My name is Paul Constant. I work here at Civic Ventures and I'm a host on this

podcast sometimes and I also co-founded a website called the Seattle Review of Books, where we run Book News, Reviews, and Interviews.

And so from time to time, I'd like to recommend books that I think would make for good further reading to fans of this

podcast, people who would like to learn more about how economics works in action.

So this time around I wanted to recommend a relatively new book. It just came out earlier this fall.

Christopher Leonard is a business reporter who's written for some of the heaviest hitters in the media,

The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Business Week, and for the better part of a decade

he's been working on a book about some of the most secretive billionaires in the United States,

the Koch brothers. His book, Coqland, is a magnificent piece of reporting.

He logged thousands of hours flying to Wichita,

to interview Koch employees, and sort of

pierced the veil of silence that surrounds Koch industries.

One of the first things that he writes about in Kochland that I thought was fascinating

is that you could not boycott Koch industries if you wanted to because they have insinuated themselves into American business in a way that is impossible to extract.

They make the fiber in carpets and in your

cell phone. They make the sensors in your cell phone. They make the nitrogen fertilizer

that helps grow the food that you eat every day.

So under Charles Koch, Koch Industries has made more money than pretty much

any enterprise in the history of the entire planet Earth. He and his late brother

David Koch's fortune when combined exceeds that of Bill Gates.

And in Kochland, Leonard uncovered the crimes and bending of norms that Charles Koch employed

to build a company as large as Koch industries and he demonstrates

...