Chase Koch on Principles, Music, and Overcoming Entropy
Conversations with Tyler
Conversations with Tyler
4.8 • 2.6K Ratings
🗓️ 15 July 2026
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Chase Koch grew up receiving Sunday philosophy lessons from his father Charles and, by his own account, spent most of them half asleep while his sister supplied the answers. The principles didn't land until he lived them: throwing tennis matches as a bored teenager, getting shipped off to shovel manure at a feed yard twelve hours later, then spending five years battling Brazilian bureaucracy to build a fertilizer terminal that should have taken one. Today he is Executive Vice President of Origination and Partnerships, leader and donor to Stand Together, plays lead guitar in a band named for the law of entropy, and has a new book with his father on principle-driven leadership.
Chase and Tyler discuss if any of his father's lessons never stuck, the guilt-trip letter his grandfather wrote three months after Charles was born, why Chase started throwing tennis matches, what Rafa's grit taught him about stoicism, who he admired most from the 1992 Dream Team, whether the Spurs should jettison De'Aaron Fox, the David Gilmour solo that hooked him at eleven, what drew him to jam bands, how he built a boom-box business out of his parents' garage, why his father interviewed Snoop on a Zoom call during Covid, why his band is named for the second law of thermodynamics, what it's like working with MrBeast, how Koch Inc has evolved, what he learned from Marc Andreessen, the philosophy behind hiring the "farm team," why he is teaching himself to code with Claude at his fourteen-year-old's urging, where he's traveling next, and much more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.
Recorded June 16th, 2026.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:00:56 - Familial Influences
00:08:25 - Tennis and Basketball
00:15:00 - The Music Industry
00:28:36 - MrBeast
00:31:24 - The Evolution of Koch Industries
00:35:54 - The Midwest
00:44:37 - AI
00:49:01 - Politics
00:53:35 - Outro
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, |
| 0:09.4 | bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. |
| 0:13.5 | Learn more at Mercadis.org. |
| 0:15.7 | For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, |
| 0:20.4 | visit Conversationswithtyler.com. |
| 0:25.7 | Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. |
| 0:29.8 | Today I'm chatting with Chase Coke. |
| 0:32.0 | He is the lead guitarist of a band known as Toulot. |
| 0:35.3 | He plays major roles in Coke disruptive technologies, and the foundation |
| 0:40.4 | stand together, and he and his father Charles Koch have a new book out, which I was happy to blurb. |
| 0:46.6 | It is called Becoming a Principal Driven Leader, Subtitle, 41 Principles to Build an Enduring |
| 0:52.7 | Business. Thanks for having me on, Tyler. It build an enduring business. |
| 0:56.2 | Thanks for having me on, Tyler. It's an honor. |
| 1:01.1 | Now, early on in the book, you tell a story of you being Penn, and your father lecturing you about Hayek, Maslow, Schumpeter, Aristotle, and others. You've absorbed a lot of those lectures, |
| 1:07.2 | but what was it from those lectures that did not stick with you? You either rejected it |
| 1:11.2 | or just you've still been ignoring it. Yeah, I mean, I definitely rejected it when I was 10 years old, |
| 1:17.3 | I think, like most 10-year-olds would. I mean, it was more than a lecture, just people kind of in the |
| 1:22.9 | room with me and my father and my sister. These were Sunday philosophy lessons, sometimes economics lessons, |
| 1:29.8 | and they were actually books on tape that he would play, whether it was Milton Friedman or |
| 1:36.0 | Hayek or, you know, choose your philosopher. Every 10 minutes, he would stop the tape and then |
| 1:42.3 | quiz us with questions to see if we were paying |
| 1:44.8 | attention. My sister Elizabeth was always, she knew the answer, she was right in there, |
... |
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