Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Charles Koch: The Luke Skywalker of Rich People

Episode Date: August 16, 2018

Robert is joined again by comedian Ever Mainard and they continue to discuss Charles Koch, the notorious face behind the Koch Brothers empire. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, dear friends. I'm Robert Evans, and this is Behind the Bastards, a show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. Now, this is part two of our epic two-part episode on Charles Koch. And with me, as within the first episode, is Evermanered, a star of the feels on Netflix. Kickbox expert? Yeah, you can say that. MMA commenter? Yeah.

Definitely a big YouTube commenter. I love Reddit, Yelp, any platform where I can make a comment, I'm going to comment. You know what I love about the internet? It lets you anonymously threaten people who live far away. Oh, it's never anonymous. Yes. Bold print. Fight me. So, last episode, how would you sum up what we learned about Charles Koch last episode? No joke, my tummy started rumbling, and I thought I was going to have to run out to the bathroom,

because I was filled with a lot of sorrow, and then how many lives were destroyed, even through cancer and that lineage of that one story of his family is fucked. But then, at one point, it's like, what a blessing, he has a job, he has stability, but then that thing ended up being the snake that bit him. Yeah, yeah. And we don't even know about it. In a way, that's him being like, hey, what was it like you can pay to be a slave? Yeah, the Freedom School, which Charles Koch funded early on in his life.

In a way, it's sort of like that, without them realizing it. Yeah. That's what's going on. Yeah, if you won't sell yourself into slavery, I will show you as little human concern as I would show for a slave, and then just trust that most of you won't realize how badly you got fucked over and sue me. No. Yeah, because like Daniel Carlson, that guy sued, but I'm going to guess there's a lot of people who didn't sue, who got fucked over and just didn't connect the dots well enough.

Yeah. You know, got leukemia and assumed it was their cigarette smoking rather than being bathed in benzene all day long. Anyway, let's... Yeah, I want to open this up by repeating a quote Charles Koch wrote in that 1978 Libertarian Reader article, where he sort of argued that business owners should fight against government regulation at all costs. Do not cooperate voluntarily, instead resist wherever and to whatever extent you legally can and do so in the name of justice. So let's start today by talking about some more of the shit Charles Koch and his company did in the name of justice. I'm going to quote from the book Dark Money here.

Carnell Green was a pipeline technician and gas meter serviceman for Koch Industries when he ran afoul of the management. No. As he witnessed his supervisor doing, Green said the mercury was so pervasive when he got home, balls of it would roll off of his clothes and out of his shoes. No! Yeah. That's not right. That's not good.

That's supposed to pour mercury down the sink. Get man the water table's bad. Wow. Yeah, I don't think Charles Koch drinks a lot of tap water. So when Green made a fuss about the rampant mercury exposure, he was approached by FBI Special Agent Mormon, who told him that he was lying about this and he'd better shut up if he knew it was good for him. Green's supervisor gave him a statement to sign to confirm that he hadn't seen any mercury in Koch buildings. So he got the FBI involved to bully this?

Oh no! Okay. When Green filed- Was it the FBI at all? It was not the FBI at all. There was an episode in Riverdale where- Okay, okay. Okay, where this guy's like, I'm an FBI agent, or she's like, I don't know what you're doing,

and he's like, I need you to be a mall. And then it turned out, uh-oh, ding-dong, it was that dude's dad. Yeah, a guy pretending to be an FBI agent. Now I see where the writers got it. It happens a shitload in the Koch story. This is the only time we're bringing it up in here, but in Dark Money and in other reports, there's a ton of times where Koch's security people- They're like, by the way, we're FBI. We're with the FBI.

They bullied them. Wow, okay. Didn't mean to interrupt, but continue. No, no, it's fine. So Green, the guy who was not comfortable with all of the mercury poisoning, he was seeing, filed a complaint with OSHA anyway, and was fired for making false statements. It later turned out that Special Agent Mormon was a Koch security employee and not an FBI agent, as you guessed. That's gotta feel really good for that.

All parties involved, that fake FBI agent, the manager. Wow. Yeah, it's fun. So there is a long history, as you might have guessed, of regulatory fuckery by Koch Industries, thanks to a tangled web of NDAs, hush payments, and law nonsense. It's often hard to pin down the exact consequences. Law nonsense. It's a good name for a TV show.

Yeah. It's hard for us, though, to get, like, exact numbers. This is how many people were hospitalized or made sick or whatever. But there are some crystal clear examples we get of times Charles Koch's corporate philosophy got people killed. In 1996, a man in Kemp, Texas- Hey! Notice an odd, gassy smell all around his neighborhood. We're both Texans, listeners, in case you didn't cast this from the first one.

Yeah. I get it. Koch Brothers really fucked around a lot in Texas. Yeah. A lot of open space. Yeah. So a man in Kemp noticed an odd, gassy smell around his neighborhood. He sent his daughter, Danielle Smalley, and her friend, Jason Stone, to go report it.

The two 17-year-olds got into their car and turned it on, and a spark from the ignition lit the gas and caused a gigantic explosion that killed them both instantly. Here is a quote from South Coast Today, a newspaper reporting on it at the time. Quote, Flames reaching dozens of feet high and a column of black smoke could be seen from miles, and firefighters from six communities were called in. So when the feds started examining the pipeline, they found severe corrosion and mechanical damage so extensive it was described as, quote, Swiss cheese. Koch Industries had actually stopped using the pipeline in 1992, but in 1995 they realized they could start making a few million dollars extra a year if they got it back into service. So they did the minimum amount of necessary repair work. I'm going to quote now from a Rolling Stone article inside the Koch Brothers Toxic Empire.

When Koch decided to start it up again in 1995, a water pressure test had blown the pipe open. An inspection of just a few dozen miles of pipe near the Smalley home found 538 corrosion defects. The industry's term of art for a pipeline in this condition is Swiss cheese. According to the testimony of an expert witness, essentially the pipeline is gone. This is what a witness says at the time. The pipeline almost doesn't exist, it's so full of holes. So Koch Industries repaired 80 of the 538 defects, just enough that it could pass a pressure test again, and they started flowing highly explosive shit through it. Now one month after they started running Fluid again, Koch employees found that one of the anti-corrosion systems they'd installed had malfunctioned.

They just didn't fix it. The pipeline repair efforts had occurred during a time when Charles Koch had told his managers he wanted costs cut so that they could increase profits by 550 million per year. That April he'd sent out a message that demanded expense cuts of 10% through the elimination of waste, I'm sure there is much more than that. Of course, getting this pipeline back an option and not properly repairing it was part of this cost cutting thing, and it led to two deaths and a huge amount of property damage. I think it led to a lot more than two deaths. Yeah, it led to two deaths that are very easy to trace to it. Yeah, yeah, I mean, who knows from the poisoning? Yeah, exactly.

Because gas is leaking out everywhere, it can't be good for people, they're the water table and crops grown in it. Exactly what we're eating. There was a trial, of course, and it did not go well for Koch Industries. Here's the rolling stone again. A former Koch manager, Kenneth Wittstein. Wittstein? Wittstein, yeah. Who cares? It's awesome.

Look at how this fucking name is spelled. Everything is spelled wrong. Knoth. A former Koch manager. Knoth, Wittstein! Knoth, get over here! A former Koch manager, Knoth Wittstein, testified to incidents in which Koch Industries placed profits over public safety. As one supervisor had told him, regulatory fines, quote, usually didn't amount to much.

And besides, the company had, quote, a stable full of lawyers and Wichita that handled those situations. When Wittstein told another manager he was concerned that unsafe pipelines could cause a deadly accident, this manager said that it was more profitable for the company to risk litigation than to repair faulty equipment. A lot like life insurance, or car insurance, and insurance companies in general. Weird that all of these people are terrible in the same way. The company could, quote, pay off a lawsuit from an incident and still be money ahead, he said, describing the principles of market-based management to a T. Yeah, so, Knoth.

No, Knoth is the guy who tried to report some of the unsafe stuff. I know, but just that name. Knoth, K-E-N-O-T-H, it's Kenneth. We all know the name. No, it's Knoth. I'm judgmental and angry. Talk about a Wichita alignment, am I right? So yeah, Rolling Stone draws a direct connection between these deaths and what was done with that pipeline in market-based management. Because under market-based management, again, the whole company, all these business units are competing,

but it also sort of encourages people to look at fines. You know, a fine is supposed to be a punishment for doing something wrong, for causing damage. But in Coke's companies, they weren't seen that they would. They were seen as essentially a cheaper alternative to the repairs. The fines cost this much, the repairs cost this much. Oh, it's much more sound to pay for the fines if we incur them. So Coke Industries was ordered to pay $296 million to Daniel's father. At that point in time, it was the largest wrongful death suit in U.S. legal history.

They settled out of court for an undisclosed amount, but it was probably a significant amount of money, and this judgment actually hurt. It wasn't the only one either. As Coke Industries got in increasing hot water over the 1990s, they paid out more and more in legal fees and in fines. Charles Coke was even forced to acknowledge this, sort of, in his 2007 self-help book, The Science of Success. Excuse me? It was more of like a business book, but you know, you get the idea. It was one of those books people who want to start businesses read.

Have you guys, while we're talking about him, there's a documentary on Netflix. It's about this wine guy that fooled everybody. Have you heard about this? No. He's like a fake wine dude. Like a fake sommelier? Yeah, but he's like selling people all these wines. See, that I support.

They interview one of the Koch brothers. Oh, good. Koch brothers. Oh, I hope he tricked them. I hope he tricked them and made them buy a lot of shitty wine. They are always getting swindled. Okay, anyways, he wrote a self-help book. Yeah, he wrote this book, The Science of Success, where he sort of acknowledged all of...

Yeah, this is what he wrote at the time. While business was booming, it was becoming increasingly regulated. We kept thinking and acting as if we lived in a pure market economy. The reality was far different. So this is what he boils it down to is, oh, we just were acting like it was a pure market economy. And in a pure market economy, you can flow explosive gas through a pipeline that's not even functioning as a pipeline and runs directly under the homes of human beings, because that's fine. The market says it's fine.

So whatever you're doing is okay. It's all about the market. The market says fucking... That's his child. That's his child. That's the force to Charles Koch. And he's, again, Luke Skywalker of rich people. I don't know, maybe I shouldn't be keep trying to draw it back to Star Wars, but...

It's okay. Yeah, that's what I'm doing. And you can't... No one can stop me. It's already been a theme running through the show. Yeah. So, the increasing regulatory costs and whatnot had a number of effects on Charles Koch and his businesses. One of these effects seems to be that his company started to obey more regulations

and commit fewer blatant environmental crimes in the late 90s and early 2000s. Charles viewed this as a temporary setback. The laws were just a reflection of the culture, and he had a plan to change both. In 1976, Charles Koch helped to launch, via tens of thousands of dollars in funding, the Center for Libertarian Studies in New York City. Now, libertarianism wasn't as much of a force in society at this point. Charles wanted to change that, and he knew he had to start by incubating a new generation, or 1976. Did I say 96?

I'm gonna read this again. Sorry. In 1976, Charles Koch had helped to launch, via tens of thousands of dollars, the Center for Libertarian Studies in New York City. Now, libertarianism wasn't much of a force in society at this point, and Charles wanted to change that. He knew he had to start by incubating a new generation of political pundits who could help sell his ideology to the nation at large. Here's a quote from Charles.

The development of talent is, or should be, the major point of all these efforts. By talent, I mean those rare, exceptionally capable scholars or communicators willing to dedicate their lives to the cause of individual liberty. Charles's actual political goals were terrifying to most Americans, even most conservatives. He supported an end to social security, to all forms of public welfare, to most of the military. One libertarian writer who interviewed him said his goal was to destroy government, quote, at the root. Now, there are a number of theories as to why this was Charles' mission in life. Clayton Coppin, that researcher who worked for Bill and Charles Koch and wrote a book about him, basically,

thinks the latter's hatred of the government came out of the harsh discipline of his childhood. Quote, only the governments and the courts remained as sources of authority, so Koch had to destroy them, too. Oh, yeah. That's this guy's theory, and it seems credible. By 1980, Charles Koch decided he'd had just about enough of sitting in the shadows funding libertarian think tanks and ignoring life-saving regulations. It was time to get political, or rather, it was time for his brother David to get political, because Charles was really, really into being the whole guy pulling strings from the shadows.

So, since the Koch brothers were, by this point, billionaires and then sort of their own right, they decided that jumping into state-level politics or even running for Congress was too small means for them, since they were already supporting the libertarian party presidential candidate Ed Clark in the 1980 election, they decided to just make David his running mate. This allowed them to conveniently ignore all limits on campaign contributions. Since David was running, he could spend all the money he wanted, which he did, providing 60% of the libertarian party's election budget that year. During the election, Clark told the nation, that libertarians planned, quote,

a very big tea party, because America was, quote, sick to death of taxes. The Clark Koch campaign advocated for, among other things, the repeal of the minimum wage, the repeal of all child labor laws, the end of all forms of public assistance, and the destruction of the FDA. Cool. Yeah. That famous enemy of liberty, the FDA. You know what I hate is when people tell me I can't sell expired food to kids.

Tell me about it. Really pisses me off. Really gets me going. They have the freedom to eat expired food. They should make that decision themselves. Yeah, exactly. You get it. Yeah, I understand liberty.

These guys get it. These guys understand freedom. Freedom is lying about the age of a- Kunas! Shockingly, most Americans did not get on board with the Koch platform of let children work and sell people poison. The libertarian party was probably received less of the vote that year than perennial write-in candidate Batman.

I told you Batman. Yeah. It was a heavy blow to Charles, but being a heroic soul, he was not about to let the bastards grind him down. He refined his strategies, and in 1996, he finally got it right. During that election cycle, he and his brother found a way to funnel millions of dollars, probably more than they'd ever spent on an election, towards a variety of right-wing candidates.

We know that through their company. They spent $320,800 on congressional candidates that year. But the Senate campaign finance investigators suspect they spent millions and just funneled it through a variety of dark money groups. One of these groups was a company called Triad Management. Triad spent a huge amount of money running vicious attack ads in several very close races. One of these was the race between Sam Brownback, a Republican, and Jill Dawking, a Democrat, in Kansas.

Shortly before the election, thousands of voters received this phone call. Quote, We think it's important for people to know that Jill Dawking is Jewish. Please vote for Sam Brownback. That's the whole message? We think it's important to know. That Jill Dawking is Jewish. She didn't make a point of this in her campaign, so we'll let you know.

Yeah, now, this had a major impact on the election, which we'll get to in a minute, but it was noticed at the time. The blowback from all this dark money and rampant anti-Semitism led to a Senate investigation on illegal fundraising. America being America, the Republicans in the Senate focused on investigating whether the Clinton re-election campaign had illegally accepted money from China, while the Democrats focused on determining whether or not the Koch brothers and their fellow rich people had violated campaign finance law in order to support the Republican Party.

To be perfectly fair, there absolutely seems to have been some shadiness between the Clintons, or at least their campaign, and Chinese donors. The LA Times actually broke that story. We're not going to go into detail here, but anyone to think that the Democrats are blameless in the dark money game. That said, the Senate investigation into the 1996 election seems to have gotten so consumed with what aboutism that very little was actually done to stop the problems that had led to both scandals. The Democratic Minority Report in the investigation stated,

quote, the fact suggests that these individuals spent millions of dollars to affect over two dozen federal elections despite operating completely outside of federal election laws. Now, we know that triad spent $3 million on 26 House and Senate races in 1996, and we know that the Economic Education Trust, funded by the Koch brothers, paid for more than half of this. Democratic investigators found that most of the purchase ads were like that famous Brownback Jew ad, focused towards assaulting specific candidates rather than promoting anything. Most of the candidates targeted were in districts where the Koch brothers had large business interests.

The money that was put into triad was then poured out via two different nonprofits, Citizens for Reform and Citizens for the Republic, neither of which had any offices or desks, and both of which seemed to exist as just a way for triad to further obfuscate their operations. Now, like I said, the other half of this investigation was into improprieties between China and the Clinton campaign. Republicans called for 320 subpoenas to investigate this, and they got 315. Democrats, meanwhile, called for 200 subpoenas to investigate all this Koch shadiness and received 89. Excuse me?

Yeah, doesn't seem fair, right? Right. Seems a little messed up. Whatever. The subpoenas that were issued revealed, among other things, 1 million in spending on four congressional races in Kansas, including 420,000 on television ads, and the race between Sam Brownback and Jill Dawking. Brownback?

Yeah, and Jill Dawking. Who? Dawking. I don't know if you caught on this. She was Jewish. Very important. In 2002, the Federal Election Commission sued the owner of triad management for failing to register as a political organization. The owner, a lady named Malinik, was forced to pay a fine and submit donor receipts to the FEC.

She refused to do this. She said, quote, the bottom line is, you can't buy your honor or integrity back. My word was my bond. She filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2006, but still stands by her work in the 1990s. She's claimed that triad's business model was ahead of its time, which is hard to argue with. Holy shit. It's crazy how these guys really are the pioneers and how much history he's reviewing it though. Yeah, they are the Christopher Columbus's of campaign financing.

Very slaughtering people. Yeah, in a couple of ways. Yeah. In every way you could be the Columbus of this. Wow. Disgusting. Terrible. You know, it's not disgusting and terrible.

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But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. We just got finished talking about the 1996 elections in which the Koch brothers pioneered what we would now just describe as the way that election ads are funded. They sort of invented that in the 1990s. Disgusting.

Yeah, funneling dark money around through a bunch of different groups that you could attack people. But when you say dark money, it sounds almost exotic. So we got to change that. Dark money. Yeah, it's like dark chocolate. Dark money. I'm involved with some shady things, but don't worry. It's just dark money. I would love to go out with a friend to a restaurant and then tip the waitress or waiter in dark money and be like, you know what, because this was so good, I'm not going to pay you in regular money. You're some dark money.

Thanks, Knoth. You spin that on something dark. I feel sad. I feel very sad. When I came into this podcast, I felt great. I really did. I like meditated for two hours today. And then now I'm just like, oh, like I'm going to go home and cry.

Probably almost cried a minute ago. Well, that's our goal with behind the bastards. I hope that when people listen to the show in their morning commute or during their workout, they're just a little bit more furious the rest of the day. Perfect workout juice. You know what else is great workout juice? Celcius. I thought you were going to do it. I'll do a Doritos ad.

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Let's get back into the tale. Now, the money that the Cokes threw directly at elections during the late 90s and early 2000s was more of a stop gap than anything. From what I can tell, it was targeted at races that would directly impact Coke industry's business. Most of what they're spending in this period like the late 90s is towards races where there would be a direct impact based on who won on their business interests. Kind of what's going on right now and always, it's always going on. It's always going on. Charles Coke does a step above that because he's not just, for a lot of companies, I think, funding races that are going to, you know, where a certain person wins that benefits the company. That's kind of the end of their thinking.

Coke is playing a very long game here. Yeah. He's just trying to influence, he's trying to change American culture. I bet he's really hard right now seeing what's going on. You might be surprised. So, from the late 1970s into the early 2000s, the Coke brothers, namely Charles, seeded a shitload of institutions and think tanks with their money. This was Charles Coke's long con. In 1978, he'd written that, quote, ideas do not spread by themselves, they spread only through people, which means we need a movement, only with a movement can we build an effective force for social change.

So, for decades, he's embarked on a strategy of funding academics and pundits, people like Lefebvre in his freedom school, but also more mainstream libertarian groups like the Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute. You mean Keto, that's in the diet? No. His goal with all this was to achieve something deeper than the short-term anger a racy campaign ad could spark. Charles believed that by provoking enough voices who'd repeat his ideas throughout the culture, he could change that culture. Now, according to Charles, young people were, quote, the only group that is open to a radically different social philosophy. So, they were the group he focused most of his resources on. In order to accomplish this, he and his fellow travelers looked to... When you say travelers, I think of like a merry band.

This guy was not a merry band. No, no, are you going to guess who they looked to for advice on recruiting children? Oh, tell me. It's the Nazis! No! You're lying. No, it's the Nazis. Oh, okay.

I'm going to quote from Derek Money here. Please. In support of building their own youth movement, another speaker, the libertarian historian, Leonard Ligio, cited the success of the Nazi model. In his paper titled, National Socialist Political Strategy, Social Change in a Modern Industrial Society with an Authoritarian Tradition, Ligio, who was affiliated with the Koch Funded Institute for Humane Studies from 1974 until 1998, described the Nazi's successful creation of a youth movement as key to their capture of the state. Like the Nazis, he suggested, libertarians should organize university students to create group identity. No! Now, some people might say that if you ever find yourself saying, like the Nazis, we should do X, you're on the wrong side.

Right? That's my thinking. Don't do what the Nazis did. Right. Ever. Yes? Yeah. This is not how Charles Koch felt.

He was like, efficiency. The Nazis, that's where our money comes from. It's important to note, she's Jewish. Yeah, when you really tie together all of the little strands, it doesn't, yeah. He looks, yeah. Yeah. Anyway. So, George Pearson, a former John Birch Society member who later worked for Charles, was

the first person to suggest to him directly that a great way to recruit the young would be to found scholarly institutes inside universities. Now, the Kochs had for a while been giving money to universities. But when you give money to a school that can spend on anything, including on paying researchers and academics who might believe in things you don't agree with, or might do research that counteracts your own opinions. Yeah. You don't want that.

Now, if you found a scholarly institute within a college, however, you have control over how that money is spent. So, you can directly control new generations of thinkers and directly influence the client minds of their students. This brings us to the Mercatus Center, which the Chronicle of Higher Education describes as a, quote, libertarian-style think tank within George Mason University. From 2011 to 2014 alone, the Charles Koch Foundation put 50 million dollars into the Mercatus Center.

Now, Mercatus was founded by Richard Fink, a professor at the college who'd also been an executive vice president and member of the Board of Directors for Koch Industries. Here's the Chronicle. Mr. Williams' politics are no secret. On his bookshelves rest a bust of Adam Smith, the patron saint of unimpeded capitalism, and a copy of the libertarian reader. But Mr. Williams says that he is careful not to bring his opinions, hardened as they are, into the classroom.

He scoffed at any suggestion that George Mason's economics department indoctrinates students with anti-regulatory free market messages. He does, however, hope his pupils will come to see the world just as he does. I would like my students to share my subjective opinions, Mr. Williams said. If they become hard-minded thinkers, they will adopt many of my opinions. Now, George Mason is a public university in Virginia, and not everyone who works there was a sanguine about the impact the Mercatus Center had on the freedom of dialogue within the university.

Here's Kerry Meyer, an associate economics professor who describes herself as somewhat left of center. Quote, Looking back on her career, Ms. Meyer said she had held back in her scholarship at George Mason, gravitating towards vanilla topics such as a book based on the diaries of her family's farm. She did not want to rock the boat. Quote, I carefully chose my research so it wouldn't be objectionable to them, she said. Ms. Meyer described her colleagues as smart economists, but said they collectively provide

graduate students with a narrow view of the discipline. I would tell people that it's better to go to a place where they would get a broader education, she said. See, the Mercatus Center was an independent body within the university, so it's true that they had no formal power to influence the kind of research people published, but many professors at the school relied on the Center for extra income. Mercatus paid out over $400,000 a year to two dozen faculty members, people who then had financial interest in not publishing any research that might disagree with Charles Koch's beliefs.

Charles Koch himself said in an interview, quote, If we're going to give a lot of money, we'll make darn sure they spend it in a way that goes along with our intent. And if they make a wrong turn and start doing things we don't agree with, we withdraw funding. So this is how you change a university using tens of millions of dollars in dark money. Yeah, it's horrifying, right? This is not the only school he does this to. This is just the clearest example. Hope you listeners at the gym are getting jacked right now.

Pump real hard. Now, there are other academic institutes that have received Koch money. It's hard to say how many researchers and professors and writers are in the U.S. have found themselves in a position of having to avoid disagreeing with Charles Koch and their work. But in 2013, the Center for Media and Democracy, which Politico describes as a, quote, liberal group, published research into the state policy network. Now, the state policy network operates in all 50 states and claims to be, quote, dedicated solely to improving the practical effectiveness of independent, nonprofit,

market-oriented, state-focused think tanks. I'm sorry, but that's a long sentence. The Center for Media and Democracy basically says that the state policy network is a vehicle for pouring dark money into right-wing think tanks around the country. Here's Politico. According to the reports analysis of IRS filings, the state policy network and its think tanks were revenue in 2011 topped $83 million and large part with funding from conservative dark money groups like the Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, which receive large donations

from groups tied to the Koch brothers and other prominent conservatives. Yeah, so there's a lot of different buckets they're putting money into and we will never know the extent of funding, but it is in the hundreds of millions probably. It's probably more than that. That they're putting into just educational institutes. So with all this money spent to change academia, Charles Koch was essentially gambling that he'd profit more by building a small but utterly dedicated core of radical libertarian ideologists than he would by trying to publicize his extreme beliefs to the masses.

His thinking here was entirely in line with what we know about the way the human brain deals with extreme ideas. In 2011, scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic published a bunch of research into how ideas in human society tip from being the minority to the majority opinion. The scariest thing they found, or the most optimistic, depending on your angle, is that this happens very quickly once an idea reaches a certain level of saturation. Here's Bolas Laszmanski, a distinguished professor at Rensselaer. When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10%, there is no visible progress

in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority. Once that number grows above 10%, the idea spreads like flame. Yeah, here's a quote from a fizz or write-up on the research. In general, people do not like to have an unpopular opinion and are always seeking to try locally to come to a consensus. We set up this dynamic in each of our models, says one of the paper's authors.

To accomplish this, each of the individuals in the models quote, talked to each other about their opinion. If the listener held the same opinions as the speaker, it reinforced the listener's belief. If the opinion was different, the listener considered it and moved on to another person. If that person also held this new belief, the listener then adopted that belief. So this was sort of a model that they set up in order to sort of represent how ideas might spread throughout a culture. And it's wise not to read too, too much into this because it's a study based on models

of human behavior rather than actual people. And the study's authors specifically note that this model was not designed to replicate a polarized society with a bunch of different radical ideas in it. That said, if you spend a lot of time reading about revolutions and protest movements, you can't deny that this all sounds somewhat congruous with observable reality, that there is a point of saturation. Once you hit a certain number of people pushing an extreme ideology, it can spread very, very rapidly.

Yeah. So that study came out in 2011, a year in which revolution and unrest spread across the Arab world like wildfire. The study's authors were admittedly more concerned with explaining that than anything else. You know, they were trying to ask like, how can a guy like Gaddafi be in charge for 40 years and almost overnight, you know, there's this movement builds up steam to put him out or whatever. Nothing.

Do you think it was overnight? I think if you listen to, if you talk to a lot of people who were involved in it, they would say that they were angry for years, but that they did not believe it was possible until somebody was like, it is possible. Yeah, exactly. There is a point at which the feeling that something like that is possible tips. Yeah. And it seems like that's sort of what Charles is trying to incocate.

Just enough people that are real true believers and doesn't take a lot. They can, you can start seeing the, an idea that's pretty extreme spread like wildfire. What is that? Is it bad religion? That song? True believers. What is that? I don't know.

I'm not good at it. Let's edit that out. Keeping it all in. Gaddaf. Gnaw. Yeah. All right. Hit me daddy with some more facts.

All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. So the study's authors, like I said, we're more interested in explaining the herbs spring than anything else, but by that point in 2011, Charles Koch was two years into fighting a revolution of his own to destroy a man he viewed as a living death star, Barack Obama.

Oh tight. Okay. Cool. Despite the regulatory concerns, the 1990s and early 2000s have been a great time for the Koch brothers. They diversified from fuel refining to every imaginable kind of petro product. If it needed oil to produce, the Koch brothers were into that shit. They maintained an 84% ownership stake in their company and put 90% of their profits

right back into the business. By 2006, Koch Industries made 90 billion per year in profit compared to 70 million in 1960. They are. They are great businessmen. Great businessmen. I'd love to pick up their books. It sounds like it's probably full of great stuff that you can generalize to your whole life without becoming a terrible parent.

A monster. Yeah. The two years were good for them, big surprise, although they were super anti-Iraq war. That is one thing you can say for Charles Koch, he has been consistently anti-war, anti-U.S. intervention. Interesting. That is a pretty consistent with libertarian ideology. You shouldn't be fucking around.

It's too expensive. It's not like he- Oh, he didn't do it for moral reasons. He didn't care about the lives of human beings. Yeah, okay. No, he just thought it was a waste of money. Here I am. I'm like, a spark of hope.

Okay. No, no, no. Okay. The lives mean nothing. Yeah. So, the Bush years were good for them, but they'd gotten a lot of what they wanted regulation-wise during his eight years in power, which may have had something to do with the 2008 crash, but now we're digressing.

May I pick up on that digress? I did hear, didn't he say that there's going to be another crash coming up in like 2021 or 22? I mean, we're lucky if it takes that long, right? Like, somebody, I was working a job this past weekend and like one of the cameras, I only got to like talk to him for part of it, but he was saying that one of the brothers was like, yeah, there's going to be a crash coming up. Yeah.

And it's like, oh yeah, you're going to cause this crash for some- Well, they're not, they're not much into real estate specula- that might honestly just be them honestly looking at the market because a lot of people are saying the housing market is due for another big crash. Yeah. Like, I don't want to be fair to these guys because they're assholes, but that may just be him looking at the writing as well. Okay.

It's coming. I'm trying to save up my money. Look, dude, I got like a couple hundred bucks. I'm trying to get myself a down payment. Hey, that's more than 80% of Americans keep in savings. I think it's like 70, 80% of the country has less than $1,000 in savings. I believe it. Yep.

Yeah. It's going to be great when the economy collapses and we eat these people. You know what's crazy is when the economy collapsed the first time, I'll get back on subject. I see your little fingers. I was just a barista, so it didn't affect me at all. I was like, why is everybody so stressed? I'm still making minimum wage.

Yeah. Nothing's changed for me. Yeah. Okay. Boy. Yeah. During the Bush years, yeah, they got a lot of what they wanted regulation-wise, but they didn't like the Iraq war.

Throughout this period, they also did support to their credit, sentence reduction for nonviolent drug offenders because they're not pro-drug war guys. So again, it's not all bad with the shit the Koch brothers funds, but it's a lot not bad. In fact, David Koch, who retired from political life recently, has shown gasps of being a human being over the last few years. In a 2003 speech to alumni at his prep school after he received a lifetime trustee status for a $25 million donation, David said this.

You might ask, how does David Koch happen to have the wealth to be so generous? Well, let me tell you a story. It all started when I was a little boy. One day my father gave me an apple. I soon sold it for $5 and bought two apples and sold them for $10, then I bought four apples and sold them for $20. Well, this went on day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year until my father died and left me $300 million, which is all a little bit, but that's David Koch.

Charles Koch has not joked about inherited wealth because he doesn't think estate taxes should be a thing. Anyway, the election of Barack Obama was a big watershed moment for Charles Koch. He claimed that the 2008 election would lead America to, quote, its greatest loss of liberty and prosperity since the 1930s, which didn't happen. I mean, maybe I missed it. Maybe I missed us losing all of our wealth and prosperity, but I didn't notice that. In his inaugural address, President Obama said, quote, without a watchful eye, the economy

can spin out of control. A clear reference to what had just happened in a 2008 financial crash. This was heresy to Charles Koch, the man who'd urged resistance at all costs in the face of regulation. Never mind the fact that back in September of 2008, the Koch Political Organization Americans for Prosperity had reversed their opinion on bailouts when the Dow dropped 777 points in the stock market crash. Then they'd supported $700 billion worth of government intervention.

But now that Obama was in the White House and talking about regulating Wall Street to avoid another crash, resistance to tyrants was the only option that remained for Charles Koch. Now, since 2003, Charles had been assembling a yearly meeting of major Republican donors, most of whom were billionaires or multi-millionaires who had inherited their fortunes. The first Koch Group meeting after Obama's election is best described as a war council. Here's dark money. Participants at the summits, for instance, were routinely admonished to destroy all copies

of any paperwork. Be mindful of the security and confidentiality of your meeting notes and materials, the invitation to one gathering warned. Guests were told to say nothing to the news media and post nothing about the meetings online. The elaborate security steps were taken to keep both the names of the participants and the meeting's agendas from public scrutiny. When signing up to attend the conferences, participants were warned to make all arrangements

through the Koch staff rather than trusting the employees at the resort, whose backgrounds were nonetheless investigated by the Koch security detail. In an effort to detect intruders and imposters, name tags were required at all functions, and smartphones, iPads, cameras, and other recording gear were confiscated prior to sessions. While foil eavesdroppers during one such gathering, audio technicians planted white noise emitting loudspeakers around the perimeters, aimed outward towards any uninvited press in public. Wow.

Yeah, they're treating it like a rebellion, like they're running an underground revolutionary organization, which is what's happening. It's just that the people who were revolutionaries in this are the richest people in the country. Yeah. I feel sick. It's super gross. We're going to get into something not gross, ads. I love ads.

Oh, they're so good. They're so good. Boy, howdy. Let's hear what they have to say about how you can support this show by spending money on other things. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and

fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic, and occasionally ridiculous, deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history

books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows.

I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me, about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Welcome to the Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot

of forensic and not an awful lot of science. The wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus.

It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so we've just gotten to the point where Charles Koch goes into full on rebellion mode. He's like white noise machines. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's doing all the spy stuff. He's portraying himself to at least other rich guys as like the leader of this rebellion.

Now there are two possibilities as I see them here. Number one, he really is ideologically committed to his course and all the secrecy in the extreme language he uses is totally honest and based on his heartfelt beliefs about the world. Or he just wants more money in his pocket and he donates what he has to donate because donation is better than paying taxes. His principled stand that businessmen should resist all regulation is more of an attempt to get other people to donate to his cause since he's clearly willing to compromise with the government for his own interests.

You can come to your own conclusion about whether or not Charles Koch's ideology is just a scam, essentially, or if he really believes this, he's in his 80s now, yeah. Hard to say. Or maybe he's changed over time. Whatever the case, after Obama's election, the Koch brothers, mainly Charles, poured astronomical amounts of money into fighting the Obama administration, 18 other billionaires joined them during the president's first term. Together they pooled money and resources to support politicians sympathetic to all of

their interests. In essence, they formed a trade union for people who were born rich, yeah. They'd held that big secret meeting during the month Obama was sworn in and it had involved a debate between two Republican senators because when you're rich, you can just have senators debate for you. Yeah, the train, what is it, another train union or maybe, yeah, a senator bought the union, anyways, I have some family members that work, they're train conductors and it's not the train union, maybe it is, but they bought a senator who changed all these rules

and it's like, oh yeah, when you have money, you can just buy these guys. So they had, these rich guys had during that big meeting, two Republican senators, John Cornyn and Jim DeMint, argue in front of them to basically determine what course the Republican party should take after McCain's big defeat by Obama. So Cornyn basically argued that the 2008 election proved the Republican party needed to get more moderate, make a bigger tent and accommodate more people so that they could win elections honestly again. Jim DeMint on the other hand said, fuck that noise, we should only go further and further

to the right, compromises for cowards. Can you guess which side of the argument, Charles Koch backed? Yeah, compromises for cowards. So the Koch brothers became a major force behind the foundation of the Tea Party movement. One Republican campaign consultant was quoted in the New Yorker as saying of the Tea Party, the Koch brothers gave the money that founded it. It's like they put the seeds in the ground, then the rainstorm comes and the frogs come out of the mud and there are candidates.

Which that's not how seeds or frogs work, but he's in politics, not in farming or knowledge. Yeah, knowledge, general knowledge about biology. Frogs from the mud. Classic mud frogs. Oh no. Came out of seeds like frogs do. A 2010 New York Times article broke it down this way or broke down the funding of the Tea Party movement this way.

Break it down for me. The other major sponsor of the Tea Party movement is Dick Army's Freedom Works, which like Americans for Prosperity. Time out. Dick Army? Dick Army. Yeah, he's a real guy. Yeah.

Okay, sorry, go ahead. Yeah. No, I mean we should, it's fine. It's fine to marinate in the enjoyment of, his name's Dick Army. Yeah, it's good. Yeah, the other major sponsor of the Tea Party movement is Dick Army's Freedom Works, which like Americans for Prosperity is promoting events in Washington this weekend. Under its original name, Citizens for a Sound Economy, Freedom Works received 12 million

dollars of its funding from Koch family donations. Using tax records, Mayor found that Koch-controlled foundations gave out 196 million from 1998 to 2008, much of it to conservative causes and institutions. That figure doesn't include the 50 million in Koch Industries lobbying and 4.8 million in campaign contributions by its political action committee, putting it first among energy company peers like ExxonMobil and Chevron. Since tax law permits anonymous personal donations to non-profit political groups, these figures may understate the case.

The Kochs surely matched the in-kind donations the Tea Party receives in free promotion 24-7 from Murdoch's Fox News, where Beck and Palin are on the payroll. So, Charles Koch and David have denied any part in the astroturfing of the Tea Party movement, but investigative reporting by Taki Oldham, director of Astroturf Wars, which is a documentary, found very direct evidence that this was bullshit. Here's a quote from the Guardian. Oldham infiltrated some of the movement's key organizing events, including the 2009 Defending the American Dream Summit, convened by a group called Americans for Prosperity.

The film shows David Koch addressing the summit. Five years ago, he explains, my brother Charles and I provided the funds to start Americans for Prosperity. It's beyond my wildest dreams how AFP has grown into this enormous organization. The convener tells the crowd how AFP mobilized opposition to Barack Obama's health care reforms. Quote, we hit the button and we started doing the Twittering and Facebook and the phone calls and the emails and you turned up.

Then a series of AFP organizers tell Mr. Koch how they have set up dozens of Tea Party events in their home states. He nods and beams from the podium, like a chief executive receiving rosy reports from his regional sales directors. Afterwards, the delegates crowd into AFP workshops, where they are told how to run further Tea Party events. So the word that these guys went as, the Tea Party is totally original movement that started on its own and whatnot.

But the evidence suggests that they funded and directly planned how it was going to be carried. And if you remember back in 1980, when David Koch ran to be vice president of the Libertarian Party, his running mate had said that that election would be the ignition of, quote, a new Tea Party. So their thinking has been in this long before the election of Barack Obama polite, it provided the political impetus. He was just a flame to the fuel.

Exactly. And also the time hadn't been right in the 80s because they spent the time, the decade since then, pumping money into education and propaganda. Yeah, but subliminally, it's been there. It's been in the people's back of their minds. I think it's more there because of their effort. You know what I mean. Yeah.

I think, I think in my mind, I'm trying to say something else that my mouth is saying. I mean, as the racism was a major factor, because I don't disagree with you there either. But I think that like, I think it wasn't ready in the 80s. But yeah, for sure, people are like, oh, that sounds familiar. You know, like, oh, wait a second. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Anyways, anyways, anyways. Yeah, the timing hadn't been right then for a variety of reasons. But by 2010, the timing was right. And that's why the 2010 midterms did not go well for the Democratic Party or for Barack Obama. Now, in 2012, the Koch brothers spent a record breaking $412 million on the election. More than what the top 10 unions in the United States had donated combined.

So they are essentially working as a union for rich people, but there's a lot more money in that than any trade union. Clearly all that money wasn't enough to stop Barack Obama from winning reelection. But overall, the Koch efforts were wildly successful as Jane Mayer summarized in dark money. With no small part to huge quantities of targeted money spent by the Kochs and their allied donors, the Democratic Party lost both houses of Congress, 14 governorships, and 30 state legislatures, compromising more than 900 seats during Obama's presidency.

So their efforts are successful. This money does not go to nothing. But if the last 20 years have seen Charles Koch's grand scheme come close to fruition, it is beginning to look like he may have reached the limits of what money can buy. During the 2016 election, the Koch brothers and their network of political organizations had, collectively, a larger payroll than the Republican Party. The Kochs employed 1,600 staffers in 35 states, which gave them three times the manpower of the Republican Party.

The Kochs originally planned to spend close to $1 billion on the 2016 election, but the rise of Donald Trump took them as much by surprise as it took everyone else. See, the Kochs actually love immigration, illegal or otherwise. They love free trade, and trade deals like NAFTA and the Pacific Partnership, because those things make shitloads of money for business owners. Donald Trump was exactly the kind of conservative they did not want to see when election. So they cut their election spending by hundreds of millions of dollars and put a huge chunk of what they were going to still spend into state races instead.

The current CIA director, for example, Michael Pompeo, received more funding than any other congressional candidate from the Kochs. Dark Money suggests that what happened between 2010 and 2016 is that essentially the rabid anti-government, anti-regulation, anti-left sentiment that Charles and David Koch spent hundreds of millions of dollars to inculcate finally grew beyond them. They helped create the movement that morphed into Trumpism, but during its evolution they lost control of it. One former Koch employee said this during the 2016 election.

Quote, we are partly responsible. We invested a lot in training an arming a grassroots army that was not controllable. So conflicts have continued between the Kochs and now President Trump. Most recently, the Koch network refused to support a Republican and a tight race in North Dakota because of his Trumpist views on trade. After that news broke, Donald Trump tweeted, quote, the globalist Koch brothers who have become a total joke in real Republican circles are against strong borders and powerful trade. I never sought their support because I don't need their money or bad ideas.

They love my tax and regulation cuts, judicial picks and more. I made them richer. Their network is highly overrated. I have beaten them at every turn. They want to protect their companies outside the U.S. from being taxed. I'm for America, first in the American worker, a puppet for no one. Two nice guys with bad ideas. Make America great again.

No. Yeah. I have agreed with the president there. The Kochs do have bad ideas. I do not agree about there being nice guys. Two nice guys, bad ideas though. These guys over here, nice guys, but bad ideas. Nice guys.

I really like what they're doing with pipelines filled with holes blowing up neighborhoods. That's a nice guy move, classic nice guy move. Bad ideas though. Bad ideas. In 1990, when their mother died, Charles Koch basically hid information about the funeral from his brothers, Frederick and Bill. Frederick missed his mom's funeral and Bill had to charter a private plane to get there on time.

Not nice guys. Charles grew up to be just as much of a terrible parent as his own dad had been. When he saw his son chase play what dark money describes as a half-hearted tennis match, Charles ordered him sent to work in a filthy feedlot seven days a week, 12 hours a day until he got better at tennis, presumably. Meanwhile, Charles' daughter Elizabeth had this to say about coming home to see her father during the summer while she was at college. Quote,

As soon as we arrived, I felt an overwhelming urge to prostrate myself on the floor and eat dirt in order to illustrate how grateful I am for everything they've done for me, that I'm not the spoiled monster they warned me I'd become if I wasn't careful. She described trying to earn her father's approval as, Staring down that dark well of nothing you do will ever be good enough you privileged waste of flesh. This is how Charles' daughter describes how she feels in her dad's presence. It's impossible to say right now whether Chase or Elizabeth will also concoct a decades-long

conspiracy to influence American political thought. What I will say is that it seems like the unique mix of obscene wealth and insane abusive pettiness that made Charles coke the man he is today will at least have a chance with another generation of born billionaires. Boy, howdy. Isn't inherited wealth grand? Yeah, what else is there to say? I feel my heart breaks in a sad way for these kids, generations, huh?

Yeah, because Charles Coke didn't have to be the asshole he is, but the way he was raised made it very low odds that he was going to turn out to be this very compassionate guy for sure. I hope his kids are compassionate. I hope his kids are better than him. I hope they've looked at the life their dad's led and realized he doesn't, I doubt he's a happy man. No.

Because I don't think he's capable of having close relationships with people. Yeah, he's probably blinded by his ideas. Yeah. Who can say what's really in another person's heart? Yeah, yeah, and maybe I'm just being hopeful that he's miserable because he's done miserable things. He's just the happiest clam in the clam factor. No, he's probably a miserable person, but he's unaware that he's a miserable person.

Yeah, because he doesn't know what it can be to have a father who cares about you and kids that you feel warmly towards and are proud of, like those that are alien to him. Yeah. Yeah. He lost that boxing once, you know? Yeah, he did lose that boxing once. You lose that boxing once, didn't you? Yeah, protesters, if you wind up protesting a Coke thing in the future, really drive home

that he's bad at boxing, that seems to be a sore spot. I wouldn't. He'll probably die. He'll probably put a hit on you. Yeah, Charles did. I've really enjoyed this. Thank you. Thank you.

I'm glad you enjoyed this terrible story of a terrible person. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely, we've definitely been thinking a lot and got sad for a little while and got happy again, and then I got sad a lot. And then it was just like, wow, I'm going to go get in my car, go on throughout my day. So at the end of this, are you more or less optimistic? Oh, less. Oh, for sure less, but also a little bit more.

It's nice to hear that his kids are aware enough to be like, oh, when I come home, this is how I feel. This is not how I want to feel, and maybe they'll change, maybe they can be like, hey, actually, we can make a difference. But he probably has it all lined up with the industry that somebody else just like him is going to take over. It's hard to imagine someone good taking over. It is kind of heartening to me, even though Trump is the result that they did lose control

of this movement that they built, because it does mean that there are limits to what wealth can buy, even though I don't like what it ran out of control and turned into. The foreshadowing of things to come. Anyways. Well, we'll see. I feel like America's on a good road right now. And you know what I love to have on those good road trips? Doritos.

Hey, we brought it back around. Well, I eat the rest of this bag of Doritos, like some sort of cheese goblins. Please save some for me. Will do. Why don't you plug your plug-ables first? Great. You can catch me on the internet at evermaynard.com, M-A-I-N-A-R-D and ever, like the word, Twitter, Instagram, at ever, Maynard.

I'm doing shows all around L.A., maybe at a place near you soon. Who knows? I'm on Netflix in a movie called The Feels. Watch it. You know. Yeah. Watch it. Again, watch it.

Tweet at me. No haters, please. I'm a sensitive soul. But also, like I said, I love to comment and I do so aggressively. Yelp. Reddit. Anyplace. Sometimes I'll just go to Yahoo.

Comment. Oh, man. Yahoo, comment. I love answering things wrong on Yahoo answers. Oh, I didn't know I could do that. But I will be aggressively commenting on Yahoo answers. Yeah, I really, stuff like that, Quora, I really like just sabotaging it. Okay.

Giving people bad advice on how to treat first aid injuries and stuff. Hey, that's not okay. Oh, I'm just. You're not kidding. No. We all try to seed the world in our own way. I guess so. Let those mud frogs come up.

You plant the seeds and then the frogs. And the mud frogs come up. What did I tell you about those mud frogs? All right. You can find this mud frog on Twitter at I write okay. You can find this podcast on the internet at behindthebastards.com where we'll have all of the many, many sources for this episode listed. And you can also find us at at Bastards pot on Twitter and Instagram where we will be

tweeting and Instagramming things. Hooray. Yeah. So until next week, we will be talking about some other terrible person or group of people. I'm Robert Evans. And, you know, I love about 40% of you statistically. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests.

It involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. He didn't inside his hearse with like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? But he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space?

Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.