Favorite collaborator in one of the nations great independent bookstores, we pride ourselves of the library among other things on the timeliness and relevance of her signature programming. Whether forms on those issues or addressing emerging or hot button national topics. We certainly did not intend on the particular timeline of todays presentation. Christopher leonard was a busy man at the end of last week. Taking reporter calls, wrote a couple pieces for the New York Times and cnn business. They spent eight years and cook koshland and the extraordinary empire in the poem Political Network has put together by david coke and his older brother charles based hundred hours on the road in wichita. Anybody had a chance to read the book . So you will not understand, youll know immediately when you get into it as you get into it it is daunting when you pick it up. Its encyclopedic, 574 pages and thats before you get to the notes and the appendix and then acknowledgments. But they have written a 574 page page turner. As a former journalist, i am inspired by how deeply researched this book is. By the degree of detail that he is packed into it, despite his limited access to Company Executives including koch industry mastermind. Its so obsessively written, its fastening, dramatic and at the very top of the checklist, it is fair. Maybe more than some people would like. New york times said in its review, it rings among the best books ever written about american corporation. It was released two weeks ago today, and immediately caught the times top ten list of nonfiction bestsellers. Chris was born and raised in kansas city, group in brookside, went to college and you and he got hooked on journalism. He worked as for job after graduation at the tribune, a Business Reporter there and has been one ever since. He went on to arkansas democratic and Associated Press where he worked out of st. Louis. The tribune in columbia, he worked a story on tyson foods. And with that he became intrigued with the issue of Corporate Power. Which is brought us to tonight. Chris is here for the second time, he spoke with a Central Library in 2014 on his book, the meat market and the secret takeover of americas food business which is how a handful companies cornered the meat supply, joining me on stage will be sean, a longtime broadcaster is collaborated on a couple of books including james autobiography. He was terrific if you were here interviewing the former mayor in july. Were honored to have both of them here tonight. Please welcome sean and christopher leonard. [applause] thank you for having us here. Non[inaudible] [applause] with kansas city, we know what a lot of people on the east coast and the west coast dont know, theres tremendous wealth in this part of the country. I think all of us are not fully understanding your book, theres tremendous power in this part of the country and mainly wichita, kansas. That is exactly right, what attracted me so much to the story is how powerful and influential this institution is, and how littleknown it is, how secretive it is and will talk about it, its not secretive in a james bond villain sense, this is an institution that does not want the rest of the world to know what its doing for strategic reasons, thats based in what they do and how they make so much money. You have a massive powerfully institution that affects everybody that walks. Koch industry specializes in the businesses in civilization. This is something you cannot fully live with. They refined the gasoline come the building and materials probably in this building, the structures, carpeting, material in her clothing, nylons, spandex, one of the World Largest makers of nitrogen fertilizer, it is something that most people dont think that they by but its that the little bedrock of our food system. Coke industries is engaged in businesses beneath the surface of everyday life, earning, stunning process, annual sales are bigger than that then facebook, Goldman Sachs combine. At the same time, you never encounter the koch brand name, you never know here engaging with this company. That is what really drew me that when youre writing about this company, i feel like youre writing about the entire American Economy in the entire political system because its so diverse that the story is a story of a bluecollar manufacturing workers on the manufactory for them i belong to the labor union not getting a pay raise in 20 years. Or who are earning millions of dollars year trading derivatives and future contents. Your writing about private equity dealmakers who are going out across the country looking for other companies to buy that they use debt to buy and pressure them to boost productivity and profit and finally he writing about one of the largest corporate lobbying operations in the country, truly unrivaled as terms of corporate lobby. The story of this company over the last 50 years, really is a portrait of Corporate Power in our country. It helps us explore a lot of questions of what is going on in our economy, very early on in the book you talk about 1988 when the federal government and the bureau affairs, find out about Coke Industries. And this is 19901988, congress had noisy who they were and some people thought they were part of cocacola, sending investigators to atlanta, some people thought it was pronounced cost, how did they make it in 1988 were outside the Energy Industry that not only were they not known to the general public, they were known to the nae United States congress. The book opens with an fbi agent hiding behind surveilling. And it really happened. And they said they investigators when they started investigating the hewitt issue of theft and oil in a chain reaction. Who are these people. All the sudden, they come to realize its a Largest Crude Oil gathering in the United States and nobody has ever heard of it. And it reminded us very early executives, who was on a plane in the late 50s, and to back up a little bit, we could talk about the koch family but to say they take over the company in 1967 when his father passed away and they were rearranging the firm and tried to figure out what to name it. He specifically chose the name koch, a family name but also completely without character, hard to remember and without description. They were not a Consumer Oriented Company that wanted to develop a name, they wanted to imply scrutiny, largely because they were in the oil business, and the theory of the oil business was opposite of the saying, what is good for the general Motor Company is good for the United States, they put themselves in the 1970s when oil prices shot up in these companies were getting massive profits in the expense of ordinary people. The idea when your business like this, you sort of stay behind the curtain and make a fortune. Coke is a second ward brother but really the patriarch, early in the book you talk about a visit, this goes both ways, no matter how they view charles koch, where wall street come to visit him and then they want to take Coke Industries public. Because i see it as a reader of your book and its brilliant. Everyone has read it or about to reader and its brilliant. [laughter] you know how to read it but if you can please buy the book. [laughter] early on the koch send them away, and on the one hand you say good, and the other side of that is, theres no motive, is not just sticking up for the little guy, they dont want to publicly report things and how that scrutiny, they dont want to be holding to anybody outside of the koch family. And if i get back that up and talk about this family, this company Koch Industries was founded by fred koch who lived in wichita, kansas in the 1960s he owned a wide assortment of cattle ranges, Oil Refineries, networks, he died of a heart attack in november of 1967, his son charles is a president of the company at just 32 years old at the time and that is when he consumer control of the firm. From the beginning, this guy, charles koch was the ceo ever since that time, he became ceo of Koch Industries and hes been in control for 50 years and i know of no other corporation in america that is been so chased by a Single Person in Single Personalities and from the very beginning he had a very clear idea of how corporation ought to be run. And one of the key elements of the dna is longterm strategic thinking. This is an organization that thinks on the horizon of two, five, ten years from now. At the same time, we talk about that and we talk about the theory of trading. But charles knew he wanted to remain private, remain contro ad control and quarter to quarter to quarter as so many corporations do, he wanted to think more longterm. Bankers came and one from j. P. Morgan and said to take the property public, you have access to all this money and you will get 25 million tonight, it was a nobrainer and he sent him packing, and when they got home they were banging their heads against the desk they said charles koch does not want the cash and one of the things he told them, if we go public, not only will the be capable to shareholders every three months but people will know how much our Commodity Traders make. And if they know how much they make they wont do business with us anymore. That is very important to me. And if we could talk a moment about trading, it set the heart of the organization, the heart of what they do in the heart of what they think in the corporation and politically, i was interviewing these traders, from the 1970s Koch Industries has been the largest traders of Energy Supplies in the world. Buying and selling supertankers of crude oil and shipping stuff. Then they began trading the future contracts and derivative based on actual oil supply. So to succeed in life as a traitor, you want to know more about the world than anybody else. You want to know what oil is actually in the real world working today better than anybody else knows. If somebody is willing to sell you a barrel for 50, you might know that is worth 52 so you by all you cannot 50, then you wait for the world to wake up to the reality that is worth 52 inyo sella above. For this reason, koch relays is in the 70s that the most important resource they deal with is not crude oil, natural gas, its information, data and knowledge about the world. They were in a particular good position because he ran huge chunks of the system. When they would shift the gold coast of the United States and can make a bet off the knowledge that the shipment was about to come in. At the same time the regressive in getting much information thats going on as much as possible. Lets get to the year 2000, koch hired and brought them inhouse to create internal secret weather forecaster codes that were better than the public forecast so koch could into spate energy demand. Koch would tap into the databases of snowfall in california, for example, snowfall is an early predictor of reservoir levels which is an early predictor of hydroelectric supply, and electricity prices. They take all the data, analyze it and use it to make trades out in the real world. When this is your line of work, you do not want other people to know what you know, you dont want people to know what youre about to do, thats why theres such a wall of secrecy around what they do. It is strategic in the company of the headquarters built in 1992, it is a giant black Granite Building with opaque windows, that is not coincidental, its black on the northern side of wichita, kansas and they dont want you to know what theyre doing. This is like trump towers in manhattan. [laughter] the philosophical differences and differences between donald trump and charles koch. Its like the world lexicon. Theres actually four and its almost shakespearean, i say naturally because of the patriot under patriarch and the oldest brother wanted nothing to do the company and the two youngest, one passed away and bill, twins and bill wound up suing in the long legal fight with his brothers and quite nasty. It is a really sad story, the brothers, the oldest, charles was in charge and then the younger twin and you have to point, he was never content with the idea that his older brother would run the firm. They had an actual dispute over how to run the business. Charles wanted to plow 90 bakken, bill koch wanted to live like a rich person and take money out of the company and by big houses and have helicopters. Which he essentially did. But they though for over, and fd than 20 years of litigation, ugly, ugly fights, they were so tired to dig through his trash, pose the reporters point negative story about his brother. It created a real feeling of being a bottle in the siege mentality, in the 1990s david koch, i think Everybody Knows he passed away last week. He said it is been picked up by all sides of the media, im glad he is dead and i hope the end was painful. [laughter] good for you, what do people think of him and is probably hardcore from the left, he did not say that when president bush passed away. Outside of donald trump, i dont know that bill mark would say that about anybody. But it comes from the whole idea in a certain perspective that the Koch Brothers are the absolute enemy of the environment and everything starting with Global Warming. I see that a lot and it has made my job difficult to report on this company because there is an atmosphere of toxicity and hostility and bad faith and distrust and all the rest of it the first of all makes people inside the company extremely hesitant to share their story and extreme hesitant to talk. Thats one reason the book took so long to report in a guess i suppose as a reporter in general i think its extremely unethical for a general understanding how things work to have such rhetoric become such a commonplace thing. And i need to own my own role in this. And as it happened spending years people who know david koch and looking at his Business Empire and the operation that he saw those positive and critical but as a reporter the job is to tell people the truth and tell people what is going on in the truth it is often obscured intentionally because the political operations have grown from the business operations. They are taken from the exact same blueprint but politics is just as obscure in the Derivatives Market so its important to tell people this is what happened. And its very important and then Global Warming over the next 30 or 40 years or maybe longer. So did david koch this is a real sincere Investigative Journalism now that they have politicized Global Warming but how they did that i dont think that has really been fully understood with the theory or the truth. But it starts with the Koch Brothers. I started reporting the story for a simple reason bricco a few years ago i was interviewing a former senior lobbyist for Koch Industries and how they do what they do. When you were there what was the front burner issue . He did not hesitate he said carbon. Carbon was the preeminent political issue. So maybe we could take a minute to talk about Koch Industries and politics maybe that has gotten more attention publicly with important economic activities. Koch has had a very particular infrastructure he calls himself a Classical Liberal he describes the views that are not libertarian like hayek i read the book so you did not have to. [laughter] but anyway. [laughter] so this organized society the voluntary Market Exchange system and the actual sovereign that human set prices on things that they care about. And then it reflects that you have to honor that but with your price of healthcare and your roads or your education. You name it. And then to intervene in that system with government regulation and Government Programs if you take money and then give it to those who are losers then you distort the system according to charles koc koch. He has worked diligently and breathtakingly in a disciplined fashion since the seventies to make American Society reflect this view. He did it with think tanks he tried to stay away from corporate lobbying since the 19 nineties when a federal investigation came out and he realized if for. Washington in the big way then you cannot be on the menu. So since the nineties he builds a political apparatus that rivaled miss america. And when i started to report the book i thought i would be writing about super pack and Campaign Donations but i was wrong. That is the wrong area the real action starts the day after the election when you get into the business of governing down in the pipes with the expertise and that model so to do that he is a multifaceted machine one of the red largest registered lobbyist a bed in the white house very nice offices and they said Something Like true power lies in silence. That is awesome. So he has a corporate lobbying shot then constellation that charles koch has built at the Cato Institute and American Energy alliance, energy researc research. These things create and promote for washington dc that is a small town. And they mainstreamed the ideas that charles koch has then you have a network that he convenes twice a year to give us much