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

Episode Date: August 20, 2022

Environmental, social, and governance scores are popping up everywhere from the biggest banks in America to the largest financial firms in the world. But if you think ESG is just a fancy banking term, you’re in for a rude surprise: This will change EVERYTHING. From high gas prices to the destruction of free speech, we’re already starting to feel its effects. So, Glenn sits down with the man who’s helping to build the resistance. Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy has been hard at work exposing ESG for what it truly is: the biggest scam of the 21st century. His first book “Woke, Inc.” took on the woke industrial complex, and now he’s launched Strive Asset Management to be a David to the world’s the financial Goliaths like BlackRock. Vivek and Glenn break down exactly what ESG is, what’s at stake, and why it’s not too late to stop it. Sponsors: Patriot Mobile is America's only Christian conservative cell phone company, and it has plans for any budget. Veterans and first responders save even more, so make the switch today at https://PatriotMobile.com/BECK School is right around the corner, and many kids do not know where their meals will come from this semester. Good Ranchers is on a mission to donate 100,000 high-quality meals to help. Go to https://GoodRanchers.com/GLENN to get $30 off your order and free shipping while changing the future one meal at a time. If you want socks that’ll keep your feet cool in the summer and warm in the winter – socks made with the latest in wool technology right here in the good old USA — you don’t have to look any further than Grip6. Go to https://grip6.com/Beck Preborn’s work of saving babies’ lives will continue at an even greater level as it fights Planned Parenthood and defends its centers from the radical hate groups who want nothing more than to shut it down. To donate, dial #250 and say the keyword “BABY” or go to https://preborn.com/GLENN Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's something else here now. Something new. From. Exclusively on Paramount Plus. It's the series Stephen King calls scary as hell. Everything here is impossible, but it's also real. Sci-fi Vision calls it the best show streaming right now. We're running out of time and we still don't know the rules.

Don't miss what the movie blog calls something you need to watch. Saving those children is how we all go home. From binge all episodes exclusively on Paramount Plus. Klaus Schwab, dark lord of the world economic forum. He has described BlackRock as the largest private asset manager in the world and as such a major shareholder and a voice to be reckoned with in many of the world's biggest publicly listed companies. End quote. It's true. These companies like BlackRock own about 20% of all the biggest companies, not only,

in America, but also the world. Schwab has said again and again that ESG will become the standard thanks to BlackRock and similar companies, Leviathans. We need to be asking ourselves right now some important questions. What do we believe in? What do we want our future to look like?

Are we a collective or does the individual still have, are they still sovereign? How did such a small group of investors, elites, CEOs, gain control of our society? Why do they actively push division? How and why have they used politics to achieve this goal? Today's guest has ruffled a lot of feathers and inspired a lot of people by giving us some answers to these questions.

You want to talk about David and Goliath? He is going face to face with. with the three largest financial asset firms in the world, which handle tens of trillions of dollars. He is by all accounts, an elite. He has degrees from Yale and Harvard, high-level experience in big tech, biotechnology, big pharma. And on his resume, three little letters appear over and over again, CEO,

and all before the age of 37. Now, unlike most elites, he doesn't make an annual trip to a certain gathering of elites in a certain town in Switzerland. He doesn't post videos of himself kneeling or performing. Instead, he exposes. His first book, Woke Inc. Inside a corporate America's social justice scam, is an attack on the woke industrial complex, and you will understand what's happening. If you read that book, just a month ago, he took things a little, step further by opening his own asset financial firm. It's Strive. I want you to know in full disclosure, I invited him. This is not because Strive is a sponsor of the Blaze. I truly like him and have been inspired by him. And I thought his voice was needed to be heard. But I just wanted

to disclose that. Strive is put together to compete to compete with black Rock and Vanguard and State Street, which he refers to as an ideological cartel. He wants you to know what's really happening in the corporate boardrooms and on Wall Street. Today on the Glenbeck podcast, Vivek Rameshwamy. Americans are super tired of being frustrated by a stalling economy, inflation, disintegration of trusted institutions. The country's going in the wrong direction and millions of people feel helpless to make a difference. Today's podcast is all about that you are not small or inconsequential and you can make a difference. There are companies in a new sort of almost parallel economy that still believe in America and our constitution and our future. And when

we stick together, greatness follows. Patriot Mobile America's only Christian conservative cell phone company is on the front lines fighting for the sanctity of life, religious freedom, freedom of speech, freedom to think and speak. Also the Second Amendment. They also have broad nationwide coverage through multiple major networks that give you crystal clear coverage minus the woke propaganda supported by the major carriers. I want you to switch today. Support the people who are supporting you and giving you great service and saving you money. Patriotmobile.com slash back. Call 972 Patriot. They have plans for any budget and their U.S.-based customer. service team is ready to help.

Veterans and first responders are going to save even more. So make the switch today. Use the offer code Beck and get free activation. It's Patriotmobile.com slash Beck. Patriotmobile.com slash Beck 972 Patriot. Welcome. Good to be here. Yeah.

Good to have you. I want to start with, I've got so many things. We could probably run three hours on this podcast. But I want to start with ESG. and I've written a book about it, you've written a book about it. So we obviously have it. But I meet people all the time. I was just with a bunch of politicians, the Senate and the House of one of the states.

I met with them just yesterday, spent the day. And it's weird. People either get it and know it and they get it deeply. They kind of go down a rabbit hole. The second response is they've been. not heard it and they're a little horrified by it. The third is the most amazing. The one where they roll their eyes. And they're like, this is such a ridiculous thing. That's not what this is. Let's take it from the beginning. Yeah. If you've just heard ESG, but you don't know what it is,

what is it? And you know, that response, I get that third response sometimes to Glenn. And so one of things I like to do is actually let's just start with the well-intentioned version of it. All right? Let's just talk about it in the best-intentioned version of it was a proponent of ESG. Let's talk about what it is, and then we can see some of the unintended content. Sure. So the ESG movement, stakeholder capitalism, that whole genre was based on the idea that we have shared global challenges like global inequity, like global climate change, that governments

aren't sufficiently addressing. And so it's going to require actors in the public sector and the private sector to work together to address these challenges that politicians have failed to address. And if we don't address them, we have existential challenges for the planet. We have existential challenges for inequity. And if nobody steps up, then ultimately we all fail in the end. This isn't my view, but I'm just stating the view of proponents of stakeholder capitalism, the World Economic Forum, the Klaus Schwab view, the Larry Fink view. That's what the heart of it is. And I think this is.

something I've talked about for a long time. I don't believe in basic, you know, basic minimum income. However, I mean, try saying this and conservative radio. I've said for 10 years, you don't understand what's coming just because of tech. Okay? We are going to have possibly 30% unemployment at some point. Right. As it all transitions. What are we going to do? If you don't like that, What are you going to do? But no one's having an open discussion. Exactly. Let's open up the channel of the balance.

So I say, you know what, even if I don't agree with you, let's give the best statement of the other view. Let's get it on the table. And then let's talk about what's wrong with it. All right. So Milton Friedman, you know, guys, you and I liked 50 years ago, said that, okay, we don't want private companies being co-opted into doing the governmental work of solving these societal challenges because it's going to make companies less effective.

It's going to make companies less effective at making women. That means they're going to be less profitable. That means they're going to make less money. If companies make less money, then society becomes poorer as a whole because the economic pie shrinks. So that was Milton Friedman's critique. I agree with much of that. I agree with most of that, actually. My issue with this whole trend, I think it's more similar to your issue, is the inverse of that.

It's not that I worry that this just sucks the lifeblood out of capitalism when you tell capitalists that they have to take care of these environmental or social or cultural concerns. It's that you actually suck the lifeblood out of a democracy. Because these are questions that whether you're on the left or right, these are important questions to talk about in the open. How do we address historical inequities? How do we address if shared global climate change is a challenge that deserves addressing?

If it's true, then it actually is so fundamental that we ought to be talking about it in the open as citizens. And when we delegate that work to a small group of elites who make the answers to those questions behind closed doors, we actually suck the air out of a democracy where you're supposed to settle those questions but through free speech and open debate in the public squares. So that's my problem with it. You're also not sucking the air out of it.

You are also creating people, okay, that will lose the ability to ask logical questions. Oh yeah. You know what I mean? You won't be able to reason anymore. You won't be able to stand.

back because you will have no models of someone saying, no, wait a minute, wait a minute, that doesn't make sense to me and can logically think things through. You have to model that. And the reason you lose it, you're absolutely right about that. The reason you lose it is that when you use economic force to settle these questions, say the everyday workers at these companies, if they don't adhere to the social orthodoxy, to the ESG agenda that's been pushed down their throats, you're at risk of losing your job. You're at risk of getting fired. You're at risk of being denied a promotion. And I think that when you force people to actually face the economic sword for speaking their mind openly, then you're left with a country where people

have to choose between the First Amendment and between the American dream. And that's what perpetuates this new culture of fear in the private sector, where we lose our ability to debate questions of, let's just say, take one issue racial injustice or another issue global climate change. I mean, those are two of the big issues pushed by the ESG movement. The E is all about the climate change agenda. The S is all about the DEI and racial equity agenda. But if that's being pushed through economic force, effectively the kind of thing that government used to be concerned about, but now it's private companies pushing those same agendas, using capital to do it, if you're an everyday citizen, you might be at risk of losing your job or putting food on the dinner table if you don't

bend the knee to that new orthodoxy. And so that's where you get to this place where we can't even talk about these issues in the open because you have an economic sword that's ultimately hanging over your head if you defect from the main orthodoxy. So I think that's the main problem. Is it fair to say that ESG is just the codification of cancel culture? Yeah, it really is. It's applying economic force to the culture that we call cancel culture. Okay, cancel culture is basically a culture, the way I define it, is a culture that settles political and social disagreements,

not through free speech and open debate. but through force. I personally think a democratic society, a Democratic Republic is a society that settles its disagreements through free speech and open debate. Cancel culture calls for the opposite viewpoint that says that these questions should not be settled in the open through free speech and open debate. We should use force, including economic force, to settle that question. ESG, what that does is it directs the flow of capital to abide by one end of the political

spectrum's views. That's one form of force. Capital is a form of force. as you say money doesn't talk it screams well at the end of the day they're screaming with money on behalf of one end of the political spectrum's views that's what the esg movement represents today so i want to just i want to stay first at the building blocks of what it is so people understand um so let's talk about uh for instance why gas prices truly are so high yep they're blamed on the war in Russia, on Putin, on just average inflation, and the president says he's doing everything

he can. And I don't make this about politics. I want to make this about what the system is that is being built. That's right. So it turns out the American people have a pretty good system of constitutional governance that determines how we hold political leaders accountable. Okay. So if we don't like the policies passed by the Biden administration, we can vote him out. If we don't like the policies passed by Congress, we can vote them out. That's the way our democratic system works. Well, what the Biden administration has managed to do, though, is, and not just the Biden administration, many administrations before him. This is, this is global. This is global, right? This is transnational. This is transpartisan even in many ways. Build back better was the slogan for the election for the

Japanese prime minister for Boris Johnson and England all over the world. Totally. So this is, this is, It's too parochial to think this is a U.S. issue. But what they've realized is that, you know what, the political process is inconvenient. Democracy is inconvenient because the people may not let us get done the things we need to get done. So what we're going to do is to delegate that work to the private sector instead. You know, the Green New Deal, we could never get that passed through Congress. Ah, here's a different idea. Let's instead have people sign the climate pledge instead.

So that's what John Kerry has done. He's the self-appointed climate change czar. in the U.S. government, he's gone to many of the major banks across the country and have them sign the climate pledge, which says that, okay, it's legal to drill for more oil in places like the Arctic Circle. Arctic drilling is legal, and we couldn't pass a law that banned it, because there's this inconvenient thing called political accountability. They'd vote us out of office if we did that. But here's what you can do. You can sign a pledge as a bank just to say that you won't lend to any of those projects. And then you get every major bank to sign that, and you get

to an entire Alaskan drilling crisis where people actually have great natural resources that companies can't drill into because they can't be financed because every major financial institution has signed that climate pledge. And the obvious point to make is these are not charitable institutions, right? Banks are self-interested institutions. So what are they getting in return for the question of signing that climate pledge? They didn't do it voluntarily. It's a new form of crony capitalism where instead of crony capitalism, one, point O before the 08 financial crisis. I got my first job in finance in New York City

before the 08 crisis. I mean, I've seen how this game is played. That's private sector actors effectively bribing government officials to gain competitive favors. This is the reverse. It's government actors effectively bribing private actors to do through the back door

what they couldn't get done through the front door through a constitutional democratic process. So I know the answer to this, but I want you to make it very clear here because what people will say to me is This is the private sector. Those banks can do whatever they want to do. We're for a free market. They're making the choice as individual banks.

Yes. So in order to really understand this, we're talking about the building blocks here, I think we've got to go back to the 2008 financial crisis. I think that's when a lot of this began, where they've duped both liberals and conservatives in the submission with their own slogans. So what happened after the 2008 financial crisis was that occupy Wall Street, was on Wall Street's doorstep, okay? And if you're Wall Street, you don't like Occupy Wall Street very much.

You know, take money from those wealthy corporate fat cats and redistributed to poor people, to help poor people. Agree or not, that's what the old left had to say, okay. But right around that time was the birth of this new ESG movement, the new three-letter acronym movement broadly, DEI, CSR, corporate social responsibility, ESG, environmental social governance factors. And right around that time, what Wall Street said was, okay, you know what we can get on board with that.

that's a little easier we can appoint some token minorities to our boards we can muse about the racially disparate impact of climate change we'll talk about systemic racism all you want don't talk about systemic financial risk effectively to the new left we expect you look the other way as long as you leave us alone with the old occupy wall street left getting defanged so the way they defanged the old left was to say that you know what we will use our corporate power to advance your agendas even more effectively than government's advancing your agendas but we don't do it for free we effectively expect that you look the other way when it comes to leaving our corporate power intact, which is the thing you wanted to attack. Now, that's how they dupe the left. The way they dupe the right,

though, is they said that, you know what, you guys have always been in favor of big business. You've always been in favor of the free market. These are just private companies making decisions that you all along. So that's how both sides got duped into submission. Liberals forgot their skepticism of corporate power because they loved the causes that these corporations, including Wall Street and financial institutions, were pushing. But conservatives, were duped into submission because they were told, well, you know, the free market can do wrong. We memorized that back in 1980. And so that was the new rise of this new, I would say, hybrid monster of government power and state power that was far more powerful than either.

So that happened with Occupy Wall Street and the corporations. But here's an answer I don't have. How, where did the government come in? Because all of this money, remember, they were too big to fail, which leads you to say, oh, Okay. So they're going to punish the big banks, break them up into smaller entities. But they didn't. They made those corporations larger and gave them bigger teeth to eat us with. But with strings attached. And the strings attached are, okay, this does not come for free.

You're effectively going to get done what government could not get done because the people would have never allowed the government to do it with the backstop of their vote. you guys in the private sector are not backstopped by a vote so you can get done what we never could have gotten done politically. So that's the birth of this story. Well, it has been a remarkable summer, a time to celebrate Roe versus Wade being overturned. And it has been a long slog, but it's not over. In fact, the fight is getting nastier. Roe versus Wade was responsible for the slaughter of over 63 million babies.

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but we really need your help. Pro-lifers, would you consider a gift to this remarkable group and organization that is on the actual front lines? $10, $50, $100,000, whatever you have, could be a dollar. All gifts are tax deductible and will go towards saving babies' lives and helping keep pre-born centers safe so they can continue their life-saving work. To donate, just dial pound 250. Pound 250, say the keyword, baby. pound 250 keyword baby or go to preborn.com slash glen i know somebody who is in the basement of the fed uh with paulson uh the week before it was a it was a sunday night uh when they first laid tarp out

and he was with a bank that didn't need the bailout and he said we're not going to take it he was the cfo we don't need it and uh paulson said to him you don't understand you're all taking this. This is an offer you can't refuse. It's a godfather style. No one, he said it was. It was like the mob. No one is leaving this room until every signature in this room is on this document. And I personally believe we are still paying for the sins. By the way, under Republican administration, we are paying for those sins today. Correct. Because that began this new merger of effectively government power and corporate power. It was breaking the free. What did George Bush say? We have to violate the free market to save the free market. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Well, in the

So what that's created is a new situation where actually we have to save capitalism from this new corporatist monster. That's actually the true capitalism is long forgotten. And this idea that what we see today is the free market is an illusion. As I often say, the free market cannot fix what it is not free to fix. If it's not free to fix it, if government is effectively granting competitive favors now to firms like BlackRock, right? Look at how many BlackRock alumni staffed the Biden administration.

Look at who gets to administer the COVID-19 stimulus packages. get charged a fee for doing it. So the two places we're seeing this most are both on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley. And in both places, the name of the game is that government is using private parties to do its dirty work, to do through the back door what government could not get done through the front door under the Constitution. In Silicon Valley, it's censorship of content. Yeah. Censoring content. First Amendment. We just saw that this week, right? What happened to Alex Barrensen? You're effectively seeing government directing private actors to take down constitutionally protected speech that government could not take down on its own.

Yes. Because the founding fathers never imagined a fourth branch of government outside the system of checks and balances. That's Silicon Valley. And then with large asset managers and with large financial institutions, what you're seeing is using the power of capital flows in the name of ESG to be able to implement through economic force policies on everyday Americans that as voters, most of those everyday Americans would have never accepted.

But they're told that it's just the free market delivering that outcome. when it's not the invisible hand of the market, it is the invisible fist of government effectively guiding those outcomes. And so it's this charade that I think bothers me the most where if everyday Americans can see what's going on with clear eyes, they would never tolerate it. But each side is duped into submission by the slogans they themselves have memorized. Liberals have totally been lulled into submission, forgetting about Citizens United in 2010, they were skeptical about the aggregation of corporations influencing our politics. Right.

Whatever happened to that, well, you know, if they're really advancing diversity, equity, inclusion and fighting shared challenges like global climate change, maybe I am okay with them having that much power. But conservatives are even more frustrating to me. Reciting these slogans we memorized in 1980, it's like Dorothy might have said at Toto, it's not 1980 anymore. Right. We don't actually have a free market? Don't you think that that is changing with the younger conservatives, if you will, they understand the world has. changed. I meet older conservatives, especially Republicans, and they'll be the first to recite that crap for you. And I think people who are thinking or young, so they haven't been, you know, cemented into

that mindset, I know I'm a completely different conservative than I was 25 years ago, because I used to be, yeah, you know what? I don't want to be the world's policeman, but send them in. Now I'm like, not even, Don't ever do that. It's the worst thing we can do. You learn. You learn. Watching you learn, right? Yeah. And I used to look at things like Blade Runner and go, oh, the corporations after him.

And I used to think that could never happen. You know, the corporation is just, you know, the government. Well, we are that now. That's where we are. And it's so frustrating to me that our side doesn't get it. My side doesn't get it. And then the last. you cared about freedom.

Exactly. You used to. You used to care about this. And so that's the way I think that it's this new cynical force that actually is just about the aggregation of power. It's way in my last book what I called the woke industrial complex. It doesn't matter what you call it. It's a new Leviathan that is far more powerful than what Thomas Hobbes envisioned four years ago. It is far more powerful than what our founding fathers envisioned. But its main goal isn't even to advance a particular agenda. it is the aggregation of power to ultimately make decisions for how to settle societal questions as a whole. And we fought a revolution in this country in 1776.

This is what's at stake today, I think, is we fought a revolution in 1776, not between Republicans and Democrats, but between a system of citizens engaging in self-governance for better or for worse. Sometimes we might together make the wrong decisions. Sometimes we might better make the right decisions. But at least we know we live in a society where we make those decisions together. where everyone's voice and vote counts equally in settling those political questions, period. That was the revolution we found 1776. And as long as you're not trying to force anybody else, you're able to live the opposite decision. Exactly.

I don't want to be a part of that. That's exactly. It's part of what I meant to live in a free country, which was different than all the world, Europe, which said that, you know, for better or worse, that we will get to the right answers with a small group of enlightened elites deciding behind closed doors what the best minds model is for the rest of society at large. Labor leaders, business leaders, church leaders, and governmental leaders, get together behind closed doors, and they decide what's the right for everybody else at large and everyone else accepts that. I'm not, for the purpose of this discussion,

I mean, you and I, we bleed red, white, and blue. Okay, so we're in the American side of this, so be it. But as I'm describing it here, I'm not saying one of those systems is better or worse than the other system, but in 1776, we fought a revolution here on this side of the ocean, saying that we reject that old world European model and we accept the model of self-governance of citizens counting equally in their voice in determining how our society is shaped. Right. That is what is at issue today in the year 2022. It is not Republican versus Democrat.

It is not a black versus white issue. It is a fundamental question of the self-governance of citizens where everyone's voice and vote counts equally. Is that the society we want? And you know what? Maybe we will get to the right answer. And maybe we won't get to the right answer of what that means for carbon emissions. But you know what?

We live in a society where everyone's voice and vote counts. equally and that we're free to live in the way that we want because that's the society we chose a society that I want to live in a society that our founding fathers created for us 250 years later. Or do we go back to the monarchical society where a small group of self-appointed, enlightened, I use enlightened in air quotes here, enlightened elites, decide and settle the answers to those questions at large and use the flow of capital to enforce that orthodoxy on the rest of society. That's the issue that was at stake in 1776, I think, is the very issue that's reared its head again today in the 20 teens all the way into 2022. And that's what I think Republicans and Democrats both would do well to wake up to.

So I just, I don't know if you know this about me, but I collect American history and I am trying to preserve it and protect it from just being erased. I just recently now, it's kind of the American story, really. I just bought an enigma machine. And that's from obviously Nazi Germany. And that gave us artificial intelligence, the idea of artificial intelligence and computers. And we move forward. And then we got the atomic bomb. And Eisenhower gave his farewell speech.

And he said, he warned against the industrial, the military industrial complex. But he also warned against the educational industrial complex. industrial. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's actually a good memory. Yeah. And so that I think is the model of where we start to where this problem comes from is at that point, he said, this is such a big problem and it can happen in 18 minutes to have a missile fly to the other side. We have to fundamentally change, but people have to pay attention or it will get out of control. Well, we didn't pay attention. And now I think the nuclear weapon that they're trying to protect us from, in air quotes, is not climate change. It is AI. It is digitization. Look, Air Canada, does a sold mondial? Super, an offer for the assort. Station thermal, volcano.

Parlant of volcanoes. You've seen the price for the Japan? Epargne and sushi. Wow, the solds are good for Mayork also. We could go to the beach and do you have to run-doney? Or it's a long march on the board of the sea-sile. Hmm, I adore the canolies.

Wait, there's another... Decide, evit. This sold is denduris limited. Reserved to air canada.com or at your agent of voyage. The conditions can't apply. They know the world

is going to change so much. They know that everything will happen so rapidly that they believe that this old system of... of a republic and democracy is too slow to address it and fix it.

And we're not capable of making decisions for ourselves. You know what I mean? Exactly. I think you're right about this. You're doing a good job of airing what I think is the authentic concern of the other side pushing this agenda. And my side too. I'm concerned about those things. Exactly.

So we ought to be, we ought to be talking about it. I think the funny thing is if you look through the arc of history, every time. this debate has presented itself, the dangers of self-governance in a Republican or Democratic form of governance seemed every bit as clear and present in old world Europe as they do today. Every time people think they're reliving a moment where this is the first time, where Chisley is actually different today, that this time is different. It turns out people have felt that way every time along the way. You know what?

I say, for better or worse, are citizens in a democratic society going to get it wrong sometimes if they're free to make their own decisions, if they each get the vote to be able to do. Absolutely. And you know what? You learn. Exactly. You learn from those mistakes and you get better and you encounter hardships. But guess what?

Hardship isn't the same thing as victimhood, especially if you were the person who gave yourself that hardship. You can learn from it and strengthen yourself from it. Individuals and as a society. That's where I come out. But that's not unique to today. No. Today it's AI.

Before it was the telephone. Another day before it was transatlantic travel. All the way from to Elvis. Exactly. You know, it was going to rot our. culture. I mean, it's, it's over and over again. And that's where principles come in to play. Do you believe in the individual? And if the individual is paramount and sacred and sovereign, then you cannot make decisions for the collective. That's right. You have to have the individual.

And we're not, we are not addressing any of the core issues that are. are real true concerns. And I don't think that technology or digitization or AI changes that fundamental question. That doesn't. It's a question about human nature. It makes it more important. For all of human history, it accentuate makes it more important at this moment. But we shouldn't take exception to the view that we would have taken 100 years ago or that

we would have taken a thousand years ago. But the nature of human agency, that's the question. Right now listening to this podcast as the sun climbs high into the morning sky, there's a guy in Texas checking his. fourth or fifth oil rig of the day, making sure the machinery is in proper working order, you know, just in case they start them up again. And feeling that sun beat down on his neck. A thousand miles away in Iowa, there's a farmer.

His wife is out digging in the garden. She's planted behind the house. She's pulling bright red tomatoes right off the vine. And over in Florida, there's a guy walking the uncrowded morning beaches waving a metal detector in search of treasures unknown. What do all of these people have in common? They're Americans. Well, beyond that, they're also walking around in really comfortable American-made socks.

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I wear them, I enjoy them, I think you will too. Put your trust and hard-earned money in a company that does it here in America. Grip6.com slash Beck. That's Grip6.com slash Beck. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are called old, outdated, dusty documents that related to a different era. No, because they are principles. Exactly.

They're universal, eternal principles. Now, maybe the document, the Constitution, needs to be updated because we live in a new world where no one saw the government, the branches, seeding all of their power to one branch. Nobody saw corporate, never in history. did we ever think a corporation could be more powerful than the most powerful country on earth? So we didn't see that that document is not made for a group of people who are nefarious. That's right. And an uninformed or detached electorate that will stand for a government making end runs.

Because all of this stuff is just an end run. your privacy, Fourth Amendment, can't do it. That's right. But Facebook can. That's right. You know what I mean? I'll tell you, I like your approach to looking at history to sort of remove ourselves from the current moment to remind ourselves of some of these principles. So there was actually, I'll give you a couple cases that have nothing to do with the moment

we're in, but that just ring all the way true to echo into the moment we're in today. But sometimes when people remove themselves from the present, they can see things more clearly. So let's take it. You brought up the Fourth Amendment. So there was actually a case. I'm going to remember the name. I think it might have been called Hansen, but there was a case involving the drug searches.

Okay, so the war on drugs. The government wanted to, at random, search people and to be able to see people if they had drugs on them and not that after all, we had a war on drugs that we had to fight. Unfortunately, there was this pesky thing called the Fourth Amendment that stopped them from doing it. So what they did was they passed a law for the railroads of this country that said that, you know what, we're not going to,

as the government, come onto your rail cars and search people randomly as to whether or not, they're carrying drugs. We'll just pass a really simple law that gives you immunity from any liability. You can't be sued in state courts or anything else if you, the railroad operators, search your passengers and search your workers. All we're saying is you can't be sued. We're passing a federal law that says you can't be sued.

But you guys do it. That's the private sector doing it. And you don't have to do it. And you don't have to do it. But by the way, we're also going to give you some threats through the back door and saying, yeah, we might regulate you a little bit more heavily if you don't really take on this shared challenge of fighting the war on drugs. The Supreme Court stepped in and said, not so fast. You can't use inducements as the government to get private parties to do through

the back door what they couldn't get done through the front door under the Constitution. So in a certain sense, yeah, you're right that our framers didn't necessarily expect it, but they set up a three-part system of government, including a Supreme Court that was interpreting and applying the Constitution that correctly found that you could not use this railroad immunity statute to get railroad companies to do what the government couldn't do directly. I'm sure you see the ties, but Section 230 is exactly doing the same thing for technology companies today. Give you another case. This one was called Bantam Books, okay, if I'm remembering the case, right, it's a Pennsylvania case,

where there's a bookstore owner that was selling a book that the local prosecutor didn't like very much. So he said, I'd like for you to stop selling the book. The bookstore owner says, no, this is my private shop. Thank you very much. I will continue selling the book because I'm a private citizen running my own business. So see you later. Show your closed door on your way out. Prosecutor comes back and says, you know,

what, I discovered you did a little something else over here, and I'm going to bring a case against you. In fact, I'm going to prosecute you unless you take down that book. Bookstorner says, okay, now you got me. He takes down the book. Somebody wants to buy the book. They said, hey, bookstore owner. You got to sell me the book. The bookstore owner says, no, no, I can't sell you the book. And normally, you would say, hey, that's the decision of a private party, right? That's just the free market. Well, that, that guy took the case all the way to the Supreme Court. The bookstore buyer or the buyer. The buyer. The buyer. The buyer. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, So it takes a case and the Supreme Court says, actually, we're going to find state action in the bookstore owner's decision.

Even though the bookstore owner decided not to sell the book, actually that wasn't the bookstore owner deciding it. That was the government making that decision because they used a threat to get the private party, to do with the private party otherwise wouldn't have done. Sorry. And sometimes these days we have to make a rhyme to make people remember things. So the rhyme I've kind of coined on this is if it is state action in disguise, then the Constitution still a, applies. It's pretty simple. Actually, the government can't use a private party to do through the back door what it can't do through the front door. So the good news about those cases, when you're talking about a bookstore owner from the 70s in Pennsylvania or railroad cars,

written the war on drugs, this is something that we can take off our partisan jerseys. And Republicans, Democrats, oh, yeah, yeah, no, I agree. That was definitely the right decision the Supreme Court made in the railroad case. That was definitely the right decision the Supreme Court made in the bookstore under case. Well, guess what? Wake up to what's happening now. Okay. If the government's making those same threats to a financial institution for not being able to lend to a driller or a fossil fuel producer, maybe you have the same problem. If they're making threats to a social media company to take down misinformation or hate speech as the government defines it, when the private company is ultimately enacting, they're the ones clicking the button. Correct.

But if there's a different force lurking behind the scene, maybe wake up and say that it was railroad companies back then. It was bookstore companies back then. Today it's tech companies and finance companies, but the same principles have to apply. And so I just love going through our history where every moment we think we are the first generation encountering a unique challenge that's presented itself turns out most of our history. We've got 250 years and we got this far. We're still the greatest nation on earth. I think we figured some things out along the way. We just have to apply them.

Yeah, we just have to apply them. We have to have to apply them. So let's go back to the basics because we've talked a lot about how the government is colloquial. with industry and they think they're smart enough to make the decision. So we see with global climate change, they have said fossil fuels and they've included nuclear energy for some reason. Natural gas. Natural gas. They've said, this is not the future. And so the governments have all decided that. And then because they decided that, this is the friendly version of it, because they decided that. The banks know, well, if the governments of the world are saying this,

then I can't really give loans to these big energy companies or the car companies unless they're going in another direction because I know the laws are going that way. Are going to be there. Yeah. So I'm going to give you, I'm going to give you an example here, Glenn, that I'm going to excuse you for, excuse me for the complexity of it. It's not actually that complicated, but it reveals the charade at the heart of that claim. Okay. Because what you're right, you nailed it. Climate risk is investment risk. So what BlackRock will say, for example, is that the reason we're not investing behind companies that aren't participating in the green energy transition isn't because we want to effectuate a social agenda. It's because we're capitalists.

And any capitalist worth of salt would know this is the way the world is going, that the laws are going to get past that if companies don't adapt that way and we don't use our corporate voting power, as a shareholder to make companies behave that way. If we don't cause Exxon and Chevron to cut oil production, then they're going to go the way of the dodo. That's exactly Larry Fink's language. Well, there's a couple problems with that. First of all, you have to then look at

actually BlackRock's own role in driving that government policy. Look at how many of their alumni are in this administration driving that policy. So that's the most obvious critique. But I think you dig a layer deeper and you see the farce at the heart of it. Okay, so in order to believe that climate risk is investment risk, which, by the way,

if you disagree with that in capital markets today, you're a pariah. Someone was fired from HSBC for giving a presentation that said that climate risk is not a serious investment risk. He's not even denying climate change or anything else. He's just saying, climate risk is not as big of an investment risk as you say it as he was fired. Oh, yeah, yeah. So I talked to him shortly after that, you know, I had a conversation to see if he was a good fit for strive. And what did they say? He was a guy in the UK.

So they put him on administrative leave for saying something so preposterous as making a claim that climate risk may not be as big of an investment risk as people claim it is. So that's the scope of where we've gotten. Not even talking about the climate change issue itself, but even denying that it's an investment risk is the new form of denialism. Anyway, back to the point I was making is that, okay, that's what they say is that climate risk is investment risk because the laws are going to change and investors need to take that into account. And according to Al Gore and Larry think, you might be violating your fiduciary duty. If you don't take those climate risks into account. Okay, hold that thought. Those same institutions, let's take BlackRock, for example,

are advocating for investments into Chinese companies. Larry Fink says China is the possibly greatest growth area for investment over the next decade. Here's a fun fact that a lot of people don't know, okay? When people buy a share of Alibaba or of Tencent, these are some of the biggest technology companies in the world are Chinese companies. And an American buys those shares, they think they own Alibaba or Tencent. I'm going to share some facts with you. They don't. What they actually own is a Cayman Shell company that has the name Alibaba and Tencent attached to it that has a contractual arrangement with the real Alibaba and Tencent to get a share of the profits. Why is that? Because there's a law in China that says that you can't be a non-Chinese person who owns a Chinese technology

company or Chinese companies in many other sectors. So it's illegal per Chinese law to own that. So So what they've created is these Cayman shell companies that have an entitlement to a profit stream. And then they sell them to U.S. investors saying that, hey, you're actually buying Alibaba and 10 cent, basically. And they market the heck out of it. Why do I bring that question up? Wow. I mean, this is going to be like, I think people could lose a lot of money in the next four years. If China invades Taiwan, China is done.

They're going to say that, you know, we don't recognize those contracts anymore because they were always illegal under our law. What China has done in the meantime is they're not enforcing that. occasionally courts have enforced it actually. So when Yahoo tried to get some acclaim on an ownership of an asset that it had that sat under Alibaba, Chinese courts actually said, actually your piece of papers worthless because under Chinese law, we don't recognize foreign owners of these Chinese companies. So they do selectively enforce it. But most of the time China's looked the other way because they said, okay, let's keep the party going.

But $2 trillion worth of market capitalization in the United States of these Chinese listed stocks and who used stocks in your quotes could be wiped out. Now, why do I bring that up in the context of the climate discussion we had? it shows the hypocrisy where you know what I say China risk actually is investment risk. Yeah. It's not that there's some law that's going to be passed in the future that these companies might not be aligned with. Under present law, under Chinese law today, it is literally illegal for an American to

own a Chinese tech stock. And so we've created these cockamamie Phantom Cayman Island vehicles that are what trade on the New York Stock Exchange. And yet BlackRock won't say a word about that, which is a a clear and present investment risk today, China investment risk, but make up this myth that climate risk is investment risk, even though they don't say a word about the China risk today, that the laws will change 20 years from now. We're so sure about that, while we ignore the laws that exist today that create those risks. You follow them saying? Oh, I absolutely do. Can I kind of

shift gears a little bit on this? I just read that China pulled Chinese stocks out of the stock market. Now, is that only tech stocks that this law applies to? Well, this is a this is a, this is is part of a broader trend. So what you probably saw recently was PetroChina and Sinopec agreed to delist from the New York, decided to delist from the New York Stock Exchange magically after Nancy Pelosi visits Taiwan. Probably the best thing she's done in her life as an elected official if you ask me. But anyway, what this means is that, so this is a long story, but they're voluntarily delisting. 60% of the vans on Amazon, proven to provide to vendor independent, Hello, here Camille of Sac Magic.

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that all the world prefer. At from here, we're grandes. Trouve of little enterprises like the other. On Amazon.ca. Now, what they're saying is the reason they're delisting is because

they're being asked to abide by the same disclosure standards as American companies, which for years they got a pass on. Yes, right. So BlackRock, this goes back to the BlackRock story, BlackRock actually quietly lobbied for Chinese companies to have lower listing standards in the United States. That was part of the mutual back scratching with the CCP for getting a license to be an asset manager in China, which is a great growth opportunity for BlackRock. Well, the U.S. has woken up to that and says, okay, at the end of the day, if there's a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange and it's a Chinese company, why should

they get a special pass relative to any other company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, we're going to ask you over three years to phase in a disclosure regime that matches the U.S. standards. So what the Chinese companies did is they said that we don't want to disclose information or have U.S. auditors have the ability to audit the financials of our companies. So we're going to delist from the New York Stock Exchange. But they also did it at a politically convenient moment where they make the CCP, the real daddy, happy because Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, the CCP is not happy about that.

So PetroChina and Sinopec, you know, bend the need of daddy and say that actually we're going to stick it to the U.S. And say that we're going to criticize the U.S. for requiring these equivalent disclosures of Chinese companies and D-LIS. So that's what we're starting to see. Now, what I worry about for the, just from an American investor perspective, is that so many investors, even in the funds they own, will have exposure to these Chinese stocks. And every time I say Chinese stocks, they put them in air quotes because they're not in many cases the actual stocks, especially for tech companies. in certain industries in China where they don't allow foreign owners. Let's say they delist. What are those pieces of paper going to be worth? Nothing. In China, nothing is the answer. Now, in good times when China and the U.S. have good relationships, China will say we honor that.

They'll look the other way. It's like the equivalent of government deciding to not enforce its own rules. But the moment that China and the U.S. have geopolitical tension on an issue they care about, like Taiwan, easy weapon for them to say is actually $2 trillion dollars of value that traded on the New York stock exchange or trade in American markets, we're just going to wipe out and say it worth zero because our law all along said that there couldn't be a foreign owner of a Chinese company. And you know the best part about this? Get to the global aspect of this. The WTO, at that time, mark my words, when this happens, will say that actually, technically

China's right, the World Trade Organization, because you know what, we can't enforce as the WTO, a contract that was actually illegal under Chinese law. So why are Americans buying up shares of Chinese companies that actually weren't even shares of the companies, but were shares of Cayman Island corporations that Chinese law didn't recognize as legal. It's because financial institutions like BlackRock have been pushing it the whole time, not at all highlighting those risks while picking up the figment of imagination of climate risk as investment risk, because supposedly the laws are going to change 40 years from now. That's how ridiculous the farce is. So in most parts of the country, everybody has gone back to

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Same guy, first name. Donate to life-changing food for kids in need. Do it now. Good ranchers.com slash Glenn. I'm a self-educated guy, okay? You've gone Harvard, Yale, self-educated guy. You know what? I respect the hell out of that.

Yeah, thank you. But I was called an imbecile in 2006 and 7 when I was saying, none of this stuff that the banks are doing makes any sense. It will collapse. You start to have higher energy prices. People will not be able to afford these mortgages that they shouldn't have had in the first place. That's right. And everyone said to me,

All of the experts, because I was living in New York City at the time. Glenn, you don't understand. We have systems for this. And I got to the point before the crash of saying to them, you don't understand you overeducated, arrogant boob. All you have to do is have something go wrong with the system. That's right. So we have made so many things now. If I hear this one more time from these educated boobs,

where they are saying to me, Glenn, yes, the dollar is bad and we've got problems with debt and everything else, but we're the best currency out there. And I've said to them, you are building your entire life around the fact that you don't think anyone in the world will say, you know what, this is going down the crap can. We're already down the crap can. We need something new. and they'll do like what the brick countries are doing right now, putting together a new global reserve currency.

You are either an idiot or so arrogant or there is something else going on because everything you were just talking about, the China stocks. God, you know that. Yep. And China, we are headed towards confrontation. God,

with China, that is going to end. And that is investment risk. Right. That is investment risk. Right. So how can you, how can you, in good conscience, tell American investors that climate risk is investment risk because 20 years from now the laws are going to have to change, by the way, because we're the people pushing for those laws to change. Right. Well, look them in the eye and say that we're going to sell you Chinese phantom stocks, even though we know there's a collision course coming that could make the value of those zero. What's the reason why? I mean, I think a lot of this comes down incentives, right? The people at the top do not have aligned incentives with the people who they're marketing to at the end of the day. The people who they're in charge of leading, their incentives are

completely detached from one other. Even a lot of those bankers that might have laughed at you in New York City, they're not dumb. Okay, they knew what they were doing. Their bonuses get paid out in cash at the end of the year. Correct. Okay, you put that in a house that they own or you put that into a plane that they own. That's a hard asset that even if the stock market crashes afterwards, that I still have hard assets that I basically cashed out when times were good. So I think a lot of this starts with just raw incentive failures for the people at the top. At the end of the day, BlackRock generates a fee from the assets they manage, including in China. They only get to generate that fee if they keep the CCP happy. They only keep the CCP happy if they shut up about the kinds of risks that

the CCP doesn't want American investors to hear about. So half of the story, I think, comes down to incentives. I think the other half of the story, though, Glenn, comes from the everyday citizen over the last 10 years having blinders on. And one of the things I love about, as I've started more recently, since you and I began talking, I actually listen to your program a lot more now. Knowledge is power, right? I agree with you. The empowerment from having your eyes open, once you see it, you can't unsee it. I know. But you have to see it the first time. And I think we got caught up in this cultural moment. Some of it's I attribute it to sort of my generation, millennial generation and younger, but I think it's true of all generations in America

right now, where we were so hungry for a cause and purpose and meaning and identity at a moment where the kinds of things that used to fill that hunger for cause and purpose, right, pick your favorite one, faith, patriotism, hard work, whatever happened to that, family, whatever might have given you purpose and meaning. We lived in a moment, and this is also in the aftermath of the 08 crisis, right around that same period with this cultural trend of this country where we have this hunger for purpose that we used to fill with these other things that we lost. And so we have this vacuum and we were so hungry for a cause and purpose and meaning and identity that we latched onto. Yes, whatever it is. Whatever it was that was

presented to us. So then you look at the incentives were half the story. The guys on the top have an incentive to create the global climate catastrophe or whatever the religious narrative of the day is. And then to sell that to you. But we were, we, I mean, so we as a people latched on to it because there was this vacuum at the heart of an entire generation. It is the reason why I pulled back from the tea party because the tea party was becoming not about principles. If our side does it, then it's okay. Don't pay attention to it.

That's wrong. That's right. I agree with you. I've been on the air television since 2006. I've never had an American flag as part of my set logo or anything. Because in 2006, I could see everybody is loving the American flag. It's no longer just a little representation of principles. It's becoming a party and a movement that is a fetish.

Yes. Yeah. And it can't be about that. I agree with you. And I think that that goes to this human need is one of the things about we were talking about it earlier, about fundamental human nature. We're free agents in the world. and that's the beautiful side of our autonomy

as individuals and human beings. But we also have a frailty as human beings. And one of our frailties is we need to believe in something higher and greater than ourselves. It's Nietzsche. It's any thinking person through human history recognizes that basic human need we all have. And the good news is we have the kinds of things

that human beings have created to fill that need that are time tested. Religion, I think fits that description. I think national identity fits that description. That's why there's uprising all around the world. The loss of national identity. Yes. The loss of national identity.

The elites say that's not good. And this isn't about religion too, by the way. Right. But, you know, exactly. So when we lose that, that allows their new religion to fill that void. Pickerism, wokeism, climate changeism, whatever, whatever is scientism, which is the same thing as science, filling that void. And so it was this two-part thing going on where they had the incentive. to do it top down, but they had a susceptible population that was vulnerable to being sold

this new form of psychological snake oil. Teach an entire generation. I mean, this was the whole birth of what capitalism was, this is half the story. You teach an entire generation that you can fill your moral hunger by going to Ben and Jerry's and ordering a cup of ice cream with a cup of morality on the side without realizing that you don't really satisfy a moral hunger with fast food. We were hungry for more substantial fare, but we fell for it because we were living in this generational moment where we lacked that sense of cause and purpose and meaning and identity. So I think part of this is dismantling a top down, but the other half of it has to be filling that vacuum with something more meaningful that we miss. And that's the way I look at this.

So is this why we have a lack of, you know, we as conservatives, I want to preserve our history, the true history, bad and good. But I'm not looking to return to that. Yeah, exactly. I'm looking to go forward with workable principles that can unite all of us. And there is so, I am, I'm an optimistic catastrophist, okay. I like that description. Thank you. And I, I, I'm a, I'm a wannabe futurist.

I look at technology. I'm fascinated by it. I'm thrilled by it. But I am also terrified that nobody seems to be looking at the big, ethical questions and are talking about them with human beings at this point because it's just going to be in our face and people just go, uh, that. Yeah, you know what I mean? It's not good. And there are these big things that we can look at and say, because I've said that, look, your life in 2035, forget about all the ESG and everything else. Let's just say that the things

were sane and the free market ruled. Okay. And the constitution, we had a rule of law. law. Capitalism and democracy are back. Right. Okay. You're the life that is coming through technology is completely unrecognizable from today. And that doesn't have to be a scary thing. It's just the, it's just the industrial revolution jam packed into the next 10 years. Okay. You're going to go from a farmer to living in a city, you know, that much of a change. And it's exciting. I think we can, we'll solve cancer. We can solve all these questions that have plagued humankind. No one is talking about that in an inspirational place. I agree with you, Glenn. I think that, I think that this is separate than the topics you and I usually talk about,

but this is really interesting to me is, so I would draw a couple rules for the road that prepare us for that future. Okay, when we're able to harness the power of, and I think at this point inevitable, revolution of technology. Oh, definitely. That unlocks both promise in medicine and other spheres of our lives from the daily convenience to the way we're able to live our daily lives and get more out of a day. Great. But where are the risks? So there's a couple rules of the road that, again, no one's talking about. But I think we ought to be talking about more. One is, I think, the distinction between kids and adults. Okay. I think one of the things we're missing is a generation of fully formed citizens that are no longer vulnerable to have their weak points preyed upon.

by advertisers, but also by technology itself. So I'm kind of become, I could have never imagined these words coming out of my mouth 10 years ago, but I'm coming around to the view that, you know what, if we say you can't smoke a cigarette until you're 18 years old, you probably shouldn't be able to use addictive social media until you're 18 years old either.

Now, when you're an adult, you're a fully formed citizen, right? We should create the cultural institutions, civic institutions, education, family institutions that basically create, create a fully formed citizen that isn't vulnerable to be preyed upon. But what social media companies, their entire model is built upon, the algorithms underlying them, is to prey on psychic insecurities that cause you to click on this, not this, more quickly.

And that's what the AI works on is really the brilliance of modern AI is in part the ability to gain a window into your soul that I could not possibly have to your soul. That is individual, not collective, individual level, that you don't even have to, that I don't even have into my own soul. That's what these algorithms do. But I think that if we have fully formed, confident, well-acultured citizens, that makes it, I think, a lot less problematic.

It's just less problematic, right? And it'll find the weak spots. But it's a different problem when we're now starting with an entire generation of kids who have themselves been shaped by the algorithm. I'll tell you what I mean. So it's not just that the algorithm is better at selling you something

or getting addicted to TikTok. When a kid sees a TikTok video, the way the kid behaves in the real world is informed by TikTok. So the TikTok world we see online becomes the way those kids act out their realities. Do you remember? That is AI working, actually. I don't know. How old are you? I'm 36.

Okay. I'm 37 as a last week. I just turned 37. So I remember the early days of MTV. And the question then was, is MTV, because they had the little small. social group, remember that? Is it reflecting the world or is it making the world? Correct.

It's exactly it. It's a TikTok question of our time. I think that is answered though now. It is answered now. It's answered now. Because the algorithms do something fundamentally different. Yes. Because TV's a linear media.

And in real time. But this does it. It is such an iterative micro real time millisecond moment that they're actually shaping the world. So it's a rule of the road one anyway. You say we should be talking about this. I agree. Let's talk about it in the open.

You know, some conservatives might chafe of this. Some liberals might shape this. I don't care. I would have chafed it this 10 years ago. But I think we've got to draw a hard distinction between the way we

think about the interface between kids and technology and the way we think about the interface between adults fully formed citizens and technology because part of it's living in a free world, but even in a free world, even with free autonomous citizens,

we all recognize that a 10-year-old is not yet a free autonomous citizen needs to be acculturated into society before he's able to live as a free autonomous citizen. And I don't think we're drawing

that distinction right now, so that's the first one. Biennue at board via Rai, Embarked and Profit The second. Embarked and celebrate. Rigolet. Publié. Savour. Admire.

And profite. Via Rae. The voice that we love. The second one, and I think this is really important, I mean, with the rise of the metaverse, okay, in Facebook's rebranding itself to meta, et cetera, the rise of the metaverse is we need to be in a position to draw boundaries

between the physical universe and the digital universe. I think the digital universe, empowers us to live our lives in the physical universe more effectively, more healthfully, overcoming cancer, overcoming other medical conditions through the genomics revolution, having the convenience of food delivered to our door if we want it at a time when we would have had to go 30 minutes to be able to get it. That's 30 minutes we can spend doing something else. That's great. But I think that where we lose the risk is when the boundary between the physical world and the digital world is dissolved. That is what the promise of the metaverse is all about. is at the end of the day, we require this space as a sanctuary from the otherwise ever-expanding digital world that we've created. Yes. So the way I think about this is we need certain principles, rules of the road for the brave new world we're entering. And so long as we're able to erect those boundaries, the boundaries between the physical world and the digital world, the boundaries between adulthood and childhood.

then we are able to at least still be the people who are in charge as the autonomous agents and leverage the power and the promise and the inspiration that comes from that technological revolution. Yes, we should find the inspiration in it. But we can only find the inspiration if we can ultimately protect ourselves from otherwise the ever expansive force that it would have on our lives. And it's not that hard. But we've got to be able to talk about it first.

Can we go a step further on this? I didn't plan on talking about any of this. Can I go? Could I ask you to consider a, a step farther on this. I am, you know, they can already just by the way they rank results, they can

change the way you vote. Absolutely. 80 or 90% change the way you vote. They already do. Yeah, they already do. Yeah. I'm one of the only people that I think believes that the Third Amendment you know, about quartering soldiers

is like, oh, that's old time. I think that's happening right now. I think with the government involved with these big tech companies, these tech companies are holding our papers, you know, they're collecting all of the information much more than a soldier would if they had to be standing there in the house because you would have your guard up.

Yep. Okay. So they're gathering all of this information. They know what we think. They know what buttons to push. I mean, this is really kind of a nefarious thing, but it's already happening at some level. Interesting. I mean, I think I've thought about this in the context of the first and fourth amendments deeply. And also in terms of the even Article 1 and Article 2 in terms of lawmaking and the enforcement has a checks and balances system that you can't evade by effectively passing those laws. I have not yet thought about it in the form of the Third Amendment. In real time, just reacting to you, I think I find that especially compelling when you smoke out the lurking state action behind the scene of that tech company. Because then actually it's not some new problem.

Correct. It's just the old problem. Correct. Disguised in modern clothing. Correct. So in a certain sense, what you just described is really, it was actually an original take, but actually you don't have to be that imaginative to get there. It's really just hiding in the veneer of modern technology. It's a virtual soldier. If they are in bed. It is a state actor. It's not even a virtual. It is a soldier. Right. Disguised in virtual clothing. Correct. Right. So to take that a step further, what I'm concerned about, I mean, we all, you know who edward bernays was the i don't okay he was the guy who they called it at the time uh in the 1920s or 1910s he was the really the birth uh he was the father of modern advertising

okay when he started it he named it propaganda okay after the second world war they just clearly said all of it is advertising but he went in and how do we deliver subtle messages how do we this? How do we bend people here? In his words, how do we take America, a country that is totally centered on needs and make them center on wants? Okay? Wow. His transition. Very interesting stuff. Yeah. His cousin was Freud. Is that right? Oh, yeah. Oh, wow. Runs with the family. Oh, yeah. It's phenomenal, the impact. So I got to learn about this. So I free I frequently, I frequently signaling that capitalism would be the perfect system for organizing any society's affairs. I describe it as the least imperfect system, but I would describe it as the perfect system for organizing a society's affairs so long as our wants match our needs.

Yes. And to the extent that you're going to find something wrong with contemporary capitalism, it can be explained. I would posit 100% by the delta between our wants and needs. That delight is what allows the social media company to pick at the fact that if you wanted what you needed, there was no gap space to pick out. Correct. But it's the extent to which as human beings are wants diverged from our needs, that you're able to see the failures of capitalism by creating opportunity for someone to pick at the

difference. And the difference between the two, I have a word for that. It's a crude word. It's a rough word. We call that virtue. The difference between our wants and needs. And so virtue to me is a precondition. for capitalism to work. It's not a product of capitalism. Yes. It is a precondition for capitalism

to work, which just relates to earlier discussion, that idea of faith or patriotism or whatever that was. That's right. That's practically right out of Adam Smith. It really, and people forget the side of Adam Smith, actually. People forget the side of Adam Smith. And the beauty. They've never read moral sentiments. His history delivers us these coincidences. In 1776 was the year of both the wealth of nations and the Declaration of Independence. It wasn't just one of them. Both of them are America's parents. And I think that, you know, virtue, capitalism without virtue is something that can actually become a self-fulfilling beast.

Correct. It eats itself from within. But virtue as a precondition for capitalism, that's what we're, that's the missing element. It's the missing shade of, is in my next book I want to call kind of the missing shade of red. You know, David Hume talked about the missing shade of blue. It was this experiment for how he talked about induction

and how we were able to learn things from prior knowledge we have. And so he had different shades of colors. And his experiment was the missing shade of blue. I kind of call it the missing shade of red, talking about today's conservative movement, missing this affirmative alternative vision of virtue. That's our missing shade of red. We're really good at taking a hammer to the poison, less good at actually filling that void with something more meaningful. I just had, we've gotten to the question on the other week ago days.

But I just had a conversation with somebody about that. And it is the idea that Martin Luther King had. You have got to be a disciplined, virtuous, spiritual being to fight. You have to do that. And I talk to these Christians and they're like, yeah, but we got to go in and fight. We're like, yeah, you stand up for his right. Well, it's right. But you don't violate your principles.

You have to know what you're fighting for. Correct. And not become. There's no way around that. You become deputized as a mercenary for someone else's battle without even knowing that you got deputized, right? And so that's, I think, and I think this is where, this is where I think the conservative movement needs to go from here. Is it about owning the libs or is it about standing for some sort of affirmative future vision? Okay.

We did the own the libs thing. Yes. And, you know, I mean, 2024. It says, right of the courtmen, is there a leader who's going to step, I don't know. I mean, it's not even in politics, though. It's just even for our culture and it's even beyond conservatism. It's the revival of an American movement. are we going to have leaders in different spheres of our lives, educational, cultural, political, in the market,

who are able to fill that void and that vacuum with something more rich and meaningful that dilutes the poison to irrelevance, or are we going to remain obsessed with our addiction to just taking the hammer to the poison one at a time? Because that's a game no one's going to win because there's going to be a new poison that fills it as soon as we take a whackamol to the old poison instead. And that's what we, I say we, myself included, yourself included, we need to do a better job. of that. We have forgotten that just because we can doesn't mean we should. Yeah. You know what mean? Yeah, exactly. I like that. We, we, restraint is part of virtue at times as well. Yes. Yes, standing up and yet being restrained, you know. And I think that is actually, but, but, but I actually think that is the best way to fight. It is. If you're, if you're fighting against a bottle, if you're fighting

against a bottle of poison, you know, you take a jackhammer to it, the poison still spilled on the table, you might have felt like you defeated it. You dilute it to irrelevance with with gallons worth of actual, what I call virtue, but gallons worth of actual substance of what you affirmatively care about and stand for, you dilute the poison to irrelevance. You're also doing, if you hit it with a hammer, you will continue to do what the left is doing now. That's right. And that's only making people stronger and smaller. You know, they'll shut up. I want to know who the Klansman is in my neighborhood.

You know what I mean? I want to know who they are. But they'll clam up. They'll clam up. You are so right about that. So this is my, when I speak to left-leaning audiences, one of the things I've tried to be as careful as I can is that there's so few people today who are able to speak to audiences outside of their,

I traveled the country after I wrote Woke Inc. And, you know, went to college campuses, went to universities with our left-leaning audiences. I don't care about the politics of it. But one of the things that, one of the things that I point out is, let's just take a psychological analogy. Any psychologist worth his salt. And let's say there's a patient who comes in who suffers from latent anxiety. But he's long over it. It's like mostly gone.

And he's just coming in for a checkup visit, you know, a decade later. the last thing you want to do as a psychologist is scold him and yell at him, don't be anxious, don't be anxious, don't be anxious, because you're going to ultimately take that last burning ember and throw kerosene on it. And I think that's what the left has done in this country to the, it's what you call the super ego in Freudian terms, throwing kerosene on the last burning embers of say, pick your favorite R word, racism. Pick your favoriteism. Okay. It was quietly just burning, the last final burning embers are just burning it. self out, you yell at somebody, don't be racist, don't be racist, don't be racist. And if you are, we're coming for you. You're just throwing kerosene. Yes. And creating a new wave of not just the

anti-white racism from the anti-racist movement, but creating now a new wave of anti-black racism that otherwise wouldn't have existed if it weren't for the Gestapo approach that we took to smoking out. So what does this mean for us? We can't fall prey to the same problem in reverse. Because you inflame the very thing you thought you were extinguishing. Right. You have to fill it with some other more rich and meaningful, you have to fill that void with some other sense of more rich and meaningful purpose and substance. That's what I'm saying.

There's the lack of leadership. Who is going to step up? And Elon Musk is one of the only people that I know that is doing this that will step up like John Kennedy and say, that's who we are, that's where we're going. That's what we need to go. And not through force, but have such an aspirational vision that we can all go, that's why we won our independence is not because of anything other than we hold these truths to be self-evident.

That's right. That was such and still is such an aspirational goal that had never been uttered before. Now we just think that's the way it is when it's not. Yeah, exactly. It's easy to say in retrospect. You always assume it's just way. It's still aspirational. How do we get people to understand we've got to start looking forward? And that's why I'm not particularly optimistic about our politics as the mechanism for delivering that leadership. I mean, we're so ossified and the system is built such that right now that's

not going to come out of our politics. I'm more optimistic in the other free spheres of our lives, like the Markham. You brought up Elon Musk. I loved what he was on the cusp of doing. and we'll see how the story ends with respect to Twitter. Yes. Now comes a pragmatist in me, okay? Is say that, yes, that's the way to do this. Let's do it by picking places where we can actually deliver victories and then use those victories to deliver more victories.

Something more meaningful that's galvanizing that gets people to understand. We're doing, fulfilling a fundamental human need together. I mean, that's why I started with the energy sector, for example, right? Because Elon's challenge at Twitter is that... I don't really care about the, I mean, I do, but the Twitter thing, he is. But you're talking about, you know. I'm talking about going to Mars. Beyond space.

Yeah. Exactly. So where do we need to go? And I think the same thing with respect to innovation in American energy. Absolutely. Nuclear power, whatever the case may be. Now, that smokes out. So one of the reasons I like that discussion is it smokes out some of the poison that you might

not otherwise see because you take the opposition to nuclear energy right now, right? So supposedly there's a climate crisis which needs to have energy sources that we need to rely on that don't emit carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Okay, we can debate that till our faces are blue, but let's, if we take that as a premise, for now, okay, well, great, nuclear energy is actually one of the most promising ways to have a sustainable form of energy that's carbon neutral,

and yet the very opponents of fossil fuels, are, many of them, at least, are opponents of nuclear energy. So what's going on there? Well, the problem with nuclear energy, and I think it's worth seeing this because it's representative of other discussions we would have, too, on other subjects. But the problem with nuclear energy

is that it's too effective at solving the energy crisis, which means that you can't load in a bunch of other poisonous agendas in the veneer of solving the energy crisis. So good. So good.

Then you can't pack in all of those other agendas. It's almost what Tesla was told by, I think, Astor at the time. Wait a minute. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Free energy. No, I can't invest

unless I can put a meter on it. Yeah. You know what I mean? And it's the same kind of thing. If I can't get my agenda through. That's right. That's right. And so that's, but that's another side benefit of the model you just laid out, which is, let's be aspirational and go together.

Yeah. To a shared, to a shared future that we can all get behind us free citizens if we want to. Correct. But then the people who may not, there's many reasons why people may not want to go in a given direction, but it smokes out, you know, those reasons that otherwise we're hiding by the surface. Because nuclear energy, oh, supposedly we were, we opposed it because it was not effective. at solving the energy crisis. And actually, if you look at the facts it is, the reason to oppose it is that it might be too good at actually failing us from doing the thing that we were going to do by capping fossil fuels, which is delivering equity between the developed world and the developing world, which was actually the real agenda, which is to say that actually if we make Western nations stop burning fossil fuels, maybe their growth rates will actually taper out and we can even things out. Nuclear energy, you know, betrays that myth.

Let me ask, because I think you can prove it to be right or wrong. about 2007. I remember I was on the air and I don't remember what we were talking about but I remember having this light bulb went off and I went, wait a minute. If you really want to make sure that there's equity,

then what has to happen is you've already tried to bring the world up to American standards and you can do that. It's just going to take a long time. if you don't want to spend all that time, you just bring America down. That's right. That's right.

And that's what's happening. That's exactly this debate, right? So that was what the goal was disguised as addressing a climate agenda by reducing emissions, by disproportionately reducing those emissions by reducing production and utilization in places like the United States. But then comes along a different solution, like nuclear energy, that says, you know what? We don't have to actually do that if we're actually able to fill our energy needs. as well and supplement them through nuclear energy. But wait a minute, if we do that, then we lose our vehicle for advancing the global equity agenda because that doesn't bring the United States or the

West down. It actually allows them to continue growing and prospering in the way they have. That's the source of some people's opposition to it. Now, for other people, you would say, actually, you might change their minds and say that, actually, you know what? If that does solve the problem, I will get on board with that. So that's, I think that's, anyway, that's the promise of affirmative solutions is that on one hand you'll bring along people who you didn't otherwise wouldn't have otherwise brought along and you smoke out the hypocrisy at the heart of what was really the opposition to the forward looking agenda in the first place. So let me let me switch to a positive solution and that is what you've done with strive and DRLL explain and tell me how it's going to make a

difference. Yeah, I mean this is where I got disillusion with politics. I say let's solve these problems through the actual market itself, right? So I found its strive earlier this year to compete with BlackRock to say that, you know what, the world's largest asset managers are using trillions of dollars of other people's money, your money, our money, the money of the people who are watching this, to invest in American companies, but to mandate that those companies adopt social and political agendas that most of those Americans don't agree with. Right. Not only that, but they are taking many people,

retirement funds and then forcing these companies to do something that BlackRock will say, well, you're probably going to have to take a hit for 10 years, but it's the future. No, wait a minute, that's my retirement fund. Exactly. Exactly. And so that, that I think is, I don't use this word lightly. I mean, I think that is the largest financial scam of the 21st century. It is a fiduciary breach. It is a large scale, multi-trillion dollar breach of trust. And the problem, Glenn, is nobody stepped up to the table to solve it. So I didn't think I was going to actually be doing this. I thought I was done. I mean, I had a successful biotech business. It was a multi-billion dollar company. Got some drugs approved. Great. I thought I was writing books and moving on to like a different

face of my career after business. But then I went around to the asset management industry. I sat down with CEOs of other large asset managers. One of them, it was a particularly shameful experience in my opinion where I sit down with him and he says that I agree with everything you're saying. I can't say it publicly because Calpers and the state of New York might pull their money and they're big clients. And then I look at his statements, and they're the exact same statements indistinguishable from what Larry Fink would be saying on a given day. So it spreads where the market isn't fixing this for a whole bunch of structural reasons. You know what I said? Okay, well, if you're beholden by your legacy clients, and by the way, they do a lot of business in China, too, this other

asset manager I'm talking about. So if you're doing business in China and China wants you to behave a certain way, and California and New York demand that you behave a certain way, guess what? I don't have those legacy commitments. So let me start a new asset manager. And by the way, I'm going to call it Strive, and I'm not going to do business in China because I want to actually serve American clients in their own best interest. And I can't be a fiduciary to you if I have the CCP's boot on my neck. And what Strive is going to do is going to invest money in those same markets that Black Rock, States, Strait and Vanguard are, in the same format of funds, index funds that just track the market or track a given sector, passively managed funds. But with a key difference, we deliver a mandate as a shareholder. isn't an ask. This isn't a suggestion. This is a mandate as a shareholder that you, the companies,

behave exclusively according to what allows you to deliver excellent products and services to your customers over any other agenda, social agenda, political agenda, I don't care. That's it. And you maximize shareholder value that way. No agenda, not a right-wing agenda and a lot, not a left-wing agenda, a product-focused customer-centric agenda. And you believe we have to actually demand that from companies now? Well, we, because of the ESG movement, I know, chokeholds, on the economy, the irony is what would have been obvious became a contrarian opportunity. So you actually have talked to CEOs of these large energy companies, correct? I have, absolutely.

And what do they say? So this is why, so we started with, so Strive is an asset manager company with BlackRock. Our first fund that we launched on the New York Stock Exchange was a U.S. energy fund. And I specifically knew this was the right place to start because this was the sector most damaged by the demands of the ESG movement. So when BlackRock and State Street in Vanguard voted in favor of scope three emissions caps at Chevron, which requires Chevron to take responsibility for the fuel emitted by an Amazon Prime truck delivering food to your house, Chevron's board recommended against it.

When they put the climate activist directors onto Exxon's board, Exxon's board had first said, no, no, no, we don't want these climate activists on our board, but they voted them in favor anyway. So what I saw with the oil and gas sector, with the energy sector, is these aren't the employees of Twitter. They actually want this new shareholder mandate. So it's not like we're going to have to bring a shareholder mandate and change the behavior of employees.

They're waiting for a white night to show up and deliver them the post-ESG mandate. I gave a speech to the Intercom conference in Denver earlier this month. I got a standing ovation at the end of the speech from a room full of oil and gas executives because they're hungry for a new shareholder

to mandate them to behave this way. And that was the power of what we saw with the launch of drill. I mean, it was, so you know, drill, DRLL was the first such fund we listed on the New York Stock Exchange. We made it over $100 million in the first week. We're well on track to making it past $200 million as of the second week. You told me at one point, if you could get up to a billion dollars by the, I think you said, the end of the year, it would send some shockwakes. It would turn heads in capital markets. It would send shockways through the boardrooms of the U.S. energy industry.

because BlackRock's U.S. Energy Index Fund is actually not as big as you'd expect. It's only about $2.1 billion. So if this new first-time asset manager is able to harness the voice of the everyday citizen to deliver this new mandate, the executives of the energy industry are saying, you know what, that's where the puck is going, guys. That's how we're going to behave. Thank you very much, ESG. We'll put that in the rear view mirror. And the beauty of it going, one of the things I loved about our first couple of weeks was the average trade size.

So when the DRLL trades in New York Stock Exchange, the average trade. for us was in the first week, it was something like less than $5,000 compared to the other ETFs that got to over $100 million in the first week. So those were the big ones. You know, we had over $100 million in the first week as well. There were like millions of dollars on average by comparison. And to me, that's the power of what we can do through the market is really this positive uprising.

I mean, in the positive sense, the awakening of everyday citizens who were able to say, you know what, I don't have to just vote every November. I vote every day with my dollars. and I can use my own dollars to not only make industries more valuable, which hopefully allows all of us to make more money in the long run as an economy, but also to deliver the voice that matches my values to corporate America. And my values for many Americans is to tell energy companies to be great energy companies, to say that if you're an American oil company, you should drill.

If you're an American gas company, you should frack. You should do whatever allows you to be most successful over the long run without regard to Klaus Schwab's or Larry Fink's environmentalist agenda or cultural agenda or social agenda. And it's a free country. If you want to deliver that message with your capital, great. You can go to BlackRock. You can go somewhere else. It's a free country.

I'm not saying people shouldn't be free to do that with their own money. But for everybody else, there wasn't even an option. And I think that's what we wanted to bring to the table. And I'm optimistic that if we can change the U.S. energy sector that way, we can do it to every sector of the economy. And hopefully go beyond partisanship to reawaken the true. promise of both American capitalism and American democracy. One more thing. I just want to get a comment from you on this. Yesterday, Saudi Arabia, uh, kind of not good on the ES or G just invested about four, what was it, $450 million

uh, into BlackRock. Yeah, I saw this, I saw this announcement between BlackRock at Saudi Arabia, but it's really, it's really interesting to me how it's sort of ESG for thee and the rest of the world for me. Right. That's kind of BlackRock's a monster. And if I'm Saudi Arabia at this point, I don't mind crippling America. Oh yeah, it's your market share because you can supply the market, right? So the more of an energy shortage there is, if American energy companies are filling the void, it's Saudi Arabia, China, and Russia. Yeah. The good news is, Glenn, at least as of now, I don't think it's too late. Everyday citizens are empowered to be able to do it.

And, you know, is it great for my business or whatever if our ETFs get a lot of money? Sure. But there's better ways to make money. And it wasn't even in the phase of my life where this was a priority for me. This is about actually empowering the voice of the everyday citizen through the market, which is going to make, I believe, a much bigger difference for our culture than our politics. And DRLL is just the first step of that journey. You are inspiring.

You really are. Back at you, brother. I mean, thank you for having me today. You bet. This is a lot of fun. Just a reminder. I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.