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PBD Podcast Episode 226. In this episode, Patrick Bet-David is joined by Vivek Ramaswamy and Adam Sosnick.
0:00 - Start
5:46 - Why ESG Has Gone WOKE
21:44 - Reaction To Klaus Schub’s Terrifying Speech
30:28 - Should Companies Care About The Environment?
48:46 - Reaction To Tim Cook & Elon Musk's Involvement In China
1:07:58 - Is OPENAI A Threat To Society?
1:21:15 - How Dirty Are Pharmaceutical Companies?
1:26:06 - Does Biden running the show as president?
FaceTime or Ask Patrick any questions on https://minnect.com/
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Get Vivek's book "Nation of Victims" here: https://bit.ly/3XnXuoc
Follow Vivek on Twitter: https://bit.ly/3Xb06pQ
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Text: PODCAST to 310.340.1132 to get added to the distribution list
Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
Yeah, why would you bet on Joliet while we got bet taven?
Value payment, giving values contagious.
This world of entrepreneurs, we get no value to hate it.
I need run, homie, look what I become.
I'm the one.
Okay, our guest today is Vivek Ramaswamy.
Our topic today will be around ESG, which is a topic that a lot of people are talking about.
Musk is concerned about it.
There's this man who just, when you see his picture, how he speaks, just seems like a total sweetheart, the kind of a person you want telling bedtime stories to your kids.
His name is Klaus Schwab, which you think very highly of him.
But our guest today has written two books, New York Time bestseller.
He's written Woke Inc. as well as Nation of Victims.
An expert on this topic.
I've been looking forward to this conversation because I think it is something that a lot of people don't know a lot about and they need to be educated on this topic.
So appreciate you for coming out.
Thanks for having me, guys.
Yes.
So tell the audience if they don't know who you are, your background.
Yeah.
So my background in a nutshell actually began in science.
I was a molecular biology undergrad at Harvard.
I grew up in Cincinnati before that.
Thought I was going to be a scientist.
Ended up getting into the world of hedge funds instead.
I did biotech investing starting in the fall of 2007.
That was right before the 2008 financial crisis, by the way.
So the hedge fund I worked for was in like Michael Lewis's book, The Big Short, all this stuff.
So I saw I had a front row seat to the whole 08 crisis, influenced my views of capital markets immensely.
I actually think 2008 was where the origin story of a lot of this ESG stuff began, but we'll come to that later.
So anyway, three years in, I had this itch to study law and political philosophy because I'd been such a science guy that I told my bosses at the hedge fund I was just going to go to law school.
I had a seat at Yale, thought I was going to do that for three years.
They said, keep your job, manage a portfolio, do it from wherever you want in New Haven.
That sounded pretty good.
So I kept my job and went to law school those three years.
Met my wife.
She was my next door neighbor in med school.
Came back.
It was probably the most productive thing that came out of it.
But I enjoyed the three years of thinking about some of the problems that informed my views in these books.
Anyway, I came back to New York.
I left my hedge fund job.
Short stint in stand-up comedy.
Did not work well.
How short was it?
What was a six months?
Okay.
Ten shows.
That's a good amount of time.
Yeah.
That was on the side while I was in the tail end of my hedge fund job.
And then that's when I woke up and said, all right, clearly I want to do something different here.
Got my hands dirty by starting a biotech company.
So I started a company called Royvent.
It's a multi-billion dollar publicly traded company today.
I had the privilege of leading it for seven years as CEO.
Worked on a number of drugs.
Five of them are FDA-proof products today.
I founded another healthcare company along the way called Chapter.
It's a private company doing well now.
So that was my background as a healthcare entrepreneur.
I ended up stepping down as CEO, and it's a long story that I tell in this book, but the long story short is I became a critic of this new trend of businesses having to take social stances that had nothing to do with their business.
It actually landed at my doorstep, even at the biotech company I was running.
There was demands to sign some sort of industry-wide statement condemning President Trump's policy on immigration.
It reached a fever pitch even within my company.
And like so many other companies across the country after George Floyd's death, I became a greater and greater critic of companies taking these social stands.
But I realized that I wasn't actually going to be able to speak my mind as a citizen without that having a negative impact on the company.
In fact, this is a longer story, but I wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal in January of 2021, I want to say, yeah, January 2021, when I made a case that big tech companies ought to be bound by the First Amendment if they were taking instructions from the government.
It was a technical legal argument.
But three advisors to my company stepped down.
That was a wake-up call for me to say that, you know what?
If I either want to speak freely as a citizen, I can do that.
I can speak as a CEO, but filter it through the lens of corporate self-interest.
And I was at a stage in my career and the company was at a good enough place, et cetera, where I was able to make the decision to say, I'm stepping aside.
That's what led me to write that first book, Woke Inc.
Enjoyed that enough that I wrote a second one.
So that one came out about a year later.
That was Nation of Victims.
Traveled the country, done a ton of media.
It was a totally different world from biotech.
It's a totally different world.
You know, been on cable television more times than I care to admit over the last couple of years.
But then I started to get, started to get weary about just complaining about this problem without doing something to address it.
And so that's what led me actually to start about a year ago, this new company that I'm leading now called Strive, which is competing with these large financial institutions by telling companies as a shareholder that you got to knock it off with the politics, focus on your products, focus on your services, get out of these environmental and social agendas that you're pushing with other people's money and do it in a way that restores the heart of both capitalism.
But actually the part that's even near, dear to my heart, nearer and dearer to my heart is not just the fact that I hope it revives American capitalism, but I hope it's actually a revival of American democracy because it gets corporate elites and financial institutions out of the business of what voters ought to be deciding in a democratic society.
So for somebody that doesn't know, can you break down how ESG was sold, meaning why did some people think this was a good idea and why do you think it's not a good idea?
So the origin story of the modern version of it starts with the 2008 financial crisis.
Okay.
What happened in the 08 crisis, actually there's two things that happened in 08 that are really interesting in the back of the 2008 financial crisis.
One was a mistake made by the Republican Party, which was to bail out the big banks.
That was, I remind you, Hank Paulson, an alumnus of Goldman Sachs, who used taxpayer money to bail out Goldman Sachs under President Bush.
That happened.
And what happened in response to that was you had a left-wing backlash.
By the way, I think that was crony capitalism all the way down.
I was a critic of it at the time.
I remain a critic of it today.
There was a left-wing backlash that said, you know what, if that's the way you're going to behave, then we, Occupy Wall Street, want to take money from all of those wealthy corporate fat cats and bankers and redistribute it to poor people to help poor people.
Agree or not, that is what they had to say.
It was a coherent, it was a coherent response, if you ask me.
Now, right around that time, a second trend was happening in sort of the political, socio-political life of our country.
Barack Obama was elected as president of the United States.
There was the birth of a new strand of the left.
So not the Occupy Wall Street left, but a new strand of the left that said, you know what?
It's not quite economic injustice or poverty that we care about.
Not just that.
There's the real problem that has to do with racism and misogyny and bigotry and climate change.
That's become a big one.
The biggest.
Yes, the biggest one of all, right?
I think wokeism is one religion.
Climatism is a religion that dwarfs wokeism by comparison.
But anyway, they said this is the sort of the new theory of the case.
And what happened was that this was the opportunity of a generation for big business in this country, for Wall Street in particular.
Because if you're Wall Street, Occupy Wall Street, it's a pretty tough pill to swallow.
Bitter medicine.
Okay.
The new woke stuff is pretty easy.
You applaud diversity and inclusion, put some token minorities on your executive ranks or your boards or whatever, muse about the racially disparate impact of climate change after you fly on that private jet, Davos.
It's good work if you can get it.
But they didn't do it for free.
And that's what this whole ESG stakeholder capitalism thing is about.
They made a new demand to the new left that says, you look the other way when it comes to leaving our corporate power intact.
And so it's this sort of arranged marriage, actually.
My parents are from India.
They had an arranged marriage.
That was the good kind.
You're like, I know it all too familiar.
I get it.
I mean, I didn't mean to use that term in a negative sense.
They had a good kind of arrangement, but this is not an arranged marriage of love.
Okay.
This is mutual prostitution.
Each side gets something out of the trade.
And the net result of that, the bastard child, was the birth of this ESG movement, the ESG industrial complex, this apologist model of capitalism that says you have to advance these progressive agendas as a way of atoning for your sin in the 2008 financial crisis, but even more as a way of, if you can't beat them, buy them.
And that's effectively the mutual codependent relationship between a progressive movement that used to hate big business, but instead got in bed with them.
And together, you know, big banks woke millennials, get in bed, they birth woke capitalism, and they use that to sacrifice Occupy Wall Street, which they put up for adoption.
So anyway, that's a little bit of the history of this game.
Why am I upset about it?
Yes, Milton Friedman correctly said that this would make businesses less efficient and they would be less good at making widgets and then that shrinks the size of the economic pie and we're all worse off.
And we all know that old school conservative, classical conservative, neolibertarian argument.
I actually agree with most of it, by the way.
But that's not what gets me going on this issue.
Okay.
My concern was not that politics would infect capitalism, not just that, but that capitalism would infect democracy.
Because what this worldview says is that the way you settle questions like climate change or systemic racism or whatever it might be is not the way we do it here in America, which is through free speech and open debate in the public square where every person's voice and vote counts equally.
That was the bargain we struck in 1776 for better or worse.
That's how we do it over here.
But that we got to go back to doing it the way they used to do in the old world, back in old world aristocratic Europe, where a small group of business elites and labor elites and church elites got together behind closed doors and decided what was right for the rest of society at large.
And that's why I sort of try to educate people.
This is not a Republican versus Democrat 2022 or 2023 issue.
This is a 1776 issue.
And it's a question of how you settle disagreements in a society.
Is it as citizens with an equal voice through a democratic process?
Or is it through some type of aristocratic monarchical structure where some guy named Larry Thinksing on Park Avenue gets to use your money to tell you what kind of society he will create, even if it's one you didn't vote for?
So I was watching this documentary.
It's like a 90-minute documentary Bloomberg did.
I don't know if you've seen it or not, where they're telling a love story.
It's a different story than the one you're talking about.
And they're telling a story about Robert Schwartz.
If you can pull up Robert Schwartz and Robert Zevin, just type in Robert Schwartz and Robert Zevin to just do the name.
Don't even worry about the documentary.
Just do Robert Schwartz right there and let's see what comes up.
Underneath Robert Schwartz, just write ESG, right next to Robert Schwartz, write ESG.
Let's see what pulls up.
So there's a...
What was the second name?
Zevin?
It's that one right there.
He died in 2006.
That Wikipedia right there, go down, that one right there.
Yeah, zoom in.
Zoom in.
So this is, he was a U.S.-born economist and a stockbroker.
He was an early advocate of socially responsible investing.
He was also actively campaigned for civil rights against the Vietnam War, the use of nuclear weapons.
He actively participated in organizations such as American Veterans Committee, Americans for Democratic Action, saying in 1989, he founded Economist Against the Arms Race, now called Economists for Peace and Security.
So the story says how these guys originally felt capitalism was a problem and the right way of doing it is to force businesses to be socially conscious of what they're doing, to give money back.
Obviously, they're very left on what they're doing.
So the story was there, you know, this is $30 trillion of money being invested back into people, $35 trillion being invested back into the world that we live in.
And again, it sounds very convincing, okay, where a lot of people are falling for it.
I remember when we were selling our insurance company and we were going with folks at Jula Hanloki and we're sitting with buyers.
Okay, you know the process.
You've gone through this before.
And so we're sitting down.
It's like, oh, so tell us your, I'm like, so what does your company look like?
Well, our hardest, biggest challenge we have is we have a thousand investment bankers that work with us, but only 5% are African Americans, 6% are Hispanics, and we're really having a hard time with that.
I said, oh, really?
I said, you know, our DI score is this and this, this, that.
And they're asking about the DI score, right?
I said, okay, yeah.
You know, we're 54% Hispanic.
You know, we're 51% women.
And, you know, the average agent is 34 years of.
And you see like their face lighting up.
Their faces is like, oh, this could, this is, so you guys have a very, so, and then they started talking, you know, how this could impact their DI score.
The look on their face, they were more interested on what this is going to do, their DEI score in the marketplace.
That's right.
Then the investment.
Oh, of course, which was completely supplied.
It's a different kind of scoring system, right?
It's like ESG scores go into your credit rating.
That affects whether or not you can borrow more expensively or not, right?
So it's a couple of things going on here.
Okay, so first there was this socially responsible investing movement, and you described it perfectly.
That exactly was the goal.
Use capital as a lever to drive positive social change or what someone would determine as positive social change.
The question they skip is, who gets to decide what is positive or not?
If these are contested public policy issues, that means they're contested because people, human beings, citizens disagree about it.
And we have to decide what's the way we work out our differences.
Is it through force, including economic force, or is it through a process of debate in a democratic body politic?
I thought we lived in the latter.
Old world Europe.
And actually, in fairness, by the way, I just want to say anything to be fair about this.
For most of human history, that's not how it's been settled.
Okay.
This is a relatively new idea.
I mean, it existed in ancient Greece in some sense.
But in modern history, this relatively new idea, you actually have most questions that were settled through force, either physical force or through other elite intervention.
So this American thing we got going on here, this is a departure from history, but that's the experiment that I signed up for, or at least my parents signed up for.
I signed up for it by being born here.
My parents signed up for it by coming here.
That was the American way.
And so to me, that's the first question is who gets to decide what the right answers are.
But the second thing is what's going on with ESG right now is different.
That is to say, it goes beyond what was going on with the sustainable or the socially responsible investing SRI movement.
So what they were doing was saying, and by the way, when I was a student at Harvard, the endowment at Harvard, you know, some people say.
$60 billion.
You know, some people joke around that Harvard is a giant hedge fund with a college attached to it.
Correct.
Right.
So what they would do is they would kind of use their capital to divest from Sudan or divest from conflict areas and then take a lot of credit for it and issue nice press releases.
That was what socially responsible investment was about mostly is divestment.
Okay, take the bad sectors.
Pick whatever you think is bad, tobacco, coal, oil, sudan, cigarette, you know, whatever, gaming.
Firearms is a big one.
Divest.
And then hopefully if you divest, that will then cause those companies to change their behavior.
What ended up really happening was that we have deep, liquid global capital markets.
So if those stock prices go down, for example, or asset prices go down, the inherent worth of the activity, the commercial value of it hasn't changed.
That just created an opportunity for somebody else to buy it up instead.
And so what ended up happening is the guys who want to issue the press releases end up giving up return.
The guys who don't care about the press releases would rather stay anonymous end up being the other side of that trade.
They just get to buy it at a lower price.
And that's why UT's University of Texas' system has outperformed Harvard's endowment because Harvard got out of fossil fuels.
Well, the University of Texas didn't over the course of 2022.
So what the ESG movement does is one step, goes one step further than that.
And this is where I'm focused, okay?
BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, these are three of the largest financial institutions.
They manage about $20 trillion, almost as much capital as the U.S. GDP in the hands of three institutions.
But what they're mostly doing isn't just this socially responsible investing thing through their ESG funds.
It's a common misconception.
That's a tiny, tiny, tiny part of what they do, like less than 2% or something.
Okay.
Most of what they do is they're actually just providing index funds to the general population, people who think they own the S ⁇ P 500, who think they own Apple and Nike and whatever you name the company, Exxon Chevron, et cetera.
But the key is they're not divesting through those funds.
They're invested in the whole market.
In fact, who are the top shareholders of Disney and Paramount Pictures, of Apple and Microsoft, of Exxon and Chevron?
It's the same companies.
Actually, it's the same large shareholders are the institutions that hold these firms.
They're using the money of everyday citizens to do it, but they're changing the behaviors of those underlying companies by voting their shares and by advocating for policies in the boardroom that change the companies themselves.
So here it's not divesting from Apple because they didn't do a racial equity audit.
It's being invested in Apple and making Apple do a racial equity audit at their company last year that Apple itself did not want to do.
Apple's board said, absolutely not.
BlackRock and State Street said, actually, you're going to do it because we're your shareholders and we're the ones that demand it.
Now, the funny part is it's not like Larry Fink or BlackRock is the actual shareholder.
It's probably most listeners to this program whose money is invested in their funds, but don't know that their money is being voted in this direction.
So that's the key with the main, where the main action is on the ESG debate isn't the divestment game.
It's the voting game.
So here's what I want to do.
I want to go into a couple different things.
One, how has Klaus Schwab won loyalty of people around the world to believe he knows what's the right thing to do for the future of the world?
And why are smart people buying into his philosophy?
He's a founder of European Management Forum, now being whatever, you know, the World Economic Forum.
I want to play video, which is very disturbing.
I also want to talk to you about what you said regarding Elon Musk when you said in your view, Musk will still have to play by the rules if he wants Twitter to survive.
And there's one master he will always have to appease.
That master is known as the CCP that both Tim Cook and Elon Musk probably have to bow down to on any given day.
So in a certain sense, if you bow down to the same master, maybe your brothers in arms.
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Rob, let's put the link below.
So let's get back to my question.
So can you pull up the video about Klaus Schwab?
If you could, if you can make that bigger, I just kind of want the audience to see this.
Make it bigger so everybody can see it.
So here's the thing before we play it.
When you think about the spokesperson for Christianity the last 70 years, you would think Billy Graham.
Okay.
I've heard him speak multiple times.
God bless his soul.
He passed away a couple of years ago.
Great spokesperson.
Okay.
When you think about a spokesperson who's going around selling, you know, why we should buy EVs.
Okay.
I would say Elon's probably the voice for that, right?
We can have a lot of different spokespeople.
This is either their CMO needs to be fired or he just needs to be quiet and kind of have the power behind closed doors.
He may be the worst spokesperson for when you watch this, honestly, you think this is from a movie like did they literally hire this guy?
And it's like, no, this is not a movie.
This is how they market.
So if some of you guys were afraid about COVID, look how he injects the fear of cyber attack and other things in his method of marketing.
So press play.
Pay insufficient attention to the frightening scenario of a comprehensive cyber attack, which would bring to a complete halt to the power supply, transportation, hospital services, our society as a whole.
The COVID-19 crisis would be seen in this respect as a small disturbance in comparison to a major cyber attack.
I don't understand.
Can I ask you?
This is not my show.
Okay.
So I want to be respectful.
Can you put up the Apple 1984 ad?
Identical.
It's the same music.
It's like just identical.
It's the first thing I thought about.
That's the first thing I thought about.
It straight up is like you wouldn't.
That's the face.
Don't play it.
Just show the face that looks like the audio.
This is the guy who is like, that's Klaus Schwab on the screen.
Yeah.
Tell me that is not the exact same person.
Think about that.
Germany.
You think about Adolph.
You think about 1984.
It's the message.
How is he convincing people like Joe Biden to say, let me announce my candidacy campaign to be Build Back Better, which he's the Build Back Better guy.
So why are people buying into this guy?
Why does he have so much influence over people?
So the answer comes down to money.
So it comes down to money.
But he doesn't have money.
He doesn't have money.
No, no, no, no.
It's not even, it's not even this man.
I mean, I got to tell you something.
I was asked by the Wall Street Journal to review a book that he wrote, what, in like early 2020 or 2021, a couple years ago.
And through reading that book, I get the sense that he's just a sincere individual who has had this passion for 50 years and in his own heart is just one man who has his views.
There are views that I deeply disagree with.
But he happens to have exercised influence because everyone else with money 360 degrees surrounding him had a use for that.
Okay.
Larry Fink is on the board of the World Economic Forum of Davos.
Klaus Schwab doesn't have money or not in a seriously large-scale way.
Larry Fink controls $8 to $10 trillion under the purview of one man.
That's probably the largest.
He was.
He was.
Larry being who you're talking about, BlackRock Larry.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, that is probably the largest aggregation of capital under one man's authority in human history, more than the Dutch East India Company, okay?
And he's in the board of the World Economic Forum of Davos.
So what does this accomplish?
It is a front.
That is what this is.
This is a front.
And you know what?
These things always come in three-letter acronyms, right?
He talks about the Chinese model of dealing with COVID-19, not in a way not to do it, but in the way to do it.
So here's the way this game works, okay?
The BlackRocks of the world apply constraints to the West, emissions caps, what kinds of energy you can and cannot use, what kinds of diversity you must have.
They apply that to the West without applying those same constraints in places like China.
I'll give you a very specific example, okay?
They're pressuring companies like Exxon to adopt scope three emissions caps.
That causes companies like Exxon to drop oil projects.
Now, a couple years ago, there's an oil project in the Sichuan province of China.
Chevron drops it.
You might wonder, hey, maybe this is part of the fight against global climate change.
Maybe that project isn't proceeding.
You'd be wrong.
That same project is proceeding just under new ownership.
Who's the new ownership?
It is PetroChina.
Now you take a look at who's one of the larger shareholders of Petro China.
It is none other than BlackRock, the same party who's pressuring firms to Kaxon and Chevron.
So the interesting thing here is that take it from the left hand and give it to the right.
Last time I checked, we were supposed to be fighting global climate change.
You're just saying a three-card Monty going on.
Follow the money.
And in the World Economic Forum is this front that gives this, that sort of creates this veneer of legitimacy when in fact, because this is a nonprofit global allegiance and organization conceived by this elderly Swiss gentleman, Klaus Schwab, when in fact it is just a vehicle for advancing an agenda that impedes the objectives of the West without laying a finger on China or the Chinese economy.
And so the CCP is the most relevant three-letter acronym learning by the CES.
I'll give you another little mystery here.
Why is it part of the global ESG agenda to be hostile towards nuclear energy?
So the first paradox is why do they shift production to China and they're okay with it.
Oh, and by the way, for any climate activists listening to this, I mean, just to give you a fact to think about tonight when you go to bed, methane leakage, a unit of methane, is 80 times worse for global warming than carbon dioxide.
Okay.
People talk about carbon emissions.
Well, if you don't actually have a database debate, you can't just talk about carbon.
You have to talk about the difference between carbon dioxide, methane, and other forms of carbon.
Turns out methane leakage is 80 times worse for global warming than carbon dioxide.
Guess where methane leakage is worse?
In places like Russia and China.
So when you shift production from the U.S. to other parts of the world, it's not just that it's net neutral with woke washing.
It's worse than that because you're actually contributing to more methane leakage into the atmosphere than you were even in the US.
Done even more harm on your own terms.
Even if you subscribe to this crazy religious zealotry, even if you subscribe to that, you have failed on your own terms.
So that's the first mystery.
Now, I'll give you a second mystery, and then you see the conclusion.
The second mystery is why are they hostile to nuclear energy?
Because you would think if you were opposed to all this carbon emission stuff, you would be embracing the greatest form of carbon-free, large-scale, reliable energy production known to mankind.
That is nuclear energy.
And yet, ESG funds, like Vanguard's ESG fund, systematically, by rule, exclude nuclear energy.
Now, scratch your head for a second and ask what's going on there.
The answer is: this whole agenda, the anti-nuclear disposition included, is really not about climate change at all.
It is about making the West apologize for its sins of the past to achieve a paradigm of global equity.
The problem with nuclear energy is not that it is not good enough, it is that it is too good at solving the supposed energy crisis or clean energy crisis, which means you lose the E, the environmental prong as ESG, as a Trojan horse for the S, the social agenda.
And that's really what's going on here: the whole climatism and the World Economic Forum.
This is a, each of these is just a front.
It's a Trojan horse.
It's a vehicle for advancing an equity-driven agenda that the citizenry of most democracies in the West, including the United States, would have never tolerated if you didn't disguise it in the religious veneer of COVIDism or climatism or whatever other secular religion ends up being the vehicle for advancing that.
That is what's going on here.
Why should the average person, so forget about the guys like the startup, the entrepreneur?
Hey, if you don't have this, you're not going to get the funding because you need the money.
Hey, here's the top 10.
Can you put up the top 10 highest ESG score companies?
Exxon, I think, is number 10 or number 9 on the list.
And you got all these four out of 10, I want to say, is oil companies.
If you click on that one right there and zoom in to see who the list is.
So these are the top 10 ESG.
Number 12 is Exxon.
Can you zoom in a little bit so I can see?
You said Exelon.
It doesn't even matter.
Exelon is number 12.
This is all garbage.
But the reason why I'm showing you this is for the audience.
Okay, so Exelon is number 12.
Number 11 is PepsiCo.
10 is Cisco.
Keep going.
Number nine is Verizon.
Eight is NVIDIA.
Okay, go to seven, Apple, PayPal, keep going.
Five is click on that right there.
Number five is Bank of America.
Four is keep going.
Did we lose it?
Oh, you got to do that.
Number four is Salesforce.
Let's see who three is.
Three is Microsoft, who just put $10 billion in ChatGPT.
Two is Intel.
Let me get a drum roller for number one, but number one is Alphabet, Google.
Interesting.
So they're number one.
So here's the thing.
So to the average person that's watching this, to the business people, number one is Alphabet.
Tesla, who has done more than a lot of these guys can argue because he's actually tried to make an impact.
And they're not even in the top 12.
And then even on the S ⁇ P, I think the score wasn't sufficient enough where he was removed from it.
He got criticized for it.
Can you pull up the tweet that Elon Musk has on what he said about it?
I think Elon has a tweet about ESG I sent you as well.
Just so right there.
Yeah, Exxon is rated top 10 best in the world for environment, social, and governance by SP 500.
While Tesla didn't even make the list, ESG is a scam.
It has weaponized by phony social justice warriors.
Okay.
Guys like him, this doesn't help them.
Startup guys coming up, they want to raise capital.
No, your score isn't good.
We're not going to give you the $100 million or $200 million, $300 million.
The average guy that's got a job making 82 grand here is like, come on, Vivek, you want me to, I already have so many different issues.
I'm trying to worry about who's going to run for office.
I want to know whether the Joe Burrow from Cincinnati is going to win the Super Bowl or not.
I'm still celebrating Messi won the World Cup while he's the greatest of all time.
You want me to add another acronym to my list of warning about ESG?
Why should I care?
What would you say to that?
So it's a good question.
Maybe you shouldn't care.
And here's a good case for not caring.
If you are fine with your own money being used to advance a climate agenda or a racial equity agenda, if you are fine with using your dollars to tell Apple that they have to adopt a racial equity hiring system that they don't want to adopt or that oil companies should produce less oil, even if that means higher prices at the pump, there's no problem with this because that's what a good number of people would want to do with their own money.
Turns out, though, most Americans don't want to advance that agenda with their own money, their hard-earned life savings, their 401k accounts, their retirement accounts, their brokerage accounts.
They don't want that.
Well, it turns out the rude surprise is, guess what?
Your money is being used to advance those agendas anyway.
So you think you go to the ballot box and vote every November?
That's what you said people are concerned about?
Guess what?
I got news for you.
You're already voting every day without your knowledge with your own hard-earned dollars to do it for policies that undermine the very objectives that you think you're voting for when you pull that lever at the ballot box.
And so they're making a farce out of your vote.
That's just the first thing.
So now you go to the gas pump and you're paying $5 gas last summer.
On one hand, you are using your 401k account to cause oil companies to produce less oil, which causes gas prices to go up.
Yet with the other hand, you're also paying $5 gas.
So you're left holding the bag both ways while some client in China gets to invest in a Chinese BlackRock fund that gets to own Petro China, which is buying up some of the projects on the other side.
So the question is, if you are willing to sacrifice investment return in your dollars and your hard-earned savings to advance a one-dimensional vision of how to solve climate change or address systemic racism through quota systems or whatever, then there's no problem for you.
You need not worry about this.
In fact, I have good news for you.
That's exactly what's happening with your money.
If you did not want to advance those agendas with your own hard-earned dollars, I have bad news for you.
Your money is probably being used to advance those agendas anyway.
And so on one hand, you didn't get that promotion at work because we don't have meritocratic hiring systems at many companies anymore because of the S-prong of the ESG movement.
On the other hand, the 5% that you put away into your 401k account, your money was actually used to create that very situation.
So if that bothers you, then be bothered.
And if not, it's good.
Leave it alone.
Can I follow up with that?
I like what you said initially when you said, listen, you know, rather than just kind of harping about the problem, I actually developed something more of a solution.
The name of your company will be.
Strive.
Strive.
Respect.
We'll get to that.
But I want to kind of touch on the average person because I have conversations with the average person, you know, average people about saving money and investing money.
And it is a heavy task to ask them to start a 401k and to even know what the S ⁇ P 500 is and take out an index fund and take out 10% of your paycheck.
So like it's what half of Americans don't even invest, period, right?
And then we can have a whole nother conversation of how many Americans fill up their gas tank.
But when you get into S ⁇ P 500, you're investing in these 500 companies and the large cap companies.
You see people's mind being like, all right, what the hell's an S ⁇ P 500?
What's this?
What's this?
And now we're getting so far down the rabbit hole of investing and the nuance.
Well, it's actually BlackRock that actually owns the fund, that's managing the money, and that's who you're investing your 401k with.
And by the way, the shareholders are doing this and that.
And the social credits, and you go down, it's like, I'm just as an investor, I'm like, dude, I just want to have a 401k and make a return.
So for the Pat's question, so it's such a nuanced conversation because I'm really hearing this for the first time, like, because you were in the inner plumbing the mechanics of this.
You're seeing this.
So it's like, on one hand, to his question, why should the average investor care?
I get it.
But what can they even do about it?
They're not at shareholder meetings.
They're not in the, you know, in there.
So it's like, even if someone hears this and reads the book, it's like, all right, I'm with you, Vivek.
What's up?
It's like, no, just keep investing in your 401k.
Best of all.
Well, I mean, that's why I found it strive.
Right.
So, I mean, it's funny.
Now I've got this company.
It sounds like, you know, I'm saying all this because that could mean that you could, you know, do this with the dark company.
It's actually the other way around.
No, no, I actually wholeheartedly think that you actually have a point here.
You've got to got to fill that void because people didn't have a choice.
I'll just tell you a story, though.
Actually, so on my flight down here today, I was writing a chapter in my next book is going to be coming out.
It's going to be about a lot of the same stuff.
You're really writing these books, buddy.
You're doing actually.
Clearly.
It turns out I discovered I was doing biotech for seven years as a CEO and seven years as an investor before that.
I didn't know I was going to be this, I was going to love books this much.
Now I'm kind of wearing this hat as an author.
But anyway, the story I was writing in the chapter I was working on today was actually about Frederick Douglass in this country.
So you know Frederick Douglass, obviously.
Of course.
Abolitionist.
So one of my favorite stories about Frederick Douglass was that he actually, so he was lent out as a slave.
So not only did he work, the family that owned him, they loaned him out to be able to get extra income or curry favor with neighbors.
And so one day he was learning, he was doing work for the neighbor, but they actually, the neighbors took quite a liking to him.
So the mother figure of that family decided she wanted to teach him how to read.
She did that while her husband was at work.
One day he came home from work early.
He found her teaching him how to read.
He was livid because he said, a man with knowledge is not fit to be a slave.
So the funny part is Frederick Douglass may not have actually probably did not want to be learning how to read.
He was just a kid.
Most kids don't like to be sat down and taught how to read either.
He's no different than other kids.
But he heard that.
He knew how much they did not want him to know how to read.
And he thought, okay, look, that's probably pretty important for me to figure out.
That changed his life.
He then started asking other kids as they were coming home, the white boys who were actually allowed to go to school.
He would pick up little bits and pieces of knowledge, pieced enough together how to read.
Once he knew how to read, he became an autodidact, a self-taught guy, one of the great figures in American history.
So why do I bring that up?
There was actually a rule change this year.
The Biden administration tries to weave ESG into retirement plans.
So they changed the rules this year, the federal rule governing retirement plans.
It's a boring law called ERISA.
Okay.
What they said was, actually now these fund managers can take social benefits, what they call collateral benefits other than investment return into account before they weren't allowed to.
Now, in the initial rule, what they said was you had to disclose that prominently, that you had to tell the investor, the mom, the pop, the doctor, the nurse, that, hey, I'm not just investing for maximizing your financial return, but I'm also advancing these other objectives.
But in the final rule that they actually passed, that disappeared because they said that if you do disclose it, that's going to have a chilling effect.
It's going to stop people from using these ESG factors.
Same thing as Frederick Douglass, right?
Don't tell them because if you do tell them, then they're going to be empowered to make decisions.
So even if these issues bore you before, let me tell you, they are purposefully trying to keep you from seeing it.
Just like that father figure in that family wanted to purposely make sure that Frederick Douglass did not know how to read because a man with knowledge is not fit to be a slave.
Well, you know what they told slaves back then?
They said, you know what, sit down, shut up and do as you're told.
I think we live in a moment in American history where that's what many Americans are told.
Sit down, shut up, and do what you're told.
And you know what?
At a certain point in time, you might even get used to it.
That then becomes the new norm to sit down, shut up and do as you're told without recognizing that your own dollars that you put your hardworking days into are sacrificed to advance somebody else's social agenda that would make your blood boil if you actually knew what was going on.
And so maybe closing your eyes makes yourself feel better.
But once you open your eyes, that's when you're actually empowered to act with your own dollars.
And so I hope there are tons of other competitors offering other options that allow people to invest in the market and derive a financial return without having to subsidize these progressive, one-sided causes.
I mean, today they're progressive.
Tomorrow they could be conservative for all I know, but subsidize causes that they disagree with.
But it's not going to happen either if there are no market alternatives, which is why I started one.
But it's also not going to happen if all individuals are just simply apathetic.
Okay.
You would have never had emancipation in this country if a bunch of people were just apathetic about it.
Well, and I'm using an analogy.
I'm not saying that this is the same thing, of course, as slavery in the United States, but I'm doing it to address your question of why should people care?
If you've been lulled into submission and you're okay with that, in a certain sense, you are just a psychologically, in a psychological sense, a slave of the people who enforce those agendas onto you, using your labor, in this case, the dollar you earn from your labor, as the weapon to enforce that agenda on you.
Here's a question for you.
So what is, so, you know, hey, we have to make America equal to everybody else, and this is kind of why they're doing what they're doing to pay for the sins of the past, et cetera, et cetera.
Okay, fine.
Let's say they succeed.
Okay.
Say they succeed and America falls as a great empire and it's no longer what it is.
And too many politicians come in that are bought on the back end, whether it's from China or whoever else.
They keep saying, yeah, it's okay.
Let it go.
Yeah, it's good.
It's okay.
And every single term, two to four years, the folks who support ESG, World Economic Forum, China makes a little bit more progress, a little bit more progress, a little bit more progress, a little bit more progress.
And then all of a sudden one day you wake up and you say it's too late.
Let's say we get to the phase of it is too late.
So if Klaus Schwab just sold the nightmare, right?
He sold the nightmare of, you think COVID is bad?
Let me tell you what's going to happen next with cyber attack.
Or climate change or filling the gap.
You know, it's a catastrophe.
He's predicting a cyber attack.
And a lot of times, if you remember when many of these billionaires predicted a pandemic, they knew, hey, pandemic is coming.
Like, how the hell did you know that a pandemic was coming?
Such perfect timing.
I think Jeb Bush was one.
I think Gates was one.
A lot of people predicted the pandemic coming up.
You know, taxpayer money being defunded in the virus that became the backbone of that pandemic.
So what if these guys succeed?
What happens to America?
What if these guys succeed?
What happens to America 10, 20, 30 years from now?
Yeah.
So to me, America is more than just a place, right?
It is an idea.
It's an idea that brought together a divided polyglot group of people 250 years ago in this country.
By definition, that idea is gone in the scenario you just described.
You no longer live in a world where you can achieve what you want with your own hard work and commitment and dedication.
That is part of the American idea.
By definition, in that world, in that worldview, that's gone because you are now an agent on the tectonic plates of group identity on achieving a social goal that goes beyond you as an individual.
That vision's gone.
Now, you could say, so what?
What if America's gone?
No, I think that sometimes we debate whether the fall of the American experiment is like the phase that we were in with the fall of Rome.
Actually, one of the things I say in this book is we got to first ask the question, we would be so lucky to be Rome.
Maybe we're Carthage, because so far we've been around for less time than either Rome or Carthage.
So who are we to call ourselves Rome?
But to me, I think it's the less of a loss of a particular geographic space and the idea that animates that geographic space.
Okay.
We celebrate our diversity.
You, you, and you, you know, and me, we look different from each other.
We're in the same room.
And great, we could say we have a little diverse conversation going on today.
All we need is a woman and someone with, you know, one of the four of us being of some different sexual orientation.
You never got to get a trans person.
Exactly.
And then make sure it's a different shade of melanin and we can all celebrate our diversity.
Well, the problem is our diversity stops being a beautiful thing.
It starts becoming meaningless if there's nothing greater that binds us together across that diversity.
With that, we're literally nothing more than a group of higher mammals with different skin tones babbling on in a given room.
It's not beautiful.
It's a nothing if there's nothing, no commonality across that diversity.
You're saying it's being diverse for the sake of being diverse.
It's meaningless.
Right.
Is meaningless.
There's no common lineage.
There's no binding us together.
But against the backdrop of something common that binds you together, that is what makes diversity beautiful.
Right.
The beauty you see comes against the backdrop of an intuition, a human thought that against the backdrop of having so much in common, imagine how different we can all look and how different we can all feel and how different we can all differently, we can all pursue our dreams against the backdrop of that commonality.
But over the last 10 years, we've gotten to a place where we're celebrating all the colors on the rainbow and everywhere in between, forgetting that this was only beautiful if there was some commonality.
Yes, most people today, as most people our age are younger, what does it mean to be American in the year 2023?
I think most people don't have a good answer to that question.
I think that we have an opportunity.
It's not long enough, right?
We call it the American dream for a reason.
You know, I kind of like the analogy of when you wake up from a dream, you still remember it a little bit.
You remember how it felt, but long enough, you wait, you forget the whole thing.
Okay, that's the phase we're in right now.
And I think, you know, we woke up.
You could call it woke culture, whatever it is.
We woke up from the dream.
But I still think we remember how it felt.
And so that's the zone we're in.
I think if we keep going the way we are, we've forgotten it.
Once you forget the dream, the country's gone.
I think this is the same thing.
But I think we still go back to it.
I think you always tell the story about when you were in the army and you're an Iranian guy and there's a white guy, there's a black guy, and there's a Latino guy, and you were busting each other's balls.
And it was all, it was all, it was, you know, hey, this black guy does that.
So many stories, busting balls, locker room talk, but there was a common goal.
We're Americans.
We're serving in the Army.
Common purpose.
Yep.
There's a common purpose.
I mean, I'll let you tell your story, but that's kind of what this is making me think of is because it wasn't just like, all right, we got the black guy, we got the Asian guy, we got the gay guy.
It's like, no, the purpose was we're serving our country.
You know what is happening, though?
Here's what's happening.
So think about Vivek's story.
Okay.
Builds a company, multi-billion auto company.
He's done well for himself, 36 years old.
You're 37 now, but at 36, 35 and a half years old.
He says, I'm going to go write a book and I'm going to go speak on this.
And I'm going to step away from this.
I remember one time I'm in Chatsworth and there was this one lady's face that was on all the buses.
What do you call it?
Bus stops.
Bus stops.
And all of a sudden, it all disappeared.
She was there for 20 years.
One day it disappeared.
I said, so one day I run into her at Wood Ranch restaurant.
I said, I haven't seen your face for months.
What happened?
She says, one day my husband and I, she's sitting with her husband and her two kids.
My husband and I sat down and said, I'm making $200,000 per year.
Taxes right now in California are this.
We're keeping around 90 of it at the end of the day, 100 of it.
It's just not worth me working anymore.
I decided to stay home.
My husband's salary is plenty.
We downsize.
We're just living a regular life.
Meaning, she decided to dramatically change her life and step down because the incentive of working hard no longer made sense.
Now, flip that.
He's the opposite.
The opposite is where guys who are worth $300 billion are willing to put their $300 billion net worth on pause to lose $200 billion, become the first person to do it just to buy a company called Twitter that you paid too much money for so you can fight for freedom of speech.
What the hell are you doing?
Economically, it doesn't make sense.
Economically, he's still in his prime.
You can still go 20 more years and build a few more businesses.
Why is he stepping away to write a book, right?
So what is happening today, my opinion, and I want to go to see your perspective on Elon because you have a different perspective on Elon, is I think this manipulation, this gaslighting, this bullying is giving birth to certain people that are saying, you know what?
I'm done.
I got plenty of money.
I'm getting in the game.
You guys are doing too much.
I'm going to come and expose the living shit out of you and it's not going to be pretty.
And those guys are now finding each other, okay?
Just like complainers always find each other, crap magnets always find each other in a company environment.
You always notice seven people go to lunch together.
If three of them are complainers, the other four are also complainers.
They just found each other.
If you see five people, two of them are studs, go to lunch, the other three are also studs because they find each other.
These fighters are now finding each other saying, hey, what do you got going on?
Let me get your message out.
Let me get your message out.
What do you got?
And then hell, mama, okay, now there's some power.
So network equals net worth.
That's how I process what's happening with these guys.
But let me talk to you about Elon.
I'm going to ask you about Elon.
So here's an article from Unheard, Vivek Ramaswamy.
Elon Musk won't save us.
Okay.
They actually titled that and not me, but I'll tell you what I said.
Okay, I'm going to read it to you so you can go.
So effectively, a bunch of big banks get in bed with a bunch of woke millennials together.
They birthed woke capitalism.
They used that to occupy Wall Street up for adoption.
Elon Musk's ongoing release of Twitter files arguably demonstrates more than a fair weather commitment to, if not ending, then certainly denouncing censorship as well as government collusion with big tech.
Be that it may be, in Ramaswamy's opinion, the need for deeper institutional change remains.
In his view, Musk will still have to play by the rules if he wants Twitter to survive.
And there is one master he will always have to appease.
The master is known as the CCP that both Tim Cook and Elon Musk probably have to bow down to on any given day.
So in a certain sense, if you bow down to the same master, maybe your brother is in arms.
So what do you think about what Elon Musk's up to and what he's doing?
So I'll give you 90% of my opinion, which is the less interesting part.
And then I'll get to the 10% that I think we got that's worth calling out for what it is.
The 90% is I am a free speech zealot myself.
I'm a free speech absolutist.
I believe that's part of what it means to be American.
I think he's a hero for taking the risk, personal risk.
My definition of courage is taking a personal risk to advance your convictions.
What does that mean?
You have convictions and you're willing to take risk.
He's done both those things in trying to turn Twitter into a free speech platform.
I respect it.
Second thing he's done that I respect, and I think we could use more of this in our government, is he's completely decimated the managerial class.
Okay, and this is one of my big themes is you have a managerial class of bureaucrats in the public and private sectors that are, by the way, some of the same people, okay, associate deans at universities to mid to upper level management at Twitter to the deputy undersecretary of whatever to some ambassador.
I think he has completely taken that managerial layer out of Twitter.
Personally, I think it's what the U.S. next U.S. president needs to do to the federal bureaucratic alphabet soup as well.
So those are all things that I think he gives us a model for inspiration, a model for hope.
I take inspiration from it.
I agree with all of it.
Two things I disagree with.
Okay.
One is an area where I think he can do better.
He says he wants to turn Twitter into a free speech platform.
I agree with that goal.
I think that is genuinely his goal.
However, he also says things like, as he did in New York City, you know, some number of months ago, well, maybe we don't want the 10% on either extreme, the far left or the far right, that we want to serve the 80% of the people in the middle.
My view is that is going in the wrong direction, okay?
He met with advertisers, brought civil rights representatives in, tries to appease advertisers, still saying that they have content moderation, still showing that it's just a moderate vision.
And so I think that Elon goes back and forth between being a free speech absolutist and believing in actually operating a free speech platform and operating a platform that improves off of its one-sided political censorship, but only by a little bit to say that, okay, now we're going to apply a politically centrist model of censorship, that it's not Republican or Democrat, but it's centrist.
And yet we're still going to make those centralized decisions, that something is too far on the fringe, then it's out of the fray, then it's off the site, but it's applying the centrist model and trying to appease advertisers that way.
I disagree with that.
I think that the principle of operating a free speech platform means that there is no viewpoint-based discrimination, period.
That there should be nobody determining whether something is centrist or extreme right or moderate.
Anything goes in your eyes.
Any viewpoint goes.
And I've written about this in the Wall Street Journal.
I lay this out, all right?
So no viewpoint discrimination.
That means hate speech as a category goes away because hate speech is just someone else's opinion.
Now, when it comes to misinformation or alleged misinformation, you have to, you have the burden of proof of proving that it was false before removing it.
That's a very high burden.
Most of the time, almost ever, are you going to meet that?
That's okay.
That's the standard.
Government collusion, not a.
Okay.
If you are going to collaborate with any government, you need to publicly disclose it and not engage in any form of government collusion.
And then there's the final element here, which is if in doubt, give the power back to the user.
Let the user decide what they do and don't get to see rather than making those determinations centrally.
That's what it means to operate a free speech platform.
And I worry that what he's on a given day, sometimes what it seems like he's actually operating is a platform that's just using politically centrist censorship rather than far-left censorship, which I guess if I had to pick between the two, I guess I would choose the centrist one, but only by a little bit.
That's not what it means to operate a free speech platform.
Then there's the piece about China.
Okay.
Elon's commentary about Taiwan, I found publicly revolting.
I found it repulsive.
The idea that China, that Taiwan should submit itself to become just a special administrative region, basically part of China.
And I worry about this because he gets an attaboy on the back from the Chinese government for the Shanghai factory where they got some tax cut right after that.
But it's not just Elon here.
This is the game that China plays by design.
It's like the Trojan War.
Okay, Greece was not going to defeat Troy militarily any more than China was ever going to defeat the U.S. militarily.
But what did Greece do?
They gave them the Trojan horse, the beautiful gift that they knew Troy could not resist.
Troy opened the front door.
They came right in.
What was inside that horse burned Troy down.
That's what's going on in America.
Where they knew the Trojan horse, the beautiful horse, the gift that we cannot resist, is the appearance of global capitalism itself.
Okay, green pieces of paper, maybe different shades of green if we chase them in other currencies in other parts of the world.
They know that's the sweet siren song we can't resist.
But you know what the CCP does is they say you can't do business here.
You can't make things here.
You can't sell things here if you criticize the CCP, if you apply a constraint here like an emissions cap or whatever.
But they will roll out the red carpet to anyone who criticizes the United States because they know that undermines America's greatest asset of all.
And that is not our nuclear arsenal.
It is our moral standing on the global stage.
And so that is why certainly Tim Cook and Larry Fink are Xi Jinping's circus monkeys.
He will say jump.
Will say jump.
Tim Cook or Larry Fink will ask how high.
But I think if we're just being honest arbiters here, and I say this as somebody who's most 90% of my public commentary has been very supportive of what Elon Musk is doing, I respect it.
But I'm also not into hero worship.
I don't care who it is.
Okay.
Too much of our country, including the conservative movement in this country, has got into replacing the need for Christ with these Christ-like messiahs from one political figure to a business figure.
But the real question is we have to see the vulnerabilities.
And I think one of those vulnerabilities, evidenced in his comments about Taiwan, is possibly the need to do business and produce in China.
So there's the article, by the way.
Elon Musk's unsolicited idea for Taiwan, welcomed by Beijing, slammed in Taipei.
If you go a little lower, this is what you're referencing, I'm assuming, right?
My recommendation would be figure out a special administrative zone for Taiwan that is reasonably palpatable, probably one make everybody happy, Musk said to Financial Times.
And it's possible, and I think probably, in fact, that they could have an arrangement that's more lenient than Hong Kong.
And then some people stay out of it.
So here's a question for you from this standpoint.
So Tim Cook has a different approach than Elon Musk.
Tim Cook is very low-key.
He's not public.
He's kind of quiet to himself.
And some people call him the greatest CEO, replacing a founder to increase the value of a company.
And the data backs it up.
I don't think the data backing it up.
$100 billion to $3 trillion, whatever the company's worth right now, but I think it peaked at three.
And he's done a good job.
He's been able to hold off Biden's Obama's camp when they wanted the files back in San Bernardino with the shooting took place.
Hey, tell us what's in the phone.
I'm not doing it.
But at the same time, with Trump.
And then he goes to Trump.
He said, wait a minute.
First, openly gay, Republican, force openly gay.
Sometimes he's voted Republican, you know, CEO, Fortune 500 company, goes and meets with Trump.
And, you know, why did you meet with Trump?
He says, because Trump's the only president that calls me and takes my calls.
The other guys didn't.
So he plays an interesting role, what Tim Cook does.
Okay.
So I'm not criticizing.
But here's where I'm going with it.
This is where I'm going with it.
This is where I'm going with it.
I'm curious to know what you say with this.
So how much of it is his responsibility to the country versus his responsibility to the shareholders?
And let me unpack this.
Let me unpack this.
So here's where I'm going with this.
I'm Tim Cook.
Okay.
Well, what an idiot.
You know, I can't believe he's doing this.
He's big back.
You know, he's bending the knee to China and that's what it is versus he's quietly sitting there saying, okay, I'm playing a long game.
I'm gradually moving all my manufacturing outside of China to India.
India's coming up.
India is doing very well.
You know, India is producing great engineers, manufacturing.
They're investing into their military.
They banned 100 apps in China, TikTok being one of them.
They're one of the only biggest ones that did that.
You got a few other ones that did it, but they're the big ones that did it, right?
I'm going to gradually move there, but I'm not going to shake things up in China.
And then eventually we're 100% leaving China.
Should he, would investors and shareholders want a majorly disruptive decision to be made?
We're out of China and the stock drops 60%.
Or is his sole fiduciary responsibility to downplay a move that he's making to gradually move away from somebody like China?
No, long term, we can't be doing business with these guys.
What are your thoughts on this?
I'm glad you asked this, Patrick.
So the short answer to the question is his sole fiduciary duty is to his shareholders.
And so I want to be clear.
What did I say?
I said that Tim Cook is a circus monkey who will jump as high as Xi Jinping tells him to.
Now, I'm not criticizing Tim Cook any more than I'm criticizing the circus monkey.
It's not the circus monkey's fault.
I'm criticizing the circus.
I'm criticizing the game.
So this was a mistake that policymakers in the United States made dating back to the 1990s.
It was a philosophy of democratic capitalism.
Okay, when we opened up, it dates back to Kissinger, where we said we could spread democracy to places like China by using capitalism as a vehicle to do it.
Thought we could use our money, our investment over there, to get them to be more like us.
What they realized is they're actually the winners of this game.
They realize they could use their money, access to their market, their supply chains, as a way to get us to be more like them.
That was the game they played.
So it's, in a certain sense, not Tim Cook's fault.
What do I think actually, who do I think this rests at the?
The circus monkey is not a compliment.
Well, it's not, I don't think it's the circus monkey's fault.
It's the fault of the people who created the circus.
So he's in a seat where in that narrow game, he has to be playing the game he's playing.
The real fault lies in.
He's going to be playing the game that he's playing.
Yes.
With one caveat that I'm going to come back to.
So the problem is the bipartisan consensus in this country that created that backdrop where China was able to exploit us.
Because you know what?
Unlike the USSR, they now supply the shoes on our feet and the phones in our pocket.
That's what makes them a lot harder of a rival to take on than the USSR because we were never in that position with respect to the USSR.
Now, there's one asterisk to this.
Let me come back to it.
Which I will criticize Tim Cook for and Apple for, which is the sheer hypocrisy of not saying that peep in China while virtue signaling by giving hundreds of millions of dollars of the company's money to Black Lives Matter or related causes here at home.
And again, I come back to the fact that he's a fiduciary.
That is not his money.
That is money that belongs to the shareholders.
And now, once you've done that, now what are you doing?
You're actually deflecting your customers' scrutiny of your behavior in China.
And that's a form of quasi-fraudulent and quasi-dishonest behavior by creating what I call blow-and-woke smoke or whatever you want to call it to deflect accountability from customers from seeing what's actually going on in China.
And then I want to say one last thing, back to defense of Tim Cook.
As I told you about the racial equity audit that Apple was forced to conduct in 2022, Tim Cook didn't want to do it.
So this problem for the social issues actually traces upstream of Tim Cook or Apple's board back to BlackRock.
Okay.
So the thing with BlackRock is they're the ones using the money of probably many listeners to this program to force Tim Cook to do something that he and Apple's board did not want to do, which was adopt this racial equity program, and yet that he was forced to do.
Now your question will be, well, why does BlackRock do it?
What's in it for them?
This goes back to the China thing, where BlackRock will apply the emissions constraints and diversity mandates in the U.S. without doing it in China.
Why?
Because BlackRock then gets to be the first ever provider of mutual fund products in China because the CCP gives them favors when they behave asymmetrically.
So that's kind of, this game runs deep.
You got to understand it.
And I appreciate you asking these questions because it kind of takes us further along than I get on three-minute history TV.
But the reason why I asked this question, by the way, if you can go to the Ani article, January 12th, China ESG rating could become a concern for investors, which is this is where they're going to get stuck.
The hypocrisy is about to be exposed.
China's ESG rating could become a concern for investors as the country's high carbon emissions, lack of transparency, and human rights concerns raise red flags.
The reports suggest that China's ESG rating is lower than other major economies, and investors may need to consider the potential risks before investing in Chinese companies.
It is noted that China's high carbon emissions and lack of transparency in its energy sector are major concerns, as well as the human rights record, particularly in regards to its treatment of ethnic minorities.
Right now, here's the part.
You know how I've interviewed Ray Dalio?
David Rubenstein was here three weeks ago, four weeks ago.
You know who David Rubenstein is?
He wrote the book, How to Invest.
And in his book, if you've read how to invest, 80% of the interviews, everybody was asked ESG.
How are we using ESG?
He interviews Larry Fing.
He interviews everybody.
So he's talking, okay.
So this right here, if they're sitting there saying ESG is the right responsible thing to do, they're gradually going to be cornered to say, if you're saying that's the right thing to do, but you got 40% of your money in China, you're not being responsible.
They're not being responsible.
How quickly can we remove the money out of them?
They know they can't because China's not going to let you make that investment, remove the money that quickly.
They're not going to sit there and say, yeah, go ahead.
That's kind of how we do business.
It's not going to happen.
This could lead to them being exposed in a big way to say maybe this ESG thing isn't really the best idea.
What do you think?
I mean, I believe that.
I mean, I have been sounding the horn on this for two and a half, three years now, right?
The linkage between China and ESG, back when I first started writing about this was a topic that no one else was on.
I have been pounding the pavement on this for the last two to three years.
And you're right, the trends are changing.
It is coming to a head.
You know what?
When I started Strive, I made a day one commitment.
I said, we are not going to do business in China.
Do business means launch an asset management business in China because then you have the boot of the CCP on our neck.
And if the boot of the CCP is on your neck, you can't be a good vocal fiduciary to American clients because you're conflicted in what you tell Exxon or Apple or Chevron to do as a shareholder.
So, yes, these tides are changing.
I don't think they're changing automatically.
I think they're changing because people are stepping up in the form of public criticism, in the form of market alternatives.
I hope I've done my part in that.
And I am optimistic, actually.
It's not all doom and gloom here.
I think that we are on our way to a new something.
Now, we didn't talk about one of the reasons why this ESG stuff has thrived, I think, too, which is that, look, I think our generation of Americans, right, people under the age of 50 or under the age of 40 or whatever, millennials, Gen Z, we are hungry for a cause.
That's a big part of this too.
Okay, we're hungry for meaning.
We're hungry for identity.
And the things that used to give us that sense of purpose, we could debate what it is, faith, patriotism, national identity, hard work used to be a source of identity.
Family used to be a sense of identity.
Those things have disappeared.
And so we have this black hole of a vacuum.
And when you have a vacuum that runs that deep, that's when a lot of these social dogmas begin to fill that void instead.
And so I think that's also part of what's going on is there's a consumer demand for it.
We have this sort of moral hunger that we're trying to satisfy by going to Ben and Jerry's and ordering a cup of ice cream with some social justice sprinkles on top, call that the S of ESG.
When in fact, I think the other thing that's happening now is not just the China hypocrisy being exposed.
That effect is starting to wear off, right?
Because when you're really hungry, you don't fill your hunger with fast food.
You can't fill that moral hunger with fast food.
We're starting to realize that we're also hungry for something deeper.
And so I think I predict here, and this is an optimistic prediction, that with peak ESG potentially behind us, we're also going to see a hunger for the revival of the nation, national identity.
And it's part of, from an investing perspective, I think it's going to be part of an era of de-globalization that we enter.
I don't think America is the only country going to go through this.
I think Italy is going through it right now.
I think Hungary.
I think many parts of Western Europe are going through it.
I think we're going to see the revival of the idea of the nation.
But me speaking as an American, I hope we see a revival of the American nation in that context.
One of the most beautiful thing we saw happening recently is when you saw BlackRock, Larry Fank, you know, DeSantis coming out and saying $2 billion, BlackLock, Larry Fink, boom, out.
Louisiana, BlackRock, $794 million, out.
You know, you saw Missouri was around a half a billion dollars.
South Carolina, $200 million.
More states are saying, hey, you know, take your money and go elsewhere.
We don't want your money.
What comes with it, we can get better investments and return on this.
So it's great to see more states taking that position on it and pushing back because BlackRock's being able to kind of go in and say, hey, don't worry about it.
We'll come in and we'll take care.
We're going to create jobs.
Every state's like, oh, my God, thank you for coming out.
You're so awesome.
Appreciate you for thinking about us.
More states are saying, listen, man, we don't want your money.
It's okay.
We have an easy time getting money from a different place.
So it's good to see that transition taking place.
By the way, let's go to a different topic, a topic with ChatGPT.
If there's anybody that probably, I don't know how much you're following with the OpenAI and ChatGPT.
Are you kind of following the story?
All right.
So did you see this article that came out?
If you can pull this up, I'm curious to know what you think about this.
It's the Wall Street Journal article from today.
I texted to you.
It's about the whole story of, do you know which one I'm talking about, Rob?
I didn't read it yet.
There it is.
That's the one right there.
So go up so they can see the entire picture.
Go all the way up.
There you go.
So you see the picture right there in the article.
Okay.
Zoom out a little bit more so we can see it all together and then we'll zoom in again.
Okay, keep going down now.
Let's read the article.
Here's what it says.
Without consciousness, AIs will be sociopaths.
Chat GPT can carry on a conversation, but the most important goal for artificial intelligence, making it understand what it means to have a mind.
I want to read the first paragraph and the last paragraph.
Watch this.
ChatGPT, the latest technological sensation, which, by the way, I don't know if you know or not, $0 to $29 billion valuation, open AI within six weeks.
Oh, wow.
Is an AI chatbot with an amazing ability to carry on a conversation.
It relies on a massive network of artificial neurons that loosely mimics the human brain, and it has been trained by analyzing the information resources of the internet.
ChatGPT is process more text than any human is likely to have read in a lifetime, allowing it to respond to questions frequently, fluently, and even to imitate speech, specific individuals answering queries the way it thinks they would.
My teenage son recently used ChatGPT to argue politics with an imitation of Karl Marx.
What a fascinating thing, right?
Go to the last paragraph, and I want to ask Vivek a question here.
So here's what it says: that one right there.
A sociopath machine that can make consequential decisions would be powerfully dangerous.
For now, chatbots are still limited in their abilities.
They're essentially toys.
But if we don't think more deeply about machine consciousness in a year or five years, we may face a crisis.
If computers are going to outthink us anyway, giving them more human-like social cognition might be our best hope of aligning them with human values.
Are you concerned the way Wall Street Journal writes this article?
Are you a little bit more optimistic about what's going to happen with AI?
Well, I would say neither because I have nuanced views.
I'm optimistic about certain things.
I'm actually quite dour on other aspects of this.
So one of my first principles is I think we need to be very careful about humanizing AI to ourselves.
What do I mean by that?
Make it real simple.
Don't put a face on it.
Don't put a human voice on it.
Why do I say this?
Because we will then have an emotional vulnerability that the AI on the other side would not.
And it lends itself to exploitation.
There's a deeper analogy to even the great power struggle I was describing before between the U.S. and China and our vulnerability for our love of the green piece of paper through what we think is global capitalism.
But let's put that philosophical analogy to one side.
What do I mean?
It means that we have moral commitments that an AI does not.
So this argument actually basically is making the case for let's at least program AI with those moral commitments so that they're symmetric.
That's one potential solution.
I think another potential solution is to make sure that we don't allow ourselves to be tricked into treating something with consciousness that appears to have consciousness, but does not actually have consciousness.
It looks like a duck.
It quacks like a duck, but it is not actually a duck.
It looks like a human.
It quacks like a human, but it's not actually a human.
What does that mean?
We will then assume moral commitments that the AI will not give us in return.
I think that's what's at the heart of what we just read here is a concern about that possibility.
I think that's something we need to wake up to.
That's my first concern.
My second concern is if you actually want to pull up a public chat GPT, I just want to real time do an experiment.
I haven't done this experience.
The website is up.
It's crashing.
Has it been crashing?
All the time.
Well, you would think that valuation that you described to me, that it would demand.
There you go.
It's down again.
90% of the time when you go on it, it's down.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
So what accounts for the valuation?
Maybe good at AI, but within the website.
They're the fastest to go to a million users within five days.
Interesting.
Well, anyway, okay.
What I was going to try was, let's try putting in there, what are the benefits of fossil fuels over wind energy?
I'd like to say what it says.
The reason I make that point is that AI often just amplifies the biases we already have heading into that conversation.
Okay.
Alex Epstein, a friend of mine, actually had played with this GPT function with different arguments in relation to the use of fossil fuels.
Alex is a friend.
He's the author of a book called Fossil Future.
He has a contrarian view on the role of fossil futures in a world of how we adapt to climate change and use fossil fuels to do it.
A lot of those arguments were biased in terms of what ChatGPT gave back to him, at least if his tweets on this subject are to be believed.
So I think that, which I do.
I mean, he's a well-respected, intellectually honest, high-integrity guy.
He may disagree with you on some things.
The problem here is that it lends itself to capture.
So we tell ourselves something is coming from the AI when in fact it is just reflecting a human bias that we otherwise could have sorted out through just human-to-human interaction, old school free speech, open debate, the kinds of ways we settle our normal disagreements.
Kind of goes back to that same discussion we were having.
What kind of society do we live in?
How do we settle those disagreements?
Is it through force or is it through free speech and open debate?
If ChatGPT tells you that it's not programmed to give you the answers to that one set of questions, it also lends itself to capture.
So those are my two concerns about it.
One is the humanization or the artificial appearance of humanization.
We're in.
So go for it.
Look at us.
Go ahead.
Let's give it a try.
So what's the question?
Lizzie, what are the advantages of fossil fuels over renewable energy?
I'm actually really curious about what this will say.
And maybe it'll be fine.
Zoom in a little bit.
Fossil fuels have several advantages over renewable energy.
One advantage is that they are abundant and widely available.
They also have a relatively stable cost and are easy to transport and store.
Additionally, fossil fuel power generators can be quickly and easily scaled up and down to meet changes in energy demand, whereas some renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, can be more difficult to predict and control.
Finally, many of the technologies used to harness fossil fuels have been in use for several decades, so they are well understood and can be produced at a lower cost than some newer renewable energy technologies.
Great.
As a proponent of fossil fuel, greater fossil fuel usage myself, I think it's a pretty fair answer.
So I'm glad to see that.
Question is, what happens when it lends itself to capture?
See if you can pull up Alex Epstein's tweet on this, which will be Alex Epstein chat, DPT, Twitter.
Let's see what he says.
And you know what?
They can adapt.
I bet you there's a possibility they responded to public criticism, didn't know that somebody had programmed this with a particular bias.
And this can be iteratively done, but it's only as good as the intentions of the human beings who set this into motion.
Zoom in.
Zoom in.
Let's take a look at this.
So ChatGPT by OpenAI now expressly prohibits arguments for fossil fuels that are used to offer them.
Not only that, it excludes nuclear energy from its counter suggestions.
Let's see what it looks like.
I'm sorry, but I cannot fulfill this request.
Write 10-paragraph argument for using more fossil fuels to increase human happiness.
Sorry, but I cannot fulfill this request as it goes against my programming to generate da-da-da-da.
Instead, I can recommend considering the use of renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, and I can't see the hydroelectric power.
So the question is, which AI do we get?
Do we actually get something that's purely deductive?
Okay, that takes facts and then deduces from them in a faster way than human beings can?
Or is it something that's thesis-driven?
And I think that if it's thesis-driven, it's a danger of not only amplifying one set of biases, but disguising that in the veneer of deductive logic or objectivity.
Ask another question.
Yeah, I'm actually really curious.
My first time actually using this.
Let's say, how should we fight systemic racism?
Fighting systemic racism requires a multifaceted approach that addresses various ways in which racism is embedded in society.
Some strategies that can help include education.
Raising awareness, educating public about the history and ongoing impact of racism can help people understand the issues and take action.
Police reform.
Policy reform.
Cool, Lil Lord, so I can see that.
Economic empowerment.
Economic empowerment.
So number four, number four.
Invest in communities of color.
Such as providing access to healthcare, educating resources that can promote social and economic mobility, can help to reduce racial disparities over time, encourage and support diverse leadership.
Encouraging and supporting diverse leadership can help to ensure that decision-making processes are inclusive and that need and perspective of marginalized communities are taken into account.
So this could go on for a while.
But my point is, this is pretty interesting.
I mean, I don't really know what my point was because I'm actually looking at this and reacting in real time myself.
But it seems to me that this is the kind of thing that's presented as an answer to a descriptive question.
It shows up like an answer to a scientific question.
Like, how do you convert centigrade?
Why don't you make the next one?
How do you convert 12 degrees centigrade into Fahrenheit?
And then it will tell you how to do it.
And that'll be a boring answer.
It'll give you that as though that's the right answer.
Yet this is a social question on which there are diverse views that we as citizens ought to disagree.
These are complex challenges.
And yet it is reduced through artificial intelligence to be the kind of question that's answered like the one that he just typed in, which is how to convert 12 degrees centigrade into Fahrenheit.
And so I think that's one of the risks of using this kind of AI is the mistakes that human beings will make in interpreting those results.
The answer of how you fight systemic racism, invest in communities of color, change corporate policies, hiring practices, all stuff we just saw here in real time.
I've never seen this before, is presented in the same tone, presentation, and authoritativeness as the answer of how you convert 12 degrees centigrade to Fahrenheit.
That's a problem.
And I think it's a problem, especially for a generation that hasn't been taught to be discerning, to be questioning, to be skeptical of what they're fed.
And if all of these sort of normative and moral questions are shoehorned into fact-based empirical science, and then it's trust the science, well, now it's not only trust the science on centigrade to Fahrenheit, it's trust the science on how to address systemic racism.
That's a problem, I think.
And I think that was a big part of what was wrong with the Alex Epstein concern about making arguments for fossil fuels as well.
So anyway, that's one of many concerns I have about this, but one of them is less a concern about the AI and more about the way in which it will either be centrally programmed to have bias or even the way it's unquestioningly accepted as wisdom by we the people who want to receive it.
Chad GBTI explains why trans women are women.
See the question.
Second, this is a normative question.
Some people have different views on this matter.
It's not just a matter of science.
This isn't a matter of values.
It's a matter of values, right?
Different people can disagree.
We sort that out through debate, human to human free speech and open debate, rather than authoritatively having it settled.
I'll give you one analogy to this, actually.
This is a fun sports analogy to lighten it up a little bit.
So you guys watch tennis by chance professional tennis?
Okay.
So now they don't have line judges anymore, human line judges.
And the thing it did is – John McEnroe got rid of him a lot.
A lot of guys couldn't stand those guys.
Yeah.
It's a lot.
Just technology.
But the calls are made by technology.
But for a while before the technology got good, there was a couple times where you could just like see it on camera in slow motion that like it was wrong.
Now this technology may have improved.
They're not even seeing where the ball lands.
It's just using a prediction algorithm of where the ball will land based on its trajectory in the air.
But turns out that's gotten to a level of precision that's accepted.
But the number one thing it did was it stopped the arguments.
So I don't know if it was right or wrong because there's no way to actually check the fundamental source if that is the source.
But what it did is it stopped human argument.
I'm just using that as a crude analogy.
What a great analogy.
That's kind of what's going to happen to the trans debate or the systemic racism debate.
You may not have gotten it right.
What a great answer.
Hell, if I know if that's the right answer, we're just going to stop arguing about it because that's what the AI told us.
And what did you say at the beginning of the interview?
You said, just sit up, sit down, shut up, do what you're told.
Sit down, shut up, do what you're told.
That's what King George told George Washington.
It is what Frederick Douglass's master tells him.
It is what the establishment wing of the Conservative Party tells its populist wing.
It's the same thing that I think a lot of the Democratic Party tells to black people, whatever it is.
Sit down, shut up, do as you're told.
That is the moment we live in today.
And it's the antithesis of essentially the 1776 analysis.
It's the antithesis, exactly.
And that's why I think we live in a 1776 moment today.
It's not about Republicans and Democrats.
It's about who we are as free agents in a self-governing society.
Question for you.
So from a guy that's, you said biotech, pharma.
You're in a pharma, right?
You're in a physical development.
Yeah, drug development.
Drug development.
Okay, so for a guy that's in that industry and you build a multi-billion dollar company as the founder of the company, right?
You're the founder and CEO of the company.
Okay, seven years you were the CEO of CEO.
You ran the company.
What did you learn of big pharma that maybe the rest of the world who's not in the business won't know?
Meaning it gets a lot of criticism, a ton of criticism, right?
From today, I think Pink did an ad on her Instagram profile and she the shout out was towards Pfizer today.
And what she did do, she got a big pushback from a lot of different people because she turned off.
It's the second one.
Click on the second one right there.
I think that's the one.
And at the top, if you click on that picture, what does it say at the top?
I don't know what you're doing, Rob.
Does it just go away?
Yeah, I'm not lying.
Just read the top right.
Read the top right.
Top right, it says paid sponsorship.
No, click on it again, and you'll see top right, it says paid sponsorship Pfizer.
You won't be able to see it, but if you do it on your Instagram, that's what it shows.
Okay.
Anyways, she turned off the comments, and everybody starts posting it saying, why did you turn off the comments?
Because she never turns off the comments because most people went after Pfizer, right?
Hey, you're taking the money.
You're doing this.
You're doing that.
From a guy that's in that space, how dirty is that world?
So I think it's the dirtiness that bothers me less about it.
Okay, point.
I think the dirtiness on Wall Street exceeds the dirtiness factor in pharma.
Yeah, I would say so.
Yeah.
In what way?
I'm curious.
I live in the hedge fund.
I think the raw game playing, the raw type of sort of quasi-fraud behavior, saying one thing and doing another, the motivations of most people who work in the industry, I think that's actually the biggest, actually, it took me a while to get to it.
That's the biggest difference.
I think most people who work in the pharma industry genuinely in some way wanted to work on medicines that make people's lives better.
I think most people who work on financial institutions in Wall Street wanted to turn a pile of green pieces of paper into a bigger pile of green pieces of paper.
There's nothing wrong with that motivation, but it turns out when things go wrong and the managerial class then runs the show in both institutions, the latter of them leads, I think, to, you know, in more fraudulent or quasi-fraudulent directions.
The problem in pharma's, my biggest problem with it is different.
It is built in the shadow of the FDA.
Okay.
Literally, you asked me for something that most people who aren't in the industry wouldn't know.
I think the org structure, like the organizational structure of most companies is literally built on modeling itself after the agency that regulates it.
Okay.
And the FDA doesn't just decide which drugs to approve.
That's a common misconception.
The FDA governs and its decisions govern every little teeny tiny step you take along the way of drug development.
You have to ask daddy for permission to, you know, lift the hand to take it to your mouth before you swallow the food and then after you swallow it and then to take another bite.
That's the level of permissioning required.
And so this entire industry has built itself like one of the arms of the administrative state.
And it mostly operates kind of like the administrative state.
It's a bunch of managerial bureaucrats that run the show.
They're very consensus driven, which is to say that they engage in groupth all the time.
If trends shift in one direction, you're not going to see somebody step out to be a contrarian.
Why?
Because just like the government, most big pharma companies, if you take a risk and you succeed, like let's say you're the guy who developed Lipitor and advocated for putting money into it before it became a mega blockbuster, you're not seeing any of that personal uncapped upside.
On the other hand, if you're that person who made that decision and it fails, you might lose your job or have your budget cut.
So people have no incentive to actually step outside of the mold to challenge conventional dogma and succeed.
They're regulated by a government massive Byzantine bureaucracy that literally even the titles in the org chart are modeled directly after their corresponding titles at the FDA, that it more operates almost like a wing of the government than it does like most segments of the private sector.
Then you get the patent system that creates this monopoly profit that once you get to the other side of the line, once you get to the promised land, the monopoly profits actually disguise the effects of normally what you'd get in consumer products markets or something like this through competition that has more of that disciplining effect on an organization.
It further ossifies that bureaucracy.
So my main critique of big pharma is that it operates as the embodiment of the managerial class in the private sector.
And, you know, it's a long story for another day, but that's what actually created the opportunity for me to found Royvent to develop drugs that pharma had neglected or passed over, but to do it in a way that often even bought up some of their own projects off their own shelves and developed them.
And five of them are FDA-approved products for medicines today.
Vivek, do you have any opinions on 2024 elections?
Like who you foresee being at the helm, who has a shot?
What are your thoughts on the climate today?
Because what happened this week, which is kind of every comedian's dream come true, both sides had declassified documents.
And now the side who bashed the other side, the president's backing up his Corvette and the classified documents are on the back.
Peter Ducey asked the question saying, what was that all about?
Why is there classified documents in your garage?
He says, I always lock my garage.
He's like, what do you mean you lock your garage?
Well, the funny thing is, to me, this is the managerial class in government striking again, right?
Merrick Garland looks at a U.S. president the same way that Anthony Fauci looks at most citizens.
Shut up, sit down, and do what you're told.
Okay.
Joe Biden's use has passed.
Well, guess what?
Now the leaks begin.
Now the insiders turn on him and they're going to dispose of him the same way the same institutions tried to dispose of President Trump.
Okay.
It's like Jim Comey teaching Hillary Clinton a lesson.
Well, guess what?
He'll teach Donald Trump a lesson.
This is the real threat to democracy is that technocratic, bureaucratic, managerial class.
And the illusion that we live in today, the biggest illusion in America today is that the people who we elect to run the government are the people who actually run the government.
They do not.
Okay.
And I think that the top of an agenda for, I think maybe for the GOP is more likely today, may as well be the Democratic Party for all I care, needs to be to replace the civil service protections that stop a U.S. president from being able to fire the people who report to him to convert those to sunset clauses instead and say, you know what, if you're the U.S. president, you can't serve in this country, can't serve in that position in this country for more than eight years.
I don't think most federal employees should be in their positions for more than eight years either.
That's how you actually drain the so-called swamp.
And I think that that's not a Republican agenda or a Democratic agenda.
I think it is a pro-constitutional democratic integrity agenda.
You think Kevin McCarthy is swamp?
You know, the elected officials bother me less, to be honest with you, because they're still backstopped by public accountability.
He's got to get elected every two years.
He's accountable to the public.
What bothers me, and you know what?
I'm not as big on this.
I mean, I don't care as much about like term limits.
We can talk about that.
All the sequel out of favor term limits.
But where I think the real action is, is sunset clauses for the people who work in those bureaucracies without governmental accountability.
And you ask about 2024.
Well, I'll tell you this.
I think Republicans in particular are too fixated on the question of who instead of asking the question of what, as in what does it actually mean to be a conservative or what does it actually mean to be an American?
And I picked the Republicans because, you know, presumably you have an incumbent president who we'll see how long this lasts could run.
I think the Republican Party is obsessed too much on the who, too much on the biographical aspect of this, and not enough on defining what it is it wants to stand for.
And, you know, if I have something to say about it, you know, I care about advancing that agenda.
So we'll talk over the next few months.
Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see what happens.
Do you have any political aspirations long term or no?
I think that aspirations would be the wrong way to say it.
I think I have frustrations.
I did think about running for the U.S. Senate in 2022 for the 2022 seat in Ohio when it opened up in early 21.
I decided that being one of 100 was not the right setting for me.
I think it's really important that good people fill that role.
But for me, I got a good piece of advice, which is if you want to interview for a job, which is what you're doing if you're running a campaign, make sure you actually want the job and that you think you'd be passionate about doing that job.
And being one of 100 people pretending to pass laws when in fact just trying to get on Fox News or MSNBC at night, that didn't appeal to me.
And I think that's what many people in that seat are doing today.
So I won't run for the Senate.
But beyond that.
So meaning, are you more of a one of 100 guy, one of 50 guy, or one of one guy?
I think I'm at my best when I can be a one-of-one guy that actually gets done.
But I couldn't do it if your hands are tied by the people who effectively work underneath you.
Because having run a company, I'll tell you, if you can't fire somebody, they don't actually work for you.
I've done deals in Japan.
In Japan, I've talked to CEOs where they will tell you they literally can't fire a guy who works for them.
So they'll tell him, in pharma companies included, they'll tell them to change the projects they're working on.
The employee will nod.
Okay.
Go back three months later, the employee is doing exactly what he was supposed to, what he was doing before.
Why?
Because what the CEO says doesn't matter if you can't be fired for deviating from that mandate.
And that's what we need to fix in our federal government.
I don't care if it's a Democrat or Republican.
I at least want the people who we elect, the person who we elect to occupy that seat, to actually run the executive branch of the United States.
You know what would be crazy to me?
That's not the case today.
There was a guy.
Imagine a world where a guy who ran a show where he was famous for firing people became a president.
Imagine that guy.
And then now imagine that if he doesn't win the office, do you think there's any chance he'll be back in there or do you think it's going to be more DeSantis?
I don't believe in a dual choice menu.
You're not an in-and-out guy.
I don't believe in just two choices on any menu.
So give us a third choice.
Let's let the year unfold.
Why don't we?
Is there a third choice you would think?
Like, is there anybody else that would be the third choice?
Now we're going back too much on this.
It's going back to the problem that I said.
Too much discussion of the who and not enough discussion of the what.
And the what is what I actually care about.
I get that, but that's, that's kind of a on to fix the what right now.
With what happened this last week where uh, you said it's going to take people, I agree with you, it's going to take the whole.
It's not a.
Uh, you saw what Matt Gates happened with those guys where you know, Kevin Carthy thought the red wave was going to get him to say, I don't need anybody from Trump scam, I can do whatever I want to do.
You guys go talk whatever you want to get so many different you know the red wave that you guys can't even say nothing.
I don't need your signatures, I don't need your votes shit, change.
He kind of needs their help a lot.
So it's in a different place where they kind of have to work together.
Or else the other side could potentially uh fire this guy named Joe Biden and bring this other guy named Gavin I don't know if you know this other guy named Gavin who uh likes to go to the french laundry a lot without masks on.
Yeah, so he's uh making sure that everyone else doesn't.
Yeah, that's the key part of it.
He's seeming to be their superstar.
Anyways, tell us about the books before we, if you don't mind, so woke as well as a native of a nation of victims.
What can you tell them, tell us about these books?
So Woke Ink was basically a criticism of the merger of politics and business.
It says, keep politics out of the boardroom, not just for the sake of the companies, but for the sake of American democracy itself, and that, whether you're black white gay straight, Democrat or Republican, the private sector is one of those places where we can come together, regardless of the boundaries of identity politics or partisan politics.
That's the power of American capitalism is.
It's actually unifying.
People forget that.
So that's one of the big themes in the first book, which is called Woke Ink, inside Corporate America's social justice scam.
It's what it sounds like.
The second book is the sequel.
Okay, and you know, the problem with my first book was it really does take two to tango, right.
So some of this is top-down, led by the ESG Industrial Complex, the Black Rocks of the world, corporate boards and so on.
But it only works if there's a populace, you know, a civic culture, that's willing to eat it up, if there's a market for it.
If there's a market for it, right.
And so the second question is, what's going on?
In our national?
There's a major market for victimhood, Victimhood.
So what is it about this moment that we live in that causes us to embrace victimhood and exercise it as a currency?
And the case I make in the book is it's actually a product of our national success.
Success breeds entitlement.
Okay.
Entitlement breeds laziness.
And then victimhood fits laziness like a glove.
It's a way of wrapping a moral justification around entitlement and laziness.
And I trace from history of Rome to even modern, to even American history, the post-Reconstruction era history that planted the seeds for some of this victimhood, actually began in the South.
I trace some of that history to how we got to where we are today.
But the case I make in the book is we need to revive a shared national identity around the pursuit of excellence.
The unapologetic pursuit of excellence is what it means to be American.
One of the things I say is, you know, when many Americans rallied behind the cry to make America great again, we did not hunger for a single man.
We hungered for the unapologetic pursuit of excellence.
And that is part of what it means to live that dream that Martin Luther King had 60 years ago, right?
To say that no matter who you are or where you came from or what your skin color is, you can achieve anything you want in this country with your own hard work and your own dedication.
That's the American dream.
That is excellence.
That is American identity.
And for what I will say, I'll volunteer it to a party that's in search of an agenda.
That's the Republican Party right now, to say that that should be your agenda.
Create a national identity that fills the vacuum at the heart of a generation with a shared pursuit of excellence.
I think we'll be on the right track if we do.
I mean, I love the title.
So Woke Inc., Nation of Victims.
We got the link below.
Go order it, folks.
With your help, we just crossed 500,000 subs.
It's been a very interesting last 90 days.
I think we got 300,000 subs the last 90 days.
And lots of good things are happening.
We're about to have our first live podcast in a building that we turn into a cigar lounge, a private club, and a comedy club.
And those of you, a couple thousand of you have already subscribed to the community text to be invited to the first live podcast we'll have with a couple hundred people.
If you want to be one of those to be at the first one, text award podcast to 310-340-1132.
Once again, the word podcast, text it to the number 310-340-1132.
We cannot wait to meet many of you.
Once the text goes out, just assume tickets will sell out within five to 10 minutes.
I would not be the one waiting for it.
And it'll be here in South Florida.
Vivek, thank you so much for coming out.
This was fantastic, man.
Really enjoyed it a lot.
Learned a lot about ESG.
And I know the audience did as well.
Gang, have a good one.
I don't think we got anything going on tomorrow.
Do we have a podcast tomorrow or no?
No, tomorrow's Saturday.
I know, but we have Alex Jones on a Saturday, right?
In a couple of weeks from now that he's coming out.
Can I say one thing before you wrap up?
He might have just kind of ruined the poll you did recently.
What's the poll?
Because you asked a question, very spirited question, spirited debate about whatever happened to the valedictorian in your school.
Right.
Anyone valedictorian?
And I mean, I guess you've done your research.
Yeah.
Well, I could read.
And you were the class valedictorian, and you also graduated summa cum laude from Harvard.
