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My name is Alex Fumero and I host the new podcast more than a movie, American Me, a film directed by and starring Edward James Olmos. I'll be diving into the behind the scenes controversy, including an alleged backlash from the Mexican mafia. Several people who worked on the movie have been murdered. I don't want to speak about why would people be murdered for being in a movie. Listen to more than a movie, American me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her social discoveries on chimpanzees. So four whole months, the chimps ran away from me. I mean, they take one look at this peculiar white ape and disappear into the vegetation. Bing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Lauren Ober, and in addition to being a charming podcast host, I am also a newly diagnosed autistic person. My new show, the loudest girl in the world, is all about my weird, winding path to diagnosis. My decision at age 42 to finally get evaluated for autism. Listen to the loudest girl in the world on the iHeartRadio. Map Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello friends, I'm Robert Evans and this is behind the ******** the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. 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. My guest is coming in cold, and this week my guest is ever Maynard, Star of the Fields on Netflix. Comedian, writer and improviser. Improviser. Stand up. Stand up. Performer. Performer. Actress. Actress. Yeah. More. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I'm a double actress. Wow, this guy. Let's talk about someone who's not a hero or a heroine, but but who will make you want to shoot up some heroin. Charles coke. Yeah. Today's episode is titled Charles Koch, the Luke Skywalker of rich people. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. Before we get into this. I have some Nacho cheese Doritos ever. Are you are you a fan of Nacho Cheese Doritos? I'm not really digging those right now. I go through phases. That's not gonna help us getting a sponsorship deal. Ohh, I love Nacho cheese Doritos. Sometimes I mix Nacho cheese Doritos with cool Ranch Doritos and really have a party in the mouth Doritos. The chips for everyone nailed it. And I'm going to do I'm going to do a sound effect and do ASMR. I didn't know you were doing that. This is the sound of ever enjoying a delicious Doritos chip. I love Nacho cheese flavored chips. Corn chips. Well, now that we're fortified, Are you ready to dig into the tail of Charles? Joke. Oh yeah, alright. There's nothing sexier than being a rebel. That's why Hollywood has, for decades, glorified gangsters and pirates. It's why the lost cause myth of the Confederacy still has traction. That's why people are so eager to identify with the #resistance. There's something deep in the marrow of our nation that makes Americans want to be seen as plucky resistance fighters, each flinging towards their own personal death stars. But what happens when your entire existence is the antithesis of rebellion? What happens if you, through sheer accident of birth, wind up with hundreds of millions of dollars? Oddly enough, that guy can and will find some way to make himself feel like a rebel. 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. 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 US government as we know it. I don't see a problem so far. You're on board with this guy so far? Yeah. I mean, yeah. You agree with rich people really taking one for the team, man? **** those guys. See what I mean? Already getting hated on. I feel you're rich people. What's up? Yeah. Yeah. No, they're they've taken too much. But yeah. OK. 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. If you're going to talk about sexual assault in Hollywood, Ronan Farrow is going to come up a lot. If you're going to talk about Blackwater and Erik Prince, Jeremy Scahill's going to come up a lot. And for the Koch brothers, it's a reporter named Jane Mayer. She wrote a book, dark money, in 2016 that delved into their past and the network of. Millionaire influencers they assembled to change American politics. If you have read a long, scary article about the Koch brothers and Politico, or The New Yorker, or pretty much anywhere else, there's a very good chance she wrote it. So she's we. We owe her a lot on this podcast, and Dark money is a big source here. Now, our story today begins back before any of the Koch brothers were born. In 1927, Fred Koch, the patriarch of the Koch family, invented a new way to refine crude oil into gasoline. Alas, this scientific breakthrough made him a threat to the big oil companies. And since this was the 20s. Everyone was even more corrupt than they are now. He was boxed out of the industry and sued into oblivion for patent infringement and other nonsense. So, so far not looking good for these guys. No, it seems like there's no way to pull themselves out of this hole. I'm nervous, but just wait. 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, and like 30s money, which is. You know, pretty, pretty good money to have a million. Enough. They won because it was found out that the oil companies had bribed one of the judges who'd initially ruled against him. In her book Dark Money, mayor quotes a family friend of the coaches saying the fact that the judge was bribed completely altered their view of justice. They believed justice can be bought and the rules are for chumps, which they are. We can all agree the rules are for chumps, but maybe that makes more sense when you're jaywalking, less when you're. So far, I'm so on board. I don't see what the problem. Yes. Yeah. I mean, look, Fred was screwed, OK? This is so far. He's he's the hero of the story so far. He's fighting oil company. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm on board with Fred Koch. So far. Yeah. He just pulled some money out of their hiding and he went to the dark side because he was like, wait a minute, you can buy justice? Well, that's kind of exact. Well, First off, while he's still mired in this law stuff, he finds himself hard up for some money, you know? Course, of course, because he's fighting the oil companies. That's not easy. Got called JG Wentworth, he did call it Jay, but the the last name was Stalin, OK or rather Joseph Stalin called him because the Soviet Union was just starting to be a thing at this point 1930 and they sent Fred Coca Telegram being like, hey, we could use some help making some refineries and you seem pretty good at refining oil. And Fred, Fred was not Red did not like the communists, but he was sympathetic to their money and they agreed to pay him half $1,000,000 cash in advance. So he helped them. Refine a bunch of oil and build like his company, Winkler Coke trained Soviet engineers and helped put together 15 new oil refineries inside the USSR. So yeah, he does this work for the Soviets. It's great. If you hop over to cokeend.com kochind.com the Coke Industries website, you can find a timeline of the company history and in the 1920s thirty section of the timeline there are two entries, one for 1925 when Coke Winkler was formed and another for 1929 to 32 when they took on their work. For Joseph Stalin and the USSR. OK, then the timeline jumps to 1940 in a parade of boring oil acquisitions. Now the timeline of the company website leaves out a job. OK, tell me about it. Yeah, yeah, and this job occurred in the mid 1930s. In 1934, Winkler Coke Engineering won a contract to help design and construct an oil refinery in Hamburg, Germany. Now the company that hired. Weird that they leave that one out, yeah? That sucks. Yeah. So yeah, the 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. Most of the Republican Party doesn't like to acknowledge no, and you can definitely find some ties to the bushes as well. So now in 1934, the company that hired Kochs company was an American company as well. It was run by a guy named William Davis, who was a big time Nazi sympathizer, and he was trying to help Germany's oil industry get off the ground. Now, back in World War One, Germany had starved halfway to death under a brutal British naval blockade. Germany's inability to feed its people and supply its military without trade was a huge source of concern. Great off Hitler and the Nazis. Hitler's goal in the 1930s in the pre war period was for Germany to reach a state of autarky or self-sufficiency 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. So Hitler was, you know, modernizing the German military and buying a metric ******** of tanks and airplanes. So gasoline factored heavily in his plans for autarky. This was not hidden news at the time. The President of 1 American Bank refused to fund Davis's planned refinery because he didn't want to help the Nazis. The arm other people eventually did put up the cash, though, and Fred Koch played it integral role in planning and building the new refinery, which would go on to become the third largest refinery in the Third Reich. The factory that coke built for Hitler didn't just make a lot of fuel, it made high octane fuel, the kind of fuel you'd use to, say, keep the lift off of lying. You would almost compare it to drinking Celsius, but I won't. No, we can. We can talk **** on Celsius unless they start offering us money. No, I'm talking about being high octane. I'm jacked. So Fred Koch went on to Ladley regret his work with the Soviet Union in the years past. But he never really talked much about what he'd done with the Nazis, at least after the fact. The time that he'd spent in the repressive Soviet regime seemed to have a huge impact on him. He would, you know, constantly talk about the dangers of government control and what was bad about having, you know, too large of a government. But he didn't hate all governments, just the socialist ones. In 1938, he visited several countries, including Imperial Japan and New Zealand. He described New Zealand as, quote, violently socialistic, but he wrote this in a letter to his mentor about. Japan, Germany and Italy, 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. The laboring people in those countries are so proportionately much better off than they are any place else in the world. 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, through dependence on government, etcetera, with which we are afflicted is not permanent and can be overcome. So that's Fred Koch. And, like, wouldn't it be great if we could get rid of the New deal and be like the Nazis? Yeah, that's where his head is in 1938. Now, World War Two happened, and Fred Coe, yeah, Fred Koch pulled away on on sympathizing with the Nazis openly. The refinery he'd helped to build was destroyed in June of 1944, after years of being targeted by the Allies, 42,000 civilians died in various Allied raids on the city that the refinery was in. Coke stopped talking openly about fascism, but continued to warn the world about socialism. According to the 2014 books Sons of Wichita, Fred became convinced that a global war between capitalism. And socialism was inevitable. Well quote, I think these times are far more serious than even civil war days, he confided to a friend and retired army officer. That was merely to decide whether we were going to be 1 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. Maybe the most someone can misunderstand the civil war. Actually, that one was about slaves. Freddie. Whoops. Dude, this Fred dude, man, not what's your vibe on him so far? Well, went downhill very fast. Yeah, you're on board with him at first, yeah, I was like, OK, cool, you you're a scientist. You're figuring out what a way to turn crude oil in the gasoline, whatever. You're getting screwed over by the oil company. A lot of people are alright on to my boyfriend. Yeah, he's not my boy. Well, no, he's he's 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. He didn't marry a woman, Mary Robinson, in 1932. He was pretty brutal to her based on sort of the recollections that we have. I don't think what he did would have been considered spousal abuse in 1930s, but I think we would consider it spousal abuse today and Ditto times have changed. A hit is not a hit in the 30s if it's to a woman, but now a hit is a hit to a woman. And I think he was more of the shouty, emotionally abusive he is emotionally OK. He was physically abusive to his kids too, which were we'll get to. Yeah. Yeah. So Fred and Mary had four sons, Frederick, Charles, David and William. David and. They were twins. Mary had an active social life and was gone frequently. Fred was also always on business trips, so the kids were raised largely by an assortment of nannies and help rather than their parents. Or what kind of impact? It probably have a lot of abandonment issues and probably trust issues going on. You think so? Yeah. Well, I don't know. I'm just gonna 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. OK, yeah, just unrelated passage sponsored by Doritos. Alienating effects of wealth and modernity on the human experience start virtually at birth and never let up. Infants and hunter gatherer societies are carried by their mothers as much as 90% of the time, which roughly corresponds to carrying rates among other primates. 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. So 16% is what a normal kid in America is getting physical contact with their parents being raised. The coaches are being raised by a nanny and dark money does not make this nanny sound like the cuddling kind. So I think these kids are spinning pretty much all of their time isolated. Quote The nannies iron rule terrified the little boys. According to a family acquaintance, in addition to being overbearing, she was a fervent Nazi sympathizer who frequently touted Hitler's virtues. Dressed in a starch white uniform and pointed nurses hat, she arrived with a stash of gruesome German children books, including the Victorian classic Dear Strule Peter, that featured sadistic consequences for misbehavior ranging from cutting off 1 child's thumbs to burning another to death. The acquaintance recalled that the nurse had a commensurately harsh and dictatorial approach to child rearing. 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. So that's the first five or six years of the Koch Brothers's lives. Wow. Yeah. I didn't know there were four of them, and that's what I take away from that whole thing. Well, there are four. There are four. Yeah. The Koch brothers that people famously talk about are two of them, Charles and David. The others were not nearly as involved in politics. Yeah. That's so sad. Yeah, it's a bummer. So it's, I think, important to get that. Background, because we talk about a lot of terrible **** they've done. It's kind of hard to imagine anyone turning out without some weird quirks growing up in that circumstance, can't we say? Yeah, so the Nazi sympathizer Fred Koch hired to raise his kids while he was busy doing business and I capitalized business, it's biggby business, for sure. 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. She said she wanted to celebrate with Hitler. Wow, dude could party. I wouldn't. No, because he couldn't. No, I wouldn't want to party with him. Yeah, I mean, on a serious note, on the record, I do not want to party with Hitler. I wanna party with Stalin. Like, he was a bad dude, too. But the drinking bouts that you hear described that the Russian high count sound sound like something I want to witness. I've never seen that ohg, man. Ohh it was. We have a whole episode about it. But they would take a list. They were the drunkest people in history. But no Hitler, not fun to party with. Doesn't sound like this lady was either. No. So when he was home, Fred Koch was a strict disciplinarian. Yeah. Sorry. I'm really riveted by this story. I'm like, looking at you. Big doe eyes. Wow. Tell me more. So yeah, Fred Koch was a strict disciplinarian. And in the context of this podcast, disciplinarian means child abuser pretty much 100% of the time. Go ahead and say that he was a child abuser. He abused his kids. One family member recalls him ripping the branch off a tree and whipping the twins quote like dogs because they stained the patio and not stained. And the yeah, but they spilled something, spilled something. Yeah. In summer, rather than let his kids play with neighbors, he made them dig holes and shovel manure. His biggest fear was that they turn out to be, quote, Country Club bums. Like most rich kids. Wow. Yeah. 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. By the time I was eight, he made sure work occupied most of my spare time. Wow. Yeah, little hands. 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 what how difficult it is to have to, like, make rent and pay for your healthcare and ****. So a lot of me is 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. And this is proof that you can go way too far in the other direction. 8 year old shouldn't be working all the time. Holy smoke. Yeah. Yeah, it's dark. I mean, I had to do some of that growing up, but nothing too much. Like, I grew up in Texas, so, like, oh, same here. Oh, wow. What part of Dallas, mostly. OK, mostly Dallas area. OK, very cool. I'm from a little town. Optina, or Temple, is office 35. Spent a lot of time in Temple near Austin. Yeah. Yeah. From a small town outside of time. OK, cool. So a lot of summer is really helping my grandpa on the farm. Yeah. And I I spent a lot of time in Oklahoma as a little kid, and we had a farm. Like, it's good to have those experiences, but not all the time. Not all the time you should come on, man. Yeah, OK. So it seems like too far in the other direction, too much compensating. So yeah, children being forced to labor will become something of a theme later in Charles's life. Just put a pin in that so the young Coke boys spend a lot of time boxing each other. This is one of the few non work activities that their father encouraged. Charles usually won these matches, but once his younger brother Bill was able to beat him and Charles stopped boxing forever. Does not like being right. Yeah. Charles had a somewhat adversarial relationship with his oldest brother, Frederick, who was more sensitive than the other boys. He also didn't get along with Bill. David Koch seems to be basically the only person Charles Koch ever sort of liked. Yeah. And Charles and David are, again the the Koch brothers. Big boys. Yeah. 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. Whether Bill if he stayed at home, he was shifted around several schools, including a public school, but always kept getting kicked out due to bad behavior. He finally wound up in a Military Academy, where he did well until he was expelled for drinking on a train. Alcohol, I assume, unless trains were. Yeah. Charles's behavior was met with correspondingly severe punishments from his father. Eventually the discipline seemed to take hold and Charles started to do better at school. 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 his brother Freddie, who just take a guess as to what sensitive means in the parlance of yeah, that was the theory and this was the idea that the brothers had. So we'll be getting into all of that and as well as how Charles Koch wound up getting some people killed through regulatory ******* and and a bunch of other fun stuff, including some quotations from the libertarian reader in some articles. Charles wrote for that. So a lot of fun stuff coming up. Cool. Can't wait. But before we get into that, it's time for some ads that actually paid US money. I love it. I 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. I love Nacho cheese. Oh my God, my favorite is with the lingering taste in the tongue and then when I get to lick my fingers, the best part? I'd love to do that right before I meet people and I still have like a little bit of chip in my teeth, my back teeth. I love it. It's like it's a little bit of extra confidence going into that. I'm always confident when I have my Doritos, Nacho cheese, corn chips. It's like there's a party in my mouth and Hitler is not invited. No way. But maybe Stalinist. Not for me. All right, here's some ads. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family and at Mint. Families start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any mint mobile plan and keep your same phone number along with all your existing contacts. Just switch to Mint mobile and get premium wireless service starting at 15 bucks a month. Get premium wireless service from just $15.00 a month and no one expected plot twists at mintmobile.com/behind. That's mintmobile.com/behind. Seriously, you'll make your wallet very happy at Mint Mobile. Com slash behind. So by now we imagine that you've seen the theories on tick tock. You maybe even heard the rumors, your friends and loved ones. But are any of the stories about government conspiracies and cover ups actually true? The answer is surprisingly or unsurprisingly, yes. For more than a decade, we here at stuff they don't want you to know have been seeking answers to these questions, sometimes their answers that people would rather us not explore. Now we're sharing this research with you. For the first time ever in a book format, you can preorder stuff they don't want you to know. Now it's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. Hey, it's Roy Wood, junior, host of The Daily Show podcast beyond the scenes, and we are back for season 2. Beyond the scenes is the podcast where we go even deeper into segments and topics we covered on the show, but there are topics that deserve a little more time, a little more finessing details, you know? So this season, we're bringing on more Daily Show writers, producers and correspondents. We're bringing on more experts to drop knowledge on all sorts of topics you're going to get. The knowledge that you can't get anywhere else. We breaking it down the season 2. We talking gentrification, we talk in gun laws, book banning, the Black Trail Blazers in fashion, all the trash ways that people treat flight attendants as well. And shout out to the flight attendants. How are you keeping us safe and still got time to give me a biscoff cookie? Respect. Listen to beyond the scenes on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It don't matter where you get it, baby. Just find us. And we're back 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. We talked some about his parenting strategies and the Koch boys nanny. And we've just gotten through Charles Koch's kind of troubled time in school. You know, he spent a lot of time getting kicked out of different educational institutions for being too rowdy and now a major source for the book Dark Money and. This podcast, as a result, was an unpublished report about Charles Koch written by a professor named Clayton Coppin. Coppin had been first hired by Koch Industries to write it in history of the corporation, and he'd get access to a lot of internal family documents. So give me more. Yeah. He was next hired by Bill Koch to basically write an opposition research piece on Charles Koch because the Koch brothers hate each other. I didn't know that. Yeah. Yeah. We'll be getting into that just now. Bill. Yeah. Hired him and said, dude, I know you've been digging around our family. Three? Yeah. We got all our stuff on the website. That's pretty cool, by the way. I want you to here's everything I got on my brother. Let me guess. This dude's dead now, isn't he? Is this dude dead? No. No. Coppins alive? Yeah, OK. Barely. Yeah, yeah. OK. Tell me more. Or at least as far as I know Coppins alive. Anyway. The the report that he wrote was like a book length report. It's unpublished, but mayor, the journalist who wrote dark money, got a copy of it, and she quotes from it liberally. So here's how Coppins report describes Charles Koch's late adolescence. Quote Charles spent little of the next 15 years at home, only coming there for an occasional holiday. When he finally did come back, the first thing Charles did when he came home on vacation was beat up Bill. So. How he's he's a bit of * **** to his brothers. Yeah, I'm off the train. Just starts punching bill, ************. Look, in 1958 Fred Koch became one of the founding members of the John Birch Society. Tell me about John Birch. I don't know about Ohh, it's fun. So the John Birch Society was a far right wing, conspiracy theory focused society. They would be kind of the 1950s equivalent of a group like Infowars. 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. Ohh they did they start that witch hunt in the Hollywood. They were a big part of that, but they went a lot further than McCarthy did because the secret communists they were going after were guys like President Dwight D Eisenhower. So Eisenhower was a lefty. But according to the John Birch Society, yeah, the Dwight Eisenhower who had the leader of the Congo assassinated for being. A leftist sympathizer. That Dwight Eisenhower is a communist. And these guys, sometimes when you are that deep into deep cover, deep cover, you have to do things to make it look like you're not. Yeah, sometimes I get it. Sometimes you have to overthrow 3 or 4 democratically elected leftist regimes in order to further the broader goals of communism, right? Is that what you're saying? Yes, because you wanna throw the people that are on your trail off your trail. It's possible Hitler was a secret convo. I'm going to shut you down. Yeah, no, you should. So the whole John Burt Society was the brainchild of Robert Welch of the John Birch Society, demanded the US retire from the United Nations and ordered Flyers circulated in Dallas, TX the day before the arrival of President Kennedy. The Flyer stated that Kennedy was wanted for treason and that quote, he is turning the sovereignty of the US over to the Communist controlled United Nations. So this has been going on for a long. This has been going on for a long time. All of this was more or less in line with the beliefs of Fred. Spoke 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. 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. This is where Fred Koch's mind is now. The Kennedy assassination was not great for the reputations of the members of the John Birch Society or for Robert Welch may know about this, but maybe did they do it? That's a myth, or I haven't heard of this myth, but I'll have to dig into it. If you dig into myths around the assassination of Kennedy, the John Birch Society regularly comes up. Wow, I guess I haven't been Googling that hard. Yeah, they were just a big thing in far right circles back in the 50s and 60s. So after the Kennedy assassination, obviously mainstream conservatives denounced the John Birch Society and Robert Welch's crazy and claimed the society was a little more than a collection of conspiracy theorists. 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 **** was nuts. He was not. Who did this? Charles Koch? Yeah, well, he really wanted his father. He really wanted his dad's approval because he did not like the John Birch Society. He was impressed by their organization and their fundraising. Travis, because they raised a lot of money and they had a really good secret sort of political organization going. He thought all the conspiracy ******** got in the way of what the society should be doing, which was actually conspiring to destroy the New Deal in most of the American government. So that was his issue with the John Birch Society. Is too much time on conspiracy theory nonsense, not enough time dismantling the US government. 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 he had 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, inventing the flux capacitor kind of moment. Here's how the Wall Street Journal described it in a fawning 1997 article 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. I spent the next two years almost like a hermit surrounded by books, he says. So Charles Koch starts running a company for the first time. And falls in love with libertarian economic theory and sort of consumes him. And for the next couple of years he's just reading. Basically, he becomes convinced that, in essence, his company would thrive. It was run on free market principles. So he basically creates a theory for how to manage a company called market based management, 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. So his idea to copy this seems to have been to have different divisions within his company compete with each other. So if like you need some of your employees to be trained right, normally there'd be a chunk of the company that's responsible for training them. 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 gonna get to train your employees. So basically every business unit within the company is competing with every other business unit in the company rather than working together. And the goal is that this will hopefully keep costs down and lead to more innovation. It sounds exhausting to me, but but this is the idea that he comes up with like during this this. This is his big like a stroke of brilliance. And also in the mid 1960s. So that mid 1960s is when he comes up with this idea for market based management, and it's also when he comes to believe that his brother Freddie is gay. He and a friend even break into Freddy's apartment to try and find incriminating evidence to this effect. Eventually Charles organized his two other brothers into a coalition against Freddie. This all culminated in a boardroom confrontation with Freddie on one side and Bill, David and Charles on the other. Now Charles told Freddie his behavior was inappropriate and warned that if their dad found out, it might kill him. But not before he disinherited Frederick. 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 1st place. This infuriated Charles. It's hard to say exactly what happened as a result of all this, but Freddie 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. It's also worth noting that that Frederick Koch says that the rumors of him being gay are untrue, and that his brothers were wrong about this. I don't know what the actual case was. He was. Definitely less focused on business and more of an artist and more interested in in that sort of world. So 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 ****. I don't know. But he never started a multibillion dollar fundraising enterprise to essentially push America further to the right. So as far as I, I got nothing against Frederick Koch, but he got a little bit ****** over by his brothers in here and he was just like, I went out. Yeah. And it seems like that's mainly the case. And Bill and Frederick are sort of the good Koch brothers. 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. Bill started a separate company and dedicated millions of dollars to ******* over his brother Charles. And then Charles and David are the Koch brothers that we all know today. So this is kind of where that schism happens, right? So Fred Koch, conspiracy theorist and honorary Nazi, finally crapped out of life in November of 1967. Aged 1967. So at least ****** people don't always live to be ******* 90. That's that's an upbeat aspect of that story. When Fred died, his kids inherited a bunch of money and shares in his company. Like most rich people, Fred Koch wanted to give as little of his estate as possible to the government. He did this by creating a charitable lead. Trust, 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. 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. Here's dark money quote to maximize their self-interest. In other words, the Koch boys were compelled to be charitable. Tax avoidance was thus the original impetus for the Koch brothers. Extraordinary philanthropy, as David Koch later explained. So for 20 years I had to give away all that income and I sort of got into it. So the Koch brothers will become major philanthropists, funding like museums as well as far right politics and conservative think tanks in 1968, the year after his father's death. Charles Koch left the John Birch Society over their support of the Vietnam War. He has been consistently an anti war guy his whole life. He discarded the conspiracy riddled far right nonsense of his father for the political theories of Robert Lefev. Now Lefev was a libertarian philosopher who supported the abolishment of the state. Because of this, some people call him an anarchist, which is inaccurate. See, when you're actually talking about anarchist political theory, not just the term anarchy is a SIM for no rules man and stuff scrawled on the bottom of skateboards, but the actual ideology with an extensive. Philosophical history you can't get far without discussing the concept of mutual aid. Anarchists do seek the abolition of the state, but it's not in everyone for himself. Ideology. I'm quoting here from a pamphlet you can find online called what the **** is mutual aid? Quote through mutual aid, anarchism takes shape as a practice and care, exchanging resources and solidarity, information, support, even comfort, care, and understanding. People give what they can and get what they need. 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, 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. This is exactly the opposite of what Robert Lefev preached. Even he didn't like being called an anarchist, he preferred to define himself as an auto artist, which that seems familiar, doesn't it? Yeah. So my only issue with dark money, which I think is a deeply important book, is that it declares Coke and his fellow travelers to be anarchists. They are not. They seek complete independence from other people because their wealth allows them to believe that is possible. Actual anarchist political theory is literally the opposite of autopsy. That was just a layman's terms. I appreciate it. I got a little lost. I don't know if you saw my eyes. I went. Sorry. I got off on a little bit of a rant there. So Charles Koch developed a brain ***** for the ideas of Robert Lefev. Yeah, philosopher. And Robert Lefev, I should note, was not just a philosopher. He committed mail fraud a number of times. He was an FBI informant during McCarthy's purge of Hollywood. He also orchestrated a movement to purge the Girl Scouts of Communists. He established the Freedom School in 1957. According to the Freedom School and its curriculum, the Gilded Age was basically the best time ever in American history. And businessmen. We know today as robber barons were heroes. 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 support of slavery, but because the Union had conscripted people and that was a worse thing than slavery. I should note that the Freedom School did not support Confederate style slavery. The Freedom School actually supported a totally different type of slavery. They wanted free people to be able to sell themselves into slavery. Jack yeah. Now you're pumping the brakes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm like pulling a handbrake on a convertible, doing a fishtail right now. Excuse me? Yeah, they're kind of nuts. Hey, dude, how much? If you pay me, yeah, I'll be your slave. But then again, use that money, yeah. Yeah, it's pretty nuts. And it's one of those, like, obviously there's a lot of different strains of libertarian thought, and I don't think most libertarians, at least that I've met, do not support letting people sell themselves into slavery. But that is a chunk of the movement, and it is the chunk of the movement that Charles Koch starts out in. So he is very drawn to the ideas of these guys. He forces his brothers to attend Freedom School seminars, which they mostly seemed to not enjoy. I guess they weren't just dude is. An *******. It's terrible. This guy sucks his brother. Like, he forced his brothers. Yeah, his brother, man, this guy sucks. And he's, you know, he's the middle kid. But Freddie is not a very forceful personality, so I think he kind of takes on the dominant role with his brothers for a lot of the time. And yeah, he's just so angry. He's really angry and he's really obsessed with control. Yeah, I have some weird compassion for him, but a lot of it is like. Yeah, it's hard not to have a little bit because clearly nobody would want his childhood. It sounds terrible, but also, his brothers didn't all grow up to be like this. So some of this is just Charles Koch choosing to be my Ding Dong. Yeah, a piece of crap. So his brothers mostly did not like the Freedom School because I think they're mostly not insane. Frederick thought Lefev was a con man and said this, and Charles threatened to deck him for saying so. Would you say about this guy? He's he's gonna tell me why slavery is OK. Yeah, if people choose it for themselves. Wow. 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. The country was ready for this, of course. Yeah. 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. They weren't all white as a rule, but Lefev said that he didn't think black people would be comfortable there because most of his students were segregationists. Wow, OK. I guess that's honest. Like, OK, I don't really know what else to say about that. That makes me feel sick. Yeah. Yeah. It's terrible. 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. Like the liberty to sell yourself into slavery. I know I keep pushing on that point, but it really like, where is your head where that's an issue. For you, we're like, you look at the world and all of the problems and are like, God, it's a shame people can't sell themselves into slavery. 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. I'm a big dog. Yeah, I guess that's got to be it because they're like part of it. Yeah. I don't know. I'm trying to be nice to him in a in a like, OK thing about his childhood. He's ****** **. He's got all these bad things. And then here's this school of thought that's like. Hey my God man, I see you're kind of vulnerable and I ****** ** kind of way. Come to Papa. You know what I mean when I think maybe it ties in a little bit too cause like he had joined the John Birch Society because his dad was a big part of that and he clearly didn't feel at home there. But he clearly, I think he wanted something like that. And maybe his thought was like, these guys can be my, I can be a big fish here. These are his proud boys. Yeah, exactly. So as the 1970s kickoff, the Koch brothers, minus Freddie, are in charge of the company, which they renamed Koch Industries from Winkler. Coke. Charles soon becomes the real power. He's working six days a week, 10 hours a day, and the 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 which I don't know if that's literally true. When you read stories about rich guys that they write about themselves, you'll usually run into something like this. Paul Manafort says the same thing about, like, how his first daughter. Was conceived in between conference calls. 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, I think they're proud of this **** like how little work life balance they have. Doesn't seem like a healthy thing, but. Progress. You know, it's not gross. What products and services that support this podcast and or program? Tell me some more. You know what? I'll do better than tell you some more. I will pause and wait for us to play some prerecorded ads. I love prerecorded ads. They're the best. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month, Mint mobile will give you the best rate. Whether you're buying one or for a family, and it meant family start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any mint mobile plan and keep your same phone number along with all your existing contacts. Just switch to Mint mobile and get premium wireless service starting at 15 bucks a month. Get premium wireless service from just $15.00 a month and no one expected plot twists at mintmobile.com/behind. That's mintmobile.com/behind. Seriously, you'll make your wallet very happy at Mint Mobilcom behind. So by now we imagine that you've seen the theories on Tik T.O.K. You maybe even heard the rumors, your friends and loved ones. But are any of the stories about government conspiracies and cover ups actually true? The answer is surprisingly or unsurprisingly, yes. For more than a decade, we here at stuff they don't want you to know have been seeking answers to these questions. Sometimes there are answers that people would rather us not explore. Now we're sharing this research with you. For the first time ever in a book format, you can preorder stuff they don't want you to know. Now it's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. Hey, it's Roy Wood, junior, host of The Daily Show podcast beyond the scenes, and we are back for season 2. Beyond the scenes is the podcast where we go even deeper into segments and topics we covered on the show, but they're topics that deserve a little more time, a little more finessing details, you know? So this season, we're bringing on more Daily Show writers, producers and correspondents. We're bringing on more experts to drop knowledge on all sorts of topics. Go get some knowledge that you can't get anywhere else. We breaking it down the season 2. We talking gentrification, we talking gun laws, book bannings, Black Trail Blazers, and fashion all the trash ways that people treat flight attendants as well. And shout out to the flight attendants how you keeping us safe and still got time to give me a biscoff cookie? Respect. Listen to beyond the scenes on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It don't matter where you get it, baby. Just find us. And we're back, boy, those were some great products and or services. So during the 1970s, the Koch boys are all sort of working at the the company. They take it over from their dead dad. Charles is running things and he increasingly takes full control of the operation. And in 1983, Charles and his brother David arrange a $1.1 billion buyout for their brothers shares of the company. This leaves them in control of more than 80% of coke industries stock. Now, while Charles and David are equal on paper, insiders reported that Charles is the company. 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. Yeah, not a boy, not yet a man. Now he's a man. Now he's a man. And this is the kind of man he is. Because I think that a great way to know someone best, because a lot of people are ****** to their siblings, right? You'd be a good person and terrible to your brother or sister. It's just life, I think. A good way to know. What kind of human being someone is, is how they treat service industry personnel. So I find this quote from dark money to be rather revealing. Quote. A former doorman described coke as the cheapest person in the building. We would load up his trucks 2 vans usually every weekend for the Hamptons, in and out, in and out heavy bags. We would never get a tip from Mr Coke. We would never get a smile from Mr Coke for Christmas, which the doorman had anticipated would make up for the years travails. Coke merely gave him a $50.00 check when the documentary aired. This was a documentary where the stuff about how we treated these people came out when the documentary. On public broadcasting service in 2012, David Koch was so incensed he resigned from the board of New York's public television station W ET, reneging on a promise to make a major donation. A spokeswoman at Koch Industries declined to comment on whether the documentary was his reason for punishing the station, but coach bluntly told one friend about the film. It's going to cost them 10 million, another family friend is quoted as saying. They move in a world with people like them or who want to be they know no poor people at all. They're not the kind of people who feel obligated to get to know the help. So this is Charles and David Koch. Now, under Charles's rule, Koch Industries expanded from a company worth hundreds of 1,000,000 to a company worth 10s of billions. The largest privately owned company in the world right now, in the 1970s and 80s, their business was mostly oil and gas refining. 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. 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 ****. So Charles Koch is not just an oil man. He's decided to be, like the dirtiest possible version of an oil man. And he does not give one **** about regulations and rules meant to minimize the environmental harm of his company or do ******** like protect workers from danger and horrific disease. 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. 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? Coke Refining Company offered these tests, but they didn't do such a good job about letting employees know when they had irregular results. Sometimes they just wouldn't tell them. So. Donald Carlson, a dedicated employee with decades on the job, was not informed within his results, showed abnormal blood cell counts in 1990. He wasn't warned about this until 1994, when he started to get sick. Yeah, well, you want to get those extra couple of years. Of them, right. This is disgusting. It's pretty bad. It's pretty bad. These guys are disgusting. Yeah, they're really terrible now. Donald continued to work after he got sick, so he was doing his job while receiving massive, frequent blood transfusions. He loved his job. He loved, and his job was like scrubbing out like these cleaning tanks from a refinery and stuff. Like, he was doing dirty work, but he was just a working class guy. He wanted to do his job and take care of his family. He was like, he took pride in it. He he. You're the best case scenario if you're like a big capitalist boss. He was your best case scenario of an employee, but in 1996 he got too sick to work anymore. He was immediately fired and given six months severance pay, which almost sounds generous. Given the Koch brothers being the Koch brothers, but it turns out this was just his accumulated sick pay leave that they were legally required to pay out. They gave him nothing that they weren't required to give him now. Carlson filed for Workman's comp, which seems like a job related illness, getting blood poisoning from horrific benzene exposure, but coke refining refused. They weren't about to pay his medical bills or give benefits to his wife and daughter. They denied that his illness had anything to do with the fact that he'd been covered in poison for years. He died in 1997, leaving his family. Destitute, his wife continued to fight the company for some restitution. They eventually settled with her for an undisclosed amount. Now, during my research for this, I found an article on benzene exposure from the Center for Public Integrity. It had Facebook comments enabled, and one of the commenters on the article was a woman named Mary Arneson. Now, Mary is a preventative medicine physician who testified against Koch Industries during the Carlson case. So she wrote in the comments to this article about her experience testifying against Koch Industries in this blood poisoning case. Quote, I was shocked by the behavior of coke. Hired gun hematologist who concealed the blood monitoring results that showed his worsening anemia and by that doctors blaming cigarette smoking. Much lower benzene exposure than waiting through spilled gasoline for his eventual development of leukemia. 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. I still seethe. I hate coke. 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. The fact that he was literally almost bathing and benzene. Yeah. Very heavy. Yeah. So they're not. They're not. They kind of started. They were definitely in on that trend that a lot of big companies. Hmm. Follow today. They were pioneers. Oh yeah. These boys. Coach boys. Pioneer boys. Yeah, yeah. Coke boys are on the cutting edge of ******* over their workers and letting hazardous chemical exposure kill people. They might be the Michael Jordans of hazardous chemical exposure. Yes, you go. Maybe the Scotty Pippin 3 pointer. So, oh, you're from Texas, too, so this will be fun. Coke Industries also owned a big refinery in Corpus Christi, TX. Now, how would you describe sort of the attitude towards Corpus Christi within Texas? Corpus Christi is like your spring break kind of vacation. Yeah, that in Galveston. Mustang island. Yeah, I went once, you know, it's like all the high school kids. Yeah. And they're they're OK. It's an OK place. It's the water is kind of gross compared to like Hawaii or the West Coast gross. Hawaii would not be a bad way to describe it. It's gross. Hawaii, my brother is actually a tankerman on ships and he goes out and I'm always worried about because he's right in the thick of that. Yeah. But I'm always kind of worried about like chemical exposure. Yeah. Him, yeah. I mean, that seems totally reasonable. Yeah. There's a lot of refining and a lot of gross stuff going on for sure. Would not want to swim in that water and looking back. Like, why would you go? Why did my parents let me swim in that Bay? Kids just poison Galveston, too. Yeah. You know is anyways. Yeah. No, absolutely. And the Koch brothers are a big part of why it is that way. Cool. Yeah. Yeah, it's great. It's great. Yeah. So they had a big refinery in Corpus Christi that was, quote, hemorrhaging benzine into the air, which is a great thing to do with benzene as hemorrhage. A 1995 regulation required them to reduce emissions. 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, yeah, they said they were putting out less poison than they were and assumed it'd be fine. 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. This is just fraud. So Koch industry sent in one of their own people to actually figure out how much the factory was polluting over the limit. This report revealed horrific levels of benzene. 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, so they're not just lying by a little bit. They are. Holy ****. Like I said, the the Scottie Pippen of poison. Well, I said Michael Jordan. I don't know much and they're all about it. That's a half point. Slam Dunk shot right there. Wish nothing but net. Assume that's all above board and accurate. Yeah, the employee who done the research wound up blowing the whistle, and in 2000, Koch Industries was indicted on 97 counts of being shady as ****. 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 not. No. No, it's not. It's not. Wow. Yeah, so this is they were willing to lie and put out huge amounts of poison rather than spend 7,000,000. Dollars on a refinery that made 176 million in annual profits. So it's not a big drop in the bucket. No. You know, it's not even a drop in the bucket. No. I found a quarter outside. Yeah, that's finding 1/4 outside. Yeah. Or losing 1/4. But you're like, oh, man, 1/4. That's the laundry. But they are like, what's laundry? You know? Yeah. Yeah. They burn their clothing after wearing. Yeah. 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. So on the surface, it doesn't seem to make a lot of economic sense what they're doing. $7 million because they had to wind up doing the refitting anyway. 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 their repairs would have cost because they decided to break the law. So it might seem, when you look at it that way, that this was just a bad gamble by Charles Koch. But Charles Coke doesn't make bad gambles, and he doesn't flout regulations to save money. He does so because ignoring government regulations is basically his religion. Like, it's like like like being a billionaire who doesn't comply with the government is like his. He's that's his Jedi faith. And he's. What are you going to do about it? Yeah, yeah, exactly. He's the Luke Skywalker of polluting. Yeah. 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. So in 1978, he contributed an article to the libertarian reader 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 while we still can. Here's how it opens government censorship is about to take a great leap forward. 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. 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. You know that big campaign to ban Chaucer. Wow. George Orwell and the Nixon Watergate tapes, all of which you're still legal. It ends with a plea for money that says this coupon fight. Censorship. Yes. I want to help save the public airwaves from the obscenity of government control. Here's my tax deductible. And tax deductible is italicized contribution of yeah. So that's the first ad in the libertarian reader. The issue that Charles Koch. Submitted an article called the Business Community resisting Regulation. That's all the SRZ's right? You imagine this is like a scene? The coach. Boys, boys boys. Yeah. Business. No, it was. This article was part of a series called Toward the Second American Revolution, Libertarian Strategies for today. 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. Quote the final stage of political capitalism is even worse. 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. And as service and equipment deteriorate, you will stand by helplessly as the threat of nationalization becomes reality. You remember when the government took over all the airlines? I do. Yeah. It was a bad thing. No. If the airlines had remained private companies, yeah, I'm sure there would be a lot of legroom on flights, good food, high quality customer service. People would not get dragged out of flights because they got overbooked. This makes me sick. 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. The goal is reducing taxes and thus reducing the government. Nothing else matters. Regulators must be regulators. They have to be battled at all costs. Fred Koch said this do not cooperate voluntarily. Instead, resist wherever and to whatever extent you legally can, and do so in the name of justice. I love this. This is insane. Yeah, like, that's why I'm making, like, the Star Wars comparisons. He views himself as like a rebel fighting this evil empire. But the evil empire. But the evil empire is being like you should pay for old people. You should have empathy. Yeah, and he's like, I will not have empathy. You spilled too much poison into the water. You have to pay for their own fault. He shouldn't have been living in Corpus Christi. Why can't they be in the Hamptons? I don't pollute there. Yeah, wish I had, like, a neck vein that would just pop. It is hard to imagine any of the things that, like, he's written that like when I because I've, I read a couple of articles Charles Koch read, and it's hard to imagine him not screaming them to you. Like that's the, that's always the tenor at which he writes. It's always like, everything will be nationalized and the government will destroy, you know, private innovation and whatnot if we don't resist. And he does use that, like, resist language a lot. He's described in dark money as almost being. Being a like a a linen marks sort of theorist where he has these very strict ideas on sort of the way societies evolve and the way things happen in history. 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. But it is a very yeah yeah, he, he's, he's again, it's not about denying these regular, like refusing to comply with these regulations. Not about. Money to him. It's about the principle. Yeah, it is. Yeah. Yeah. Or always about the principle. Yeah. Yeah. It's he's willing to spend more money to stick a finger at the government. Yeah. Just resist at all costs, dude, I get it, man. Yeah. Do you? No, I don't get inheriting hundreds of millions of dollars and not just being like, oh, sweet, I lucked out. I'm just going to have fun. I mean, I get wanting to be smart with your money and sharing it and and I wish I had more of a monetary. Education or a financial education but to the point where you're just dicking over and and forgetting the human experience or being so devoid is he's almost like a serial killer. You know they have no to sort of like compare that mental state except he's got my. I mean he's killing people. Maybe some of it inadvertently, but definitely through. Yeah. I mean he might be. I don't know. Like, I always try to hesitate from, like, diagnosing people and stuff, but it is worth noting that there are, there is scientific research that suggests access to wealth, reduces empathy. And say that to Bruce Wayne. Well, you know, he was a rich dude and guess what? He turned out to be Batman. Well, yeah, but Batman just beats up poor people. No, Batman takes care of the poor, and Wayne Industries really looks out for people. Don't you speak ill of Wayne Industries? Dude, you're right. And I do make a Batman reference later. That's coming up. We have a lot more coke to talk about. We have so much coke to talk about that where this is going to be another two point. Need a break? Yeah, you need to need to take a chill pill, have a nice cup of cup of Doritos. And I love dorito soup. We all love dorito soup. 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. Now that sounds lovely. And you know what? I dip in that soup. Doritos? Yes. You know, what I have actually done is taken Doritos and made migas with them. Wow. It's pretty damn good, actually. Like copyright that. Yeah. I mean, Doritos oughta copyright that. That's another free thing. I'm offering you Doritos. Doritos. Migos. You know, it's not free. These ads, ohh no, we're not breaking into edge. We're breaking it at the end of the episode, the end of the episode part one now so excited to break it. In Part 2, we're going to be talking about the 1980 election where Charles's brother David ran for Vice president of the United States. We will be talking about the Koch brothers establishment of a of an empire of think tanks and educational institutions. And we will of course talk about more people that they're flooding of regulations got killed. So all of that and more in Part 2. But first you wanna plug some plegables like ads. Well, your ads. Ads for your thing where people can find you on the Internet. I'm so excited to roll those apps. Really wanted to support the show? Yeah, you can find me on the Internet. I'm in a movie on Netflix called the Feels FELS with some really fun folks and you can find me on Instagram, Twitter at EVERMAINARD. Yeah, I do a lot of shows around town and I have a lot of fun. Awesome. Well, you can find us on the Internet at behindthebastards.com all of the many, many sources, including some writings of Charles Koch. That, uh, we're sources for this episode will be up there to find some pictures too. You can also find us on social media at at ******** pod. You can find me at at I write. OK, and yeah, we will be back on Thursday talking more coke. So get coked out with us later this week. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break your handle the hosting creation distribution. And monetization of your podcast go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Movies will I have the podcast for you? Hey there, this is Mike D from movie Mikes movie podcast your go to source for all things movies. Each episode explores a different movie topic plus spoiler free reviews on the latest streaming and movies in theaters. You'll also get interviews with actors and directors to take a look behind the scenes of your favorite movies. 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