Speaker 1: At PwC, we don't just deliver ideas, we make them
work with the expertise and tech. You need to outthink
and outperform, and we work with you alongside you from
start to finish, so you can stay ahead, so you
can protect what you've built, so you can create new value.
We build for what's next, so you can get there now, PwC,
so you can. So.
Speaker 2: I hurt my hip at the gym and ended up
with Phi Urgent Care. They really took care of me.
Speaker 3: They referred me to one of.
Speaker 2: Their physios and while working on my core, the physio
nottised I was walking a little oddly, so she refers
me to a VHI podiatrist and.
Speaker 3: He was able to help me correct my gait.
Speaker 4: So, yeah, it was really great how Vhi was able
to connect all the dots.
Speaker 1: VHI because your health means everything.
Speaker 5: That's the Clear Mobile parate. He knows a good thing
when he hears it because it's only twelve ninety nine, Yes,
only twelve ninety nine for unlimited five G data and calls. Yes,
yes there are texts, and that's why he's our top
salesperson at Paris or Brave ninety nine. Clear Mobile Keep
It Clear powered by Vodaphone or Brave ninety nine activation
for twelve or A ninety nine nineteen gigabytes UK and
EU roaming data. For terms, see Clear Mobile dot.
Speaker 2: A emining a live Man like this man letting butterfly,
flapping his wing big down in the forest. Man, it
gonna cause a tree fall, letting five thousand miles away. Man,
nobody see nobody else. You don't need no man don't
like you, and you got back. That's win. Man got
black a name on the pane.
Speaker 3: All right, we'll held Welcome to Jay Burden show. How
you doing?
Speaker 4: Man, Great to be with you.
Speaker 3: Man, Yeah, I'm glad to have you on. It's funny.
I think I've got your ad copy on the Good
Old Boys memorized at this point. I mean, I'd probably
have it better if Bog Beef could ever get through
the whole thing without dripping over his words. But nonetheless, Man,
I'm glad to have you on. Obviously I'm familiar with
who you are and what you do, but my audience
might not be. So what do you do? Man? Yeah?
Speaker 6: Absolutely, Well, first I'll just know it's funny. I promised
them new copy for the New Year, Like, I was
gonna take Christmas break and write some new jokes and
stuff like that, and then I just couldn't come up
with anything that I liked better than what we already had.
I think it's kind of become like iconics. I think
I'm gonna stick with it.
Speaker 4: My names Will Hild.
Speaker 6: I'm the executive director of a group called Consumers Research.
Were the nation's oldest consumer protection organization, dating back to
nineteen twenty nine when we began options, but I came
on about I guess six years ago now, and with
the focus of retooling and regrowing the organization to focus
on woke capitalism and ESG. We can get into what
those things are and what that means, but just sort
of noticing that more and more of the quality and
of goods and services provided in the market we're being
dictated or mitigated by this ESG phenomenon, determined by that,
and sort of going at that and saying, hey, we
need to be focusing on corporate America, on providing goods
and services, not on becoming a you know, political utility
for the Democratic Party.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So when we're obviously you oftentimes discuss ESG and
it's sort of a frustrating issue to talk about because
there actually is something really threatening in that conversation. But oftentimes,
you know, you get to talking about Blackrock and Larry
Fink and you get the kind of you know, maximal
tinfoil hat level of conversation where it's like, look like,
I'm sure he's not a great guy. But starting off
with he can unzip his face and reveal a lizard
person underneath is, while technically true, may not be the
best start to a discussion. So if you could, could
you give the kind of the kind of reasonable take
on ESG, why it's a problem, then how that index
is with your work and consumer protection?
Speaker 4: Absolutely? Absolutely well.
Speaker 6: First, I always want to start off by defining ESG,
because part of the tactic itself by the left is
sort of it's a mat and Bailey. So they the
definition of ESG as it exists in the world or
the phenomenon is much broader than things with the term
ESG on the label, And so when you start attacking
ESG the phenomenon, they will run to what's your problem
with ESG? Finds So imagine for a second you have
like a Venn diagram circle like a huge circle and
relabeling that the entire.
Speaker 4: Phenomenon of ESG.
Speaker 6: Okay and I would define ESG as financial services companies
using their market share to push a far left progressive agenda,
So that circle would encompass everything financial services companies are
doing to.
Speaker 4: Move that forward.
Speaker 6: Inside that massive circle would be a tiny little circle,
and that little circle would be funds labeled ESG, meaning
funds that make investment decisions. They buy some things and
they sell other things based on ESG scores, And so
people hear ESG scores and they think, oh, well, companies
just doing this because if they have a high HG score,
then these ESG funds will put more money in them.
Speaker 4: I wish that were the case. I actually support people's
right to support.
Speaker 6: Whatever values they want with their own investment dollars, ANDESG
the funds is an example of that. I think their
values are stupid and a bad idea, but that's at
least them using their money to make decisions for their money,
whereas the entire phenomenon of ESG is much much broader
and much much more nefarious, and much more detached from
people willingly deciding that they want to put you know,
have their money with skin in the game to push
those values forward. So let me give you an example
of that and why black Rock is such a good
poster child for doing that. There has been a move
over the last twenty to twenty five years from what
they call active management to passive management funds. Active management
funds are what we think of like with like the
movie Wall Street with Gordon Gecko saying, you know, you know,
he's on the phone. You sell this, buy this, that
kind of thing. Those are people given money by you know,
individuals trusting their money and a fund manager, and that
fund manager than making decisions about where to allocate the
money into different companies that has been dying because the
amount of fees you have to pay that person when
you encompass those into your total returns is usually lower
than the overall market. So the idea is you'd be
better off just putting your money into a large, wide
ranging pass get usually the S and P five hundred
or the dowdo Industrial something like that. You'd be better
off than paying somebody who may beat the market, but
you have to pay them such high fees to do
so that on net you're worse off. There have been
a number of companies that have specialized in this. One
of them is black Rocket's the largest, but there are others,
State Street, Vanguard, I think, Northern Trust. There's a whole
host of them, but there are some a few big
dogs like Vanguard, State Street, and black Rock. Because they
end up with tons and tons of money in these funds,
they end up owning large shares of each individual company,
so unlike an active manager, when they don't like a company,
they just sell it. They don't usually unless they're an
activist fund, try and replace the management. But with a
passive fund, the shares that are owned in that fund
are set are set list. They can't change them. There
is no real fund manager. There's just a list of
things that when you give money to the fund, that's
what they go buy on your behalf. And companies like
Blackrock end up overseeing all the shares that are in
those funds as stewards, and that means they have to
vote on things like re electing or not re electing
the board of directors.
Speaker 4: Approving or not approving the compensation packages for the executives.
Speaker 6: Was you can imagine that gives them a ton of
power over those corporations. If you have eight to ten
to fifteen to twenty percent of the shares outstanding in
your portfolio or amongst a small group of companies like
take State Street, Vanguard, and Blackrock. Add them together, I
think they own twenty five percent or more control twenty
five percent or more of like ninety percent of S
and P five hundred. So those three firms have a
huge amount of power when it comes to sort of
setting the rules and the guidelines and the incentives for
corporate America. And that when I talk about the huge
circle of ESG, that's where most of the juice is.
That's where most of the power of ESG. It comes
from those types of interactions, not the you know funds
labeled you know ESG investments in your thinking, Oh well,
you're selling Exon and buying win farms.
Speaker 4: I think that'd be great. Actually, that would get people.
Speaker 6: Who don't believe in the business of Exon out of
owning Exon. The problem is you have tons and tons
of people now like Larry, who do not like the
way Exon operates, even though it does a good job.
But they control those shares anyway, and so they push
the companies to do things that were not in their
best interest and not in their ultimate shareholders' best interest.
It's always important to remind people Larry Fink, it's not
Larry Fink's money, it's not State Streets money, it's not
Vanguard's money. It's a whole bunch of other people's money.
And it's sort of this principal agent problem. So, I know,
that's a fire hose of information. I'll stop there. Maybe
we can dive into specific part.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so let's talk about that that mechanism you've said
that most often actively managed funds don't attack the management, right,
they simply sell their position and find some other company
to invest in. So how does that work? And how
does owning twenty five percent or you know, some large
percentage of the outstanding stock allow firms like black Rock
and State Street to enact their control. Like what does
that look like?
Speaker 4: Mm hmm, that's a that's a great, great question.
Speaker 6: So when when you have an active fund, that's you know,
sometimes active funds in the old days you were sort
of just trusting the person themselves. So again that would
be like the Gordon Getcko example. You're saying, oh, I
found a hot fund manager. He's really good at stock picking,
and so I'm just gonna give him money because he
just he sees things that other people don't see.
Speaker 4: Warren Buffet would be another great example of this.
Speaker 6: Then there are other ones that are sort of based
on rules, so they'll they'll say, like, we're going to
sell things that you know have a low dividend. We're
going to buy things that have an increasing dividend. So
you're still trusting someone to make the decisions, but you
have a general understanding of what their strategy is. So
you're kind of choosing both a fund manager and a strategy,
and an ESG funds labeled that way, that's sort of
what you're buying. You're saying, they're saying, we've come up
with some sort of internal ESG score. To be clear,
there is no one ESG score. This is like this
is like there's no one type of valuing a company.
You're picking a rubric when you pick a fund. You're
picking a person saying, hey, I have my conception of
what ESG should be, and this is how we apply
it when we buy and sell investments. But generally speaking,
that means they're going to be moving out of things
that are carbon intensive manufacturing and they're going to be
moving into things like either green so called green energy,
which is not green at all. We can talk about that,
but at least has the impro moter of being green,
like solar panels and wind farms, and away from things
like like again like Exxon Chevron, that.
Speaker 3: Kind of thing.
Speaker 6: When you're talking about the passive funds again, they do
not buy and sell shares based on their own decision making.
There's a set list and they just end up owning
whatever in that list. More money comes into the fund,
they end up owning more of the shares of all
those companies. And so the way that they have exercised
power isn't with the threat to sell the shares and
you know, sink the stock price. It's actually worse than that.
They do what they call corporate engagement, and that is
really just a euphemism for hassling management and using a
carot and stick approach to try and cajole them into
doing the left's bidding. So what that might look like
is you have a department at Blackrock called stewardship. I
think Sandy Boss is still the head of that. She's
a UK employee of black Rock. But in any case,
these fund managers have usually a stewardship department, and that
person is in charge of doing this corporate engagement. Ostensibly,
they're there to make sure that the companies that they
own a lot of shares in are being run well.
But of course the definition of what you mean by
well can be used to inject a whole bunch of
personal politics of these companies into that situation. And so
they'll set up meetings with and I keep using his example,
but just will carry the analogy through Exon's executive team,
for example, and Exon's investor relations team will sit down
sometimes sometimes annually with these passive managed fund companies, and
they these fun companies will basically say, listen, we control
eight to you, whatever it is percentage the shares of
your companies. Here's what we would like to see before
we would vote yes on your compensation packages. Or here's
what we'd like to see included in the rubiks by
which you renumerate your executives. So, in other words, we
don't think the criteria you're using to compensate your executives
right now is proper. We want you to add in
things like a net zero ambition or getting out of
coal and gas entirely by a certain year or something
like that, and how far along you are in that progress.
That sounds like a crazy thing to tell Exon to do,
it would blow up the company. But that is literally
the kinds of things they have asked of these of
these executives. In fact, Exon adopted a quote unquote net
zero twenty fifty ambition a few years ago that I
fought them on. I think Exon is generally speaking very
well managed company, but adopting that was a huge mistake.
Speaker 4: It's not being used against them.
Speaker 6: So what will happen is these executives will either go
along with it or they will risk the fact that
at the next board election, you know, annually these these
boards are re elected and these compensation packages are voted on.
Black Rocks, State Street and Vanguard and all the others
may vote against the board or vote against the compensation packages.
So that's the carot and stick that they have to
hold they hold on to. In addition to that's sort
of the you know, do what we say or will
hurt you side of things. A lot of the DEI
I think is actually there. You know, we both fans
of good old boys, and their focus on the patriotage pill.
I think a lot of the DEI is actually there
as an excuse for Larry Thinking others to put their
favored candidates on the boards and have an excuse for
doing so, so you can say, oh, your board doesn't
have enough women or black people or gay people or
something like that, and then use that as an excuse
to force them to take on somebody that's that's loyal
to you at these asset managers. So it's actually a
very smart way to build a base of power within
corporate America where just holding one large company like black Rock,
you can influence all of corporate America. And again with
other people's money. You're in this weird middleman position where
it's not your money, but you hold the authority of
the of assets, and so you're able to sort of
push for a political agenda and create a patron's network
within corporate America that answers to you.
Speaker 4: Roughly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that is you mentioned earlier, the principal agent problem,
and this obviously smacks very much of James Burnham's The
managerial Revolution, right, the idea that ownership is no longer
really connected to authority. This has been delegated to managers, right,
asset managers quite literally in this case, but also right
one hundred years ago, you could go to Ford Motor Company,
ask to see the guy in charge, and there'd be
a guy named Ford there, right, some one who is
in seat of a monarchical fashion, either the guy or
connected to the guy who started. You know, as millennials
would say the thing. Whereas once you have you know,
wide proliferation of joint stock ownership. You know, everyone, if
you're not stupid, effectively is involved in the market to
one degree or another. You simply have to to keep
pace with inflation. Well, that means you kind of own
a little bit of Ford through planning you got at
your job right. You probably aren't really checking it all
the time, but you do. But you know, your fraction
of a fraction of a fraction of Ford has really
no power to it. But because those are managed by managers,
go figure, right, they get to sort of on your
behalf control all of these companies. And look, I'm guessing
that there is some kind of standard. This is what
we call, by the way, will a leading question in
the business. I'm guessing there's some kind of standard for
those managers, right one, in whose interest are they supposed
to operate? And how well do we see them sticking
to that? I realized this might be I legally a
questionable thing. So you can just like, what have critics said?
Could we could put it ou later?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 6: Absolute, Well no, I've I've sort of already crossed that rubicon.
If I'm gonna get sued for defamation from saying Blackrock
breaks the law, then they can already come for me.
So I'll say black Rock breaks their fiduciary duty routinely,
and so do the others Vanguard, State Street when they
push these sort of political agendas that are not tied
to any kind of pecuniary sort of the keyword meaning
related to money, related to returns for shareholders, these kind
of non pecuniary issues. And you're one hundred percent right.
So these managers are supposed to be governed by something
called their fiduciary duty. And this is not just a
catch phrase or a corporate buzzword. It is a legally identified,
like legally defined responsibility that actually predates our own country.
This was something that was developed under British common law
about five hundred years ago. So these are this is
a long standing legal duty that groups like Black Rock
have when they're managing other people's money. Now the problem is,
and this kind of goes back, well, not goes back,
This goes gets to a more philosophical issue that we're
running into. I mean, basically goes back to James Burnham's
The Manager Revolution, which is to say that they have
a legal burden that they're not following is only one
step in the process, because then it gets a question
of enforcement and who decides when they're violating it?
Speaker 4: Right, And the.
Speaker 6: Issue is you've got two parts to their fiduciary d
Fiduciary duty includes a duty of loyalty, meaning you're not embezzling,
you're not taking opportunities for the person you have a fiduciary.
You know, you're not like front running them. For example,
if they ask you to buy a stock, you don't
go buy it out from under them first and then
sell it to them at a higher price.
Speaker 4: That would be a direct conflict of interest. That would
be a violation of the duty of loyalty.
Speaker 6: But there's also a duty of care in other words,
sort of my wife's in obgyn for example. So the
doctor example comes to mind, doctors have a duty of
care not to do surgeries drunk. It doesn't really matter
if they can do the surgery drunk or not.
Speaker 4: They shouldn't.
Speaker 6: They just shouldn't be drunk because that violates we all
understand from a hippocratic go standpoint, that violates their duty
of care when they're engaging in the in the in
medical treatment of any kind, to be inebriated is a
violation of that. In the financial services world, there is
a duty of care now depends what kind of you know,
services you're providing. If you're providing research services, obviously there's
there's requirements that you actually do due diligence and that
kind of thing. Now, again, these passive investment firms are
not making investment decisions for you. They're not saying, you know,
buy this, sell that. But when they start voting your
shares or using those shares to influence or control the
company in the form of corporate engagement, they are making
decisions around things that could infect act excuse me, effect
up or down the stock price. And so if they
are making those decisions based on i think the technical terms,
wild ass guesses or just their own politics, they're violating
that duty of care. And that's what Blackrock and others
have done in this situation. And lest you think I'm
you know, you know, watch out here, will you're gonna
get like the long arm of Larry Fink's defamation lawyers
coming out at you. That's actually already been determined in
a court of law. There was a case that played
out over the last couple of years where they stick
with me. It is a little complicated, but employers who
have four oh one K pension plans also owe a
duty of care to their employees on who they decide
to manage the plan. So if your employer, for example,
chooses their drunk uncle to manage your investments and he
blows it all at the racetrack, you can sue the
employer for having chosen someone they knew they negligently chose right.
They knew their uncle was a drunk and had no
expertise east and they hired him anyway. A union of
or a group of American Airlines employees sued American Airlines
executives for using Blackrock to manage their investment firms, even
investment funds, even though they knew that they were using
the funds to push EESG, which was going to hurt
the returns on the fund, and the court actually found
that that was true. American Airlines executives were negligent in
allowing Blackrock to manage the pension funds of these employees.
They were doing ESG, they were bragging about it, and
they court agreed that this was a violation of both
Blackrocks duty of fuduciary duty and of the American Airlines
executives duty to fire Blackrock. However, and this is the problem.
This is where we get into the issue of managerialism.
The court could not find damages and the reason for
that is when you engage in ESG, you draw down
the value of everyone shares. So normally, if you're someone
like if you gave the money to someone's drunk uncle
and they blew it at the racetrack, you would measure
the returns that someone could have made over that period
of time in the stock market versus what the drunk
unk hole got you, because they're two separate things. The
problem is when Blackrock goes in or any other investment
fund and they bully these companies into doing stupid things,
it doesn't just affect the shares that Blackrock holds as
a fiduciary. It affects one hundred percent of the shares
of those companies, so there's not really anything you can
measure it against. So it becomes very difficult for them
to figure out how much it costs the employees of
American Airlines for them to have their four to one
k's mismanaged in this way. So these are kind of
the issues that have to be.
Speaker 4: Overcome.
Speaker 6: And you know, it's sort of like in the movies
when they'll off handily say you know, it's like a
crime show or movie, and they'll say, well, so and
so got off on a technicality, and you're supposed to
take that to mean that there's just sort of some
nuance of law that allowed a perfectly obviously guilty person
to go free or unpunished. That's sort of situation. It's
not that it's not clear to courts that have adjudicated
it that they're violating the produciary duty. It's that they
can't figure out a legally be recognizable way to assign
damages to that. Now, I will say there is a
case making its way through the Fifth Circuit right now,
brought by the Attorney General of Texas and eleven other states.
That's suing State Street, Vanguard and Blackrock for a different
claim related to their activities, which is, take everything I
just told you about ESG, now amplify it by coordinating
your activities. So instead of just Blackrock calling these executives
up and threatening them, you have State Street, Vanguard and
Black Rock acting in concert together to threaten these companies.
Speaker 4: And that's what happened.
Speaker 6: That's what's happened in a lot of industries, but specifically
in this case, it's talking about what happened in the
coal industry where in the lead up to I mean
they were doing they didn't know the Ukraine War was coming,
but the relevant period in the lead up to the
Ukrainian War, these companies were encouraging, let's say I'm doing
air quotes for those listening by audio, coal executives to
decrease their production of coal. And the reason for doing
this wasn't some sort of like, oh, you need to
like slow down, you're overproducing because it's bad for the company.
It was purely ideologically driven in the idea that they
were going to, you know, basically ultimately reduce the amount
of coal produced to nothing. Now in the interim, this
raises the price of coal precipitously. And after you know,
Ukraine War started and Germany had to switch from Russian
natural gas to coal most Europe did. The price of
coal went up like I think four x over a
very short period of time. And a big reason for
that is because these companies had not been able to
invest in the production because they had these owners of
the shares or controllers of their shares pressuring them to
do so.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 6: That is like a textbook antitrust violation. So you didn't
really asked this question, but in terms of how we
how we come at this from you know, we have
this sort of cartel of managers protecting each other. Uh,
you kind of have to figure out those types of
of of problems because it's it's sort of again I
go back to James Burnham the managerial revolution. You have
a class of people. Now they're not the owners in
the way that you described. They're not Henry Ford, and
they're not the proletariat because they're not worker. You know,
they're not workers on an assembly line. In fact, technically,
as you noted, the average American is now sort of
the owner in a Marxist sense, and yet they're being
lorded over by this third group of people, the managers,
and the managers seem to have more power than either
the worker or the actual sharehold or the owner of
capital because of these weird eccentricities of our common law.
Speaker 3: Several things there, Uh, one you've mentioned obviously because they're
you know, particularly pertinent examples, these kind of big industrial concerns.
But oftentimes when you hear about people complaining about ESG,
it's something closer to home. It's an entertainment, it's in
other industries like that. So if you could, could you
provide other examples of ESG which feels kind of more
relevant to someone who isn't necessarily a co worker or
an executive at Exxon.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I think that's a good point, which is from an
economic destruction standpoint. I tend to focus on the net
zero stuff, but that's not what most people see. They
may see, you know, the prices of goods and services
going up, but not realize what that's attached to. But
I actually think, to your point, the more offensive effects
of ESG, or the day to day effects, And I'll
take the recent example of cracker barrel. I can't prove this,
there's no way anyone. Well, I guess you could crack
their emails and see if someone said it explicitly. But
back in twenty seventeen, Larry Fink was giving an interview
with a format called deal Book. It's New York Times
is like a business section sort of video style thing,
and he bragged he was asked about, you know, more
representation in corporate America for you know, non whites, non males,
that kind of thing, And that's where this infamous clip
comes from, where he brags about how that at Blackrock
we believe for behaviors to change, they're going to have
to be forced to change, and at Blackrock we're forcing
behaviors to change. People usually cut the clip right there,
but if you listen to the whole thing and you
listen to context of the question he was asked, he's
talking specifically about forcing race and sex based quotas across
the boards of every company that they're and the executives
of every company that they're invested.
Speaker 4: That those are his words, not mine.
Speaker 6: And the reason that's so deleterious the products of services
that you are by, or your listeners by, is because
when you start selecting for things other than competence and skill,
you get less competence and skill. And that could be
anything they've chosen, race and sex. But if you wanted
to increase the percent of left handers and you started
hiring people based on whether they were left handed or not,
you would start to get more left handedness and less
skill and competence. Because anytimes you filter for something else
you get less of. You get more of the other
thing and less of less skill and competence. Take Cracker Bear,
for example, the woman that became the CEO to me
at least looks like she may have been a DEI higher.
Speaker 4: She had no.
Speaker 6: Cultural fit with a very cultural niche product. In other words,
the reason cracker Barrel is so great is because it
really nails a sort of similar acrum of a particular thing.
I am a native of Tennessee. It was Cracker Barrel
was started in Lemanon, Tennessee, not far from where I
was born in Knoxville, And so for me that like
it typifies home in a certain way, I just understand
it's faking since it like when I stop on a
you know, I ninety five in Maryland, I'm not actually
going back to Tennessee. But they've kind of created created that,
And then they hired this woman whose previous job was running
young brands, which is Taco Bell and KFC, which are
some of the most deracinated sterilized brands over the last
ten to fifteen years. They basically don't stand for anything
except flat logos and streamlined food. But she fit the
democratic profile that they say, people like Larry Finks say
they're looking for, right, They're getting a woman to run
the company. And I think that, rather than someone who's
necessarily qualified to run that specific a good match.
Speaker 4: For that specific company.
Speaker 6: And so when you look at the changes that she made,
they're all along the lines not just of the woke
stuff she did push in the LGBTQ stuff, she's trans
stuff like all that came out through Robbie Starbucks's good investigation.
But it also affects the product in the sense that
she doesn't know how to do anything other than this
sort of like stripped down minimalist, you know, change the logo,
lowest common denominator, mass appeal product. And I think that's
an indication of the downstream effects. When you start choosing
people based on DEI you get mediocrity, you get same this.
You don't get you know, innovators and thinkers and people
making unique products that fit niche brands. You get just
sort of Bayesium writ Large, And there's a whole other
run of examples like that. You had Boeing went heavy
into DEI and the run up to having you know,
doors fall off their airplanes and that kind of thing. Uh, Basically,
you know, any company that adopts DEI is going to
start having quality control issues because part of DEI is
insulating people of certain identity groups from feedback, whether that's
feedback and hiring, meaning you're not qualified for this job,
but we're going to hire you anyway because you meet
a certain demographic profile that we're trying to hit quotas
for or once you're on the job, we don't want
to lose you because we're we're trying to keep those
quotas in place, and so certain people are gonna be
able to perform at a lower level and maintain their
positions because of that. So it's happening writ Large any time.
But of course, one of the things that corporate America
will do is they will sort of say, I'll give
you an example, when Silicon Valley Bank went under, right,
people may remember this caused sort of a short term momentary,
are we going to have a nineteen twenty nine style
bank run situation? Because so many Silicon Valley billionaires had
their money in this thing and when you looked as
people looked at the company and what you know, in
the lead up to the crash, there were sort of
two ways you could explain what happened. Well, one is
they got way overweight treasuries and then we had sort
of a historic decline. And the value of treasuries is
you know, treasuries, bond yields and bond prices are inversely correlated.
So if you own a bond at two percent and
that type of bond goes to five percent, well you've
lost a ton of money. And that's what happened with
US treasuries, and Silicon Valley Bank had a ton of those,
and so basically they became insolvent if they to liquidate that.
So it's people as there was a run on the bank,
they had started had to sell in those treasuries at
a discount, and they didn't have enough money, and so
Federal Reserve.
Speaker 4: Had to step in.
Speaker 6: Fdic all that souff well in interviews or I'd say,
in research, it came out that, uh, their risk management officer,
the person who's supposed to be looking at those sort
of hey, what if this happened, would we have enough
money on hand to pay all the depositors out? That
person had been on a six month sabbatical to plan
a lesbian pride parade I think in the United Kingdom,
and so had not even been at their job during
that period of time. And when I would do interviews
about how this was an example of how wokeness and
esg were you know, herting corporates, I would get the pushback,
mostly from left wing journalists, but even some right wing
would say, hey, what do you mean this is like
that's that's just a coincidence that had nothing to do.
Like what crushed them was this interest rate issue? You
know this once in a you know, blue moon decline
in treasury prices, and see it's an issue between like
first and order effects. Correct, Yes, it is true that
the first order cause of Silicon Valley Bank going out
was that treasuries declined, But the second order effect of this,
you know, the cause behind the cause was that they
were focused so much on woke issues instead of making
sure that they had their bank balance sheet solidified and
ready for you know, all weather situation, which is what
they're supposed to be doing. And so I would say
corporate America is in the same situation. You can look
at a building that burned down and say, well, it's
because the fire alarm didn't work. But then you can
find out that the fire alarm didn't work because they've
been hiring based on DEI and not competence, and so
no one was replacing the broken fire alarm, if that
makes sense. And that's sort of happening at large corporate America,
and so the goods and services are sort of declining
in quality for that reason.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean you see this in kind of typically
corrupt blue cities. New Orleans comes to mind, where okay, yeah,
New Orleans, well, I guess I was gonna say, is
a shithole because of but a large part of the reason,
one of many reasons, I'll put it that way. We
see's Hurricane Katrina, and you can say, oh, well, I
blame the hurricane, and it's like, well, yes, of course
the hurricane is the problem.
Speaker 4: You know, like the.
Speaker 3: Kind of like the first cause for a large number
of these issues. But also the guy you paid to
keep the pumps working never showed up, so the pumps
didn't turn on because then been worked on in a decade.
And it's like, well, okay, like that's also a relevant factor, right,
It's a both and sort of thing. I'm curious because
you mentioned hiring earlier. Have you read this piece was
in compact the Lost Generation?
Speaker 4: Yeah, big fan Yeah, And.
Speaker 3: Dave Green, the distributist, wrote a great response to it
came out today. You can find it on his substack
for those interested. But a lot of this was chronicling
the difficulties that particularly young white men have had in
the job market after the great Awokening, right, the kind
of mid Obama years. And so I'm curious, right, if
we hear about this push for diversity at the executive level,
idea that we need to be hiring more people of color,
more women, more you know, sexual minorities, is there a
one Is there any relationship between the broader hiring issues
that certain demographics are facing, and if so, is this
one of those first or second order effects? Is it
black Rock saying no, we want more diversity all the
way down to the ground level like company wide. Or
are they simply saying we want more at the executive
level and those very woke privilege to use their term
executives are saying, well, I'm going to replicate this more
of me so there will be more people like me.
Or is it kind of a mix. I realized I
threw a bunch at you there, but I'm curious to
get your thoughts.
Speaker 6: So I'm glad you brought it up that way because
I think you're exactly right. It's it's a self reiterating
feedback loop, so it's both, but they feed on each other.
So I mentioned before that, you know, one of the
motivations that potentially could be behind companies like black Rock
pushing this kind of stuff is that because you know,
executives and board of director members who are you know,
earn their spot by being really good at their job
or having the requisite skills, They don't really, I mean,
they do rely on these asset managers to to to
re elect them in the sense, in the literal sense,
but that's not the reason that they were able to
climb to where they are. They're competent, they know what
they're doing, they have to quote liambescent, a special set
of skills that has allowed them uh to to to
get there. When you are chosen because of your race
or sex explicitly in your politics, let's be honest, they're not.
You know, they wouldn't put Clarence Thomas on any boards.
You owe your job to your patron right. You can't
just go get another job somewhere else without that person's help.
Somebody who's really good at oil drilling is always going
to be employable, even if they got fired unfairly from exon.
They would go work at Chevron, or they would go
work at bpaid because they're really really good at their job.
Somebody who's just there because they're part of a political
patronage system is dependent on the patron and that's not
a defect, that's a feature of what they're trying to
create once there. Though, I've always said that DEI departments
are cancerous, not just in the pejorative sense, like we
hate them they're bad, but also in the technical sense.
A cancer cell. Part of what makes a cancer cell
cancer cell is that it doesn't actually serve a purpose
within the body. Its mission becomes simply to grow itself.
To multiply itself and to gain more and more dominion
over the host body until it kills the host. Not
meaning to kill those just a natural side effect of
the fact that it's on inexorable growth trajectory. And if
you look at these DEI departments, that's exactly how they act.
When you look at the way that they score how
well they've done as a DEI department, It's not we
added this much money to the bottom line of the company.
We found talent in some faraway place that no one
else could find because they're just too racist or whatever,
and that person invented the next you know, better mousetrap
or whatever proverbial, you know, improvement for society. That's not
how they advertise what they did. They will advertise what
they did by how much of the company now fits
the democratic profile that's their preference, meaning how much they
grew usually non whites, non males, And then how many
areas of the company DEI is now injected into. And
one of the things they'll brag about is that constantly
you'll hear this in corporate speak in.
Speaker 4: Or are you used to.
Speaker 6: It's obviously gone away significantly since the election, but you
used to hear them brag about we've integrated DEI into
everything we do or DEI is the core of everything
we do. Right, that's not I mean, that should be
an offensive statement to shareholder. It's an aggressive statement towards
shareholders and consumers because what should be the foundation of
anything the company's doing.
Speaker 4: Is not DEI.
Speaker 6: It should be either serving a customer base or which
really the best way to frame it is, it should
be making money for shareholders by serving their customers. If
it's not related to that, they shouldn't be doing it.
But DEI again acts as a is a cancer in
the technical sense. Its only point is to grow its
size and dominion. And I may have forgotten the second
part of your question, so I'll stop there. But I
think that is a really important thing to note, because
once you get a DEI department going, those people want
to constantly hire more people based on DEI. And one
of the reasons why sometimes I think conservatives I'll just
say this to stop, is that conservatives offense like the
point to like a non wide or non male person
that's been it's conservative and say, well, why don't you
want like Stacey Dash to be your company or something
like that, and it's like, yeah, because that's not they're
not actually selecting for race and sex like that is
what they're doing, but that's not the purpose behind it.
The purpose is to be able to have an excuse
to hire people within their political coalition and put them
in positions of power and influence and race and sex
acts as.
Speaker 7: A uniform, so to speak for and an excuse so
they can say, if they just said, listen, we just
need more Democrats in charge of every company.
Speaker 6: Every company needs to be an arm of the Democratic Party.
You know, we're going to get rid of any executive
or any board of director is not a Democrat. They
would not be able to get away with that. The
DEI thing gives them a fig leaf that they're attempting
some other greater good. But what's really happening is their
their unstated purpose is to just become a political utility
for the Democratic Party. And so when people self, so
when people take off the uniform, would be aware the uniform,
raise their hand and say I'm actually not part of
your army. In other words like i'm black, or i'm
a woman or whatever, but I'm not a Democrat. And
then they're shocked when like they don't apply the same
patronage or dei rules to that person. You shouldn't be confused.
You've just self selected out of the whole purpose of
what they're doing. So why would they Why would they
pick you for something? But that kind of the reason
I mentioned that is it sort of helps people understand
why this is a crisis of managerialisms or managers in revolt,
rather than just some sort of you know, general societal
obsession with increasing the number of black people or women,
or if that was really the motivation behind it, they
would not select out conservatives, women or blacks or gays
or whatever when they when they make these types of selections,
that's not the purpose behind it.
Speaker 4: That's just a fig leaf they use.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so several things they're one I think probably the
best analysis is Spandrel's essay on Bioleninism, where he talks
about exactly this process, that it's actually an advantage to
have an incompetent person in a position of power under you,
because they understand that on a fair field, they wouldn't
have this great job, they wouldn't have the corner office.
So they realize very quickly, I need to do what
he wants because he's Z's the reason I'm here, right,
they understand that relationship implicitly. I mean also to that point,
you know, when we're talking about you know, this is
a political proxy. I mean, look, man, like you see
this with the traders, right when you know Joe bidenopolists
said and I can't remember the front half of the
sentence where he basically said, you know, if you're not
voting for me, you ain't black. He's not wrong, And
conservatives mocked him for you know, having poor biology, but
that's not the point that he's making. He's talking about
capital B political identity black, which has a whole number
of different features to it, you know, certain attitudes towards
law enforcement, and you know, have a certain voting pattern
associated with it. That's what he's talking about. He's right,
you're the idiot. And now look I realized Joe Biden
literally is an idiot. You know, there's not a lot
going out upstairs. But functionally that is a more true
statement than you know, Oh well Clarence Thomas is black.
It's like, well, yes, and right, that's not the context
in which we're talking. And so similarly, right, like that's
exactly what this is. This is a massive patronage network.
And look, one of the other interesting things, and you mentioned,
you know, the purpose of cancer versus the purpose of
a should we say, a useful cell with an organism, right,
Eventually this thing is also parasitic in the sense that
it becomes the purpose of the institution. This is something
that I see conservatives struggle with a lot, is that
they will read the box. They'll say, oh, well, this
is a company for making shoes. Why don't they just
shut up and make sneakers because Republicans buy Nikes. Two
It's like, well, yeah, that's the stated purpose of this
organization the revealed preference. What it actually does is completely different.
And look, obviously I'm a professional internet dweller now, so
I don't really have a real job, but my last
corporate job, right when I had an office and you know,
all these sort of different organs in it. It was
really interesting because as the company started to circle the drain,
what do they bring in a huge DEI push like
that's going to be the thing that saves us. And
so there's a weird degree to which it has kind
of wormed into the sort of best practices the way
that you're supposed to run a successful business. And so
in times of crisis when they're casting around for solutions,
in many cases, that's the first thing that they reach for,
because that is what every accrediting institution, that is what
the press, that is what in many cases the shareholders
are saying you should do. This is part of being
a good manager, a good VP. And one of my
friends who will probably hear this and tell me to
stop talking about him, he is a stricken company and
he keeps telling me. It's kind of increasingly despondent messages.
The how often this phrase we're not doing well, but
we're doing good is coming up in meetings. The idea
that we've just given up on, the idea of being
a functional company, that's completely out the window. But in
these like last remated years, before this thing just you know,
impacts the surface, that just explodes into flames, we'll make
sure that we've sure got a lot of homos on
staff like that. That'll be the thing that you know,
defines our company. And yeah, I really that wasn't the
most organized response, But it is interesting the degree to
which the DEI effectively the ESG right because it's not
just diversity, it's also the climate stuff. It's also the
other things become the purpose of these institutions. Obviously, even
Black Rock as an example, right, that is on the
tin it's a asset manager. They're supposed to grow money,
you know, within certain bands. But now it's like they
still do that, right, that's a thing that they you know, operate,
but the purpose is no longer their stated purpose. It's
their revealed purpose. And I think that's an interesting gap
that oftentimes conservative struggle with because again, on a technical basis,
they're right, that is what this thing is supposed to do.
But you coming up with the rules of the game,
you know, midway through and saying, oh, you're you're violating them,
you're cheating. They don't care. Obviously they don't care. And
I think that that is sort of a trap that
you know, critics often fall into, if you see what
I'm getting at.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean we've done the same thing with journalism,
where you know, someone will find out a journalist, you know,
like that time they caught that and I noticed nothing
ever came of that, But wasn't didn't they catch somebody
from NBC? Like following the jurors home from the Rittenhouse
trial or something like that, and you'll see these pieces
where it's like that's not within the journalism rules of
ethics or something like that. It's a little bit like
you've caught a double agent inside the CIA or something
like that. And you start lecturing like, you know, this
violates the rule book at the CIA. What do you
have to say for yourself? It's like, yeah, no kidding,
they're not on your team, like they why would they? Yeah,
you find Yeah, they're literally they're literally there to to
like hurt you.
Speaker 4: Why would they care what?
Speaker 6: And it's the same thing within a lot of these
whether it's you know, journalists who are obviously just far
left of part checks or you know inside corporate America.
And I would say, what's probably happening at your friend's
company is and this is where sort of the patronage network,
you know, goes from like you know, you know they
have like you know, there's a macroeconomics and microeconomics. This
is where it goes from like micro patronage to macro
patronage system. Right if you have a company, if let's
say you're the executives at one of these companies, and
you just think you're doomed. You're well, I don't want
to name anybody because I'll I'll get attacked for beating
down on some poor company that's that's in trouble. But like,
imagine a brick and mortar store that sells something that's
easier to get on Amazon. That shouldn't be a hard
thing to imagine, right, Yeah, like the.
Speaker 3: Last remaining radio shack or something.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you're running radio shack, Like, what exactly are you
gonna do? You probably don't have enough money to the
horses left the barn. Maybe if you'd started right at
the beginning, you could try and come up with some
sort of you know, same day delivery thing to compete
with Amazon. Or you could have you know, only hired
like full on autists to work at the store so
that you can come in here and you can build
anything because we can tell you how, kind of like
the old home depot model before they ruined themselves. But
in any case, it's too late. You know you're sunk.
You're just riding it out. You're collecting a paycheck. Right
if you're one of the executives at that company, and
you know the writings on the Wall, Why wouldn't you
just virtue signal with your remaining days as hard as
humanly possible and gain yourself cachet with the New York
Times or Washington Post or with some other you know,
left wing institution, or Larry Fink for that matter. I mean,
if Larry Finks out here running around saying, you know,
he only wants to put people of a certain stripe
on boards, and you are able to signal to him, hey,
I may not be a black guy or a gay
guy or a chick, but I will will work harder
on this at Radio Shack than you've ever seen. Right,
then maybe you could catch his attention and he puts
you on some board of some company that's not failing,
or at least not as far along in failing.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 6: So that's what's a competitive patronage is it's a good
company level to like, I'm not thinking any more about me,
the guy who runs Radio Shack. I'm just thinking about me,
the guy who could go anywhere is and I need
to get off the sinking ship.
Speaker 3: Oh one hundred percent. And again, this is what we
call a principal agent problem, right where the people in
charge of doing the thing have a different set of
incentives than you, the guy who's ostensibly in charge of them.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: Obviously, again with this first ownership, this is a you know,
difficult problem just to point out who owns anything. But
again right, like, this is the same pattern we see everywhere.
So you've mentioned a couple court cases attacking you know,
Blackrock and others, but for using ESG to manage corporate funds,
but also for seems to be anti trust violations. What
is the fight against ESG looking like?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 3: How organized is this? Who is going after it? And
I know you mentioned, you know that this has become
less vocal in the kind of Trump two point zero admin.
But has this actually stopped happening or are we just
changing our terms to do the same thing.
Speaker 6: Yeah, So, as far as where we are in the
fight right now, I neither want to give people too
much confidence nor doom pill them. So they are no
doubt on their back heels. If you look at where
they were in you know, twenty twenty two, you know,
thousand year ESG Reich was was was here. Groups like
as you sow, which are one of the big environmentalists,
shareholder activists, nonprofits. We're saying you know, we're in charge now,
we run corporate America. I mean, this was that kind
of language is like being put into their you know,
annual reports to their donors that is gone. And if
you look at to the extent they're talking at all,
they're talking about the retrenchment of ESG, the companies abandoning
net zero pledges, the companies changing the name of their
DEI departments, and there's this sort of morose, you know,
the party's over type of tone to the things that
they're saying. That said, I I do an annual ESG
conference for for some folks that got recorded I think
by staff of the hotel and leaked to The Atlantic
earlier this year, and it's a great peace. I forget
what the title is, which is really bad on me.
I should know that offhand. But if you google consumers
Research in Atlantic, it'll it'll pop up. What's interesting about
it to me at least, wasn't just the you know,
fact that we were worth committing wiretapping crimes against. But
at the end it quoted some people in the ESG
movement anonymously and it asked them, you know, way, where
do you know? It seems like, yes, she's dead, like,
where do you think this stands? And what the person
said was I'm telling all of my people, which that
statement in of itself says a lot right there. Right,
this is a network, this is a ESG industrial complex.
I'm telling all of my people just to lay low
and try not to get kicked out. So basically they
understand they now is not the time to put their
head above the parapet You have groups like us, you
have obviously the administration, a lot of states have become
activated against this. But that doesn't mean these people are
self deleting from these companies. They still want their jobs,
they still want their sinecures. They still for the ones
that are true believers, you know, want to wait maybe
till the political wind shift and you know, regain their
corporate dominance.
Speaker 4: Utopia that they thought they had.
Speaker 6: So what it's gonna take, unfortunately is I tell my staff,
last easy day was yesterday because when we started this,
they were doing all these things, and they were bragging
about doing all these things. Well they're no longer bragging
about doing all these things. So we can't just go
to their website and say, aha, you're you know, discriminating
based on racist X. I mean some of them still are.
I think Microsoft basically told everyone to pound sand. They're
just gonna do it anyway. But more or less a
lot of them have changed the Department of Belonging or
they've dropped the E and just become Department of Diversity
and Inclusion because for complex reasons. I won't they're too
tedious to bore you with. Equity is actually the most
legally objectionable term in DEI. But if you are in
the business, like I said, if if you're a cancer cell, right,
you don't just suddenly become like a kidney cell.
Speaker 1: Oh.
Speaker 6: I I've never been able to actually perform valuable service
for this company, But I guess now that I'm being
told that I have to, I'll just figure out a way.
These people don't know how to. They're in competence, or
I should say they're competent at one thing. They're not
competent at, you know, making new airplanes or you know,
making sure the bolts are on so the doors don't
fall out. But they are good at being cancer ourselves,
and that's all they know how to do. And so
we're gonna have to be chiseling these people out We're
gonna have to be looking for the behaviors and not
just the bragging about the activities. And it's gonna take
I think, a lot of state and federal actions and
hopefully groups like ourselves to really apply a price. And
we started off talking about the American Airlines case and
how they weren't able to find damages in that situation.
We're going to have to apply damages to these companies.
And I think one thing if I could, you know
this is going to come out of left field, because
I haven't brought it up yet, but if I could
give one message to the conservative movement writ large, is
that it has been way, way, way too reluctant to
apply actual consequences to corporate America. We have been bitching
and moaning about these people for decades, and hey, you
could point the finger at me and say, well, what
have you done. You've run ad campaigns. Isn't not a
form of bitching and moaning, And it absolutely is. I
think it's hurt their brands in a way that is measurable.
But it has to the reason Larry Fink groans when
he sees US launch a new billboard campaign or advertising
campaign against him isn't the advertising campaign. He's a billionaire,
what does he care like? He'll just go off to
his place and aspen. He has to worry about the
actual real world consequences. But legally and financial that will
befallow his company if people wake up to the scam
that he's running, and that's what we have to make
sure gets applied. It's fine to point and shriek at
these issues, and we should keep pointing and shrieking at
these issues until they go away, but you have to
have the follow on. And if we don't have the
follow on because we're too busy listening to CATO or
the American Enterprise Institute or the Chamber of Commerce, then
this will just keep getting worse and worse, because why
would they take us seriously. We're not actually going to
apply any negative consequences. And there's one thing you can
say about the Democrats when you cross them, they make
sure people pay real prices, and that can't be said
for our political coalition. So I think that's what's going
to shift it. Whether that's legal, whether that's political. Prices
need to be.
Speaker 3: Paid, No, definitely, and I think that that is something
that you see sort of across the conservative movement. I
think a lot of it is libertarian priors. And when
I say libertarian, I don't just mean like fa hyek, right,
but this idea of kind of polite, gentlemanly conduct, right,
the Marque of Queensbury rules right of politics. And the
problem is, right, Look, you know, if if you were
in a tightly constrained system where these rules are kind
of in formally enforced, right, you know, playing golf with
your buddies or whatever, Yeah, you can have those, right,
you can have the like, ah, you know, you get
a mull again, or you know, everyone cheat, so who cares?
You know, you're all within a kind of an honor
based system, right, even in an un serious way. Once
that's broken, right, once the it has become sort of
an existential capital p politics struggle. Right, what Schmidt refers
to his politics where you have two groups whose you know,
quality or ability to live life as they see fit
are mutually incompatible. Well, dude, all of that, you know,
kind of like nice high school civics class stuff goes
out the window. And clearly our opponents have come to
that conclusion decades ago, right before my parents were born.
And so look man like if if you're a professional wrestler,
you're in a fake fight, you know, you kind of
know the bounds, and then all of a sudden, the
other guy pulled out a switchblade and sticks it in
your gut, and you're like, hey, what with this?
Speaker 7: Wait?
Speaker 3: This was what we were supposed to do. You're supposed
I was supposed to kick out, you know where. We've
got this whole thing choreographed. And he pulls out another
one stab you again, and you're still like, well, wait
a minute, this isn't fair. It would be sporting, you know,
to respond in kind like you're doomed. You're not serious,
You're gonna lose. And so when it comes to this,
this is something that the Democrats have done a very
good job of creating consequences for their political opponents. If
you're an octagenarian who doesn't like abortion, the FBI is
going to knock on your door. If you went to
a boomer rally five years ago, the FBI is going
to knock on your door. This is something that the
conservative movement is not very good at. I mean even
now they're they're getting just a little bit of a
taste of it. Right the idea that you can you know,
perhaps you know, receive some form of consequences, however minor
right for you know, threatening to go kill a US
president or you know, celebrating the death of a prominent
conservative figure. It's like, again, this is very very nation,
and it's so frustrating to see the kind of uh
prince of old conservatives wine and wine and wine about
how this isn't fair, this isn't what the constitution you know,
would have, what the framers of the Constitution would want,
And it's like, yeah, man, sure, but also like where
do you have been in the last hundred years? You know,
the idea that this is still the rules of the game,
The idea that everyone is occupyed or you know, occupying
the same moral frames is as mint Romney, is just
completely and totally absurd. And so again like there need
to be consequences to this. People need to have hefty
finds and lose their jobs for violating their fiduciary responsibilities
or else. This won't change that pretty much. That is
the math there.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I couldn't agree more and I would just go
a step farther to say one of one of the
things you when you have a conversation with somebody who's reluctant.
Maybe it's all just fake. Maybe they're just cowards and
they're just trying to come up with reasons not to
act and still sound like they're being principled. But often
you'll get this sort of like, but if like, I'm
in a big fight with the Chamber of Commerce right now.
For example, they've gone super woke. They were one of
some of the biggest pushers of DEI. In fact, they
gave out small business grants based on race. They gave
up to just black people small business grants during the
BLM thing, which is like obviously illegal but also just
an absurd thing for a supposedly pro free market organization
to do. And one of the pushbacks I get sometimes
when people talk to me about it, it's like, oh, well,
that wasn't what Chamber of Commerce was created for. Like
if you go back, it was made by William Howard
Taft to be like an advocate for the free market system.
It's a way for the businesses sort of payback. You know,
they were only successful because we have this free market system.
It was a way, a channel of a vehicle for
which them to help maintain that system basically voluntary tax
sort of the for you know, as the Dems love
to say the cost of living in some wised country
and they'll say, but like so we need to just
get them back to that, and it's like, but they're
not gonna do that because they're not doing it.
Speaker 4: It's like if somebody.
Speaker 6: Kidnapped your child and brought back a different child, and
you said, well, this isn't my child, this isn't like
who I was supposed to be raising. We need to
get back to the original child. It's like, yeah, you
have to get rid of the fake one, right, Like
you can't. You can't keep dealing with this impersonator, right
and get that back on track. You have to force
them either to abandon their current identity and their current
reason for being, and you can.
Speaker 4: You can do that.
Speaker 6: It just takes you know, leverage and exploiting that leverage,
or you just have to say that institution no longer
exists in the way that it was created. And I
think conservatives, like you said earlier, have a real hard
time reading past the label of something like if something's
a shoe company, well they're there to make shoes. It
doesn't matter if you know, like when you had the
Stakem's guy who was like a communist, very funny one,
by the way, it's a great account, but would be
like spewing like Marxist thought and rhetoric. You know, Stakeums
isn't entirely a Stakum's company at that point, right, And
clearly they're up to something else. And these institutions are
now up to other things, and we have to be
willing to acknowledge when they no longer are fit to purpose,
and be willing to destroy them. And I just think, honestly,
I think a lot of it is people have lived
through very very comfortable, quiet times. We've sort of lived
through another period of era of good feelings, and they
just don't want to come to grips with especially the
you know, people crap on the boomers.
Speaker 4: But and I'm about to as well.
Speaker 6: But I can understand your your sixties, like you feel
like you don't really want to spend the last twenty
twenty five years of your life in some sort of
revolutionary healthcape. But there they become institutionalists because they're worried
that if we start fixing things quickly and doing things
in a way that it's going to be. That's going
to require that the ground is going to shift under
their feet in ways that they're not ready for. And
that's probably true, to be honest and to be fair
to them. But the alternative is to simply sort of
die with a whimper instead of a bang. And I'm not,
to be clear, I'm not like, you know, advocating anything
in minecraft or anything. I'm just talking about I'm just
talking about, like, I'll give you a concrete example. Most states.
Most states have a Human Rights Council that, if for
historical reasons, is the one charged with enforcing state civil
rights laws. Most states have some sort of corollary to
the Civil Rights Act that says roughly the same thing,
and basically, you know, no race and sex being able
to be you know, part of the calculation of hiring
and promotion in red states. You would think, oh, well,
you're going to have at least, you know, good or
at least equal in force of anti white, anti Asian,
anti male, discriminate discriminatory policies or practices as you would
you know, against blacks or any other group. But the
truth is, in most red states, the governors who selected
the people to put on that committee because conservatives generally
don't they kind of get something's wrong with this committee
being able to constantly hassle businesses and for profit institutions.
Instead of taking the reins of power and saying, yeah,
you're not gonna you know, you don't want us discriminate
against you guys, You're not going to discriminate us either,
or we will face the consequences. Those organizations basically just
don't do anything. In red states, they put people on
them who will just sort of a win is they
just become benign, you know, committees that just chat a
bunch and they never do anything. And I will laud
the state of Tennessee. Recently they just gave co enforcement
powers to their state attorney general, Scrimmatti, who's very, very
good attorney general, and it's already paying dividends in the
fact that he's able to go after companies for anti white,
anti Asian, anti male discrimination in all the other kinds.
The reason I bring that up is because this is
on the books. This isn't like some you know, innovation.
I know we both love good old boys and we're talking.
You know, they talk a lot about Caesar and kind
of like doing new things but making them sound like
oh old things, that kind of thing. Conservatives wouldn't even
have to go that far to apply a price. These
state civil rights laws are on the books, are already
being enforced when the person being discriminated against as a
woman or a black person or a non white person.
They're just not being enforced when it's a white person.
And again, it's like, I just don't know how we're
not even enforcing rules that everyone agrees should be rules
when the party being aggressed against is a specific demographic
and that's something that we're just gonna have to get over.
Speaker 3: Well, well, this has been a great conversation. Where can
people find you? Where can they find your work?
Speaker 6: Absolutely well, they can visit us at Consumer Research Org.
It sounds really gimmicky. I thought it was really gimmicky
when someone pitched it to me, but everyone loves it.
On that website, you can sign up for something called
voc Alerts. It's a text message based subscription system. I
promise we won't spam you. It's not like when you
sign up for like a fifteen percent discount at a
clothing store, you get hit up like every two days.
This is like once every one or two weeks, we
put out a voc alert when it really matters, and
we don't just like to rile people up. We like
to give them an ability to take action. So we
always include contact information for the company that's going woke
or the woke activity that's taking place. And this is
the kind of patronage system political activism system that has
allowed the Democrats to push around corporate America. We're building
our own, so if you'd like to become part of that,
visits at consumers Research dot org and sign up for
the Vocal alerts. You could also follow me on x
formerly known as Twitter. I'll always call it Twitter. At
will Hill that's wil L Hild and that's where we
put out a lot of other stuff on ESG and
fighting back against black Rock and the other asset managers.
Speaker 3: Well, sure thing man, highly recommend it obviously. Look this
is a good old boys appreciation podcast as well. You
support them, so everyone should have your support. Wait, I
said that all backwards. Check it out, man. I don't
know what to tell you. As far as my stuff,
the Jay Verdon Show, Apple Spotify YouTube. Despite my inability
to speak basic English, I am a professional podcaster. I
can't do this without you. Guys. If you want the
episodes early in ed free throw me a few bucks
a month on Patreon, Substack or gum Road. Look at
that managed to get it all done again. Well, it's
a ton of fun to have you on. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Man.
Speaker 3: Thanks everyone home, keep your head up. I can't last forever.
Good Night, but
Speaker 5: Not the blagariagary problem.