America's foreign policy issues are a "form of insanity," billionaire Charles Koch said Tuesday, during the first-ever joint interview with his brother, David, as there is nothing to show for the effort that is being made.
"To me, foreign policy is a form of insanity, and I mean that in the sense that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result," the elder brother told
MSNBC's "Morning Joe" hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.
"We keep kicking out dictators and we don't get anything better, and we mess up a lot of lives in the process," he continued. "We spend fortunes and have many Americans killed and maimed? What do we have to show for it? It's kind of like my support for some of these Republican candidates."
The brothers, interviewed in their childhood home, gave a bit of insight on their very different personalities. Charles was very much the more outgoing of the two during the interview, but he insisted that they both share the same vision and values.
"I believe to have any long-lasting partnership, there are three requirements," he said. "You've got to share vision and values and bring complementary capabilities and we're quite different. We share vision and values and we have quite different capabilities, although we both studied engineering, I was more in math, philosophy, scientific method, philosophy of science and David was an engineer."
He said that their father had predicted that his brother David would be the engineer, and "David spends most of his time on developing devices and systems that are engineering-based that create value for our customers. So we have quite different capabilities and interests."
Meanwhile, David Koch said that after he decided to work for the family company in 1970, he was put in the field to sell various products, and the technology companies grew larger.
"When I first joined the company, we had just $6 million in revenue," he said. "And now years later our revenue is $2 billion. We've done pretty well there."
He also said he is much like his mother, in which he "loves the world of philanthropy," and has given major gifts that he feels "very proud of."
David Koch also said that he has felt for years that the "good Lord has been sitting on my shoulder" after he was able to escape the horrific collision of two jets in Los Angeles in 1991, and he felt he was spared to do "something very, very important."
But one thing he is not happy about was his own foray into presidential politics in 1980, when he was vice president for the Libertarian Party with presidential candidate Ed Clark.
"I found it extremely difficult," he remembered. "When I spoke to these audiences, particularly students, God, they disliked me. They were extremely unfriendly. And I felt very demoralized trying to speak to those students and grown-up people. Anyway, I was probably not a very good candidate, but I did try."