for some restitution.
[00:53:59]  They eventually settled with her for an undisclosed amount.
[00:54:02]  Now, during my research for this, I found an article on benzene exposure from the Center for Public Integrity.
[00:54:07]  It had Facebook comments enabled, and one of the commenters on the article was a woman named Mary Arneson.
[00:54:12]  Now, Mary is a preventative medicine physician who testified against Coke Industries during the Carlson case.
[00:54:17]  So she wrote in the comments to this article about her experience testifying against Coke Industries in this blood poisoning case.
[00:54:24]  Quote, I was shocked by the behavior of Koch's hired gun hematologist who concealed the blood monitoring results that showed his worsening anemia and by that doctor's blaming cigarette smoking, much lower benzene exposure than waiting through spilled gasoline for his eventual development of leukemia.
[00:54:39]  When it became obvious that I was on my way to testify against Coke, they withdrew their objection to his widow's claim for work comp benefits and payment of his medical bills.
[00:54:47]  I still see.
[00:54:48]  I hate Coke.
[00:54:49]  So basically, up until they were forced to by the courts, they were lying and saying the fact that this guy had smoked cigarettes is why he got leukemia.
[00:54:57]  The fact that he was literally almost bathing in benzene.
[00:55:01]  Yeah.
[00:55:01]  Very heavy.
[00:55:02]  Yeah, so they're not, they're not.
[00:55:03]  They kind of started.
[00:55:04]  They were definitely in on that trend that a lot of big companies follow today.
[00:55:10]  They were pioneers.
[00:55:11]  Oh, yeah.
[00:55:12]  These boys.
[00:55:13]  Coach boys, pioneer boys.
[00:55:14]  Yeah.
[00:55:15]  Yeah.
[00:55:15]  Coke boys are on the cutting edge of fucking over their workers and letting hazardous chemical exposure kill people.
[00:55:23]  They might be the Michael Jordans of hazardous chemical exposure.
[00:55:26]  Slam dunk.
[00:55:27]  Yes.
[00:55:28]  There you go.
[00:55:29]  Maybe the Scotty Pippin of three pointer.
[00:55:36]  So, oh, you're from Texas too.
[00:55:37]  So this will be fun.
[00:55:38]  Coke Industries also owned a big refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas.
[00:55:42]  Now, how would you describe sort of the attitude towards Corpus Christi within Texas?
[00:55:47]  Corpus Christi is like your spring bake kind of vacation.
[00:55:52]  Yeah.
[00:55:52]  That in Galveston, Mustang Island.
[00:55:55]  Yeah.
[00:55:55]  I went once, you know, it's like all the high school kids like, oh, no, Corpus.
[00:55:59]  Yeah, and they're okay.
[00:56:00]  It's an okay place.
[00:56:02]  Yeah.
[00:56:02]  The water is kind of gross compared to like Hawaii or the West Coast.
[00:56:06]  Gross Hawaii would not be a bad way to describe it.
[00:56:08]  Yeah, it's gross Hawaii.
[00:56:10]  My brother is actually a tankerman on ships and he goes out and I'm always worried about.
[00:56:14]  Because he's right in the thick of that.
[00:56:16]  Yeah, but I'm always kind of worried about like chemical exposure.
[00:56:19]  Yeah.
[00:56:20]  Yeah.
[00:56:20]  I mean, that seems totally reasonable because there's a lot of refining and a lot of gross stuff going on.
[00:56:26]  For sure would not want to swim in that water.
[00:56:28]  And looking back, I'm like, why would you go?
[00:56:30]  Why did my parents let me swim in that bay?
[00:56:33]  It's just poison.
[00:56:34]  It's in Galveston, too.
[00:56:35]  Yeah.
[00:56:36]  Anyways.
[00:56:37]  Yeah, no, absolutely.
[00:56:38]  And the Koch brothers are a big part of why it is that way.
[00:56:41]  Cool.
[00:56:42]  Yeah, yeah, it's great.
[00:56:43]  It's great.
[00:56:45]  Yeah, so they had a big refinery in Corpus Christi that was, quote, hemorrhaging benzene into the air, which is a great thing to do with benzene is hemorrhage.
[00:56:53]  A 1995 regulation required them to reduce emissions.
[00:56:56]  So they just lied about how bad the emissions were when they filed their reports with the Texas National Resource Conservation Commission, which is fun.
[00:57:04]  Yeah.
[00:57:04]  They said they were putting out less poison than they were and assumed it'd be fine.
[00:57:08]  So a lawyer within the company, within Coke Industries, actually called them out for lying to the government and was like, we can't defend this in court.
[00:57:16]  This is just fraud.
[00:57:18]  So Coke Industries sent in one of their own people to actually figure out how much the factory was polluting over the limit.
[00:57:23]  This report revealed horrific levels of benzene.
[00:57:26]  Rather than report this, Coke Industries just decided to lie again and say their emissions were one 149th of what their own people had found.
[00:57:33]  So they're not just lying by a little bit.
[00:57:36]  They are.
[00:57:37]  Holy shit.
[00:57:38]  Like I said, they're the Scotty Pippin of poison.
[00:57:41]  Well, I said Michael Jordan.
[00:57:42]  I don't know much about that.
[00:57:43]  Man, they're all about it.
[00:57:44]  That's a half point slam dunk shot right there.
[00:57:48]  Swish, nothing but net.
[00:57:50]  I assume that's all above board and accurate.
[00:57:53]  Yeah.
[00:57:54]  The employee who'd done the research wound up blowing the whistle and in 2000 Coke Industries was indicted on 97 counts of being shady as fuck.
[00:58:02]  During the trial, it was revealed that just refitting the refinery to make it put out the legal amount of emissions would have cost $7 million, which seems expensive, but that's...
[00:58:11]  That's not.
[00:58:11]  No, no, it's not.
[00:58:12]  It's not.
[00:58:14]  Wow.
[00:58:14]  Yeah.
[00:58:15]  So this is, they were willing to lie and put out huge amounts of poison rather than spend $7 million on a refinery that made $176 million in annual profits.
[00:58:26]  So it's not a big drop in the bucket.
[00:58:28]  No, you know, it's not even a drop in the bucket.
[00:58:30]  No.
[00:58:30]  I found a quarter outside.
[00:58:33]  That's finding a quarter outside.
[00:58:35]  Yeah.
[00:58:36]  Or losing a quarter.
[00:58:37]  Yeah.
[00:58:37]  You're like, oh man, a quarter.
[00:58:38]  That's laundry.
[00:58:39]  But they are like, what's laundry?
[00:58:41]  You know?
[00:58:42]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:58:42]  They burn their clothing after wearing it.
[00:58:44]  Yeah.
[00:58:45]  So when everything shook out, they wound up paying about $10 million in fees and another $10 million to make Corpus Christi a little bit cleaner.
[00:58:52]  So on the surface, it doesn't seem to make a lot of economic sense what they're doing.
[00:58:56]  $7 million, because they had to wind up doing the refitting anyway.
[00:58:59]  So they paid $7 million to comply with emissions requirements and then another $20 million in fines, which means they spent four or five times more than what the repairs would have cost because they decided to break the law.
[00:59:10]  So it might seem, when you look at it that way, that this was just a bad gamble by Charles Koch.
[00:59:15]  But Charles Koch doesn't make bad gambles and he doesn't flout regulations to save money.
[00:59:20]  He does so because ignoring government regulations is basically his religion.
[00:59:25]  Like, it's like being a billionaire who doesn't comply with the government is like his, that's his Jedi faith.
[00:59:31]  Like, what are you going to do about it?
[00:59:32]  Yeah.
[00:59:32]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:59:33]  He's the Luke Skywalker of polluting.
[00:59:36]  Yeah.
[00:59:37]  Yeah.
[00:59:38]  So we can get an understanding of Charles Koch's thinking during his first couple of decades in charge of Koch Industries by reading the stuff that he was writing at the time.
[00:59:45]  So in 1978, he contributed an article to The Libertarian Reader.
[00:59:49]  To give you an idea of the intellectual tenor of this publication, an ad on the second page is titled, Let's Hear It for the First Amendment.
[00:59:56]  While we still can.
[00:59:57]  Here's how it opens.
[00:59:58]  Government censorship is about to take a great leap forward.
[01:00:02]  A government agency, the Federal Communications Commission, believes it has the right to act as our parents and restrict the broadcast of certain words at times when children just might be listening.
[01:00:12]  There's a box in the middle of the ad that just says banned with a question mark and then has a list of works, including The Bible, Ernest Hemingway, Chaucer.
[01:00:21]  You know that big campaign to ban Chaucer.
[01:00:23]  Wow.
[01:00:24]  George Orwell and the Nixon Watergate tapes, all of which are still legal.
[01:00:28]  It ends with a plea for money that says, this coupon fights censorship.
[01:00:33]  Yes, I want to help save the public airway from the obscenity of government control.
[01:00:38]  Here's my tax deductible.
[01:00:39]  And tax deductible is italicized.
[01:00:41]  Contribution of.
[01:00:42]  Yeah.
[01:00:43]  So that's the first ad in the Libertarian Reader, the issue that Charles Koch submitted an article called The Business Community Resisting Regulation.
[01:00:52]  That's all the S's are Z's, right?
[01:00:57]  You imagine this is like a zine.
[01:01:00]  Z?
[01:01:00]  No, just for the coach boys.
[01:01:03]  Coke boys.
[01:01:04]  Coke boys.
[01:01:06]  Business.
[01:01:08]  No, this article was part of a series called Toward the Second American Revolution, Libertarian Strategies for Today.
[01:01:16]  And in this article, Koch rails against what he calls political capitalism, which he defines as a terrible state of affairs wherein businesses work with the government and don't reject all regulation out of hand.
[01:01:27]  Quote, the final stage of political capitalism is even worse.
[01:01:31]  Richard Ferris, president of United Airlines, an exception in his industry, predicts continued government control would mean airline service as you know it today will be seriously jeopardized.
[01:01:41]  And as service and equipment deteriorate, you will stand by helplessly as the threat of nationalization becomes reality.
[01:01:46]  No.
[01:01:47]  You remember when the government took over all the airlines?
[01:01:49]  I do.
[01:01:49]  Yeah.
[01:01:50]  It was a bad thing.
[01:01:51]  No.
[01:01:52]  If the airlines had remained private companies, I'm sure there would be a lot of legroom on flights.
[01:01:59]  Good food, high-quality customer service.
[01:02:02]  People would not get dragged out of flights because they got overbooked.
[01:02:05]  This makes me sick.
[01:02:08]  In his article, Charles argues that businessmen should refuse subsidies from the government, so they shouldn't even take money from the government, and refuse to comply with regulations, even ones that benefit their particular business or hurt a competitor.
[01:02:20]  The goal is reducing taxes and thus reducing the government.
[01:02:23]  Nothing else matters.
[01:02:25]  Regulators must be battled.
[01:02:26]  Regulators!
[01:02:29]  They have to be battled at all costs.
[01:02:31]  Fred Koch said this.
[01:02:34]  Do not cooperate voluntarily.
[01:02:36]  Instead, resist wherever and to whatever extent you legally can, and do so in the name of justice.
[01:02:43]  I love this.
[01:02:45]  This is insane.
[01:02:47]  Yeah, like that's why I'm making like the Star Wars comparisons.
[01:02:50]  He views himself as like a rebel fighting this evil empire.
[01:02:53]  But the evil empire is being like, you should pay for old people to have health care, billionaire.
[01:02:58]  And he's like, I will not have empathy.
[01:03:00]  You spilled too much poison into the water.
[01:03:02]  You have to pay for that.
[01:03:04]  They shouldn't have been living in Corpus Christi.
[01:03:07]  Why can't they be in the Hamptons?
[01:03:08]  I don't pollute there.
[01:03:09]  Yeah.
[01:03:10]  Wish I had like a neck vein that would just pop.
[01:03:15]  It is hard to imagine any of the things that he's written.
[01:03:20]  Because I read a couple of articles Charles Koch read, and it's hard to imagine him not screaming them to you.
[01:03:25]  Like that's always the tenor at which he writes.
[01:03:28]  It's always like everything will be nationalized and the government will destroy private innovation and whatnot if we don't resist.
[01:03:36]  And he does use that like resist language a lot.
[01:03:39]  He's described in Dark Money as almost being... being like a Lenin Marx sort of theorist where he has these very strict ideas on sort of the way societies evolve and the way things happen in history.
[01:03:57]  But rather than sort of applying it within the context of, you know, obviously like communist theory or whatnot, he has his own sort of like far-right libertarian theory.
[01:04:06]  But it is a very...

=== Refusing Compliance for Principle (02:54) ===

[01:04:07]  Yeah.
[01:04:08]  Yeah.
[01:04:09]  He's, again, it's not about denying these regulations, like refusing to comply with these regulations is not about money to him.
[01:04:17]  It's about the principle.
[01:04:18]  Yeah, it is, isn't it?
[01:04:19]  Yeah.
[01:04:20]  It's always about the principle.
[01:04:21]  Yeah.
[01:04:21]  Yeah.
[01:04:22]  He's willing to spend more money to stick a finger at the government.
[01:04:26]  Yeah.
[01:04:26]  Just resist at all costs.
[01:04:28]  Dude, I get it, man.
[01:04:29]  Yeah.
[01:04:30]  Do you?
[01:04:33]  I don't get inheriting hundreds of millions of dollars and not just being like, oh, sweet.
[01:04:37]  I lucked out.
[01:04:38]  I'm just going to have fun.
[01:04:40]  I mean, I get wanting to be smart with your money and doing it.
[01:04:43]  And I wish I had more of a monetary education or a financial education.
[01:04:49]  To the point where you're just dicking over and forgetting the human experience or being so devoid is he's almost like a serial killer.
[01:05:00]  You know, they have no to sort of like compare that mental state, except he's got money.
[01:05:05]  I mean, he's killing people.
[01:05:06]  Maybe some of it inadvertently, but definitely through.
[01:05:09]  Yeah.
[01:05:10]  I mean, he might be, I don't know.
[01:05:12]  Like, I always try to hesitate from like diagnosing people and stuff, but it is worth noting that there is scientific research that suggests access to wealth reduces empathy.
[01:05:23]  Say that to Bruce Wayne.
[01:05:25]  Well, you know, he was a rich dude, and guess what?
[01:05:27]  He turned out to be Batman.
[01:05:29]  Well, yeah, but Batman just beats up poor people.
[01:05:31]  No, Batman takes care of the poor, and Wayne Industries really looks out for people.
[01:05:40]  Don't you speak ill of Wayne Industries, too.
[01:05:43]  You're right.
[01:05:43]  You're right.
[01:05:43]  And I do make a Batman reference later.
[01:05:45]  That's coming up.
[01:05:47]  We have a lot more Coke to talk about.
[01:05:48]  We have so much Coke to talk about that there's going to be another two points.
[01:05:54]  I need a break.
[01:05:55]  Yeah, you need to take a chill pill, have a nice cup of Doritos.
[01:06:01]  I love Dorito soup.
[01:06:02]  We all love Dorito soup.
[01:06:03]  Between you and me, sometimes I'll boil water and throw in a bunch of nacho cheese Doritos flavored chips and let all that flavor, you know, get off the chip and then this chip dissolves and then I eat it like a soup.
[01:06:15]  Ooh, now that sounds lovely.
[01:06:17]  And you know what I dip in that soup?
[01:06:18]  Doritos?
[01:06:19]  Yes.
[01:06:20]  You know what I have actually done is taken Doritos and made Migas with them.
[01:06:24]  Wow.
[01:06:24]  That's pretty damn good, actually.
[01:06:27]  Copyright that.
[01:06:27]  Yeah.
[01:06:28]  I mean, Doritos ought to copyright that.
[01:06:31]  That's another free thing I'm offering you, Doritos.
[01:06:34]  Doritos, Migas.
[01:06:35]  You know what's not free?
[01:06:38]  These ads.
[01:06:38]  Oh, no, we're not breaking into ads.
[01:06:40]  Oh, I thought we were breaking into ads.
[01:06:41]  It's the end of the episode.
[01:06:42]  Oh, it's the end of the episode.
[01:06:43]  It's the end of part one.
[01:06:45]  I'm so excited to break into ads.
[01:06:47]  In part two, we're going to be talking about the 1980 election where Charles' brother David ran for vice president of the United States.
[01:06:54]  We will be talking about the Koch brothers' establishment of an empire of think tanks and educational institutions.

=== End of Part One: 1980 Election (03:32) ===

[01:07:02]  And we will, of course, talk about more people that their flooding of regulations got killed.
[01:07:07]  So all of that and more in part two.
[01:07:10]  But first, you want to plug some pluggables?
[01:07:12]  Like ads?
[01:07:13]  Well, your ads.
[01:07:14]  Ads for your thing.
[01:07:15]  People can find you on the interweb.
[01:07:16]  I'm so excited to roll those ads.
[01:07:20]  You're really wanting to support the show.
[01:07:23]  You can find me on the internet.
[01:07:24]  I'm in a movie on Netflix called The Fields, F-E-E-L-S, with some really fun folks.
[01:07:32]  And you can find me on Instagram, Twitter, at E-V-E-R, M-A-I-N-A-R-D.
[01:07:38]  Yeah, I do a lot of shows around town and I have a lot of fun.
[01:07:42]  Awesome.
[01:07:43]  Well, you can find us on the internet at behindthebastards.com.
[01:07:47]  All of the many, many sources, including some writings of Charles Koch that were sources for this episode will be up there.
[01:07:52]  You'll find some pictures too.
[01:07:54]  You can also find us on social media at BastardsPod.
[01:07:57]  You can find me at IWriteOK.
[01:08:01]  And yeah, we will be back on Thursday talking more Coke.
[01:08:06]  So get coked out with us later this week.
[01:08:19]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[01:08:27]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:08:30]  He is not going to get away with this.
[01:08:32]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:08:34]  We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
[01:08:38]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:08:40]  Trust me, babe.
[01:08:41]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:08:51]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
[01:08:55]  This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[01:08:59]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
[01:09:06]  An in-depth conversation with the man who's shaping our future.
[01:09:09]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[01:09:12]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[01:09:21]  Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
[01:09:26]  Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
[01:09:29]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[01:09:32]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[01:09:34]  That's so funny.
[01:09:36]  Sherry stay with me each night, each morning.
[01:09:44]  Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:09:52]  What's up, everyone?
[01:09:52]  I'm Ego Mode.
[01:09:54]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[01:09:58]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[01:10:01]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[01:10:02]  But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[01:10:09]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[01:10:12]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[01:10:19]  Yeah, it would not be.
[01:10:21]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[01:10:22]  There's a lot of life.
[01:10:23]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:10:30]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[01:10:33]  Guaranteed human.