00:00:00.000What seems to be happening to me is that not only do they get all the gold, but they get all the bloody unearned moral virtue, because now they have the gold and they think, well, I'm going to atone for my sins by what? By standing forward for equity now that I've made a fortune? And by what? Trying to save the planet by decarbonizing it, despite the fact that my industries, at least in principle, by my own standards, contributed to that?
00:00:22.640it's not even their money. It's the money of everyday citizens in that democratic society,
00:00:28.500which has been aggregated in the hands of these small institutions that are using the money of
00:00:32.700other people to advance social and political agendas through the market that most of the
00:00:38.720owners of capital actually disagree with. In a certain sense, there's a large-scale breach of
00:00:43.520trust here. Welcome to episode 160 of my podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson. I had my
00:00:52.360dad Jordan Peterson and Vivek Ramaswamy on for this episode. I heard about Vivek through a mutual
00:00:58.400friend because of his book Woke Inc where he talked about ESGs. He's on today to discuss ESGs
00:01:04.080and his new book which is out now linked in show notes called Nation of Victims. ESGs are something
00:01:10.140that everyone should know about. When I was opening for dad's shows I was actually talking about them
00:01:14.880because I think it's one of the most important topics that people should be discussing now.
00:01:19.780It's an acronym that discusses how people who have control over companies like BlackRock are influencing policies that are contributing to issues like massive energy shortages.
00:01:40.100What you can't trust are CEOs who are not elected, banding together, deciding they know what direction society needs to take, then influencing how companies operate in order to push society in that direction.
00:01:52.960And the worst part is most people don't know this is happening or what the outcomes are.
00:01:58.260This kind of setup is not how America was built.
00:06:05.440And I've been writing in the Wall Street Journal, producing scholarship on issues relating to
00:06:09.980stakeholder capitalism and the ESG movement.
00:06:12.060I thought that that was going to be my future in writing and possibly, dare I say, thought
00:06:17.820leadership in this particular area that was a passion of mine. But I was called back to the
00:06:23.060world of entrepreneurship in part by my own writing. Highlighting a problem was somewhat
00:06:28.560important, but I thought that addressing the problem was even more important. And that led
00:06:33.840me to start the latest company that I'm now leading, which is Strive. And it's a new asset
00:06:39.100management firm that's competing against companies like BlackRock and other leaders in the so-called
00:06:44.260ESG and stakeholder capitalism movement. And so that's made this a very busy year with a new book
00:06:50.080and a new company, and hopefully reviving what I think of as excellence in our economy and our
00:06:56.820culture in the process. Okay, that was fantastic. I think before we get into this conversation,
00:07:03.280you should describe to people who don't know exactly what ESG stands for and what it means
00:07:08.060for people. Yeah, that's a good table stakes point, because the definition keeps changing,
00:07:13.860even by its biggest proponents. So I think it's important we flash freeze it so we can talk about
00:07:18.100it, whether or not we agree. Yeah. ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance Factors
00:07:23.720Influencing the Allocation of Capital in Global Capital Markets. Okay, that's a mouthful. Well,
00:07:30.140that's a close cousin of a broader movement called stakeholder capitalism, which refers to the basic
00:07:36.660idea that businesses should not just focus on selling products and services for a profit,
00:07:41.940but that they should also advance other social agendas and societal interests. That sounds
00:07:49.020benign enough. Now, this was designed as a contrast to the worldview advanced by Milton
00:07:54.180Friedman in the 1970s and 1980s, where he said, no, the right purpose of a business is exclusively
00:07:59.020to focus on selling products and services for profit to maximize value for shareholders.
00:08:04.540And the thing that Milton Friedman worried about was that if companies didn't do that,
00:08:08.280they'd be less effective at making widgets and the size of the economy would shrink and everyone
00:08:11.840would lose out. We can get into this, but my critique of this trend is actually quite different
00:08:19.000than Milton Friedman's. My main concern is not just that it threatens the effectiveness of
00:08:24.120American capitalism or the effectiveness of corporations, though I believe all that's true.
00:08:29.660My bigger concern is that the ESG movement and this broader philosophy of stakeholder capitalism
00:08:34.420actually threatens democracy, because democracy is a system built on the idea that everyone's
00:08:40.680voice and vote counts equally on questions ranging from climate change to addressing racial
00:08:46.280injustice. Whatever the right answers may be, those are the political questions that a democracy
00:08:50.880settles through free speech and open debate in the public square. And it's my view that what the ESG
00:08:56.420movement demands and what the stakeholder capitalist movement demands is that actually
00:09:00.780we take those questions out of the political process and settle them through the use of
00:09:05.300capital force in boardrooms across America and across the West more broadly. And I think that's
00:09:10.420a betrayal of the democratic system that we built in 1776 in this side of the ocean, but even more
00:09:16.980broadly, a betrayal of a system of self-governance of free agents in a free society. Let me ask you,
00:09:23.980if you don't mind, a couple of questions pertaining to ESG. Three, I would say, it isn't
00:09:31.640obvious that if the focus of return switches to the stakeholders, let's say, the broader
00:09:39.340stakeholders that doesn't mean something like i have a particular ideological agenda and uh it's
00:09:46.560the moral one and because of that you should subordinate your company to me rather than say
00:09:52.300dedicating it towards these hypothetical social agenda this hypothetical social agenda and
00:09:57.300interests so the first question might be just exactly what are those hypothetical broader
00:10:03.620social interests and who determines what they are and then on the friedman side now i've always
00:10:10.560been curious about this because friedman's notion was that a company should maximize shareholder
00:10:15.840value and my issue with that as a research psychologist was always well maximize shareholder
00:10:23.000value over what time period because if it's quarterly returns that looks a hell of a lot
00:10:28.320different than it's if it's if it's a pension fund and it's a 20-year investment horizon and
00:10:33.200that's very much relevant to the issue, let's say, of the sustainability that the ESG power mongers
00:10:39.840hypothetically are working to promote. So the first question is, what are these social agendas
00:10:45.500and interests? And why is it that some arbitrary third party, let's say, should be able to set what
00:10:52.260those are? I know that your concerns pertain to that to some degree. Oh, to a large degree,
00:10:58.260actually. So you're getting right to the heart of the most important questions here, which is great.
00:11:02.980I mean, look, I think that the questions that are the prime targets of the ESG movement today generally relate to staving off global climate change and delivering equity to rectify what they view as historical group identity-based injustices, racial and gender-based and sexual orientation-based.
00:11:21.200When you think about the E and the S, the environmental and the social prong, which are really doing most of the work here, the G is just a nice little add-on at the end.
00:11:29.740It's really mostly related to staving off global climate change through decarbonization and achieving global equity, both between different identity-driven groups based on race or gender or sexual orientation, and also even transnational equity, which actually relates to the first agenda of staving off global climate change.
00:11:49.020But the question is, who gets to decide? And I think that's actually the biggest and most mysterious question of all. It turns out that the answer to that question is one of the principles that I have revived in my first book, which is the principle of the golden rule, not the golden rule that most people know, that you treat people like you want to be treated in return.
00:12:09.060you know the golden rule that says that he who has the gold makes the rules which is to say that
00:12:13.580the people who control the largest swaths of capital are the ones who make the you know
00:12:19.680unilateral decisions as to which questions hypothetically that would be fine if the rules
00:12:25.800they were making pertain to their capital but what seems to be happening to me is that not only do
00:12:31.100they get all the gold but they get all the bloody unearned moral virtue because now they have the
00:12:35.440gold. And they think, well, I'm going to atone for my sins by what? By standing forward for equity
00:12:40.660now that I've made a fortune? And by what? Trying to save the planet by decarbonizing it, despite
00:12:46.100the fact that my industries, at least in principle, by my own standards, contributed to that?
00:12:51.220So much to say there. I think first, though, we have to pause on whose gold they're actually
00:12:55.080holding. So this is different than the John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie era,
00:13:01.440where it was their own goal, and they would wield it to advance not only market power,
00:13:05.780but certain forms of political power. And that's one debate. And we can get to that debate.
00:13:09.640My biggest beef is actually even simpler than that. What's happened in the 21st century is that,
00:13:14.880for example, let's just take the three largest asset managers in the United States,
00:13:18.180BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard. Those three institutions wield not tens of billions
00:13:23.640or even hundreds of billions of dollars, or even trillions of dollars, but tens of trillions of
00:13:27.100dollars, $21 trillion just in the hands of those three institutions, half of that 21 trillion
00:13:32.580almost in the hands of one. Yet here's the rub. It's not even their money. It's the money of
00:13:39.260everyday citizens in that democratic society who has been aggregated by the hands of it,
00:13:45.100which has been aggregated in the hands of these small institutions that are using the money of
00:13:49.240other people to advance social and political agendas through the market that most of the
00:13:55.260owners of capital actually disagree with. In a certain sense, there's a large-scale breach of
00:14:00.060trust here. Even if you accepted that the guys who have the gold get to make the rules if it's
00:14:04.560their own gold, that's a proposition we can itself debate. The funny part here is it's not even their
00:14:09.480gold. So that's the betrayal at the heart of the modern ESG system. And you ask the question of who
00:14:13.640gets to decide? The answer is it's a small handful of actors, people like Larry Fink, the CEO of
00:14:18.040BlackRock. And is Larry Fink worth a billion dollars or whatever? Sure he is, but he's not
00:14:21.660worth $21 trillion. He's using $21 trillion or $10 trillion in BlackRock's case of other people's
00:14:27.480money, most of whom don't even know that he's doing it. And most of whom don't even know that
00:14:32.000he's using it to advance social and political agendas that most of those people disagree with.
00:14:37.040Now let's get to the deeper question that you raised, though, is, look, if you earned a lot
00:14:41.560of money or aggregated a lot of market power, presumably it was by market judgments that give
00:14:46.100you standing to decide which products rise to the top, whether this jacket or a different jacket or
00:14:50.560this phone or a different phone rise to the top, that's not a one-person, one-vote system,
00:14:55.140and I don't think it should be. That's a $1, one-vote system. But if you're talking about
00:14:59.200how to settle, how and whether to address global climate change through higher prices for goods
00:15:04.480versus lower carbon emissions or racial equity through quota systems or some other means,
00:15:09.520those are not the kinds of questions that one ought to settle through the use of capital force
00:15:14.860because there's no greater standing for Larry Fink or anyone else to have a superior view as
00:15:19.460a citizen on the answer to that question, those are the kinds of questions where everyone's voice
00:15:24.400and vote ought to, in my opinion, count equally, regardless of the number of dollars they wield
00:15:29.480in the marketplace, unadjusted by the number of dollars they control. And that's the perversion
00:15:34.140at the heart of the system. So there's really two perversions. One is it's the use of other
00:15:37.540people's money, not their own money. And they're actually using other people's money who mostly
00:15:40.780disagree with the agenda they're advancing. But the second perversion is the nature of the question.
00:15:45.100It's a question of the wrong kind that they're using capital force to settle when in a democratic society, at least, those are questions of a kind that we settle through a shared political process that we set into motion through a constitutional republic.
00:15:56.300How did BlackRock come to be so dominant?
00:15:58.300How did they manage to leverage themselves into a position like this?
00:18:05.460But we expect that the new left work with that old left and come to a bargain where you agree
00:18:11.020to look the other way and leave our game intact as long as we use our game, our power, corporate
00:18:15.920power included, to advance some of the agendas that you all love. So it was this cynical arranged
00:18:21.740marriage between two bedfellows who didn't really love each other. It was closer to mutual
00:18:25.260prostitution than an arranged marriage. But the net result was the birth of this hybrid of state
00:18:30.000power and corporate power that together was more powerful than either one alone. That was what you
00:18:35.480want to call it the woke industrial complex, the ESG industrial complex. That was what through
00:18:39.800kerosene- Just call it fascism. You could call it fascism. Yeah, you could, because that's what
00:18:45.160fascism means. Fascism means the union of people out the top. The merger of state power and
00:18:50.920corporate power to advance what neither one could alone. This is a modern fascism, no doubt about it.
00:18:55.360So that was the birth of that story top down. But as I said, it takes two to tango. It takes a culture to fall for this trick, to not be able to see through it. And so what's going on there? So that's what Nation of Victims is all about. It's the spread of this new apologist psychological attitude in our culture that left an entire general population that was vulnerable to be exploited by this trick.
00:19:19.340And at the end of the day, we also live in a moment where, you know, my generation,
00:19:23.860Mikhail, your generation, our generation, probably, and younger, millennials, Gen Z,
00:19:27.960whatever, we're so hungry for a cause and purpose and meaning and identity.
00:19:33.080We're in the, I mean, probably not you and I personally as much, I know I'm not, but
00:19:37.620on the receiving end of the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in human history.
00:19:43.020And, you know, von Mises said this a century ago, Schumpeter said it at points along the
00:19:47.060way. Capitalism creates the psychological need that anti-capitalism ultimately fills. And so
00:19:53.160this culture of accepting the self-criticism, those moral and psychological insecurities in
00:19:58.480a generation, that's part of what allowed the ESG movement to make for good big business,
00:20:02.440good business over the last 10 years, to aggregate funds, to say that you're going to invest not
00:20:07.020just for return, but also for virtue. And the two kind of, there's really three factors there. I
00:20:12.960and one is defanging the Occupy Wall Street old left. The second is a business opportunity,
00:20:17.480but third is a business opportunity created by a generation of consumers that were so
00:20:21.760psychologically hungry for purpose and meaning and identity and a cause that they fell for it,
00:20:26.660that together you got the new version of modern capitalism. What was supposed to be a challenge
00:20:31.620to the system became the system, and it's become, I think, the new form of fascist totalitarianism
00:20:38.480effectuated, ironically, in the Trojan horse and in the veneer of the free market itself,
00:20:44.320which is actually pretty frightening. Interesting. How much of this ESG, these
00:20:49.660mandates are contributing to the energy crisis at the moment?
00:20:54.380A lot is the answer to that question. So the number one sector palpably damaged by the demands
00:21:02.860of the ESG movement is no doubt U.S. energy, Western energy more broadly, okay? And there's
00:21:10.620reasonable debate for that because is it the policymakers that are responsible for it or is
00:21:13.740the ESG movement? I think the answer is both, but I think the underappreciated role is the role that
00:21:18.060the private actors themselves have played. So I actually sent a, you guys may have seen, I sent
00:21:23.100a public letter to the board of Chevron this week as a shareholder of Chevron, right? So my new firm
00:21:28.600launched a U.S. Energy Fund. Through that U.S. Energy Fund is a shareholder of Chevron. We sent
00:21:33.440a letter to the boards questioning certain of their behaviors that it's a good case study,
00:21:38.540but it's just an example of a broader trend of a company that did not want to adopt many of these
00:21:44.340toxic measures. How do we know that they didn't want to adopt them? Because when a scope three
00:21:48.720emissions proposal, and I can tell you what that means, but when a toxic scope three emissions
00:21:52.680proposal was imposed by shareholders on this company in 2021, the board of directors said,
00:21:57.880no, we recommend against this. It was proposed by a Dutch non-profit founded by a former
00:22:03.460refrigerator salesman who wanted to fight climate change, who had, on the face of it,
00:22:07.160no interest in Chevron's business success, but put up a shareholder proposal that 15 years ago
00:22:12.280would have been appropriately ignored, but in 2021, earned the support of BlackRock,
00:22:18.100State Street, and Vanguard, giving it majority shareholder support. I use shareholder in air
00:22:23.620quotes because it's not their own money. It's the money of everyday citizens they're using
00:22:26.580to vote in favor of it. But at the end of the day, even though Chevron's board said, no,
00:22:31.260we don't want to adopt this, we recommend against it, it earned majority shareholder support with
00:22:37.020the aid of folks like Larry Fink's BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard. And what does this
00:22:43.100kind of proposal call for? Let me just be specific about it. It's a little technical,
00:22:46.640but it's important to understand what a scope three proposal calls for. It says an oil company
00:22:51.980like Chevron is responsible not just for reducing its own emissions and not just reducing the
00:22:57.920emissions resulting from its own use of electricity and power in its own business. Those are scope one
00:23:02.420and scope two respectively. But scope three emissions, which means that it has to reduce
00:23:07.440the emissions of its employees in their commuting costs to work, carbon costs, in their employee
00:23:13.920business travel, in their investments that they make, even in the use of their fuel by every
00:23:20.120customer in their supply chains. So if you get this straight, I mean, this is staggering, right?
00:23:25.600So this is how they reach the private companies too, because there's many private companies in
00:23:30.000the supply chain, even though Chevron's the public company. So I'm just going to make this really real
00:23:33.420for you, okay, here, just to make this crystal clear. This means that Chevron has to take
00:23:39.380responsibility for the emissions of a truck, an Amazon Prime truck that burns its fuel delivering
00:23:46.500food to someone's home without demanding that Amazon make a reciprocal commitment on the
00:23:50.120in return. That makes about as much business sense as McDonald's voluntarily committing
00:23:56.280to reducing the body weight of everyone who's ever consumed a Big Mac without asking the
00:24:01.120consumer to bear any responsibility in return. So the question I asked at the heart of the
00:24:05.980second section of my letter to Chevron this week was, why on earth is this possibly in
00:24:11.600the best business interests of Chevron?
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00:25:58.440you learn something about ESGs. It's messed up. And I think that is the question at the heart of
00:26:04.040this debate. If it's in the right interest of society, great, let's debate it as a society
00:26:07.640through the democratic process where everyone voiced count and votes counts equally. But what
00:26:11.620you debate in the boardroom of Chevron or the shareholders bring to the boardroom of Chevron
00:26:14.780ought to be guided by a more narrow question. What is in the best long run? And this is to
00:26:19.220your second question, Dr. Peterson, but your second question, what is in the long run best
00:26:22.640interests of Chevron? That's the scope of what ought to be debated in Chevron's boardroom.
00:26:27.760And I think that there haven't been other shareholder voices to the table. That's why
00:26:30.940I founded Strive. At the end of the day, we showed up as a shareholder and Mike Worth,
00:26:34.820the CEO responded to me the very day I sent the letter. You know, I was on CNBC, he was on
00:26:38.840Bloomberg. Great. Let's have this discussion out in the open. But Mikel, I think the positive part
00:26:44.480of this, just to, you know, end that rather pessimistic answer with a small note of optimism
00:26:48.460here, is that the employees, I've learned this pretty quickly, even in recent weeks. I mean,
00:26:53.640my company, we've engaged with over 10 US energy companies already since we launched our first fund
00:26:58.380that's a shareholder of these companies. What I've learned is the employees of US energy
00:27:02.400companies and even their CEOs and their boards, they're not the employees of Twitter. And I mean
00:27:07.460that in a good way. Where Elon Musk could buy Twitter, he's going to have a lot of trouble
00:27:11.940changing the behavior of 15,000 people who don't want to do the thing he actually wants them to do.
00:27:16.160In the US energy industry, it's almost the other way around, where most of these employees
00:27:20.220are quietly waiting to run in this new direction. They just need to be liberated from the handcuffs
00:27:24.780of the Black Rocks of the world who are imposing these ESG mandates.
00:27:27.220Okay. So what exactly is Strive doing to help liberate these people?
00:27:33.860Bringing a different shareholder voice to the boardroom. It's actually pretty simple. So
00:27:39.180just like BlackRock and State Street and Vanguard offer index funds, that's what Strive is in the
00:27:45.180business of offering as well, ways for people to invest in different segments of the market.
00:27:50.100Tell people what an index fund is so everybody's real clear about that and what BlackRock offers.
00:27:55.300That was part of my question about why they are in a position where they manage so much
00:32:28.940So I've never really said it that way, but actually you're exactly right. More than a bit of an irony. And so anyway, that's the problem. So what am I doing? I'm writing about the problem. I'm speaking about it. I was a former CEO. I've seen this from the inside. At the end of the day, though, okay, you're only going to move the needle by shining a spotlight on the problem.
00:32:47.160Okay. I wrote a book last year. I'm writing this other book that's coming out in a month,
00:32:50.680and that's more about the culture, the revival of excellence over these apologist values. Okay.
00:32:55.080We're going to move the needle a little bit, but how about solving it? So I thought about maybe,
00:33:00.600is this a political problem that needs to be solved through state action? I grew disillusioned
00:33:05.240by that path for a range of reasons we can talk about, but then it became clear to me, look,
00:33:09.000if this is a problem that originated in the market, by golly, let's solve it through the market
00:33:14.600by actually bringing competition to the table. If this is an anti-competitive problem,
00:33:19.640and I can talk for a long time, if you guys are interested in this, about why I do think it's an
00:33:24.440anti-competitive problem. Well, at the end of the day, don't complain about it. Solve it through
00:33:28.120competition. So that's what I did. So I founded Strive. It's a new asset management firm competing
00:33:32.840directly against BlackRock, starting by also launching index funds. Index funds that say,
00:33:37.640we're just not going to pick stocks. We're just going to offer exposure to the market,
00:33:41.240market, exposure to different sectors of the market, but crucially, bring a different voice
00:33:47.720and vote to the table. And the voice and vote that Strive brings to the table is to mandate
00:33:53.300companies. We're not asking them. We're mandating them as a shareholder to focus exclusively on
00:34:00.080delivering excellent products and services to their customers over any other agenda, including
00:34:05.820social or political agendas without regard to Larry Fink's or anyone else's social or environmental
00:34:11.520or climate change or racial equity goals. And that actually closes the loop. Dr. Peterson,
00:34:17.580you said something interesting about Milton Friedman. You had a critique of him, which was,
00:34:20.880he doesn't say anything about the time horizon. I agree with you. My other critique of Milton
00:34:24.120Friedman is he doesn't say much about how it is a corporate board is supposed to go about this
00:34:28.620monumental task of maximizing shareholder value. That's irreducibly vague. In fact, that's part
00:34:34.700of the vagueness that allowed the ESG movement to then actually fill the void and say, no, no,
00:34:38.580we're actually concerned with long run shareholder value. What I want to do is make it really clear
00:34:43.400and say, focus on your products and services for your customers. That's how you maximize shareholder
00:34:47.500value. Anyway, that's the voice that strives. So you take responsibility for your particular
00:34:53.420level of interaction with the actual market is that people who run a big company, they have a
00:35:00.340domain of responsibility it's not universal perhaps they should be acting universally in
00:35:06.340their private lives but in their public and corporate life they should be doing the right
00:35:11.820thing by their customers and then we'd hope that the aggregate consequence of all the companies
00:35:16.600doing right by their customers would be everyone doing right in the broadest possible sense
00:35:22.380in the absence of a centralized control system and the problem with the centralized control system
00:35:28.000is you can't predict the outcome, right?
00:35:57.220So before I started Strive, before I got started in knowing what the next step entailed, I was meeting with asset management CEOs across the country and was curious, almost encouraging them.
00:45:50.860And by the way, the cherry on top, the biggest opponents to fossil fuels in the ESG movement
00:45:56.080or also the biggest opponents to nuclear energy, which by the way, is supposedly the most carbon
00:46:02.620neutral form of large scale energy production known to mankind. Vanguard's ESG funds by rule
00:46:09.960exclude nuclear energy companies, which show you what this debate is really about. To me,
00:46:15.920those two facts, right? The fact that it really wasn't about reducing carbon emissions so much
00:46:21.780as shifting those same carbon emissions to the east from the west. And then the second fact that
00:46:27.340actually, even as we're opposed to burning fossil fuels, we're also going to be opposed to the
00:46:33.560utilization of nuclear energy, reveals something really important about what's going on here.
00:46:38.820And the thing it reveals is that this actually wasn't about climate change at all. This wasn't
00:46:42.960about the energy debate at all. This was about an attack on human flourishing, particularly human
00:46:49.560flourishing in the West relative to other parts of the world. And the problem with nuclear energy,
00:46:55.340for example, is that it might actually solve the energy crisis, even the clean energy demand,
00:47:02.240too effectively. And the problem is once you've solved the problem, then you lose the Trojan
00:47:08.220horse to pack in all of the other social agendas. Because wait a minute, how are we-
00:47:12.640You also lose the opportunity to exercise your unearned moral superiority.
00:47:17.620Right. Exactly. God only knows you don't want to give that up. Exactly. And this is, as I say in my
00:47:23.080books, both of them, the problem with virtue signaling is at some point, the appearance of
00:47:30.420virtue becomes more important than being virtuous. And that's exactly what's happening here, where
00:47:37.440it's a form of dishonesty, where there were other agendas at work, the global equity agenda. How
00:47:42.900else would the rest of the world catch up with the West if it weren't for asymmetrically imposing
00:47:47.920fossil fuel caps on the West? Well, that's what explains the asymmetry and not applying the ESG
00:47:52.400standards to other parts of the world. It's also what explains the opposition of the ESG movement
00:47:56.880to nuclear energy, because both of those could actually solve the alleged energy-driven climate
00:48:02.000crisis without actually accomplishing the other social goals of addressing other global injustices
00:48:07.920instead. I'm not minimizing that conversation, but if we're going to have that conversation,
00:48:11.380let's have that debate in the open on its own terms rather than using the Trojan horse of a
00:48:16.680climate religion to advance that agenda instead. And by the way, you're not even, as we talked
00:48:22.400about, even helping that third world. I mean, at the end of the day, eight times more people today
00:48:27.420die of cold temperatures rather than warm temperatures. And the best answers to all
00:48:32.580temperature-related deaths is more plentiful and abundant access to global energy. You know where
00:48:37.280net zero Somali. So at the end of the day, they can be net zero, but they have bigger problems
00:48:42.380and they're starving their people. So anyway, I think there's so much going on here, but I think
00:48:47.480that we're very much on the same page on this, I would say. Dad, can you talk, this is kind of
00:48:53.400off topic, but can you talk a little bit about what you told me a couple of weeks ago about
00:48:56.940ambassadors from Europe coming to Canada and America to ask for energy? Oh, well, it wasn't
00:49:02.860the ambassador it was the chancellor of germany who's a leftist he came olaf shots came to canada
00:49:09.700cap in hand about three weeks ago and said to trudeau do you think you could open up the lng
00:49:17.680pumps so to speak and canada has massive uh reserves of of natural gas and natural gas is a
00:49:25.700very very clean energy source high density clean energy source i mean the americans started
00:49:32.360fracking for natural gas in a big way back around the turn of the millennium and they cut their
00:49:38.460carbon output and this is relevant to the next point about what just exactly what are we trying
00:49:43.800to accomplish here the death of western civilization or saving the planet the americans cut their
00:49:49.320carbon output by 15 by turning to fracking and canada could have over the last decade invested
00:49:56.760heavily in liquid natural gas production and movement and then shipping. We have the technical
00:50:03.840ability to do it and to do it cleanly. And then we could have provided Europe with an alternative
00:50:08.160energy source that was clean and efficient. They're going to turn back to burning coal here
00:50:12.320right away. They're already doing that in Germany. And anyways, Olaf Schatz, who's one of Canada's
00:50:18.100great allies, let's remember that, came to Trudeau, one of his fellow left-wingers, and said,
00:50:24.280man we could sure use some gas here since we're uh putin's surf and slave because we set ourselves
00:50:31.240up to be that and trudeau said well we don't think we can make a business case for that
00:50:38.360and the reason he couldn't make a business case for that is because his bloody appalling
00:50:43.440administration has done everything they possibly could have to make it absolutely impossible for
00:50:48.560energy energy company to make a business case for it because it's become so expensive and
00:50:53.220so difficult to do business in canada on the energy front that no one's willing to risk the
00:50:58.120investment you can't make this stuff up you really can't it's beyond comprehension this
00:51:04.840is at the same prime minister who's who's spouting off at every moment his um ritual adherence to
00:51:12.400the support for the brave people of ukraine but when it but he's still willing to put all the
00:51:18.140power in the hands of putin who is much more masterful as far as i can tell at the moment
00:51:23.840at the use of arbitrary power than any of the opponents he faces in the west means he's already
00:51:29.280put the screws to europe and we just wait till the winter comes if you think you've seen screws
00:51:34.100so far man we ain't seen nothing yet right you're so right about this i mean and winter is coming
00:51:39.600to europe no doubt about it and and you know what putin's putin making a historical bet here i mean
00:51:44.840I, you know, obviously I can't get in his head, but, you know, if you're putting yourself in his
00:51:50.720shoes, what are you going to say? Russia has a long history of outlasting its European opponents
00:51:55.920through long, cold winters. Look at Napoleon, look at Hitler. They're not going to be able to
00:52:00.640muster the political power through this winter when they lack enough energy to actually heat
00:52:04.620their homes. And you have to think about, you know, it's not just Trudeau. I mean, you know,
00:52:08.540you look at this from the Canadian perspective as a Canadian, that's, I think you're spot on.
00:52:13.020I'll also make a very similar observation as American about President Biden, who with one hand is giving $45 billion in aid to Ukraine to fight against Putin.
00:52:23.480On the other hand, the number one lobby against the European ban on Russian oil imports was actually the U.S. White House, who was actually President Biden, which is in turn financing Putin's war machine that in turn allows him.
00:52:39.040the one thing that's gone well for Russia, of course, is its oil and gas sales going up since
00:52:42.400its invasion of Ukraine. So on one hand, giving 45 billion to Ukraine, with the other hand,
00:52:46.020lobbying against a policy that has the effect in turn of increasing Putin's cash machine to
00:52:51.840finance his war machine. Yeah, well, let's not forget cozying up to the Iranians at the same
00:52:56.820point. Yeah, of course. Because that's a fun little side effect. Yeah, a fun little side note.
00:53:01.920Oh, yeah. That's just, yeah, just a trivial, and also alienating the Saudis at the same time while
00:53:07.480he's doing that. So if this is bad economically, if this is bad geopolitically, if it's even,
00:53:15.480as I made an argument before, bad environmentally on its own, on the terms of the environmentalist
00:53:20.120movement's own terms, then why is it happening? And at the end of the day, it's that the small
00:53:26.940handful of actors who have benefited both politically and economically, they wield so
00:53:33.200much aggregated capital, including capital aggregated from every citizens across Western
00:53:37.980nations, they are actually the ones who are able to influence all of these decisions because it's
00:53:43.500in their self-interest. That sounds conspiratorial, but it's hiding in plain sight. And this is not a
00:53:47.540left-wing or right-wing debate as a consequence. I think this is a 1776 issue. This is a question
00:53:53.620about whether you believe in the distributed power, both distributed political power and
00:53:58.340distributed market power that we set into motion in 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence,
00:54:03.520the year of the wealth of nations. Both of those people forget. We're both in 1776. Is that what
00:54:08.700we believe? Or do we believe in the old world European model where a small group of enlightened
00:54:14.480elites decide the right answers to how society is to organize its affairs for the rest of society
00:54:20.560at large? I mean, that's a legitimate debate. It was a historical debate. We settled it in 1776
00:54:25.360through a war. It reared its head again in World War I. What was that issue in both sides of the
00:54:32.680World War I battle? At the end of the day, that has now reared its head again in the 21st century
00:54:38.480version of this, in what's at stake in the ESG movement, is the debate between distributed power
00:54:43.540through a democracy, distributed power through actual decentralized free market capitalism,
00:54:48.360or the new version of monarchy. This is not a left-wing, actually, agenda. It is a monarchical
00:54:54.360agenda that i think people once they see what it is hopefully can debate this issue in in terms
00:54:59.100that that's the sort of thing partisanship that's the sort of thing that russell brand keeps
00:55:03.140objecting to because in some sense he's an objector on the left and what he's fundamentally
00:55:08.080objecting to is monarchical pretensions on the part of gigantic uh uh corporations rather than
00:55:16.060gigantic government actors but a common enemy as you just pointed out or a common threat i would
00:55:21.460say is unconstrained gigantism period it doesn't matter whether it's on the corporate front or the
00:55:27.480government front and remember back in 2008 the mantra was too big to fail that's right okay how
00:55:34.000about this for a mantra so big you must certainly fail i like that actually yeah absolutely i like
00:55:41.060that and well and it's relevant to this issue of of uh of the fundamental debate that you see going
00:55:47.780on here is that and it's relevant to this issue of so-called fascism that we talked about earlier
00:55:53.580too much centralized control constitutes a catastrophe in and of itself it doesn't matter
00:56:00.320if it's corporate or governmental and that's the same problem and the problem is the tower of babel
00:56:06.940problem essentially which is you have one centralized authority who has all the responsibility
00:56:12.220and all the power and everyone else is turned into a voiceless peon and that means the centralized
00:56:18.760authority turns into a tyrant partly because they get dissociated from the populace and all of the
00:56:24.500intermediary structures of responsibility that should be there as an antidote to that totalitarian
00:56:30.640structure are are wiped out are demolished and then you have the moral hazard that that all
00:56:37.000accrues benefit, at least in the short term, to the people who are wielding the power and accruing
00:56:43.560the moral virtue. It's utterly appalling. It is appalling. But I think that I'm also just
00:56:49.520increasingly focused on how it is we're going to do something about this. And I know this is
00:56:54.480something that both of you think a lot about. I think about it. At the end of the day, you could
00:56:59.280think about breaking up that distributed power. I like breaking that up through market competition.
00:57:02.880It is wild to me. It is staggering to me that literally no one else has taken up the mantle of creating an affirmative alternative to ESG.
00:57:15.820I think others should be ashamed of the fact that within the first year, Strive is unambiguously the world's, I think, leading voice of offering an affirmative alternative to ESG in the marketplace.
00:57:28.800How much can you talk about how much capital you are now indirectly responsible for? And also what dangers you think your approach might produce? You know, because some of this was unintended consequence of index fund development, right?
00:57:45.140Are there dangers in what you're doing that you see on the gigantism side? And how are you guys doing at Strive?
00:57:50.600Well, so there's, I mean, I was not without some reluctance that I started Strive because I do worry about the bifurcation of an economy in a democratic society. I think the private sector needs to be a place that provides cohesion in an otherwise divided body politic.
00:58:10.160This is Tocqueville, the intermediating institutions. American capitalism is an
00:58:13.640apolitical intermediating institution. And so the last thing, and I'm very focused in the way we're
00:58:16.980building Strive, to minimize the risk. It is a risk, but to minimize the risk that we actually
00:58:22.060contribute to that fracturing and the politicization of the private sector by
00:58:26.820affirmatively keeping our North Star as depoliticizing the private sector. But that
00:58:30.160won't be easy. So Strive is brand new and its first fund only launched on August 9th. And the
00:58:36.360thing that was staggering is within the first month, within the first three weeks, we exceeded
00:58:40.400$300 million in just that first fund, which makes it, I think I'm told the fastest launching
00:58:45.880non-seeded ETF, exchange traded fund of the year, which for a newcomer, it turned a lot of heads.
00:58:52.440You could look at the press around it and the financial press, it turned a lot of heads. People
00:58:55.500were shocked. What does that say? And by the way, the average trade size in that first few weeks
00:59:02.420was less than $5,000. So the other funds that launched over $100 million in the first week,
00:59:08.700the average trade size was millions of dollars. In our first week, it was less than $5,000.
00:59:13.040In our first three weeks, I think we had over 400,000 visits to our website. I mean,
00:59:17.020I read many of these messages and were flooded by them. So this is a bottom-up demand of the
00:59:22.080everyday citizen who understands their money and their voice is being exploited by someone else
00:59:27.760today, I think that there's a potential tidal wave of everyday citizens who are hungry for a
00:59:33.360different alternative, but the system is so set up in an intermediated way that it's going to
00:59:38.020take a new market actor, and that's not easy. That's the mountain we're climbing, taking a
00:59:40.840jackhammer to that system to ultimately break the dam to actually allow the voice of the everyday
00:59:45.600citizen to be heard over all of the intermediating financial institutions that actually serve as
00:59:50.000gatekeepers to advancing the voice in the interests of the ultimate capital owners,
00:59:54.280the everyday citizen whose money is being invested. Now, I think that part of this,
00:59:59.940I'm aiming to solve this, I hope, through the market. I hope to God there are other competitors
01:00:04.740like Strive that step up to the plate. And I think that will help solve the problem that I worry
01:00:09.360about, which is that there's one unilateral institution that represents this other alternative
01:00:14.880viewpoint to the otherwise codified ESG hegemony. I don't want hegemony in any direction. I want a
01:00:20.520diversity of viewpoints represented in a marketplace of ideas and represented in the
01:00:24.760marketplace of capital and products that's distributed. So I don't want Strive to ever
01:00:28.820become a $20 trillion financial institution. I think we should, by that point, have greater
01:00:33.320competition in the marketplace of capital and products and ideas that keeps the flow of capital
01:00:38.120competitive for the everyday citizens who are participants in that economy. And so do I worry
01:00:43.180a little bit about that? That's a high-class problem as a business that we'll turn to in the
01:00:47.720future. But I worry in the meantime about also politicizing this whole debate, which is
01:00:52.480unfortunately what the ESG movement has done. But even when you counter it through a movement
01:00:56.300of depoliticization, it's hard not to be seen as a politicized effort in its own right. And so
01:01:01.980that's what makes this a uniquely challenging thing to really do right, not just to go to the
01:01:06.500lowest hanging fruit and say that, well, we're going to create the conservative version of
01:01:10.020the liberal ESG movement. I think that would be the wrong way to do this versus to say that the
01:01:14.300way we want to do this is to actually take a depoliticized approach that focuses exclusively
01:01:19.300on what companies should be doing and to take those political questions, as important as they
01:01:23.240may be, and to have the humility to say that we don't deal with those questions. Those should be
01:01:27.360reserved to the political process. And that was part of why I wrote the book as well. So, I mean,
01:01:33.040I'm releasing the book, you know, this week, right? And at the end of the day,
01:01:38.300part of the book, what I hope to achieve through the book is it's going to take a citizenry
01:01:43.620who is no longer susceptible or vulnerable to the demands and to the siren song of the
01:01:51.520virtue signaling and the advertising through virtue that has empowered the ESG movement.
01:01:57.100And what I worry about is that we can live in this moment where we have this black hole of
01:02:02.040identity in an entire generation, an entire nation, in an entire Western civilization,
01:02:07.660that the kinds of things that used to fill those moral voids, whatever they may have been, right?
01:02:12.280You mean like family? Family. That was at the top of it. Just to take one example. Family as an
01:02:18.220example. And we could have other examples. Hard work as an idea. People used to derive identity
01:02:23.440from hard work. Religion. Patriotism. Patriotism. Yeah. Community. National identity. All these
01:02:28.700subsidiary organizations, levels of social organization. I mean, in some ways, you're
01:02:35.200going to intuit this even more deeply than I did in writing this book just because it's where you
01:02:39.620spend your waking hours over decades of scholarship, but you're right about that. Whatever those may
01:02:45.720have been that filled that void of identity and meaning and purpose, when we've lost that,
01:02:50.540there's this black hole of a vacuum that then allows poison to fill the void. One of my goals
01:02:55.880with Nation of Victims was, look, far be it for me to have all the answers, but at least to start
01:03:01.060the conversation about offering one vision of what it means from an American context. What does it
01:03:05.460mean to be an American in 2022? If you ask most of America's citizenry, I don't believe they have
01:03:10.320a good answer to that question. I offer one answer to that question, which is part of what it means
01:03:15.020to be an American includes the reason why many immigrants, including my parents, travel across
01:03:19.660the world to be part of America is to pursue excellence unapologetically, to say that the
01:03:24.680shared pursuit of excellence, of self-actualization, and to be free to do so in whatever way we as
01:03:29.880individuals and free agents determine is the right way for us to pursue excellence in our lives,
01:03:33.660to be able to do that, to be able to do it in an unrestricted way, and to be able to do it
01:03:37.660unapologetically. That is part of what it means to be American. Well, I would put a twist on that.
01:03:44.220So I just did a seminar in Miami on the biblical story Exodus. And Exodus is the prime story that,
01:03:52.000let's say, people promoting freedom of all political stripes refer to when trying to
01:03:58.060foment transformation in the face of tyranny. And one of the things that God says to Moses
01:04:04.780when he's enjoining Moses to push back against the tyranny of the Pharaoh is,
01:04:10.200let my people go. And that's that call to the sort of freedom that you just described. But
01:04:15.140that's actually not what God says. And it's said 10 times, one for each plague. He says,
01:04:22.720let my people go so that they may serve me in the wilderness and so it isn't freedom exactly
01:04:29.760it's constrained freedom and the reason i'm making this case is because the case you just made there
01:04:35.500for freedom versus say top-down tyranny can turn into kind of an atomistic protestant liberalism
01:04:41.580where we're nothing but atomistic actors defining our identity subjectively it's sort of and so
01:04:47.800here's an alternative vision of freedom it's like well you're free to free to vary and play as an
01:04:53.480individual but that's within a relationship within a committed long-term relationship
01:04:57.700because that puts some boundaries on you and then to devoted towards families and then devoted
01:05:03.480towards communities and then devoted towards states and nations and then maybe devoted to
01:05:08.400the international order and you have to have fealty at all of those levels and that actually
01:05:14.260constitutes your identity, right? It's not just the freedom. I agree with you wholeheartedly.
01:05:19.560And so you responded appropriately to the way I framed it in that 20-second rant and summary of
01:05:27.080the book. But in actuality, one of the arguments I also make, and this is synchronous with what
01:05:32.160you just said, is that actually virtue is not a product of capitalism. Actually, I think the
01:05:38.480virtue is a precondition for capitalism to deliver on its promise, right? And so I'll give
01:05:43.480an example, and I laid this out and now I'm losing track with which book it came up in, but
01:05:47.720across the two books, you know, Facebook actually faced a lot of criticism. And I've been a public
01:05:53.860critic of a lot of the censorship on social media. So people called me when Facebook faced criticism
01:05:57.680for its knowledge that teen girls using Instagram suffered body image issues that were caused by
01:06:04.740the platform and that it's anger management, that people suffered anger issues when using
01:06:08.920its platform and they knew about it and they didn't do anything about it. And they expected
01:06:11.720me to criticize Facebook since I had criticized Facebook for censorship practices, but my response
01:06:15.360is actually different. I actually said that, you know what? I'm not sure I want Facebook. In fact,
01:06:22.060I'm sure I don't want Mark Zuckerberg in charge of being responsible for cultivating the kind of
01:06:28.580self-confidence and identity and virtue in a teen girl that gives her the psychic security and
01:06:35.060fortitude to not be vulnerable to being picked out by an algorithm in the way that Instagram
01:06:41.400works. In fact, I think that's part of the problem is that, again, we didn't cultivate
01:06:46.020enough of that psychic fortitude, that virtue, whatever you want to call it, in the offline world
01:06:50.000that left them vulnerable to being algorithmically exploited in the online world. But the answer
01:06:54.500isn't to make Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey a modern rabbi or a modern day priest. It's to
01:07:00.340actually do the hard work in the offline world, even outside the sphere of the market, to get to
01:07:04.560the same place. And so one of the cases I make in the Nation of Victims, and I don't know if a lot
01:07:08.140of conservatives are going to love this, Dr. Peterson. I'm going to be really honest with you.
01:07:11.280I don't much care. I think that there's two components to this. I'm speaking from an American
01:07:16.660context, American identity. Part of it is responsive to the half of us, the half of us
01:07:22.860internally. I mean, the half of me internally that wants to be the individualist, the rugged
01:07:26.900individualist pursuing my own dream as a free agent expressed through free market capitalism.
01:07:32.340Okay. That's half of the story, the individualist. But if we're being honest with ourselves, each of
01:07:37.380us as citizens also hungers to be part of something that is greater than ourselves, a whole
01:07:42.600that is greater than the sum of its parts. And that too is part of what it means in the American
01:07:48.120context to be an American. And in that is, I think, the beautiful tension at the heart of
01:07:53.500Western identity, at the heart of American identity, the individual, the whole, individualism
01:07:58.580and unity. They sometimes run roughshod over one another. Capitalism and democracy, I think,
01:08:03.160are the expressions of each of those. And one of the things that I think the conservative movement
01:08:06.540gets wrong. So I would want to be the last person that was guilty of committing the same mistake
01:08:10.380was talking disproportionately about the former, which is just the pursuit of freedom through the
01:08:14.920system of free market capitalism, something that we've lost and need to revive, no doubt.
01:08:18.380But without talking about the revival of a bad word I'm going to use here, but it's a word I
01:08:23.100think we need to at least, we at least need to talk about more, the revival of civic duty to a
01:08:29.340nation that also is part of what it means to be a citizen. And I think that the two actually go
01:08:34.620hand in hand because part of the stakeholder capitalist siren song is to be the apologist
01:08:40.260for being the capitalist pursuing your own self-interest. But that comes from the fact
01:08:44.420that you never were actually a fully formed citizen who had lived out his civic duty
01:08:48.620in the first place. So you have the psychic insecurity that gave you the muscle memory
01:08:53.240of neither pursuing self-interest nor pursuing sacrifice ever properly because the two were
01:08:58.740always co-mingled. And what I think is we actually need to revive the muscle memory
01:09:02.160of doing each of those things unapologetically in our different capacities as both capitalists
01:09:07.320and as citizens by separating those activities and those pursuits from one another. And one of
01:09:13.500the things I think that the conservative movement, particularly in the United States, gets wrong is
01:09:16.620it's completely sacrificed and given up on this idea of civic duty as a constituent feature of
01:09:22.880citizenship itself. And the idea of being a citizen of a nation is part and parcel of what gives you
01:09:28.960the foundation to then be a self-interested capitalist in the sphere of the market, and part
01:09:34.320of what allows capitalism to then fulfill its promise in an otherwise democratic society,
01:09:39.600which is to say that, you know, I often joke that, but it's not really a joke, but I do joke saying
01:09:43.460that everything that's ever wrong with capitalism could be explained by the fact that our wants do
01:09:49.120not fully match our needs, and that divergence in the delta between the two is what we might call
01:09:54.280virtue in the first place, which is why I come back to what I started with, which is virtue as
01:09:57.600a precondition for capitalism to deliver on its promise. So I don't know how much of that
01:10:02.480resonates with you or you agree with it or not, but that's definitely a big part of the book.
01:10:07.620Well, I think I'll add one thing to that, and then I'll turn the questions over to Michaela again.
01:10:11.260Look, if you're not a virtuous citizen and you're a capitalist, like a self-interested hedonistic
01:10:19.120capitalist, free market individualist, you're going to be guilty because you're not oriented
01:10:25.760in the proper direction let's say towards the highest of all things and the problem with being
01:10:30.580guilty is that when the mob comes for you and accuses you you're going to be guilty and then
01:10:36.360you're going to do foolish things like abide by esg statutes let's say and try to backpedal because
01:10:42.100you're guilty for what you've done and it is exactly as you said because the sacred duties
01:10:48.080of citizenship and the identity that goes along with that which is actually psychologically
01:10:52.640protective in the highest degree that's been sacrificed and part of what's happened too is
01:10:57.920now that's being replaced by this insistence that only subjectivity defines identity which is an
01:11:04.260unbelievably immature and pathological insistence and so that fractionates and alienates everyone
01:11:11.460on the basis of their subjectivity and that also facilitates the transfer of responsibility and
01:11:16.680power to the people at the top of the Towers of Babel. So revitalization of citizenship in its
01:11:23.060broadest sense, that's absolutely necessary. And this is one of my failures in Woking.
01:11:29.120It was one of my regrets in that last book is that I didn't do anything with this idea of
01:11:34.680citizenship. And that was the gaping hole that led me to write this new book. So that's at the heart
01:11:39.940of Nation of Victims, actually. And there's a chapter in the book called A Theory of Duty.
01:11:44.760It plays on the John Rawls trope of a theory of justice.
01:11:49.020I think that David Hume had a famous thought experiment about the missing shade of blue.
01:11:53.460He believed that he could infer from a spectrum of shades of blue, a shade of blue that was
01:12:10.880And so if I had to pick up a chapter of the book that was the most important, it was the chapter entitled The Theory of Duty.
01:12:16.520And I think that that was part of what I missed in even what was, in retrospect, a more myopic perspective that I brought to bear in Woke, Inc.,
01:12:24.020that I hope at least begins the project of filling out that vacuum in Nation of Victims.
01:12:29.520You guys are talking about revitalization of citizenship, but what are examples of civic duties people should actually pursue?
01:12:40.880Okay, well, I think you can think about it hierarchically, and that's the most effective way to do it.
01:12:47.680You owe your self, your extended self, you owe a duty, which means you have to act in a manner in the present that doesn't sacrifice your medium to long-term viability and well-being.
01:13:01.640And I think the voice of conscience and the voice of meaning are pointers to that.
01:13:06.320And so when your conscience calls you on your misbehavior, it's because you're subordinating your long-term sustainability and growth to the hedonistic and impulsive demands of the present.
01:13:18.860And so you're acting in a very immature way.
01:13:20.920You're not making the proper sacrifices, even in relation to yourself.
01:13:25.980And then you have to have someone along for the ride.
01:13:28.400someone that you commit to over the long run a wife or a husband who you bind yourself together
01:13:35.560with and struggle through life with and then that's a foundation for a family and that family
01:13:42.160the children in your family they remind you i just watched bill burr's new special it was quite funny
01:13:48.080very politically incorrect and bill burr has a real temper and he doesn't control it well by his
01:13:53.420own admission and he says his his two and a half to four year old daughter so over a two year span
01:13:59.440has been a signal uh what would you call it moderator of his temper because when he gets
01:14:06.900upset his daughter has learned to come and pat him on the shoulder and tell him that he's going
01:14:11.620off the handle and that he should be careful and that he doesn't have to be so upset and
01:14:16.220your children do modify you if you set the circumstance up right to keep the harmonious
01:14:22.660balance of life going in your family you have to modify your own stupidity and that keeps you sane
01:14:29.140and then you do that with your family in relationship to your local community and then
01:14:33.480the state and the province and then the national sphere and the business sphere and the sphere of
01:14:38.440your friends and then you can think of mental health not as something that's subjectively
01:14:44.020defined or even subjectively experienced but as the felt sense of the harmonious balance between
01:14:51.100all these different levels of identity stemming from you all the way out to, well, to the broadest
01:14:58.240possible sphere. And that is, as Vivek pointed out, that's something conservatives haven't figured
01:15:03.900out, is that you can sell to young people, and I've seen this in my lectures, you can sell people,
01:15:09.300young people, the idea of multi-dimensional social identity and responsibility as a solution to their
01:15:15.760problems of nihilism and meaninglessness. And it's the genuine solution. It's not an ideology or
01:15:21.140a Band-Aid solution. It's like, that's life, to do all those things at once properly. And that is,
01:15:30.540it's a gaping hole in our culture that isn't being filled by much at the moment.
01:15:36.920Okay. So would that be summed up in actual actionable things people can do? Would that
01:15:43.320be summed up and figure out how to have a proper relationship and get married and ideally have kids
01:15:48.340well that's a start yeah yeah well you have your job you have your friends you have your civic
01:15:55.080duty as vivek points out join a political party join a church don't your cynicism about those
01:16:01.300things especially when you're young doesn't justify your lack of participation of course
01:16:05.440they're corrupt and blind partly because no young people are in there working diligently to set them
01:16:12.100right. Now, I mean, young people have things to learn too, but they can at least be eyes for the
01:16:16.400blind. So I'm going to throw something out here and I'm going to say that this is something that
01:16:25.280I'm not there on being fully committed to yet, but I'm a lot closer than I would have been 10
01:16:32.460years ago. I have to admit that, or even five years ago, even two years ago. Mandatory military
01:16:39.520service. Mandatory military service. I struggle with that because of the aggregation of state
01:16:45.640power and what that means. But the cultivation of citizenship and co-equal citizenship
01:16:50.020is something that cannot be simply wished upon a society. It has to, the capacity as a citizen
01:16:58.780has to be earned. And what I believe is if we see ourselves as truly co-equal citizens,
01:17:04.240then we will stop obsessing over fetishizing the differences in the green pieces of paper or
01:17:10.480whatever other petty privileges are, the superficial privileges that now we obsess over
01:17:15.480correcting for. And those native psychological impulses, I think, are rendered silly by comparison
01:17:24.120to a deeper civic equality. And I think many conservatives will cringe at this idea. I would
01:17:30.080have cringed at this idea as recently as a few years ago. But I think that actually that's part
01:17:34.300of our path to the shared revival of excellence and individual self-actualization is the insecurities
01:17:40.800that stop us and shackle us from being able to pursue our own vision of excellence and
01:17:45.460self-actualization as free agents in the world are in part created by the psychological apologism
01:17:51.840that I forget the word you use with the guilt, right? That was created by the lack of civic
01:17:56.820equality in the first place, there may be some very pragmatic benefits to this in the West anyway.
01:18:00.700I mean, we can talk about the rising and I think potentially inevitable the city's trap-esque
01:18:06.480destiny that I think we in the United States and Canada alike may face with the rise of China
01:18:11.680and I think triggered by the invasion of Taiwan, which I think is upon us in the next couple of
01:18:16.180years, and the implications for the global semiconductor supply chain to the way we even
01:18:19.880live our Western lifestyle very much at stake for what happens there in a realist sense of
01:18:26.400the world, this may not be an option anyway. But putting aside what for this conversation I'll call
01:18:32.180just a positive externality, I'm actually solving for a different internal goal of reviving the
01:18:37.740psychic and civic fortitude of an entire nation. In a certain sense, those aren't two different
01:18:43.700issues anyway. I think that our foreign policy and our ability to project strength abroad starts
01:18:48.000with our civic strength at home, but brings me back to an idea that I would not have even
01:18:53.960entertained as one that made it to the table of conversation two years ago to something that I'm
01:18:59.160actually quite growing increasingly sympathetic to in the American context, maybe in the Canadian
01:19:03.200context of like in an Israeli sense of the model, a mandatory civic service through military. It
01:19:13.140doesn't have to be combative military, but in some sense of actually serving the national security
01:19:17.620of the United States or of Canada, of being a citizen of a nation state, like it is to be a
01:19:22.720citizen of Israel today, part of what it entails is acting out that civic duty over a one or two
01:19:28.360year period or period that's distributed over the course of a decade. That's the implementation
01:19:33.000question, but the idea itself. I'd really be curious for your reaction to that because I'm
01:19:36.340still thinking through this one. Well, I'd be inclined to make that an invitation rather than
01:19:42.040a necessity and that I think the right way to do that perhaps is to do the sort of thing that
01:19:48.520we're doing in this conversation, which is to make a case that without pronounced civic engagement
01:19:55.100and the sacrifice of a narrow hedonism that necessitates, we're all going to be not only
01:20:01.120in trouble socially, but we're also going to be in trouble individually. That you have to pick
01:20:05.720something above yourself to serve, or you'll be miserable and unhappy. But I think to the degree
01:20:12.220that you do that voluntarily that because voluntary participation is so important
01:20:17.780psychologically as well and i think you can do that by telling people uh the right compelling
01:20:23.480story and so you're optimistic that's an optimistic view that's an optimistic well it isn't it isn't
01:20:30.380it's not that easy to formulate the story properly right that's the trick and yeah one of the things
01:20:35.980i have learned on my lecture tour um hundreds of times now i would say is that it's possible to
01:20:43.260make a case for the redeeming quality of responsibility and maturity it's possible
01:20:48.360to make a case that people really respond to if you can do it clearly and lucidly enough and to
01:20:53.780say to people look you might think of these external games these external constraints as
01:21:00.540nothing but restraints on your hedonistic freedom why should i get married you know when i could have
01:21:05.420my choice of women. It's like, well, marriage in some sense is a constraint, but in another sense,
01:21:11.580it's a game and a protective container and a precondition for your life. And you do give
01:21:19.160something up by deciding to play one game rather than another, let's say, but you do not nearly as
01:21:24.500much as you give up by not being able or willing to play any games whatsoever, which is the-
01:21:30.740Can I stay on that analogy for a second? Because I think it's so interesting to the national
01:21:34.060case which we'll come back to right after that but the so then then we get into an interesting
01:21:39.260discussion about do you think that let's take the eastern model you know my family's context
01:21:44.880or historical context of my parents for example in india or whatever achieving that benefit but
01:21:50.320but somewhat through mandate right is is the arranged marriage model and certainly my
01:21:55.100grandparents generation the arranged marriage model that you didn't really have a choice but
01:21:59.580but the society was set up to give you that binding constraint, but not even one that you
01:22:05.960volunteered into. My model of it was actually volunteering into the same model in the life
01:22:10.640that I live. How much of the benefit you derive from that constraint, the psychic vacuum that it
01:22:18.900fills, is the choice that you make into being bound versus how much of it is just from the experience
01:22:25.140of actually having it be so? Look, that's a really good question. One of the things we do know
01:22:32.120psychophysiologically, let's say, is that if you present people with a stressor of a certain
01:22:39.000magnitude, so imagine it's an occurrence that would require a certain amount of time and energy
01:22:44.360and resources to overcome. If you present them with that stressor arbitrarily, you have to do this,
01:22:51.600or you bring them on board so they can choose to do it voluntarily the pattern of psychophysiological
01:22:57.580response is completely different in the first situation it's a stress response and it tends to
01:23:03.280be physiologically damaging especially if it's exceptional in the second case it tends to be
01:23:08.560beneficial and so i would say an optimized social accord is predicated on voluntary agreement
01:23:15.740now you might say well it's impossible always to negotiate towards an optimized solution
01:23:21.620and i would say well that seems to be the case with criminals for example and so maybe there
01:23:27.060are circumstances under which compulsion is required but you know part of what we're arguing
01:23:33.760against here on the esg front in some sense is compulsion yeah well is to remove that compulsion
01:23:39.860yeah and and so i think and you're offering people with strive you're offering the opportunity
01:23:45.000to choose a different path. And you have a powerful narrative associated with that.
01:23:50.220And I would say that's optimal if you can do it. Now, that doesn't make it easy.
01:23:56.700Yeah, I would identify a third space, actually. I'm still thinking about this in the analogy
01:24:02.040between marriage and the Eastern arranged marriage context versus the Western chosen
01:24:07.820marriage model and its implications for the national service and the military service
01:24:13.200discussion we were just having. But I wonder if there's a space for a third category. You talked
01:24:20.320about the model of forced adoption of behavior versus choice and the benefits, even psychic
01:24:29.620benefits associated with, psychological benefits associated with actually choice being an important
01:24:35.820component to it. I wonder about a third space. And this is actually closer to the arranged marriage
01:24:41.480model. No one was using police force or government backstop military force to say,
01:24:46.440doggone it, you two are going to marry each other. But it was woven into the social fabric so much
01:24:51.000so as to become the norm. This is the societal norm and expectation that this is the binding
01:24:59.660constraint that you will adopt, not having choice of women, but be bound to this household and to
01:25:06.780derive that benefit not backstopped by by the police state at gunpoint but there is there's
01:25:14.220an element of it that's different than just voluntarily being persuaded by the arguments
01:25:18.180either well we well look one of the things you really look man people want norms let's look at
01:25:24.020the situation with teenagers yep we think of teenagers as rebellious well they're not rebellious
01:25:29.880they're so peer-oriented it's beyond comprehension they're hungry for the norm they're well they're
01:25:35.740rebellious against their parents because they're trying to move away from dependence into the
01:25:40.180broader world but they're starving for norms and every teenager is dying to fit in and i mean that
01:25:47.000literally if you don't fit in you're going to want to die as a teenager it is no joke and so
01:25:52.820the notion that there should be norms and ideals to for people to follow that are part and parcel
01:25:59.560of the cultural structure is actually the definition of a cultural structure and i think
01:26:05.100it is a third way between well it's it's tradition versus force you might say well
01:26:10.280tradition you're maybe you're a follower of jean-jacques rousseau and you say well people
01:26:14.080are naturally good except insofar as society warps them it's like well that's half the story
01:26:22.160society can warp you to some degree but it also shapes and molds and guides you and provides you
01:26:27.100with necessary the necessary rules of playable games and and that's not well explained to young
01:26:34.400people anymore at all that really what they don't want absolute freedom they want the freedom
01:26:38.960to choose a game and then abide by the rules of the game and tradition offers them a variety of
01:26:44.080time tested and sustainable games dad um going back to you talking about how you have to basically
01:26:52.880choose your hardship otherwise it's traumatizing right you can't be forced into it um is there any
01:26:59.360literature talking about whether or not something that is maybe a little bit harder than you would
01:27:04.740choose would still be maybe even more beneficial to you like i know some of the hardships i've been
01:27:10.260through that i would have avoided at the time i look back on and think oh no i wouldn't go back
01:27:15.260and change it but at the time there's no way in hell i would have chosen that route yeah yeah
01:27:20.160yeah not that you want that implemented by the government we're talking about optimality here
01:27:25.220You know, your mother and I were talking about relationships the other night in response to some dancing we've been doing.
01:27:33.200We've been experimenting with this new dance where we push on each other's hands and play, right?
01:27:38.940And it's quite interesting because you can balance against each other extremely precisely.
01:27:44.480And so it's a very interesting way of dancing.
01:27:46.460I learned it from a woman in Nashville when I was down there.
01:27:49.760She volunteered to give me a dance lesson.
01:27:51.820in any case part of what you're doing in a relationship is providing each other with
01:27:55.780optimal resistance right and you do that in a competition in the game as well you you want to
01:28:02.020be playing against someone who's about as good as you and then that pushes you to the limit and i
01:28:07.320would say michaela that the marker for being pushed to the optimal limit is that you're playing
01:28:12.640intensely and then if it exceeds that then it starts to get risky now you might say well that's
01:28:18.520not as risky as never being challenged. And I think that's true, because never being challenged
01:28:23.540is the pathology of hyperdependence. But if you exceed your limits, and it starts to become not
01:28:29.400fun, part of that's a marker that you're exceeding your psychophysiological capacity
01:28:34.680to master the new challenge at the rate at which it's occurring. Now, you still might be able to do
01:28:42.460that. But you know, generally, if someone goes through a period of time, that's extremely
01:28:46.400difficult that it takes them quite a long time to recover now they might be better off afterward
01:28:52.340but it's still they still pay a price for it if it's optimal is the way the resistance what was
01:28:59.240the word you used there i really liked it you said it was it was optimal resistance optimal
01:29:03.500resistance yeah optimal though you know the word help me which is what god calls eve when he makes
01:29:11.440her for adam means in the hebrew it means beneficial adversary it means partner yeah it
01:29:18.480means partner of optimal resistance and that's actually a play partner because a play partner
01:29:23.900is a adversary of optimal resistance that's like a definition of what constitutes play
01:29:30.380and so i would say i'm trying to work this out to trying to solve some of the problems that
01:29:35.220you're addressing is like what's the antithesis of power and compulsion like specifically what's
01:29:41.760the antithesis and the antithesis to the spirit of power and compulsion is the spirit of play
01:29:45.800yeah yeah and we know that in the animal literature as well and it's not freedom without
01:29:51.320that resistance which is exactly the libertarian siren song so yeah this is also not freedom which
01:29:57.240it's also not freedom without structure because if you're going to play right it's got to be a game
01:30:01.960The structure is part of what provides the optimal resistance, right? That's what introduces the play. And so I love this analogy. I mean, it really speaks to me, you know, in sort of my marriage, you know, that I think describes out why we work.
01:30:16.240Well, Vivek, it's not that the rules are the optimal resistance. The rules provide the precondition for the joint engagement in optimal resistance.
01:30:27.340conditions for play. Yeah. Well, right. Because if you're both playing basketball,
01:30:33.000you can hone your basketball skills. Totally. Totally. Okay. Okay. So what I'm interested in
01:30:38.280is how can we, or if at all, should we extend that to the relationship between citizens in a
01:30:48.560co-equal relationship with one another and the role of the nation state, or even the relationship
01:30:53.940between the citizen and the and the nation well you know there's there's a biblical injunction
01:30:59.120right that you can't enter the kingdom of heaven until you become like little children
01:31:03.440and that's a very peculiar injunction but a huge part of what that means and this isn't all it
01:31:10.020means but a huge part of what that means is that if you're an optimized adult you rediscover the
01:31:16.380spirit of play in everything you do and then you invite people along for the game you know that as
01:31:21.540businessman to the degree that you've been a successful businessman you tell me if this is
01:31:25.500wrong if you're selling to someone you don't force or pressure them into it what you do is you go say
01:31:31.380look here's a bunch of things i'm doing and i think they have value and there's some things you doing
01:31:37.040that seem to have value and we could jointly bring our uh our abilities together and we could do
01:31:43.540something even better and and then they say i'd be thrilled to do that and then your interests are
01:31:49.280aligned and away you go. And, you know, cynics will say that isn't how business works. And I
01:31:54.120would say, well, you go try to run a successful business and you'll find out pretty damn soon
01:31:59.080that that's how it works when it's working. Yeah, no doubt about it. No, I will. I will
01:32:03.500second that right away. But what is that? What are the implications of that for the
01:32:08.840nation state discussion, though? Well, I think you build that spirit of play everywhere that
01:32:13.740you can around you, you know, when you practice that with your wife and you practice that with
01:32:17.700your kids and then maybe you know part of what we're doing in this conversation is playing right
01:32:24.220we're here by our own voluntary uh will and you have some things to say and Michaela has some
01:32:30.780things to say and we're pushing back and forth to see if we can optimize our conceptions and
01:32:37.200we want to be doing that all the time everywhere with everything we do now that's a very hard thing
01:32:44.080to manage especially if you're trying to deal with people who don't know how to play you know
01:32:49.100and criminals might be the most classic example of that many criminals and this is straight from
01:32:55.420the clinical literature of a very large proportion of career criminals are kids who did not learn to
01:33:03.360play properly between the ages of two and four it's a well-documented clinical literature
01:33:08.860so then they can't play and they don't know how to play with others so they enforce their
01:33:13.800they're they're narrow and selfish hedonistic and impulsive games on others using compulsion
01:33:22.800and then they're not popular no one wants to be around them then they get resentful and bitter
01:33:27.220and that makes them even more criminal it's a cat it's a catastrophe they don't know how to play
01:33:32.660so and some people are much harder to play with than others and that's a you know common problem
01:33:39.180but still that's still what we should be aiming for do you think um do you think as a country or
01:33:45.740as a people that are kind of bound together people need to have some sort of common enemy
01:33:51.400which it's kind of a side note to the whole playing thing but i mean um we seem to as a
01:33:57.860society be saying okay the common enemy maybe right now are racists or it's climate change
01:34:03.540but you were talking about how people should potentially have mandatory
01:34:08.120you know being that's what mandatory Michaela that's what satan is for
01:34:12.720yeah but that might be a little bit too uh that's a kind of difficult to comprehend uh to
01:34:20.860comprehend for a lot of people well well yeah that's partly because we lack a reasonable
01:34:25.320religious education but the idea look yeah yeah it's clearly the case that people can unite against
01:34:30.760a common enemy the problem is you get the enemy wrong yeah and you demonize the wrong people or
01:34:36.440you demonize people period the the the judeo-christian presumption let's say is that you
01:34:43.060identify that enemy in your own heart and you try to constrain it there and then and then that does
01:34:48.640motivate you right because it is motivating to work against what's terrible as well as to work
01:34:53.780towards what's good. But if you locate it inside, then you don't end up with pitchforks and torches,
01:35:02.800you know, mobbing. Yeah, well, that's the plan. That's cool. The difficult question is
01:35:10.700how to actualize this vision amongst a populace that, you know, maybe through no fault of their
01:35:22.440own as individuals, but because of the structures we've created, has very little interest or ability
01:35:28.260to engage in that type of play. Look, I think the interest is there. Look,
01:35:35.060you know what? Look what's happening with your company. You said most of the people who are
01:35:39.460investing are small investors. That's right. So you've offered them a better game. I wouldn't
01:35:44.000underestimate the hunger for this at all. I mean, I see it all the time as I'm touring.
01:35:49.020the reason the hunger is deep as long as people are able to recognize it and show up yeah oh yeah
01:35:54.000well it's not easy for people to articulate these sorts of things and they don't they don't they
01:35:59.520have a hunger and they and there's a desire say to adopt responsibility that's definitely true but
01:36:04.620the narrative the coherent narrative that would entice them towards doing that voluntarily
01:36:12.440in the absence of social norms has been lacking because we haven't been conscious enough to
01:36:18.380formulate it but certainly in your books you're trying to formulate it you're trying to absolutely
01:36:22.860consciously and you decided to take it upon yourself to produce this company and you're
01:36:28.140allowed and this is a game it's it's a game it's like would you want to support esg with your money
01:36:33.780or do you want to wake up and see what's going on and try this alternative route and so that's what
01:36:39.320you're doing and it looks to me like you're doing it in a very positive manner so even in your books
01:36:44.340Your, you know, your books are diagnostic, but they're not demonizing, not, you know, you try to point out where the problems might be, but you're not trying to foist it off on someone else. And you are making a very strong case in what you're doing, I would say, in your writing, but also on the business front for the adoption of something like localized, non-tower-of-babel adoption of responsibility, financially and ethically.
01:37:11.420and and that's a marketable story man yeah in the highest sense well thank you for saying that i
01:37:17.980mean that's what i'm hopeful that that will that that will get us there or at least get us enough
01:37:22.040it's the only thing it's the only thing that could get us there that that doesn't mean it will because
01:37:27.560the alternatives are something like tyranny and slate the alternative to play is tyranny and
01:37:32.140slavery that's the alternative freezing maybe well freezing in the dark yeah yeah yeah okay uh vivek
01:37:39.760what could the average person who's listening do to try and go against these ESGs? What can
01:37:47.480they do with Strive? Yeah, I mean, look, I think that at a higher level, putting Strive even to
01:37:53.860one side, I can come back to that. Look, when you feel like you're the only person who's in a room,
01:38:00.540whatever that room may be, who believes what you do, I think you have a civic obligation to
01:38:07.440speak up and express yourself. And I think what you'll find is that when you do it, you probably
01:38:13.100weren't the only person in that room who believed what you did. And so what is Strive doing? Strive
01:38:18.980is just providing a vehicle for people to be able to speak, but without having to take the same
01:38:24.480level of risk that they might by doing that at a meeting at work or at a board meeting or at a
01:38:30.600place where they may actually take risk of putting food on the dinner table. One of the beauties of
01:38:34.620buying an exchange-traded fund on the New York Stock Exchange is that it's anonymous, but you're
01:38:39.980able to speak. At the end of the day, with the dollars you invest, you're actually speaking to
01:38:45.520corporate management teams, to boards, as an owner, telling them how you would like to see them
01:38:50.140behave. Yeah, you've also put your money where your mouth is, and there's some real moral virtue
01:38:54.680in that. That's not virtue signaling. That's a bet. That's a sacrifice of value. It's the real
01:39:00.900thing. And so it's one of the things I love about what you're doing. In speaking, and Dr. Peterson,
01:39:06.440I think one of the things that struck me is, this is from the stories of people who have,
01:39:11.320you know, even in recent weeks, come out of the woodworks and really shared their experience of
01:39:15.420why they're drawn to this, is that if they said that at work, they may not be able to have
01:39:24.580certainty they're going to get that promotion or even keep their job or put food on the dinner
01:39:28.160table, but to be able to say it and to fully express themselves with their hard-earned dollars
01:39:33.480and hard-earned investment dollars and savings, to be able to say that, you know what, I'm going
01:39:37.360to unapologetically express myself, that's an intermediate way of being able to speak that
01:39:42.620hopefully gets people and our culture and our cultural norms to a place where they don't just
01:39:47.540have to do it through anonymous capital investment, where, you know, thankfully, I don't have to worry
01:39:52.700about putting food on the dinner table, so I'm speaking on behalf of everyone who puts their
01:39:56.040money into Strive or Strive's funds, great, but gets us culturally to a place where we won't need
01:40:02.180that anonymized intermediary vehicle either. We're able to do it in other spheres of our lives as well
01:40:07.460by normalizing it, right? To think about the use of norms and the way in which Strive, I hope what
01:40:13.880we're doing is then changing norms. And so what can the everyday citizen do? Well, look, part of
01:40:17.880the point of launching exchange-traded funds is that those are democratized. Those are accessible
01:40:23.240to everyday citizens, unlike hedge funds or private equity vehicles that, because of, I think,
01:40:28.100misguided laws, limit the accessibility of that to the everyday citizen. Part of the reason I
01:40:33.680didn't want to just start some sort of alternative hedge fund or private equity vehicle, I mean, I was
01:40:38.280in the world of hedge funds before, was to make this a vehicle where the everyday citizen could
01:40:42.580actually speak on their convictions and to be able to do so with their own money and therefore the
01:40:48.020optimal authority that they bring to the boardroom or to the capital markets. That's part of what I
01:40:53.460wanted to create. I hope the everyday citizen is able to participate in that in whatever way
01:40:57.940makes sense for them. We launched our first exchange-traded fund for the U.S. energy sector
01:41:02.260in August. That was a very simple message contained in the ticker. It was DRLL,
01:41:08.220drill, was the ticker of that fund. But there will be more of these funds coming in the future.
01:41:12.740So that's what Strive is bringing to the table. But, Miguel, I just think that's a subset of a
01:41:17.140broader, I think, obligation, civic obligation that any citizen has today now more than ever
01:41:24.740to say that when you find yourself surrounded in a room or in a meeting or in a culture where
01:41:31.220you believe you're the only one who has to say what you have to say, go ahead and speak up and
01:41:37.060say it. And I think that in the same way that fear has been infectious over the last decade of our
01:41:42.600of our cultural uh evolution i think courage can be infectious over the next decade as well and
01:41:48.360i'm really hopeful that you know not only strive but hopefully other actors and institutions step
01:41:52.540up to the plate to create the conditions for that revival of of courage in our discourse
01:41:57.720well i i think psychologically that your solution is a very good one because part of the problem
01:42:04.760with expecting people to speak up is that they're caught in a nexus of competing responsibilities
01:42:09.880yeah so for example my clients went before my clinical practice precipitously collapsed because
01:42:16.660of of the sorts of things that we're talking about in no small part i had many clients who
01:42:22.800were being bullied by uh activist types who were virtually virtue signaling and bullying them
01:42:28.160at great personal expense and many of them were loath to speak up because they were afraid they
01:42:34.760would lose their job or lose a promotion and they had a family dependent on them and so it wasn't
01:42:41.140exactly that they were cowardly it was that they didn't want to sacrifice one set of virtues for
01:42:47.100another and what i would do with those people is come up with a very detailed medium to long-term
01:42:53.500strategy to put them on firmer ground financially and practically so that they could conceivably
01:43:01.340take the risk of speaking up without sacrificing their responsibility to the people around them
01:43:07.100and you've done that in some sense with this fund because you enable people to make a bet
01:43:12.040with something that's valuable which is a cost and a risk and a real one without simultaneously
01:43:18.220exposing them to the high probability that their financial viability will be uh uh compromised in
01:43:25.600the future. And so I think it's a lovely example of a very intelligent partial solution. And that's
01:43:33.840what we want, right? A plethora of optional partial solutions. Yes, there's no such thing
01:43:39.700as a singular solution. It is at best a partial solution, but I hope a partial solution. And a
01:43:45.420plethora of partial solutions might be our best hope of getting to some of the places we've
01:43:51.620addressed in this discussion. Yeah, well, that's what you sort of believe if you're a free market
01:43:56.580person. It's like, well, what do we want? A plethora of possible solutions. That's what we
01:44:01.880want. One of them might work. Exactly. And that shifts with time too. So for my part, I'll write
01:44:07.880a couple of books and start a company. I hope somebody else chooses to make their contributions
01:44:12.300in a different way. So well said. Thank you, Michaela. Thanks for the opportunity.
01:44:17.520Yeah, thank you very much for coming on.
01:44:19.860And I will link Strive and I will link both of your books
01:44:44.280But, you know, there's not too many Vivek Ramaswamis floating around, so I won't be hard to find.
01:44:50.540But, you know, I'd love to engage in this play that both of you talked about with anyone who reads the works that I put out, anyone who's a client of Strive or wants to be a client of Strive.
01:45:03.500This is part of a broader play between co-equal citizens.