Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - The Rise of Woke Capitalism

Episode Date: October 8, 2021

We're launching a new podcast! This episode is a sneak peek into Truth over Tribe. If you commercialize social activism or service, does that cheapen social justice? Should CEOs of a company use their company's platform to enforce their ethical agenda? In today's episode, Keith and Patrick take a look at these questions and many more. They discuss the moral limitations to what capitalism should be involved in. They start with LLCs and the dark side that can live in an LLC. Then you'll hear a deep dive into shareholder and stakeholder capitalism and the problems that can come with each: dangerous hypocrisy, covering up wrongdoings, a lack of social trust, and more. Listen now for a complete discussion on the rise of woke capitalism. Subscribe to https://podcast.choosetruthovertribe.com/public/98/Truth-Over-Tribe-9f32ad1e (Truth over Tribe). Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life in the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. I'm Tanya Wilman. And I'm Patrick Miller. If you've been listening to our podcast for a while, you probably remember that we occasionally have longer episodes. We'll go on for a lot longer than 10 minutes and talk about a topic at length. Now, here's the problem with those episodes. They are neither 10 minutes, nor are they quite Bible talks.

So Keith and I decided we wanted to start a new podcast where we do that thing. once a week. It's called Truth Over Tribe. We'll be talking about all kinds of topics that I don't think nice church people are supposed to talk about, but we think it's important to think through not just our political life, but our cultural life through the lens of Jesus. What does King Jesus have to say about these things? So here's the cool part. We are going to put these episodes right here on 10-minute Bible talks, probably for the first five or six weeks. You're going to hear interviews with people like John Mark Comer, Justin Gibney, Oz Guinness. We're going to talk about topics like how businesses have become woke. We'll talk about tribalism and does Jesus care about politics and even

the rise of the religious rights. We've got a lot of really interesting topics coming up. I hope that you will take the time right now, not just to listen to this episode, which is great, but also to go and subscribe to Truth Over Tribe on your podcast player. Do it right now. Just set down the phone. Truth over Tribe, find it, subscribe to it, listen to the episode there and join us on this new journey. Are you tired of tribalism? I think a lot of what the left supports is satanic. The only time religious freedom is invoked is in the name of bigotry and discrimination. Are you exhausted by the culture war? If they don't like it here, they can leave. You could put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.

Are you suspicious of those who say Jesus endorses their political party? Is it possible to be a good Christian and also be a member of the Republican Party? And the answer is absolutely not. From certainly a biblical standpoint, Christians could not vote democratic. We trust the lamb, not the donkey or the elephant. This is the podcast that's too liberal for conservatives and too conservative for liberals. I'm Patrick Miller. And I'm Keith Simon, and we choose truth over tribe. Do you? If you follow the news last spring, you probably saw that the Major League Baseball Association moved its all-star game from Georgia to Colorado in a protest of Georgia's voter. ID laws. The message was really clear. Enforce our corporation's politics in regards to this particular

issue, voter ID, or you're going to lose out on millions in revenue. And it's a message, interestingly, that me as an everyday person can never possibly give. In fact, a small business can never possibly send that message. And it's a message that creates tremendous incentive for compliance from states and from people who are running cities and government. And it's really not new. Disney said they were going to pull out of Georgia over an abortion law. The NCAA threatened to move the championship in the final four of basketball out of North Carolina because of their bathroom bills. Similar threats were made against the state of Indiana when they were thinking about enacting a religious freedom law that just reflected the national law. So these big businesses are able to exert

their power and influence in a way that we're asking, is that healthy for democracy. And we're not the only ones asking this question. All the way back in 2015, the New York Times columnist Ross Douthit called this woke capitalism. And I think we're not merely asking, is this good for democracy? We're also asking, as Christians, how should we think through this? What I mean when I say that is, these stories bring up incredible ethical questions that I do think the Bible has something to say to. Here's some examples. Does the commercialization of a thing? Does that actually change the thing? So if you commercialize social activism or service, does that change? change social activism and service.

Should CEOs of a company use their company's platform, their business power to enforce an ethical agenda that the democratically elected legislatures are not for? Few more. Are corporations really even qualified to be ethicist? Should they be the moral tastemakers of the 21st century? Are there moral limits to what capitalism should be involved in? In other words, is it okay to pay money to buy a kidney? Well, and this is going to be fun because I'm going to force you through a quiz here in just a second.

Oh, I didn't know, a pop quiz. You really don't. I'm really excited to hear your answers. I can't wait. Are there spheres of life where monetary sticks and carrots are inappropriate or oppressive? Are there places where exchanges of capital debates or even corrupt a thing or cheap in the social worth or utility of a thing? Put a little bit differently. Are there places where markets don't belong?

And should we be a society with markets? or should we be a market society? Well, you promised a quiz. Let's get to it. Let's get to it. Okay. Okay, Keith, it's quiz time. You ready?

Love it. You love giving people quizzes. I don't like receiving quizzes. Okay, so there's a great book by a author named Michael J. Sandel. He's a Harvard ethicist. And the name of the book is what money can't buy. And he's asking some of these ethical questions we just brought up. But as I read through his book, I just started creating a list of all the different things that money can

buy right now. that he's trying to ask, should money be able to buy these things? And I want to ask you, Keith. Should money- Lay it on me. You ready? Okay. So some of these are going to be challenging, some of them art. Okay. So I'll start with what I think of as a non-challenging thing. Should money be able to buy sex. No. Oh, good answer. That's a biblical answer. No, I mean, it does buy sex, right? Yeah, it should. Should know. But does it? Yes. And obviously there's a disagreement. It all depends on what you think sex is. And this is the disagreement around the term sex work. People saying sex work is real work. You should be able to buy and sell sex as much as you

want to. And of course, that's something the Bible has something to say about. That that's something that the market shouldn't be involved in. Because when money gets involved in sex, it demeans or devalue sex. It does. Tremendously. Here comes another one. Should you be able to pay money to hunt an endangered black rhino? I can give you more context if you want it. I'd take more context. Is this like going to friend or I don't know. So in South Africa, this happens. And it's a way to incentivize ranchers to basically keep and help breed black rhinos. They can sell a black rhino for $150,000 to a hunter who will come in, shoot it and get to take it back home. But that's how they make their money. So what do you think? I say yes. It helps the black rhinos, right? Everybody wins.

All right. The hunter wins. The black rhinos win. The farmers win. Let's get more complicated. What about shooting an endangered walrus? Now, again, I'm going to give you context here. So in Canada, there are Inuit tribes who part of their lifestyle is hunting. And it's always been hunting walruses. Now, it's technically illegal to hunt these walruses in Canada, but a certain allotment are given to the Inuits so that they can continue their traditional way of life. Now, the Inuits decided, well, if we get an allotment, what if we just sold the walruses, the right to hunt the walruses? Smart people. To hunters. And here's the catch-o. Unlike the black rhino, the Inuits keep the walrus. So they keep all the meat, they keep the skins.

You can't take anything home. So the only reason to shoot the walrus is because it's on a list of animals that you want to kill. And by the way, unlike a rhino, which is really difficult to hunt, they're basically water cows. You just walk up to them and shoot them. Water cows. So what do you think about that way? Would they be able to do it? Well, I'm not a hunter, so I have zero interest in doing this. But it sounds like I'd be okay if they did it. Okay, so I'm going to press back on this one. All right. Here's maybe the alternative case against it, which would be this. The whole purpose of giving the Inuits the right to break the law to hunt these endangered exception. Yeah, to give them an exception was because of their way of life. But part of their way of

life is not, in fact, bringing in while they're on terms. That's true. But they do get the food from it. Yeah, they do. I mean, if you were up there and it was really cool, because I've been it's really cold. I think you'd be figuring out how to make some money. How to make some money? Okay, here's another one. Don't hold the little man down. All right. Paying children to read books. Oh, no, I'm definitely against that. Oh, interesting. We never did that. What about the state paying children to read books in areas where there's low levels of literacy. I'm sure somebody can make a decent argument for it, but personally, I'm opposed, solidly 100% opposed. Why? Because I don't like to mess with people's motivations. And I think when it comes to reading or learning, motivation is really important. And when

you offer an extrinsic reward, something not related to the activity itself, you corrupt motivation. So these children might not learn the joy of reading. Instead, they learn to read as a commodity. And as soon as the incentive is taken away, they'll stop reading. Okay, here's another fun one. How about speeding rights? So there was a... Hmm, I like this. Okay.

So it was in Nevada. I can't remember what office this guy was running for, but his platform was that he wanted to allow people to pay money to speed up to 90 miles per hour on back Nevada highways. You could just pay a certain money in the day and you couldn't get pulled over for doing this. What do you think? I love the idea. I'd do it anyway, even without that protection.

I don't know. I would say that it probably endangers other people. At least that would be the thought. So you probably shouldn't do that. Okay, okay. I've got a few more I want to run by. Okay. Line jumping at an amusement park. Well, it happens all the time. Yeah, so this is being sold at all of them. So I think yes. Okay. But don't you find it interesting that in a lot of these amusement parks, when you get that, right, that feature, they have to have someone who goes with you to basically legitimize what you're doing because it totally breaks. I mean, it used to be amusement parks for the place where it didn't matter how much money you had. Everybody had to wait in the same line. But now, you can get brought up to the front, but it seemed a little dirty. It's been a long time so I've been to Disney World, but they had this fast pass. That's what it is. And somebody else paid for it, but nobody had to go with us. You just had a different color ticket. Okay. And you'd kind of scour the ground, hoping anybody dropped one of their fast passes so that you could jump the line.

Jump on it. But this happens all the time just so, you know, like, if you go to a sporting event, you go sit down with the common people. If you have money, you sit up in a suite. If you go in. And there's different entrances where you can park right next to the entrance and get in very easily. Yes. You must have taken advantage of some of those. I wouldn't know those things. Oh, yeah. It sounds like you do. But this is just the way life is. How about airlines? You get first class and then the people sit behind you. And if you get first class, a lot of times you can go through the special

TSA line so you can bypass even the security line. Well, I just went and got pre-checked and so now I can do that. You don't have to buy first class. But the most demeaning thing is when you're sitting in the back and then they close that curtain. You can't see what's happening up here. Don't watch. Okay, can I do another line-jumping one that I think is a little more iffy. What about paying, so lobbyists paying homeless people to wait in lines for congressional hearings? So they pay a homeless person. The homeless person will wait oftentimes for very, very long hours to get in. The homeless person loves it. I'm getting some money. And the lobbyist loves it because when you're in the congressional hearing, now you get a chance to go and talk to lawmakers and chum it up with them. I assume that the only reason

you'd be against that is because you think it is unfair, that people who don't have the bank accounts of a lobbyist don't have access to this. But that's the way the world works. I mean, the reality is that there is an unequal distribution of financial resources. So if a homeless person makes money off of it, great. Yeah. No, that would be the alternative case, which is if you don't have the money to pay someone to wait, you now have to use your time to wait, which, of course, has an impact on your ability to affect laws being made. And in a sense, is making it seem as though you are selling time with Congress people. Am I flunking? this test. No, I'm just amoral, immoral, what am I? I think it's interesting. Here's our last one.

Is it okay to pay someone to do a apology on your behalf? This happens. In China, you can pay people to go to whoever you've wronged and they will offer an apology in your place. That's wrong. Why? Well, because it seems like it. I mean, the apology giver wins, the person who paid for the apology, they win. They get to apologize. As you go through these, one of the things I'm realizing is that sometimes money corrupts the thing that you're buying, and sometimes it doesn't. And I know it's gray, and it's not always clear to everybody. But it seems like an apology is something that needs to come from the person who committed the crime or who hurt the person. You don't get to hire someone else to your apology. It goes to the very sincerity of the apology. It corrupts the very thing you're trying to do. It corrupts it. It makes it so that it's no longer authentic. It's no longer the thing it was. The minute you buy and sell an apology, it ceases to be an apology. That's right. That's so, no. Yeah. So I think these are interesting examples. And I have so many more. In fact, I'll just say this. We're probably going to do a part two of this episode with someone who has a lot of expertise in finance. His name's Brent B. Shore. He owns a private equity company. And I'm going to run him through the same gamut. I've got a whole other list, though. I mean, I can just keep going on these. They're so interesting. And we'll see what he says to some of them. See if he's right or wrong, whether he agrees with me or not. Well, no, I'm going to give him different ones. Oh, okay. You missed out on some of the most fun ones, actually. So tune in to that.

next episode. You'll get to hear some of the questions. Here's the main point, though. It goes back to our fundamental question. Are there places where the market doesn't belong? There are places where the market debases or even changes a thing? And this really matters when we start talking about how businesses are getting involved in social activism or social causes. Does it change the thing? So to help us think through this, we're going to talk about a number of topics today, and hopefully you'll learn something in the process. But I think the best place to start, since we're pastors, is actually going back to the economic world of Jesus and seeing what the New Testament says about money. Yeah, so let's think about the economic world that Jesus lived in.

And we often don't think that way when we read our Bible. And yet Jesus talks about money more than any other topic. He lived in a world that had an economic system, even though it was not like the one that we have. Yeah, I mean, he didn't live in a world where capitalism existed or socialism existed. And in fact, where really any of the market systems which are functioning today existed, he lived in a very different universe. And yet, at the same time, there were some similarities because Rome was very, very, very socially satisfied. So if you had power and wealth, that gave you the opportunity to access all kinds of privileges, kind of like what we were talking about earlier. But there were a very few people at the top of the Roman society who had a lot of money.

There was a lot of social inequality. Again, not completely unlike ours, except on steroids, far more than what we experience. The elite definitely had the biggest pots of money, and they were able to use that money to great personal benefit and great political benefit. I mean, Rome was a world where quid pro quo, which is a Latin phrase for a reason, was just the way of doing things. Cronism was just the way of doing things. Patronage, so this would be where a wealthy patron would basically pay money to people to fight for their interest and say great things about them. this was the way of doing things. Now, in Rome, the elite class only made up about 3% of the population. The very top, you've got the Roman emperor who had unrivaled wealth and power because he was able to tax people insanely. I mean, that's how they got all of their wealth. Below them, you've got senators. These were wealthy power players and equestrians. These were kind of a class of high-ranking military and political figures. Is that why they're called equestrian? They wrote around on horses? I do believe they had horses, and I think that we got that word later on from them.

And you also had the Curians who were aristocrats who had land and wealth, but usually their power was local, so they'd live around the Roman Empire. But the thing that I think you really have to understand is that their wealth, it came from taxation, it came from property ownership, and it came also from the spoils of war. It sounds kind of like a fundraising form or something. You have to be platinum, gold, silver, copper bronze, what level of contribution do you want to make? Or what level of privilege and access do you have to power, to influence? And that's exactly how Rome was built. So at the top, like Patrick said, you had this elite, but that was only a very small percentage, maybe 3%. Yeah, 3%. And it's also worth saying that within that 3% are what economists would probably call the managerial class. So these were

priests, bureaucrats who they didn't have as much. Priests were in the 3%. Well, Roman priests. I was born at the wrong time. I know. Not Christian priests. It depended on the kind of priest you were, but they were bureaucrats. They kept the machinery of power running. And so they worked right with these kind of power players, and they benefited from it tremendously. They were also among the elite. Now, kind of in the next five to 15 percent of Rome, you have wealthy merchants and artisans. Now, it would be easy for us to think of this as a middle class. There really is no comparison to the middle class in ancient Rome. If you were a wealthy artisan, you just had a moderate surplus of financial resources. So it wasn't like you were rolling in it. They also tend to

lack social power. And these artisans were part of the trade guilds. And it was built around your job, your career, your vocation, what you did for a living. But they were more than union. They were a place of social activism, a place where they worship together. They were a communal living that you associate with people in your class. Yeah, it sounds super weird to us today, the way that work in religion and politics really all, those weren't separate categories. They all merged together. And so your guild, like a union, would lobby in favor of your guild's interests with the local magistrates. So, hey, we want to get the best taxation rates. We want to make sure that we can sell in all the best places. But they also

collectively worshipped idols. They especially worshipped the idol of Artemis. She was the common goddess of guilds. And isn't this one of the big struggles that Christians had? Could they be a part of these guilds because they included idol worship? And if you were refused to partake in idol worship, then that put you in a position of... You don't get the benefits of being in the guild. And maybe that means that I have to pay an economic price because I don't have access to the same career opportunity. Well, and it's worth pointing out the guilds were essentially cronism. They were paying out money and paying out special favors to the power players in their cities to get special favors and return. That's quid pro quo. It's economically corrupt. The vast majority of the people

living in Rome, so we're talking 80, 85 percent of the people were poor. They lived at or below subsistence level. Some of these were slaves, and some of the were people who used to be slaves, but who had been bought out or able to work off the debt that they owed. These were people on the bottom rung of society. And again, it's the vast majority of society fit into this category. Yeah, and as you continue to move your way down below even slaves and freed persons, you had the working poor. So these were day laborers and farmers. And then you had the bottom 25 percent who were living below a subsistence level, so they didn't have enough to eat. They didn't have necessarily great places to live. They were below the subsistence level. It's about 25 percent

of the population. And that was made up of widows, orphans, and prisoners. And so as you read through your New Testament, you realize that there are Christians who are involved at every one of these levels. So Paul talks to the common person and tells them to work hard with their hands. And if they don't, then they won't eat. They're kind of worse than an unbeliever. But then you also see people, especially of some women, who obviously come from more of the upper class. There's Joanna. She's household manager of Herod. There's Lydia, Act 16, and she's a wealthy person. Joanna would have been in the top 3%. She was a retainer for the local powers, the household of Herod. And so she had a lot of wealth and a lot of power. And she used that wealth and power to help Jesus in his ministry,

to help the disciples in their ministry. It's actually quite likely that Roman 16 talks about a female apostle named Junia. And there's scholars like Richard Bachham, who think that that actually might have been Joanna. Oh, really? I didn't know that. Yeah. So then you have somebody like Cornelius, who you read about in Acts 10 and 11. He is a Roman military leader. So he would be in that second tier that we talked about, that 5 to 15 percent. He had a big household. And so he was a person of wealth and of means. Yeah. And he was employing that household to his household's benefit and interest. Lydia, who you already mentioned would have been in that second class. She was an artisan.

She sold dyed goods, which would have made her a very wealthy, woman, and she actually ran her own household as well. And so all this to say, you find Christians, again, on every level of this very stratified society, which meant that Christians at every level had to think through, how do I navigate economics as a follower of Jesus? No one got a pass. And the gospel kind of interrupted or disrupted, you might say, the Roman economic system, because yes, there were Christians at all different levels, but what the gospel called them to do was to live in a community where you cared for one another, and you saw your resources as something to be shared with others in need. So if you think of Acts 2 and Acts 4, when the church is beginning

to form, one of the things that were told about them is that they shared with those who had need. And that was pretty different than Roman society. Interestingly, it was really a reflection of the guilt. So the church was functioning almost in the role of the guild, providing for each other's needs mutually in a very community-oriented way. Along the same lines, we noticed that in the New Testament, cronyism and corruption, this quid pro quo thing, they're rejected. So, for example, Paul is imprisoned for two years because he won't give a bribe to someone. Paul refuses to do it. Another example of this is the rejection of patronage, the political games that people played. Paul in 2nd Thessalonians 311 says this. He says, we hear that some among you are idle and

disruptive. They are not busy. They are busy bodies. Such people, we command and urge in the Lord Jesus Christ to settle down and urge the food they eat. Now, we often take this to be a passage against laziness, which sure enough, I mean, yeah, we probably should warn against laziness, but he was talking about people in the patronage system who were going from house to house to try to find new patrons. He's saying, you're just being busy bodies. You aren't adding anything to society. You aren't being productive. You've got to get out of this system of patronage and political favors. And then there's the small book of Philemon. And Philemon is a person of wealth, of means. He has a large household. He even has slaves. And one of his slaves, Onesimus, has fled. And he's met up with Paul. And somewhere along the line, Anissimus has become a believer. And now Paul is sending Anissimus back to Philemon and tells him, take this letter to Philemon. And one of the things he encourages Philemon to do is to treat Anissimus as a brother.

Which is a shocking thing for an owner to do with a slave in Rome. And it's one of Paul's ways of undermining that system of, of owning people. And what that means, of course, for Philemon is if he's going to treat Anissimus, his slave as a brother, that's going to be a costly obedience, because now he's going to have to give him his freedom. It's going to free him. That's the only way. That is going to come at a financial cost. A few other interesting examples. Jesus believed that, by the way, there were some goods that shouldn't be commercialized. There are places where the market shouldn't be welcome. One of my favorite ones was that he critiqued the Pharisees for commercializing disregard of parents. And so the Pharisees,

taught that instead of giving money to your parents to help care for them as you should, even according to the Torah, they said if you declare it Corbin, in other words, if you give it away as a gift, then you can put it somewhere else. You can imagine a kid who says, I don't like my mom and dad. I'm just going to declare this Corbin and make sure that they never see it. And Jesus says you are commercializing, caring it for parents. You cannot do that. He also critiqued people who only invited movers and shakers over for dinner. It's just part of that patronage system again. Remember, if you invite someone over and the whole purpose is to get them to invite you back and get you into their circles. Jesus says, that's just quit pro quo. You can do it, but that's not

true hospitality. Yeah, that's in Luke 14, where he tells them to go out and invite the poor, the crippled, the blind, the lame, break down this system. So Christians have always had to navigate the economic system that they lived in. And the Bible doesn't really advocate for one type of economic system. No, it never does. But what it does call for, both in the old and New Testaments is economic justice. It warns against commercializing things that shouldn't be commercialized. Back to the bribes, like you said, this time in the Old Testament. And that's called injustice when you use your wealth to buy things from a judge that really shouldn't be for sale. The same thing actually goes for what we talked about with sex. Sex shouldn't be for sale.

There are places where the market doesn't belong. And so like Keith is saying, there's lots of warnings that we can take from the Old and New Testament. And it helps us as Christian. to realize that we're going to be in different kinds of economic systems. There are Christians in China who are in a socialist system. There's Christians in America who are in a capitalist system. And how we navigate that is a matter of tremendous importance to Jesus. And that's what we want to talk about today, because the system of capitalism in the United States is undergoing what some people might describe as an evolution, which is positive, other people might describe as a de-evolution or just a transformation into something different. Now, I just want to say this. Keith and I

are not economists. We aren't claiming to have expertise here. We are trying to present arguments, which have been laid out by people with far more expertise than us. In particular, I already mentioned Michael J. Sandel's book, What Money Can't Buy. Another great book that we are going to refer to and steal all kinds of stories from is Vivek Ramoswamy's book, Woke, Inc. I just encourage you to go check it out. I thought it was a fabulous book. Yeah, I listened to it and just couldn't stop. So then I bought it and read it after I listened to it. It's so, so, so good. And like I said, in our second part of this series. We're going to talk with someone who does have more expertise in us to try to present a positive vision of what Christians in capitalism could be together. So let's move on,

though, and talk about our economic system. You might not realize it, but capitalism has a secret super weapon, a secret superpower, one might say, and that is LLC's limited liability corporations. So let's try to explain, Keith, really quick, what an LLC is. Do you have an LLC? My family actually has an LLC. What? You do? Uh-huh. No, I don't have. have an LLC. I don't have an LLC for me. It's for Emily. She does interior design and she has some of that business on the side. So we actually just opened up an LLC. Interesting, because you're afraid of getting sued? Well, okay. So this. I mean, that kind of goes, all right. So imagine, well, well, let's go down Emily. Yeah, let's go down that example. All right. So let's say that Emily owns

an interior design business. And she wants to expand it. She wants to hire more workers. She maybe who wants to franchise into different parts of the country. But when you do that, you accept a lot of risks as the owner. I mean, what if someone gets hurt? What if you mess up somebody's house? Let me get some examples. Like, let's say Emily hires some people to become movers for her because they're bringing in furniture, setting up furniture.

And let's say one of those workers drops a giant desk on their foot and breaks their foot. Now, are they going to sue Emily? Yeah. Emily and I will not start this company if that person is able to sue us because they'll be able to take the shirt off our back. We don't have enough wealth to really be able to defend ourselves against that kind of thing. So the LLC protects you. It allows the person who is injured to sue the business, but not you as an individual. Exactly. So they could sue the business. They couldn't sue us. And we could pull out all kinds of other examples. Like you just said, let's say she was doing

design in a home, although that's not usually her emphasis, but if she was doing design in a home and someone received a couch that was defective. Defective, exactly, which had nothing to do with Emily. It was whatever company brought it in. They might want to sue Emily. and say, you've given me a defective cows, you need to be responsible. Well, they could sue the company, but they could not sue us. And this even goes further because, like I said, if she wanted to open up other branches of this office, she would want to go out and raise capital from people to invest in it, to allow her to expand the business. But if those people who are investing capital in her business were therefore personally responsible to pay for every couch dropped on someone's toe,

you could imagine that there's no possible way they would invest in Emily's business. So the LLC not only protects Emily, but it also protects her investors. And some people have called the LLC the greatest invention of the last century because it's imaginary. It's giving people a power they don't have on their own. Normally, you should just be able to sue us. But now that you can sue the corporation, it allows my wife and I to take risks that we wouldn't take in hiring people, in creating wealth, and creating opportunity, and that's what makes the capitalist system work. Now, I just want to say that. Someone's going to hear this and say, so are you against people trying to sue? Is someone drop the couch on their foot? Well, no, they can sue the company.

If Emily is constantly hiring too few movers, and that's why they're dropping couches on their feet all the time, well, she does bear a responsibility, but it's not a personal responsibility. Yeah, it absolutely still allows recourse for those who are hurt and injured. But it kind of is a good segue to the dark sides of the LLC. Because what's some people say is this protection encourages people to take unnecessary risks, to go after short-term gains, and that those short-term games come at a cost to society. So you probably have heard recently in the news of Purdue Pharma. This is the business that people think were largely responsible for the opioid crisis in which they illegally marketed a painkiller that

killed hundreds of thousands of people globally. They were very careless and reckless. They were sending millions of painkillers out, and they knew. That's why they're bankrupt now, because they got sued, and guess what they found? They said, yeah, you are responsible for this. But that's the catch. It was Purdue Pharma that got sued. You know who didn't get sued? The Sackler family who made untold millions, maybe billions of dollars off of Purdue Pharma. So the dark side is, here Purdue Pharma helped advance the opioid crisis. To the benefit of the Sackler family. And they walk away billionaires, but a lot of other people are addicted to opioids. And the company that did it, it's now bankrupt.

It's gone. So, I mean, it doesn't exist anymore. But the individuals who were behind that company bore no personal responsibility. That's the dark side. I think another example of this is Donald Trump. He's able to remain a billionaire, even though he's had countless properties that have defaulted. He's defaulted on debts, including payments to contractors struggling to make ends meet.

Why does Trump get to stay a billionaire while his property, are defaulting. It's the LLC. You can't sue Donald Trump personally for his business dealings. Now, I want to say there's actually another dark side of the LLC. And I feel like I'm not to say this a million times. I'm not against LLC. I'm so thankful that we have an LLC. We have one. But there are dark sides. The other side is a side that you don't hear people talking about as much because it's the new dark side, which is slowly growing in our midst. And this is what happens when corporations make ideologically driven decisions where they advocate for questionable social changes with both money and their voice. And the people at the top, they don't have to face the consequences. You can sue

the corporation, but you can't sue the person who owns the business. So here's an example that Vivek Reboswamy mentions in his book. There's a truck driver named Emmanuel Cafferty. He's Latino gentleman. He's working this day. He's out driving his truck. He pulls up to a stoplight. And next to him in a car, a guy screaming and yelling at him, flipping him off, all upset. And Cafferty doesn't know what in the world's going on. So he's just kind of sitting there trying to de-escalate the tension. And the guy next to him all of a sudden seems happy now. And he's shown him the okay sign with his hand. And it's as if he's trying to get Cafferty, the truck driver, to say okay as well. Like, okay, we're all good now. And so that's what Emmanuel Cafferty

does. He does the okay sign with his hand. And the guy in the car, who'd be a guy in the car who'd been yelling and screaming at him now takes a picture of him. Well, you probably know this, but some people believe that the OK signed, or what at least appears like that to you and I, is really a white supremacist signal. Well, it has been taken over by some white supremacist groups as a signal. I think saying that everybody holding it up as a white supremacist is insane. Insane. Like, really insane. And to say this Latino truck driver is just sitting at a traffic light trying to de-escalate a conflict holding. up his hand and making an okay gesture so he can drive off. There's no idea that it's a white supremacist

side. No, he's just, I mean, he's just trying to live his life. But his company fired him. His company fired him, this Latino truck driver for giving a white supremacist hand signal. Now, the LLC says that you can't sue the owner of the company for wrongful termination. You can sue the company, but you can't sue the owner. So not only does it protect the Sackler family who made billions off the opioid crisis, but it also protects the owner from using their ideology to hurt people. And depresses one step further. I mean, so he's fired for, according to them, imperiling diversity.

That was his crime. Imperling diversity. Now, here's the problem. It is inevitable that the owners, the company did realize that he had no idea what he was doing, but they did not care. Why? Because they didn't want the PR scandal of bringing this guy back on. So they do the wrong thing.

They leave him fire. They're not bringing this guy back. there's nothing he can do. He's a truck driver. He's always going to sue a corporation with all the money that he has. Yeah, he doesn't have the financial resources to sue the company. Well, and he doesn't even have a case because they can fire you. So this is the challenge that he's going to face personally, and it's what the LLC protects him from. So this is just two things. The first thing is where we started. There's a debate out there about whether corporations should seek after long-term or short-term gains. And of course, we see the cost of seeking after short-term

games in the story of Purdue Pharma. Now, the reason why this is a debate is because if society gives you the superpower, Keith Simon, of not being sued for what your company does, don't you owe something back to society? Don't you owe something to the people who are allowing you to do this amazing thing that you could not do otherwise? You do owe something to society, but the question is, what do you owe them? And I think that leads to the second half of this equation. If companies do owe something back to society, if they should be invested in social welfare,

and the good of the people who have given them this amazing superpower of the LLC, what do they owe? Because if they pursued social justice or these social causes in a way that harms people, shouldn't they be held accountable? Should the owners of these companies be free from being sued in the exact same way that the Purdue Farma family was free from being sued? That's the question that we're exploring. So let's take a moment and think what was the economic situation for companies before LLCs were a thing? And what would happen is our government would give charters to businesses and corporations to do a project.

So, for example, if you're a railroad company, you would go to the government and seek a charter to build railroads. And you would have that superpower of not being liable to lawsuits, at least the owner personally. Of course, the corporation always is liable. You would have that superpower as long as you stuck to what was included in your charter. But if a railroad company started building roads, they would live. lose that superpower. So now we're facing a similar challenge. If we're giving people the superpower of being non-liable, you're not liable the corporation is, it's always based on the idea that they stay in their lane. The railroad company needs to build railroads. Now, we've broadened that and we've said,

as a for-profit company, you need to be gaining profits. You need to be maximizing shareholder value, and we'll get into that in just a second. But the point is, if we give this superpower to people, it's important to define what's the lane they're supposed to stay in. What are their goals supposed to be? Because once they over extend, they go beyond that lane, they get outside of those goals, they should be liable. The individuals behind these companies probably should have liability. So this brings this to the current debate over shareholder and stakeholder capitalism. These are two different goals, we would say, for corporations. Two different lanes, two different ways they can exert their influence. So shareholder capitalism was something that was advocated by Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago in the 1970s. He wrote a famous column in the New York Times where he advocated for this shareholder approach. And what he said was that businesses and companies, their lane was to maximize profit. Not any way possible, but they needed to stay within the laws. They needed to play by society's rules as established in the laws. And shareholder capitalism is built on the idea that the CEO of a company,

is the employee of the shareholders. So one of the things that happens in my story of Emily and I having an LLC, Emily is the owner. She owns the company. But if the company got big enough and we went public, we could sell shares of our company to all kinds of people, but that creates a problem because now all of a sudden there's thousands of owners of our company. And so who, if you've got thousands of owners, is making the calls.

Well, that's why you have boards of directors and why you have CEOs. And CEOs have what's called a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders to do what Keith just said to maximize profit. That's their job. The CEO is the employee of the shareholders, and he's there to maximize all the profit. Now, you contrast shareholder capitalism with stakeholder capitalism. And stakeholder capitalism says that the lane that the business is supposed to stay in is that they are supposed to care for or look out for the interests of customers, suppliers, employees, community, and the shareholder. So they've got lots of interest to juggle. So now it's not just the shareholders who matter in their interest of maximizing profits.

It's a lot. I mean, we're talking about communities and suppliers, people who don't even work for the company. So you can imagine that that lane just got a lot bigger. If the shareholder lane is more narrow, maximize profits according to the laws or rules, ethics at a given time, stakeholder capitalism is far, far broader. But you can also see that there's some inherent tension between these groups that they're supposed to be looking out for. In other words, come first. Right. If you want to maximize say cost for the customer, that's going to come at a cost of the employee or a cost of the supplier. Or if you're a CEO, you have personal interest. You want to stay a CEO for the rest of your life. You might want to get an appointment one day in the government. You might want to work at a different

company. And so you have some personal interest in terms of your name and cachet, which are different from the interest of everybody else we just said. But what stakeholder capitalism does is it expands that lane that businesses can get in. And that allows, you know, you know, businesses to all the sudden be a part of decisions that we're not sure they should be a part of. It allows the market economy to enter into conversations that I'm not sure it's designed to do. So the question with stakeholder capitalism is how it plays out. There's two different ways to be a stakeholder capitalist. One is to say I'm for the community and the way I do that is by supporting causes and supporting ideologies. A different way of doing it is saying we make a product and we're

going to take responsibility for how that product impacts communities. So a practical example of this might be Coca-Cola. If you're in the first lane, which is what they are, they say, hey, we're going to support ideologies and causes, and that's what it means to care for our community, that's what they've done. And this is why they've supported groups like Black Lives Matter and why they paid huge amounts of money to bring in diversity consultants to do trainings that have been very controversial. So that's one way to be a stakeholder capitalist. But they could have gone a different round. They could have said, you know what? We make a product, a drink, which has played a major role in the obesity epidemic taking black lives. So we're going to take responsibility for the

thing we actually control, and we're going to say we have a stake in the community, and we're going to address that thing. So I'm just trying to illustrate. There's two different kinds of stakeholder capitalism, and guess which one most corporations like? They don't want to take responsibility for their products. They want to be for causes that make no impact on the bottom line. So in order to keep clarifying stakeholder versus shareholder capitalism, let's take a test case and see how each might think about it. So the company we're going to consider is Volkswagen. Do you drive a Volkswagen? I do now. A friend just sold me as you Volkswagen. I think I got the pastor discount, which is kind of nice. Your car's called a Passaat, but I thought it'd be really funny if someone got

like a pastor and took off the Passaad. Just put pastor in its place. That would be horrible. So Volkswagen in 2015, they wanted to be the number one car manufacturer in the world. And, you know, that's a lofty goal. Toyota held that title at the time. And so what they did is they came up with a marketing campaign around clean diesel. So they said, hey, our vehicles are better for the environment because we've running clean diesel. And that catapulted them up into the leaders and eventually allowed them to take over the car market and be the number one car manufacturer in the world. Well, and along those lines, they did this under the guise of stakeholder capitalism. He said, we're going to be stakeholder capitalist. And this is why the Dow Jones Sustainability Index gave them a near-perfect

to score. Well, they said what we're going to do is we're going to be the kind of company that cares about the environment, that cares about our community, that cares about the world. By the way, I'm great with that. That's not just out for the bottom line. We're not just trying to maximize profit. We care about our world. And that was their marketing device to get people to buy in to this clean diesel and to a company that cared about more than money. But it turns out. Oh, there's always, there's always a catch. They had installed defeater devices in 11 million cars to get around emissions tests. Yeah, so catch this out.

They had put a device in the car that could tell when they were being tested for emissions. And so they gave a false report. And at first they denied it. And then they eventually came out and admitted that that's exactly what they had done to get to the top. They'd rigged the system so that they could pretend to care about the environment and not the bottom line. The whole time, all they care about is the bottom line. And to be crystal clear, the emissions on these vehicles were not remotely environmentally friendly. Oh, no. That's why they had these defeater devices on. I mean, they were bad environmentally. And so

here's what I think so interesting is people came at Volkswagen and they tried to shoot it down with the shareholder capitalism argument. They said, see, here's what happens when you have a company that's trying to maximize its profits. If your only interest is profit, you end up lying so that you can make money. But here's what's funny. The argument actually cuts both ways. shareholder capitalists could critique Volkswagen for being a stakeholder capitalist corporation. They could say, see, this is what happens when you start claiming or even trying to put the interest of community above profits. When you start saying that we're about environmental protection, we're going to create cars, it creates this kind of situation where people will lie in order to look good to these stakeholders. When you sell your product based on some virtue signaling of something that you're doing good for the world. It gives you every incentive to hide the damage that your product is actually doing. Instead of creating a product that's really good for the environment,

which I think we'd be all for. What happens is you just create a marketing campaign that makes you look good. Meanwhile, your product is doing the opposite of what you promise. Well, yeah, and I think what we're underlining here is that both stakeholder and shareholder capitalism can create incentive to lie. That's right. Right. You either lie for the money or you lie for the reputation. Exactly. So one doesn't help you escape from the other. So, Keith, let's stay on this theme. And let's talk about how stakeholder capitalism can actually produce dangerous hypocrisy. So let's just start with what hypocrisy is. Everybody is against hypocrisy. And if you're against hypocrisy, that makes you a lot like Jesus is what I was going to say. Because Jesus is the one who was against hypocrisy. Hypocracy is pretending to be something you're not. not. Hypocrisy is not having struggles, which you acknowledge and are open about. Hypocracy is pretending to have no struggles. It's projecting an image that is not real or genuine. In fact, Jesus was probably the person who invented the idea of hypocrisy. He took the term from Greek plays. They were play

actors who, you might not know this in Greek plays, they'd always put on masks. And that's how they'd play the other role. And they were called hypocrites in Greek. And Jesus is the first person we know of who use this image of the actor wearing a mask and faking as a description of people, that people can be play actors who appear to be one thing, but in reality or something else. And of course, this is the temptation for corporations in a world of stakeholder capitalism. As you put on the mask, so you look one way when the reality is there's something else hiding. In his book, Ramoswami gives an example of Amazon calling out Walmart. This one just made me laugh. Well, they were calling out Walmart for not paying their employees enough. So Amazon's saying, hey, we're paying $15,

an hour. What do you guys paying? By the way, let's pause here. Does Amazon have a vested interest in critiquing Walmart? Might they be opponents in anything? But they're pretending to be for their workers. We are pro-worker. We're $15 an hour. Meanwhile, while they're saying all this, here's what's happening. They have workers in some of their distribution centers, their distribution warehouses, who are on social media critiquing them for their working conditions. They're telling Amazon, you might pay us well, but our working conditions are awful.

And since then, it's been leaked that they were actually actively trying to brand one of these leaders, a guy named Christian Smalls, who was a black man. They were trying to brand him as stupid to try to discredit the whole movement. They actually ended up firing all of these people who posted on social media about their working conditions. But they paid $15 an hour. They pay $15 an hour. So you have to ask, is Amazon really care about their workers, or was this just a marketing campaign to look good and to try to put the squeeze on Walmart? Well, I think it's kind of obvious. We could pull out other examples.

Let's talk about Nike. They've given $40 million to buy communities to help with urban development, other things. And again, on one level, I really don't have any problems with that. But they publicize it. They make a big deal about it. See, we're stakeholder capitalists. We take care of our communities. Meanwhile, they're ignoring sweatshops.

They're ignoring the fact that they're marketing $200 sneakers in these impoverished communities where people really can't afford to spend $200 on sneakers. So as long as I look good and I support the right causes, it doesn't mean. matter what I personally, our corporation, does to the people who we are marketing to. And this happens on both the left and the right. So you have the guy named Mike Lindel, who is famous for the My Pillow guy, a big Trump supporter, and he's selling his pillows to Trump supporters, not because he's got great pillows, but because it's a sign that you are on the right side. Do you like your My Pillow, Keith?

My Pillow, stop. Or Black Rifle Coffee. I mean, do you think that's a sign? You're a lot of my pillow. I mean, Do you think that coffee is really that different? Oh, I've actually heard it's bad. I don't know if it's true. I had a friend who bought it, very conservative person. I'm like, I'm not buying Starbucks. I'm going to buy black rifle. And he came to me to go, I'm just so bummed because I just don't think the coffee was very good.

I think I might keep buying it, though. Or it's Uber pledging to be anti-racist while trying to pass legislation in California that allows them to classify their drivers as independent contractors so that they don't have to pay taxes and provide other. basic things come with employment. Everybody, we're for Black Lives Matter, but all of those black drivers driving for Uber, we'd really prefer them to pay our taxes. Otherwise, we can't stay open. So it just makes you ask the question, how sincere is this, or is this just a marketing campaign? I have to share one more. This one is the one that I find most atrocious, which is Disney. Keith already mentioned that they were really critical of a Georgia abortion law. This was a pro-life law. I was trying to limit abortions. And Disney said, nope, we aren't for that. So there you see.

Stakeholder capitalism, we're for the progressive cause. go to Georgia and film movies because of this law. Yeah. Meanwhile, Disney is thanking both on social media and in the film itself, the state of China for allowing them to film the movie Mulan there. And catch this. They filmed Milan in the very region where Uighur women are being forcibly sterilized. In fact, they're being sterilized so much that the birth rate, in the exact place where they filmed Milan, has dropped by 60% in a matter of years. Yeah, I think the province is called Jing Zhang, if I understand it right. And they thank the Communist Party in Jingjiang for allowing them to film. Meanwhile, all this horrible stuff is happening to the Uighurs,

but they won't go to Georgia to film something. But China ends up being the test case for a lot of people. Oh, absolutely. It cuts through a lot of hypocrisy. So you remember that the NBA were coming out with all these statements last summer in the summer of protest of 2020, but they don't have any problem with what's happening in China. They don't have a problem with China. The general manager of the Rockets made a statement in favor of Hong Kong and saying that China was threatening the democratic rights, which, by the way, they legally obligated themselves too. And this is a fact, by the way. China is shutting down the free press in Hong Kong. They are suppressing democracy by offing people, by making them disappear, by putting them into prison, by taking away their money.

China's doing this, and it's illegal. They weren't supposed to do it. And so this guy, this general manager critiques China. And what does China do? Yeah, he says free Hong Kong on his Twitter account. And China says, hey, we won't put up with that. And they put economic sanctions on the NBA. And what does the NBA do? Do they stand up to China? Of course not, because China has the money that they want and need. And this is true of lots of companies.

They considered firing the general manager. He eventually had to leave. Google, Apple, Airbnb is selling the information that you give them to China. But their marketing campaign is that we don't let white supremacists rent our facilities. but we'll sell your stuff to the most totalitarian government in the world. The Airbnb one is, I think, actually hilarious. They did this giant forum. It was a stakeholder capitalist forum where they invited everybody who has a stake in Airbnb,

the property owners, the people who are renting out those properties. Others, they invite everybody. You know who wasn't invited or who wasn't even mentioned? I don't know. China. Despite the fact that China has a huge stake, they're hiding it. And they actually hired someone to come on. And his entire job was to protect the privacy rights of people on Airbnb.

And he went to Airbnb and he said, guys, we're blowing it. We are selling away the information, personal information of people who are renting properties to China and they are using it in nefarious ways. And Airbnb said, ah, thanks, no thanks. Why don't you just go ahead and leave? So he ends up having to quit. Because that guy thought he had a real job. His job was to project an image not to actually do the world. Not to actually protect people's privacy.

It was just to look good. And that's what hypocrisy is. And it's why it's so dangerous as it puts up a facade and image that, you know, just isn't true. And it gives people the room and the freedom to harm the very people that they say they're trying to help. And that's the real problem that we're dealing with in this form of stakeholder capitalism, where you're a stakeholder by supporting the right ideology or the right ideas. It allows you to cover up wrongdoing by saying the right things. And I think this is incredibly dangerous, not just because it's hypocritical, not just because it's false marketing.

It's all of those things. I think it's incredibly dangerous because, Corporations are big. They have a superpower, the LLC. They can use their money in ways that individuals can't. And so now all of a sudden, we have these hypocritical organizations out there now claiming to be the moral taste makers. Not only are we hypocrites, but we're going to tell you what to think about what's right and what's wrong. That's a hugely dangerous power. So part of what these businesses, these corporations are doing is training all of us of what real social justice looks like. And real social justice to them means buying the right products or maybe posting a black square on Instagram or having the right hashtag. But hashtags don't lead the real change in people's lives. So we are all for social justice. We are all for fighting for rights of people. We're just asking, is that what these businesses are actually doing? Or are they trying to tell you that if you just buy my product, that makes you a good person?

Let's go to the point we brought up earlier. There are places where the market doesn't belong. When you start commodifying social justice, if you want to do social justice, just buy the Nike shoes. If you want to do social justice, just start streaming on Disney. If you want to do social justice, partner with us. You are now commodifying it. I no longer have personal responsibility to go out and serve my community, I can just do it by buying things. And this matters. Aristotle had this idea that we strengthen things by using them. So if you want to be a virtuous person, you need to practice virtue. If you want to be a just person, you need to practice justice. And the more you do it, the more you become it. Well, if we're outsourcing our justice to these big corporations and we're not flexing

those muscles by serving in our own communities and making a difference in our own communities, it's going to make us incredibly flabby in the area of justice. And you can see why Jesus, encouraged us, called us as Christians to do our good deeds in private. Really what he was doing is warning us of doing our good deeds in order to be seen by other people. Because when you do something in order to be seen, it corrupts the good deed. It corrupts the justice. And that's exactly what these companies are doing. They're putting on this show in order to be seen as being right and on the good side of the cultural argument. And that corrupts the very thing that they're trying to do it. It corrupts the good. Give your $40 million to black communities. Just don't

tell me about it. Don't debase it by turning it into a marketing campaign. That might be all that I could ask. Next I want to talk about the problem of cronyism and corruption. So the Bible, we already covered this. The Bible warns against cronyism. It warns against corruption. And by the way, this was actually the left's critique of the right in the 2000s, especially around the financial collapse. They critiqued the right because they filled federal cabinet seats with former execs from big banks like Goldman Sachs. And then 2008 hits, and it turns out that banks like Goldman Sachs and others were invested in financial weapons of mass destruction. Well, it's kind of interesting that Hank Paulson is the Secretary of Treasury under President Bush. And when the economic

collapse hits of 2008, he is a former CEO of Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs gets bailed out, but not everybody. else does, including Lehman Brothers, they don't get bailed out. And at least it has the... Not a good look. No, I mean, right. I mean, I don't know all of it is involved in that. So I'm not saying he for sure did the wrong thing, but I am saying that it doesn't look good. If part of the game from the big banks is to get your CEOs into the federal government so that they can give favors to your company when the big day comes, that's cronyism. That's kind of what it looked like when he's willing to bail out his team, but not the other team. And something similar also happened around the collapse under the Obama administration because these businesses that had been involved in a subprime

loan crisis, they got hit with big fines, the Department of Justice, I mean levied billions of dollars worth of fines against these big banks that had acted irresponsibly. And so what you're told as the citizen is that those banks are going to pay those billions of dollars back to the U.S. Treasury for consumer relief so that their money goes to help those that they hurt. But here's what really happened. And this is amazing. And when I read it in the book, I went back to the Wall Street Journal article. I just had to make sure that this was really trill because it is so stunning.

What the Obama Department of Justice did is they cut a deal with these big banks and they said, we will lower the amount of fines that you have to pay. If instead of paying them to the U.S. Treasury, you will give them to our list of nonprofits that we live. like and support. Not just any nonprofit. The ones we like and support. So what happens is they cut their fines, say, in half. So imagine you- I'm more than that. Sometimes it was even more of $3 for every $1. Well, just imagine you have to pay back to the U.S. Treasury or you owe $5 billion that you pay to our choice of nonprofits. What would you rather do if you were the bank? If the money goes back to the U.S. Treasury, then Congress gets to decide where it's spent. Not just that. It's marked as a fine. You've paid a fine. But if you pay to our list of nonprofits, now we get to decide where that money goes and it goes to our favorite groups.

Well, it's not just that. And you as a bank, you get the tax deduction. You get to mark this as a charitable gift. It's no longer a fine. It's win, win, win. The only person who loses here, by the way. Is the American citizen. The people who got hurt. It is stunning that they got away with that. How? Here's the point I want to draw out. The left critiqued the right for a form of cronians. We're going to hire people from the big banks, and then when they come in, they can give their banks favors. And that's wrong, too. This is a different form of cronyism. They're both wrong. Right?

This is a different form of cronyism. Where now, if you as a bank are willing to support financially and eventually we'll see with your voice as well, our causes, you're going to get special benefits. You don't get fined. You just get to get a nice, nice, nice, big tax deduction in the end. That's a different form of cronyism, but it's a cronyism which is linked to stakeholder capitalism because they are giving according to an ideology. So you see the difference here. Another great example of this is campaign finance. So there's a case

Citizens United versus the Federal Election Commission. The question was whether they could give money to political campaigns. And liberals said, no, corporations aren't individuals. They shouldn't be able to give their money to campaigns. It's basically paying for a future favor. Yeah, I think both sides are pretty hypocritical on this because like you said, the Democrats were against the Supreme Court ruling in that case because the Democrats said that corporations said that corporations, should not be able to give unlimited amounts of money to campaigns because that money would negatively impact democracy. Yeah, it would corrupt the politicians they gave to. I mean, how am I supposed to go against a corporation that's financing my campaign?

But at the same time, Democrats are okay with stakeholder capitalism that allows businesses to use their economic clout to influence social and cultural issues. Now, the Republicans, I think, are just as bad because they were all forced to, They were saying, hey, yes, corporations should be able to give unlimited money to campaigns. But now they don't want businesses to be involved in stakeholder capitalism where they're using their economic clout to influence social and cultural issues. They're both inconsistent. Now, I don't think they're equally inconsistent. We can get that later. But they're not saying that they're both pretty inconsistent. Let me try to put legs on this. It's not merely that they're

using their money to influence society. It's that we're seeing progressives give special benefits precisely to the corporations that support their ideology. Let me give some examples of this. BlackRock Financials made a big deal about what are called ESG products. That stands for environmental, social, and governance products. So basically they're investing in companies that according to them are pro-environment. So they lower pollution emissions. They're for air quality. They're for renewable forms of energy and energy conservation. They use natural resources and land responsibly. They take care of waste management and water quality and hazardous materials responsibly. These are also companies who have social agendas. They've got good labor standards and

employee relations. They've got production and quality safety measures in place. They have a positive local community impact. And they're also companies, by the way, that emphasize governance, which would be not just ethical business practices, but it often includes supporting things like voting rights or, again, progressive causes. So anyways, here's what happens. Black Rock, they invest in companies like this. and they create a portfolio of those companies. And then you can come in and buy into that portfolio. You can invest in that portfolio. BlackRock is huge, and therefore they have tons of influence.

And what they're doing is saying, hey, if you invest with us, we're going to invest in these socially conscious businesses. And they're using that to get more people to invest with them. Well, they're also using it to prop up their name. It's a great marketing campaign. Look at the kinds of companies that we invest in. And they often say, we get great returns on these. Now, there's questions of whether it essentially functions like a Ponzi scheme

that it looks like great returns because more and more people are investing in those kinds of companies. But here's the main thing. Guess what happened when the stimulus package had to be distributed? Who gets to distribute the stimulus package? None other than BlackRock. Can anyone prove it's because they offered these ESG products that they had the right ideology, that they got to be the ones who were administrating the economic stimulus package? Well, no, no one can prove that. But there are other examples. of how these companies that have the right agenda are getting benefits from the government. Yeah, AstraZeneca, the pharmaceutical company, made a big deal about committing $1 billion to environmental sustainability. And you can be sure that went to causes that the lawmakers

liked, that there were their kind of pet causes. And just a few months later, totally coincidence, I'm sure, AstroZeneca got a $1.2 billion grant, so something they did not have to pay back from those same lawmakers allowing it to develop a for-profit vaccine. So the United States government paid for them to develop a for-profit vaccine. A COVID-19 vaccine. And to some extent, like, well, I guess that's okay as long as we're doing that equally for other companies. But to do it because you gave them a billion dollars to their pet organizations, it just seems

like this quid pro quo, like there's a trade-off here. And the AstraZeneca is being financially rewarded for, saying that they are committed to environmental sustainability. And that's really the damnable aspect of this whole thing. Other forms of quid pro quo are explicit. If a company gives money to a political campaign, it's pretty obvious that politician does favors for that company why he or she did that. But in this case, it's very difficult to figure out. Keith and I might just be making stuff up right now. There's no way to prove that these companies got the benefits they got because of their social activism and their social causes that they supported. But again, these examples continue to

crop up and it just begs the question. And the problem is when you can't draw a straight line, when you can't prove something, the quid pro quo, it can go on as long as it wants to. The other interesting thing happening right now is that when we allow these corporations to have an oversized voice, they get to start shaping our definitions of incredibly important ideas. George Orwell, the guy who wrote Animal Farm 1984, famous author, he wrote an essay called Politics Politics and the English language. It's my favorite essays of all time. Well, you went to the private school, right? So that's why you loved Orwell. But in the essay, he says, be careful about words that have vague definitions because people will use words to hide a true agenda.

They will use words to get an emotional response from you. They will use words to manipulate you. So he says this often happens with words like democracy or equality or patriotism. But I think right now, if Orwell were writing, he's. He would say that one of the words that people are using to manipulate is the word diversity. Can I do a fun little thing here? Oh, yeah, private school fun. This is private school fun. So like you just said, he talks about this with democracy and how countries were using democracy.

This is what Patrick did like on a Friday night of high schools. He sat around and read my oil for fun. Me, I was doing other things. I don't know about you, but. I was in the band at the football game. You were? Yeah. Oh, I was a nerd man.

All right. Let's keep going. I want to do something fun. I want to take a quote from George Orwell. But I'm going to trade the word democracy out for diversity. I'm going to trade the word country out for corporation, for company. Okay? And let's just see what happens. Okay. In the case of words like diversity, not only is there no agreed upon definition, yes, absolutely, let's just agree with that. No one knows what diversity is. But the attempt to make one is resisted by all sides.

It is almost universally felt that when we call a company diverse, we are praising it. Consequently, the defenders of every kind of company claim that it is diverse and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. This is pretty good. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. Yeah, and that's exactly what is happening now, is that they've defined diversity in a way that is very convenient for them. Because they've defined diversity according to gender or skin color or sexual orientation. Which is a legitimate form of diversity. But one way they refuse to define diversity is in diversity of thought, diversity of opinion, diversity of political opinion.

In fact, they've defined it the opposite. So you have companies that are saying we're diverse, by which they mean skin-deep qualities. So race, ethnicity, gender, those kinds of things. I'm not trying to minimize them by saying that. It's just what they are. And yet, at the exact same time, they are coaling people out who do not agree with their ideology. So I want a diversity of race and gender. We do not want a diversity of thought. And the way they do. do this is by pulling up, and there's countless research studies out there that show that diversity is actually good for corporations. You'll be more successful if you have diversity. The problem is that in most of those articles, the diversity they're talking about is diversity of thought. It's not diversity of skin color and gender and all of those things. Sometimes it's both, but it's never to the exclusion of diversity of thought. Sometimes people of different gender and skin color and orientation, they bring new ideas, but the important thing is the new idea they bring. It's a thought. Not the way they look.

So New York Times columnist Nicholas Christoph said this about universities. He said that they are diverse in this sense. We're fine with people who don't look like us as long as they think like us. And that's one of those uh-oh moments where, yes, we want diversity. As long as you agree with us, we're happy with any way you look or act or whatever. How about there's a congresswoman from Massachusetts. Iona Presley. She said, it's time to shake up that table. We don't need any more brown faces that don't want to be a brown voice. Just think about what she's saying here. She's saying the color of your skin actually does not matter to me. You can have a

brown face or a white face. What matters is do you have a brown voice? What's brown voice mean? You agree with me. You share my ideology. And she went on to say we don't need any more black faces that don't want to be a black voice. So what she's essentially saying is if you are black or brown and you don't agree with me, then you're not really black or brown, or at least not in the way I want you to be. Well, it tells you what the definition of diversity is again. And we're beginning to buy into this definition. Just 15 years ago, if you talked about diversity, I think it would have probably meant both things. Diversity of gender, diversity of ethnicity, and diversity of thought, but we are increasingly ruling out diversity of thought. This is why people like Barry Weiss,

who wrote for the New York Times, ended up essentially getting ousted. She's a lesbian. She's a woman. So she checks off a lot of the diversity boxes, but you know what she didn't have? The right kind of thoughts. And it's why Andrew Sullivan got kicked out of more than one place, but most lately the New York Magazine for the same thing. Now, both Weiss and Sullivan are making a ton of money writing on their own personal substacks because there's a lot of people who want heterodox thinking out there. So the problem here is that we're beginning to commercialize definitions. In other words, again, Ramoswamy in his book, he talks about what he calls the Goldman Sachs rule, which is kind of a joke he makes, but the Goldman Sachs rule is simply this. The person with the gold makes the decisions.

Whoever's got the most money, they get to make the decisions. And now we're entering a place where important ethical terms like justice, diversity. Whoever has the gold gets to make the definition. And I think that's an outsized power. Why in the world do we want businesses to get out of the lane of making profit and being businesses and all of a sudden becoming ethicist who get to tell us how to think and what words mean and how to live? Yeah, this goes back to the quiz that Patrick threw on me at the beginning. Should money, should capitalism, should markets invade every area of our life, are there some areas of our life that markets aren't good for? If you're like me and you leave each episode with a lot to think about and wishing you could go just a little bit deeper, you

should subscribe to the Truth Over Tribe newsletter. Not only do we explore the topic further, but we also interact with people who disagree with us and tell you about upcoming episodes. Just go to choose truthovertribe.com and sign up for the newsletter there. So when you don't have a work environment or a school or a business or a government or a church or whatever that allows diversity of thought, what happens is that everybody falls into group think. And to say something that is out of step with the group is, well, to risk sanction. And economic sanction within your business, people have been fired for saying things and holding opinions that are not in the mainstream of the way that business thinks. And that's really dangerous when people are afraid to

express their genuinely held beliefs. Especially when many of those sincerely held beliefs are held by plenty and plenty and plenty of other people. I mean, this is what the cultural revolution was in China. Now it's happening in our, it's the corporate revolution where we are ousting people because they don't agree with the ideology. We're not defending people who say racist or horrible, hateful, ignorant things. What we're saying is that if you're not in lockstep with the company culture, you share a political belief, a personal belief outside of that culture, the business culture, even of lots of other people hold it. You might be fired. Well, and depress it even further. What's wild is if you are in lockstep, you can be as extreme as you want to be. If you're on the progressive side, it's not

bad to talk about killing Trump supporters. It's not bad to make incredibly incendiary comments. It's not bad to bully people for not believing what you believe. But if you even question that ideology, you are out. We should tell the story of James DeMore. James DeMore was a Google employee who was invited to a 2017 Google meeting. And the topic was diversity and inclusion. And the people in that meeting were asked for their feedback. And so DeMore goes back and continues to- Well, and the specific question was why they weren't hiring more women. Yes, that was one of the questions they were trying to figure out. How do we be an inclusive workplace where we have women engineers? So DeMore goes back to his office, thinks about it, and writes up a memo and sends it to

the people who hosted the seminar. He kind of lays out some thoughts and ideas about what they could do to make it more inclusive for women. He doesn't get a response from the host of the seminar. So what he does is he posts his letter, his memo onto an internal Google website. And all the sudden, everybody freaks out. And the reason that they freaked out is because he said that one of the reasons, he asked if one of the reasons. He didn't even declare it. He said maybe one of the reasons. Well, if you just read James DeMore's memo, it is super reasonable. He's not trying to be a jerk. He's throwing out ideas.

And he's trying to help solve a problem that he was asked by Google to be a part of a team that solved. And he said if you look at the kind of distribution curve of who excels in these areas that we're trying to hire for, it looks like men do better and worse than women. In other words, men have more extreme scores on the high and low end. And perhaps that's one of the reasons. And he was fired. So they let go a guy who people said was a good guy, a good employee, trying to help solve a problem. And all he did was share an idea that they thought was too controversial for the workplace. Yeah, we could pull out other examples. You can look up on your own Larry's summary story. He was the president of Harvard and ended up losing his job in 2007 for almost the exact same story. Okay, so it's the same question. Why are women not in the hard sciences in the same rate that men are? He is asked to be provocative.

He's literally asked. They said, will you be provocative? And so he says, well, here are three reasons. Three provocative reasons that this might be the case. One, men, women are drawn to different kinds of jobs. Two, companies have discriminated against women. So that's one of the options. Yeah, that's one of the options.

Or three, maybe there's a greater variability among men and cognitive abilities related to science and engineering. Which is James DeMore's point. Now, people, that's just a fact. We can like things and not like things. We can wish the world was different, but we have to play in the world of facts. And he was run out of Harvard for just asking that question. He was asked to be provocative. I don't get it. I'm laughing because it's so sad. And again, these stories are happening more and more frequently. You know, I think whenever we go to the Bible's example and we look and we say, does Jesus give us an example, did he oust people for disagreeing with him? Did he say, if you're not in lockstep with me, you can get out of town. I don't want to hear from you. And again and again, we see Jesus going to, speaking to, listening to people that his tribe had rejected, whether it was the Samaritan woman or the Cyro-Fenician woman, lepers, centurians. And he welcomes into his disciple group, people who had wildly different ideological ideas. He's got people who want to be revolutionaries and people who say, Rome ain't that bad. He brings them all in.

You got Matthew, the tax collector, who had kind of gone over to Rome's side. And you got Simon the Zeal. who famously is trying to overthrow him. And he says we can all band together. We can work together toward a common good. He wanted an actual diversity of thought. So, I mean, Jesus' example is the exact opposite direction. I want to press even further, though. The Bible has the example of the prophets.

The prophets were heterodox thinkers. They called out idolatrous kings. In fact, pressing it even further, people like Abraham, Moses, and Habakkuk, they had the audacity to challenge God. They tell God, I don't think you're doing. it right. And does God smite them down and say, you can get out? I don't want anything to do with you. If you're not in locks up with me. No, he actually talks with them. So God's example is not that we should be some sort of, again, group thinking, lockstep. If you're not with us, you're against us,

kind of approach to how we gather together. He gives us a different way. So remember that one of the reasons that companies do better when they have diversity is because they bring in more voices, different kinds of voices, different experiences, different ideas, beliefs, and that helps make them a better, stronger company that makes wise decisions. Well, if you shut those down, if you shut down opinions that are different than yours, if you shut out perspectives that you don't want to hear because they don't fit with your worldview, what you end up doing is becoming dumber. Yeah, you literally become dumber because you're unwilling to let your ideas be challenged and sharpened by different ideas. Obviously, the classic example of this would be Galileo. He spoke out and said, hey, the earth revolves around the sun, not the other way around. And the guy's put on house arrest for the rest of his life for it.

Now, thankfully, his ideas ended up winning out. But no one's going to look and say, we want to be like the Catholic Church that imprisoned Galileo. Yeah, because the Catholic Church was dumber because they refused to listen to him because he said something that was out of step with. their opinion. I think this is also tremendously bad for democracy, freedom, and justice. And the reason why is simple. Who gets to decide what's the right view and the wrong view? Well, in a corporation, I'll tell you who it is. It's the person with the most money and the person with the most power. Whoever signs the checks. Whoever signs the checks. So if you're the one signing the checks, you get to say whatever you want to say and set the rules and the agenda ideologically.

But the everyday employee now is all of a sudden having to either agree with the CEO, I guess, or get out. And so the person with the most money has the most votes or has the most power in a democracy. And I'm not sure that's what we want. I'm not sure that we want votes to be able to be bought. I think what we want is democratically elected representatives making their choices and being held accountable by the electorate. But when a business says, we won't make our films or we won't have our sporting events in a particular state, what they're trying to do is resist the will of the democratically elected representatives of that state. And I don't think that's what we want. We don't want to be ruled by an oligarchy of CEOs. We want to be ruled by our, again, democratically elected representatives. It's also tremendously bad for justice. There's the story of the emperor with no clothes. He's walking around naked. And he thinks that everybody can't see that he's naked. They'll see him as being clothed and gloriously beautiful clothing. And the crowds are so afraid of the emperor, they go along with the joke. They're just cheering for him. Your clothes are so amazing. and it's a child who walks up to him and says,

sir, you have no clothes on. Somebody's finally willing to speak the truth, what they all knew it. They all knew he didn't have any clothes on. They were just afraid of saying it. And that's what happens when your economic livelihood is threatened. You're going to lose your job if you speak out.

So what happens? You become the crowd who tells the naked emperor that his clothes are beautiful. We see this happening all over the place. My favorite example, it's really actually sickening, is with Unilever. So Unilever has kind of positioned himself

as being the great defender of women in the corporate world. This is from their website. Every time you scrub with Dove, wake up with Lipton, or clean with per... Is it pronounced Purcell or Perseal? I don't even know what that is. I've never cleaned with it. You're supporting Fempowerment. I love that word Fempowerment. By helping girls and women unlock their amazing potential. And in fact, towards this exact end, they've partnered financially and in other ways with UN Women, which is a nonprofit branch of the UN. And the UN women are constantly praising Unilever for their amazing work to bring justice for women. The CEO, Alan Jope, said this. The immutable laws of intersectionality

mean that the better job we do for women of color, the better chance we have of progressing gender equality everywhere. Now, what you don't hear about in the Unilever story that's being praised by the UN celebrated by our world, given special benefits because they're so pro women. Meanwhile, in December 2007, there was a candidate that lost Kenya's presidential election. And Unilever actually suspected that after this happened there might be some violence. And that's exactly what happened. Hundreds of men ended up attacking ethnic minorities at Unilever's tea plantations in Kenya. And by the way, I should say this, the UN efforts have all been to protect female tea workers. So these guys, they attack these women. And what you might not realize is that Unilever, they saw this coming. And so they actually posted guards to protect their people. But did they protect the employees? Nope. They didn't protect. the employees, they only put it around their facilities and their manager's homes. The worker camps were left completely unguarded. Now, as if that wouldn't be bad enough, it gets worse. Unilever ends up closing down the plantation for six months. And when those brutalized workers,

when they show back up again, they see their attackers, the people who raped them, who attacked them, who murdered family members, they see them working there at the Unilever tea plantation. And Unilever, what do they say publicly? This is so sad. You know what we've done? we've given all of these workers who, by the way, haven't worked for six months, we've given them a month's worth of payback. They didn't pay for their bills, their hospital bills. They left people employed who had raped and attacked them. And here we have Fempowerment.

That's what's sickening about it is here they're pretending to be all about women's rights and women's health and they've got this reputation as pro-woman, but they won't take care of their very employees who were brutalized and attack because they worked for them. Does the UN say the emperor has no clothes? No, the UNILI-Liver and then is quiet about what happened on their facilities. They're quiet about how Unilever mistreated women because they're getting so much money from Unilever that they are unwilling to speak the truth. And that's why this kind of lockstep thinking, group think, is so bad for justice.

One of the other costs of stakeholder capitalism as it's currently being expressed is that it has a tendency to erode social trust. So that's a word that you might not be familiar with. Keith, do you want to kind of try to explain what social trust is? Social trust is really important to our culture. It is the confidence that we have that other people that we don't know are acting in good faith. So if you go to the grocery store and you buy food there, you have confidence that you're being sold a product that is good for you, that isn't contaminated, say with pesticides or something. It's not a cinnamon toast crunch box with shrimp tails in it. Social trust is something even like driving down the highway.

You trust that people are going to stay on their side of the lane. So social trust holds our society together. It's social trust is required by banks that you expect them to handle your money in appropriate ways and to follow the rule of law. When social trust dissolves and we don't trust each other, we don't trust the school board to do what's right for kids. We don't trust our neighbors to maintain their property. property and to stay off our property. We don't trust our church leaders, our government leaders, everything begins to break down. You have to have a certain amount of social trust for a healthy

business, for a healthy society, anything. Yeah, so the question then becomes, how does stakeholder capitalism actually erode trust? And the answer to that question is that corporations are currently, as they buy into various ideologies, they are promoting stories, visions of the world, which promote outrage and actually divide us. They're promoting stories. that give us a narration of reality, which may or may not be true. An example of this, in my interview with John Mark Comer, he was drawing at the point, he said, look, if I don't check the news, if I don't check my social media feed, if I was just off the grid, I would come to the conclusion that living in America was a pretty good place.

You know, he goes, I travel around a lot, I visit nice places, there's great food, great people. He goes, on my own, I would come to the conclusion. So he had a place, and he goes, go ahead. He would be accused of having privilege. He would say, because I know people would accuse me of having privilege, and there might actually be some truth to that. But he says something interesting. He goes, I can never say this in my church in Portland because they would just run me out. It doesn't fit the narrative that they've been told, which is that America is the most racist place in the world. It's one of the worst place in the world

to live. And so he could never possibly say it. And ironically, we've got these corporations that are beginning to promote that exact idea, that America is a terrible place. It is the most racist place in the world. I guess the motivation is that if America is bad, then they can be the hero by fixing it, right? The corporation gets to be the hero. I don't know if the corporations are setting that narrative or if they're following that narrative. It's always hard to figure out what comes first, the chicken or the egg. Absolutely. But there is definitely the momentum behind the idea that everything in America is falling apart. It's a bad place. And we need heroes, whether they're political figures or government figures or somebody to come fix it. So let me give an

example of this, again, pulled from Ramoswamy's book. He talks about how in January of 2020, at the World Economic Forum in Davos. I'd love to go there. It's in the mountains. It sounds like Switzerland, right? Yeah. It sounds rich. It does. I don't think I can afford to be there. They wouldn't want me there. Anyways, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, he announced that they would not take any companies public unless they had one diverse member on the board. Now, he didn't really offer a definition of diversity. Well, we already talked about that, right? Everybody wants to keep that definition vague. That one's going to be vague. All we know for sure is it's not diverse thinking. No, it's not that. But he said it was going to have a focus on women. This is how he explained his reasoning. He said,

this decision is rooted first and foremost in our conviction that companies with diverse leadership perform better because it reduces the risk of group think. So again, we're hitting the exact same point. Well, diversity of thought reduces group think. Diversity of skin color, diversity of gender doesn't necessarily. But we have to think, what's the narrative that he's implying by saying this? Well, by emphasizing women, the narrative he's implying is that boardrooms are controlled by men, actively trying to keep women out. It's a way of enforcing the patriarchy. A glass ceiling. Yeah, there's a glass ceiling. And so there's a narrative. And that's a narrative that's caused a lot of division and outrage and erosion of social trust in our country. And he's painting himself

and Goldman as being the people who are going to break through that ceiling. Trust us because we are going to force women into the boardroom where they have belonged for years. Since companies won't do it, we're going to do it for them. Yeah. And again, for the record, I would love it. There's more women on the boards of these big businesses. We're not saying that we're against that. I know that's how people are going to hear. But here's the important part. Before he made this announcement, every publicly traded company on the S&P 500 had already appointed at least one woman to their boards, to their governance boards. I love that strategy. I'm going to accomplish this great goal that's already being accomplished so that I can take credit for accomplishing it, but it was already

accomplished before I even set the goal. And in fact, in 2019, half of all open board seats went to women. Half of all of them went to women, which again, I hear that and I say, that's great, but let's think about what he's doing. He is promoting a narrative. Men are keeping women out, and we're not like that. And yet the narrative is false, because in the last year, leading up to this, that's exactly what isn't happening. But how is this eroding social trust? Well, I think it erode social trust, again, by playing into a narrative that one fuels outrage. You have people on the left who are outraged over these boardrooms that aren't diverse enough, and it fuels outrage on the right who say, well, hold on.

That's not even the case or that's not something we should be worrying about. And so it plays into the culture war narrative and it puts them on a particular side as the hero. And the whole problem is it's a made up story. I guess I would have said that it erodes social trust because they're being disingenuous. One thing you can know for sure is that Goldman Sachs knew what they were doing. And they knew that women were already on all the boards of S&P 500 companies. And so they had set themselves up to succeed, but they had lied and told a story. And that erode social trust. But all those stories we told earlier about hypocrisy of people pretending to be something they're not, those stories, too, they erode the social trust because we don't believe anyone anymore. We don't believe what we're being told anymore.

Let's plan to this for a second. I would agree with the ideal that I'd love to have more women in leadership at these corporations. Again, I don't have a problem with that. But there are people who probably do have a problem with that. And you want to know how they discredit Goldman Sachs? It's by looking at Goldman Sachs. It's by looking at Goldman. and sacks misdeeds. Because they're virtue signaling, because they're putting on a mask and saying how good they are, there are people who go and say, well, actually, you're not as good as you look. And that means that all of your ideas are wrong. Who is it that doesn't want women to be in? I don't know. I would guess this. I would guess what people who may be against this are saying is, let's put qualified people. Let's put the best people with the best resumes who are most likely to push this company forward. And let's not worry about their gender or their race. Let's not discriminate on the basis of gender and race.

We're going to get ourselves in trouble here because we're not trying to make a point about gender diversity or racial diversity. What we're trying to make a point is that businesses tell stories to promote themselves, but they act like they're trying to promote the social welfare, the social good. They're really not. They've always been about themselves and making money. And if they can use a narrative that people on the left like, if they can use a social justice narrative to make money, they will. But don't believe the story that they're telling you. telling you they are about themselves, which is okay. Just be up front and be honest about it. Yeah, that's kind of our part. We're like, look, you just stay in your lane and be honest. We're okay. We want you to make as much money as you can, legally, ethically, morally, make as much

money as you can because all the time you're making money, you're providing a good, a service, or a product that people want. So we're all for you making money. Just stop telling us things that aren't true. And along those same lines, it's worth pointing out, again, that there are a lot of competing interests here. A CEO who gets up and makes that kind of statement. We won't take a company public unless they have a woman on their board. That CEO, is he defending the interests of Goldman Sachs? Is he defending the interests of shareholders? Or is he a CEO who wants to look a particular way so that when he moves on to his next job as CEO, he's known as the guy who did this great, amazing thing. Here is the man who brought women into the boardroom. Again, problem. He didn't do it. It was already

happening. And so again, all this to underline, it erodes our trust in each other. That's the problem. just that, it also erodes our sense of social responsibility because the implicit message is, and we've hit on this earlier, if you buy my product or if you buy our bank's products, if you do that, you are fighting for justice. This is the hashtag justice or the product justice that you really don't have to go out and serve in your community. You don't have to get involved in grassroots, politics, just buy the right t-shirt, say the right slogans, post the right things on Instagram or Twitter. But that erodes social responsibility. because what we really need to be doing, you, me, everyone is working for a better society at the street level.

The local level. Where we're actually making sacrifices of our time, our effort, relationships, money, whatever it is, instead of just posting on social media about it. Well, and the irony is if I'm out there buying stuff thinking, now I've done my social justice work or I've fought for the cause, but I'm not getting out into the community to serve, I'm missing a huge opportunity to build social trust. You know what happens when you go to a homeless shelter and feed people, and you're alongside people who share your politics and don't share your politics, and you're getting to know homeless people and hear their story and how they ended up where they're at? You know what gets built? Social trust. That's how we learned to trust one another. Well, what you realize is that the person serving with you is a person of the different political party. But they too care about the community. And they too are willing to sacrifice their time to be out there. And you realize they're just good people, even if you disagree with them on the second. amendment or on abortion or on whatever. Some other important topic. And so you trust them and you want to live in the community and work for the common good

together. And along the same lines, I mean, this is one of the problems with only protesting and not serving. If you protest, it's a guarantee you are only around like-minded people. Or if you're not, it's people that you're yelling at on the other side. So when we start thinking social responsibility equals buying products or doing some sort of protest online or in person, it's not going to help us trust one another more. There's an interesting quote from Jean-Jacques Rousseau that I think nails this on the head.

He said this, as soon as public, not private, as soon as public service ceases to be the chief business of citizens, and they would rather serve with their money than with their person, the state is not far from its fall. I mean, that hurts. That hurts me, you all right, everybody, right? Because we know it's easier to write a check than it is to give your time. And I think he's right that when we just want to give money and not personally invest, we lose touch with our community. We don't trust other people in our community. Absolutely. And when you think about the example set by the CEO of Goldman Sachs again, he's giving us a vision of social justice, which is not getting out there and serving.

It's standing in front of a group of very, very wealthy investors and saying, look at this great idea I have that I'm going to implement. Well, we all know service opportunities. They're more photo ops or something you can put in the paper, issue a press release for. We've probably all seen that. And there's something about it that is appealing to us, the dark side of us, because we get the credit without having to do the work. But we know ultimately that it's not healthy for us as individuals and it's sure not healthy for our communities. I want to kind of wrap a bow on this episode. We've got one other thought to run into next.

But before we do, someone's going to walk out of this and say that we're, I think, anti-capitalism or even anti-stakeholder capitalism. And I don't think that's our point. I think what we're trying to address where we started is the fact that Christians have to navigate their economics, the world in which they live. And there's going to be a way to do shareholder capitalism that could be very destructive. Short-term gains can be incredibly destructive. And there's a way to do stakeholder capitalism, which is what we've been discussing, which can also be incredibly destructive. And so the question becomes, what's a positive vision for maybe both share and stakeholder capitalism? That's one reason why we're going to invite Brent Bishore, who I mentioned earlier, who's the owner of a private equity company, who is a leader in this space and is talking to a lot of people in this space to help us think through what a positive vision would be.

To be honest, Patrick, my main thing that I've been wanting to discuss and think about is, is it really good for our culture and our society, for these big businesses, to have so much power that they can shut people out of jobs, fire people for stating their beliefs, shut down state economies. Do we really want those companies to have that much power while they are doing business with China, while they are mistreating their workers in Kenya, while they are fighting against basic protections for people who work in the gig economy? Are these the people that we want to give that much power to. Again, we've talked about Goldman Sachs, but simultaneously, well, he's making this big announcement at Davos about, you know, how I hate to say woke, but that's what it is,

how woke we are simultaneously. At the exact same time, it turns out that they had paid more than $1 billion in bribes to the one Malaysia Development Burrhard Fund, say that one 10 times fast. Now, that might sound like nothing to you. Supposedly the fund was supposed to help public development projects, but Goldman Sachs, it turns out they knew all along, it was actually basically just a slush fund for Malaysian officials so they could buy luxury goods, jets, those kind of things. Yeah, and Rob Moswami in the book we've referred to, he has some of his own solutions that

he proposes. So one of the things I respect about him is that he doesn't just critique and criticize, but he really tries to offer solutions to some of these problems. And I'd encourage you to check it out. I think some of the solutions are real and legitimate and actually could make a difference. So the last thing we want to do, I want to propose. an answer to a question. How did we get here? How do we get to the point that we have this kind of shareholder capitalism taking root so deeply and so quickly? Where did this come from? Again, in Ramoswami's book, he kind of presents an idea and I'm going to build on his idea. He has a nice cake. I'm just going to add a layer to that layer cake here today. I'm hungry. Yeah, I'm hungry too. But let me suggest this.

I want to go back, interestingly, to the Great Depression. So the Great Depression happens, and the public totally loses their faith in capitalism. Big business. They had blown it. And what ends up happening in its place is the New Deal politics of FDR. And FDR starts rebuilding the country in kind of a new image. Now, these big corporations, they want to get back in the public's good graces. And so they do the stupid thing. They go out and just promote themselves. Hey, we're great. We're not as bad as you guys think they are. Does it work? No, it doesn't work at all. Shocked. So World War II happens. people come back, and of course these big businesses still want to win over Americans, but they've discovered, we can't do this ourselves. Luckily, just something drops into their lap, and that is

communists. Yeah, communists are great to rally the country around, right? I mean, they're evil, they're bad, they're going to take over the world, we're the good people who are going to fight them off. Well, and I mean, they really are kind of evil and do lots of bad things. So it's not a bad boogeyman to go point at. So the businesses rallied around anti-communism and joined forces with the government, joined forces with the church. That's where things get really interesting. These big businesses discover that there's one particular kind of thought leader who is deeply anti-communist because communists are deeply anti-God.

You want to know who that is? The Christian. The Christians, in particular. And so they start finding pastors who are, again, profoundly anti-communist, and they start developing programs that will shape their thinking to help them become. They hand out sermon notes, right? They hand out sermon notes. They create magazines.

You can preach this in your... your church that is anti-communism and pro-capitalism. And we mentioned God plenty, but it turns out that this pro-capitalism message is really good for our big business bottom line. It's actually fascinating when you get into the history of it. There's a great book called One Nation Under God by Kevin Kuse, where he explores some of this. But they end up developing an organization called spiritual mobilization. And that's what they do. They're training pastors to preach these kinds of things. And interestingly, I mean, they do some kind of dirty things. For example, they have sermon contests.

And so if you were a pastor, you could win $5,000, which back then was a lot, a lot, lot, lot of money. Still a lot of money to me, bro. Yeah, still a lot of money to be. But back then it was a lot of money. And you could win this $5,000 by preaching a sermon based on the theme, established by the big business spiritual mobilization group. You could win money.

And so you have pastors all over the country entering into these contests in promoting kind of this big business, anti-communism, capitalism. They begin founding press. breakfast and spiritual groups that are designed to bring together big business leaders and pastors. And of course, this is a heavy experience for pastors. They get to be around kind of the movers and the shakers. And together, collectively, it begins to reshape America's conception of capitalism. Yeah, so the pastors are joining forces with big business and an anti-communist message. And the pastors are winning because they are gaining cloud and they're getting maybe some money

and they're getting help for their churches. And the big businesses are winning because they're being redeemed from being the bad guys during the Depression, their reputation is now kind of of being cleaned up and laundered by the church. Well, and it leads to the most Christian decade in American history. So, I mean, the whole project actually goes on quite well. What's interesting is that a lot of these business owners were not Christian. They weren't anti-Christian, but they had no interest in faith. They were just using the church. And you have these people who aren't Christians working actually, again, very closely with some pastors to promote these goods. They had shared interests. Big picture. The Great Depression happens, and America's perception of big business goes down the

tank. Big businesses are bad. And then a new vision of what America looks like begins to develop, again, which is not very good for big businesses. But then something drops into their lap. They realize that people who shape the thoughts of everyday Americans, pastors actually share a lot of their vision. And so they go out of their way to become pro-Christian to help these pastors share this mission so that the pastors could go out like marketers and give big business a facelift. So big business gets redeemed by pastors fighting against anti-communist. That's exactly right. So let's fast forward to the present. The Great Recession of 2008. So this to me is a very real time is when I was in college. And so I knew a lot, lot, lot of millennials who graduated from college, couldn't find good jobs,

couldn't find paying jobs, had to live in parents' houses, not because they wanted to, but because everybody was only offering them unpaid internships. And as a result of that great recession, again, America's perception of capitalism goes down the tank. You have Occupy Wall Street movement happening around this time. Even the Tea Party was throwing a fit against the corporate bailouts that happened because of the 2008 recession. Both sides are incredibly angry. And so now, again, we have big business. They need a facelift because America no longer trusts them. And guess what happens? Another magic golden opportunity. Except this time, it's not the high priest of Jesus. it's the high priests of social justice who step into the gap. They walk in and they say,

you have heard it said that economics are the real injustice in our country. But I tell you this. It's not economic injustice. It's identity-based injustice. The real injustices are rooted in inequity of skin color, of gender, of sexuality. It's nothing to do with economics. That's where the real inequality starts. Now, who are you saying says that the social movements or the businesses are saying it. It's the social movement. This comes out of academia. And so you have social justice where, in fact, if you watch the development of Occupy Wall Street, you see this happen. It starts off as a thoroughly economic movement. But a few years in, they start telling white men, you can't speak, you need to take the back seat. And it shifts from being about economics,

all of a sudden being about identity politics. And so the big businesses take advantage of this. And they say, here is our chance to launder our reputation. Just like we did with the Depression, we used the church to rally against anti-communism. Here now we're going to launder our reputation by working with the activists against identity-based discrimination or injustices. Well, think about it from their perspective. Up until then, what's the problem? Economics. That's the problem. Then someone comes along and says, actually, you know what the real problem is? It's not economic injustice. It's something else. Well, that's something a big business can get behind. Yeah, of course it's not economics. It is about gender. It is about race. And so what do they do?

they do spiritual mobilization. That organization I talked about, they do it all over again. They start pumping money into organizations that are promoting this identity-based politics. They start saying it themselves. They're going to be pro-progressive politics, exact same way that those companies, which weren't really Christian, became very explicitly pro-Christian. And just like you said, that the big business owners weren't necessarily Christian. I mean, I'm sure some of them were, but most weren't. They were just using the church. So also, I don't think most of them actually buy what they're selling. Of course, some do. Some are it's really sincere. But a lot of people, they're just using the activist to launder their own reputation while they're making money

hand over fist behind the scenes. On the point of sincerity, there were business owners who authentically became Christians. And I think there are business owners who have authentically converted to the religion of wokeness. I think there'll be people listening to saying, that's not true. Well, it's a both and. But again, do you see the pattern happening? There is a financial recession. People lose faith in capitalism. And then someone comes along. He says the real problem isn't economics. The real problem is social inequity based on identity. My last thought in the midst of this has to do with my fellow millennials and even myself. If you are a millennial, there is a good chance that you will make

less than your parents did. It's the first generation. Are you sure? Oh, you can find all kinds of studies that show this. I read one study. I think my kids are going to do better than me now. Well, it's because you're a pastor. And your kids are some Gen Z. So what it has to do with is where you're at on that Great Recession. I have two each. One of your millennials is really smart in med school, so she's definitely going to make more than me. She's my retirement plan. She has your retirement line. I read something and it was showing that millennials on the whole make less than the generation that came right before them and the generation that's coming right after them. In other words, they came into the workplace at much lower wages and that had to do with the Great Recession.

Can you imagine what I was like to office with Patrick and me to hear his woe are the millennial stories over and over and over? Have I said, woe are the millennials? Yeah, are you right now. All right. Well, let me make my point. Here's my point. When you realize that you will more likely than not have less than your parents did. And the myth you grew up with was that every generation gets more. Every generation gets better. If I know I'm going to have less money than my parents, I am going to have something better than them. I'm going to be more moral than them. I'm going to be more righteous than them. I'm going to be more progressive than they ever were. And I think this is the temptation that millennials. I actually don't think Gen Z will ultimately buy into this temptation, which will be interesting to watch. This is the temptation that my generation has bought into. In the place of financial success, I will be a Pharisee. So you're saying that as a generation, the generation is going to end up winning somehow. And if they can't win in the traditional American dream sense, they're going to win by finding holes, by picking apart all that their parents and previous generations did wrong. Absolutely.

And I say this to myself because I am a cynic. I have a deep delight in deconstruction. and I have to question myself, is what's driving me to become invested in certain politics or ideas of justice, diversity, all of those things, is what's driving me this kind of phariseical I want to be better than the previous generation? And am I allowing myself to just become a marketer for these corporations that saw an opportunity and identity politics to whitewash their reputations? Those are serious ethical questions, and I think if we're following Jesus, we have to ask those questions. So big picture, if you care about it.

about justice, if you care about economics, if you're someone who says, I want to be thoughtful about how I engage, which is what Jesus calls us to do. Remember, Christians always engaged at every level of an economic system. And yet Christians always had to disrupt as well. They always had to issue challenges in the name of justice. That's all we're challenging you who are listening. That's what we're challenging you to do. You might not agree with Keith and I on everything. You might not agree with the problems we see or with the solutions we see, but I hope you can agree with the questions that we're asking. Thanks for listening. If you found this podcast helpful, make sure to subscribe and leave a review.

And make sure it's at least five stars. Stop. No. Just be honest. Reviews help other people find this. Okay. Okay. At the very least, you can share today's episode. Maybe put it on your social, your favorite text chain. And if you didn't like this episode, awesome. Tell us why you disagree on Twitter. At Truth Over Tribe underscore. We might even share your thoughts in an upcoming newsletter. If you're still listening after the credits, thanks so much for joining us. really hope that you will take the time right now to go and subscribe to Truth Over Tribe on your podcast player. We want to go on this journey as a community, thinking about politics,

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