Part One: Charles Koch: The Luke Skywalker of Rich People

In Episode 17, Robert is joined by the hilarious Ever Mainard and they discuss Charles Koch, who despite being born into impossible fortune came to believe that he and his fellow rich people were the most discriminated class in America. Over the course of a convoluted and bloody career, Charles Koch would become the driving force behind the infamous “Koch Brothers” and build a rebellion with a goal no less extreme than the destruction of the U.S. government as we know it. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Mmm, Hello friends, I'm Robert Evans, and this is Behind
the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you
don't know about the very worst people in all of history.
Every week I sit down with a guest and read
them an exhaustively detailed story about one of the worst

(00:20):
people in all of history. My guest is coming in
cold and this week my guest is Ever Maynard, star
of The Fields on Netflix. Uh. Comedian, writer, improviser, stand
up stand up performer, actress, actress more. Yeah. Yeah, I'm
a double actress. Let's talk about or a heroine. But

(00:42):
but who will make you want to shoot up some heroin?
Charles Coke? Um? Yeah. Today's episode is titled Charles Coke,
The Luke Skywalker of Rich People. Uh. And that's that's
who we're gonna be talking about today. Before we get
into this, I have some nacho cheese der rito's. Ever
are you Are you a fan of nacho cheese doritos.
I'm not really digging those right now. I got through phases.

(01:04):
That's not going to help us getting a sponsorship deal.
Oh I love nacho cheese doritos. Sometimes I make nacho
cheese doritos with cool ranch Doritos and really have a
party in the mouth Doritos the chips for everyone nailed it,
and inside, I'm gonna do a I'm gonna do a
sound effect and oh a, s mr, I didn't know
what you're doing that. This is the sound of of
of ever enjoying a delicious Dorito's chick Love nacho cheese

(01:28):
flavored chips. So good. Well, now that we're fortified, are
you ready to dig into the tale of Charles Coke? Oh? Yeah,
all right. There's nothing sexier than being a rebel. That's
why Hollywood has for decades glorified gangsters and pirates. That's
why the lost cause myth of the Confederacy still has traction.
That's why people are so eager to identify with the
hashtag resistance. There's something deep in the marrow of our

(01:49):
nation that makes Americans want to be seen as plucky
resistance fighters, each flinging towards our own personal death stars.
But what happens when your entire existence is the antithesis
of rebellion? What happens of you, through sheer accident of birth,
wind up with hundreds of millions of dollars. Oddly enough,
that guy can and we'll find some way to make
himself feel like a rebel. Today we'll be talking about
the story of one such man, Charles Coke, who, despite

(02:11):
being born into impossible fortune, came to believe that he
and his fellow rich people were the most discriminated class
in America. Over the course of a convoluted and bloody career,
Charles Coke would become the driving force behind the infamous
Coke Brothers and build a rebellion with a goal no
less extreme than the destruction of the U. S. Government
as we know it. I don't see a problem so far.
You're you're on board with this guy. So far. You

(02:32):
agree with rich people really taking one for the guys.
See what I mean, already getting hated on. I feel
your rich people. What's up? Yeah, yeah, they've taken too much?
Uh yeah, okay. Uh So I should note right now
the tale of Charles Coke is one of those rare
stories in journalism where there is a single, indispensable reporter
behind much of the coverage. If you're gonna talk about

(02:53):
sexual assault in Hollywood, Ronan Farrow is going to come
up a lot. If you're going to talk about Blackwater
and Eric Prince Jeremy's a hill is going to come
up a lot. Uh. And for the Koke brothers, it's
a reporter named Jane Mayer. She wrote a book, Dark Money,
in Steen that delved into their past and the network
of billionaire influencers they assembled to change American politics. If
you have read a long, scary article about the Koch
brothers in Politico or The New Yorker or pretty much

(03:16):
anywhere else, there's a very good chance she wrote it.
So she's we owere a lot on this podcast, and
dark Money is a big source here. Now, our story
today begins back before any of the Koch brothers were born.
In nine, Fred Coke, the patriarch of the Coke family,
invented a new way to refine crude oil into gasoline Alas.
This scientific breakthrough made him a threat to the big

(03:36):
oil companies, and since this was the twenties, everyone was
even more corrupt than they are now. He was boxed
out of the industry and sued into oblivion for patent
infringement and other nonsense. So far not looking good for
these guys. It seems like there's no way to pull
themselves out of this hole. Nervous but just wait. Fred
Coke Law battled the oil companies for fifteen years, and
eventually the court settled in his favor and awarded him

(03:58):
one point five million dollars you know, in like thirties money,
which is, you know, pretty pretty good money to have
a million of um. They won because it was found
out that the oil companies had bribed one of the
judges who had initially ruled against him. In her book
Dark Money, Mayor quotes a family friend of the coax
Is saying the fact that the judge was bribed completely
altered their view of justice. They believe justice can be

(04:19):
bought and the rules are for chumps, which they are.
We don't agree the rules are for chumps, but maybe
that makes more sense when you're jaywalking less, when y're
so far I'm still on board. I don't see what
the problem. Yes, yeah, I mean, look, Fred was screwed.
This is so Far's he's the hero of the story.

(04:40):
Oil company. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm on board with Fred
Coke so far. He just pulled some money out of
their and he went to the dark side because he
was like, wait a minute, you can budge justice. Well
that's kind of exactly. Well, First off, while he's still
admired and this lost stuff, he finds himself hard up
for some money, you know. Of course, of course, because
he's fighting the oil companies. That's not easy. Wentworth, he

(05:02):
did calle j but the last name was Stalin, or
rather Joseph Stalin called him. Because the Soviet Union was
just starting to be a thing at this point nineteen
thirty uh, and they sent Fred Coke a telegram being like, hey,
we could use some help making some refineries, and you
seem pretty good at refining oil. And Fred Fred was
not read uh, did not like the Communists, but he

(05:23):
was sympathetic to their money, and they agreed to pay
him half a million dollars cash in advance. UM. So
he helped them refine a bunch of oil and build
Like his company, Winkler, Coke trained Soviet engineers and helped
put together fifteen new oil refineries inside the USSR. UH. So, yeah,
he does this work for the Soviets. It's great. Um.
If you hop over to Coke in dot com ko

(05:45):
c H I n D dot com the Coke Industries website,
you can find a timeline of the company history. And
in the nineteen twenties thirty section of the timeline. There
are two entries, one for nine when Coke Winkler was formed,
and another for nineteen thirty two when they took on
their work for Joseph Stalin and the U. S. S R.
Then the timeline jumps to nineteen forty in a parade

(06:05):
of boring oil acquisitions. Now the timeline of the company
website leaves out a job. Yeah yeah, and this job
occurred in the mid nineteen thirties. Uh. In nineteen thirty four,
Winkler Coke Engineering went a contract help design and construct
an oil refinery in Hamburg, Germany. UH Now the company
that hired where Yeah that sucks? Yeah, so yeah. The

(06:36):
coke industries to this day doesn't really like to acknowledge
the fact that they got their start in part by
working for the Nazis. Yea, most of the Republican Party
doesn't like to acknowledge. No, you can definitely find some
ties to the bushes as well. So now, in UH four,
the company that hired Coke's company was an American company

(06:56):
as well. It was run by a guy named William
Davis who was a big time Nazi sympathizer. UM and
he was trying to help Germany's oil industry get off
the ground. Now, back in World War One, Germany had
starved halfway to death under a brutal British naval blockade.
Germany's an ability to feed its people and supply its
military without trade was a huge source of concern for
Adolf Hitler in the Nazis. Hitler's goal in the nineteen

(07:18):
thirties and the pre war period was for Germany to
reach a state of autarchy or self sufficiency, so they
wouldn't need to trade with the world in order to
meet their basic needs in case they wound up going
to war with the world again. Uh So Hitler was,
you know, modernizing the German military and buying a metric
fuckload of tanks and airplanes, so gasoline factored heavily in
his plans for autarchy. This was not hidden news at

(07:41):
the time. The president of One American bank refused to
fund Davis's planned refinery because he didn't want to help
the Nazis rearm Other people eventually did put up the cash, though,
and Fred Coke played an into rural role in planning
and building the new refinery, which would go on to
become the third largest refinery in the Third Reich. The
factory that Coke built for HIT didn't just make a
lot of fuel, and made high octane fuel, the kind

(08:02):
of fuel you'd used to say, keep the Liftwaffa flying.
You would almost compare it to drinking celsius. But I won't, No,
we can. We can talk shit on celsius unless they
start offering us money. No, I'm talking about being high
octane jet um. So. Fred Coke went on to loadly

(08:24):
regret his work with the Soviet Union in the year's past,
but he never really talked much about what he'd done
with the Nazis, at least after the fact. The time
that he'd spent in the repressive Soviet regime seemed to
have a huge impact on him. He would, you know,
constantly talk about the dangers of government control and what
was bad about having you know, too large of a government.

(08:46):
But he didn't hate all governments, just the socialist ones.
In nineteen thirty eight, he visited several countries, including Imperial
Japan and New Zealand. He described New Zealand as quote
violently socialistic. But he wrote this in a letter to
his mentor about Japan German in Italy. Quote. Although nobody
agrees with me, I am of the opinion that the
only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy and

(09:06):
Japan simply because they are all working and working hard.
The laboring people in those countries are so proportionately much
better off than they are any place else in the world.
When you contrast the state of mind in Germany today
with what it was in you begin to think that
perhaps this course of idleness, feeding at the public trough,
dependence on government, et cetera, with which we are afflicted
is not permanent and can be overcome. So that's Fred

(09:29):
Coke being like, wouldn't it be great if we could
get rid of the New Deal and be like the Nazis.
That's where his head is in nineteen thirty eight. Now,
World War Two happened and Fred Coke, Yeah, Fred Coke
pulled away on on sympathizing with the Nazis openly. The
refinery he'd helped to build was destroyed in June of

(09:49):
nineteen forty four, after years of being targeted by the Allies.
For civilians died in various Allied raids on the city
that the refinery was in, uh Coke stopped talking openly
about fascism, but continued to warn the world about socialism.
According to the two fourteen books Sons of Wichita, Fred
became convinced that a global war between capitalism and socialism
was inevitable. Quote, I think these times are far more

(10:12):
serious than even Civil war days. He confided to a
friend and retired army officer that was merely to decide
whether we were going to be one nation or two,
whereas the fight that is going on now in this
country is going to decide whether we are going to
be freemen or slaves. Just maybe the most someone can
misunderstand the Civil War Actually that one was about slaves. Fred. Whoops, Ye, dude,

(10:38):
this Fred, dude man not what's your vibe on him?
So far? Well went downhill very fast. Yeah, you're on
board with him at first. Yeah, I was like, okay, cool.
You you're a scientist. You're figuring out what a way
to tearing crude oil on the gasoline whatever. You're getting
screwed over by the Wild Company. A lot of people
are all right, on to my Boyfrida. He's not my boy.

(10:59):
Well now he's he's he's no one's boy. Actually, because
Fred Coke does not seem to have had a warm
thought for anybody in the course of his life. Uh.
He didn't marry a woman, Mary Robinson in nineteen thirty two.
He was pretty brutal to her. Based on sort of
the recollections that we have, I don't think what he
did would have been considered spousal abuse in nineteen thirties,

(11:21):
but I think we would consider it spousal abuse today. Uh.
And did over times have change? Is not a hit
in the thirties if it's to a woman, but now
hit is a hit to a And I think he
was more of the shouty emotionally abuse. So he was
an emotionally okay, he physically abusive to his kids too,
which were we'll get to yeah yeah. Uh. So Fred

(11:42):
and Mary had four sons, Frederick, Charles, David, and William.
David and William were twins. Uh. Mary had an active
social life and was gone frequently. Fred was also always
on business trips, so the kids were raised largely by
an assortment of nanni's and help rather than their parents. Um.
I wonder what kind of impact. You probably have a
lot of abandonment issues and probably trust issues going on

(12:05):
you think, so, Yeah, well, I don't know. I'm just
going to read an unrelated passage from the book Tribe
by Fame War correspondent Sebastian Younger that just happens to
talk about what occurs when children are separated from their
parents at a young age too often. Yeah, just unrelated
passage to read us. The alienating effects of wealth and
modernity on the human experience start virtually at birth and

(12:27):
never let up. Infants and hunter gatherer societies are carried
by their mothers as much as of the time, which
roughly corresponds to carrying rates among other primates. Meanwhile, Younger
notes over in America, quote during the nineteen seventies, mothers
maintain skin to skin contact with babies as little as
sixteen percent of the time, which is a level that
traditional societies would probably consider a form of child abuse.

(12:47):
So sixteen percent is what a normal kid in America
is getting physical contact with their parents being raised. The
Cokes are being raised by a nanny. Uh and dark
money does not make this nanny sound like the cuddling kind.
So I think these kids are spending pretty much all
of their time isolated. Um. Quote the nannie's iron rule
terrified the little boys. According to a family acquaintance, in

(13:10):
addition to being overbearing, she was a fervent Nazi sympathizer
who frequently touted Hitler's virtues. Dressed in a starch white
uniform and pointed nurse's hat, she arrived with a stash
of gruesome German children books, including the Victorian classic der
Strue Peter, that featured sadistic consequences for misbehavior, ranging from
cutting off one child's thumbs to burning another to death.
The acquaintance recalled that the nurse had a commensurately harsh

(13:32):
and dictatorial approach to child rearing. She enforced a rigid
toilet training regiment, requiring the boys to produce morning ball
movements precisely unscheduled or be force fed castor royal and
subjected to enemas. So that's the first five or six
years of the Koch brothers as his lives. Yeah, I
didn't know there are four of them. That's when I
take away from that whole thing. Yeah, the Cooke brothers

(13:56):
that people famously talk about are two of them, Charles
and David. The others were not nearly is involved in politics, Yeah, yeah,
that's so sad. Yeah, it's a bummer. So it's I
think important to get that background because we're gonna talk
about a lot of terrible ship they've done. Uh. It's
kind of hard to imagine anyone turning out without some
weird quirks growing up in that circumstance, can't we say? Um? Yeah?

(14:18):
So the Nazi sympathizer Fred Coke hired to raise his
kids while he was busy doing business, and I capitalized business.
It's big business for sure. Stayed around until about nineteen forty,
when she got so excited about Germany's victory over France
that she moved back home to be a bigger part
of this whole Nazi thing. She said she wanted to
celebrate with Hitler, who would dude, good party? I wouldn't

(14:41):
because he couldn't. No, I wouldn't want a party with him. Yeah,
on a seriously, on the record, I do not want
a party with Hitler. I want a party with Stalin
like he was a bad dude too. But the drinking
bouts that you here described that the Russian high count
sound sound like something I want to witness. I've never
seen that, man, it was we have a whole episode

(15:02):
about it. But they were. They were the drunkest people
in history. Um. But no, Hitler not fun to party with.
It doesn't sound like this lady was either. So when
he was home, Fred Coke was a strict disciplinarian. Yeah. Sorry,
I'm really riveted by the story. I'm like, looking at you,
big do I uh so? Yeah. Fred Coke was a

(15:24):
strict disciplinarian, and in the context of this podcast, disciplinarian
means child abuser. Pretty much, he was a child abuser.
He abused his kids. One family member recalls him ripping
the branch off a tree and whipping the twins quote
like dogs, because they stained the patio and not stained
in the Yeah, but they spilled something, spilled something. Yeah. Uh.

(15:44):
In summer, rather than let his kids play with neighbors,
he made them dig holes and shovel manure. His biggest
fear was that they turned out to be quote country
club bums like most rich kids. Yeah. In his own book,
Charles Coke wrote, quote, by instilling a work ethic in
me at an early age, my father there did me
a big favor, although it didn't seem like a favor
back then. By the time I was eight, he made

(16:04):
sure work occupied most of my spare time. Yeah, little hands.
It's made me reconsider some of them, because, like I've
known some frustrating people who grew up very wealthy and
who didn't really have a realistic understanding of hard work
or how difficult it is to have to like make
rent and pay for your health care and ship. So
a lot of me has always thought if these rich

(16:25):
parents would instill in their kids some sort of respect
for what it takes, maybe they would be better people.
And this is proof that you can go away too
far in the other direction. Um, eight year old shouldn't
be working all the time. Holy small Yeah, yeah it's dark.
I mean I had to do some of that growing up,
but nothing too much. Guy grew up in Texas, so

(16:46):
like same here Dallas mostly okay, cool in Dallas area, Okay,
very cool. I'm from a little town. You know where
Temple is if I've spent a lot of time in Temple. Yeah,
from a small town outside of Okay cool. So a
lot of summers really helping my grandpa on the farm. Yeah,
And I spent a lot of time in Oklahoma as
a little kid, and we had a farm, like it's

(17:06):
good to have those experience, but not all the time,
all the time you should. Yeah. So it seems like
too far in the other, too much compensate. So yeah,
children being forced to labor will become something of a
theme later in Charles's life, and just put a pin
in that. Um. So, the young Coke boys spent a

(17:28):
lot of time boxing each other. This is one of
the few non work activities that their father encouraged. Charles
usually won these matches, but once his younger brother Bill
was able to beat him, and Charles stopped boxing forever.
It's like yeah. Um. Charles had a somewhat adversarial relationship

(17:49):
with his oldest brother Frederick, who was more sensitive than
the other boys. Uh. He also didn't get along with Bill.
David Coke seems to be basically the only person Charles
Coke ever sort of liked. Um. Yeah, even Charles and
David are again the Coke brother Yeah. So. In the
grand tradition of rich families, Charles Coke was sent away
from home when he was eleven to the strictest school possible,

(18:11):
mainly because his mother was worried of what he might
do to his brother Bill if he stayed at home. Um.
He was shifted around several schools, including a public school,
but always kept getting kicked out due to bad behavior.
He finally wound up in a military academy, where he
did well until he was expelled for drinking on a
train alcohol I assume unless trains were Yeah, Charles behavior

(18:32):
was met with correspondingly severe punishments from his father. Eventually,
the discipline seemed to take hold and Charles started to
do better at school. UM. So we will be getting
into the rest of Charles Coke's adolescent gears uh, and
his adulthood battles with some of his other brothers, including
his his brother Freddie, who just take a guess as
to what sensitive means in the parlance of Yeah, that

(18:55):
was the theory at list was the idea that the
brothers had. So we'll be getting into all of that
and uh, as well as how Charles Coke wound up
getting some people killed through regulatory factory, and a bunch
of other fun stuff, including some quotations from the Libertarian
Reader and some articles Charles wrote for that. So a
lot of fun stuff coming up, can't wait. But before

(19:16):
we get into that, it's time for some ads that
actually paid us money. I love it. I love ads
as much as I love the cheesy crunch of a
nacho flavored Dorito's chip, which I'm about to eat right now.
I love nacho cheese, Oh my god. My favorite is
with the lingering taste in the tongue and my fingers

(19:36):
the best part. I'd love to do that right before
I meet people, and then I still have like a
little bit of chip in my teeth, my back teeth.
I love it. It's like it's a little bit of
extra confidence going on. I'm always confident when I have
my Dorrito's nacho cheese corn chips. It's like there's a
party in my mouth and Hitler is not invited. Maybe
Stalin us not for me. All right, here's some ads

(20:06):
and we're back. Uh Now. When we last started off,
we talked about Fred Coke, the family patriarch, how he
built the family fortune by working with the Soviet Union
and the Nazis. We talked some about his parenting strategies
and the Coke Boys nanny. Uh and we've just gotten
through Charles Coke's kind of troubled time in school. You know,
he spent a lot of time getting kicked out of

(20:28):
different educational institutions for being too rowdy. Um now. A
major source for the book Dark Money and for this
podcast as a result, was an unpublished report about Charles
Coke written by a professor named Clayton Coppin. Coppin had
been first hired by Coke Industries to write it in
depth history of the corporation, and he gets access to
a lot of internal family documents. Yeah. He was next

(20:49):
hired by Bill Coke to basically write an opposition research
piece on Charles Coke because the Cooke brothers paid each other.
I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah, we'll be getting into that.
Jew Bill yeah hired him and said, dude, I know
you've been digging around our family history. We got all
ourselves on the website. That's pretty cool. By the way,
I want you to here's everything I got on my brother.

(21:11):
Let me guess this dude's dead now, isn't he? Is
this dude? Did no? No Coppins alive? Yeah? Okay barely? Yeah, okay,
tell me more or at least as far as I know,
Coppins alive anyway. The report that he wrote was like
a book link report. It's unpublished, but mayor the journalist wrote,
Doc Money got a copy of it, and she quotes
from it liberally. So here's how Coppin's report describes Charles

(21:33):
Coke's late adolescence. Quote Charles spent little of the next
fifteen years at home, only coming there for an occasional holiday.
When he finally did come back, the first thing Charles
did when he came home on vacation was beat up Bill.
So how he's a bit of a dick to his
brothers Um, yeah, I'm off the train, your motherfucker. So

(22:01):
in nineteen fifty eight, Fred Coke became one of the
founding members of the John Birch Society. About John Birch,
I don't know bout Oh it's fun. So John burt
Society was a far right wing conspiracy theory focused society.
They would be kind of the nineteen fifties equivalent of
a group like Info Wars. Ok. Yeah, So the society's
goal was to stop the spread of communism in America

(22:22):
and push back against the efforts of secret communists hiding
in the American government. Oh they did. They start that
witch hunt in the Hollywood. They were a big part
of that. But they went a lot further than McCarthy did,
because the secret Communists they were going after. We're guys
like President Dwight D. Eisenhower. So Eisenhower was a lefty
by according to the John Birch Society. Yeah, the Dwight

(22:45):
Eisenhower who had the leader of the Congo assassinated for
being a leftist sympathizer. That Dwight Eisenhower is a conist.
Sometimes when you are that deeton in too, he's deep cover,
deep cover, you have to do things to make it
look like you're not. Yes. Sometime I get it. Sometimes
you have to overthrow three or four democratically left and

(23:07):
leftist regimes in order to further the broader goals of communism.
Is that what you're saying yes because you want to
throw the people that are on your trail off your
trail is possible. Hitler was a secret I'm gonna shut
you down. You should uh So. The whole John Burt
Society was the brainchild of Robert Welch of the John

(23:28):
Burt Society demanded the US retire from the United Nations
UH and ordered flyers circulated in Dallas, Texas. The day
before the arrival of President Kennedy The flyers stated that
Kennedy was wanted for treason and that quote, he is
turning the sovereignty of the US over to the communist
controlled United Nations. So this has been going on for
a long This has been going on for a long time.
All of this was more or less in lined with

(23:49):
the beliefs of Fred Coke, a man who, in publications
he wrote for the John Birt Society stated, quote, the
colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take
over America. Fred suspected the Welfare was a conspiracy to
fill American cities with black people, who would then carry
out a race war to exterminate white people. This is
where Fred Coke's mind is, uh Now. The Kennedy assassination

(24:09):
was not great for the reputations of the members of
the John Birch Society or for Robert Welch. I don't
know about this, but maybe did they do it? That's
a myth. I haven't heard of this myth, but I'll
have to dig into it. If you dig into myths
around the assassination of Kennedy, the John Birch Society regularly
comes up. I guess I haven't been google and not
hard Yeah, they were just a big thing in far

(24:31):
right circles back in the fifties and sixties. Um So,
after the Kennedy assassination, obviously, mainstream conservatives denounced the John
Birch Society and Robert Welch is crazy uh and claimed
the society was a little more than a collection of
conspiracy theorists. Charles Coke joined the John Birch Society to
impress his father, but he actually hated the John Society
because he thought all this conspiracy ship was nuts. He was,

(24:53):
who did this, Charles Coke, Yeah, Well, he really wanted
his father. He really wanted his dad's approval because he
did not like the John Bird Society. Um he was
impressed by their organization and their fundraising prowess because they
raised a lot of money and they had a really good,
secret sort of political organization going. He thought all the
conspiracy bullshit got in the way of what the society

(25:13):
should be doing, which was actually conspiring to destroy the
New Deal and most of the American government. Um So,
that was his issue with the John Burt Society. It's
too much time on conspiracy theory nonsense, not enough time
dismantling the government. Um So in nineteen sixty one, when
Charles was twenty six, his father's health began to fail,
and Charles went back home to Wichita to help run
the company. Uh he'd been working as a consultant in Boston. Um,

(25:36):
and he hadn't been back in Kansas long when he
had his Doc Brown hitting his head on a toilet
and inventing the flex capacitor. Kind of moment um. Here's
how the Wall Street Journal described it in a fawning
nine article. Quote. One day in nineteen sixty two, Charles,
a newly minted m T engineer, pulled down a book
on the Austrian school of economics, which describes free economies

(25:56):
as systems of spontaneous, unplanned order. I spent the next
two years almost like a hermit, surrounded by books, he says. So,
Charles Coke starts running a company for the first time
and falls in love with libertarian economic theory and sort
of consumes him and for the next couple of years
he's just reading. Basically, he becomes convinced that in essence,

(26:16):
his company would thrive it was run on free market principles. Uh.
So he basically creates a theory for how to manage
a company called market based management UM quote. The free market,
best of all, agglomerates local interactions into a whole vastly
exceeding the sum of its parts, a phenomenon that Mr.
Coke is especially keen to copy. So his idea to
copy this seems to have been to have different divisions

(26:38):
within his company compete with each other. So if, like,
you need some of your employees to be trained, right,
normally there'd be a chunk of the company that's responsible
for training them. Well, in Charles Coke's company, that chunk
of the company exists, but they have to bid with
outside companies that do training in order to like determine
who's going to get to train your employees. So basically
every business unit within the company is competing with rather

(27:00):
business unit in the company rather than working together. And
the goal was that this will hopefully keep costs down
and lead to more innovation. It sounds exhausting to me,
but but this is the idea that he comes up with,
like during this this period, this is his big like
stroke of brilliance um And then also in the mid
nineteen sixties, so that mid nineteen sixties is when he

(27:20):
comes up with this idea for market based management. And
it's also when he comes to believe that his brother
Freddie is gay. Uh. He and a friend even break
into Freddy's apartment to try and find incriminating evidence to
this effect. Eventually, Charles organized his two other brothers into
a coalition against Freddie. This all culminated in a boardroom confrontation,
with Freddie on one side and Bill, David, and Charles
on the other. Now Charles told Freddie his behavior was

(27:43):
inappropriate and warned that if their dad found out, it
might kill him, but not before he disinherited Frederick. Now.
At some point in this ugly mess, Bill Coke apparently
found his sense of basic human decency and started defending
his brother uh and later apologized for being a part
of it in the first place. This infuriated else. It's
hard to say exactly what happened as a result of
all this, but Freddie did wind up taking a much

(28:04):
larger chunk of his inheritance in cash upfront, rather than
getting as big a chunk of the company that he
and his brothers all inherited. It's also worth noting that
that Frederick Coke says that the rumors of him being
gay are untrue and that his brothers were wrong about this.
I don't know what the actual case was. Um. He
was definitely less focused on business and more of an
artist and more interested in in that sort of world.

(28:26):
So it may have just been that that he was
a kid in the sixties who cared more about art
than running a company, and that's why his brothers treated
him like ship. I don't know, Um, But he never
started a multibillion dollar fundraising enterprise to essentially push America
further to the right. So as far as I got
nothing against Frederick Coke, um, but he got a little
bit sucked over by his brothers in here and probably was.

(28:51):
And it seems like that's mainly the case, um, And
Bill and Frederick are sort of the good Coke brothers.
Frederick kind of went off on his own and d
of lived on his own and didn't have much to
do with the family. Bill started a separate company and
dedicated millions of dollars to fucking over his brother Charles,
and then Charles and David are the Coke brothers that
we all know today. Um. So this is kind of

(29:13):
where that schism happens, right, Um. So fred Coke conspiracy
theorist and honorary Nazi finally crapped out of life in
November of nineteen sixty seven, aged nineteen sixty seven. So
at least shitty people don't always live to be fucking ninety. Um.
That's that's an upbeat aspect of that story. When Fred died,
his kids inherited a bunch of money and shares in
his company. Like most rich people, Fred Coke wanted to

(29:35):
give as little of his estate as possible to the government.
He did this by creating a charitable lead trust for
some reason that I have to exsume is indistinguishable from voodoo.
This allowed him to hand most of his money to
his kids without paying inheritance taxes. The only sticking point
was that for twenty years, his sons had to take
all the interest earned by the trust and donated to
charity here's dark money quote to maximize their self interest.

(29:58):
In other words, the coke As were compelled to be charitable.
Tax avoidance was thus the original impetus for the Koch
brothers extraordinary philanthropy is David Coke later explained, So for
twenty years I had to give away all that income
and I sort of got into it, so the Koch
Brothers will become major philanthropists, funding like museums as well
as far right politics and conservative think tanks. UM. In nineteen,

(30:21):
the year after his father's death, Charles Cooke left the
John Birch Society over their support of the Vietnam War. Um.
He has been consistently an anti war guy his whole life. Uh.
He discarded the conspiracy riddled far right nonsense of his
father for the political theories of Robert Lefev. Now. Lefev
was a libertarian philosopher who supported the abolishment of the state.
Because of this, some people call him an anarchist, which

(30:42):
is inaccurate. Um. See, when you're actually talking about anarchists
political theory, not just the term anarchy is a sim
for no rules, man and stuff scroll on the moment
of skateboards, but the actual ideology with an extensive philosophical history.
You can't get far without discussioning the concept of mutual aid.
Anarchists do seek the abolition of the state, but it's
not an everyone for himself ideology. I'm quoting here from

(31:02):
a pamphlet you can find online called What the Fund
Is Mutual Aid. Quote through mutual aid, anarchism take shape
as a practice and care, exchanging resources and solidarity, information support,
even comfort, care and understanding. People give what they can
and get what they need. When a group comes together
to push for a change, When social outsiders come together
to share or explore ideas and new ways of living,
these are all forms of mutual aid. In other words,

(31:23):
mutual aid is what happens when a group of people
embrace their dependence on each other and turn it into
a strength. This is exactly the opposite of what Robert
Lefev preached. Even he didn't like being called an anarchist,
he preferred to define himself as an autarchist. Which that
seems familiar, doesn't it. Yeah? Uh so. My only issue
with Dark Money, which I think is a deeply important book,
is that it declares Coke and his fellow travelers to

(31:45):
be anarchists. They are not. They seek complete independence from
other people because their wealth allows them to believe that
is possible. Actual anarchists political theory is literally the opposite
of autarchy. Um, that was just a layman's terms. I
appreciate it. Got a little loss. I don't know if
you saw my Sorry, I got off on a little
bit of a rant there um. So Charles Cooke developed

(32:07):
brain Bonner for the ideas of Robert Lefev. Yeah, philosopher,
and Robert Lefev, I should note, was not just a philosopher.
He committed mail fraud a number of times. He was
an FBI informant during McCarthy's purge of Hollywood. He also
orchestrated a movement to purge the Girl Scouts of communists.
He established the Freedom School in nineteen fifty seven. According
to the Freedom School and it's curriculum, the Gilded Age

(32:29):
was basically the best time ever in American history in
businessmen we know today as Robert Baron's were heroes. The
Freedom School believed that the poor should be helped only
by charity, that the Civil War had been a terrible mistake,
not because of the Confederacy support of slavery, but because
the Union had conscripted people, and that was a worse
thing than slavery. I should note that the Freedom School
did not support Confederate style slavery. The Freedom School actually

(32:52):
supported a totally different type of slavery. They wanted free
people to be able to sell themselves into slavery what. Yeah,
I'm like pulling a handbrake on a convertible during a

(33:12):
fish tail right now, excuse me. Yeah, they're kind of nuts. Hey, dude,
how much if you pay me? But then I can
use that money. Yeah, it's pretty nuts, um. And it's
one of those Like obviously, there's a lot of different
strains of libertarian thought, and I don't think most libertarians,
at least that I've met, do not support letting people

(33:35):
sell themselves into slavery. But that is a chunk of
the movement, and it is the chunk of the movement
that Charles Coke starts out in. So he is very
drawn to the ideas of these guys. Uh. He forces
his brothers to attend freedom school seminars, which they mostly
seemed to not enjoy. I guess they weren't. This is
an asshole. It's terrible. This guy sucks, Like he forced

(33:59):
his bro there's his brother. Man, this guy sucks, and
he's you know, he's the middle kid. But Freddie is
not a very forceful personality, so I think he kind
of takes on the dominant role with his brothers for
a lot of the time. And yeah, he's just so
angry he's really angry and he's really obsessed with control. Yeah,
I have some weird compassion for him, but a lot

(34:21):
of it is like, yeah, it's hard not to have
a little bit because clearly nobody would want his childhood.
It sounds terrible. But also his brothers didn't all grow
up to be like this, So some of this is
just Charles Cooke choosing to be yeah, a piece of crap.
Uh So his brothers mostly did not like the Freedom
School because I think they're mostly not insane. Frederick thought

(34:45):
Lefev was a con man and said this, and Charles
threatened to deck him for saying So would you say
about this guy, He's gonna tell me why slavery is
okay if people choose it for themselves. Now, in nineteen
sixty six, Charles became one of the chief funders of
the Freedom School um because he just thought all these

(35:08):
guys needed was a little bit more money to really
really press their ideas home to American society. The country
was ready for this. Yeah. In the nineteen nineties, during
a speech, he claimed his life at the all white prosegregationists. Also,
the school was all white and prosegregationists. They weren't all
white as a rule, but Lafev said that he didn't
think black people would be comfortable there because most of

(35:29):
his students were segregationists. Okay, I guess that's honest. Like, okay,
I don't really know what else to say about that.
That makes me feel sick. Yeah, yeah, it's terrible. Um So.
In the nineteen nineties, Charles gave a speech where he
said that the Freedom School is quote where I began
developing a passionate commitment to liberty as the form of

(35:51):
social organization most in harmony with reality and man's nature,
like the liberty to sell yourself into slavery. I know
I keep pushing on that point, but it really like
where is your head where that's an issue for you.
We're like you look at the world and all of
the problems and are like, God, it's ashamed people can't
sell themselves as a slavery. It sounds like he found

(36:13):
someone or a group of people that accepted him, and
he's probably was like, Hey, accept me, and I'm a
big deal. I'm a big dog. Yeah. I guess that's
got to be it, because they're like part of it. Yeah,
I don't know, I'm trying to be nice to him
in a in a like, Okay, I think about his childhood.
He's sucked up, he's got all these bad things, and
then here's this school of thought that's like, oh, my

(36:35):
gun man, and I see you're kind of vulnerable in
a funked up kind of way, you know what I mean. Well,
I think maybe it ties in a little bit too,
because like he had joined the John Birch Society because
his dad was a big part of that, and he
clearly didn't feel at home there, but he clearly I
think he wanted something like that, and maybe his thought
was like, these guys can be these are his proud boys. Yeah, exactly. So,

(37:00):
as the nineteen seventies kickoff, the Coke brothers minus Freddie
are in charge of the company, which they rename Coke
Industries from Winkler Coke. Uh. Charles soon becomes the real power.
He's working six days a week, ten hours a day
and sinks himself so deeply into his work that he
has to propose to his wife Liz over the phone
while looking through his schedule to see when he can
pencil the wedding in which I don't know if that's

(37:21):
literally true. When you read stories about rich guys that
they write about themselves, you'll usually run into something like this.
Paul Manafort says the same thing about like how his
first daughter was conceived in between conference calls, Like I
think it's a thing rich guys brag about, like how
busy they are that they didn't like, Oh yeah, we
had to fit the wedding and in between all these
different acquisition meetings and stuff. I think they're proud of

(37:42):
this ship. Like how little work life balance they have
doesn't seem like a healthy thing, but super gross. You
know it's not gross. What products and services that support
this podcast and or program? Tell me some more? You
know what, I'll do better than tell you some more.
I will pause and wait for us to play some
prerecorded ads. I love prerecorded ads. Oh they're the best,

(38:11):
and we're back, um boy, those were some great products
and or services. So during the nineteen seventies, the Coke
Boys are all sort of working at the company. They
take it over from their dead dad. Charles is running
things um and he increasingly takes full control of the operation.
In a three, Charles and his brother David arrange a
one point one billion dollar buy out for their brothers

(38:32):
shares of the company. Uh, this leaves them in control
of more than of Coke Industry stock. Now, while Charles
and David are equal on paper, insiders report that Charles
is the company. Um. Now, I feel like this is
a good place to talk about what kind of man
Charles is now that he is a man and not
just a kid. Yeah, not a boy, not yet. Yeah,

(38:56):
now he's a man. Now he's a man, and this
is the kind of man he is, because I think
a great way to know someone best because a lot
of people are shitty to their siblings. Right, you'd be
a good person and terrible to your brother or sister.
It's just life. I think a good way to know
what kind of a human being someone is how they
treat service industry personnel. H So I find this quote
from Dark Money to be rather revealing quote. A former

(39:16):
doorman described Coke as the cheapest person in the building.
We would load up his trucks two vans, usually every
weekend for the Hampton's in and out, in and out,
heavy bags. We would never get a tip from Mr Coke.
We would never get a smile from Mr Coke for Christmas,
which the Doorman had anticipated would make up for the
years travails. Coke merely gave him a fifty dollar check
when the documentary aired. This was a documentary where this
stuff about how he treated these people came out. When

(39:38):
the documentary aired on public broadcasting service in two thousand twelve,
David Coke was so incensed he resigned from the board
of New York's public television station w n ET, reneging
on a promise to make a major donation. A spokeswoman
at Coke Industries declined to comment on whether the documentary
was his reason for punishing the station, but Coke bluntly
told one friend about the film, it's going to cost
them ten million. Another family friend is quoted as saying,

(40:00):
they move in a world with people like them or
who want to be. They know no poor people at all.
They're not the kind of people who feel obligated to
get to know the help. So this is Charles and
David Coke. Uh. Now, under Charles's rule, Coke Industries expanded
from a company worth hundreds of millions to a company
worth tens of billions, the largest privately owned company in
the world right now. In the nineteen seventies, and eighties.
Their business was mostly oil and gas refining. The center

(40:22):
of it all was the Pine Bind refinery, which takes
hundreds of thousands of gallons of filthy Canadian crude oil
from the Tar Sans and turns it into usable gas.
This process is incredibly wasteful and produces an enormous amount
of pollution, but it's also super profitable because you're buying
garbage oil from Canada and turning it into premo ship.
So Charles Coke is not just an oil man. He's
decided to be like the dirtiest possible version of an

(40:43):
oil man UM and he does not give one funk
about regulations and rules meant to minimize the environmental harm
of his company or do bullshit like protect workers from
danger and horrific disease UM. Starting in the nineteen seventies, OSHA,
the organization dedicated to stopping companies from killing their workers UH,
the Comtattional Health and Safety Administration put in place new
regulations that required companies to give annual blood tests to

(41:06):
workers who spent a lot of time around benzene UH.
They're also required to warn these employees if the tests
show any abnormalities. So that the employees can receive medical
treatment before they get full on blood cancer or whatever. Right,
Coke Refining Company offered these tests, but they didn't do
such a good job about letting employees know when they
had a regular results. Sometimes they just wouldn't tell them.

(41:26):
So Donald Carlson, a dedicated employee with decades in the job,
was not informed within his results showed abnormal blood cell
counts in nineteen nine. He wasn't warned about this until
nineteen when he started to get well, because you want
to get those extra couple of years out of him. Right,
this is disgusting. It's pretty bad. It's pretty bad. These
guys are disgusting. Yeah, they're really terrible. Um Now, Donald

(41:49):
continued to work after he got sick. Uh. So he
was doing his job while receiving massive frequent blood transfusions.
He loved his job. His job was like scrubbing out
like the his cleaning tanks from refinery and stuff. Like
he was doing dirty work. But he was just a
working class guy. He wanted to do his job and
take care of his family. He was like he took
pride in it. He was your the best case scenario

(42:11):
if you're like a big capitalist boss. He was your
best case scenario of an employee. But in nineteen six
he got too sick to work anymore. He was immediately
fired and given six months severance pay, which almost sounds
generous given the Koch brothers being the Koch brothers, But
it turns out this was just his accumulated sick pay
leave that they were legally required to pay out um.
They gave him nothing that they weren't required to give

(42:32):
him now. Carlson filed for workman's comp which seems like
a job related illness getting blood poisoning from horrific benzine exposure,
but Coke Refining refused. They weren't about to pay his
medical bills or give benefits to his wife and daughter.
They denied that his illness had anything to do with
the fact that he had been covered in poisoned for years.
He died in leaving his family destitute. His wife continued

(42:56):
to fight the company for some restitution. They eventually settled
with her for an undisclosed and out now. During my
research for this, I found an article on benzing exposure
from the Center for Public Integrity. It had Facebook comments enabled,
and one of the commenters on the article was a
woman named Mary Arnisson. Now Mary is a preventative medicine
physician who testified against Coke Industries during the Carlson case.
So she wrote in the comments to this article about

(43:17):
her experience testifying against Coke Industries in this blood poison case. Quote.
I was shocked by the behavior of Coke's hired gun
hematologist who concealed the blood monitoring results that showed his
worsening anemia, and by that doctor's blaming cigarette smoking much
lower benzing exposure than waiting through spilled gasoline for his
eventual development of leukemia. When it became obvious that I

(43:38):
was on my way to testify against Coke, they withdrew
their objection to his widow's claim for work comp benefits
and payment of his medical bills. I still see. I
hate Coke. So basically, up until they were forced to
by the courts, they were lying and saying the fact
that this guy had smoked cigarettes is why he got leukemia.
The fact that he was literally almost bathing and benzing

(43:59):
very heavy. Yeah, so they're not they're not. They kind
of started. They were definitely in on that trend that
a lot of big companies follow today they were pioneers.
Oh yeah, these boys coach boys, pioneer boys. Yeah yeah.
Coke boys are on the cutting edge of sucking over
their workers and letting hazardous chemical exposure kill people. Um,

(44:21):
they might be the Michael Jordan's of hazardous chemical exposures. Yes,
go maybe the Scottie Pippen p um so. Oh you're
from Texas to so this will be fun. Coke Industries
also owned a big refinery in Corpus Christie, Texas. Now,

(44:41):
how would you describe sort of the attitude towards Corpus
Christie within Texas. Corpus Christie is like your spring bake
kind of vacation. Yeah. That in Galveston, Mustang Island. Yeah,
I went once. You know. It's like all the high
school kids like corpett Yeah, and they're they're okay. It's
an okay place. The water is kind of gross compared

(45:02):
to like Hawaii or the West Coast. Gross Hawaii would
not be a bad way to describe its gross. Hawaii. Um,
My brother is actually a tankerman on ships and he
goes out and I'm always worried about because he's right
in the thick of that. Yeah, but I'm always kind
of worried about like chemical exposure. Yeah, him, Yeah, I
mean that seems totally reasonable. There's a lot of refining

(45:22):
and a lot of gross stuff going on. For sure,
would not want to swim in that water, And looking back,
I'm like, why would you go? Why did my parents
let me swim in that day? It's just poison Galveston too, Yeah,
you know. Anyways, Yeah, no, absolutely, and the Koke Brothers
are a big part of why it is that way. Yeah,
it's great, it's great. Um. Yeah. So they had a

(45:44):
big refiner in Corpus Christie that was quote hemorrhaging benzene
into the air, which is a great thing to do
with benzene is hemorrhage. Regulation required them to reduce emissions,
so they just lied about how bad the emissions were
when they filed their reports with the Texas National Resource
Conservation Commission, which is fun. Yeah, they said they were
putting out less poison than they were and assumed it'd

(46:06):
be fine. So a lawyer within the company, within Coke Industries,
actually called them out for lying to the government and
was like, we can't defend this in the court. This
is just fraud. So Coke Industry sent in one of
their own people to actually figure out how much the
factory was polluting over the limit. This report revealed horrific
levels of ben zeene. Rather than report this, Coke Industry
has just decided to lie again and say their emissions

(46:28):
were one forty nine of what their own people had found.
So they're not just lying by a little that they
are holy ship Like I said that the Scottie Pippen
of poison. Um well, I said, Michael Jordan's I don't know,
they're all about it. That's a half point Sam Dunk show.

(46:48):
Assume that's all above board and accurate. Yeah, the employee
who had done the research wind up blowing the whistle
and in two thousand Coke Industries was indicted on ninety
seven accounts of being shady as during the trial it
was revealed that just refitting the refinery to make it
put out the legal amount of missions would have cost
seven million dollars, which seems expensive. But that's not no, no,

(47:10):
it's not it's not. Wow. Yeah, So this is they
were willing to lie and put out huge amounts of
poison rather than spend seven million dollars on a refinery
that made a hundred and seventy six million in annual profits.
So it's not a big drop in the bucket, you know,
it's not even a drop in the bucket. No, I
found a quarter outside. Yeah, that's finding a quarter outside. Yeah,

(47:34):
or losing a quarter. Yeah, you're like, oh, man, a quarter,
that's laundry. But they are like, what's laundry? You know? Yeah? Yeah,
they burned their clothing after where Yeah. Uh So when
everything shook out, they wound up paying about ten million
in fees and another ten million to make Corpus Christie
a little bit cleaner. Uh So, on the surface, it
doesn't seem to make a lot of economic sense what
they're doing. Seven million dollars because they had to wind

(47:56):
up doing the refitting anyway, so they paid seven million
dollars to comply with the missions requirement. Uh and then
another twenty million dollars in fines, which means they spent
four or five times more than what the repairs would
have cost because they decided to break the law. So
it might seem, when you look at it that way,
that this was just a bad gamble by Charles Coke,
But Charles Coke doesn't make bad gambles. And he doesn't

(48:16):
flout regulations to save money. He does so because ignoring
government regulations is basically his religion. Like it's like like
like being a billionaire who doesn't comply with the government
is like his he that's his Jedi faith, and he's
what are you going to do about it? Yeah? Yeah, exactly.
He's the Luke Skywalker of of polluting. Yeah. Uh. So
we can get an understanding of Charles Coke's thinking during

(48:39):
his first couple of decades in charge of Coke Industries
by reading the stuff that he was writing at the time.
So in nineteen eight he contributed an article to The
Libertarian Reader to give you an idea of the intellectual
tenor of this publication. Uh. An ad on the second
page is titled let's hear it for the first Amendment
while we still can. Here's how it opens. Government censorship
is about to take a great leap forward. A government agency,

(49:01):
the Federal Communications Commission, believes it has the right to
act as our parents and restrict the broadcast of certain
words at times when children just might be listening. Uh.
There's a box in the middle of the ad that
just says banned with a question mark and then has
a list of works including the Bible, Ernest Hemingway, Chaucer,
you know that big campaign to ban Shaucer, George Orwell,

(49:23):
and the Nixon Watergate tapes, all of which you are
still legal. Uh. It ends with a plea for money. Uh.
That says this coupon fights censorship. Yes, I want to
help save the public airways from the obscenity of government control.
Here's my tax deductible and tax deductible is italicized contribution. Yeah.
So that's the first ad in the Libertarian Reader the

(49:44):
issue that Charles Coke uh submitted an article called the
Business Community Resisting Regulation. That's all the s are z
s right. You're imagine this is like a zine just
for the coach boys boys business. No, um, it was.

(50:07):
This article was part of a series called Towards the
Second American Revolution Libertarian Strategies for Today, and in this article,
Coke rails against what he calls political capitalism, which he
defines as a terrible state of affairs wherein businesses work
with the government and don't reject all regulation out of hand. Quote.
The final stage of political capitalism is even worse. Richard Ferris,

(50:30):
president of United airlines an exception in his industry predicts
continued government control would mean airline service as you know
it today will be seriously jeopardized and his service and
equipment deteriorate. You will stand by helplessly as the threat
of nationalization becomes reality. You remember when the government took
over all the airlines do? Yeah, it was a bad thing.
If the airlines had remained private companies, I'm sure there

(50:54):
would be a lot of leg room on flights, good food,
high quality customer service. People would not get dragged out
of flights because they got overbooked. This makes me sick. Uh.
In his article, Charles argues that businessmen should refuse subsidies
from the government, so they shouldn't even take money from
the government and refuse to comply with regulations, even ones

(51:16):
that benefit their particular business or hurt a competitor. The
goal is reducing taxes and thus reducing the government. Nothing
else matters. Regulators must be they have to be battled
at all costs. Uh. Fred Coke said this, Do not
cooperate voluntarily. Instead resist wherever and to whatever extent you

(51:37):
legally can, and do so in the name of justice.
I love this. This is insane. Yeah, Like that's why
I'm making like the Star Wars comparisons. He views himself
as like a rebel fighting this evil empire, but the
evil empires being like you should pay for old people
to have health, and he's like, you spilled too much

(51:59):
poison s into the water. You have to pay for that.
He shouldn't have been living in Corpus Christy. Why can't
they be in the Hampton's I don't put there. I
wish I had like a neck vein that would just pop.
It is hard to imagine any of the things that
like he's written that, like when I because I've I
read a couple of articles Charles Cooke read and it's

(52:20):
hard to imagine him not screaming them to you, like
that's that. That's always the tenor at which he writes.
It's always like everything will be nationalized and the government
will destroy you know, private innovation whatnot if we don't resist.
And he does use that like resist language a lot.
He's described in Dark Money as almost being being a

(52:43):
like a Linen Marks sort of theorist, where he has
these very strict ideas on sort of the way societies
evolve and the way things happen in history. Um, but
rather than sort of applying it within the context of
you know, obviously like communet theory or whatnot, he has
his own sort of like far right libertarian theory. But

(53:04):
it is a very yeah, yeah, he's he's again, it's
not about denying these regular like refusing to complay with
these regulations is not about uh money to him, It's
about the principle. Yeah, it's always about the principle. Yeah. Yeah,
it's he's willing to spend more money to stick a
finger at the gun, just resist at all costs. Did

(53:26):
I get it, man? Yeah? Do you. I don't get
inheriting hundreds of millions of dollars and not just being like,
oh sweet, I lucked out. I'm just gonna have fun.
I mean, I get wanting to be smart with your
money and ensuring it, and I wish I had more
of a monetary education or a financial education. But to

(53:48):
the point where you're just digging over and forgetting the
human experience or being so devoid. Is he's almost like
a serial killer. You know, they have no to sort
of like compared that mental state, except he's got my
I mean, he's killing people. Maybe some of it inadvertently,
but definitely through Yeah, I mean he might be. I

(54:10):
don't know. Like I always try to hesitate from like
diagnosing people and stuff. But it is worth noting that
there are there is scientific research that suggests access to
wealth reduces empathy. Say that to Bruce Wayne, Well, you
know he was a rich dude and guess what he
turned out to be Batman? Well, yeah, but Batman just
beats up poor people. No, Batman takes care of the poor.

(54:31):
And Wayne, industries really looks out for people, don't you
speak industries? You're right? And I do make a Batman
reference later that's coming up. We have a lot more
coke to talk about. We have so much coke to
talk about that where there's going to be another two.

(54:52):
I need a break. Yeah, you need to need to
take a chill pill, have a nice cup of cup
of Doritos, and uh I love Derrito soup. We all
love Doritos soup. Between you and me. Sometimes I'll boil
water and throw in a bunch of nacho cheese Dorrito's
flavor chips and let all that flavor, you know, get
off the chip, and then this chip dissolves and then

(55:12):
I eat it like a soup. Now that sounds lovely.
And you know what I dip in that soup, Dorito's.
You know what I have actually done is taken Doritos
and made Mega's with them. It's pretty damn good. Actually,
copyright there, I mean Dorito's out a copy right that.
That's another free thing I'm offering you Doritos, Derito's megas.

(55:33):
You know it's not free these ads, we're not breaking
into three part one. I'm so excited to break into ads.
In part two, we're going to be talking about the
nineteen eighty election where Charles's brother David ran for Vice
President of the United States. We will be talking about

(55:54):
the Koke brothers establishment of an empire of think tanks
and educational institutions, and we will of course talk about
more people that they're flighting of regulations got killed. Uh
So all of that and more in part two. But
first you want to plug some plug doubles like ads, Well,
your ads, ads for your thing where people can find
you on the Interwell, I'm so excited for all those ads.

(56:18):
You're really wanting to support the show. Um, you can
find me on the internet. I'm in a movie on Netflix.
Called the fields um at E L S with some
really fun folks and you can find me on Instagram
Twitter at E V E R M A I N
A R D. Yeah. I do a lot of shows
around town and I have a lot of fun awesome. Well.

(56:41):
You can find us on the internet at behind the
Bastards dot com. All of the many many sources, including
some writings of Charles Coke that we're sources for this episode,
will be up there. We'll find some pictures too. You
can also find us on social media at at Bastards pod.
You can find me at at I right okay uh
and yeah, we will be back on Thursday talking more coke.

(57:04):
So get coked out with us later this week. M
h h h m hm