Grubstakers - Episode 122: Ingvar Kamprad (IKEA)

Episode Date: December 10, 2019

It's the IKEA episode on furniture entrepreneur and "not a nazi anymore" Ingvar Kamprad. We discuss Ingvar's innovations in do-it-yourself furniture, made-from-illegally-logged-wood furniture, crafted-by-child-slaves furniture, and crushes-your-toddler furniture. It's one of our more light-hearted episodes.

I want to be held accountable for what I'm doing. This may sound like an exaggeration, but it was like the 9-11 of my career and certainly of making kombucha. Jesus is smart. This idea of income inequality, that always strikes me as a very, it's a deceptive term, income inequality. Well, let's flip it around. It comes from outcome inequality. In five, four, three, two. Hello, welcome back to Grubstakers, the podcast about billionaires. My name is Sean P. McCarthy, and I'm joined here by... Steve Jeffries.

Andy Palmer. And so, this week, we're going to talk a bit about IKEA, and more specifically, we're going to talk about the... IKEA? The founder of IKEA, Ingvar Kamprad, who's now deceased, but before he died in 2018, before he died, Forbes gave him a net worth of about $23 billion. We count people who died after we started this podcast. I think at his zenith, he was worth about $57 billion. Right.

He was the fourth richest person in the world for a minute. Yeah, his net worth yo-yoed, but also IKEA is owned by a very complicated tax structure that is currently being investigated by the European Union for tax evasion. Would you say that his net worth was kind of built up and then it collapsed and then it was replaced? Right. Yeah, Forbes tried to climb up his net worth and pull out some drawers and fall on top of them. And yeah, so he passed away in 2018, but his children are all billionaires. He has four children. unless they've like done serious research on ikea have the general sense that ikea is a more humane more environmental more sustainable more swedish more social democratic company than a lot of u.s multinationals you run into they're the uh adorkable chain yes the actual story is ikea is one of the most evil companies on earth presently. I mean, it'd be hard to rank them. But when you go through the history of IKEA, you start with the founder who was a Nazi,

who funded rat lines to take Nazi war criminals out of Europe after the war, which we'll get to. You start with that. Then you go through lots of instances of slave labor all the way up to the present where they are currently suspected of using a Uyghur Muslim slave labor in China to source their cotton. And we'll get to that. But then also just the actual environmental destruction of the company where they are the third largest consumer of wood in the entire world. They use about 1% of the world's wood supply. And how do you think they get it so cheap illegal logging and clear cutting i would say that they are also responsible for about in the countries that they operate they're responsible for a breakup rate of about three per capita with with a in a nearly relationship ending argument rate of about eight per capita.

So we're recording from Grubstaker's south currently in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and approximately 80% of the furniture in this unit is IKEA that has been owned by all of the hosts. Some of it has been passed on from host to host. Well, that's the thing is, you know, Ikea furniture, it's, they do kind of a perverse thing where they argue that, hey, you know, we're using less wood and lighter materials. So that's more environmentally friendly than a piece of furniture that uses more wood. But it's like, well, the end result is it's cheaper, you throw it out earlier and you replace it. So in the long run, I mean, there's a, so we, we watched this documentary that's on Netflix that I do recommend. The documentary series is called Broken. The episode is called Deadly Dressers.

And it's mostly about Ikea. And they talk about how up until the 1980s and 90, uh, up until the 1980s, most Americans would buy furniture and keep it for their entire lives and ikea has really revolutionized the world in that um you know people will just throw their ikea shit out and buy new ikea shit every time they move which if you're in new york happens like every twice a year yeah it's usually a dresser just kind of strewn about outside of our building yeah ikea is uh the primary supplier of uh sidewalk bookshelves that said i i'm actually going to start a conspiracy theory which is um that ikea uh spread the exaggerated threat of

sidewalk furniture being full of bed bugs so that no one would take in a perfectly good dresser that someone just didn't want to pay someone to carry. It's like the neighborhood. I don't know if we have audio of it, but there's a 2002 ad by Ikea that somebody throws a lamp out and there's a sad music going. And then a Swedish actor comes in and says, don't feel bad for the lamp. Right.

Because you can just get another one. Basically. It's a commercial directed by Spike Jonze. One of the most famous Ikea commercials is in 2002. And the message is, don't feel bad about throwing out your lamp. You're crazy for feeling bad about that. It was actually a compromise. By getting Spike Jonze, it was a compromise from the original idea,

which was a commercial that was directed by Spike Jonze and written by Charlie Kaufman. But it had way too many masturbation scenes. So they had to throw out Charlie Kaufman. We should just skip to the end because a lady carrying a lamp uh a depressed man laying in bed masturbating because it can't finish his uh script okay now it's a man who's part man part ape who can't control his own masturbation well so they put this lamp out on the curb and it's getting rained on and they're the perspective of the camera is trying to make you sympathize with the lamp and feel bad that they just threw

out this innocent lamp now there's a kindly swedish man masturbating oh yeah it's real wait the lamp's light goes off outside, which, you know, that doesn't happen. Many of you feel bad for this lamp. That is because you're crazy. It has no feeling. And the new one is much better. And then it has a fake, I don't know, two-tonization where it says unboring with

umlauts on the O. Many of you feel bad for the refugees our founder's political party kept out of Sweden and got sent to Auschwitz. That's because you're crazy. Jews don't have feelings. But yes, so that is the commercial where they say

they are a ruthless international clique that will destroy all of the But yes, so that is the commercial where they say... They are a ruthless international clique that will destroy all of the true racially pure people. So, like, that's the commercial, 2002, where they're telling you, hey, don't feel bad about throwing your fucking lamp out. You're crazy if you feel bad about this. It doesn't have feelings.

And of course, what happens is these things end up in landfills. And then, you know, people buying new stuff ends up consuming even more wood than if you just kept the original product. But then IKEA has rebranded as an environmental company. So they re-released this ad in 2018 2018 which is a sequel where some little girl comes and takes the lamp that has been rained on on the street and brings it to her family's house and then she makes shadow puppets in front of the lamp and then that's saying it's promptly electrocuted it's just like there's dressers falling on the other kids in the background the surrealist the dresser

falls on a kid and then the swedish actor's like don't feel bad about the kid crazy get a new one it's much better get a new toddler you crazy well maybe we could just play the voiceover of the guy at the end of the 2018 okay here's, here's John Malkovich masturbating. John Cusack is masturbating inside John Malkovich. They've just finished the tasteful rape scene. Many of you feel happy for this lamp. That's not crazy. Reusing things is much better.

Shut the fuck up. Jesus Christ. And then they went with the new um so the last one it was like unboring and now it just says the beautiful possibilities which is endemic of you know 2010 smarm well something we will get to is that ikea um a former executive of ikea wrote a tell all book in 2009 called the truth of ikea the Truth About IKEA. And he makes the allegation very credible, in my opinion, that IKEA has basically bought off Greenpeace and some of these other NGOs to get a clean environmental record. And he says that if you actually add it up,

IKEA is a powerful enough company that they could enforce discipline in their supply chain. They could say, hey, no illegal clear-cutting, no slave labor, but instead it is cheaper for them to use illegal clear-cutting, use slave labor, and then pay off these NGOs to launder their reputation because paying off the NGOs is also charitable tax deductible. It's also they make money on both ends where they do the cut rate supplier thing, and then they save money on their tax bill by donating to non-profits also thanks to the patreon subscribers we're now uh ranked

number one in ethics and podcasting but it is like so you know i i read that uh responsibly source drops i read the executive make the allegation that they paid off greenpeace which i guess abc news when they did a write-up, had to withdraw this claim because they said there's not actually evidence of this particular claim. And then I googled IKEA Greenpeace. All of the Greenpeace stuff on IKEA is just press releases for IKEA, where it's like, IKEA will commit to total sustainable light bulbs by 2020. IKEA, fully sustainable wood sourcing by 2020. And this is greenpeace doing press releases for a company that is clear-cutting romania russia china among others yeah in the broken documentary they

um they're like ikea uh announced that they were committing to sustainability by 2020 and then the explanation of their sustainability was one of those clear like uh corporate double speak things that you know we've seen a dozen times before and covering companies on this show where it's just like they will do a slightly better job of checking who is doing their logging yeah like the the phrase they use was forest positive yeah and i was like okay so that must mean like they're gonna plant more trees than they cut down or something like that. But no, it's much more vague.

Yeah, there's no physical metric that you would expect in a real plan. Right. So, yeah, and the documentary Broken the Deadly Dressers episode, it goes through, they follow this guy from a Romanian organization called Agent Green, and him and his compatriots, they go around filming illegal logging in Romania. And that guy, he seemed cool as hell, and he is 100% within the next 10 years, if he's not already, going to be in an unmarked grave somewhere in the clear-cut Romanian forest. But so they talk about the Carpathian Mountains in Romania, and the forests there are some of the last, like, real old-growth forests in Europe, you know, because so much of this has been just clear-cut by multinationals.

Yeah, I wasn't aware that there were still forests in Europe. No, if you ever check out this documentary, I think you'll agree that it's just, like, Romania is, like, stunning. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I really want to visit now. Yeah, all the drone shots are just gorgeous, beautiful forests. And then they'll go to the areas that the multinationals have been allowed to log in and it's just gone.

But I will say also that the footage of the trees that were cut down, that did look like really good quality wood. Well, that's the thing is you know um well so romania of course is a communist dictatorship um until uh boo uh which which had its problems but they didn't open up uh the forests to multinational logging companies and then what we've seen again and again with all these former eastern european communist regimes when they fall yay organized crime takes over state resources and then takes bribes to sell them off to mostly western multinationals who destroy them yeah one of the one of the great pr coups of uh the last a few decades is when problems in former communist countries are characterized as problems of the former communist regime

and not the brutal, just brutal neoliberalization of what was essentially forced by the West into being a series of failed states. Can I talk about that? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, and then Steve found some interesting stuff about IKEA's involvement with bribery to various factions in Romania. Yeah. So, in the 80s in Romania, there's a group of secret police that was just called the Securitate. And IKEA actually got into a bit of a scheme with them in order where they would be, they agreed to be overcharged by these suppliers in Romania, these Romanian suppliers of finished furniture, like finished wood to be packaged into.

It's like collapsible, just you build it kits. And they were overbilled at the end of the whole process. This went from 1983 to 1988 or so the the overbilling amounted to about 13 million us dollars and it basically it the 13 million what they would do is they would voluntarily be overcharged and then the overcharged amount over and above what they, like, in actuality agreed to as their real cost, would be sent to overseas banking accounts owned by the security state of the communist regime in Romania to eventually accrue some interest. gruesome interest and then they would use that interest to pay down their foreign denominated debts of of the romanian state the state that's involved in a genocide and boom wait was this post-soviet then this was during during the communist regime in the mid early to mid 80s right and they would use that money to pay down their foreign denominated debts.

Genocide isn't cheap. Yeah, yeah. Thereby avoiding like the hyperinflations and stuff like that, because they were able to pay down those debts. You'd think they would have been able to get a cheaper genocide, though, working with Ikea. They would make these payments. Well, anyway, the Guardian reported on this first, and they found old notes from what researchers had recovered from the secret police of Romania's records, because they kept meticulous notes on everything.

No words words just pictures like it showed these payments going back and forth between Ikea and these corrupt suppliers like every month it was just like hundreds of thousands worth of Swedish crowns or US dollars going forth so the Romanian notes were like a picture of a dissident being shot with a checkmark and then a supporter of the government being shot with an X through it. Yeah and so anyways like IKEA was eventually paid back the principal balance of what those functionally speaking this loan that they gave this like very cheap loan they gave to the romanian government um it worked for them they got relatively cheap goods uh for uh

you know somewhat generous loan to the romanian state yeah but yeah functional bribery yes absolutely and interestingly enough money laundering around this time in the 80s, Ikea keeps their costs down by using slave labor, political and other prisoners in the East German communist regime, where they source from there, where, you know, various prisoners are, of course, turned into forced laborers, including political prisoners throughout the 80s. And apparently they did the same thing with the Cuban government, Castro's government in the 1980s, where they would get all these materials sourced by forced prisoner labor. So yes, that's just one way that they were able to keep their costs down in the 80s. And then, you know,

this bribery program that Steve goes through. You can't even understand the directions. This bribery program that Steve goes to. Plus you can't even understand the directions. This bribery program that Steve goes to. Well, of course, you know, when the communist government in Romania falls and it's basically taken over by organized crime and people selling off these resources. Well, IKEA is in the prime position to have the contacts to be able to get the best access to the best wood. Because, of course, you know, when it is regulated as to how you're going to cut down forests, generally the, let's say, best pieces of wood are very old trees that they want to leave up, whereas they're saying, hey, you should cut down the sickly trees because then you could plant something new that will grow better in its place whereas you

know the illegal illegal loggers or whoever are just going to ignore that and say no i want to cut down this you know a hundred year old tree or however old it might be because this is like the much better piece of wood even if it is illegal logging and ikea is saying hey we don't give a shit we can just say it's the contractor not us you know this is we were always they always have these same fucking pr statements about uh oh we're investigating our contractors and if necessary we will remove them from our supply chain and violations are found and it's it's just bullshit they're like they need the absolute best wood to grind down into particle board the um so the uh the executive i mentioned and I'll talk a bit more about him later in the episode, but in his book, his tell-all book in 2009, The Truth About Ikea, he says that the

wood they were sourcing from China, he claims, the quote is, I know that even in China, you can't buy legal wood for the price that we paid there. So he's saying that, you know, and this is a 20-year executive at IKEA saying, I know the prices in China, and even though it is cheaper there, the price we were getting at, it was not legal wood. So even with, you know, all of the abuses of the environment that the government in China allows, they were still being like, no, we're not even going to obey these laws. Well, cheap wood doesn't put a deep enough divot into a toddler's skull. And so that's the other thing we've been mentioning, that they go through very well

in this broken documentary, is tip over falls killing kids with IKEA furniture. And it was something where before I watched the documentary, I assumed, oh, these are freak accidents. There was, you know, nothing malicious. This stuff happens. But no, the documentary, Broken, it goes through very well. There's a federal U.S. department called the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which does have— The Consumer Product Kind Recommendation Commission. Basically, yes.

So they have voluntary, not mandatory furniture standards. And for dressers, for dressers, the standard, the Voluntary Consumer Product Safety Commission standard is, can you pull out all the drawers of the dresser and not have it fall over, or pull out one drawer and put a 50 pound weight on it? Because unsurprisingly, you know, kids are curious.

Kids will climb on dressers. They'll think, you know, hey, this is a ladder or whatever else. They'll pull out the drawers. They'll fuck around with it. So this is, you know, the U.S. regulatory standard of dressers, which IKEA knew about and ignored and we knew they know knew about it and ignored this voluntary standard because in their 2002 manual where they introduced the malm dresser malm uh their standard dresser that has killed at least eight kids in the united states and it's about uh i'd say about four feet from sean mccarthy right now that uh yeah there's a like a web variant of the mom in

the room we're recording in right now yeah and then another one two rooms over i mean it's only killed two children so yeah well this one yeah it's a double wide model so yeah there's more mass at the bottom we call it the uh the twin uh the twin crusher well like they they're so tippy because they don't have much mass at the bottom of the structure and they're not as wide apparently uh the way that dressers are supposed to be made is they're supposed to be heavy on the bottom and the back and they're supposed to be wide and i guess uh it's but it saves on shipping costs to make a dresser that in addition to not being able to fit nearly as many clothes as would be practical. They also are light and it's almost like they put all the weight in the front of them.

It was like they wanted to fall down. Yeah. And then they tell consumers, oh, but we're not responsible because we told you to uh drill a hole in your drywall and attach an anchor to it you know the thing that uh everyone who buys ikea furniture and is clearly renting yes is able to do drill holes in their drywall so that when it falls over you also have to patch up a giant divot in your child's bedroom when you're repainting it for the new one. Yeah, I mean, they're just saying, go ahead, the security deposit, you can just lose that. Don't be sad about your toddler, you're crazy.

Take $50 million, it's much better. So yes, IKEA. IKEA, cheaper than abortion i mean like look and again before i portion with an um with a little circle over the oh non-functional umlauts yeah before i knew this story i again i did think hey these are freak accidents ikea tip overs killing kids but no the documentary goes through very well in ikea the mom dresser when they introduced this dresser in 2002 the instruction manual has a kid has a picture of a child climbing up on it and getting

tipped over and they have an x through this picture well in fairness it looks like a small workman it's more of like a mario figure and you're like well he can take a hit yeah um and you know their internal documents did acknowledge the problem of tip over injury seriously injuring and potentially killing children and the thing is they uh well first of all they put all the onus on the consumer like we're mentioning where they said hey just screw screw it into the wall even though clearly like we just said if you're renting you can't do that they put all the onus on the consumer but that has been a trend in the United States where for example chicken all has salmonella in it and you know numerous people have died because of salmonella chicken

in the United States and they just say eggs just get shit on and you're supposed to be like, yeah, that's fine. Right. It's your fault for not... Washing it. Yeah, for not washing your eggs and then cooking it until it's rubber. Exactly. And that's exactly what happens with salmonella chicken. It's an interesting story.

A kid in the United States died from an E. coli. I believe it was a Wendy's burger. Either Wendy's or Dairy Queen or one of those. Jack in the Box had the E. coli thing. Oh, maybe it was Jack in the Box. Anyways, a kid died from an E. coli burger. So finally, the United States in the 90s said, okay, we're banning E. coli. You cannot have E. coli in the meat anymore. This is in the 1990s. And since that time, there have been numerous calls to be like, hey, could we also ban salmonella from the chicken? And every time the industry has fought back. And so in the United States, it is perfectly legal for them to just cover all their chickens with salmonella. And numerous people have died. And

every time they go, well, you should have cooked it better. You should have washed it better. We told you that if you're cooking chicken, you got to wash your hands before you touch the lettuce because we have salmonella all over the shit. So again and again, it is all the consumer's responsibility. And this is what happened with the tip overs where the current acting commissioner of this Consumer Product Safety Commission says they want to work with stakeholders to raise awareness about how you need to screw in your dresser yeah uh and you know what was really funny is in the unbroken documentary you never see a government a former government official from an agency just outright shit on the current head of the agency but they were

interviewing like the former commissioners of this board and they're like yeah the current lady like i've never seen her do anything that uh uh the powers that be disagree with and they have it's a volunteer they want ikea to self-regulate because they think it has an incentive to do so because like well if stories of kids fucking get killed by the mom yeah then they'll have an incentive to make it better one of the one of the most unnerving things in the documentary was uh one of the parents was like yeah people ask me like why didn't you hear it and it's like well because it was muffled from falling on my child yeah it only happens twice a year but yes um and then another thing they go through in the documentary is the consumer product safety

commission is prohibited by law from saying anything about a company without running it by them first. So they want it to tell IKEA, hey, you have to do a recall. And IKEA was like, let's not use the word recall. Let's say repair, and we'll send out repair kits. So they sent out these repair kits that, again, people are supposed to screw it into the wall when many people are renting and cannot do that. And then, of course, after they sent out these repair kits, kids kept dying because parents hadn't heard about these repair kits or the recall. And then finally, IKEA did a recall.

But again, kids kept dying because nobody knew about the recall. Yeah. If you have IKEA furniture in your apartment now, think back to that time that you were explicitly alerted by Ikea that they will buy back your dresser because that happened within the last two years. And I first learned about it in the documentary about all the kids that got crushed.

Yes. Like the recall system is fundamentally flawed because it's, I mean's it's just a manifestation if it's easier to uh say you're sorry than ask permission exactly instead of building it right they'll just you know a few kids will get killed and then they'll be like oh we're sorry we'll buy it back and of course you know they no one no one knows about it they tweeted about it which uh even though we do all follow the ikea uh twitter website for their great irony racism um you know that one seemed to slip under the radar

right and kind of a bitch to just package up the thing and send it back yeah that too like you they were like oh we'll send someone over to help like pack it up but i i mean if you're buying ikea furniture you probably don't have that kind of free time like one of the things that they also mentioned in passing was that america has become addicted to cheap furniture since the 1980s which isn't it it it sounded like they were also kind of placing the blame on the consumer. But if you, I mean, look at trends. I mean, it becomes a cliche to talk about neoliberalization. But if you look at the trends since the 1980s and neoliberalization, Americans have become very, how would you say it, like displaced.

Like we're all constantly moving to go to wherever the jobs are because, you know, regions just get devastated. And if you're constantly moving, you need to replace a lot of furniture. And buying handcrafted artisan furniture that won't crush your child is expensive. And it's a cost that, along with everything else in American life, you just can't afford. Since 1980, there's more real wages have stagnated since about 1979 or 1980. And also there's more renters. But the cost of furniture has just kept on its normal trajectory. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So. And so, yeah. So to end the the Malm story, again, they introduced this in 2002, knowing that it's going to tip over and kill kids. And they're just like, hey, let's just put the blame on the consumer. Finally, by 2016, there have been enough kids killed in the United States specifically, where they have to do this recall. But again, people don't hear about it. It keeps killing kids. They pay like 50 million to three of the families. But the thing is, you know, there's still tens of millions of these dressers, not only in the United States, but around the world. And you can imagine, say, if this thing is in fucking China, and it tips over and kills a kid, well, IKEA doesn't have to worry about that, because it's not going to get the press that if it kills a toddler in the United States. So, I mean, it's just a really horrible situation and they should be ashamed of themselves. Well, it also, you know, it helps enforce the one-child policy.

And also on this thing about IKEA's responsibility for the environmental destruction of getting people to keep buying furniture, you know, and throwing it out and this kind of thing, The New Yorker did a profile and they asked, the journalist asked IKEA's sustainability manager whether IKEA was at least partially culpable for having created a throwaway culture. She resorted to false humility. Quote, I think the trend of using products for a short lifespan comes from consumers. I wish we had that much influence. I hope that our products have enough quality that they can have a second and third lives in other people's homes.

So that is the sustainability manager for IKEA being like, oh, I wish we had that much influence. But it's your fault. Yeah. This fucking multi-billion dollar multinational is acting like kind of a humble bragging random person off the street. But I guess what we should do here is... It's your fault for every place you try to plant roots in, the rent gets jacked up every year and you have to move to further and further neighborhoods inciting the cost of relocating yourself. Yeah, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that we don't need to explain to our listenership

why IKEA's alleged solution to all this is bullshit. Yeah. But I guess we could talk a bit about the biography of the IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad. It's interesting. According to a book by Thomas Schoberg, his paternal grandparents go back to being old money in 19th century Germany. His paternal grandparents were some of the wealthiest estate owners in the German state of Thurgen. Thurgen, yeah. They were apparently distant relatives of Paul von Hindenburg, you might know as the Reich's president

before Adolf Hitler took over, as well as the German, one of the two most powerful German generals in World War I. So, you know, he's like an old money aristocracy German family on the father's side. Hindenburg, the guy who, when he saw the brown shirts

marching through the streets in the massive Nazi demonstration when Hitler was appointed to power, thought it was the boys marching home from World War I. Yeah, he was so senile by that point. But yeah, so the, and then his paternal grandmother, Ingvar Kamprad, his paternal grandmother was a Sudetenland German. You might know the Czech provinces that Hitler demanded from Czechoslovakia are these Czech border provinces with Germany where lots of Germans live. So his grandmother was from there. His grandmother was from there.

Her family left that area for Sweden in 1896. According to the New Yorker, in the official IKEA museum, the only thing that is mentioned about Ingvor Kamprad's Nazi connections is that the IKEA Museum mentions that his grandmother was very close to her grandson and that she saw Hitler as Germany's future. That is all. So what has happened, and we'll get to this in just a moment, in 1994, his Nazi connections come out and they have explained it away by saying that he loved his grandmother and she was a moment. In 1994, his Nazi connections come out and they have explained it away by saying that he loved his grandmother and she was a Nazi.

So it's his grandmother's fault that he was a Nazi. He made a mistake by listening to her. Yeah. I've actually got a book about this in my Lebensraum bookshelf. But so the family, you know, his grandparents on both sides emigrate to sweden apparently the paternal uh uh grandparents they start um a farm in a swedish problem

province of a small land uh you know don't get don't get mad at me nobody knows how to pronounce these things uh yeah as soon as as soon as you go go to Sweden, you can just free ball it and no one's going to notice. But so they start this farm because, again, his paternal grandparents were wealthy German landowners. His grandfather starts this farm called Elm Tiard, which was at the time... Yeah, just say it from the back of the throat. No one's going to call you on it.

Usually we would make fun of Sean, but we don't know either. It had 449 hectares of land, and it was the largest farm in the area. And again, that's from the Thomas Schoberg book. And from the New Yorker write-up, which was written by Lauren Collins, she wrote up this write-up of IKEA and a biography of the founder. According to this, this farm farm ltrd um it floundered and in the spring of 19 of 1897 after the local savings bank rejected his loan application um ingvar comprad's grandfather shot his hounds and then killed himself in 1897 his widow continued

to run the farm which in 1918 passed to her eldest son, who was Ingvar's father. He married the daughter of the... Wait, wait, how did he kill himself? He shot himself. Oh, I thought he climbed a dresser. The note is all pictures, like, give my medallions to my son yeah he he wrote out a diagram for how he was going to kill himself and his son was just inspired this is the original design for the mole yeah his note it's so it's a picture of the estates and then it has his son standing there

with a check mark and his daughter standing there with an X through it. No, the sons get the estate. Yeah, so Ingvar's father takes over the farm, which, again, was the largest farm in this particular area of Sweden. He marries the daughter of the proprietor of the area's biggest country store. And they kind of talk about, this is a wilderness area of Sweden in the forests. It is, yeah, it's near the small village of Ungernard.

And again, this is in the province of Småland. I love his crime novels. But the important thing is, according to the new yorker profile they write at the farm uh the silence is uh more likely to was more likely to be to be broken by the bark of a roebuck than the sound of a tractor or a car you know there was uh deers all over apparently when ingvar Kamprad was a child, he went fishing. He caught fish and crayfish. And, you know, he would like stuff the crayfish down his pants and bring them home. And, you know, he would work on the farm and get up early and help his father with the cows and this kind of shit.

Most people would use buckets or something. But he's born in 1926. The founder of IKEA, Ingvar Kamp but he's born in 1926 uh the founder of ikea inga ingvar comprad is born in 1926 we should mention apparently the surname comprad is a variant of comrade that dates back to the 14th century so interesting that he became a fascist when his last name is comrade. But so, and you know, and so the New Yorker profile goes through, I guess the standard billionaire biography at this point where they talk about his early business adventures. Which included bringing American grad students

into his small village where they would have a couple of them impregnate the young ladies before ritualistically killing them for a good crop yield i will say the uh the ikea headquarters is in a small village like two and a half hours by train outside of copenhagen and it really does sound like the village from midsummer it's like this weird company town but in the swedish social democratic model where everybody who lives there works for ikea and there's like an ikea hotel and everything's ikea it's fucking bare it's a

bear cage no one knows why yeah i just realized that in midsummer like they they have all the foreshadowing with those diagrams of like you know lady cuts up her pubes and puts it into a biscuit and it's it's really just an ikea manual for mating rituals it's a check mark yeah uh so yeah ingvar kamprad he talks about his early businesses he says uh after he's born in 1926 he says he engineered his first business deal at the age of five when he contracted with an aunt in Stockholm to buy 100 boxes of matches. Then I sold the boxes at two or three or each, sometimes even five or, he told an interviewer,

talk about profit margins, but I still remember that lovely feeling. Almost as good as when I swung the hammer down on the old man's skull. He says that he eventually... He lost $50,000. This is the old... He says that he eventually branched out into Christmas cards and wall hangings.

He caught fish and picked lingonberries. At age 11, he made a killing in garden seeds. So he got into the lingonberry market he made a killing in garden seeds when he convinced them to climb up the side of a dresser uh as he tells it uh in my last year in middle school my first rather childish business was beginning to look like a real firm and um in 1943 uh he says at his uncle ernst's kitchen table he founds ikea and the ik stands for his name his initials ingvar comprad the e is for the farm name elm tiard and the a is for um the uh the small areas the a is for the small towns. The A is for the small town that the farm was located by Ungernard.

He found it in 1943. He sold pens, encyclopedias, table runners, reinforced socks. In 1948, imitating a competitor, he adds furniture to his profile. He's originally

just selling furniture by mail. The way the New Yorker profile describes it is at 6.50 every morning, the milk bus came by his father's farm and picked up goods that had been ordered from his mail delivery service. So the milk bus would come to the farm and pick up the goods and then ship them for him. But the mail order business proved tricky. Customers were not always pleased with the items that arrived on their doorstep. In 1952, he bought a joinery in Olmholt, which is the small town that is now an IKEA company town. He bought a joinery there in 1952.

His grandfather's general store had once occupied the same site, and he set up a showroom where people could come and see the goods. And this is the basis of modern Ikea. The first store opens in 1952 in this place that is now a very creepy Ikea company town where the official Ikea museum is located. And he realized over time that he could engineer the rooms just right so that you can have a different argument with your significant other as you pass through each different part

of a piece of furniture. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The walkway kind of snakes around rather than just... Yeah. It doesn't look like a Costco or something. Yeah, so first you can have a fight about the color of a chair, you know, first you can, uh, have a fight about the

color of a chair, um, then the style of a lamp and then whether or not you should, uh, get plants in the house or whether they're going to poison the pets. And then finally, you know, you, you go through the, um, the room where you pick up the things and have an argument over who carries what before finally checking out and having the perfect parking lot to really yell at each other. And so again, the first door opens in Sweden in 1952. The first one abroad opens in Oslo in 1963. Oslo in 1963, the first one abroad. And then according to the New Yorker profile, within 10 years later. I like how you pronounced Oslo the correct way and then corrected yourself to the wrong one.

Damn it. Or like, no, I was like, damn, that was spot on. And then you changed it. Dude, this podcast has destroyed my self-esteem on pronunciations. I just say it both ways. Deservedly. Yeah, you say it all the ways that you can think of.

That's my new strategy is i say it all the ways and then i fix it in post so i got the right one we record for three hours i try 10 times in every word but yes so that's their first store abroad um and uh uh in 1963 but uh within 10 years later, they are expanding so rapidly that apparently an executive opens a store in Konstanz in Germany when they meant to open one in

Koblenz. An executive opened the store in the wrong city of Germany because they were expanding so rapidly and nobody was paying attention. John? Yes. You got Koblenz right. Thank you. But so yeah, because they were expanding so rapidly and nobody was paying attention. Sean? Yes. You got Koblenz right. Thank you.

But so yeah, so that's kind of how IKEA expands. And we mentioned throughout the 80s, they're using slave labor in East Germany, Cuba for assembly. They're contracting with the Romanian government and paying bribes under the table to get

premium access to resources, the wood that they're so dependent on for their products. But I guess I wanted to spend a minute just talking about his Nazi ties, because I think that is important. And you should know just a bit of background for Sweden in World War II, just from Wikipedia. Sweden was neutral in World War II, but it was also an essential supplier of Nazi Germany. They had a very neutral highway running from the shores where Nazi boats would dock to Norway where the Nazis would invade.

So just from Wikipedia, Sweden acted as a major supplier of raw materials for Hitler's military, laundered the gold confiscated from Holocaust victims, and often failed to provide adequate asylum for refugees, including the near-completely exterminated Norwegian Jews. Between 1933 and 1939, Sweden accepted only 3,000 Jewish refugees and permitted 1,000 more to use Sweden as a transit stop. As the war broke out, Sweden only absorbed political refugees and turned away Jews from occupied Norway at the border, many of whom were later murdered at Auschwitz. An interesting fact about this point is that one of Ingvar Kamprad's best friends throughout his life was a Jewish refugee from Austria that his parents hired as a farmhand on their farm, whose parents were both murdered at Auschwitz. And you can imagine the kind of wages that the parents could offer to a refugee farmhand

who would be deported back to certain extermination. His farm had a sign that said, Fry mocked our bite. They say he had the wages of destruction. The sign is a picture of somebody working and then it's zero dollars. But yes, so... It's a Star of David and then an arrow and then a figure with a hammer

but but so it is an interesting thing where you know his uh he was a nazi but one of his close friends was jewish through most of his life and this journalist elizabeth asbrink actually wrote a book called maiden sweden and she talks about among other things the founders Nazi connections and she actually gets to interview him in 2010 and she asked him about the contradiction and he says in 2010 there's no contradiction as far as I'm concerned pair Engdahl who was the leader of the Swedish neo-nazi party was a great man and I'll maintain that as long as I live in 2010 the founder of the Swedish neo-Nazi party was a great man, and I'll maintain that as long as I live. In 2010, the founder of IKEA says,

the leader of the Swedish neo-Nazi party that helped rat line out all these Nazi war criminals was a great man. He was certainly a great Catholic. Yes. And so it is something where, I mean, the basic story of his Nazi ties is that in 1994, this is published for the first time by a Swedish newspaper.

And, you know, he like admits it. with regards to his Nazi ties, including the fact that the Swedish security services were monitoring him during the war and considered him an integral part of the Swedish Nazi party and a recruiter who had helped out various people. It's real, like, when people talk about the contradiction of he had a Jewish friend,

it's sort of like the, I'm not racist, i have a black friend type thing where or um there's also uh at the i forget the name of the oh von c conference um there was a discussion uh the von c conference was where the nazis uh planned out the logistics of who qualified as a jew and how they would carry out the hol Holocaust. And one of the problems that they had to address was that everyone in Germany knew a good Jew. And so they had to be, they had to find a way to convince people out of that. And it's sort of this phenomenon where when you have any kind of systemic mass murder of an ethnic group, whenever you have a genocide,

everyone who's close to people within an ethnic group, they have people in that group they like, but they can create kind of that contradiction in their mind where they may like the one person, but still believe that that group of people needs to be murdered. like himmler's secret speech to the ss he talks about this where he's uh talking about you know we we can say in theory you know we're going to exterminate the jews and that's fine and then he gives the quote which is and then they turn up the 80 million upstanding germans and each one of them has his decent jew saying you know all the jews are swine except for this one yeah and so that's it's it's it's you know mexicans are rapists but some of them has his decent Jew saying, you know, all the Jews are swine except for this one. Yeah. And so that's, it's, it's, it's, you know, Mexicans are rapists, but some of them are good people.

Exactly. But so, according to this journalist, Elizabeth Asbrink, she said she found the Swedish Security Services archive, they've, she found the IKEA founders file in this archive from 1943. According to this, Ingvar Kamprad was 17 years old. He was member number 4014 of the Swedish Socialist Unity, the country's leading far-right party during the war. Sweden's General Security Service apparently kept him under surveillance for at least eight months, confiscating and reading his correspondence. In November 1942, he wrote that he'd recruited quote quite a few comrades to the party and missed no opportunity to work for the movement um and then

the uh uh the memorandum about his correspondence reached the sixth division of the stockholm police uh july 1943 six days later he sent an application to the county administrative office to register his new company, IKEA. So he was a Nazi during the time he founded IKEA. And then even after the war, we mentioned Per Engdahl was the founder of what was called the Malmo Movement, which was based in the Swedish city of Malmo. Just because it sounds like one of their pieces of furniture. So in 1951 it became official. They gathered in the Swedish town of Malmo

and under Per Engdahl's leadership, this was a formation of Oswald Mosley, the English fascist, his black shirts, the Belgian fascist, the Dutch Nazis, French fascist, Germans still loyal to Hitler, Swiss Nazis, remnants of the Hungarian Arrow Cross, the Italian MSI.

This doesn't sound like youthful indiscretion. No, not at all. Danish and Norwegian Nazis. So this was a movement that was based around, Per Engdahl received refugees, hid them from their persecutors, and helped transport them to safety. Nazi refugees, that is. By 1943, Engdahl had created a network for Europe's shattered Nazi and fascist movements. Was someone or their secret Nazi refugees hiding in his house? And they had a journal.

They were like, there are people outside trying to give me social democracy. And then they were given away when a dresser fell. What's that sound? It was kind of deadened, but I still heard it. So Elizabeth Asbrink writes about, nobody knows when Ingvar Kamprad left the Swedish Nazi Party. But on the other hand, we know that his involvement in Peer Engdahl's fascist organization, the New Swedish Movement, continued after the end of the war. He invited comrades to the movement from his home in Elmtiard, his big farm, where he was regarded as their benefactor.

There are letters where he is asked to donate or thanked for the latest contributions. Kamprad also acted as a publisher for one of the fascist leader Peer Engdahl's books. The two had become close friends and called each other BB, best brother. Engdahl was invited to Kamprad's first wedding in 1951, where he gave a beautiful speech. So again, he, and apparently he also wrote a letter to um the fascist leader peer engvall's uh in 1951 he wrote a later a letter to thank him for his book the renewal of the the west where he engaged in of course uh holocaust denial and uh you know standard nazi white supremacy and stuff and he published one of his uh neo-nazi books well. And all the way up to 2010, he gives an interview where he says he was a great man,

this neo-Nazi who smuggled Nazi war criminals out of Europe and set up a network. I don't think he was a neo-Nazi. I think he was just a Nazi. They're all neo after 45. If you're smuggling current Nazis and running the Nazi party while they're Nazis. So in 1940, and then just last thing on this Nazi thing, because I find this

really just incredible. According to the New Yorker profile, in 1994, when the Nazi ties are first revealed, and again, this stuff that we just read about the security service, he denied all that, being a recruiter. At least he never came forward. We had to wait until, you know, the mid-2000s for that stuff to come out. But the first stuff of the Nazi ties comes out in 1994, and he writes a handwritten letter to IKEA employees entitled, My Greatest Fiasco. And just quoting a little bit from it, Dear IKEA family, you have been young young yourself and perhaps you find something in your

youth now so long afterward that was ridiculous and stupid in that case you will understand me better in hindsight i know that early on i should have included this in my fiascos but now that is spilled milk uh and then uh the employees responded with a letter signed by hundreds ingvar we are here whenever you need us. And then he cooperated for an official biography in 1998 or 9, and the official biographer wrote that when he received that letter, then the father of the family broke down

and wept like a child. Knowing that he was buddy buddies with Oswald Mos mosley i'd love to have heard what he thought about elvis costello he's not he's not a child though when he was doing all this yeah i mean he was in his 40s well he was like his 40s and 50s for some of it yeah like well he was in his 20s when he was helping fund the movement after the war. But then, you know, again, all the way up until 2010, he says the leader of this neo-Nazi movement who helped Nazi war criminals escape prosecution was a great man. In 2010, he says this. Yeah, he's like, it was a mistake in my 20s.

And you think back to the mistakes of your 20s. It's like, I had some bad relationships. I got way too drunk hosting an open mic. I was a member of a neo-Nazi party. Right. And, you know, we mentioned just earlier about how Sweden

was turning away all these Jewish refugees. Well, part of the reason was because of the pressure of these Nazi and far-right parties saying, you know, these people are vermin,

don't allow them in Sweden. And, you know, they had an influence on the government. But, and then, last thing from this on this official biography probably the reason that sweden didn't get invaded is because they were so i mean the reason is they were so sympathetic uh yeah i mean they were providing the raw materials for nazi germany's war machine um in the official biography, he adds a chapter for his Nazi links called, quote, a youth and his errors. He ends the chapter saying, as I have lain awake at night pondering this dismal affair, I have asked myself, when is an old man forgiven for the sins of his youth?

Is it a crime that I was brought up by a German grandmother and a German father? So, you know,'s his grandmother's fault throwing oma under the bus to uh explain his nazi ties but um i guess with the time we have left we should talk a little bit about this tell-all book in 2009 um johan stenobo was a 20-year ikea executive uh or he worked at ikea more than 20 years. He was an executive for a time. He opened one of their most profitable stores in the United Kingdom. He makes the claim that on the executive floor, this is from a write-up of his book in ABC News, on the executive floor, Stenebo claims foreigners were repeatedly denigrated as the N-word, which, I mean, you know

what it is. I'm not going to say it. But yes, the executives at IKEA were calling foreigners the N-word. They apparently had no chance... It was Njomner, which is one of their chairs. They apparently had no chance of promotion within the company.

And Stenobo blames that on uh ingor comprad's increasing paranoia in ikea in spite of being the world's largest furniture company is run exclusively by people from omholt in the swedish region of small land this is the small company town that ikea makes all executives go live in for a while and it's like this weird fucking midsummer forest where they're two and a half hours from copagen by train. There's no civilization and almost everybody in the fucking town works for Ikea. So, you know, just the kind of weird company environment. He also goes, I hate when you're trying to smash an elder's skull with a hammer and it's made of cheap particle board and just bounces off. In his book, he also goes through how IKEA funds WWF,

the World Wildlife Foundation. They fund Greenpeace. And they do this, like we said earlier, instead of using the best contractors, they use the cheapest, he says. Charitable gestures are cheaper than a clean conscious and have the added advantage of being tax deductible. And we went through this earlier. But he also goes through how the carpets, the barnslig carpets, which is apparently a Swedish word that means childlike, the barnslig carpets were apparently made by Pakistani children, according to his book. And we can spend a second going through all the various slave labor complaints about IKEA and this kind of stuff.

Wait, are they just hiding all of their slave labor in plain sight using Swedish names? Yeah. Childlike carpets. Nobody wanted to bother trying to pronounce this shit, so they didn't look into it. It's the Juhinger bookshelf. Oh, yeah.

He also reveals in his book that there's an anecdote from the official biography that gets told a lot about how Ingvar Kamprad has a 30-year-old clip-in IKEA sofa in his living room along with the Billy bookshelf, like he's had these for over 30 years he says this story is totally made up and they just spread it because credulous press people repeated it so you know and this is supposed to be like an anecdote to say not only

is the founder of ikea even though he's a billionaire like a kind of humble down-to-earth guy who uses ikea furniture but also it lasted 30 years and that's just complete bullshit you know it's fake durable furniture um and he also says um uh last thing johan stenobo says the sons uh he has three sons and ingvar comprad now that he's died you know the sons are taking over the business he says the sons matthias and peter who were promoted to top management five years ago um this is uh an abc news story from 2009 uh the elder son peter in particular has been positioned since then as ikea's heir apparent stenobo however calls him an incompetent racist unquote and anyone that criticized peter for his chauvinistic attitudes was silenced by the patriarch patriarch engvar and there's multiple

interviews and press accounts where they describe the children as uh morons and they have since taken over the company but also you know the racism does not die with the father unsurprisingly and there's also a story from the new yorker about a plant in Danville, Virginia, where they were playing, you know, really low wages doing mandatory overnight overtime. So the, um, the workers there successfully unionized. Um, but, uh, the, the, one of the workers who joined the, uh, the union, he says, quote, I truly believe that Danville management has a plantation mentality. They think that they own these workers and it's their right to use them any way they choose. And six former employees of that plant have filed grievances

with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging racial discrimination. So there are again and again, unsurprisingly, with this Nazi founder who makes all the executives live in one small town in Sweden, there are again and again

racial discrimination complaints levied against IKEA, where executives refer to fucking foreigners as the N-word. And, you know, so with the time we have left, we can go through also another case that Stephen found of Harvard University's involvement in IKEA's clear-cutting. Yeah, so the quasi-legal entanglements between Ikea and the Romanian communist regime didn't end even after the communist regime was deposed. So when Ceausescu and his wife were executed during the Romanian Revolution in 1989... They were made to climb a dresser. They actually, top-ranking party officials who were able to escape the chaos of the revolution

eventually came back and basically forged ownership over tracts of land in the forest and said it was theirs to sell. And they ended up selling it to, years, years later, in 2004, they sold some of it to Harvard, like the business arm of Harvard that manages its investment portfolio. They were looking for some alternative assets, I guess, for higher returns. And so they sent a local contact, this guy called Drago Slipan.

He ran a Romanian investment management firm. And they gave him millions of dollars to buy tracks of old-growth forest on Harvard's behalf. Now, Harvard may not have known it, but at at the time he bought some of this illegally obtained land from like the old like the old school uh romanian communist ex-senior officials and they claimed ignorance over it but in a 20 in a 2010 memo from lipon's company to harvard he he detailed all of like you know oh by the way there's all of these like legal hardships that you may face later if you continue to hold on to the forestry stuff on the forestry assets and eventually harvard this is getting too hard there are too many questions legally legal questions, surrounding these forests.

And Harvard tried to do sort of an end around where they used two shell companies, actually. They used a shell company in Luxembourg, owned by another one in Delaware, and they essentially sold it to themselves to try and basically retain ownership but throw people off the track of who actually owned the forestry tracks. It's good that they're paying attention

in their own business courses. So apparently this nonprofit, because they set it up, I think in 1983, Ingvar Kompraad transfers ownership of IKEA to a nonprofit based in, I guess, the Netherlands, which we should mention the European Union is currently investigating for illegal tax evasion. But so this nonprofit was for a time a bigger nonprofit than

the Gates Foundation, because it owned all of the IKEA assets. And The Economist has described its actual charitable givings as quote unquote, a rounding error. So it was just this fake nonprofit that he set up in the netherlands to dodge taxes yeah so eventually harvard like uh people investigators still kept inquiring about harvard's holdings in romania because there are other like based based on what broken details there are other claims to the forest that were seen as dubious and people just wouldn't get away from it so harvard actually ended up selling to ikea they use in 2015 they sold ikea most of harvard's forestry assets for about 62 million dollars ikea said they also had no idea about the the original illicit contracts that were used to attain this and that they would you know

investigate further whatever but that that actually is an ongoing investigation and actually harvard and ikea are in litigation over just who is would be who knew what when over this 62 million dollar contract right no i mean and it is something where almost every multinational we get to does this bullshit with subcontractors that we've talked about but uh just like really quickly i'll give you a couple other hits um uh occrp wrote a report in 2016 going through how the cotton campaign an international organization working with uh well uh an international organization called the Cotton Campaign, pointed out that IKEA is using a subcontractor in Turkmenistan. They have made the argument, the Cotton Campaign has, that all cotton sourced from Turkmenistan can be

known to have slave labor. Turkmenistan, like, they import zero cotton, they export their cotton, and slave labor is all throughout the supply chain. So, IKEA was using slave labor cotton from Turkmenistan in 2016, specifically for their Nippon Rose and Malo duvet covers and pillow shams. So, the cotton campaign said that they have this subcontractor and IKEA does the basic thing like, you know, we're investigating our subcontractors and we will terminate if we find any allegations, blah, blah, blah. But it's always just putting the onus on the subcontractor. Yes, according to this write up, both Turkmen Civil Society and the International Labor Organization have reported on forced labor throughout Turkmenistan's cotton industry. We mentioned at the top the China, the mass internment of Uyghur Muslims. The Australian program ABC Four Corners interviewed multiple Uyghurs who said that they were forced to work in textile factories as slave labor.

The region that these Uyghurs were forced to work in as slave labor, again, there's allegations that up to a million Uyghurs are detained. There have been Chinese government documents that reveal plans for, quote unquote, re-education through labor. The province, the area where these Uyghurs are detained and forced to work in textile factories has been a cotton and textile source for Target, Cotton On, Jeans West, Dangerfield, IKEA, and H&M, among others. So IKEA is currently using slave labor in 2019. And then we went through East German slave labor and Cuban slave labor in the 1980s.

So it's just, I mean, it's such a middle finger. Like, yeah, it's an interesting look at kind of how the world economy works, because you have the, I guess, the ruling class. And we're not, we're not, those, those of us here, and those of us listening, we're not the ruling class. And we're not the slaves in the world economy. But it seems that what we ultimately have is people in Western countries like us are more or less working in the service industry, essentially providing services for the ruling class. And what you have then is you have people in the global South working as slaves, developing cheap furniture to provide some moderate living standards for the servants of the ruling class.

Like it's this very bizarre kind of chain of power. And so, on one hand, you can say we don't have a place to complain because we're not these slaves. We have slaves making things for us, even if we're not aware of it most of the time. But it's just interesting, this kind of ladder of power that's been placed on us. So IKEA introduces a new table made with Cuban slave labor called the gusano. But yes. Yeah, look, part of the service,

to use your letter analogy, metaphor? Yeah, yeah. The primitive accumulation that capitalists use in the global south and also some of the north like with romania yeah um on like the third world a part of the service that um we here in the global north who are not part of their own like the the bondholder class the shareholders uh is to simply turn a blind eye to all of this suffering and never identify with all of these other workers. Continue to buy this cheap stuff

that ultimately doesn't get recycled, exacerbates the climate crisis, and enriches these people. Right, right. One of the things that I found interesting, this is kind of, it's kind of a tangent out of left field, but a lot of people these days will talk about 1984 and how it like reflects the world today. But one of the things that kind of,

a lot of people miss about that book is that the main character Winston isn't at the bottom of the social ladder. He's kind of a middle management figure. And they constantly in the book refer to the proles who are the real working class. But he's the one who's under surveillance where you're supposed to identify with him and the oppression that he's under. And it's interesting how that level of social control kind of really does extend from the bottom up and is applied in different ways to different levels. And Sweden is a social democratic country that's frequently cited by, you know, Bernie Sanders. Yeah. It's a minimally decent social democratic state where you have socialized medicine and, know free transport certain areas all that good stuff

and yet it still hosts ikea this like monster multinational company with asking relatively few questions about anything yeah given all the questions that like you know the the broken crew have brought up yeah yeah and just two other things from jan Stanabo's book. One is we mentioned that they were using Pakistani children to make their carpets in the child's carpets range. He says, quoting from the ABC News write up here to IKEA allegedly make skillful use of promoted sponsorships of children's aid organizations to effectively defend its image. So they do the same thing with Greenpeace, WWF that they deal with using child labor, where they give money to these children's age organizations who are, of course, going to keep their fucking mouth shut about how IKEA is exacerbating the problem because they rely on IKEA for funding and added bonus. It's all tax deductible.

So it's actually more profitable to do it this way. Right. And Johan Stenebo also makes the allegation that ingvar komprat up until he died maintained a quote-unquote secret police within ikea which would spy on various people within the company uh give him i think weekly reports of what was going on like what employees within the company were talking about because i guess ingvar komprat was there's a nod to with their stasi lamp i think he did actually describe it as a quote-unquote stasi um but yeah so uh ingvar komparad was a tax exile exile for numerous years uh throughout his death uh until his death i think he came back to sweden

in like 2014 but he lived outside of the company outside of the country because he was such a miserly fuck that he didn't want to pay taxes and ikea managed to get his tax bill down to something like an effective percentage of 13 oh because he came to dominate sweden's economy so much that right which yeah i mean for a swedish national is just like basically nothing yeah like if you heard that about an american national you'd be like okay that makes sense but then you hear that this swedish company has managed to get its swedish tax bill down to such a fucking insanely low percentage entirely through a tax deal with the netherlands that is currently being investigated uh for illegal behavior by the european union um but i guess uh we we've covered a fair bit here um but uh ingvar comprad dies 2018 uh he has one daughter and three sons the three

sons have kind of taken over the company since his death in 2018 but you know it's only been a year so we'll kind of see if they fuck it up or do anything particular but i would say uh if you're listening to this it's a big topic if there's stuff we didn't get to we will most likely at some point do a follow-up episode on the children who have inherited his, uh, massive fortune and try to learn more about them and what they're doing with it.

So if there are things we miss, hit us up and we'll follow them up on a future episode. If we metaphorically forgot to secure it to the drywall. Um, uh, anything we didn't get to that, uh, you guys.

Okay. Um, I did want to give a quick shout out to one of our discord users Arona Arona Arona Arona

I wanted to give them a shout out because they gave us the suggestion to do an episode on OneCoin the scam cryptocurrency which is currently up on the Patreon so you can check it out and listen to it. It's a very fascinating story. They stole something like $4 billion through crypto. But I wanted to give a shout out to our patron

and Discord user Rona for suggesting the episode and just being cool. If you want to check us out on Discord, just subscribe to our Patreon. We have the link to the Discord in there. And you can keep up on how Andy is doing on his playthrough of uh stardew valley stardew valley i wanted to say harvest moon but yes you can you can know it's the 2010s man it's

stardew valley all right uh thanks for listening check us out on patreon we'll be back next week