Ep 151 | Why ESG Is the Biggest Scam of the 21st Century | Vivek Ramaswamy | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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Klaus Schwab, Dark Lord of the World Economic Forum.

He has described BlackRock as the largest private asset manager in the world and as such a major shareholder and a voice to be reckoned with in many of the world's biggest publicly listed companies.

End quote.

It's true.

These companies like BlackRock own about 20%

of

all the biggest companies, not only only in America, but also the world.

Schwab has said again and again that ESG will become the standard thanks to BlackRock

and similar companies, Leviathans.

We need to be asking ourselves right now some important questions.

What do we believe in?

What do we want our future to look like?

Are we a collective or does the individual still have,

are they still sovereign

how did such a small group of investors elites CEOs gain control of our society why do they actively push division how and why have they used politics to achieve this goal Today's guest has ruffled a lot of feathers and inspired a lot of people by giving us some answers to these questions.

You want to talk about David and Goliath?

He is going face to face with the three largest financial asset firms in the world, which handle tens of trillions of dollars.

He is by all accounts an elite.

He has degrees from Yale and Harvard, high-level experience in big tech, biotechnology, big pharma, and on his resume, three little letters appear over and over again, CEO, and all before the age of 37.

Now, unlike most elites, he doesn't make an annual trip to a certain gathering of elites in a certain town in Switzerland.

He doesn't post videos of himself kneeling or performing.

Instead, he exposes.

His first book, Woke Inc.,

Inside a Corporate America's Social Justice Scam, is an attack on the woke industrial complex, and you will understand what's happening.

If you read that book, just a month ago, he took things a little step further by opening his own asset financial firm.

It's Strive.

I want you to know in full disclosure,

I invited him.

This is not because Strive is a sponsor of the Blaze.

I truly like him and have been inspired by him, and I thought his voice needed to be heard, but I just wanted to disclose that.

Strive is put together to

compete with BlackRock and Vanguard and State Street, which he refers to as an ideological cartel.

He wants you to know what's really happening in the corporate boardrooms and on Wall Street.

Today, on the Glenn Beck podcast, Vivek Ramaswamy.

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Welcome.

Good to be here.

Yeah, good to have you.

I want to start with, I've got so many things.

We could probably run three hours on this podcast.

But I want to start with ESG.

And I've written a book about it.

You've written a book about it.

So we obviously have it.

But I meet people all the time.

I was just with a bunch of politicians,

the Senate and the House of one of the states.

I met with them just yesterday, spent the day.

And it's weird.

People either get it and know it and they get it deeply.

They kind of go down a rabbit hole.

The second response is

they've not heard it and they're a little horrified by it.

The third is the most amazing, the one where they roll their eyes and they're like,

this is such a ridiculous thing.

That's not what this is.

Let's take it from the beginning.

Yeah.

If you've just heard ESG, but you don't know what it is, what is it?

And you know, that response, I get that third response sometimes too, Glenn.

And so one of the things I'd like to do is actually, let's just start with the well-intentioned version of it.

All right.

Let's just talk about it in the best-intentioned version of it.

Who's a proponent of ESG?

Let's talk about what it is, and then we can see some of the unintentional concepts.

So the ESG movement, stakeholder capitalism, that whole genre was based on the idea that we have shared global challenges like global inequity, like global climate change, that governments aren't sufficiently addressing.

And so it's going to require actors in the public sector and the private sector to work together to address these challenges that politicians have failed to address.

And if we don't address them, we have existential challenges for the planet, we have existential challenges for inequity, and if nobody steps up, then ultimately we all fail in the end.

This isn't my view, but I'm just stating the view of proponents of stakeholder capitalism, the World Economic Forum, the Klaus Schwab view, the Larry Fink view.

That's what the heart of it is.

And I think this is something I've talked about for a long time.

I don't believe in basic, you know, basic minimum income.

However, I mean, try saying this in conservative radio.

I've said for 10 years, you don't understand what's coming just because of tech.

Okay.

We are going to have possibly 30% unemployment at some point as it all transitions.

What are we going to do?

If you don't like that, what are you going to do?

But no one's having an open discussion.

Exactly.

Let's open up the channel of drugs.

So I I say, you know what?

Even if I don't agree with you, let's give the best statement of the other view.

Let's get it on the table and then let's talk about what's wrong with it.

All right.

So Milton Friedman, you know, our guys you and I liked 50 years ago said that, okay, we don't want private companies being co-opted into doing the governmental work of solving these societal challenges because it's going to make companies less effective.

It's going to make companies less effective at making widgets.

That means they're going to be less profitable.

That means they're going to make less money.

If companies make less money, then society becomes poorer as a whole because the economic pie shrinks.

So that was Milton Friedman's critique.

I agree with much of that.

I agree most of that, actually.

My issue with this whole trend, I think it's more similar to your issue, is the inverse of that.

It's not that I worry that this just sucks the lifeblood out of capitalism when you tell capitalists that they have to take care of these environmental or social or cultural concerns.

It's that you actually suck the lifeblood out of a democracy.

Because these are questions that whether you're on the left or right, these are important questions to talk about in the open.

How do we address historical inequities?

How do we address if shared global climate change is a challenge that deserves addressing?

If it's true, then it actually is so fundamental that we ought to be talking about it in the open as citizens.

And when we delegate that work to a small group of elites who make the answers to those questions behind closed doors, we actually suck the air out of a democracy where you're supposed to settle those questions through free speech and open debate in the public squares.

That's my problem with that.

You're also not only

sucking the air out of it, you are also

creating

people,

okay, that will lose the ability to ask logical questions.

Oh, yeah.

You know what I mean?

You won't be able to reason anymore.

You won't be able to stand back because you will have no models.

of someone saying, no, wait a minute, wait a minute, that doesn't make sense to me and can logically think things through.

You have to model that.

And the reason you lose it, you're absolutely right about that.

The reason you lose it is that when you use economic force to settle these questions, say the everyday workers at these companies, if they don't adhere to the social orthodoxy, to the ESG agenda that's been pushed down their throats, you're at risk of losing your job.

You're at risk of getting fired.

You're at risk of being denied a promotion.

And I think that when you force people to actually face the economic sword for speaking their mind openly, then you're left with a country where people have to choose between the First Amendment and between the American dream.

And that's what perpetuates this new culture of fear in the private sector where we lose our ability to debate questions of, let's just say, take one issue, racial injustice, or another issue, global climate change.

I mean, those are two of the big issues pushed by the ESG movement.

The E is all about the climate change agenda.

The S is all about the DEI and racial equity agenda.

But if that's being pushed through economic force, effectively the kind of thing the government used to be concerned about, but now it's private companies pushing those same agendas using capital to do it.

If you're an everyday citizen, you might be at risk of losing your job or putting food on the dinner table if you don't bend the knee to that new orthodoxy.

And so that's where you get to this place where we can't even talk about these issues in the open because you have an economic sword that's ultimately hanging over your head if you defect from the main orthodoxy.

So I think that's the main problem.

Is it fair to say that

ESG

is just the

codification

of cancel culture.

Yeah, it really is.

It's applying economic force to the culture that we call cancel culture.

Okay, cancel culture is basically a question, is a culture, the way I define it, is a culture that settles political and social disagreements, not through free speech and open debate,

but through force.

I personally think a democratic society, a democratic republic, is a society that settles its disagreements through free speech and open debate.

Cancel culture calls for the opposite viewpoint that says that these questions should not be settled in the open through free speech and open debate.

We should use force, including economic force, to settle that question.

ESG, what that does is it directs the flow of capital to abide by one end of the political spectrum's views.

That's one form of force.

Capital is a form of force.

As you say, money doesn't talk, it screams.

Well, at the end of the day, they're screaming with money on behalf of one end of the political spectrum's views.

That's what the ESG movement represents today.

So

I want to stay first at the building blocks of what it is so people understand.

So let's talk about,

for instance, why gas prices truly are so high.

They're blamed on

the war in Russia, on Putin,

on just average inflation.

And the president says he's doing everything he can.

And I don't want to make this about politics.

I want to make this about what the system is that is being built.

That's right.

So it turns out the American people have a pretty good system of constitutional governance that determines how we hold political leaders accountable.

Okay.

So if we don't like the policies passed by the Biden administration, we can vote him out.

If we don't like the policies passed by Congress, we can vote them out.

That's the way our democratic system works.

Well, what the Biden administration has managed to do, though, is, and not just the Biden administration, many administrations before him.

This is global.

This is global, right?

This is transnational.

This is transpartisan, even in many ways.

Build Back Better was the slogan for the election for the Japanese prime minister, for Boris Johnson in England all over the world.

Totally.

So this is not a, it's too parochial to think this is a U.S.

issue.

But what they've realized is that, you know what, the political process is inconvenient.

Democracy is inconvenient because the people may not let us get done the things we need to get done.

So what we're going to do is to delegate that work to the private sector instead.

You know, the Green New Deal, we could never get that passed through Congress.

Ah, here's a different idea.

Let's instead have people sign the climate pledge instead.

So that's what John Kerry has done.

He's the self-appointed climate change czar in the U.S.

government.

He's gone to many of the major banks across the country and have them sign.

the climate pledge, which says that, okay, it's legal to drill for more oil in places like the Arctic Circle.

Arctic drilling is legal, and we couldn't pass a law that banned it because there was this inconvenient thing called political accountability.

They'd vote us out of office if we did that.

But here's what you can do.

You can sign a pledge as a bank just to say that you won't lend to any of those projects.

And then you get every major bank to sign that, and you get to an entire Alaskan drilling crisis where people actually have great natural resources that companies can't drill into because they can't be financed because every major financial institution has signed that climate pledge.

And the obvious point to make is these are not charitable institutions, right?

Banks are self-interested institutions.

So what are they getting in return for the question of signing signing that climate pledge?

They didn't do it voluntarily.

It's a new form of crony capitalism, where instead of crony capitalism 1.0 before the 08 financial crisis, and I got my first job in finance in New York City before the 08 crisis.

I mean, I've seen how this game is played.

That's private sector actors effectively bribing government officials to gain competitive favors.

This is the reverse.

It's government actors effectively bribing private actors to do through the back door what they couldn't get done through the front door through a constitutional democratic process.

So I know the answer to this, but I want you to make it very clear here because what people will say to me is this the private sector.

Those banks can do whatever they want to do.

We're for a free market.

They're making the choices, individual banks.

Yeah, so this is this is the so in order to really understand this, we're talking about the building blocks here.

I think we've got to go back to the 2008 financial crisis.

I think that's when a lot of this began, where they've duped both liberals and conservatives into submission with their own slogans.

So, what happened after the 08 financial crisis was that Occupy Wall Street was on Wall Street's doorstep.

And if you're Wall Street, you don't like Occupy Wall Street very much.

You know, take money from those wealthy corporate fat cats and redistribute it to poor people to help poor people.

Agree or not, that's what the old left had to say.

Okay.

But right around that time was the birth of this new ESG movement, the new three-letter acronym movement broadly, DEI, CSR, corporate social responsibility, ESG, environmental social governance factors.

And right around that time, what Wall Street said was, okay, you know what, we can get on board with that.

That's a little easier.

We can appoint some token minorities to our boards.

We can muse about the racially disparate impact of climate change.

We'll talk about systemic racism all you want.

Don't talk about systemic financial risk.

Effectively, to the new left, we expect you look the other way as long as you leave us alone with the old Occupy Wall Street left getting defanged.

So the way they defanged the old left was to say that, you know what, we will use our corporate power to advance your agendas even more effectively than government's advancing your agendas.

But we don't do it for free.

We effectively expect that you look the other way when it comes to leaving our corporate power intact, which is the thing you wanted to attack.

Now, that's how they duped the left.

The way they duped the right, though, is they said that, you know what?

You guys have always been in favor of big business.

You've always been in favor of the free market.

These are just private companies making decisions that you all have supported all along.

So that's how both sides got duped into submission.

Liberals forgot their skepticism of corporate power because they loved the causes that these corporations, including Wall Street and financial institutions, were pushing.

But conservatives were duped into submission because they were told, well, you know, the free market can do no wrong.

We memorized that back in 1980.

And so there was the new rise of this new, I would say, hybrid monster of government power and state power that was far more powerful than either of us.

So that happened with Occupy Wall Street and the corporations.

But

here's an answer I don't have.

How,

where did the government come in?

Because all of this money, remember, they were too big to fail, which leads you to say, okay, so they're going to punish the big banks, break them up into smaller entities, but they didn't.

They made those corporations larger and gave them bigger teeth to eat us with.

But with strings attached.

And the strings attached are, okay, this does not come for free.

You're effectively going to get done what government could not get done because the people would have never allowed the government to do it with the backstop of their vote.

You guys in the private sector are not backstopped by a vote, so you can get done what we never could have gotten done politically.

So, that's the birth of this story.

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I know somebody who was in the basement of the Fed with Paulson the week before.

It was a Sunday night when they first laid tarp out, and he was with a bank that didn't need the bailout.

And he said, we're not going to.

take it.

He was the CFO.

We don't need it.

And Paulson said to him, you don't understand.

You're all taking this.

This is an offer you can't refuse.

It's a godfather stopping.

No one, he said it was.

It was like the mob.

No one is leaving this room until every signature in this room is on this document.

And I personally believe we are still paying for the sins.

By the way, under the Republican administration, we are paying for those sins today.

Because that began this new merger of effectively government power and corporate government.

It was breaking the free.

What did George Bush say?

We have to violate the free market to save the free market.

Yeah, that's right.

That's right.

Well, in the avatar, so what that's created is a new situation where actually we have to save capitalism from this new corporatist monster.

That's actually the true capitalism is long forgotten.

Long gone.

And this idea that what we see today is the free market is an illusion.

As I often say, the free market cannot fix what it is not free to fix.

It's not free to fix it, if government is effectively granting competitive favors now to firms like BlackRock, right?

Look at how many BlackRock alumni staffed the Biden administration.

Look at who gets to administer the COVID-19 stimulus packages and get charged a fee for doing it.

So, the two places we're seeing this most are both on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley.

And in both places, the name of the game is that government is using private parties to do its dirty work, to do through the back door what government could not get done through the front door under the Constitution.

In Silicon Valley, it's censorship of content.

Yeah.

Censoring content.

First Amendment.

We just saw that this week, right?

What happened to Alex Berenson?

You're effectively seeing government directing private actors actors to take down constitutionally protected speech that government could not take down on its own.

Because the founding fathers never imagined a fourth branch of government outside the system of checks and balances.

That's Silicon Valley.

And then with large asset managers and with large financial institutions, what you're seeing is using the power of capital flows in the name of ESG to be able to implement through economic force policies on everyday Americans that, as voters, most of those everyday Americans would have never accepted.

But they're told that it's just the free market delivering them that outcome.

When it's not the invisible hand of the market, it is the invisible fist of government effectively guiding those outcomes.

And so it's this charade that I think bothers me the most, where if everyday Americans can see what's going on with clear eyes, they would never tolerate it.

But each side is duped into submission by the slogans they themselves have memorized.

Liberals have totally been lulled into submission, forgetting about Citizens United in 2010.

They were skeptical about the aggregation of corporations influencing our politics.

Whatever happened to that, well, you know, if they're really advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and fighting shared challenges like global climate change, maybe I am okay with them having that much power.

But conservatives are even more frustrating to me.

Reciting these slogans we memorized in 1980, it's like Dorothy might have said to Toto, it's not 1980 anymore.

We don't actually have a free market.

Don't you think that that is changing with the younger

conservatives, if you will?

They understand

the world has changed.

I meet older conservatives, especially Republicans, and they'll be the first to recite that crap to you.

And I think people who are thinking or young, so they haven't been, you know, cemented into that mindset.

I know

I'm a completely different conservative than I was 25 years ago because I used to be, yeah, you know what?

I don't want to be the world's policeman, but send them in.

Now I'm like, not even.

Don't ever do that.

It's the worst thing we can do.

You learn.

You learn.

Watching, right?

And I used to look at things like Blade Runner and go, oh, the corporation's after him.

And I used to think that could never happen.

You know, the corporation is just, you know, the government.

Well,

we are that now.

That's where we are.

And it's so frustrating to me that our side doesn't get it, my side doesn't get it.

And then

the left,

you cared about freedom.

Exactly.

You used to.

You used to care about this.

And so that's the way I think that it's this new cynical force that actually is just about the aggregation of power.

It's in my last book, what I called the woke industrial complex.

It doesn't matter what you call it.

It's a new leviathan that is far more powerful than what Thomas Hobbes envisioned 400 years ago.

It is far more powerful than what our founding fathers envisioned.

But its main goal isn't even to advance a particular agenda.

It is the aggregation of power to ultimately make decisions for how to settle societal questions as a whole.

I mean, we fought a revolution in this country in 1776.

This is what's at stake today, I think, is we fought a revolution in 1776, not between Republicans and Democrats, but between a system of citizens engaging in self-governance

for better or for worse.

Sometimes we might together make the wrong decisions.

Sometimes we might better make the right decisions.

But at least we know we live in a society where we make those decisions together, where everyone's voice and vote counts equally in settling those political questions, period.

That was the revolution we fought in 1776.

And as long as you're not trying to force anybody else, you're able to live the opposite decision.

Exactly.

I don't want to be a part of that.

That's exactly.

It's part of what it meant to live in a free country, which was different than old world Europe, which said that, you know, for better or worse, that we will get to the right answers with a small group of enlightened elites deciding behind closed doors what the best model is for the rest of society at large.

Labor Labor leaders, business leaders, church leaders, and governmental leaders get together behind closed doors and they decide what's right for everybody else at large and everybody else accepts that.

I'm not, for the purpose of this discussion, I mean, you and I, we bleed red, white, and blue.

Okay, so we're on the American side of this, so be it.

But as I'm describing it here, I'm not saying one of those systems is better or worse than the other system.

But in 1776, we fought a revolution here on this side of the ocean saying that we reject that old world European model and we accept the model of self-governance of citizens counting equally in their voice in determining how our society is shaped.

That is what is at issue today in the year 2022.

It is not Republican versus Democrat.

It is not a black versus white issue.

It is a fundamental question of the self-governance of citizens, where everyone's voice and vote counts equally.

Is that the society we want?

And you know what?

Maybe we will get to the right answer and maybe we won't get to the right answer of what that means for carbon emissions.

But you know what?

We live in a society where everyone's voice and vote counts equally and that we're free to live in the way that we want because that's the society we chose.

It's a society that I want to live in, it's a society that our founding fathers created for us 250 years later.

Or do we go back to the monarchical society where a small group of self-appointed enlightened, I use enlightened in air quotes here, enlightened elites decide and settle the answers to those questions at large and use the flow of capital to enforce that orthodoxy on the rest of society.

That's the issue that was at stake in 1776, I think is the very issue that's reared its head again today in the 20 teens all the way into 2022.

And that's what I think Republicans and Democrats both would do well to wake up to.

So

I just, I don't know if you know this about me, but I collect American history and I am trying to preserve it and protect it from just being erased.

I just recently, now it's kind of the American story, really,

I just bought an Enigma machine, and that's from obviously Nazi Germany.

And that was, that gave us artificial intellig, the idea of artificial intelligence and computers.

And we moved forward, and then we got the atomic bomb, and Eisenhower gave his farewell speech, and he said, he warned against the industrial, the military-industrial complex, but he also warned against the educational industrial complex.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, that's actually good memory.

Yeah.

And so.

That, I think, is the model of where we start to, where this problem comes from, is at that point, he said, this is such a big problem, and it can happen in 18 minutes to have a missile fly to the other side.

We have to fundamentally change, but people have to pay attention or it will get out of control.

Well, we didn't pay attention.

And now I think the nuclear weapon that they're trying to protect us from, in air quotes, is not climate change.

It is

AI.

It is digitization.

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They know the world is going to change so much.

They know that everything will happen so rapidly that they believe

that this old system of a republic and democracy is too slow to address it and fix it.

And we're not capable of making decisions for ourselves.

You know what I mean?

Exactly.

I think you're right about this.

You're doing a good job of airing what I think is the authentic concern of the other side, pushing this agenda.

And my side, too.

I'm concerned about those.

Exactly.

So

we ought to be talking about it.

I think the

funny thing is, if you look through the arc of history, every time this debate has presented itself,

the dangers of self-governance and a Republican or Democratic form of governance

seemed every bit as clear and present in old world Europe as they do today.

Every time people think they're reliving a moment where this is the first time, which history is actually different today, that this time is different.

Turns out people have felt that way every time along the way.

Every time.

You know what?

I say for better or worse.

Are citizens in a democratic society going to get it wrong sometimes if they're free to make their own decisions, if they each get the vote to be able to?

Absolutely.

That's true.

You know what?

You learn.

Exactly.

You learn from those mistakes and you get better and you encounter hardships.

But guess what?

Hardship isn't the same thing as victimhood, especially if you were the person who gave yourself that hardship.

You can learn from it and strengthen yourself from it, individuals and as a society.

That's where I come out.

But that's not unique to today.

Today it's AI.

Before it was the telephone.

Another day before it was transatlantic travel.

Whatever.

All the way from to Elvis.

You know, it was going to rot our culture.

I mean, it's, it's

over and over again.

And that's where principles come into play.

Do you believe in the individual?

Yep.

And if the individual is paramount and sacred and sovereign, then you cannot make decisions for the collective.

That's right.

You have to have the individual.

And

we are not addressing any of the core issues that are real, true concerns.

And I don't think that technology or digitization or AI changes that fundamental question.

It doesn't.

It's a question about human nature.

It makes it more important for all of human history.

It makes it accentuate, makes it more important at this moment.

But we shouldn't take exception to the view that we would have taken 100 years ago or that we would have taken 1,000 years ago.

But the nature of human agency, that's the question.

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The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are called old, outdated, dusty documents that related to a different era.

No, because they are principles.

Exactly.

They're universal, eternal principles.

Now, maybe the document, the Constitution,

needs to be updated because we live in a new world where no one saw the government, the branches ceding all of their power to one branch.

Nobody saw corporate,

never in history did we ever think a corporation could be more powerful than the most powerful country on earth.

So

we didn't see that that document is not made for a group of people who are nefarious

and an uninformed or detached electorate that

will stand for a government making end runs

because all of this stuff is just an end run.

Your privacy, Fourth Amendment, can't do it.

But Facebook can.

That's right.

I'll tell you, I like your

approach to looking at history to sort of remove ourselves from the current moment to remind ourselves of some of these principles.

So there was actually, I'll give you a couple cases that have nothing to do with the moment we're in, but that just ring all the way true to echo into the moment we're in today.

But sometimes when people remove themselves from the present, they can see things more clearly.

So let's take a, you brought up the Fourth Amendment.

So there was actually a case,

I don't remember the name, I think it might have been called Hansen, but it was a case involving the drug searches.

Okay, so the war on drugs.

The government wanted to, at random, search people and to be able to see people if they had drugs on them or not.

After all, we had a war on drugs that we had to fight.

And fortunately, there was this pesky thing called the Fourth Amendment that stopped them from doing it.

So what they did was they passed a law for the railroads of this country that said that, you know what?

We're not going to, as the government, come onto your rail cars and search people randomly as to whether or not they're carrying drugs.

What we'll do is we'll just pass a really simple law that gives you immunity from any liability.

You can't be sued in state courts or anything else if you, the railroad operators, search your passengers and search your workers.

All we're saying is you can't be sued.

We're passing a federal law that says you can't be sued, but you guys do it.

That's the private sector doing it.

And And you don't have to do it.

You don't have to do it.

But by the way, we're also going to give you some threats through the back door and say that, yeah, we might regulate you a little bit more heavily if you don't really take on this shared challenge of fighting the war on drugs.

The Supreme Court stepped in and said, not so fast.

You can't use inducements as the government to get private parties to do through the back door what they couldn't get done through the front door under the Constitution.

So in a certain sense, yeah, you're right that our framers didn't necessarily expect it, but they set up a three-part system of government, including a Supreme Court that was interpreting interpreting and applying the Constitution that correctly found that you could not use this railroad immunity statute to get railroad companies to do what the government couldn't do directly.

I'm sure you see the ties, but Section 230 is exactly doing the same thing for technology companies today.

Give you another case.

This one was called Bantam Books, okay, if I'm remembering the case right.

It's a Pennsylvania case, where there's a bookstore owner that was selling a book that the local prosecutor didn't like very much.

So he said, I'd like for you to stop selling the book.

The bookstore owner says, no, this is my private shop.

Thank Thank you very much.

I will continue selling the book because I'm a private citizen running my own business.

So see you later.

Show your, close the door on your way out.

Prosecutor comes back and says, you know what?

I discovered you did a little something else over here, and I'm going to bring a case against you.

In fact, I'm going to prosecute you unless you take down that book.

Bookstore owner says, okay, now you got me.

He takes down the book.

Somebody wants to buy the book.

They said, hey, bookstore owner, you got to sell me the book.

The bookstore owner says, no, no, no, I can't sell you the book.

And normally you would say, hey, that's the decision of a private party, right?

That's just the free market.

Well,

that guy took the case all the way to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court.

The bookstore buyer or the buyer.

The buyer.

The buyer.

The buyer.

Yeah.

So it takes the case and the Supreme Court says, actually, we're going to find state action.

In the bookstore owner's decision.

Even though the bookstore owner decided not to sell the book,

actually, that wasn't the bookstore owner deciding it.

That was the government making that decision because they used a threat to get the private party to do what the private party otherwise wouldn't have done.

Sorry.

And sometimes these days we have to make a rhyme to make people remember things.

So the rhyme I've kind of coined on this is, if it is state action in disguise, then the Constitution still applies.

It's pretty simple.

Actually, the government can't use a private party to do through the back door what it can't do through the front door.

So the good news about those cases, when you're talking about a bookstore owner from the 70s in Pennsylvania or railroad cars in the war on drugs, this is something that we can take off our partisan jerseys and Republicans, Democrats and say, oh, yeah, yeah, no, I agree.

That was definitely the right decision the Supreme Court made in the railroad case.

That That was definitely the right decision the Supreme Court made in the bookstore owner case.

Well, guess what?

Wake up to what's happening now.

Okay.

If the government's making those same threats to a financial institution for not being able to lend to a driller or a fossil fuel producer, maybe you have the same problem.

If they're making threats to a social media company to take down misinformation or hate speech as the government defines it, when the private company is...

ultimately enacting, they're the ones clicking the button.

Correct.

But if there's a different force lurking behind the scene, maybe wake up and say that it was railroad companies back then.

It was bookstore companies back then.

Today it's tech companies and finance companies.

But the same principles have to apply.

And so I just love going through our history where every moment we think we are the first generation encountering a unique challenge that's presented itself.

Turns out most of our history, we've got 250 years and we got this far.

We're still the greatest nation on earth.

I think we figured some things out along the way.

We just have to apply them.

Yeah, we just have to apply them.

We have to have to apply them.

So

let's go back to the basics because we've talked a lot about

how the government is colluding with industry, and they think they're smart enough to make the decision.

So we see with global climate change, they have said fossil fuels, and they've included nuclear energy for some reason.

Natural gas.

Natural gas.

They've said,

this is not the future.

And so the governments have all decided that.

And then because they decided that, this is the friendly version of it, because they decided that

the

banks know, well, if the governments of the world are saying this, then I can't really give loans to these big energy companies or the car companies unless they're going in another direction because I know the laws are going on.

It's going to be there.

Yeah.

So

I'm going to give you an example here, Glenn, that

I'm going to excuse you, I guess excuse me for the complexity of it.

It's not actually that complicated, but it reveals the charade at the heart of that claim.

You're right.

You nailed it.

Climate risk is investment risk.

So what BlackRock will say, for example, is that the reason we're not investing behind companies that aren't participating in the green energy transition isn't because we want to effectuate a social agenda.

It's because we're capitalists.

And any capitalist worth the salt would know this is the way the world is going, that the laws are going to get passed, that if companies don't adapt that way and we don't use our corporate voting power as a shareholder to make companies behave that way, if we don't cause Exxon and Chevron to cut oil production, then they're going to go the way of the dodo.

That's exactly Larry Fink's language.

Well, there's a couple problems with that.

First of all, you have to then look at actually BlackRock's own role in driving that government policy.

Look at how many of their alumni are in this administration driving that policy.

So that's the most obvious critique.

But I think you dig a layer deeper and you see the farce at the heart of it.

Okay, so in order to believe that climate risk is investment risk, which by the way,

if you disagree with that in capital markets today, you're a pariah.

Someone was fired from HSBC for giving a presentation that said that climate risk is not a serious investment risk.

He's not even denying climate change or anything else.

He's just saying climate risk is not as big of an investment risk as you say it is.

He was fired.

Okay.

But wow.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

So I talked to him shortly after that.

I had a conversation to see if he was a good fit for Strive.

But

he was a guy in the UK.

So they put him on administrative leave for saying something so preposterous as making a claim that climate risk may not be as big of an investment risk as people claim it is.

So that's the scope of where we've gotten.

Not even talking about the climate change issue itself, but even denying that it's an investment risk is the new form of denialism.

Anyway, back to the point I was making is that, okay, that's what they say: is that climate risk is investment risk because the laws are going to change and investors need to take that into account.

And according to Al Gore and Larry Fink, you might be violating your fiduciary duty if you don't take those climate risks into account.

Okay, hold that thought.

Those same institutions, let's take BlackRock, for example, are advocating for investments into Chinese companies.

Larry Fink says China is the possibly greatest growth area for investment over the next decade.

Here's a fun fact that a lot of people don't know, okay?

When people buy a share of Alibaba or of Tencent, these are some of the biggest technology companies in the world, they're Chinese companies, and an American buys those shares, they think they own Alibaba or Tencent.

I'm going to share some facts with you.

They don't.

What they actually own is a Cayman shell company that has the name Alibaba and Tencent attached to it that has a contractual arrangement with the real Alibaba and Tencent to get a share of the profits.

Why is that?

Because there's a law in China that says that you can't be a non-Chinese person.

who owns a Chinese technology company or Chinese companies in many other sectors.

So it's illegal per Chinese law to own that.

So what they've created is these Cayman shell companies that have an entitlement to a profit stream and then they sell them to U.S.

investors saying that, hey, you're actually buying Alibaba in 10 cent basically and they market the heck out of it.

Why do I bring that question up?

Wow.

I mean, this is going to be like, I think people could lose a lot of money in the next four years.

If China invades Taiwan,

they're going to say that, you know, we don't recognize those contracts anymore because they were always illegal under our law.

What China's done in the meantime is they're not enforcing that.

Occasionally, courts have enforced it, actually.

So when Yahoo tried to get some acclaim on an ownership of an asset that it had that sat under Alibaba, Chinese courts actually said, Actually, your piece of paper is worthless because under Chinese law, we don't recognize foreign owners of these Chinese companies.

So they do selectively enforce it.

But most of the time, China's looked the other way because they said, okay, let's keep the party going.

But $2 trillion worth of market capitalization in the United States of these Chinese-listed stocks and used stocks in air quotes could be wiped out.

Now, why do I bring that up in the context of the climate discussion we had?

It shows the hypocrisy.

You know what I say?

China risk actually is investment risk.

Yeah.

It's not that there's some law that's going to be passed in the future that these companies might not be aligned with.

Under present law, under Chinese law today, it is literally illegal for an American to own a Chinese tech stock.

And so we've created these Kakamame Phantom Cayman Island vehicles that are what trade on the New York Stock Exchange.

And yet BlackRock won't say a word about that, which is a clear and present investment risk today, China investment risk, but make up this myth that climate risk is investment risk even though they don't say a word about the china risk right today that the laws will change 20 years from now and we're so sure about that well we ignore the laws that exist today that create those risks you follow i'm saying yo i absolutely do can i can i kind of shift gears a little bit on this i just read that china pulled Chinese stocks out of the stock market.

Now, is that only tech stocks that this law applies to?

Well, this is part of a broader trend.

So what you probably saw recently was PetroChina China and Sinopec agreed to delist from the New York

decided to delist from the New York Stock Exchange magically after Nancy Pelosi visits Taiwan.

Probably the best thing she's done in her life as an elected official, if you ask me.

But anyway,

what this means is that

this is a long story, but they're voluntarily delisting.

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Now, what they're saying is the reason they're delisting is because they're being asked to abide by the same disclosure standards as American companies, which which for years they got a pass on.

Yes, right.

So BlackRock, this goes back to the BlackRock story.

BlackRock actually quietly lobbied for Chinese companies to have lower listing standards in the United States.

That was part of the mutual back scratching with the CCP for getting a license to be an asset manager in China, which is a great growth opportunity for BlackRock.

Well, the U.S.

has woken up to that and says, okay, at the end of the day, if there's a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange and it's a Chinese company, why should they get a special pass relative to any other company listed on the New York Stock Exchange?

We're going to ask you over three years to phase in a disclosure regime that matches the U.S.

standards.

So what the Chinese companies did is they said that we don't want to disclose information or have U.S.

auditors have the ability to audit the financials of our companies.

So we're going to delist from the New York Stock Exchange.

But they also did it at a politically convenient moment where they make the CCP, the real daddy, happy because Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan.

The CCP is not happy about that.

So Petro China and Sinopec, you know, bend the knee-to-daddy and say that actually we're going to stick it to the U.S.

and say that we're going to criticize the U.S.

for requiring these equivalent disclosures of Chinese companies and delist.

So, that's what we're starting to see.

Now,

what I worry about,

just from an American investor perspective, is that so many investors, even in the funds they own, will have exposure to these Chinese stocks.

And every time I say Chinese stocks, I put them in air quotes because they're not, in many cases, the actual stocks, especially for tech companies and certain industries in China where they don't allow foreign owners.

Let's say they delist.

What are those pieces of paper going to be worth?

Nothing.

In China.

Nothing is the answer.

Now, in good times, when China and the U.S.

have good relationships, China will say we honor that.

They'll look the other way.

It's like the equivalent of government deciding to not enforce its own rules.

God really.

But the moment that China and the U.S.

have geopolitical tension on an issue they care about, like Taiwan, easy weapon for them to say is actually $2 trillion of value that traded on the New York Stock Exchange or traded in American markets.

We're just going to wipe out and say we're worth zero because our law all along said that there couldn't be a foreign owner of a Chinese company.

And you know the best part about this get to the global aspect of this the wto at that time mark my words when this happens will say that actually

technically china's right the world trade organization because you know what we can't enforce as the wto a contract that was actually illegal under chinese law so why are americans buying up shares of chinese companies that actually weren't even shares of the companies but were shares of cayman island corporations that chinese law didn't recognize as legal it's because financial institutions like blackrock have been pushing it the the whole time, not at all highlighting those risks

while picking up the figment of imagination of climate risk as investment risk, because supposedly the laws are going to change 40 years from now.

That's how ridiculous the farce is.

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I'm a self-educated guy, okay?

You've gone Harvard, Yale, self-educated guy.

You know what?

I respect the hell out of you.

Thank you.

But I was called an imbecile in 2006 and 2007 when I was saying, none of this stuff that the banks are doing makes any sense.

It will collapse.

You start to have higher energy prices.

People will not be able to afford these mortgages that they shouldn't have had in the first place.

That's right.

And everyone said to me, all of the experts, because I was living in New York City at the time, Glenn, you don't understand.

We have systems for this.

And I got to the point before the crash of saying to them, you don't understand, you overeducated, arrogant boob.

All you have to do is have something go wrong with the system.

That's right.

So we have made so many things now.

God, if I hear this one more time from these educated boobs,

where they are saying to me, Glenn, Yes, the dollar is bad and we've got problems with debt and everything else, but we're the best currency out there.

And I've said to them, You are building your entire

life

around the fact that you don't think anyone in the world will say, You know what, this is going down the crap can.

We're already down the crap can.

We need something new.

And they'll do like what the BRIC countries are doing right now: putting together a new

global reserve currency.

You are either an idiot or so arrogant,

or there is something else going on because everything you were just talking about, the China stocks.

God, you know, that.

Yep.

And China, we are headed towards confrontation, God forbid, with China.

That is going to add.

And that is investment risk.

Right.

That is investment risk.

Right.

So, how can you, within good conscience, tell American investors that climate risk is investment risk because 20 years from now the laws are going to have to change, by the way, because we're the people pushing for those laws to change.

Right.

Well, look them in the eye and say that we're going to sell you Chinese phantom stocks, even though we know there's a collision course coming that could make the value of those zero.

What's the reason why?

I mean, I think a lot of this comes down to incentives, right?

The people at the top do not have aligned incentives with the people who they're marketing to at the end of the day, the people who they're in charge of leading.

Their incentives are completely detached from one another.

Even a lot of those bankers that might have laughed at you in New York City, they're not dumb.

Okay, they knew what they were doing.

Their bonuses get paid out in cash at the end of the year.

Correct.

Okay, you put that in a house that they own, or you put that into a plane that they own.

That's a hard asset that even if the stock market crashes afterwards, that I still have hard assets that I basically cashed out when times were good.

So I think a lot of this starts with just raw incentive failures for the people at the top.

At the end of the day, BlackRock generates a fee from the assets they manage, including in China.

They only get to generate that fee if they keep the CCP happy.

They only keep the CCP happy if they shut up about the kinds of risks that the CCP doesn't want American investors to hear about.

So half of the story, I think, comes down to incentives.

I think the other half of the story, though, Glenn, comes from the everyday citizen over the last...

10 years having blinders on.

And one of the things I love about, as I've started more recently, since you and I began talking, I actually listened to your program a lot more now, knowledge is power, right?

I agree with you.

The empowerment from having your eyes open, once you see it, you can't unsee it.

I know.

But you have to see it the first time.

And

I think we got caught up in this cultural moment.

Some of this, I attribute it to sort of my generation, millennial generation and younger, but I think it's true of all generations in America right now where we were so

hungry for a cause and purpose and meaning and identity at a moment where the kinds of things that used to fill that hunger for cause and purpose, right?

Pick your favorite one, faith, patriotism, hard work, whatever happened to that, family, whatever might have given you purpose and meaning.

We lived in a moment, and this is also in the aftermath of the 08 crisis, right around that same period with this cultural trend in this country, where we have this hunger for purpose that we used to fill with these other things that we lost.

And so we have this vacuum and we were so hungry for a cause and purpose and meaning and identity that we latched onto

whatever it was that was presented to us.

So then you look at the incentives for half the story.

The guys on the top have an incentive to create the global climate catastrophe or whatever the religious narrative of the day is.

And then to sell that to you.

But we were, we, I mean, we as a people latched onto it because there was this vacuum at the heart of an entire generation.

It is the reason why, it's the reason why I pulled back from the Tea Party because the Tea Party was becoming not about principles.

You know, if our side does it, then it's okay.

Don't pay attention to it.

That's wrong.

That's right.

I agree with you.

I've been on the air television since 2006.

I've never had an American flag as part of my set, logo, or anything.

Because in 2006, I could see.

Everybody is loving the American flag.

It's no longer just a little representation of principles.

It's becoming a party and a movement that is a fetish.

Yes.

Yeah.

And it can't be about that.

I agree with you.

And I think that goes to this human need.

One of the things about, we were talking about earlier about fundamental human nature.

We're free agents in the world.

And that's the beautiful side of our autonomy as individuals and human beings.

But we also have a frailty as human beings.

And one of our frailties is we need to believe in something higher and greater than ourselves.

It's Nietzsche.

It's Nietzsche.

Any thinking person through human history recognizes that basic human need we all have.

And the good news is we have the kinds of things that human beings have created to fill that need that are time-tested.

Religion, I think, fits that description.

I think national identity fits that description.

That's why there's uprising all around the world because of the loss of national identity.

Yes.

The loss of national identity.

The elites say that's not good.

That's not a good idea.

It's hating on religion, too, by the way.

Right.

But you know, exactly.

So

who knows that that allows their new religion to fill that void.

Correct.

Picorism, wokeism, climate changeism, whatever, whatever is scientism, which is the same thing as science, filling that void.

And so it was this two-part thing going on where they had the incentives to do it top-down, but they had a susceptible population that was vulnerable to being sold this new form of psychological snake oil.

Teaching an entire generation, but this is what the whole birth of woke capitalism was.

This is half the story.

You teach an entire generation that you can fill your moral hunger by going to Ben and Jerry's and ordering a cup of ice cream with a cup of morality on the side without realizing that you don't really satisfy a moral hunger with fast food.

We were hungry for more substantial fare, but we fell for it because we were living in this generational moment where we lacked that sense of cause and purpose and meaning and identity.

So I think part of this is dismantling it top-down, but the other half of it has to be filling that vacuum with something more meaningful that we miss.

And that's the way I look at this.

So is this why we have a lack of,

you know, we, as conservatives,

I want to preserve our history, the true history, bad and good, but I'm not looking to return to that.

Exactly.

Okay.

I'm looking to go forward with workable principles that can unite all of us.

And there is so, I am.

I'm an optimistic catastrophist.

Okay.

I like that description.

Thank you.

And

I'm a wannabe futurist.

I look at technology.

I'm fascinated by it.

I'm thrilled by it.

But I am also terrified that nobody seems to be looking at the big ethical questions and are talking about them with human beings at this point.

Because it's just going to be in our face and people just go, ah, that.

You know what I mean?

It's not good.

And there are these big things that we can look at and say, because I've said that.

Look, your life in 2035, forget about all the ESG and everything else.

Let's just say that things were sane and the free market ruled, okay?

And the Constitution, we had a rule of law.

Capitalism and democracy are back.

Right, okay.

You're the life that is coming through technology is completely unrecognizable from today.

And that doesn't have to be a scary thing.

It's just the industrial revolution jam-packed into the next 10 years.

You're going to go from a farmer to living in a city.

That much of a change.

And it's exciting.

I think we'll solve cancer.

We can solve all these questions that have plagued humankind.

No one is talking about that in an inspirational

place.

I agree with you, Glenn.

I think that

this is separate than the topics you and I usually talk about, but what is really interesting to me is, so I would draw a couple rules for the road that prepare us for that future.

Okay, when we're able to harness the power of an, I think,

at this point, inevitable revolution of technology

that unlocks both promise in medicine and other spheres of our lives, from the daily convenience to the way we're able to live our daily lives and get more out of a day.

Great.

But where are the risks?

So there's a couple rules of the road that, again, no one's talking about, but I think we ought to be talking about more.

One is, I think, the distinction between kids and adults.

I think one of the things we're missing is a generation of fully formed citizens that are no longer vulnerable to have their weak points preyed upon by advertisers, but also by technology itself.

So

I'm kind of become, I could have never imagined these words coming out of my mouth 10 years ago, but I'm coming around to the view that, you know what, if we say you can't smoke a cigarette until you're 18 years old,

you probably shouldn't be able to use addictive social media till you're 18 years old either.

Now, when you're an adult, you're a fully formed citizen, right?

We should create the cultural institutions, civic institutions, education, family institutions that basically create a fully formed citizen that isn't vulnerable to be preyed upon.

But what social media companies, their entire model is built upon, the algorithms underlying them, is to prey on psychic insecurities that cause you to click on this, not this, more quickly.

And that's what the AI works on: is really the brilliance of modern AI is in part the ability to gain a window into your soul that I could not possibly have in your soul.

Individual,

collective,

individual level that you don't even have to, that I don't even have into my own soul.

That's what these algorithms do.

But I think that if we have fully formed, confident,

well-acculturated citizens, that makes it, I think, a lot less problematic.

It's just less problematic, right?

And it'll find the weak spots, but

it's a different problem when we're now starting with an entire generation of kids who have themselves been shaped by the algorithm.

I'll tell you what to mean.

So it's not just that the algorithm is better at selling you something or getting addicted to TikTok.

When a kid sees a TikTok video, the way the kid behaves in the real world is informed by TikTok.

So the TikTok world we see online becomes the way those kids act out their reality.

Do you remember?

That is AI working.

You remember, I don't know.

How old are you?

I'm 36.

Oh, why am I saying that?

I'm 37 as of last week.

I turned 37.

I just turned 37.

So I remember the early days of MTV.

And

the question then was,

is MTV, because they had the little social group, remember that?

Is it reflecting the world or is it making the world?

Correct.

It's exactly it.

So it's a tick-tock question of our time.

I think that is answered, though, now.

It is answered now.

It's answered now.

Because the algorithms do something fundamentally different.

Yes.

Because TV is a linear meeting.

It's a lot of real-time.

But this does it in such an iterative, micro-real-time millisecond moment that they're actually shaping the world.

So it's a rule of the road one anyway.

You say we should be talking about this.

I agree.

Let's talk about it in the open.

And this, you know, some conservatives might chafe at this, some liberals might chapel at this.

I don't care.

I would have chafed at this 10 years ago.

But I think we've got to draw a hard distinction between the way we think about the interface between kids and technology and the way we think about the interface between adults and fully formed citizens and technology.

Because part of it's living in a free world, but even in a free world, even with free autonomous citizens, we all recognize that a 10-year-old is not yet a free autonomous citizen, needs to be acculturated into society before he's able to live as a free autonomous citizen.

And I don't think we're drawing that distinction right now.

So that's the first one.com.

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Not available in all states.

The second one, and I think this is really important.

I mean, with the rise of the metaverse, okay, and Facebook's rebranding itself to meta, etc., the rise of the metaverse, is we need to be in a position to draw boundaries between the physical universe and the digital universe.

I think the digital universe

empowers us to live our lives in the physical universe more effectively, more healthily, overcoming cancer, overcoming other medical conditions through the genomics revolution, having the convenience of food delivered to our door if we want it at a time when we would have had to go 30 minutes to be able to get it.

That's 30 minutes we can spend doing something else.

That's great.

But I think that where we lose the risk is when the boundary between the physical world and the digital world is dissolved.

That is what the promise of the metaverse is all about.

At the end of the day, we require this space as a sanctuary.

from the otherwise ever-expanding digital world that we've created.

So the way I think about this is we need certain principles, rules of the road for the brave new world we're entering.

And so long as we're able to erect those boundaries, the boundaries between the physical world and the digital world, the boundaries between adulthood and childhood,

then we are able to at least still be the people who are in charge as the autonomous agents, to leverage the power and the promise and the inspiration that comes from that technological revolution.

Yes, we should find the inspiration in it.

But we can only find the inspiration if we can ultimately protect ourselves from otherwise the ever-expansive force that it would have on our lives.

And it's not that hard.

But we've got to be able to talk about it.

Can we go a step further on this?

I didn't plan on talking about any of this.

Could I ask you to consider a step farther on this?

I am, you know, they could already, just by the way they rank results, they can change the way you vote.

Absolutely.

80 or 90%

change the way you vote.

They already do.

They already do.

Yeah.

I'm one of the only people that I think believes that the Third Amendment

about quartering soldiers is like, oh, that's old timey.

I think that's happening right now.

I think with the government involvement with these big tech companies, these tech companies are.

holding our papers.

You know,

they're collecting all of the information much more than a soldier would if they had to be standing there in the house because you would have your guard up.

Yep.

Okay.

So they're gathering all of this information.

They know what we think.

They know what buttons to push.

I mean, this is really kind of a nefarious thing, but it's already happening at some level.

It's interesting.

I mean, I think I've thought about this in the context of the First and Fourth Amendments deeply, and also in terms of the even Article 1 and Article II, in terms of lawmaking and the enforcement has a checks and balances system that you can't evade by effectively passing those laws.

I have not yet thought about it in the form of the Third Amendment.

In real time, just reacting to you, I think I find that especially compelling when you smoke out the lurking state action

behind the scene of that tech company.

Because then actually, it's not some new problem, it's just the old problem,

disguised in modern clothing.

Correct.

So, in a certain sense, what you just described is really

an original take, but actually, you don't have to be that imaginative to get there.

It's really just hiding in the veneer of modern technology.

virtual soldier if they are in bed it's it's it is a state actor it's not right it is not even a virtual it is a soldier right disguised in virtual clothes correct right so is so to take that a step further what i'm concerned about i mean we all

you know who edward bernays was the i don't okay he was the guy who they called it at the time uh in the 1920s or 1910s he was the really the birth uh he was the father of modern advertising.

Okay, when he started it, he named it propaganda.

Okay, after the Second World War, they just clearly said all of it is advertising.

But he went in and how do we deliver subtle messages?

How do we do this?

How do we bend people here?

In his words, how do we take America, a country that is

totally centered on needs

and make them center on wants?

Okay,

Wow.

His transition.

Very interesting stuff.

His cousin was Freud.

Is that right?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, wow.

Run to the family.

Oh, yeah.

So they have to do that.

It's phenomenal.

The impact.

So I got to learn about this.

So

I frequently say Glint that capitalism would be the perfect system for organizing any society's affairs.

I describe it as the least imperfect system, but I would describe it as the perfect system for organizing society's affairs so long as our wants match our needs yes and to the extent that you're going to find something wrong with contemporary capitalism it can be explained i would posit 100

by the delta between our wants and needs that daylight is what allows the social media companies

to pick at the fact that if you wanted what you needed there was no gap space to pick at correct but it's it's the extent to which our our as human beings our wants diverge from our needs

that that you're able to see the failures of capitalism by creating opportunity for someone to pick at the difference.

And the difference between the two, I have a word for that.

It's a crude word.

It's a rough word.

We call that virtue.

The difference between our wants and needs.

And so virtue, to me, is a precondition for capitalism to work.

It's not a product of capitalism.

Yes.

It is a precondition for capitalism to work, which just relates to our earlier discussion, that idea of faith or patriotism or whatever that was.

Those are the building blocks.

I was like, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.

And people forget the side of Adam Smith, actually.

People forget the side of Adam Smith.

I've never read moral sentiments.

History delivers us these coincidences.

1776 was the year of both the wealth of nations and the Declaration of Independence.

It wasn't just one of them.

Both of them are America's parents.

And I think that

virtue, capitalism without virtue is something that becomes a self-fulfilling beast that eats itself from within.

But virtue as a precondition for capitalism,

that's the missing element.

It's the missing shade of, in my next book, what I call kind of the missing shade of red.

You know, David Hume talked about the missing shade of blue.

It was this experiment for how he talked about induction and how we're able to learn things from prior knowledge we have.

And so he had different shades of colors.

And his experiment was the missing shade of blue.

I kind of call it the missing shade of red, talking about today's conservative movement, missing this affirmative alternative vision of virtue.

That's our missing shade of red.

We're really good at taking a hammer to the poison, less good at actually filling that void with something more meaningful.

I just had, we've gotten to the question on the other,

we could go days.

But I just had a conversation with somebody about that.

And

it is the idea that Martin Luther King had.

You have got to be a disciplined, virtuous, spiritual being to fight.

You have to do that.

And I talk to these Christians and they're like, yeah, but we got to go in and fight.

We're like, yeah, you stand up for what's right, but you don't violate your principles.

You have to know what you're fighting for, correct?

And not be afraid.

There's no way around that.

You become deputized as a mercenary for someone else's battle without even knowing that you got deputized, right?

And so that's, I think, and I think this is where I think the conservative movement

needs to go from here.

Is it about owning the libs or is it about standing for some sort of affirmative future vision?

Okay.

We did the own the libs thing.

And, you know, I mean, 2024, it says Ronald Courtman, is there a leader who's going going to step?

I don't know.

I mean,

it's not even in politics, though.

It's just even for our culture, and it's even beyond conservatism.

It's the revival of an American movement.

Are we going to have leaders in different spheres of our lives, educational, cultural, political, in the market, who are able to fill that void and that vacuum with something more rich and meaningful that dilutes the poison to irrelevance?

Or are we going to remain obsessed with our addiction to just taking the hammer to the poison one at a time?

Because that's a game no one's going to win because there's going to be a new poison that fills it as soon as we take a whack-a-mole to the old poison instead.

And that's what we, I say, we, myself included, yourself included, we need to do a better job of that.

We have forgotten that just because we can doesn't mean we should.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, exactly.

The strangest part of virtue is at times as well.

Yes, yes.

Standing up and yet being restrained.

And I think that is actually, but

I actually think that is the best way to fight.

It is.

If you're fighting against a bottle of poison,

you know, you take a jackhammer to it, the poison's still spilled on the table.

You might have felt like you defeated it.

You dilute it to irrelevance with gallons worth of actual,

what I call virtue, but gallons worth of actual substance of what you affirmatively care about and stand for.

You dilute the poison

to irrelevance.

You're also doing, if you hit it with a hammer, you will continue to do what the the left is doing now that's right and that's that's only making people stronger and smaller you know they'll they'll shut up i want to know who the clansman is on my in my neighborhood you know what i mean i want to know who they are but they'll they'll clam up they'll clam up you were you are so right about that so this is my when i spike when i speak to left-leaning audiences one of the things i i've um

tried to be as careful as I can.

There's so few people today who are able to speak to audiences outside of their ecotourism.

I traveled the country after I wrote Woke Inc.

and

went to college campuses, went to universities with far left-leaning audiences.

I don't care about the politics of it.

But

one of the things that I point out is,

let's just take a psychological analogy.

Any psychologist worth his salt, and let's say there's a patient who comes in.

who suffers from latent anxiety, but he's long over it.

It's like mostly gone.

And he's just coming in for a checkup visit, you know, a decade later.

The last thing you want to do as a psychologist is scold him and yell at him, don't be anxious, don't be anxious, don't be anxious, because you're going to ultimately take that last burning ember and throw kerosene on it.

And I think that's what the left has done in this country to the, it's what you call the superego in Freudian terms, throwing kerosene on the last burning embers of, say, pick your favorite R word, racism, pick your favoriteism.

Okay, it was quietly just burning, the last final burning embers are just burning itself out.

You yell at somebody, don't be racist, don't be racist, don't be racist, and if you are, we're coming for you.

You're just throwing kerosene and creating a new wave of not just the anti-white racism from anti-from the anti-racist movement, but creating now a new wave of anti-black racism that otherwise wouldn't have existed if it weren't for the Gestapo approach that we took to smoking out.

So

what does this mean for us?

Well, we can't fall prey.

to the same problem in reverse because you inflame the very thing you thought you were extinguishing.

You have to fill it with some other more rich and meaningful, you have to fill that void with some other sense of more rich and meaningful purpose and substance.

That's what we need to do.

That's what I'm saying.

There's the lack of leadership.

Who is going to step up?

And Elon Musk is one of the only people that I know that is doing this, that will step up like John Kennedy and say, that's who we are.

That's where we're going.

And not through force, but have such such an aspiration such an aspirational vision that we can all go that's that's why we won our independence is not because of anything other than we hold these truths to be self-evident that's right that was such and still is

such an aspirational goal that had never been uttered before.

Now we just think that's the way it is when it's not.

Yeah, exactly.

You know what I mean?

You always assume that it's still aspirational.

How do we get people to understand we've got to start looking forward?

And that's why I'm not particularly optimistic about our politics as the mechanism for delivering that leadership.

I mean, we're so ossified and the system is built such that right now that's not going to come out of our politics.

I'm more optimistic in the other free spheres of our lives, like DeMarcum.

You brought it brought up Elon Musk.

You know,

I loved what he was on the cusp of doing, and we'll see how the story ends with respect to Twitter.

Yes.

Now, now comes a pragmatist in me, okay, is say that, yes, that's the way to do this.

Let's do it by picking places where we can actually deliver victories and then use those victories to deliver more victories.

Something more meaningful that's galvanizing, that gets people to understand we're doing fulfilling a fundamental human need together.

I mean, that's why I started with the energy sector, for example, right?

Because Elon's challenge at Twitter is that.

I don't really care about the Twitter.

I mean, I do, but the Twitter thing, he is.

But you're talking about, you know, I'm talking about going to Mars, going Going to

planetary.

Exactly.

So where do we need to go?

And I think the same thing with respect to innovation in American energy.

Absolutely.

Nuclear power, whatever the case may be.

Now, that smokes out.

So one of the reasons I like that discussion is it smokes out some of the poison that you might not otherwise see.

Because you take the opposition to nuclear energy right now, right?

So supposedly there's a climate crisis which needs to have energy sources that we need to sort of rely on that don't emit carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Okay, we can debate that until our faces are blue, but if we take that as a premise for now, okay, well, great.

Nuclear energy is actually one of the most promising ways to have a sustainable form of energy that's carbon neutral, and yet the very opponents of fossil fuels, many of them at least, are opponents of nuclear energy.

So what's going on there?

Well, the problem with nuclear energy, and I think it's worth seeing this because it's representative of other discussions we would have too on other subjects, but the problem with nuclear energy is that it's too effective at solving the energy crisis, which means that you can't load in a bunch of other poisonous agendas in the veneer of solving the energy crisis.

Because if you solve the energy crisis, then you can't pack in all of those other agendas.

It's almost what Tesla was told by, I think, Aster at the time.

Wait a minute, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Free energy?

No, I can't invest unless I can put a meter on it.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

And it's the same kind of thing.

If I can't get my agenda through.

That's right.

That's right.

And so

that's another side benefit of the model you just laid out, which is let's be aspirational and go together to a shared future that we can all get behind as free citizens if we want to.

But then the people who may not, there's many reasons why people may not want to go in a given direction, but it smokes out those reasons that otherwise we're hiding behind the surface because nuclear energy, oh, supposedly we opposed it because it was not effective at solving the energy crisis.

Now, actually, if you look at the facts, it is.

The reason to oppose it is that it might be too good at actually failing us from doing the thing that we were going to do by capping fossil fuels, which is delivering equity between the developed world and the developing world,

which was actually the real agenda, which is to say that actually, if we make Western nations stop burning fossil fuels, maybe their growth rates will actually taper out and we can even things out.

So, nuclear energy, you know, still trades that myth.

Let me ask, because I think you can prove it to be right or wrong.

About 2007, I remember I was on the air, and I don't remember what we were talking about, but I remember having this like light bulb went off.

And I went, wait a minute,

if you really want to uh

you know make sure that there's equity then what has to happen is you you've already tried to bring the world up to American standards and you can do that it's just going to take a long time if you don't want to spend all that time you just bring America down that's right that's where everybody and that's what's happening and that's exactly this debate right so so so that was that was what the goal was disguised as addressing a climate climate agenda by reducing emissions, by disproportionately reducing those emissions by reducing production and utilization in places like the United States.

But then comes along a different solution, like nuclear energy, that says, you know what?

We don't have to actually do that if we're actually able to fill our energy needs as well and supplement them through nuclear energy.

But wait a minute.

If we do that, then we lose our...

vehicle for advancing the global equity agenda because that doesn't bring the United States or the West down.

It actually allows them to continue growing and prospering in the way they have.

That's the source of some people's opposition to it.

Now, for other people, you would say, actually, you might change their minds and say that, actually, you know what?

If that does solve the problem, I will get on board with that.

So that's that, I think that's anyway.

That's the promise of affirmative solutions.

Correct.

Is that on one hand, you'll bring along people who you didn't otherwise wouldn't have otherwise brought along, and you smoke out the hypocrisy at the heart of what was really the opposition to the forward-looking agenda in the first place.

So

let me switch to a positive solution,

and that is what you've done with Strive and DRL.

Explain and

tell me how it's going to make a difference.

Yeah, I mean, this is where I got disillusioned with politics.

I say, let's solve these problems through the actual market itself, right?

So I founded Strive earlier this year to compete with BlackRock to say that, you know what, the world's largest asset managers, are using trillions of dollars of other people's money, your money, our money, the money of the people who are watching this, to invest in American companies, but to mandate that those companies adopt social and political agendas that

most of these Americans don't agree with.

Right.

Not only that, but they are taking many people's retirement funds and then forcing these companies to do something that BlackRock will say, well, you're probably going to have to take a hit for 10 years, but it's the future.

No, wait a minute.

That's my retirement fund.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And so that I think is, I don't use this word lightly, I mean, I think that is the largest financial scam of the 21st century.

It is a fiduciary breach.

It is a large-scale, multi-trillion dollar breach of trust.

And the problem, Glenn, is nobody stepped up to the table to solve it.

So I didn't think I was going to actually be doing this.

I thought I was done.

I mean, I had a successful biotech business.

It was a multi-billion dollar company, got some drugs approved.

Great.

I thought I was writing books and moving on to like a different phase of my career after business.

But then I went around to the asset management industry.

I sat down with CEOs of other large asset managers.

And one of them, it was a particularly shameful experience,

in my opinion, where I sit down with him and he says that I agree with everything you're saying.

I can't say it publicly because CalPERS and the state of New York might pull their money and they're big clients.

And then I look at his statements and they're the exact same statements, indistinguishable from what Larry Fink would be saying on a given day.

So it spreads where the market isn't fixing this for a whole bunch of structural reasons.

You know what I said is, okay, well, if you're beholden by your legacy clients, and by the way, they do a lot of business in China too, this other asset manager I'm talking about.

So if you're doing business in China and China wants you to behave in a certain way and California and New York demand that you behave a certain way, guess what?

I don't have those legacy commitments.

So let me start a new asset manager.

And by the way, I'm going to call it Strive.

And I'm not going to do business in China because I want to actually serve American clients.

in their own best interest.

And I can't be a fiduciary to you if I have the CCP's boot on my neck.

And what Strive is going to do is going to invest money in those same markets that BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard are, in the same format of funds, index funds that just track the market or track a given sector, passively managed funds, but with a key difference.

We deliver a mandate as a shareholder.

This isn't an ask.

This isn't a suggestion.

This is a mandate as a shareholder that you, the companies, behave exclusively according to what allows you to deliver excellent products and services to your customers.

over any other agenda, social agenda, political agenda, I don't care.

That's it.

And you maximize shareholder value that way.

No No agenda.

Not a right-wing agenda, not a left-wing agenda, a product-focused, customer-centric agenda.

Do you believe we have to actually demand that from companies now?

Well,

because of the ESG movement's chokehold on the economy, the irony is what would have been obvious became a contrarian opportunity.

So

you actually have talked to CEOs of these large energy companies.

I have, absolutely.

And what do they say?

So this is why, so we started with, so Strive is an asset manager company with Black River.

Our first fund that we launched on the New York Stock Exchange was a U.S.

energy fund.

And I specifically knew this was the right place to start because this was the sector most damaged by the demands of the ESG movement.

So when BlackRock and State Street and Vanguard voted in favor of scope three emissions caps at Chevron, which requires Chevron to take responsibility for the fuel emitted by an Amazon Prime truck delivering food to your house,

Chevron's board recommended against it.

When they put the climate activist directors onto Exxon's board, Exxon's board had first said, no, no, no, we don't want these climate activists on our board, but they voted them in favor anyway.

So what I saw with the oil and gas sector, with the energy sector, is these aren't the employees of Twitter.

They actually want this new shareholder mandate.

So it's not like we're going to have to bring a shareholder mandate and change the behavior of employees.

They're waiting for a white knight to show up and deliver them the post-ESG mandate.

I gave a speech to the Entercom conference in Denver earlier this month.

I got a standing ovation at the end of the speech from a room full of oil and gas executives because they're hungry for a new shareholder to mandate them to behave this way.

And that was the power of what we saw with the launch of Drill.

I mean, it was, so do you know, Drill, DRDL, was that was the first such fund we list on the New York Stock Exchange.

We made it over $100 million in the first week.

We're well on track to making it past $200 million as of the second week.

You told me at one point, if you could get up to a billion dollars by the, I think you said the end of the year, it would send some shockwaves.

It would turn heads in capital markets.

It would send shockwaves through the boardrooms of the U.S.

energy industry because BlackRock's U.S.

Energy Index Fund is actually not as big as you'd expect.

It's only about $2.1 billion.

So if this new first-time asset manager is able to harness the voice of the everyday citizen to deliver this new mandate, the executives of the energy industry are saying, you know what?

That's where the puck is going, guys.

That's how we're going to behave.

Thank you very much, ESG.

We'll put that in the rearview mirror.

And the beauty of it, Gunn, one of the things I loved about our first couple weeks was the average trade size.

So when

the DRLL trades on the New York Stock Exchange, the average trade for us was in the first week, it was something like less than $5,000 compared to the other ETFs that got to over $100 million in the first week.

So those are the big ones.

We had over $100 million the first week as well.

They were like millions of dollars on average by comparison.

And to me, that's the power of what we can do through the market is really this

positive uprising.

I mean, in the positive sense, the awakening of everyday citizens who are able to say, you know what, I don't have to just vote every November.

I vote every day with my dollars, and I can use my own dollars to not only make industries more valuable, which hopefully allows all of us to make more money in the long run as an economy, but also to deliver the voice that matches my values to corporate America.

And my values for many Americans is to tell energy companies to be great energy companies, to say that if you're an American oil company, you should drill.

If you're an American gas company, you should frack.

You should do whatever allows you to be most successful over the long run without regard to Klaus Schwab's or Larry Fink's environmentalist agenda or cultural agenda or social agenda.

And it's a free country.

If you want to deliver that message with your capital, great.

You can go to BlackRock.

You can go somewhere else.

It's a free country.

I'm not saying people shouldn't be free to do that with their own money, but for everybody else, there wasn't even an option.

And I think that's what we wanted to bring to the table.

And I'm optimistic that if we can change the U.S.

energy sector that way, we can do it to every sector of the economy and hopefully go beyond partisanship to reawaken the true promise of both american capitalism and american democracy one more thing i just want to get a comment from you on this yesterday saudi arabia uh

kind of not good on the es or g

just invested about four what was it four hundred and fifty million dollars uh into blackrock yeah i saw this i saw this announcement dating blackrock at saudi arabia it's really it's really interesting to me how it's sort of ESG for thee and the rest of the world for me.

That's kind of BlackRock's market.

If I'm Saudi Arabia at this point,

I don't mind crippling America.

Oh, yeah, it's your market share because you need to supply the market, right?

So the more of an energy shortage there is, if American energy companies aren't filling the void, it's Saudi Arabia, China, and Russia.

The good news is, Glenn, at least as of now, I don't think it's too late.

Everyday citizens are empowered to be able to do it.

And, you know, is it great for my business or whatever if our ETFs get a lot of money?

Sure, but there's better ways to make money.

And I wasn't even in the phase of my life where this was a priority for me.

This is about actually empowering the voice of the everyday citizen through the market, which is going to make, I believe, a much bigger difference for our culture than our politics.

And DRLL is just the first step of that journey.

So you are inspiring.

You really are.

Back at you, brother.

I mean, thank you for having me today.

You been, this is a lot of fun.

Just a reminder: I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.

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