Transcript: Chase Koch: The Operating System for a Free Society

Chase Koch [0:07] You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. Let me talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Probably should be. Probably should be.

Marty Bent [0:34] Case Coke, welcome to the show.

Chase Koch [0:38] Thanks, Marty. Appreciate you having me on.

Marty Bent [0:41] I am honored to have you on. As we've been discussing over a couple of conversations over the last few months, we've implemented Coke Industries' principle-based management system here. At TFTC, and it's been wonderful.

Chase Koch [0:56] Is it working?

Marty Bent [0:58] It is. I think it is working. I think it is.

Chase Koch [1:01] That's good, man.

Marty Bent [1:01] Yeah, we actually—

Chase Koch [1:03] What have you found is like the most helpful, like right out of the gates to you guys?

Marty Bent [1:08] I think for us, we did a— we probably spent 3 months doing PBM implementation with a consultant. And through that process, we realized that we had a bunch of knowledge gaps. in the company. And we have a relatively small team. And I think that was the most surprising thing is since we're so small, it should be relatively easy to get information and data to every member of the team. But through the process, we noticed that there are some knowledge gaps, and mainly because I've been running the company. I ran the company as a solo founder for like 6 or 7 years, and we've grown the team over the last 2. And there's a lot of embedded knowledge that I built up in my own head over the course of the first 7 years that I just took for granted and needed to open up to the rest of the company.

Chase Koch [2:00] Well, good. Well, I appreciate you experimenting with it and the principles. What you're talking about on the knowledge side, also there's the framing of trying to have a republic of science. So Polanyi's idea of a republic of science, whether it's a very small team, or like Koch, we have 140,000 employees and growing, to try to get knowledge on a specific problem, to try to get the best knowledge we can from the talent that we have around the world, and then make the best decisions at scale with the knowledge we have. It's always been one of our biggest challenges, right? But it starts with a mindset of having a republic of science, and not thinking about an organization in silos, which I think is a trap that many companies have, is that if you have 4 or 5 different companies or even capabilities, right?

Chase Koch [2:00] Sales versus marketing versus operations, whatever the— however your company's set up, how you can work as a team and design knowledge systems to make knowledge move as quickly as possible to where it's needed most. And we were actually talking about this yesterday because all of the innovation in AI that we're trying to experiment with, and it's been amazing over the last year just to see the company from the bottom up experiment with some of these models and not do that from the top down. Sure, we have a vision, Of leveraging technology and driving transformation with it. But where you get the magic, at least in our experience and learning, is when you can create a bottom-up culture where it's spontaneous order, where someone has an idea, let's say 2 businesses in our fertilizer business, and then we have Georgia-Pacific, where someone says, you know what?

Chase Koch [2:00] I think some of these folks over in Georgia-Pacific in operations can also benefit from this knowledge. And it automatically— that knowledge automatically transfers to those people, and no one's telling them to do it. No one's from the top down waving some magic wand and is like, oh, you need to tell this person that this— there's no way you can do that in a really large company. So back to what I was saying, yesterday we were in a meeting and we were thinking, how do you create a faster republic of science with technology? And so there's so many new models that are being spun up, like with Anthropic, for example, or even a Microsoft Copilot.

Chase Koch [2:00] We use all these different technologies. And there's amazing models that are being built, but back to the, how do you make it so it's not stuck in silos and groups? And the CFO group are just applying it in their group, and how do you get that over to Georgia-Pacific or to our fertilizer or energy business or whatever, so that not all these groups are making the same model?

Marty Bent [5:08] Right.

Chase Koch [5:09] Over and over and over, because that drives your cost up, and there's also waste and inefficiency in that. So we're just talking about how do you build like a— it's almost like an app store, a Coke app store, where people can see these are the— you can see the trends within the company of these are the ones that are being used the most and are adding the most value. And hey, why don't you try it on your business instead of starting from scratch? This one's probably 80% all the way there, right? So back to your point on knowledge, this is one of our key principles, knowledge and transformation, and then also creative destruction, having every employee have the mindset of, one, how do I transfer knowledge across the organization?

Chase Koch [5:09] But how am I innovating with these models and how fast they're moving and staying ahead to create a competitive advantage for the company? So what you're working on within your shop, we're working on in spades as well. So I think what's cool about principles and, like, knowledge, as an example, or creative destruction, it can work for one person, it can work for a 10-person shop, or a 140,000-person company. That's where we're— we see— we're so excited about what these principles can do. That's going to be kind of make or break Coke in the future. Are we going to keep applying these principles and innovating or not?

Chase Koch [5:09] And to us, that depends on the results and the future of Coke and where we go as a company.

Marty Bent [6:46] Well, that's what really drew me to principles-based management when it was originally pitched, is that it's really seeped in Hayekian, Mises, Austrian principles of grassroots. I mean, on the macro scale, grassroots development of, of an economy. But you can apply that to, to the micro too. And I think information and being, being the source of the inputs that go into the decision-making, whether it's a fully grown economy or a business, is—

Chase Koch [7:19] Yeah.

Marty Bent [7:20] I think that I've, I've believed very deeply in on the, on the macro side for years. And so it was very intuitive Once I found principle-based management. So it's just like, apply this to your business. 6 was coming out. And then in January, we were still going through the process and OpenClaw was becoming popular and we hopped on that right away and actually helped us solve this knowledge gap. And I think it was a combination of PBM, the agents, and then the paper that Jack Dorsey and Roloff from Sequoia put out about businesses becoming this intelligence layer and sort of flattening the hierarchy that most businesses follow with a managerial executive class, managerial class, and then underlings between them in these silos.

Marty Bent [7:20] And identifying that we had this knowledge gap and then having the tool of these models and then the harnesses that make them very powerful has enabled us to solve those knowledge problems that we had pretty quickly because now we've built up this agentic system internally with a company brain. And instead of people having to communicate even with each other, they can just ping the company brain, the intelligence layer to figure out, okay, who do we have coming on the podcast in the next week? Is there a headshot that we need to get? Is there an ad we need to insert?

Chase Koch [8:55] Yeah.

Marty Bent [8:56] Interacting with the agent. I mean, obviously we're still interacting with each other, but you can sort of solve that knowledge problem with the agent as well.

Chase Koch [9:03] Well, I mean, it's so exciting to hear that you're practicing these principles and experimenting with them. For us, the reason my father and I just wrote this book, it's called Becoming a Principle-Driven Leader. It's the first book I've ever been a part of. This is my dad's 5th. But not just to get these ideas out to Koch employees, which we feel like we have so much opportunity just to empower people with these principles to continue to transform the company, but we want to get it out to society too, because we feel like we'll all be much better off if we can solve problems in a principled way.

Chase Koch [9:03] And not only get better business results, but interact in a way in society that takes us out of this divisiveness. And I mean, look, we are all living in unprecedented uncertainty, right? Whether it's economic uncertainty or the stuff we're just talking about with AI, will it displace jobs? all of those things, or just divisiveness in general. So the whole reason why we think a principled approach wins is that you have to have something to navigate all of this uncertainty. If you don't have a principled approach and a framework to kind of work with, I think too many people unfortunately blow with the wind, right? And whatever's trending or whatever's the most popular, then you can apply that to business and just chasing the trends, or you can apply that to what you believe at your core based on what you read in social media, right?

Chase Koch [9:03] So our hope is that this principle-based framework and the way we're kind of organizing this and then communicating it to the world gives people a navigation tool to that unprecedented uncertainty. So big picture, I know we started right in the business, but this is For us, it's much more of a societal thing. I know you've studied all this stuff, and I did as a kid too. Hayek, von Mises, Milton Friedman, all, all of the, the core philosophers that really my father learned these principles from. But it's more than just transforming a business. It's like transforming your life, right? And transforming society at large. So anyway, just as for your audience, just more of like a, a broader picture of why we were so excited to get these ideas out into the world.

Chase Koch [9:03] That's the reason why.

Marty Bent [11:50] To your point, I think they're very important to get out there because I think the principles that you've laid out in Becoming a Principle-Driven Leader and the book that I read when I first started getting into PBM was Good Profit, which your father Charles wrote, and it really helped orient myself as we were beginning to go through this process. And I think To take that step back, Koch's been around since 1940, 86 years. And I believe our conversation in May or June that we had, our first call, one of the ideas that's been stuck in my mind since I've read Good Profit is it seems very clear to me that Koch Industries has paired patients, just in general, patient capital, risk-taking and creative destruction in a way that very few companies have done over the last century.

Marty Bent [11:50] And I think that particularly that idea of patient capital, taking long-term bets, staying private so you can take those long-term bets is something that is underappreciated these days, particularly in a world where we like to say on this show that we live in a world of a high-velocity trash economy where everything's driven by quarterly financials.

Chase Koch [13:07] Yeah.

Marty Bent [13:07] And really just thinking day to day, not taking a step back and thinking long-term. And I think Coke having been around for 86 years is a testament to the other way of doing things, which is long-term principles seeped in principles and morals and taking the time to actually do things in a calculated way.

Chase Koch [13:30] Well, Marty, to your point, I appreciate what you're saying about the company and you're right. I mean, it's up to the last almost 90 years, it's really been an enduring business to your point, because of this principle-based approach. That is the differentiator and where it started. But I will tell you, a lot of people think that the Koch story is like this, up and to the right. And if you've read the book, you've seen the story, you've read the story that it has been a rocky road. Rocky road. I mean, there was almost 2 bankruptcies in there in the story. But the way we framed the storytelling of The book that we hope is most helpful to the world is through the lens of failure.

Chase Koch [13:30] And I think that's one of the biggest differentiators on how we tell the story is that we learn a hell of a lot more from our failures than we do our successes. And back to this principle-based approach, all of those failures, the consistency comes to ignoring one or more of the principles where we just ignored it and we just plowed ahead. And we didn't challenge ourselves with that. And all of our successes or where we've transformed and dug ourselves out of the ditch is because we really focused on the principles to dig ourselves out. So, you know, rocky road, lots of failures, but it's how you learn from those failures and then internalize the principles at a deeper level and then share those stories with others so they can learn from your mistakes.

Chase Koch [13:30] and keep growing from that standpoint. But yeah, I mean, it's a crazy story. It's, like I said, it's a rocky road, but it's been a 9,000x growth since the early '60s. Something that my father never— that was never in his goals to build a company that, but he just kept learning from failure but also studying the principles of human progress and what worked in society, what made countries successful, what made countries fail, and then kept adding these principles, and then just empowering great talent with those principles and getting out of the way. And I think, just, I don't know, I like celebrating my father, not only 'cause he's my best friend and mentor, but he leads by example, right?

Chase Koch [13:30] I mean, that's the only way this works and you have the story that you do. is that he looked at his own gifts and where his own weaknesses were. And instead of kind of thinking about himself as a typical CEO, that top-down, making a lot of the strategic decisions, he thought about himself more as a chief philosophy officer, because his core gift was these abstract principles. He learned them, he understood them, And then how do you communicate that into a large organization where if people can understand the principle, they can go empower it in their own way, not in a rules or formulaic basis? Like a lot of companies are run that way, very process-driven, and we've always done it this way, we're going to do it that way.

Chase Koch [13:30] He wants it to change daily, right? In terms of what are the new systems and processes? How do we leverage AI in a new way? I used to do it this way. Let's— how can we blow that up and start over, right? And that's, you and I talked this before, but one of the key principles that is core in our vision statement is creative destruction. And that's, as you know, Joseph Schumpeter's principle that he coined in 1942, that if you're not disrupting yourself from within, the market will disrupt you and turn you into a dinosaur. And we're seeing that his whole idea of the ground is always crumbling beneath your feet.

Chase Koch [13:30] My father always says, well, now it's earthquakes. It's not crumbling. We're all dealing with earthquakes all the time. And so that's why creative destruction is in every meeting and every conversation of what we're doing to transform ourselves and disrupt what we've done in the past. And there's no sacred cows at Coke. Even though my grandfather started the company in pipelines, crude oil pipelines and energy and refining, none of that's sacred. We're investing in all sorts of alternative energies, right?

Marty Bent [18:18] All right.

Chase Koch [18:19] Because we believe that the energy stack of the future is we need all of it to power the world. Right? We need fossil fuels, natural gas and crude oil. We need solar, we need nuclear. And so a lot of people, I think, have a misperception that, well, Koch's just focused on fossil fuels because that's where they started. That's like 4% of the capital that we have in the business goes towards that. And why? Because we believe in creative destruction and constantly investing in the next technology. and make experiments, make investments that we know have low probability of success. But if we're not in the game testing and learning and driving that principle of experimental discovery, we'll eventually become a dinosaur.

Chase Koch [18:19] And so a combination of creative destruction and experimental discovery, you've got to live and breathe that every day, right? And not just the top, right? We need the whole organization to be thinking that way and innovating in their day-to-day roles, their jobs, all their tactics. And yeah, it's core to what got us here, and it'll be core to see if we can keep this going for multiple generations.

Marty Bent [19:41] Yeah, I think another sort of list of values or principles that you've talked about in the book and just having observed from going through the process that we have here, At TFTC, is there a level of humility that's necessary for the individual within Koch Industries, even at the top, and meritocracy that exists based off of that humility? Notice what you're good at and focus on that, what you're passionate about, because at the end of the day, that will benefit the company overall. And you went through this personally.

Chase Koch [20:12] Yes, I did.

Marty Bent [20:14] Within the company.

Chase Koch [20:14] Time and time again, many, many times.

Marty Bent [20:19] And so how did you recognize that you need to step back? I believe you were the head of the fertilizer division.

Chase Koch [20:26] Yeah. Yeah. So maybe just to give your audience just kind of a high-level framing on the company, we have 9— we touch the majority of the economy. I mentioned we have 140,000 employees, one of the largest privately owned businesses in the US. And one of those businesses, one of those 9 operating businesses, is in fertilizers. So we're wood products with Georgia-Pacific. We're in technology with Molex Connectors Global Business, Inforce, a very large ERP software company. We're in glass manufacturing. So anyway, a lot of different things that we're very broad, and we own and operate those platforms, but I spent about a decade in the fertilizer business. And this goes back to one of the principles that you're talking about, whether it's humility, you could say intellectual honesty about who you really are, but also the principle of comparative advantage. What have you demonstrated your gift is relative to what everyone else can do on the team?

Marty Bent [21:44] Right.

Chase Koch [21:44] And that's a very important point. And what you can do relative to others, what you're good at, but relative to what others are good at on the team. I think a lot of people mistaken comparative advantage for absolute advantage. It's like, what am I best at in a vacuum? And if you're not looking at trade-offs of what you could be doing relative to your alternatives and relative to what others can be doing, you're missing out on a huge opportunity. So that just as kind of a pre, just to tee up my story and looking at my father and how he recognized his comparative advantage was abstract concepts and really organized his role and his job around being more of a chief philosophy officer and really challenging with principles and empowering people with principles.

Chase Koch [21:44] I realized in the fertilizer business that I was a much better builder than I was operator. And, you know, I, I had a great opportunity to be president of the business. It was third large— third largest profit driver of Coke. Huge business operating in 30 countries and 3,000 or 4,000 employees. But I realized that I was not, it was not my comparative advantage after about 9 months. And frankly, I was miserable in the role. You know, most people think that, oh, you got the big job, you're running the whole thing now. You know, why would you ever step away from that? And it's because one, my father taught me humility and intellectual honesty to really look in the mirror and understand who you are.

Chase Koch [21:44] But the second thing is I really understood comparative advantage, and I looked at the guy, Scott, that could have been running. He was a great operator, and he, he, I knew he was going to be a great president as well. And he was operating a smaller part of the business. So his opportunity cost of not running the whole thing But then my opportunity cost, back to the trade-offs and what I was giving up as a team member, was focusing on building and looking at innovation and what we can do to drive creative destruction. Because if I was honest with myself, even though it was cool to have the CEO title and what everyone thinks you should want, I wasn't happy and I wasn't doing a good job relative to the alternatives we had in the business and someone like Scott running it.

Chase Koch [21:44] And we were missing out on this big opportunity to go invest in new technologies. And so once I met with leadership and we talked about all the different trade-offs, I've called it firing myself before. It doesn't really articulate the principle itself because if you look at it objectively, it's just about Wrong person, wrong role, and too many trade-offs for all the people involved, right? So think about everyone's comparative advantage, just like a sports team. Get everyone in the right positions— quarterback, wide receiver, lineman, tight end, or what— relative to what they could be doing on other roles on the football team, and go get the best results overall and go win the championship.

Chase Koch [21:44] Right? And so that's what we did, and we started getting better. The business performed better, and then I got to ultimately start Koch Disruptive Technologies. That was a whole new arm for Koch. And then everyone, if they're in their comparatively advantaged role and they can look in the mirror and say, this is my sweet spot, you start to see the results follow that, right?

Marty Bent [25:26] Right.

Chase Koch [25:26] And so to me, like, you know, we talk about 41 principles in the book, comparative advantage is one of the most powerful, and I think it's one of the most misapplied principles. And I think the reason why for that is too often we worry about what everyone else thinks about our job, you know, our own ego, or how many people report to me, and that's some kind of measure of success. When the measure of success is, are you maximizing how much value you can create as an individual towards the overall vision of the business, right? And I just think so much is missed in that across so many businesses that, I mean, what a societal transformation we could make if we just all applied.

Chase Koch [25:26] Think about what the world would look like if we all applied comparative advantage and people would be self-actualizing because it's like, I'm killing it every day. And I'm not in the wrong role. It's a really big one. I know I probably overexplained that one, Marty. Sorry, but I'm very passionate about that one because I've seen it misapplied so much. And I'm kind of example number one on that.

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Marty Bent [29:36] Yeah, that was, know your role is a concept that's been in my mind since high school. I played at a very, I played on a very good lacrosse team. We were number one in the state in our senior year. We had very good coaches, and that was the one thing that they beat in our head. Yeah. Know your role. You don't need to be the star if you just do your role perfectly well.

Chase Koch [29:55] For some reason, it's easier to apply in sports. It's more obvious. But then when you apply that in business, for whatever reason, it's just more gray, I think, in terms of who does what. So we have a lot of people working on the wrong things.

Marty Bent [30:07] Yeah. Well, I mean, it seems clear that you're enamored by creative destruction, and I think that can lead into a couple of other principles from the book too, because with creative destruction, you're venturing into the unknown in a way to figure out what's new and how you can apply it to your business. That comes with a lot of experimenting and a lot of failure as well, which should both be expected. And that's another thing from the book that I really appreciated is the normalization of failure and rapid experimentation, which is necessary if you're actually going to be able to successfully Creatively destruct your incumbent business.

Chase Koch [30:48] Yeah. Well, I mean, just to jump on that one, whether it's creative destruction or experimental discovery, I mentioned that before, but those are 2 of the 41 principles as well. And I go through this one because it's also an illustration of if someone's reading the book or trying to get their head around the principles, It can be daunting to say, oh my God, there's 41. Why does there have to be so many? But the reality is, like, these are— and why 41? These are just the ones that we had the stories that we thought were most powerful that could help the most people. But you really only need, like, 1 or 2 to get started.

Chase Koch [30:48] And if you take the story, the comparative advantage story that I applied to my own role, and it was one of the most important decisions of my life because it set my life on a completely new trajectory. And I also enjoyed my life a lot more. I was having more fun, I was adding more value. I even had a better relationship with my kids because work was going better. It all ties together, right? But then when you take experimental discovery and creative destruction, the next role of starting something like Koch Disruptive Technologies, which was basically our venture capital to growth equity platform. We had a gap within Koch.

Chase Koch [30:48] If we're going to drive creative destruction, to your point, we have to be able to see what technologies are coming at us. Otherwise, we're going to wake up one day and wonder what happened, right? So we have to be able to see around corners. And as you know now, with all your work in AI, that's more important than ever. But then how do you apply experimental discovery to areas that we don't understand, But we need to be in the game. And so this goes, and this is a learning, and I think I talk a little bit about this in the book, of the early days of KDT.

Chase Koch [30:48] We were, because of me, we were violating experimental discovery in some cases, meaning we were making, like in healthcare, right? That's an area we didn't have a lot of expertise in, but we saw it as 20% of of our economy, we need to really start to set some experiments in there. Well, we were writing $100, $200 million checks into these companies without a lot of knowledge around that specific company. And so when you think about, okay, what have we learned from that? It's like to apply experimental discovery, even in venture, and you can apply this to any element of your business, right? It's like bet your knowledge size.

Chase Koch [30:48] The size of your bet should be equivalent to the size of your knowledge on that. And make some bets, and you're going to lose, right? But a great experiment we define as the value of the learning exceeds the value— the cost of the loss. So if you can approach anything like that, whether it's a venture capital bet or trying out a new vendor for AI, as an example, Right? That you know it might fail, but you need to put enough experiments out there on the board to say, all right, we got to try new things. We got to figure out who our preferred partner is that we want to work with.

Chase Koch [30:48] And so I share that just so your audience understands. You mentioned experimental discovery. I had to fail a number of times with experimental discovery to understand what good looks like in applying it. And so that's why I'd just encourage your audience to think about, like, okay, where am I stagnant? And where have I not made any changes? And how do I put some responsible experiments in place where I can bet, basically make small bets that are relative to the size of my knowledge, and figure out how I can learn from them, knowing that a couple of those will be failures?

Marty Bent [34:55] Yeah. And I think one of the examples in the book is not necessarily And sort of creative destruction. But after the acquisition of Molex, I think, from what I recall, the pure KPI was revenue growth, but that wasn't really leading to increased profit margins. So you had to do a deep dive on the different products that Molex was spinning out, and you found some interesting things. You came in with some assumptions and they proved to be wrong, particularly about which products were where the most successful and where you should focus on new initiatives. And I think a lot of, from what I recall reading the book, one of the problems was you just had this, or the managers of Molex had this assumption that we've been running this for a while and it's a popular product. But after going in and dissecting exactly what was going on, it became obvious like, oh, this actually isn't the right way to do things.

Chase Koch [35:53] No, I think that's right. And Molex has always been a fantastic company, but I would say that, like, that's a great example of the challenge of M&A and doing an acquisition and bringing in a new, very large company. I think when we bought it, it's 50,000 employees. So you can imagine, you know, that took Koch from 80,000 or 90,000 to, you know, 130,000, 140,000 employees overnight. That is a large— gulp to integrate and to take on. And to your point, you're right on the story is that Molex had been public for decades. And so this is where you started the conversation back on one of the key principles of our principle-based culture is long-term thinking versus short-term.

Chase Koch [35:53] But if you're thinking top line, and a lot of public companies have this problem, right? You're thinking quarter to quarter, and making sure that you hit your numbers for the analysts, it's very, very difficult to make the capability investments you need for the long term. And so that was one thing that culturally we had to overcome. But I'd say it was top-line thinking versus bottom line, to your point, and that took many years to start to turn the corner there. But it was also some top-down thinking versus bottom-up empowerment. And so I think that's been one of the biggest transformations in Molex is empowering people.

Chase Koch [35:53] Here, let me back up a little bit. And I think you benefit from having experimented with PBM in your own organization. For your audience though, if you take a principle-based management culture and what we've tried and developed within Koch, over many, many decades. If you boil what that is into a— basically down to a nutshell, I always tell people, what if you had a business where people knew what to do without being told? And that is the simplest way I can describe all of these principles, all of our frameworks of like what you're— you're never gonna get there perfectly, right? But that's what you aspire to be, and that's your vision.

Chase Koch [35:53] Then you can start designing and running your business with that operating system, with a bottom-up empowerment mindset. It's just like what I talked about with my dad. He tries to empower people with principles and let 'em run. It is not him at the top, um, saying, well, you guys need to go do this and you need to do this or this strategy. He challenges all the time, right? But it's more of, you know best, you're closest to the opportunity, you're closest to the problem. How can I help you? How can I remove barriers? And just on your point on Molex, the last quarterly business review or last board meeting we had, I remember they're really performing well right now across all their businesses, automotive, healthcare, their data center business, their consumer business, all of them are growing.

Chase Koch [35:53] Much more things need to be connected in this IoT world that we live in, and especially with AI driving transformative demand. But our data center business in particular is just— we can't keep up with demand because we make the connectors that connect all the data centers and the cables and products like that. But I remember in the quarterly business review, Instead of going through a 40-page PowerPoint on just a page turn and what are the results and asking a bunch of detailed questions, his approach, and most of our senior leaders are, just what are the top problems? How can we help you remove constraints? And let's talk about what principles either we're not applying or that we should be.

Chase Koch [35:53] Changes the whole dynamic of the culture, but also how businesses are run, right? So I think it's like that kind of mindset, culture, and leadership that enables you to go from a top-down kind of control and dependency of leadership to bottom-up empowerment. And when you have leaders doing that, what that does is it gives everyone else permission downstream to say, oh, well, I need to do that too, right? I see how that's empowering me. How am I empowering my people instead of operating as a supervisor or a leader and just telling them what they need to be doing? Completely very, very different approach.

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Chase Koch [43:28] Boy, I mean, that is a big one. And I would say, you know, one of our frameworks at Koch is around motivation. We call it 5 Dimensions. It's like a problem-solving tool, problem-solving framework. And motivation, what used to be called incentives, we now call it motivation because it's much more— people think incentives, they think money.

Marty Bent [43:53] Okay.

Chase Koch [43:53] But to your point, it's much broader than that. And motivation is about motivating long-term value creation, right? And you may be motivated by different things than I'm motivated by, right? You may be motivated by what teams you get to work on, who you get to work with, which exciting projects do you get to be a part of? It's not just about, okay, what's my total compensation at the end of the year? There's all these different things, right? So To break it down for your audience and how we think about motivation, there's kind of 4 key areas that we want to motivate every employee to unlock their potential on.

Chase Koch [43:53] And it's not— the first thing you'd say was, how much money are you making right now? That's not the first thing that we look at, right? It's more about cultural alignment to these principles that we're talking about. Are you, as an individual, like if Marty works at Koch, Are you advancing the culture or are you taking away from it? And we have a 360 process where we'd ask the people that you work with, your supervisor, even your customers, your vendors, your coworkers, hey, how's Marty doing on that? And you get very specific examples of what's going well and what's not. And so then it's like, okay, let's see how Marty's doing on culture.

Chase Koch [43:53] But then the other thing is on capability building, right? And thinking about what's Marty doing to innovate and building for the future for his role and for his business. That's highly subjective. There's no, like, you made X dollars, so therefore you get Y, right? But then, and then we think about long-term value creation. Like, you know, what are you doing to advance the long-term value of Coke or whatever business that you're in? And then leadership is one too. And it doesn't mean that you have to have people reporting to you to be a leader, right? It's like, are you helping others around you succeed? And it was like, how's Marty doing on that?

Chase Koch [43:53] And then of course, there's the more objective thing is like, well, how's Marty's P&L and how's his results? But that's a very, again, a very different approach than most companies that if you're a salesperson, Well, I brought in $10 million of business this year, and so I made X, therefore I get Y. You've got to put all these subjective factors, otherwise you're not motivating people on a principle-based culture. So you have to have all those factors, and it's harder to do, it takes more time, and we put a lot of— we put all that leadership back on supervisors of their people to really make recommendations on bonuses and base salaries based on those factors.

Chase Koch [43:53] And so I think that's one of the key elements of our secret sauce to build the culture that we have. You have to hire based on that culture, you have to fire based on that culture, and you have to motivate day-to-day based on that as well.

Marty Bent [47:03] Yeah. And it's interesting because having read the book, Coke has their internal process. What I like about your principles and your view on the world and how a company should operate in that is that it's steeped in mutual benefit too, which I think can tie into this. You create this culture internally, but then you're making sure that you have partners and that you're actually doing good to your counterparts as you're doing business throughout the world. I think Particularly in today's day and age, I mean, AI is the big topic right now, but if you're looking at the AI race right now, many of the leaders in that space view it as a zero-sum game. And I think one of the core principles of Koch is that it's not a zero-sum game. There's mutual benefit to be had.

Chase Koch [47:55] Yeah. And I think you hit on what we don't want in society is constrained pie thinking. Like, we want to grow the pie together. And if you pick the right partners to do that, and you have— let me hit 2 principles in here because I think they're very important. One is preferred partnerships. This is one that I've learned because the nature of my role is I'm pounding the pavement a lot. I'm trying to find the next disruptive technology, the next family-owned business that we can help with a capital solution. I'm in that flow every day. And I think this is one that is very important and one of the principles that I think is a big differentiator for Koch as well, and how we select and how we choose what we're going to work on and who we're going to partner with and who we won't.

Chase Koch [47:55] Creative destruction is one of those principles that we learned from Joseph Schumpeter back in the '40s on, but preferred partners, we learned from failure internally and we created our own principle around that. So this one's a good example, but a preferred partnership requires 3 things. One, an aligned vision. 2, aligned values. And 3, complementary capabilities. And when you have all 3 of those in place, you have the best, the highest probability of creating the most long-term value and having a long-term growing partnership with someone. And again, that applies to business and a customer, a supplier. It applies to an M&A deal. It applies in your personal life, your girlfriend or your wife, right?

Chase Koch [47:55] I mean, all it applies— it is a principle that applies to everything that we found. And anytime when you pull one of those out, you don't have an aligned vision, right? Because one partner's thinking, long-term, the other one's thinking short-term. That's just vision misalignment, right? You see that at board levels all the time. Someone wants to sell, the other one wants to hold on and keep growing. That's just a misalignment that's going to break the company. Or aligned values, right? Do you operate with integrity? Do you, you know, how you treat your customers? Are you compliant or do you cut corners with rules and regulations and that sort of thing?

Chase Koch [47:55] And then the third one around complementary capabilities, if you and I are partnering, do you bring something to the table that I don't have, and do I bring something to the table that you don't have? And then, because if we both bring something to the table, then there's synergy, and then that goes back to this, we grow the pie together. And you're right, I mean, the alternative to that is zero-sum game.

Marty Bent [50:46] Yeah.

Chase Koch [50:47] So do you want to have a zero-sum game thinking, Of which there's a story. I won't belabor it here, but there's a story where I learned mutual benefit through failure because I was running the trading group in Koch Fertilizer, and I basically took one of my trading partners to the mat where he didn't make any money on the trade, and I did really, really well, and we're all high-fiving on the trading floor, only to find that 3 months later, he competed with me and set up a whole business. that destroyed everyone's business, and then there was nothing for anyone. Because I thought— because I applied short-term zero-sum game thinking to one trade, what could have been this amazing long-term partnership where everyone won, I left that on the table, and I'll never forget that, right?

Chase Koch [50:47] And so thinking about how you help the other person win, If you have a preferred partnership and you have the aligned vision, values, complementary capabilities, and you have the mutually beneficial mindset where I'm going, how am I helping my partner win all the time? And they do the same for you. That is a beautiful long-term relationship where you're going to grow the pie and everyone's going to win and everyone's going to get results. So, so many examples where we've screwed that up as a company and we paid for it, right?

Marty Bent [52:10] Yeah.

Chase Koch [52:11] Those failures in the early days are almost blessings because you learn from them. And it's like, boy, mutual benefit is so core to everything that we do. Yeah.

Marty Bent [52:20] It goes back to the patience, right? The low time preference that's necessary.

Chase Koch [52:24] That's right. That's right. Exactly.

Marty Bent [52:26] The trade-offs, conceding some upside at certain parts of the relationship to make sure that the ultimate upside is there in the long term. And again, I can't Stop thinking about the high-velocity trash economy. And I'm very happy that you and your father decided to write this book and you're putting a concerted effort to spread these principles outside of Koch Industries because I do look out at a lot of the modern economy and the giants that exist today. And again, bringing it back to the AI sector, there's too many people that view the world as zero-sum and it's very cannibalistic in the long term and not good for the health of the individual companies and the economy broadly. And so, like, on that note, what would you say are the biggest mistakes that companies that exist today make, and/or what changes could they make coalescing around principle-based management to get everybody rowing in the same direction?

Chase Koch [53:28] Wow. I mean, we've hit on a bunch of them, right? I think if you just took a step back and said, what if we have a culture of mutual benefit? And we just think of that one principle, right? You think about every interaction, whether it's a customer, a vendor, a supplier, every decision, and we have that in our DNA, every employee. And you think about how the results that you could get. And also just like how the world would work. I think that's a big one. I think the comparative advantage one where I told my story about being in the wrong role, what if everyone just put— really thought about their own role and their own comparative advantage and we had the right people in the right roles in society, right?

Chase Koch [53:28] I mean, more but not just in your business but— across other businesses and other nonprofit organizations, right? Sports teams, you can apply it to anything. I think those are 2 that are just really, really significant. And then to your point on time preference, thinking long-term versus short-term, so much of our decision-making is as a society is short-term versus what's best for everyone long-term. But I think the overarching principle for all— that's almost like I think about this umbrella principle for then take this to society and how we think about the institutions across our economy, whether that's our education system, our government systems, are like how business works, bottom-up versus top-down.

Chase Koch [53:28] Bottom-up empowerment. And if we actually believe in people and we empower them with principles and we believe that people that are closest to the problem are the ones that should be solving those problems, as opposed to the alternative and where So much of our society works today, and we're trending in the wrong direction. Top-down control and dependency to where the government keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger, more regulations, more telling people how to live their lives, and more, sadly, more people, especially the next generation that believes— well, we've done the research on this— that that is the answer. We can't solve our own problems anymore.

Chase Koch [53:28] We need someone else to come in and solve them for us. That's a very scary place to be, and it's a very scary trend. That's why I say bottom-up empowerment and just that one mindset alone and that one principle, what that could do for us to start to strip back more of the layers of bureaucracy, red tape, barriers that we're putting on ourselves as a country and believing in people to go help people improve their lives, apply mutual benefit, help their neighbor, make a contribution, not just in business, but in your community as well. We need to get back. We need to get to that.

Chase Koch [53:28] And that's where the country started, right? I mean, the Declaration of Independence, and it's all about grit and entrepreneurship and making a contribution to your community. That's where we got to turn the tide on that.

Marty Bent [57:10] I completely agree, and I'm happy you brought this up because that's where I wanted to go. If you think of the federal government, how big it's gotten, the Federal Reserve, how important it's become, it's a complete derelict of the knowledge process and the principle that you talk about. Because just from an information theory perspective, there's no way that people congregating in Washington, D.C. and in the Eccles Building and in New York City can get all the local information necessary to make decisions for small towns across the country and cities across the country. It literally does not make sense.

Chase Koch [57:50] You're right. But what we've done a bad job on, the people that believe in bottom-up empowerment and what made the country such a Like a beacon of entrepreneurship and hope and everyone wanted to come here was because there's the fewest barriers in their way to go chase the American dream. And so what we try to keep putting more barriers so it's less attractive and let fewer and fewer people, it's like the system is rigged against them so they can't, right? So what we've done a bad job of is get the stories out there so people can connect to the principle of bottom-up empowerment as opposed to top-down control to fix problems. I'll just hit 2 quick examples if I could, Marty. I talked about education as one of the key institutions of our society. I mean, so many of our problems are downstream of our broken education system.

Marty Bent [58:50] Sure.

Chase Koch [58:51] K through 12 as an example. But what we're seeing in terms of the transformation of our— the opportunities of where that trend is going is very exciting. So I don't want to be someone that comes on doom and gloom and say, everything's so screwed up, or whatever. Well, what are we going to do about it, right? How are you going to drive change? And this is one of the things, we have an organization called Stand Together. We've talked a lot about business. We apply all those same principles into our nonprofit organization called Stand Together. And I'd encourage any of your audience to dig in and check us out.

Chase Koch [58:51] But I'll give you 2 examples of just some things that— some problems that we're working on where we're seeing some very exciting results. Education, back to that. Bottom-up empowerment vision for education is one where You basically have individualized education and understand that every kid is different, every kid has a different gift, every kid learns differently. So why do we have this broken system that's one-size-fits-all? You know what I mean? We're treating our kids like an assembly line with this teach-to-test model where everyone's on the same— they have to— and then they don't understand basic math, but then they go on to the next grade without having that fundamental understanding, right?

Chase Koch [58:51] So we have to look at every kid as an individual in our education system and figure out how we help support them and move at their speed. And now we have the tools to do that. I mean, you look at Sal Khan with Khan Academy, what he's done with technology with his mastery system. Look at Joe Lemont with his Alpha School concept and leveraging AI. He's taking failing students out of the broken system, and by thinking about new ways to motivate them and meeting them where they are and helping them with AI, to A students in 3 to 6 months. So this is the exciting stuff to me.

Chase Koch [58:51] And one of the things that Stand Together has really invested in, and we work with the Walton family on this, We have a Vela Fund. And so basically think about venture capital for education, right? So writing very small checks to what we call education entrepreneurs that are sick of the existing system. It could be a pissed-off parent, a teacher that says, this system is failing my kids. I got to get out and I have a better way. And then so we fund those people. to go build like micro schools and new concepts or new software, right? Like, like Asal Khan. And so over the last, since COVID we've built, I think now we're at like 5,000 new schools across the country.

Marty Bent [1:01:51] That's awesome.

Chase Koch [1:01:51] And we thought it'd be like venture capital where 70% of 'em would just fail and it wouldn't work, but those 30% would be really like awesome new models. What we're finding is more than 80% are succeeding. This is a crazy result, right? 80% of those are succeeding and don't need more capital because they're sustainable and the market wants it and the market's willing to pay for it. And it's priced in a way where even the least advantaged are benefiting from these new microschool concepts. So education transformation is underway, but one of the things that enabled that was really changing the whole regulatory framework for education. And now, I think there's 30-plus states that have gone through education reform. A lot of those are school choice reforms in these states.

Marty Bent [1:02:45] Of course.

Chase Koch [1:02:46] And so, when I talk about barriers that are stacked against kids in our society, those are the barriers we need to remove so they have options and then we can have a new system where they can learn and self-actualize, understand their gift, get the right job, and then go start the right business or whatever, right? I mean, it's that one thing alone, um, I think is one of the most exciting things that's happening. And, uh, from a society standpoint, I'll leave you with this. We did all the research pre-COVID in terms of families that were open to new models for their kids, and it was like 20%.

Marty Bent [1:03:23] Wow.

Chase Koch [1:03:24] or something, like very, very low. And then post-COVID, because families saw how wrecked the system was and seeing some of these models emerge, now more than 80% are open to their kid going to a new innovative kind of school model. So to me, it starts there. It starts with completely transforming the education system, and we're making progress.

Marty Bent [1:03:48] I completely agree. Sal Khan helped me Dearly in college. And I mean, his YouTube, his Khan Academy was, I leaned on heavily in college. And then Alpha School, we've actually had an Alpha School student on the podcast. That's one thing I love.

Chase Koch [1:04:03] How'd that go? How'd the student do?

Marty Bent [1:04:06] Great. I gotta check that out. And one of the, they gave her a hard problem. She made a, she made a, her like semester project, she had to go out and find a way to get on a podcast and talk about it. And she did.

Chase Koch [1:04:19] That's amazing.

Marty Bent [1:04:20] We talked about Alpha School, what the process is like, and it's incredible. Then on top of that, like, shout out to Corey DeAngelis, who's really been on the tip of the spear of school choice, which I think is a no-brainer option. Give parents the ability to take their tax dollars and spend it how they want on their children's education.

Chase Koch [1:04:38] So, you know, hopefully you get more like what you're doing. You put one of the kids on your podcast, people see the results, they see it's a show versus tell. I think we've got to do that across all these and bad regulations that are holding people back. We have to get the stories out that show people there is a better way, and empowering people and like removing barriers is what is going to transform all of our lives and make society better off.

Marty Bent [1:05:07] Yeah.

Chase Koch [1:05:08] So anyway, um, but I'm glad you're doing what you're doing, um, by getting these ideas out there. It's, it's, uh, it's great. We need more of that.

Marty Bent [1:05:18] Well, the feeling is mutual. I'm glad that you're doing what you're doing and for taking the time. I know you're an extremely busy person, but principle-based management has been great for us at TFTC. Becoming a Principle-Driven Leader is a book I highly recommend if you're looking to reorient your philosophy of business and how to apply free market grassroots principles to what you're doing to get the best results. And I'm very happy that, that you're, you're out there beating the drum, getting this, this message of PBM out there, because I think the world would be a better place if more companies adopted this. And hopefully it would prove to the government that we don't need, we don't need them as much and we can, we can have a flourishing economy that the founders envisioned when, when they started this country.

Chase Koch [1:06:11] Well, Marty, this is a great opportunity for me to be on your podcast, so I appreciate you thinking of me. But I wanted to leave your audience with a real practical way that they can leverage the principles, so I don't want to miss this opportunity. And something that you're working on and very focused on is AI. The combination of principles with AI, to me, is one of the biggest opportunities that we have. And so our first experiment was with this book where we created an app that was basically powered with these principles to solve very specific problems. So we have an app, it's called Principle Companion, and you can get it on, you know, in any of the app stores, Apple Store, Google Play, all the platforms have it, and it's free.

Chase Koch [1:06:11] So if you download it, you can put any problem you're having, not only in business, whether you run any type of organization, a sports team, or you're having problems with your kids, like it's just like a ChatGPT field, type your problem in and it coaches you to think through that problem with 2 or 3 of these principles. So instead of the alternative is saying, well, I gotta go learn all these 41 principles, and you feel like you gotta eat the elephant all at once. Start with a problem that you have right now, today. Take 5 minutes and engage with it. And to me, then it's like you start to see and connect.

Chase Koch [1:06:11] It's like, oh, wow, I can think about that problem differently. This is very effective in helping me get to an answer through a principled approach. And then what happens is you get momentum, right? It's like, oh, I learned about mutual benefit there. I'm going to put in another problem. Oh, it's telling me I need to really think about creative destruction, or maybe my own role with comparative advantage. And so we've started there, and we've had some really good success internally and externally of people solving problems. That's one of the most rewarding things for me is me getting the emails and texts like, oh, dude, I tried this and it actually transformed the way I'm looking at my team, or, I tried this with my wife or my kids, or whatever.

Chase Koch [1:06:11] And so those are so rewarding because it's actually— You see people transforming and getting real results with it. But the next step of what we're doing, and I love your ideas or anyone in your audience that has ideas of how to combine principles with AI, we're taking that same brain that we've been building that feeds the Principle Companion, and we want to apply that to more surface areas. So for example, then one of the next steps within the company, is we use Microsoft Copilot, and almost all, more than 100,000 employees are using this. So to get these principles and problem-solving tools into the flow of their existing work and meeting them where they are, much different than having them go download an app, right?

Chase Koch [1:06:11] So how can we open-source these principles in a way that It really helps people solve problems in a principle-driven way. So any ideas that you have that we want to experiment with in your shop or anyone that listens to this, we are wide open on this. And I'm thinking about this much more than just what helps COPE transform. I'm thinking about this at the societal level. And we're just so excited. We're just scratching the surface in what's possible. because of AI and the power of this technology. So Principal Companion, one, go try it. That's out there now. But bigger ideas on this that you or anyone on your team or your audience has, please ping me, reach out to me.

Chase Koch [1:06:11] Would love it. Put it in the chat and we can discuss big opportunities because this is going to change the game.

Marty Bent [1:10:12] Yeah, I'll leave you with one That's been very helpful for us. We have the principle-based management, we have a bunch of skills, but the most helpful one has been the after-action review. So we'll do a launch or a webinar or something like that, and then immediately after, we have a PBM skill after-action review. How'd it go? Where'd you mess up? What do you want to do better?

Chase Koch [1:10:33] Oh, that's beautiful. We need to take notes from you on how to apply this within Coke. I love that though. I mean, the more any organization's applying this, and then back to that Republic of Science, you share knowledge, what's working, that's how we're going to keep transforming. So very exciting, and thanks for your interest in the principles.

Marty Bent [1:10:53] Well, thank you, Chase, and thank your father for me for co-writing the book with you. It's been a great pleasure. Hopefully, we can do this again at some point.

Chase Koch [1:11:02] Yeah. Thanks, Marty. Appreciate you, man.

Marty Bent [1:11:04] Thanks a lot.

Chase Koch [1:11:06] Peace and love, freaks.

Marty Bent [1:11:06] Okay. Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad-free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app. You can go to fountain.fm to find that. $5 a month gets you every episode a day early, ad-free. Helps the show, gives you incredible value. So please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time, and until next time.