Mike Rowe's Interview with Charles Koch

Oh, do I remember! My father announced he didn't want his sons to be country club moms. I had an older brother and two younger brothers, so I bore the brunt of it. Years later I asked my father, 'Why are you so much tougher on me than my younger brothers?' He said, 'Son, you plumb wore me out.' My first job was digging dandelions. You just can't cut them off—they come right back. You gotta dig down. I could remember there was a swimming pool across the street, and I could hear my friends jumping off the diving board and giggling. I could tell from the giggle who it was. And I was saying, 'Why does my father hate me and their fathers love them?' Because you're up to your elbows in dirt and they're playing. Then I graduated to milking cows—that was the worst. After I got in the second bucket with the second cow, she'd stick her foot in it. For weeks I didn't think the smell was ever gonna come off. But my hands were exhausted. That's what I remember—you're eight or ten and you're milking cows. Then I graduated to shoveling out stalls, bailing hay, fixing fence, digging ditches—every dirty job he could find. And I'm thinking, 'Okay, I'm learning the work—thank God I've already learned it.' But I learned years later that unless you learn to work by the time you're in your 30s, you're never that productive. So what do you learn? You learn discipline. You gotta show up on time, show up ready to work, work diligently no matter how unpleasant it is, and work as a team with the other people. It develops this attitude of mutual benefit—let's work together, find out who can do what, and how to work as a team rather than shirk and put it on the other guy.

I don't know. I think part of it is that somehow people believe that all these goodies we have today just appear out of the sky. We get spoiled, and that's what I say—the worst enemy of success is success. When you become prosperous enough, you take it for granted and you forget what's required to make people's lives better—your own and others—to have a society of mutual benefit where we're all trying to help each other make better lives for ourselves and the people we know and love.

Well, my next books are going to be about the studies and the experience of humanity from the beginnings. People who lead happy, fulfilling lives are ones that develop their abilities and figure out how they can best contribute. They find something to do where they contribute and they're rewarded for it and respected for it. Then they feel good about themselves because they're helping others while also benefiting themselves. It's a system of win-win. Just sitting there and taking stuff, or stealing stuff, or getting more stuff by hurting others—how many people are going to feel good about that?

Absolutely. My granddad used to say, 'Shortcuts lead to long delays.' And that goes back to doing dirty jobs. You take a shortcut and try to put the burden on the other guy, and what happens? It starts pitting everybody against each other rather than, let's work together and help each other and we'll make all our lives better.

You're pretty good. For a guy who started pulling dandelions, you've come a long way. That was a key part of my development, believe me.

As you know, our overall vision and with the seminar network—what we're trying to do is move society toward a brighter future for everybody. And when I say everybody, I mean everybody. If we have a two-tiered society with some successful and a bunch who aren't, that isn't sustainable. Our commitment is to help everybody have a chance to develop their abilities and succeed by making a contribution. What about people who, unlike me, didn't have parents that made them work and study and gave them opportunities? We need criminal justice reform that doesn't take people who make one mistake—and in large part it's not their fault because they were never exposed to other ways, this is the way they were brought up.

We think it starts with the punishment needing to fit the crime. Some people who sell marijuana and have a gun in the car—as Weldon did—get 55 years when a rapist gets 20 years and a terrorist gets 20-some years. The injustice of that—then he has no chance with 55 years for not hurting anybody, not threatening anybody. We worked hard on that and others did too, and got him out after 13 years, which is still way too much. But now he's dedicated to helping others not make the same mistake he did, and to work with us on reforming the system. That's the starting point—not having unjust sentences.

Oh absolutely. These are underserved skills. There's tremendous need—in recent years, the cost of doing a project, particularly on the Gulf Coast, has gone up 50 percent and taken much longer. It's because we don't have enough skilled people—carpenters, welders, electricians, mechanics, across the whole board. So we've been working with trade schools and others, subsidizing them and supporting them and expanding. And then we do that through Youth Entrepreneurs—helping these kids who haven't learned the values and skills required for success find out what they have an aptitude for, where they can make a contribution, and help them develop those skills. Then find mentors to help them be successful. And that's exactly what you're doing. I have this philosophy that we want to partner with everybody with which we share vision, values, and bring complementary capabilities. My friend, you fit that to a key.

It's a disrespect for the person providing and a disrespect for their customers—it's like their customers are too dumb to know whether they braided their hair the way they wanted. Some expert off in the distance knows? Give me a break. Why is society putting that kind of barrier between the people who most need help and the very thing we all want? It's a nasty word, but it's called cronyism. The hairdressers and people in the business don't want the new competition. Our general counsel has been working on criminal justice reform and these other issues for many years, and he decided to write an op-ed on occupational licensure. It's different from community to community, state to state, but all together there are like a thousand different occupations that have some form of it. He sent it around to dozens of communities, and we got more hate mail from that than anything we've done. The local people say, 'We can't just have anybody come in our business—they may not be any good, they'll hurt our reputation.' Come on. You don't want the competition. These people will be passionate, dedicated. This is a great opportunity for them to have fulfilling lives and make a contribution, and you're keeping them out. It's monstrous.

That's, as you know, our new ad series is called 'Divide.' And I'm very fond of this philosophy they had in Holland at the start of the 17th century that contributed to them being the most prosperous country in the world with more creativity—welcoming dissonance from all over the world. It's called, 'Listen even to the other side.' Boy, that is radical. But that's what innovation comes from, and entrepreneurship, and new ideas. When I put those ideas together, I can think about things differently. And I want to thank you, Mike, because you are in the central path of what is necessary to bring this brighter future we're working on. Looking at what you're doing, you're not only helping people help themselves, helping them transform their lives so they can lead successful, fulfilling lives, but then they're helping everybody else. It's win-win, it's mutual benefit, it's exactly what we need. So once again, thank you.

Sam Peltzman at the University of Chicago said these rules aren't making people safer or saving lives—it's doing the opposite. And so that's true everywhere. When we say permissionless, we say the burden of proof needs to be on government, just like on hair braiding. If you're going to force people through that, you've got to prove it's unsafe and they're hurting people. And if you can't, get out of the way. Then we'll have much more innovation, much more people employed, and a better life for everybody.

I wanted to thank Mike for all he's doing.

I think we have to—we're talking about reforming government, but government isn't the sole cause of our problems. It's a consequence of problems in the rest of society—failures in our education system, failures in our communities, and failures in the business community. That's what we're working most on. We've got to get rid of corporate welfare, and part of which leads to occupational licensure. We need an educational system that helps students learn the values and skills required for them to make a contribution and be successful, and teaches freedom of speech and open inquiry. It shouldn't push everybody through the same cookie cutter but help them understand what they have an aptitude for and where they can make a contribution. That's one of the ways I was blessed. In about third grade, I didn't think I was good at anything. The teacher was putting math problems up there, and I asked myself, 'Why is she doing that? The answers are obvious.' I noticed they weren't obvious to anybody else in the class. I said, 'My God, I'm good at something other than getting in trouble. This is like a miracle.' That was in the '40s when they believed people were either smart or dumb. Later they developed multiple intelligence theory—we're all better at some things than others. If we can figure that out early and direct our lives to that—whether that's trades, everybody doesn't have to become a philosopher or master Greek history. We want to help people figure out what they have an aptitude for that will make a contribution and help improve other people's lives. We need an education system that does that and helps these kids figure it out so they can have an aha moment like I did, which changed my whole life.

No—I didn't find that letter. It was in his safety deposit box when he died in 1967, so I was already 31. But that's the way he tried to raise us. The letter said, among other things, 'I've left you an insurance policy to help pay for your education,' because he thought he'd die before I was 31. He said, 'If you will use this to advance your skills and learn to make a contribution, you will experience the glorious feeling of accomplishment. And if you don't, if you misuse it and indulge yourself with it, you will miss that. And my leaving this to you would have been a great disservice to you, and I will be very sorry.' No pressure. But that was true from the beginning. The great thing about my parents—and I'm so sad for kids that don't have this—is it wasn't a bunch of lectures. The worst thing is parents lecture their kids to be a certain way and they're acting the opposite, and kids can spot hypocrisy sooner than anybody. Then the parents have no credibility and the kids do the opposite. But my parents lived a life of integrity, humility, responsibility, work ethic, and always trying to learn. My father used to say, 'Son, learn everything you can, because you never know when it'll come in handy.' That's the way I've been. I'm just fascinated with learning new things.

Right now I'm reading Bing West's book, 'The War for the Greater Middle East.' It goes through all the things we've done that have just totally blown up in our faces. It's fascinating. He was in the military and he's been a professor at the War College, so he's not just some guy with an opinion—he's been there.

No, it was really a TV series—oh, what was the name of it? I think it was—no, not Dirty Jobs. I like True... no, this was the one about the—they were in the West and they drove these cattle up to Montana.

Lonesome Dove, thank you. Larry McMurtry wrote that book in the '70s, and Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones—they were terrific.

Tommy Lee Jones played Woodrow Call. And when Robert Duvall's character died—Gus McCrae—he dragged his body all the way back to Texas. Remember?

Yeah, it was Evita.

I love that. You want to sing 'Don't Cry for Me Argentina'? Oh, I love it. And there's another one by Boublil and Schönberg that I like—'The Miss Saigon'... I mean, it started with socialites in Paris, high-living, and they learned about these revolutionaries in South America so they went down to help them. And boy, they were going to change the country and do everything right. And then once they got in power, they were just as bad as the people they kicked out.

Well, there are a number of books. One is Charles Murray's 'In Pursuit of Happiness.' And another is Hayek's 'The Road to Serfdom.' I've got other stuff that's much denser, but I wouldn't wish those on anybody. A nerd like me enjoys reading them.