So they realized okay, we are not going to win this way so what do you do then . Well, the kochs are very smart. They are terrific businessmen, both graduates of mit and they are engineers and they went back to thedrawing board to figure out the new model. And in the years after that, soon after that they began to draw up a blueprint for how you could do sort of an Assembly Line to change american politics, even if you couldnt win the popular vote to go there, they follow the footsteps of a couple other major multimillionaires and billionaires on the right who were also funding this project and they figured out that from their standpoint politicians are just actors who are spouting lines andthe key to changing america is to write the script. How do you get to write the script . Well, you have to change kind of the whole way that elite opinion is formed in the country. There happened to have been right around the same time, a little bit earlier, a paper that was the blueprint for all of this. It was writtenby lewis powell who became a Supreme Court justice and he , before he joined the court he wrote a paper that said conservatives and particularly corporative conservatives are impelled in america because liberals, at the time he wrote the paper were ascendant and he said weve got to fight back and to do that youre going to have to capture elite Public Opinion like the kochs were trying to do and to get that you are going to have to change a couple things. The real enemy, he said, is not the kids industry to our hippies who are protesting, its not the antiwar protesters. Its not even the Environmental Movement in some ways. He said what youve got to change are the people who write the editorials at the newspaper, the professors at the university, the scientists who are putting out studies, the preachers in the pulpits and as much as anything else, the judges on the courts. We can see today why the judges on the courts matter but this was the game plan and after the 1980 election when went badly for the kochs they follow this game can plan closely and begin to take their fortunes, all four sons in the koch family had inherited several Million Dollars from their father who had made it in a new process for how to refine oil. They took those fortunes, particularly charles who is kind of the ideological leader in the family and began to think how you are going to change that elite Public Opinion and they funded the system to do it. University programs, think tanks and quite a few other things. And we counted 89 nonprofit groups with names like the center for blue skies except thats not a real one i dont think but we actually identifiedall of them and as you recall. It was 30 or 40 million in a fiveyear period that went, at least that went to those groups. It could be more. All those numbers are in the koch club online. But the breadth of it is astonishing, the extent of it. No one has ever seen a single group doing this and it was this five family related foundations sending money out and we looked at the 990 pf norms which shows what donors give out, not just what organizations received and thats the only way we could track it but while their commercial lobbyists were twisting arms and working the town about Climate Change and other things they cared about, these happy sounding groups were experts, phds of course and were going up to the hill and testifying that theres really not a problem about Climate Change and creating this whole narrative in all of these hearings, house and senate that was establishing that this really is a contested area and everyone is quite concerned about it and they didnt say im funded by the oil industry. They worked at these socalled groups, thirdparty entities and thats not the first time thats happened in washington but no ones ever to my knowledge done 89 at one time, several dozen of which were focused on energy and environment issues. It creates the sense that there is a groundswell of opinion and of course of agreement out there. When you have this many different groups all speaking at once and while all of these different experts, chuck, the work you guys did in particular was front fantastic and showing that the experts didnt just put out papers but they testified on the hill where of course its become part of the Expert Opinion that guides legislation and so , what was interesting to me and still is is that so much of this effort was done as charities. The groups, these nonprofit groups, many are 501 c 3 s which are charitable organizations so when you give a contribution, you get a tax deduction. They are supposed to be Public Interest groups but theres been questions raised over the years about some of the ones the kochs have given to an organized because they Serve Private interests as much as anything else. They serve the interest of Koch Industries so you have experts out there logging essentially for positive position better good to their companies and the people that are giving the contributions, the kochs are taking Tax Deductions for it. Its mindboggling when you look at the whole thing altogether and it was hard to do but idid first. Theres even larger issue as though we are not large enough here. Of the 889 million that the kochs pledge, i think it was charles that they would spend this year basically regarding the current president ial election. That level of money being spent at the same level as political parties. Weve never seen donors, its not just the koch now, its scores, maybe hundreds of other exceedingly wealthyfolks who have these periodic mysterious , amusing, strange meetings in fancy hotels and things and ive never seen anyone declare they were going to spend as much as Apolitical Party in a single election. The numbers now and the numbers of people, similarly minded folks now joining forces, most of which you carefully, clearly document and by the way she names which is great. She names names, all these billionaires and i guess some of them only have a five or 600 million which i would reach for my handkerchief but anyways you talk about that and what it all means and its unprecedented, right . Theres just been an explosion and this other thing were talking about is dark money for the most part. Thats money thats undisclosed and so instead of being the charitable contributions that go to the 501 c 3 go to a kind of group that are called social welfare groups and they too are not supposed to be pacifically and predominantly involved in politics but its become kind of the great dodge ever since Citizens United and its become the slice through which secret money flows so the coax magic trick was not just to put their own fortunes into this project but theyve been brilliant at gathering 400 or 500 others with them and somehow convincing the others to let them control the contributions so they are all pooled in one place and have huge weight as a result and this pile of money, its unheard of in American History to have this much money in one place. Its 889 million. Its twice what the Republican National committee spent in the last president ial campaign. It is so much money that its just such a distortionreally of what was expected. Also by Citizens United opinion, people may forget that when the Supreme Court decided that opinion , the justices who wrote it for it including kennedy and scully as well thought that money was going to be visible. That the spending would be transparent you would see instantly where it was and it would go up online because of the internet and so that would keep that kind of money from becoming corrupting. It wouldnt be secret money. To the contrary though, as some people have warned in advance, most of that money or an awful lot of it has been sidelined into these secret groups where its being spent in ways that reporters even as dogged as chuck cant follow. Its hard to figure out where its all coming from and who the original donors are. They keep their names secret. The only reason we know who some of them are is somebody left the guest list once and it got out and every now and then theres another sort of moment like that and you begin to see who are these people so, i enjoyed trying to figureout who they were, how they made their money , why they were doing the things they were doing and what it was they really wanted to see the American Government do. As we move into all these things and, 2012 the Koch Brothers and others, many conservative republicans were hoping that mitt romney would win. He did not win. They had other candidates they were flirting with, i guess you would say. Chris christie of new jersey and scott walker, they were intrigued with him and i cant resist asking you this because if not in the book but, sorry. Whats happening now . Who are they backing now exactly because they have been interested in a couple of president ial candidates currently that theyve now dropped out so im kind of curious because im not seeing anyone obviously noting this so im kind of curious what the answer is. So far, theyve got this warchest of potentially 889 million, not all of it is supposed to be spent on the campaign. Some of it will be spent on advocacy and its sitting there. They are on the sidelines waiting to see which candidate emerges as the best chance of knocking off Hillary Clinton basically and so they, while theyve been waiting there a couple of the candidates they like, scott walker in particular has dropped out and most of the major republican president ial contenders have come to their donor group and begged for the money and are sort of auditioning for itself pretty much any of the candidates would do with one exception who must be very perplexing to them and thats donald trump you he makes a great point of saying hes a billionaire in his own right and doesnt need other billionaire backings and hes been rudely described by the other contenders who have gone to the donor summits to beg for the backing, he described them as puppets so i think probably part of his appeal to the public is that people think hes not owned by these private interests, hes sort of his own interest but not by some other interest. Theyve discussed now whether or not they should use some of this money to try to knock out trump but of course thats problematic as well because there could be a backlash from the voting public if it feels that a small group of billionaires and multimillionaires are trying to deprive them of the candidate they want so theyre kind of in a corner right now and trying to figure it out. Thats somewhat delicious i think. I would like to say, inevitably so people would say, well it seems like they dont have that much influence with their money and i have to say that what you have to look at with the kochs is sometimes theyve won elections, sometimes they lost elections. The elections are just one sphere of what they are involved in your theyve poured money into trying to have the republicans take over the house of representatives which they were instrumental in making happen in 2010. They poured money into the 2014 race to try to have the republicans take over the senate which again they were instrumental in effecting and more than that, even if you look at trump and, say hes the outlier. Take a look at some of his decisions. He is espousing the same orthodoxy about Climate Change the rest of the republican candidates are espousing which is to say hes denying that it matters or maybe even that its real. Its quite amazing. The entire Republican Party is taking a position thats going in the opposite direction of science and of the rest of the world and really the only explanation for that according to people i interviewed was the money thats been involved in pushing the fossil fuel interests that are so important and pushing the Republican Party in that direction. The other part is the 50 state legislatures and the states, between the gerrymandering that goes on and the state legislatures, they had just worried about washington for one or both houses or president , theyve done a grassroots thing which is extraordinary. Again, i think it getsback to thinking about the kochs engineers. They looked at american politics as a system and try to figure out what the pressure points are. How do you get what you want out of it . One thing you can do, one place where Money Matters more than in president ial politics in a way, or at least it has much more effect is at the lower level. A small amount of money goes much further in state and local races theyve been involved in. Some School Board Races in colorado and other local issues. The coke organization has been fighting these bits of medicaid in states across the country and has been quite effective. One other thing i wanted to say about trump also thats interesting to me is while he is independent of the Koch Organization and is not asking for their money, Corey Lewandowski who is the chairman of his campaign is, his last job was working for americans for prosperity, the koch political group. Their group acts in many ways as a Training Camp for many people on the right in american politics at this point. The other part that we must know is whats happened with the money thing. Im sure you saw the New York Times article in october that 156 families a 50 percent, basically half of all the money given in the first half of 201 , that we are down to that many families giving that much money in the course of representational democracy so the question is, and im also fascinated in 2012 at the end of it that they are all upset and frustrated because they wereoutmaneuvered in their view. They start investing in technology, ways to age races in a precise way in a microtargeting way and the way they are convinced the obama folks had mastered and the democratic party. You have a section about these new things like i 360 and all these various things. I just fascinated, they have also dumped large sums of money into the technologies in addition to all the hundreds of likeminded souls they are rounding up who have lots of money. How is that going to affect 2016 . It sounds like they girded for battle after losing in 12 with technology, at least some of the way the things you wrote seem to imply. They went back to the drawing board and try to figure out what went wrong after 2012. They were shocked that they lost in 2012, right up until the afternoon of election day they thought they were going to win and their operatives were telling them they are going to win so it was kind of a crushing blow in some ways and they did a lot of studying and they realized, they felt they been outmaneuvered in terms of big data which is so important now in politics and so they have built up an operation that many people think is better than the one the Republican Party has. Its this small group of extraordinarily wealthy donors creating almost its own party, a thirdparty and so they got their own get out the vote operation and ability to sort of have people going door to door and enter all the data in an interactive kind of system. Its very sophisticated, really but more than that they also, i found it interesting. They studied themselves after 2012 to try to figure out why it was that they had not been successful and they did a huge amount of Market Survey research and they did polls and focus groups and they came to the conclusion that they had an image problem. Very perceptive. And i know this because a tape leaked out of them discussing, its the koch operatives discussing to the donors what they learned from this research and then they described the problem was that the public felt that libertarian businessmen who wanted to Government Services were greedy so they felt they were misunderstood and they needed to be seen as virtuous and generous and so they, you can hear them discussing this. They decided they needed to get involved in altruistic activities and they have since that. Started doing many more sort of outreach programs to the poor. Theyve been giving out turkeys in some places and they have formed unusual alliances with liberals on some issues like criminal Justice Reform and have recast their own ideology. They now describe it very purposefully, not as just libertarianism and not just about prosperity but as a movement for wellbeing and so you will see theres a new sort of initiative that Charles Kochs foundation has thats about wellbeing and if you drill down into it, what you will find the definition of wellbeing for the most part is the free market from their standpoint so it gets you to the same place but it has a whole new branding effort and Koch Industries meanwhile has put 15 million or so a year into fixing up its image with corporate ads and thats a new thing for them also. Theyve also started giving out a couple interviews which they had notdone for many years. So it reminds me of Richard Nixon when he ran for president in 68 and they packaged him a different way. The new nixon. The new koch. Were thinking of it as the new koch. Last question from me and then we will turn it out. We could talk for two days on the subject. We have a lot of students in the audience and i, also that we will be watching at some point on tran one. Im sorry to askyou this but what advice would you give . Clearly you were impressed and inspired by ida tarbell but thats so last century so, you are obviously one of the preeminent investigative journalists in the us. This book is an extraordinary book. I recommend it. Its really a stunning read but what would you recommend to some of our budding investigative journalists in the audience in terms of trajectory and dedication to the profession and all those things .