#784: The Billionaire Playbook with Chase Koch

**SPEAKER_1** (0:07)
You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:10)
When you talk about a Fed just going nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:18)
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In a world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:29)
I mean, that's part of the bold case for Bitcoin.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:31)
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.

**Marty Bent** (0:36)
Chase Koch, welcome to the show.

**Chase Koch** (0:38)
Thanks, Marty. I appreciate you having me on.

**Marty Bent** (0:41)
I'm honored to have you on as we've been discussing. Over a couple of conversations over the last few months, we've implemented Koch Industries as a municipal-based management system here at TFTC. It's been wonderful.
Is it working?

**Chase Koch** (0:58)
It is.

**Marty Bent** (0:59)
I think it is working.

**Chase Koch** (1:00)
I think it is. That's good, man. What have you found is the most helpful right out of the gates to you guys?

**Marty Bent** (1:09)
I think for us, we probably spent three months doing PBM implementation with a consultant. Through that process, we realized that we had a bunch of knowledge gaps in the company. We have a relatively small team. 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. Mainly because I've been running the company.
I ran the company as a solo founder for like six or seven years, and we've grown the team over the last two. There's a lot of embedded knowledge that I built up in my own head over the course of the first seven 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.
Well, 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 four or five different companies or even capabilities, right? Sales versus marketing versus operations, whatever your company is 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 are 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, you know, it's spontaneous order, where someone has an idea of, let's say, two businesses in our fertilizer business. And then we have Georgia Pacific, where someone says, you know what, I think some of these folks over in Georgia Pacific and operations can also benefit from this knowledge and that knowledge automatically transfers to those people and no one's telling them to do it. No one's from the top down, like waving some magic wand is like, oh, you need to tell this person that there's no way you can do that in a really large company. So back to what I was saying, like yesterday, we're in a meeting and we're thinking like, 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 co-pilot, 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, right, 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 Koch 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 percent 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 like creative destruction. Having every employee have the mindset of one, how do I transfer knowledge across the organization? But how am I like innovating with these these models and how fast they're moving and staying ahead to create a competitive advantage for the company? So what you what you're working on within your shop, we're we're working on in spades as well.