Sometimes when I talk about Jewish identity or express an opinion on Israel Palestine or on a Jewish public figure I get accused of secretly shilling for Mossad or for global Jewish finance or being part of a reptilian uber cult secretly controlling world politics which would be great obviously because it would imply that I'm much more organized than I actually am but seeing as it's not it makes me question why anti-Semitism sometimes takes the form of conspiracy theories. What role does anti-Semitism play in a broader political landscape and of course am I actually part of a swarm of Jewish lizards gunning for world domination? If you've been keeping up with the news in the past couple of years you've been forgiven for thinking that anti-Semitism was either a curse solely endemic to the Labour Party or a non-issue cooked up by the Tories in order to smear the Labour Party. In short it's been used as a political football to allow different people to score points against one another particularly by the conservatives who rightly feel like they're losing the argument on a lot of social and economic issues and so are trying to distract people with a culture war. It also happens a lot in the debate of Israel Palestine and a lot of people dismiss all criticism of Israel as necessarily anti-Semitic which is of course not true and on the other side people think that any implication that they might be anti-Semitic is automatically a way to sign in support for Palestine so let's get this out of the way to begin with. Not all Jews are Israeli not all Israelis are Jewish a lot of Jewish people are critical of Israel and a lot of people who support Israel can themselves be pretty damn anti-Semitic. Donald Trump has been ramping up support for Israel and he was buoyed to office by actual Nazis and Klan members. The Israeli state should be held up to the same standards as any other states aka when our governments fund and support the theft of land, mass dispossession, war crimes and apartheid to support their own geopolitical ends we should be allowed to criticize that. Cool? Okay so that aside these debates around who can and can't be anti-Semitic tend to muddy the waters a bit means all talk about anti-Semitism becomes a proxy debate about Israel or about the labor party and that's pretty worrying because and I can't stress this enough there are actual fascists and Nazis on the streets and in our political institutions. The far right is on the rise throughout the world and especially in European and Anglo-Saxon nations this comes flavored with a particularly dangerous brand of old-school anti-Semitism. Sometimes anti-Semitism is pretty obvious sometimes it looks like people marching on the streets with swastika flags and putting bricks through synagogue windows and sometimes it comes in a much more subtle dog whistle form using cultural signifiers to associate Jewishness with a nefarious dangerous influence on society and a lot of the time this takes the form of conspiracy theories. These paint Jewishness as a corrupt political influence which is disruptive to UK society. This is a less direct but no less dangerous form of discrimination because it builds the case the exclusion of Jewish people from public life and sometimes from life altogether. There's a huge wealth of conspiracy theories featuring cabals of Jewish people secretly controlling the world or which accuse Jewish finance of having a corrupting influence on politics this kind of racism is as old as the hills. It was claimed that the Rothschilds had made their money on the back of Wellington's victory at the Battle of Waterloo essentially profiting from the bodies of dead English soldiers and in the early 20th century a pamphlet called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was circulated and this purported to reveal the secret Jewish plot for world domination. Of course this was a total forgery but that didn't stop many thousands of copies of this propaganda being circulated often to school children throughout the next couple of decades despite the fact that it was exposed as a fraud publicly in 1921. Actually famous industrialist Henry Ford paid for the printing of 50,000 copies. This has pretty much been the story throughout the century and the one before that. Jewish groups have been blamed for orchestrating all kinds of public disasters from the Boston bombing to Sandy Hook to 9-11. Yes there is a theory that Mossad did 9-11 and a so called Jewish banking has been blamed for the economic crash of 2008. Also a lot of Holocaust denial is premised on the idea that the Holocaust is a myth concocted by Jewish people in order to justify their perceived political influence and this isn't just limited to the scruyer outposts of the internet it's actually everywhere in UK political life. Recently the Telegraph published an article accusing famous Jewish billionaire George Soros of secretly financing a campaign against Brexit and this theory is directly borrowed from the propaganda of the Hungarian and Polish governments which recently passed legislation whitewashing their own role in the Holocaust and where they've seen mass far-right street movements burning effigies of Jewish people in the street and this has been repeated pretty uncritically by the mainstream press in an effort to catalyze support for Brexit by painting its opponents as clandestine saboteurs you know foreigners and Jews. It should be said here that George Soros has a history of campaigning on liberal issues he's made no secret of this and he's not even the biggest donor to the pro-remain campaign and obviously whilst I don't have any particular loyalty to one of the world's richest financiers the man is a Holocaust survivor so yes stay classy Telegraph. A few months ago Kevin Meyers at the Times suggested that top BBC presenters like Vanessa Feltz were paid more than other women because of their Jewish ancestry which made them like better negotiators or greedier the actual link is unclear but anyway this is on the same spectrum as when fascist gammon Nigel Farage talks about the malign influence of Jewish lobbies.  Incidentally that speech was itself written by Nick Timothy who was one of the authors of the article on George Soros. So we need to look at why this figure of the wandering Jew is so useful for right-wing demagogues. We know that politicians and pundits often use racial bogeymen to stoke up fears that they can play off for political gain and to distract from their own failed economics and disastrous political decisions and to paper over the cracks in an increasingly divided nation but why Jewish people and why code it like a conspiracy theory. The figure of the wandering Jew is displaced without any perceived ties to any particular nation so they're easily smeared as traitors or double agents for an outside influence so when something goes wrong you've got someone to blame. When Brexit turns out to be an omnishambles it's not because this government is craven corrupt and incompetent it's because of Jewish bankers trying to secretly sabotage the will of the British people and let's not forget that Jewish former Labour leader Ed Miliband was smeared in the press as the son of a man who hated Britain. Displaced mobile people are also useful when politicians are ramping up nationalist rhetoric. Nationalism and its bloodthirsty cousin nativism are ways of summoning up some sense of unity at a time of deepening inequality and political polarization. It says that sure you might be living in a cardboard box whilst I own half of Mayfair but we ultimately have the same interest in common because we're both British. It distracts from the real source of people's misery and leaves the wealth and power of the upper classes intact and you need a pretty powerful enemy who can unite people who don't really have that much in common materially speaking so enter the racialized other figure of the Jew who has no link and no loyalty to the nation or the land. It's not a coincidence that rhetoric around migrants looks a lot like Nazi rhetoric around Jews both a fluid and stateless and a threat to the survival of the coherent land-bound nation-state and it's no coincidence that the far-right demonstrators at Charlottesville were chanting the slogan blood and soil. And remember Donald Trump made his first entrance on the modern political scene by championing the Bertha movement claiming that Barack Obama wasn't really born in the United States he was just a foreign influence trying to ruin the country. The association between Jewish people and the corrupt influence of bankers is also a Philip to the far right. Popular suspicion of the power of the Rothschilds or Jewish finance or whoever comes from the correct observation that global financial systems are ruining our country and our planet driving them into disaster and that could be a basis for a radical transformative demand for the democratization of our economy but instead it's twisted into racial hatred.  So yes this conspiracy-style anti-semitism is usually the domain of the right but people on the left also have a responsibility to route out conspiracy thinking in our own ranks as well. These theories have a particularly ugly history because they provide the justification for mass violence against Jewish people. The story goes that if Jewish people are responsible for the failure of a nation you need to eradicate Jews to restore that nation to glory by any means necessary that means pogroms that means ghettoization that means genocide. We live in a world in which capital disperses power across borders and national governments claim they have no power to hold the market in check. Sometimes it feels like the buck stops nowhere so I get it. I see how it's easy to try and reach for easy solutions and try and pin the blame on a single group of people it's comforting to think that there are people secretly controlling the world. It's easier to swallow than to face up to the messy reality that power is used and abused right before our eyes that we're all implicated in that system and that overturning that power is a lot more complicated than just getting rid of the bad guys. I hate to break it to you but there actually isn't a secret gang of Jewish billionaires carefully orchestrating the rollout of whatever kind of political settlement you happen to dislike. The world is just more complicated than that. If there is a worldwide Jewish conspiracy and I just haven't been invited I'm gonna be so annoyed.


This is Jim Hogue, and this is the House of Buchorna, and today we are going to be talking about alternative currencies, and your guest is Devin Landis, who has invented yet another alternative currency, and that's an area that is of great interest to me, because I would like to see the Federal Reserve disappear, and local currencies become more common. So I will give about a one or two minute introduction to what local currencies are, and what money is, and then we'll turn the program over to Devin, and first of all, let me just explain that money is an agreement, so any local currency that comes up that people agree to use is on, it will work, and so what does that mean? It's an agreement to use it, and if it's accepted it's usable. It can be accepted by all of the above, which is, by the state itself, by local businesses, by businesses throughout the state primarily, and if it becomes extremely successful, businesses that extend outside the state, and when I mean the state can accept it I mean for fees and for taxes. The key, I think for me personally if a currency is going to be accepted widely, is that that currency has to be exchangeable for the dominant currency, so in this case it would of course be the dollar, and there's another word for that, which is another kind of alternative currency which is mutual credit, and there's a wonderful one in Burlington now run by Amy Kirschner, which is accepted by businesses all throughout the Burlington area and wider than that, and a local currency can be based on the concept of the dollar per se, but I like the idea of a local currency being based on what Devin has come up with, which is the minimum wage for that area, and it can also be accepted for exchange of labor. That's a very local currency in that case, and it doesn't matter how widely picked up it is as long as people agree to exchange the labor. Now what happens when a local currency becomes really successful? What happens if a country has a currency that is outside the central banking system? I've done several programs on how money is created, which in this country and in Europe is created by the banks based on loans, so everything out in circulation right now was put there, was created because somebody wanted to borrow money. Money doesn't have to be that way and it's not supposed to be that way, it wasn't initially conceived that way, but that's the system since 1698, 1694, excuse me, that was created when the British created the Bank of England, and we are going to talk about the opposite of that throughout history when an area has created a different system outside that banking system, it's usually created a war, motivated a war by the powers that be or an assassination to change the minds of the people so that they will see the light and go to the current paradigm, which is debt based money. We did a program here recently with John Root, where it was the exact opposite. Money was created by the exchange itself. Money was given as a minimum basic income and that money was put into the exchange system so that it became productive money and it became money that you could spend on what you needed. So today we're going to be talking about an alternative currency that is based on the productivity of the people who are creating the currency and I find that a very good idea. We can go back to colonial script and talk about the great success of that. The Guernsey Pound, which was very successful, started in 1812 in order to rebuild the sea walls and other infrastructure that was falling apart because they had all the goods they needed. They had all the product, they had the stones, and they had the labor and they had the know-how. All they lacked was this concept of money and so they created the money to make all that work. And then there's the weir in Switzerland, which is not state accepted, but it is business accepted, quite successful. There's another concept which is warrants, which California instituted and my friend John Ford with Gwen Halsmith tried to get Vermont to understand the value of a warrant, which is when the state runs out of money, the state gets to write a warrant and that is usable within exchanges of the state. And if people don't like it, what they can do is they can sell the warrant at a discount and get dollars for that and then it gets subsumed into the currency as long as the state has no money. And that worked very, very well in California. Argentina had the Patacone, which is one of many complementary currencies that became the state currency. And it was bought out by the way by the IMF because they were a little, they were intimidated by the threat of the good example. So let's go to our guest, Devin Landis, who's going to be talking about his currency and does it have a name? It does. The central credit exchange distributes talents, which are blank, like I have here some talents and what they are is they represent about an hour of work at the most basic level. So we would call that minimum wage, the minimum earning. So it is always tied to a concept which people know, which is time and everybody has the same number of hours in a day, so it can all easily convert time to money. All right, these are talents and these are talent bills. You can see that these bear my name on them, October 11th, they were created and my economic standing, what makes this system unique is that what has formerly been personal, which is your own personal finances or bank account, is made somewhat public by receiving a grade that ranges from negative to positive four and is printed on your talent certificate when you create it. And now I have a 2.4, which is probably in the upper 30th percentile, and if I were trying to spend these within a community, this is a pretty good bill and you would readily accept it because it shows that I have been serving the community. What else can be said? Well, it's an IOU, like any dollar, by the way, all dollars are IOUs, they're printed by the Federal Reserve, but essentially they're IOUs, and so yours is a traditional IOU because it's got your name on it and so you're the bottom line or is the next creator of the next dollar, the bottom line or what? How does that work? It downs to classic accounting, which you would find in any of your banks that everybody uses or most people use. So if you receive a talent with my name on it, you can't necessarily redeem it, especially to me as you could to anybody else, all you can do is turn it into the central credit exchange and your account, in this case, would go up five talents and they would see that this came from me and they would deduct five from me and yeah, this is the basis of all the accounting. So that is like what Amy Kirschner does in Burlington. You do a service for somebody and you get credit, you accept a service, you become indebted to that credit system, but no money has changed hands, whereas this is a physical IOU. Now, do you have other ways to make this work other than the physical piece of paper? Yes, that would be an app which I am currently trying to raise funds for. I need about $11,000 to create an app and folks with smartphones could make these transactions happen instantly and it would help me as the only administrator of the central credit exchange to not have to do as much paperwork and to not have to use Microsoft Excel as much. So that is the next stage, the next hope for the system as far as expansion goes. Now are you using a blockchain kind of system or is it just like you said, you are simply adding and subtracting? Yeah, I am simply doing it with Microsoft Excel and when people register they submit a real form, but with an app a lot of that could be done electronically and as far as app security, I would hope that nobody tries to hack the app, but if somebody does we will definitely get them and yeah. So yours will start with agreements among the people who use it and that is important for people to understand because there are really two different ways to get a complimentary currency going and in almost every case that I can think of except the colonial script, well even that to an extent it is created by normal people and the state may or may not come in later. With the Patakone in Argentina it was something that in a manner of speaking throughout Argentina people did anyway because they didn't have enough cash and throughout history a lot of people don't have enough cash so they come up with something else and it is a local currency and it may or may not be accepted by the state. If it is successful enough you would think that the state would say hey I don't want to miss out on this and it is just like they forbid barter unless you pay taxes on it, which is ridiculous because who pays taxes on barter you have to be you know people barter all the time without paying taxes on it, but the state likes to get it cut so with an alternative currency if the state sees a benefit to it then the state should kind of help it out and move it along. I would suggest that Vermont would be the last state in the union to do this just because there is a fear among legislators of doing anything that does not have the approval of the feds and of all the people and I think that a currency like yours if it got going and the state saw how usable it was this state would approve of it just like they do of the mutual credit system but guess what they taxed that so they are really happy with Amy Kirschner's mutual credit system because it is all accounted and therefore it is all taxable. Is she able to pay her taxes in the currency that she has made? No. So the state doesn't care about anything except getting its tax money. They like to see businesses thrive I am not saying they are deliberately trying to stop a business from thriving but all they really care about is that they get their money and that you are not thriving without paying your debt to the state so keep that in mind. Two conditions for somebody registering for the central credit exchange talent network one is to uphold honesty and two is to never exchange talents for any established other currency. Okay so you are doing the opposite of what I suggested at the beginning is that it is not. Yeah. Okay so have you thought of the ramifications of that for the success of your talent? Yeah growth will be slower but in the end more stable. Okay and can you talk a little bit more about why it would be slower and why it would be more stable? Well I remember when Bitcoin hit the stock market and I remember about three days of accentuated explosion and that is because Bitcoin like if stock market was a large gear and Bitcoin was a small gear it was basically engaging with the international monetary system and picking up speed and you know now it has reached its equilibrium. There is another quote like the idea of new wine if you put it in an old wine skin there is like extra fermentation that would burst the old wine container so I just think that this is a new fresh wine and it needs to be separate in a new wine skin I guess if that makes sense. Yeah now when the people in Argentina used the Patacone etc I am using the word Patacone more as a synecdoche meaning there were a lot of them they merged they were so successful that they kind of merged into one and the name I am using is Patacone that and it became accepted by the state because the state was bankrupt. Now why it was bankrupt I have read various explanations from the quote experts and some of these particularly the mainstream media experts blamed I think false villains for this they blamed the excess of imports over exports they blamed the spending money when they didn't have it all that paradigm stuff I think what happened was the flight of capital from Argentina from the aristocracy turning their remaining money that they might have had into dollars and so they stripped the country of currency period and when you strip your country of currency people can't buy and sell anything and there is no point in producing anything so everything grinds to halt that's what happened with colonial script the currency act forbid the creation of colonial script and so everything ground to halt now I forget why I mentioned that except to talk about your interesting idea of making it a slow developer yeah so that those kinds of things that I just said can't happen yeah exactly yeah no I'm imagining that if gradually it became more and more and more accepted and the state said well we'll take it for parking fees yeah that would be good yeah that'd be great that'd be really good so how do you imagine it developing well for example give me some examples of businesses yeah that might do it and I'll say first that if that business that you're talking that you're about to mention yeah is petroleum oil gasoline yeah not gonna happen yeah I would say farming communities farmers and trades people are the foundations of society they're the folks that keep our country going so it would start with them and then where would it go then it can grow beyond that to some larger businesses and more established small businesses and once like large things like if a large mine of any raw material were to accept that I think that would be a switching point because that's like and it is maybe your analogy is correct if petroleum were to take it that would be the the true tipping point well then it could be a unit then it would be a universal currency yeah and you'd be famous sure like Bill Gates yeah or somebody like that yeah now if that mine were to be found in Vermont mm-hmm then then the state would be extremely foolish not to move in and say well we have yeah a something we have something here yeah that is accepted worldwide yeah as a currency and as a stable value yeah and we are going to create a currency based on that but you're not you know you're starting with goods and services mm-hmm first mm-hmm and then if the son there's a some other thing going on yeah then the state could pick up on that yeah what we just discussed when the brain trust was working on this with second Vermont Republic mm-hmm we we discussed forests mm-hmm the great thing about timber and some pitch is that you don't have to do anything to make it grow mm-hmm so it accrues interest if you will yeah without any debt yeah it just keeps growing yeah and when you harvest it it's got a certain value mm-hmm the trouble with it is of course based on the dollar it goes up and it goes down depending on the needs mm-hmm of the community for lumber mm-hmm but in any event that's one of the things we talked about it's a commodity yeah and then there have been there have been others that people have thought of I thought of actually water mm-hmm because Vermont has a rich clean supply of water mm-hmm which can be used for hydro mm-hmm which they foolishly kind of abandoned in the early 1900s and continued to abandon it there's actually enough hydro to supply all the electricity in Vermont if they decided if they wanted to do that but they don't so you've got forests and you've got water that are actually worth more than gold mm-hmm try to buy a little water in the store and how much you pay for it you pay more than you pay for gasoline mm-hmm so it seems to me that that would be a good thing to fall back on mm-hmm as the basis for your currency but again you've chosen to go with goods and services but do you see any shifting if that's the right word or morphing into a currency based on timber or water I don't think so I would like to eventually print well how do you call it make coins mm-hmm where you melt down metal and one talent is worth about ten bucks so that is not practical when it comes to buying coffee because you still have about eight dollars left over enter coins and then to make coins real and accurate they should the value of their metal should as precisely as possible match the amount of time and effort it took to mine and coin that coin I can cite a definite problem in our US economy where if you go to the hardware store a washer is between five and ten cents a penny is a washer without a hole in it so if you were to drill a hole in a penny you'd have a washer for one cent and the secretary of the Treasury or the US men readily admits that it's impractical to print pennies and they lose money when printing pennies so at least in the US system inflation has occurred for so long that a penny is no longer even accurate well there was a time when the copper in the penny was worth more than the penny so they swish melting it down yeah so they switched that that they don't yeah copper painting yeah but so now you've got the same situation yeah only without the copper yeah where the penny is worth more for making a water out of it I haven't I'm only 30 years old but one thing I would love to see and would really interest me is economy and a society maybe it already exists but it's certainly not in the United States where money is not always inflating and so instead of people like chasing an ever decreasing value in their currency like anybody who is saving money it's every year one to two percent less worth less than it was the year before what would it be like if a currency were in some cases becoming more valuable than the goods and services around it I don't think we've ever seen that since the early 1900s well gold oh yeah so if you are an owner of gold then you do feel like that every day yeah well sometimes he drops and you know there could be a yeah there there could be a run on gold and you know the price go up and then the price go down so precious metals but generally speaking gold has increased tremendously in value yeah and then back to Bitcoin yeah look what happened with Bitcoin the thing about that Bitcoin isn't that much of an alternative folks because it's based on the dollar yeah clearly and so that you're not buying Bitcoin hoping that it's gonna lose value yeah you're buying Bitcoin hoping that it'll be worth more dollars than it was when you bought it and so it's a speculative event but it is at least it's not inflationary because it's a there's a finite amount of Bitcoin out there and so that what gets unless you mine it which is another matter there's a finite amount of Bitcoin out there so it can't become inflationary yeah just because of that but it can change its value based on the dollar so you've got a if you're going to buy Bitcoin folks buy it when it's low it's that simple yeah and hope that it goes up about what you said is probably true that it has probably hit a an equilibrium at this point I don't know was it six thousand dollars I think so yeah I really don't know what Bitcoin is that sounds about right today and it's whatever it hit I think it stayed there for a long time so that's why you're suggesting it's hit an equilibrium now if on the other hand the dollar becomes extremely inflated quickly Argentina just went switched and didn't switch picked up Bitcoin as an exchange as an official government exchange wow method okay again it's not going to do them any good unless they have production yeah if you just simply creating another way of exchanging it doesn't help you if you don't have anything to exchange it for except things from out of the country which is really bad idea yeah so I guess we don't have time to go into that no but you can basically understand that a a nation that doesn't produce enough to make up for the currency at hand is in trouble because that currency flows out of the country and there you are again yeah in debt there you are again with without enough money to buy what you need to buy yeah so a local currency can be a big help yeah in that I'll plug my website before we sign off it's a centralcreditexchange.org okay and thank you very much for listening House in precorder with Devin Landis thank you and Jim Hogue thank you bye bye


Snastron! One game that's held up over time, as well as any other game, is Legend of the Mystical Ninja. Not only is it a really fun platformer that executes the fundamentals really well, but it's one of the best-looking games and one of the funniest games on the Super NES.  These look like everyday people, like the guy evidently trying to bring home a ginormous fish that's flopping around trying to get away.   Legend of the Mystical Ninja is a great example as to why games of this era, in my opinion, have aged much better than the early 3D games of the late 90s. I'm a big nerd for pixel art, and this is some of the best on the system. Everything is so crisp and colorful. The facial expressions are fantastic.  There's a lot of slapstick humor like that, that I personally think is funny as hell. The multiplayer is what really puts this game over the top. For the tougher platforming parts that require precise jumping, you can just get on the other players back to minimize annoyance. Imagine that! This, along with Mario Kart and Secret Urmana, are probably my favorite multiplayer games on the Super NES. The plot is about as important as it is in any Mario game, for instance.  This game is fun enough as a platformer, but it's interesting to see the sheer amount of stuff that they crammed into this game. There's about 80 gazillion minigames. Many of them centered around gambling of some kind, like the Over Under Dice game and horse racing. But there's a quiz game show, there's Whack-a-Mole, there's Snake, which I'm terrible at, obviously. There's a ring toss kind of a game, there's a matching game, there's Breakout, and there's even Gradius. That's right, in the middle of Legend of the Missile Ninja, you can stop and play Gradius. It's got the power-ups and everything. That's pretty frickin' cool. There's so much variety in this game that even the platforming itself has variety, sometimes kind of a top-down perspective, and sometimes a pure side-scrolling approach. One major flaw this game has, however, is that it has a password system, and not just any password system, the most ridiculous, unthinkably complex passwords that you will ever see in your life. Look at this crap! This is reason number 1A that you want to play this game on the virtual console instead of the Super NES. That's a bummer, but it's just reality. Other than that, this is a fantastic game. The controls are tight, the artwork is colorful and expressive, the hit detection is good, and the multiplayer is excellent. Legend of the Missile Ninja is a great example of an older game that holds up brilliantly today. Hell, when I'm making this video, I felt like I almost had too much footage and there wasn't a way to use it all, so just go play it.


Today, I woke up in Skagway. Check it out. We are on the border of Alaska and Canada. Alaska's there. Canada's there. And there's a big mountain, too. Right there. There's my partners in crime over here. Oh, I'm just taking a video. They're pre-programmed to just take pictures all the time. You've trained us well. I know. This is Skagway and we're going to train, so I'm on the train next. First shake, what everybody get. Cherry vanilla. Almond frailine. And it's delicious. Yeah, we're gonna go head back to the ship now. So we are back in the room. It's been a while since I've said hello to the vlog. We took our mandatory nap, clearly. Went to a show and then currently my mom is counting quarters. Do you want to tell the people why you're counting quarters, mother? Because we're gonna do laundry tomorrow because we've got all the stinky underwear. We've got more days close tomorrow. We do. And we're not sure if our hotel room in Denali has laundry services where we can do it ourselves. So we're gonna do it here. But there is a laundry facility on the same floor, so tomorrow we're gonna do that. We were at sea all day tomorrow and we're gonna be passing by some glaciers, so hopefully I'll be able to show you some glacier action. And I don't think I'll need to leave the room for that, actually, because we should be passing it on the side that we're on, so. Yeah, so do we have, do we have enough cash, mom? Nope. Dang it. No, we've got cash, but we don't have enough quarters. Yeah, so we needed another five dollars and quarters. Oh man, all right. So somebody has to make a trip to the... Yeah, we have to go to guest services tomorrow. To the quarter, the quarter person. Yes, exactly, but um, but yeah, today was really good. It was really fun, and um, sorry I didn't vlog a ton, but I really wanted to just like enjoy what we were doing versus pull up my camera every two seconds, but um, yeah, I mean it was a good time. It was a good time. What did you think today, mother? Oh, it was great. I loved the, um, the train ride. It was really, really, really cool, and really, the highlight was the ice cream. The ice cream? The ice, the Skagway. It was awesome. So go to the Skagway ice cream. I can't remember what it's called, but I did vlog it. It was like something cone. Corner cone, or something like that. Creamery cone, I don't know, something with some K's. There was a lot of K's. Yes. Oh, I should, I should show you guys my, um, haul. Give me a second here. Whoa. All right. Hi. Okay, so here is all the things that I got today. So in Larsville, I got a Skagway pen. Great. There we go. I also got an Alaska pin with the glacier. Sorry, it's hard to kind of see that because of the glare, and then I got a free Larsville postcard with some doggies on it. I got one of those too. Yeah. Mom got one as well. And then, oh, oh, and then we panned for gold in Larsville too, and we got. Oh, yeah, we have gold. A tiny little couple little flux of gold that we got. It was hard work. Yeah. Also when we went to town in Skagway, I got this little pin. There we go. I also got a bunch of stickers, so I got some, like, this is a Skagway sticker. Um, I got the flag sticker, and then I just got, like, a bunch of random stickers because I don't really know how I want to, like, do stuff in my planner. So I just got some stickers, you know. And then, oh, wow. There's other things too in here. And then I went to this, like, general store thing that they said was basically their Walmart because they don't have a Walmart. And I got these. They're kind of like... It was a hardware store. Yeah. Ace hardware. Yeah, but there was, like, not, I mean, there was hardware things there, but there was, like, other things too. It was Walmart. So I got this, and these are kind of, like, reflective, and this just shows the state of Alaska inside of the United States. The lower portion. So this is kind of a cool thing that you guys will probably see in my shop. I'm hoping by the end of the month, but I got some of these. I'll open them up for you. I found Alaska washi tape, you guys. All right, so this one has just more, like, nature-themed Alaska stuff. This one has the totem poles, and also says Alaska. And then this one has the Northern Lights, and on the bottom says Alaska as well. This one's a little darker and a little harder to see, but I'm hoping that these will be up by the end of the month. On my shop. And then the piece de resistance. I got a gray sweatshirt, you guys. Alert the authorities. Yeah, it just says Alaska on it. It's not very exciting, but it's very me. And that's all the stuff I got today. So anyway, I'm gonna call it quits here today, but thanks for watching, y'all. Did you guys have anything you'd like to add to the vlog? Okay, my mom always has things to add because this is her channel now. You want to hold the camera and talk? Okay. Oh, hi there. So, so I've been not collecting pins, Alaska pins. Oh my, so this is what I've gotten so far. I don't know. I'm not gonna highlight any one of them, but they're all kind of cool and really kind of fun. And we also saw a black bear today when we were on our train ride, too. We did. The black bear was climbed up on top of a tree. So we actually did see that, so that was pretty pretty cool. Still haven't seen a whale yet. Not yet. Hoping tomorrow or the next day, because then after that, then we get off the boat, so after that... We're not gonna see a whale. No more whales. In Denali? It's not gonna happen in Denali. I don't think so either. No, no. But it's been, it's been fun so far. We're having a great time. Oh, and you got a new hat. Oh, I got my new hat. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, from the train ride. Yeah. So that's kind of cool to them. Mm-hmm. So anyway. Have a great time. Oh, that's it. Okay. Oh. You know, it's her channel now. So, you know, we got to be respectful of the favorite mama. She's just got things to add. She's got content, y'all. So anyway, now I'm gonna go. Thanks for watching. Feel free to thumbs up, subscribe, share it with your friends, do all those things those YouTubers tell you to do. And I will see you guys tomorrow for another fun day at sea, and I'm in a fashion show tomorrow. So I should like tune in because I'm gonna give the camera to my mom and she's gonna film it and it's gonna be funny and I'm wearing something really colorful and really out of my comfort zone. All right, I will see you guys tomorrow for another episode of bloom. Bye guys. Well folks, it's time to kick it off school. So you can feel cool.


Oh god people who chew loudly.   Wow, you know what I can't choose those both are going to help I don't do the washing up.  Yeah, I don't like that I don't like that we were shooting in Bulgaria, which is like we're shooting all in the countryside of Bulgaria Which is a very rural country and at one point there was some Cacophony on this bridge. We were trying to do this long shot with this crane And there was all this like this Cuffuffle on the bridge and I was like we're trying to shoot guys like what's going on and down the bridge I see a bull from one of the neighboring fields clomping running down the bridge at me and the bull came down the bridge crew I'll move it out of the way it stopped at me and looked at me and Like did that thing that they do with their hose And that clearly he was saying like you know because I'm in the full get-up like red You know help and he was like you shave your horns man Like it sort of felt like that and then finally one of the stunt guys was like we need to get you out of here And they got me out of there and then they sort of contained this bull But that was a very scary moment feeling like I might die in a hellboy outfit, you know what I mean There's no way to cut you know what I mean It's in control and so yeah, it stopped and it kind of looked at me I think it was confused because it didn't know You know, I mean I got horns too like I think he was like should I Identify with this creature or kill it. Oh, yeah, I got tremendously injured in this movie I'm just too old to be doing these things, you know I mean I should have done this movie when I was 20 But nobody wanted me to do this movie when I was 20 The biggest thing was which is a weird injury and it doesn't seem like it's that big of a deal But then once it happens to you It's a pretty big deal is like my big toe It was broken and messed up for a while and and I couldn't stop shooting so I had to just tape it up But it's surprising how much you need your big toe You'd think like, you know, I got five of them But the big one is the one where you don't want to mess with and so yeah The big toe was messed up the knees got messed up I got all kinds of bruises and scratches and things like that But it was mainly that right big toe man. It was like it's never recovered. It's still kind of angry I did a lot of training for the movie but that is not my body I mean the funny thing about the thing people think that's my body and I'm very gratified But I don't think there's any way I could do that In life like I am not Arnold Schwarzenegger I guess I could take a ton of steroids and eat like just pounds of meat all day But I didn't do that. I just put on a suit But I you know I did some training and I lifted a lot of weight and stuff But the secret diet is you get the suit and then the diet is a lot of pancakes and doughnuts Just to be able to continue to fill out the suit. It's like three hours in the morning. Yeah We got it down to like two and a half, but it's it's a long time. Yeah, it's no joke. That's a good question I mean unfortunately I do feel like the Avengers would have the leg up in the fact that there's like 80 of them And they're all really strong and powerful and hellboy is kind of this loner outcast, you know But I think he might Wear them down at a certain point with just his sheer resilience and his Kind of jokes and his bad behavior, you know, just they'd feel bad for him at a certain point Just leave him alone any one of the Avengers to be his best friend I want the guy with the bow. I want Hawkeye to be his best friend just because I'd like to learn archery I mean, there's so many things he could be doing right like the world could open up in such a cool way and he has all these buddies And that he's developing through this movie And I would like to see more of some kind of squad of buddies and see those Interrelationships because one of the most fun things about hellboy is and you see it in one scene at the end of the movie that He has these idols in his life or these people that he loves and has awkward relationships and that to me is the most fun So I'd like to see how he interacts with all these people that are his friends and and and also You know that make him feel sorts of things inside his Very demonic, but very simple heart the bprd


Good evening. I'm gonna go ahead and get us started. Still feel free to wait for your drink at the bar You're in the room, so you should be able to hear me. My name is Iwista Yub, and I'm director of the Fellows Program here at New America This event is part of a 20th anniversary series that we're hosting throughout the course of this year for those who don't know We're celebrating our 20th anniversary this year 1999 we were founded as a radical think tank here in DC That was willing to reach outside of the Beltway to figure out new ways to do that and books and films became an avenue in which We could do that 20 years later that vision has resulted in the publication of 116 books Over 200 fellows and we've supported nine films in addition to several long-form reporting articles as well Chris's book came out this year, and it's actually 114 on our list of 116 So a good number to have I think if you ask me So as I introduce the speakers just want to go over two housekeeping notes We do have a live stream happening this evening So please wait for the microphone when you do ask a question and more importantly we do have books on sale Our selling partner solid-state books is here tonight So please be sure to buy a copy of the book this evening and Chris will be available afterward to sign copies So with that it's my honor and my pleasure to introduce our two speakers Christopher Leonard is a class of 2014 national fellow and a business reporter whose work has appeared in the Washington Post The Wall Street Journal fortune and Bloomberg Business Week He's the author of two books two books the meat racket and coakland which won the Anthony J. Anthony Lucas Prize For work in progress from the New York Times or from Columbia and is also a New York Times bestseller Reaching the list this summer Chris is joined by Franklin for he's a class of 2016 national fellow and a national correspondent for the Atlantic He's also the author of the claim book house soccer explains the world Which is one of my favorite books by the way as well as the world without mind Which is a book that we actually helped support through his fellowship. So with that I'll turn the conversation over to you Frank Thank you, it's it's a real honor to be here and to be with you because as I think it's a journalist I kind of I look at what you did here with incredible. Ah, just at the That it this is not first of all It's not an easy story to tell because you're dealing with a company that it will discuss in a minute It is in many ways a very diffuse company and a company that I think pretty clearly intentionally it tries to obscure its footprint and so I mean, I think it's it's important to have program like the fellows program where you're able to kind of cover The market gap in journalism, which doesn't permit you to engage in this sort of One to engage in this sort of massive reporting project the very it's just such a such a painstaking Process to go through so I thought maybe one place we could start is Look around the room What are the things in this physical space that could be traced to coke industries? Okay, it's gonna be a long list Thank you and actually Before I answer that if I could you really Point it out how long this book took to report and to write and it simply would not have been possible without new America And and I want to take the moment to say thank you so much to this institution for everything It's done. It is impossible for me to articulate the level of support. I mean new America gave me years it sheltered me for years and gave me total independence to work on this book and Without that I mean talk about the gap in the marketplace Without somebody stepping in to fill that breach this type of journalism I just know it wouldn't have happened for me and I think that's the case for a lot of other fellows So from the bottom of my heart new America Thank you. It's just amazing when it happened without new America So, yeah, thank you That being said so this room You know, it sounds like I'm over advertising the reach of this company, but they definitely If they didn't make the specific carpet they make carpets just like this They make the plastics that are in the chair They make the fibers that are in our clothing in in elastic waistbands in Nylon in spandex They are playing a role in the delivery of the the electricity that's on right now Whether it's buying and selling natural gas supplies that fire up a plant whether, you know They were very involved in trading actual electricity hours in California They are a major player in the energy infrastructure that's hidden from our view But that keeps the lights running right now So I'd say other than like our clothing The building materials in the wall the insulation panels you probably see Georgia Pacific logos on office buildings under construction all the time I know I do but I'm also kind of obsessed with the whole thing but the wall panels the insulation the the timber framing and then you know finally the the food we're eating and Coke plays there in a really interesting way. They're one of the largest Global producers of nitrogen fertilizer Which is something that you don't think you buy but it is literally the bedrock of our food system So they are making billions of dollars and and having a major influence at that sort of foundational level of our food system As you were digging in and you were Unfolding this entity was there something was there a moment you said holy cow coke industries Makes that is there something so far afield that they do because everything you're describing is quite sprawling. Yeah It happened a lot The phones they make the sensors in our phones They bought this company called molex and they make Sensors that are in the door of your car and that that sense the speed in your car and that are in your phones So that's an area where I didn't think that they would be at all. How many people work for coke industries Oh, man, that's a hard question. I mean honestly, it's like it's over a hundred thousand spread around the world and yet You know despite that that reach despite the omnipresence despite the fact that we're consuming Coke things all the time. It just it's we there's there's no awareness of it. I mean people are so much more I mean We read about coke in the newspaper. It's usually has to do with politics. Yes, and not the things that they make Yes, okay That is key to the whole institution and it's key to the whole book and I can describe the reasons for it But you know first of all to back up. We're talking about their size. We're talking about their scale We're talking about a reach into our lives. That's really important but also as an author what drew me to this is is How they are spread across our entire economy if you're talking about the US economic system and our politics Coke can encompass the whole thing you can write about all of it by writing about this firm I mean that's how broadly dispersed and and deeply embedded in the system They are which is what drew me to it and then the second thing is exactly what you talked about Nobody knows about this stuff. Okay, and part of that Is because of coke strategy and I'm sure we'll talk about this but secrecy and privacy is key to the whole enterprise Part of that is personal about how Charles coke approaches life, but part of it is really deeply strategic But but also, you know For example coke isn't publicly traded So there's not a stock price to bounce around every day and get talked about on CNBC Which is very attracted to the shiny object. That doesn't mean that coke is not important I mean, it's it's vitally economically important, but they're just not trying to get attention and and to me That's really important. I remember You know one of the great people I met at New America was Lena Kahn and we used to talk all the time about stuff like this and in In terms of what's going on in the world. There's this quadrant of Things that are important and things that are boring okay Coke is down in this corner of super important and super boring oil refineries pipeline networks commodities trading nitrogen fertilizer production David and Charles coke as you know David coke passed away. They're two of the richest people in America Not coincidentally, but they're they're simply not trying to get attention by being involved in these hyper complex boring industries that underpin civilization They're making a massive fortune and they're influencing our lives Yeah, your book is the most boring thriller ever written. Yeah, or thrilling borer ever written Let's I want to just weave the discussion of tradecraft into the whole evening, but I'll just begin here So when you set out to write about this company You probably had an instinct that a lot of what they do would be a snoozefest if not Narrated in the right sort of way What were the choices that you made at the very beginning of the project that kind of tried to Try to tell the story of something important yet Diffuse and and in some ways, I mean there is a center to the book, right? Right, which is Charles coke and we'll talk about him But he's and he's he's Probably boring fascinating as well What were the how did you start to conceive of the project at the start in order to? Make it jump off the page in the way that it does wow, okay? And by the way now we're going back to like 2012, so let me dust off the cobwebs and remember First of all as a writer and as a reporter and as a reader I actually get really geeked out about this boring stuff because I have this theory that if you can take these things that are so vitally important to people and the writer's job is to mine through Miles and miles of tedium and horrific boring Material to come at the super important spark at the heart of it for example Michael Lewis's book the big short is like the textbook example of somebody who took collateralized debt obligation and help explain why This destroyed the economy and it's fundamental to modern American finance So in the beginning I I became obsessed and fascinated with the oil refining Super important part of the world the economy the country tells such an important story about our political system and and how people make fortunes and So to me that it was exciting to learn about it And I realized if I could distill it down to the real essence that people don't talk about if you've got the guts to get The machete and go through the brush for months and get to the real story You can bring it out in a way that's going to be interesting to people But then the honest truth is as I started reporting it. I Wanted to learn how things worked. I wanted to learn what coke industries really was How they really operate how they really think and what they really do and that's when I started interviewing people and people have this way of just being fascinating and so these stories started to really come forward which Totally changed my conception of of the whole institution and the whole history and and that's when it started to Jump off the page if you will and become super fast Yeah, give us an example of a person that you discovered Yeah, you found especially beguiling and who opened up the company in the way that you're describing Thank you so much because this person is like jumping out of my head So in the very beginning I'm calling around to everybody who's ever worked at coke industries And I also want to talk to people who used to be senior coke industries And I'm literally going down a list It's a you literally at the beginning of the project You just you compiled a spreadsheet of names and then just started calling I wish I could say I'm sophisticated enough to have a spreadsheet. Yeah I have like these yellow legal pad with yellow legal pads and scribbled stuff everywhere and these Microsoft Word documents It makes sense to me about don't make sense to anybody else But it means coke can't hack them. So yes, and actually that's a real thing. I Won't go there now, but that's a real thing Return to that bracket that bracket return to it later And so one of the random names on this list was Bernard J. Poulson former senior oil refining executive at Coke Who I reach at home and he's I think he was in his late 70s or early 80s And he just starts talking. How do you how do you present yourself to somebody like Bernard J. Poulson? Hello, my name is Christopher Leonard. I'm a business reporter I am writing about coke industries, and I'd love to interview you about your time with the company And before they can hang up on me. I try to rush in with an informed question I wanted to ask you about the 80s when they bought the Refinery in Corpus Christi because I heard that there was a lot of dissent about that deal, but it went through and you were in charge of it Well, then all of a sudden they're like, oh Well, yeah, you got that wrong though because like I you know, I did this or did that so you're like instantly kind of telegraphing I'm genuinely interested in the substance that I know a thing or two kind of thing So anyway, Paulson starts talking to me And he's like, well, yeah, it reminds me of the time Charles Koch hired me to break the Union up in Pine Bend, Minnesota Disco yeah, so like sweat breaks out on my forehead and I and I said well, please do tell me about that, you know and So an hour later he had unspooled This amazing story that like truly was lost to history about this very brutal bitter Labor war that Charles Koch undertook and he picked a fight When he was in his 30s right after he'd taken over the family company and he hired Bernard Paulson It's like six foot six Texan guy wore cowboy boots to go up and break the back of this militant labor union in Minnesota So that that became a huge chapter in the book which helped I think me understand What labor unions were like back in the 70s? What working conditions were like for blue collar workers at an oil refinery in the 70s and What the dispute was like and it also revealed to me a lot about Charles Koch's character So there's there's a case of a story where all of a sudden You're just talking to a person and the stories just come out How would you manage a source like Paulson? Would you you have this initial conversation with them on the phone? And then would you just keep talking to them on the phone? Would you go visit Paulson in person? Would you? How do you how do you? How did you open I mean it sounds like he opened up pretty much instantly, but how did you? What was your strategy for kind of milking him for all he was worth? Well? Of course we collaborated jointly on a synergistic project and no, but the way I I milked him for all he was worth was called him back and Asked him more questions that had come up if I had more frankly if I was more resourced up I would have flown to Houston, but you know you've always got to figure out How to use resources, and I didn't have that kind of resources at my command But then I went to the Library of Congress and verified what he was telling me with the old newspaper Clippings from the Minneapolis papers in the St. Paul papers, which are in like a Raiders of the Lost Ark style crate in the bottom and not digitized And then when I realized he was telling me the truth, and it was verifiable I flew to the actual refinery and then interviewed all the old-time Union people to flesh out the other side of the story and I think You know one in the green room You were you were mentioning that you take you took a trip to Houston And you were literally just knocking on Doors it when you went to Pine Bluff. Was that what you were doing there? You were you were you just I Mean, I think it's people don't realize no, maybe maybe not in Pine Bluff, but No, but there's a kind of shoe leather part of it is is it seems so antiquated in the age of the internet perhaps or Google, but it's actually Vital yeah reporting doesn't happen without it the reason I made that funny face is yeah I went up to I'm sorry if I mispronounced pine bend a pine bed. I'm sorry if I said that so I went up to pine bend I had a couple a couple phone call Contact setup of people I knew I could visit and then I spent I did spend the rest of the time knocking on doors and meeting people in diners and Might have kind of walked into a nursing home behind somebody without buzzing in and knocked on a door and got a Incredible interview with a guy who used to be a manager at the refinery and so but really truly honestly the point is you cannot do reporting I think without that and it's it's we live in an extremely fraught era in the media world in the political world in our literal communities and It is somewhat creepy and invasive and aggressive to knock on somebody's door and So I dress like this, you know and you show always wear the tie Yeah And particularly if I'm doing door work because you want to telegraph to somebody. I'm not a creep I'm like on the job.  I'm a journalist And I really do want to know about this Would you be willing to talk to me about this and if they say I'm not interested? Thank you so much. I really appreciate it You can't be creepy and aggressive But unless you try to connect with people Unless you try to connect with people you can't understand what's going on is my view. Yeah. Yeah, so It's strikes me that two central characters in the book one Is something it's a concrete human being and then we'll get to the second one in a second the most concrete human I mean the concrete the human being who ties it all together is of course Charles Koch and One question I had this is a bit abstract But I was thinking, you know, what is this what Hank what keeps this corporation hanging together in one piece? What is this corporation and it seems it's an extension of one man? Above all else. Yeah, absolutely I Didn't know that going in I had no idea I knew this company was a big big company that could let me report all the stuff I cared about This figure at the heart of it didn't start to emerge until months into the reporting when I realized Charles Koch okay, the CEO of a corporation is is like a dictator They are accountable to the board of directors, but other than that they have the authority to hire fire and direct strategy This isn't like a democracy Charles Koch incidentally appoints the board the only person who can fire Charles Coke is Charles Koch He has been CEO of this organization since 1967 when Lyndon Johnson was president that's over 50 years He is the unquestioned authority at the top of the whole system. Okay, so that's pretty rare And you asked me if there was this sort of this aha moment when I realized oh my gosh I didn't think they were into that what came to my mind was a little bit different. I was at Dupont Circle Reading on a nice day This book he had written called the science of success that he published in 2007 which is Charles Koch's Management philosophy although that's such a simplistic term. It doesn't capture what it really is It is his blueprint for how to organize a company how to organize a country and how to live your personal life And there's a bar Code thing that that lays that all out in science of success and I was reading that book and I was just like Jesus this thing is so much more than a company this I this is like a true internal mini Society this is different from Walmart. This is different from General Electric This is different from Tyson foods, which I'd written a book about the people who work for coke Subscribe to this philosophy speak this vocabulary and and follow these rules that Charles Coke has has codified in this market-based Management system to a degree unlike any other I've ever seen okay, let's unpack this because One of the things that I think is so fascinating about coke industries and Charles Coke is what you're describing that it's it's we think about coke is an ideologue and Ideologues can sometimes have totalizing philosophies and there is this kind of Totalizing philosophy at the core that extends into almost every aspect of The company of his life and of his politics and so maybe you could just you could You could you could you could give us the contours of that absolutely, okay? So let's start very quickly Charles coke is born in Wichita, Kansas His dad is Fred coke his dad is a millionaire who owns this industrial conglomerate Fred coke has four sons Charles coke is one of them Fred coke was a co-founder of the John Birch Society. He is a hard core Right-wing conservative who believes the federal government is a Trojan horse of tyranny This is the political conversation at the coke family dinner table and coke is also raised Charles coke is also raised To believe in hard work. How did the federal government tell you today daddy? You know, I suppose so right and These are the ideas That are put into his head growing up and then he kind of augments this kind of right-wing anti-communist Theory with these Austrian economists Hayek and von Mises and all these people and then he gets handed the keys to the family company In 1967 when his dad dies of a heart attack. So now he starts to shape the institution In fact, it's his like obligation to start shaping the institution and what I'm getting at is he develops He's he's trying to think through he's a total engineer. How do I do this? What is the blueprint? To do this. What are the actual rules and he I interviewed him about market-based management?  He teaches it to his employees and internal You know focus groups and and set and audit in the auditorium. You have these Teaching sessions about it called a university. They call it a university coke university and to your original question He says in his book the science of success there must be a quote total conversion You're not halfway in and halfway out you either obey the laws or you don't you either understand it Or you don't get it and you've got to fully embrace it and as I mentioned earlier. There's in science of success I don't know what you call it, but these it's a table. It's a table, and he's like this is good for a company It's good for a country, and it's good for your personal life like this is an all-encompassing view of how the world ought to work We'll just talk talk. All right. Let's let's break this down talk about I just obviously it's it's much more significant how this applies to Country and and company but begin maybe by talking about how it applies to personal life well, you get back to these ideas of personal responsibility Innovation and entrepreneurship How did it apply in it? How did you apply it in his own way? like in terms of oh child rearing or Gosh, so discipline Here's how I'll put it Before we talk about child rearing on Sunday afternoons Charles Koch brought his son and daughter into the family study And they listened to economic lectures on tape when they were toddlers So it's a full thing. It's a full thing. How does this apply to Charles Koch? There is I'm not kidding.  What's fast? Well You said fear of failure there. It was the one what is Psychic psychologically you have this guy who is kind of in this act of Constant creative destruction perpetual revolution Company revolutionizes itself several times over He's relentless when it comes to Constructing his political vision and influencing political economy to the ends that he deems ideal Is there any torment? underlying The way that he thinks about the world. Is there any does he is is he somebody who's ever had a second thought or questioned anything about his life So, you know first of all, I can't answer that I'm a reporter on the outside I don't know what goes on in his private moments. Well, you're no fun. I know sorry But I'll give you an answer. I Mean here's here's what here's what I do know. He doesn't project out he doesn't the people who work for him Describe a kind of supremely unemotional character. He doesn't pound his hand on the desk. He doesn't curse. He doesn't yell There are parts in the book where you see him. I rate and furious and angry He waged a super Ugly fight against his own brother bill over the fight over the control of the company I mean the kind of stuff that just I think Nauseau the person until they die. I mean really brutal inner family stuff But he projects an aura of Determination and calm and you know, I asked him about the worst period of the company's history and his personal history of the 1990s The company failed In major business ventures. They racked up an incredible roster of criminal fines from the US Department of Justice for pipeline leaks air pollution Wanton water pollution that's documented in the book. It was really hard time for the company and I asked him how he dealt with it And I mean, of course, how honest is he gonna be with the reporter? I don't know But he told me, you know, I just saw the failures and I worked harder like I sincerely believe he did not doubt the rules He didn't doubt his own vision of the world He didn't doubt his own competency He just realized he made a mistake and he needed to get back to the grindstone and work harder so I don't detect a lot of like self-tortured Doubt or self-interrogation Let's just what was the moment like So you interviewed him in what year? 2015 so relatively was it It was the book you conceived of the book by that point. Oh, yeah and what was to describe the interview and describe meeting him and What was what was it like staring at this guy and And meeting in the flesh and blood the person who would become the center of Your life for the next four years. Yeah You know as you know as a reporter It's always hard because you always want more. You know, he and I met in a very I Was interviewing him for a story. There was a PR person Sitting at the table right there. Did he know you were working on the book at that time? Yes. In fact, this is telling I conceived of the book and Wrote a profile of coke for Fortune magazine when I was here at New America and then I got a contract to do the book and I mailed Charles coke a letter and I mailed his PR team a letter saying I am before the book was ever announced I said, I'm writing a book about coke industries and I want you to know before it's publicly announced and One reason I did that is because they are so Smart and they're relentless researchers and they knew a lot about me And I knew that they were gonna find out I was doing a book very very quickly And that if I wasn't totally transparent and straightforward They would sense duplicity on my part and I also just think it's good practice to let the subject know what you're doing But I was more aggressive about it with coke because I knew They would find out and they're very big on trust. What was the reaction? Silence and then we can talk about this their PR team back then was very Contentious and aggressive and in your face, which I actually kind of appreciate it. They were very honest and Missy called me other PR person sent me an email saying I was very surprised to see someone referred you as an expert on coke industries recently I'm like, what can I say missing people say what they say, but um, why did they give you that they give the interview for the fortune article or for The book so they gave me interviews. Well for the fortune article when I told them I was doing the article They said no way. We're not gonna cooperate. We just have zero interest. Goodbye And so I flew to Wichita knocked on doors started getting interviews and as time went on after a lot of contentress back and forth They said okay fine come back We'll give you like two interviews with two people that are key to the story and they opened up a little bit And it was sort of like that over a period of four and a half years of They would open doors and give access and then maybe close them again When I was in the penalty box and we'd go through the whole thing and it goes back and forth like that so yeah and What was the like but let me let me pose the question this way You spend all this time sitting and staring at Charles coke Into a lot of Americans of Either who have a liberal persuasion. He's the devil incarnate Would you did you Did you find him likeable after looking at him were the things that you found yourself empathizing with or coming to appreciate that maybe others Can't see yes, and so I realized I didn't answer your first question what it was like to meet him Okay, I'm gonna just say this really quick During that tough time in 2013 They wouldn't talk to me and I just drove right up to the headquarters and walked into the lobby and said come down And talked to me. No, this is ridiculous. Well, that was 2013 Then they renovated the corporate headquarters When I went back in 2015 part of the renovation was at the street I had driven on in on a city street They had torn up and at their own expense ran it in a horseshoe shape around the campus and built a 10-foot tall wall Around the corporate headquarters because legitimately Charles coke gets so many death threats Constant stream of death threats and vitriol which I've seen on Twitter having done this book And so it you know, it struck me that I got a security code emailed to my phone I held it up to a scanner at a bunker the steel gates open. I drove down a long road Security escorted me up to his office building. I walk in here's one of the richest men on planet earth One of the most powerful men in America. I think it's fair to say and you know He's kind of hunched over he says oh, hey Chris. How are you doing? He didn't need a where tie to come talk to me, you know, and it's this instantly disarming Midwestern avuncular Personality that he projects but it is deceptive in a way it hides The backbone of a real fighter the prologue of the book is about Charles coke. It's kind of overview It's called the fighter.  But there's also a lot more to the story About what his legacy is going to be and what the full impact of this Corporation and the political operation is going to be and not all of it's good and and the whole story isn't pretty so You know all that stuff is swimming around in your head When you're around someone like that, but I guess to close I mean like on this comment What struck me truly struck me about that time with him the one hour. I had was how much power he has He lives every day of his life at the apex of a globe-spanning Corporate Empire that's one of the most profitable in America that he has owned and operated since he was 32 years old and Virtually everybody he comes into contact with is beholden to him for a paycheck The people in that firm, you know borderline worship this guy and so that's the world he lives in every day That's what struck me Let's let's go through the counterfactual if Charles coke didn't exist How would America be different? Okay? I I mean I'm surprised at this answer You know the corporation Reflects deep realities about the American economy Okay, about how our political system and economic system works, but it's not like it transformed our life The coke industries did not invent the personal computer. They did not invent the automobile They run the machinery that makes life work, but if there was no Charles coke I think a lot of the stuff about our life would be the same I really do think at the end of the day after looking at this for years I would say the biggest impact they've had is on American politics and When I started reporting on their political apparatus all of the reporting Pointed me in one direction and that's the issue of climate change and carbon regulations. That's what they care about That's what got them up every day They have been unique in their approach to this issue. They've been uniquely uncompromising and militant to Not only derail any effort to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, but to cast out on the very science behind climate change What I'm telling what I'm saying is if there was no Charles coke a key thing that would be different And I feel comfortable saying this is the politics around climate change Contrast coax approach that to you dealing with cap and trade and the various other regulatory questions with say exxons of Approach if if you didn't have coke there Staking this uncompromising position would the rest of industry have Maybe folded under the pressure to make a deal Would we be would we actually have would we actually be in a different place with climate now if he wasn't sitting there at the vanguard of the Anti-regulatory Denialist movement Great question And and and I'm thinking about a lot of this stuff to me one of the central battlefields over this issue was in 2010 when the Democrats in Congress wanted to pass the waxman marky bill cap and trade They were close and The other fossil and this has never been an easy lift You I'm sure you've read the Nathaniel rich book losing earth which is about climate change debates back in the 70s or 80s It's not like this was an easy lift It was never gonna be an easy lift to do something about this problem, which is so deeply embedded in just modern life You know Producing greenhouse gases, okay, but Exxon Chevron Valero Big big players in this fossil fuel space were playing ball Okay, they weren't embracing climate change legislation, but a lot of them realized This is gonna happen Let's manipulate the law to work as as well as it can for us Let's make this so it's a hospitable future for fossil fuels and we can continue to make money even if Greenhouse gas emissions go down or we have to pay a price for putting carbon into the sky and the book documents that And and Exxon mobile some people say that they're playing a little game by supporting a carbon tax And they're just trying to forestall legislation But they are on the record saying we think this should happen and we will support it Coke was a different animal entirely and a lot of it traces back to this fact of what we've been talking about Charles coke Has a set view of how the world should work and you can't argue with a blueprint You can't say I don't want the laws of physics to apply here only here And so when they came to Washington on this issue of climate change, they approached it in a stunningly Militant uncompromising fashion And they helped burn to the ground that moderate wing of the Republican Party that wanted to do something about this They Infused cap-and-trade rhetoric into the Tea Party They helped reshape Republican politics so that when someone with a very good ear for politics like Donald Trump comes along He's talking about cap-and-trade climate change being a hoax and and the Chinese are behind it and solar power gives you cancer He's he's responding to the the sound waves that coke was putting out back in 2010 and the way they've reshaped the Republican Party So I mean my answer to you is I think coke is Quantitatively different from the other big oil companies I think a lot of that has to do with that they're privately held and Charles coke is in control And I think that they've had an outsized effect on this issue We'll open it up. I think in let me just ask you one more question, which is I said that there were two central characters in the book Yeah, the second I think it's capitalism American capitalism and and What as you as you studied the American economy through the lens of coke industries What did you learn about capitalism? What's what do you want the reader to take away? About the second subject. Yeah, thank you. That is a great question Capitalism is like Frankenstein's monster It's something that we create It is not handed down. It is not an organism that evolves independently It is a human created system of rules That's all capitalism is and it's I mean, I guess it's a beautiful thing. I think it's one When done, right? It creates opportunity liberty Individual sovereignty and all these amazing things. It's a great way for people to coordinate together You hear a lot about that in the coke rhetoric. It's it's an incredible way for humans to operate together Looking back, okay from 1900 to 2019 the the picture I took away is that when left alone capitalism kind of wants to revert to a mean and That's a mean where you've got kids working in coal mines the workplace injuries tainted meat Environmental pollution massive corruption in politics and profound income inequality and that's what America was like in 1900 straight up And then there was a public policy response to that in the 1930s and 40s that regulated financiers Controlled the power of monopolies empowered labor unions and as you and I were talking about earlier labor unions sure aren't perfect And when they were at the peak of their power, they sure weren't perfect, but it's not coincidental that when they were most dominant in American life is when Income was most broadly shared that productivity and wage gains went side by side. That's I just find it hard to believe That's coincidental and That whole system that was built in the 30s and 40s fell apart in the 70s And it wasn't just because of a cabal of right wing people who destroyed it They were like fundamental problems underline it was a really complicated thing But now we live in an era where the economy is is is leaving a decade of growth a decade of growth and unemployment is at a level where it hasn't been since the 1960s and You know, you just know this doesn't feel like the 1960s to people it just doesn't and the reason why is because The economy can grow for ten years the gains are captured by a small group of people. Most people are treading water economically and Fixing the hole with debt is that's exactly what's happened over the last decade So my lesson about American capitalism is that it's a wonderful system It has to be tinkered with constantly like a refinery And that when you don't tinker with it it can break down and when it breaks down the consequences are really bad I'm almost finished reading the book and it's it's a really wonderful read. It's hard to put down sometimes so Thank you My question is about so oftentimes when you describe Charles coke and the sort of senior people around him He seems so logical and methodical and everything he does and very rational and that's almost across the board except when it comes to climate change and then all of a sudden you hear people in The book saying things that I I didn't think that they actually believed like it's all a hoax It doesn't matter, you know, we don't have to do anything about this because it's not real And I know of course this has to do with his management philosophy and so forth but I and I'm asking you maybe to peer into someone's mind in a way that you can't but Did you get a sense of how? He and those folks around him kind of square this idea of there's the scientific evidence about this thing that's happening and You know fighting cap and trade might be good for our short-term bottom line But in the long run for our business for you know, our kids this could be really devastating Yeah, thank you. So my answer is so unsatisfying Because I don't have an answer and you're asking questions. I hear all the time and that I was asking I have sent multiple requests to coke industries to let me sit down with Charles coke I have sent the list of questions. I have and they're exactly what you just asked Here's a person with three masters degrees in engineering from MIT one of them being nuclear engineering He understands data. He understands science Where does he come down on this? Okay, I don't know he won't answer that question to me Now here's what I do know. We've recorded their footprint. We've recorded what they've done in the world through the lobbying Through their think tanks and they have done what we just talked about earlier Which is derail efforts to regulate greenhouse gases. Is it because they think the science is fake? Is it because they think a market solution will emerge and that by regulating the energy industry We're only going to create massive problems that will forestall that market solution Is it a totally cynical effort to protect the future profits of the company? the cost to coke industries from Cap on carbon emissions or a price on carbon emissions Over 50 years is measured in a tee and trillions of dollars and I can walk through that whole thing And I've published that and I printed it and coke can't dispute it and hasn't disputed it Because what you look at the value of the assets they have in the fossil fuels business and then the future value of those assets as oil Flows through them and if oil prices fall and demand falls the losses are just huge So there is a clear economic interest there You know the only other data I have as I was interviewing Philip Ellender their top lobbyist here in Washington, DC in 2014 and he was telling me we're not so sure about the science of climate change and I was interviewing a former senior executive at Coke Very very smart person who I think totally sincerely Believes the whole climate change thing is a massive hoax Cooked up by universities and governments to cow the population into accepting tyranny and he was like, you know shaking his head Chris How can you be so? Seduced by this lie, you know, how can you believe this and I think he was being sincere with me So at the end of the day You know, I talked about how Charles Cokes live lives in the middle of an empire He created there probably aren't a lot of people aggressively questioning this. In fact the book Features on the record a former senior compliance attorney at Coke named David Hoffman Who did question this stuff and and created an internal think tank to figure out how to adapt to a cap and trade Regulated carbon world and and was Kind of forced out of the company certainly was ignored on that topic and told me They they accept challenging views, but not on this topic So maybe what you can see is a snowball building over decades where the challenging information is minimized and the supporting information is emphasized But look at the end of the day, I'm an outside reporter Looking into a dark glass window, and I don't know what they really believe in their heart about the issue But we can say what they've done about it. Hi, Anne-Marie Slaughter CEO here and Chris first of all, we're just enormously proud of this book It's wonderful to hear you So my question is are there any women in the story at all? Are there any? Sisters are there any wives are there any senior women? I mean, it's just actually extraordinary to hear you talk and the only woman's name I've heard is the PR person so I just wonder inside the coke family. Were there any women presumably yet a mother, but anybody else? Wow, so The demographic diversity inside coke industries has not been tremendous over the decades That is for sure and there are very very few women in this book. It is Extraordinarily dominated by not just conservative white men, but conservative white men of a certain type Who thrive in the company who help? lead the company So and and there is one woman in the book I really would like to talk about but there were no sisters There's no coke sister There were four coke brothers and the father You know encourage them to box with each other and compete with each other and there were lots of king of the hill games there's a lot of competition and aggression there and even physical and so I You know there's a daughter Charles coke has a daughter and a son and They were both brought into the family study to listen to the economic lectures and the daughter was the eager pupil and the son told me He would fall asleep with a ball cap over his eyes But the son is in line to take over the company and the daughter runs a publishing house in New York City so and Leslie Rudd a close friend of the family said look this was Wichita in the 70s the son came in behind the father That's a very real cultural thing One of my favorite chapters in the entire book is called the secret brotherhood of process owners And it's about a woman named Heather Faragher who went to work at a coke refinery in Pine Bend, Minnesota and Her bosses began to break the law by dumping ammonia Laid in water into nearby wetlands Because the refinery wasn't working well. They were producing all this pollution They had the choice to put it into the river where it would be detected and they would bust their permit and face Fines or they could dump it out the back into the nearby wetlands and she sent them All documented all totally documented. She sent memos saying you can't do this. She told them verbally you can't do this She would leave for the weekend. They would do it over the weekend. She'd come back Monday And they tell her she did it she ended up cooperating with federal authorities and they were given a record Fine for that and found guilty essentially even though it didn't go to court It was a very interesting story Because it I loved that chapter because it talks about whistleblowers and it talks about how difficult it is inside a corporation to stand up and say no and It can't be Coincidental the gender issues that are there she told me that the compliance hotline attorney told her she was being too emotional and Should literally she told me he said you know you should take care of your family so I think that there was an issue of people not being listened to and and and this look this all ties back in my view to sort of Homogene and corporate group think and how difficult it can be to stand up against it And I guess my final closing thought And I hope I've answered the question there I'm you know, they're just not many women in the book But it does describe a significant like institution in our system And there's real conformity here one of my favorite things was I found a picture of the coke Cafeteria back in the 70s and everybody's wearing White shirts sport coat and a tie and then Charles Koch decided in the 90s ties are not working They're too formal and you see the same picture of him sitting there with no tie and everyone behind him's no tie You know and so There yeah, it's it's a homogenous in many ways Oh Hi in terms of the actual makeup of the business the Corporate structure so oil always at the heart of it In terms of like percentage terms has that changed over time or is it really oil at the core and then profitable bits on the sides Thank you so much for asking that and and I should have gotten into that more when I described the company Starts an oil and oil is the bread and butter bedrock of this firm oil refineries pipelines and trading has always been at the core And then they're very smart about how they expand and grow This is a company always looking to expand and grow, but they branch out from what they know Okay, so they branch out from oil refinery into liquid natural gas processing plants Which are like oil refineries and then they break out from there into natural gas Pipelines and from there into trading electricity, which is highly contingent on natural gas prices So you can see how the thing branches out into the world constantly growing, but doesn't grow in the sense that they don't sell TVs They don't sell t-shirts. They don't make movies. They do these certain kinds of businesses So it's very difficult to measure what coke industries is today because they're privately held and they jealously guard that I think what I can tell you is that still about 55 percent of their sales every year comes from just Flint Hills resources crude oil and that's probably wrong now because it fluctuates a year-to-year But that's not probably it's a good ballpark and then they have a huge chunk that does nitrogen fertilizer Which again, it's just natural gas. That's all it is and then after that you you've got Georgia Pacific Which is paper building materials? So these would make up the minor Components, but nitrogen fertilizer Georgia Pacific then the small little suite of companies like molex, which makes those phone sensors Guarding glass which makes the glass in buildings and then a very troubled division called in Vista, which is what makes the clothing materials It's never really been that profitable. Hi, I'm looking they work in criminal defense in the city So it's a really great book And I'll just say that like throughout your descriptions of the details of like how an oil refinery works I never thought I'd be interested in reading about that, but I found myself pretty You know the chapter three on the war on pine bend is really fascinating. So I was very impressed with that my question is Does coke the Duke oak and coke industries faithfully apply market-based management Where where do you see that being faithfully applied or where do you see them falling short of applying those principles? Okay, and first of all I'm gonna tell my editor exactly what you said about that chapter in pine bank because we had a lot of fights about that But my my theory is like I want readers to really feel empowered and I want you to or I really like when books Teach me about the machinery and so that when you're having a conversation about this stuff You can talk about it, you know and talk back and that's really great And so I'm glad you were as fascinated about that stuff as I was so then how is market-based management applied and is it applied? consistently I'll all answer this honestly, and this is how I see it. I think it is a Constantly moving target. It's got this set of principles. They've got worksheets to go through before you make an acquisition There's a definite vocabulary to it To me the major power of market-based management is very Significant and serious it unifies the workforce when you've got a company Spread across the globe in all these different industries market-based management gets everybody speaking the same language Working under the same incentives and marching to the same tune that can't be overstated That's hard to do I've covered a lot of companies and having a unified corporate culture is really hard but in the sense that it's applied Like a actual blueprint equally in each division. I have found it tends to be a moving target so that when somebody fails they weren't doing it right and when someone succeeds they were doing it right and It's arbitrary in my view, and I'm sure coke would like massively dispute that say I got it all wrong didn't observe the right things and But that's my takeaway point is that it's mostly a cultural thing And of course they're Important nuggets in it in terms of how you think about the markets you're trading in for example and how you buy another company But at the end of the day It it did seem to be a moving target if you will And if you heard from coke at all any week in pretty and coke about the book so no We The book came out August 13th Back up to February 1st. I gave them 260 pages of material from the book Fact-checking memos with a emphasis on everything bad. Here's everything critical. Here's everything that might upset you Let's talk about it. We went through that for months They engaged in a totally good faith effort with me We had a constructive dialogue It got heated at the end as we got down to the final issues And got pretty heated at the end when we kind of had different views of things and then when the book came out It has been total radio silence Nothing to refute Congratulations again, thanks. All right. Thank you. Thanks everybody


angels assist those who don't resist their advice. Angel meets Hagar for the first time and the angel does not tell Hagar doesn't do a miracle for Hagar he gives her advice he said Hagar I know you're offended I know you don't want to go back and I know you think Sarah has wronged you I know that Sarah is a hypocrite you think that Sarah doesn't have any love of God in her life I know you have that and you have the right to think of that but you need to go back if you don't respect Sarah have respect for your destiny but you need to go back and you know what Hagar did Hagar instead of debating with an angel and saying no not in my watch not in this time unless Sarah calls me first and apologizes unless I receive a sincere apology I will never go who does she think she is that she's gonna treat me like that am I her property no I'm pregnant she's not pregnant she's a jealous of me and until she admits she's jealous I'm not doing anything and Hagar instead of taking that route that most people would take Hagar says yes sir it's interesting the second time Hagar meets an angel she is in drought with Ishmael and dying but the second time an angel comes it doesn't give advices he gives her a miracle if helps her find water where she didn't see water angels do not assist with miracles if their advices are rejected miracles are result of our obedience to God's advice counsel and many times that advice that console comes contrary to our feelings our circumstances and what we have planned to do we already have chosen our navigation to go toward that path and the angel of God comes and says listen I know you don't want to go that route but you gotta turn around you gotta submit you gotta change your ways and you say God but I already like it this is good if you obey God on the way from a painful situation to go back to where God wants you to be you have bonus you have faith that whatever bump you hit on the road you can plead and you will begin to see a supernatural intervention of God's angels in your life God's angels don't assist people who have a need they assist people who have shown their obedience to God by following his word his direction even when their feelings were contrary