Chase Koch: evaluation

Transcript context

…There must be something from those books on tape that you absorbed the least. Do you wake up in the morning and say, “Ah, today, still, A does equal A. Dad was right about Aristotle,” or did that just still like, “Ah, I don’t need this so much. I know A equals A.” It’s interesting, Tyler. I would say, he looks at everything through the lens of principles. Ever since I was a kid, whether it’s how he raised Elizabeth and raised me, how he treats my mother, how he does business, the things he’s trying to change in our country with all of our efforts and Stand Together to help people improve their lives, those principles, I’m 100 percent aligned on with him. There’s not something I could sit here and tell you, “I’m just so polar opposite my father on that.” What I will tell you is how I express them is different. He also taught me this, the principle of comparative advantage, which I think, of the 41 principles in the book, is maybe one of the most powerful. As you know, the principle of comparative advantage is really focusing on where—you can look at it from an individual standpoint. You can look at it on a country’s comparative advantage and what they make and produce and at what cost. Look at it from a personal level: What my comparative advantage is, is what is my gift. What is my superpower relative to everyone else on the team? If you look at it from a business standpoint, what I could be doing versus all my other alternatives, what I focus on. Also, whoever else is on the team trying to go build a business or achieve a vision, what I could be doing, relative to them and relative to their comparative advantages. My comparative advantage, compared to my father, is completely different. My father, his comparative advantage is abstract concepts, because he’d studied philosophy his entire life. He studied the philosophers that you mentioned, Hayek, von Mises, Milton Friedman. The list goes on and on, Joseph Schumpeter. He also studied Lenin and Marx and applied the scientific method to understand the opposite of what he believed, to refine his own views in terms of how to build a business, how the world works. My comparative advantage is more around that I’ve discovered over time through lots of failures, and I talk about this in the book. My comparative advantage is much different. I think I got more my mom’s comparative advantage around working with people and understanding people and understanding interpersonal skills and intrapersonal skills. What I’ve learned through a lot of failure is that focus on that, and don’t try to be something that you’re not. I think that’s where my father and I would diverge. We have the same principles, but we express them much differently in business and with the social change efforts that we have. Other than your mom, dad, and sister, are there other relatives who influenced you earlier on?…

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