00:00:42.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:49.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:47.000So Dave, tell us about the Inflation Reduction Act.
00:01:50.000Will it reduce inflation or is this another Orwellian curveball thrown by our politicians?
00:01:56.000Yeah, it's a good thing the bill doesn't have anything about false advertising because this is really, as Bernie Sanders said, absurd to call it an Inflation Reduction Act.
00:02:09.000I'm not one who thinks there's a whole lot it's going to be doing to make the inflation worse because it really almost does nothing at all except for ad IRS agents.
00:02:19.000It's much more of an Orwellian bill than it is economic.
00:02:24.000Even the climate issues, there is about 300, 400 billion of corporate welfare to green energy companies.
00:02:32.000But Manchin, to get his vote, also agreed for more permit approvals for oil and gas companies.
00:02:39.000So even the greenies in the Democratic Party proved to be a cheap date.
00:02:43.000It's really a disaster of a bill, and the IRS agent issue is the primary thing that stayed in it.
00:03:34.000And the people who are most aggressive at reducing their taxes are left-leaning clients.
00:03:40.000They support the taxes, and then they will move heaven and earth to avoid paying them.
00:03:46.000The people that don't have the options to hire financial firms like mine and accountants and lawyers and so forth are middle-class people.
00:03:55.000And so all of a sudden you have wage earners that maybe get certain money from Venmo and the IRS starts auditing how much cash they're receiving if they're Uber drivers and other things like that.
00:04:07.000Well, the IRS people are not the cream of the crop intellectually.
00:04:44.000All that means is the rest of the money is going to be lost and thrown away in bureaucracy because it is fundamental.
00:04:50.000Yeah, I mean, it's like saying, okay, it will only be a Yankee stadium full of IRS agents, which is new ones on top of what we already have.
00:04:58.000And just so you know, because I know you're very charitably minded, you know that I care about these things.
00:05:02.000I give a lot to my church, Christian schools, 501c3s, which of course Turning Point has.
00:05:09.000They're going to audit charitable donations, Charlie.
00:05:12.000Oh, it's going to be a huge part of it.
00:05:15.000We have no delusions of grandeur of what the police state will try to do.
00:05:19.000Something tells me that BLM and the alphabet mafia groups aren't going to get that much scrutiny.
00:05:24.000So, Dave, I want to play a piece of tape here just to kind of add to what you're talking about here.
00:05:28.000There's this video going around, which appears to be a video that shows new IRS agents training and knocking and entering a room, then arresting two men for conspiracy.
00:06:05.000Well, if you're going to hit it on behind your back, say no.
00:06:11.000Do you have any other weapons on your hands behind your back?
00:06:17.000So, Dave, right there, I don't know if you could see that video or not.
00:06:20.000That is a training video of what seems to be otherwise-looking civilians trained to become IRS agents, not learning how to go through tax returns or how to cite deductions or accounts in the Canary Islands.
00:06:34.000How to bulldoze a door and say, IRS, you're under arrest for conspiracy.
00:06:41.000Yeah, obviously, I wish I knew more context and so forth.
00:06:45.000I can tell you that I don't imagine IRS agents are going to become much more qualified at ATF-style raids than they are right now at auditing offshore accounts.
00:07:24.000The fact of the matter is they have a tax code that's too darn complicated.
00:07:28.000Take away the need for IRS agents by having a flatter tax code and a simpler tax code that disincentivizes people to get creative in their taxes.
00:07:37.000So I'm going to get cynical here for a sec, Dave.
00:07:39.000But if you have a super complex tax code, then can't you decide who you're going to enforce that complex tax code against?
00:07:46.000Well, and also who you're going to need to enforce it against, because again, back to my prior point, subsidy, regulation is a subsidy.
00:07:54.000Okay, I promise you, my multi-millionaire left-wing clients are going to be fine.
00:08:10.000The people who won't be fine are the people who don't have the resources to do more complex tax planning.
00:08:16.000And people whose politics they don't like.
00:08:18.000Any other parts of the bill, Dave, that you think actually might result in, is there anything meaningful, anything good in this bill at all?
00:08:26.000And then also tell us about your online courses.
00:08:46.000The other bad thing is the price fixing on pharmaceuticals.
00:08:50.000I think that making Medicare negotiate after 2026 is going to stunt innovation in how we develop new life-saving treatments.
00:09:01.000And I don't like that part of the bill either.
00:09:04.000A lot of the principles that drive my political opinions are the things I delve into in this online course, Charlie.
00:09:11.000Bonson.com has my Bonson Economics 101 course.
00:09:16.000It's 30 lectures, all free, a full syllabus, dozens of links to readings and videos and things to just simply drive a better understanding of economics, a better understanding of first principles that should influence the way we think about public policy.
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00:10:59.000This is one of the most important topics in America, period.
00:11:03.000It is one of the most important yet difficult to grasp at times topics.
00:11:08.000So we're going to go through it in a step-by-step manner with a subject matter expert who's super smart and he loves the country and he's doing something very important.
00:11:18.000It's Vivek Ramaswamy, and he joins us right now.
00:11:21.000He is behind a new effort called Strive to Fight ESG.
00:11:34.000Great interview with Tucker last evening.
00:11:36.000But let's start at the beginning because some of our audience, they're not really as well-versed in this as I think they would like to be.
00:11:42.000They're very busy and it can be very confusing.
00:11:44.000What is ESG and how does that impact normal everyday people?
00:11:49.000Yeah, so the rise of ESG is basically a way for quasi-governmental actors in the private sector to use your money to advance progressive values in corporate America without you knowing it.
00:12:01.000So, Charlie, I know that sounds confusing.
00:12:03.000Here's how it works: is a group of large asset managers, let's name them, BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard.
00:12:09.000What they do is they aggregate the money of everyday citizens, probably most of the viewers of this program, and then they use that to buy up shares in public companies in corporate America.
00:12:19.000And then they tell those companies to adopt diversity, equity, inclusion quota systems for race or gender, carbon caps, climate change measures, scope three emissions caps that most of those everyday citizens don't actually agree with.
00:12:33.000I think it's a form of financial fraud, actually, Charlie, using someone else's money to advance agendas that the owner of capital, the citizen, disagrees with.
00:12:52.000But this is hopefully the beginning of a great uprising of everyday citizens saying that it's not just our voice, it's our money too, that we can use to exercise our voice.
00:13:02.000And I think that's the power of what we saw, even in the first week since our launch last week.
00:13:34.000It gives the people in charge, like Larry Fink, the power to define how he feels like on a daily basis.
00:13:40.000So here's the irony: actually, they claim to apply environmental standards to American energy companies.
00:13:46.000So what these ESG-linked asset managers and financial institutions have done is they have used shareholder pressure to cause companies like Exxon and Chevron and great American energy companies to produce less oil, to frack for less natural gas.
00:14:01.000That has contributed to a generational energy crisis in this country, where people are paying high prices at the pump, people don't have enough access to energy, and American energy companies are doing worse.
00:14:11.000But you know what the funny part of the story is, Charlie, is that when American energy companies produce less, that allows companies like PetroChina on the other side of the world to fill the gap by producing more oil instead.
00:14:23.000And then you look at who the top shareholder of Petro China is.
00:14:26.000It's one of the top shareholders, at least, is none other than BlackRock.
00:14:30.000And so in a certain sense, some of these ESG-based financial institutions aren't clearly defining ESG.
00:14:35.000So they can apply these constraints to American companies, but they don't apply those constraints to Chinese companies that they invest in.
00:14:42.000And the cherry on top, Charlie, is that that's even bad for the environment because American energy companies are actually much cleaner in their production of oil and gas than Russian companies and Chinese companies.
00:14:52.000Yet the ESG movement, even in the name of environmentalism, that's the E in ESG, are actually making the environment worse, let alone making America less strong and our economy less vibrant as well.
00:16:04.000And then G is just a catch-all for everything else that didn't fit number one and number two.
00:16:09.000And so they are bullying companies into being like the pseudo-college campus equivalents of hyper-radicalism to give money to all their favorite causes, to all their kind of social causes.
00:16:22.000So let's talk about what you're doing now to go about fix it.
00:16:25.000Tell us about Strive and the response you've received since your launch.
00:16:31.000So I found a Strive earlier this year.
00:16:33.000It's a new asset management firm designed to compete against BlackRock, where the message that Strive delivers to corporate America is to tell companies to get out of politics, to focus exclusively on delivering excellent products and services to people who need them and maximize shareholder value that way rather than focusing on these toxic political agendas.
00:16:55.000It was an energy index fund, a U.S. energy index fund that delivers a different voice than BlackRock and the other large asset managers to the U.S. energy industry.
00:17:08.000It's listed on the New York Stock Exchange as of last week.
00:17:10.000I had the chance of the privilege of ringing the bell at the New York Stock Exchange last week.
00:17:14.000But the message to American energy companies that we deliver as a shareholder is to drill more, to frack more, to do whatever allows you to be most successful as a company over the long run without regard to somebody else's climate change agenda or DEI agenda or social agenda.
00:17:30.000And I have to say, Charlie, we were overwhelmed by the support we've gotten in the first week alone.
00:17:36.000Within the first week, we exceeded $100 million.
00:17:39.000That made that the fastest non-seeded ETF launch of this year.
00:17:43.000And the part that really inspired me was unlike the other ETF launches that launched with over $100 million in the first week, our volume was driven by tiny trade sizes by comparison, like under $5,000 on average per trade versus millions of dollars for the other ETFs that scored over $100 million in the first week.
00:18:01.000So this is truly the beginning, I think, of a great uprising of everyday citizens, a positive uprising.
00:18:07.000You hear about the term the great reset.
00:18:09.000The great reset refers to the imposition of ESG by dissolving the boundaries between the public and private sector in places like Davos.
00:18:16.000Well, I think the counterforce to the great reset is the great uprising of everyday citizens who say we had enough of this merger of state power and corporate power, enough of the fascism.
00:18:26.000But the good news is you don't have to wait till November to vote.
00:19:15.000Well, we can continue this conversation for hours, but the long story short is actually the problem, Charlie, is even in the red states.
00:19:21.000Because it's one thing when California and New York went to BlackRock and States Jr. Vanguard and said, you have to adopt these values and we're using our money to tell you.
00:19:27.000But the problem that I've seen firsthand is the complacency amongst the deep state within the red states that are really the administrative class that forget the intentions of their citizens.
00:19:43.000So when Carrie Lake becomes governor of Arizona, she has to say, we're going to put all of our state pension money into Strive.
00:19:50.000We're going to say we're going to let an asset manager that isn't BlackRock or Vanguard manage the state pension money.
00:19:57.000Well, I think this is, I hope there's other competitors to Strive because at the end of the day, this is about actually accomplishing the goal.
00:20:03.000Nobody else stepped up, so that's undoing with Strive.
00:20:04.000But we'll talk more about what I think is an uprising in the red states that can be positive.
00:20:14.000If you're renting or a friend or family member, that is, right now is the time to make the move to homeownership.
00:20:19.000My good buddies, Andrew Del Rey and Tadavakian at Sierra Pacific Mortgage have helped so many people to make that leap from renting and owning.
00:20:29.000The problem is, though, why are you giving all of your money to rent when you could be building equity with lots of programs that offer first-time buyers assistance with little to no down payment needed?
00:20:40.000I encourage you to visit andrewandtodd.com right now.
00:22:43.000So if you count New York, California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, you have almost a trillion dollars of pension fund money that is thrown around with a lot of weight that the wokies have taken over.
00:22:56.000What is the solution to the state pension funds that dictate so much of this radicalism?
00:23:00.000So I'm going to give you a counterintuitive solution, Charlie.
00:23:03.000It is not to focus on California and New York and Oregon.
00:23:06.000It is actually to focus on the rest of the country, where if you add up the money in places, not just like Texas and Florida, but Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia.
00:23:15.000I mean, you go across North, Dakota, South, Dakota, Wyoming, et cetera.
00:23:18.000That actually adds up to a big sum of money as well.
00:23:21.000Well, in excess, depending on any account of a trillion dollars as well.
00:23:24.000But the problem is that red states for the last 10 years, as the ESG movement has invaded capital markets, have tried to stick their heads in the sand and pretend like the problem didn't exist.
00:23:36.000So, when Cowpers and New York and other states demanded large asset managers, embrace these new climate change orthodoxies, embrace these racial justice orthodoxies, including quota systems, et cetera.
00:23:46.000The other states just said, Hey, we're going to pretend like this doesn't exist.
00:23:49.000But their capital and the citizens' capital that they manage was dragged along with it.
00:23:55.000I think it's going to actually be delivering political accountability to pension fund managers, including even in red and purple states, where the same thing that happened in school boards across the country last year, right?
00:24:06.000The school board was supposed to be this managerial institution that was somehow untouched.
00:24:10.000Everyday citizens and parents woke up and said, You know what, those aren't your kids, those are my kids.
00:24:14.000I'm going to take ownership by bringing accountability to the school board.
00:24:18.000We need to see that same movement happen in the pension fund system to pension fund boards, reminding them, especially even starting with red and purple states, to remind those state bureaucrats that it is not your money.
00:24:28.000Yes, it is actually our money as citizens.
00:24:30.000For example, North Dakota or South Dakota or Wyoming could say right now, our pension fund money will not go to BlackRock, Vanguard, or State Street, correct?
00:24:40.000And more importantly, even affirmatively use their shareholding power to send a message to corporate America to say that, you know what, Apple or a subsidiary of Berkshire, after the way when you donate to BLM, that's not your money.
00:24:53.000But we're going to have to actually pursue new alternatives that deliver a different voice to corporate America.
00:25:00.000And that's where the red states haven't really woken up yet, but I think that they're going to.
00:25:03.000They're going to have to be forced to because the everyday citizens are going to demand accountability just like they did at school boards last year.
00:25:11.000And I mean, so for people that are more kind of concerned about woke corporations, your vision is that through the asset fund managers, but also through creating alternatives, do you think deep down some of these CEOs have been waiting for this to try to?
00:25:28.000I don't think a lot of these CEOs are on board for this.
00:25:31.000So that's why we started with the U.S. energy sector, Charlie, because I spoke to, for example, one of the largest energy conferences in the country last week in Denver, a room full of oil and gas executives and CEOs.
00:25:41.000What I love about the energy industry is that the employees of the energy industry are not the employees of Twitter.
00:25:45.000And what I mean by that is Elon Musk can take over Twitter if he wants, but he's still got 60,000 employees who don't want to do the thing that he actually wants them to do.
00:25:52.000In the U.S. energy industry, my impression, Charlie, is that they are waiting in the wings for this new shareholder mandate to say that, you know what, Strive gets off the ground, DRLL gets off the ground.
00:26:10.000See you later, ESG in the rearview mirror.
00:26:12.000We're going in that new direction because most people who work in the oil and gas industry don't believe that they're harming humanity.
00:26:17.000They believe that they're delivering prosperity to human beings and Americans, and they're proud of it.
00:26:21.000So I think it starts with the shareholders.
00:26:23.000And then, Charlie, I think a lot of people mistake, take a company like Disney.
00:26:26.000A lot of people mistake Disney for Disney CEO for bending the need to his employees.
00:26:30.000Actually, the top shareholders of Disney are BlackRock, State Student, and Vanguard.
00:26:33.000And so I think once you get this new shareholder movement going, that's actually going to get top down.
00:26:38.000But then again, BlackRock only has money because red states give them money, right?
00:26:42.000So BlackRock does, I mean, again, BlackRock probably has some sovereign wealth money from some Middle Eastern country too.
00:26:48.000However, but if all of a sudden BlackRock had $100 billion less than Tennessee, Kentucky, and Alabama said, we're not doing that anymore, boy, you're really onto something.
00:26:57.000I would love to lead the red state crusade.
00:26:59.000Nothing I love more than calling out weak Republicans for not understanding what time it is.
00:27:03.000But these red states, they could change woke corporate culture almost overnight because it's like, oh, wow, okay, Disney is beholden to BlackRock.