Vivek Ramaswamy's positive alternative to "ESG" investing
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Welcome to Power Hour. I'm Alex Epstein.

It has been a while since I've done an episode. Very excited to be back and very excited to tell you I'm going to be doing several episodes in the near future for the pre-launch and launch of my new book, Fossil Future, which is finally real. I have many physical copies of it. There are tens of thousands of physical copies in existence, in part because viewers and listeners have been buying them and the publisher tripled their

initial printing. So looking good, but I want to spread the word to many more people. And one way of doing that is creating some great new podcast content for everyone to enjoy. So before I get into today's episode, which is a really good one, I've already recorded it as I'm speaking to you now, I want to talk about the

the launch of Fossil Future and in particular, why you should order, why you should pre-order Fossil Future. And so I'm sharing my screen right now.

And I just want to explain what I'm offering and why in terms of people pre-ordering Fossil Futures. So first of all, why care about pre-orders? Well, because a book getting on bestseller lists is very, very important for the long lasting impact of the book. For example, Moral Case for Fossil Fuels was on the New York Times bestseller list.

That helped a lot. Wall Street Journal bestseller list. That enables more people to learn about it. And it accelerates what is ultimately the most important thing with the book, which is word of mouth. If Moral Case for Fossil Fuels weren't really good, it wouldn't really matter that it hit a bestseller list because interest would fade pretty quickly. But because it was good, the bestseller list helped it a lot.

So my strategy with Fossil Future is very, very simple. The main thing was write the best book imaginable on the future of energy. And I honestly believe I have done that. I'm incredibly happy with how it turned out. Those of you who have followed my work know that I spent much more time on this than expected.

But I'm really happy with the result. And I'm getting some truly amazing feedback that I think you'll see in my media appearances coming up. One in particular, I won't mention who said this, but a very, very good writer said to me at the outset of his show that he would retire happy if he had written a book like this. So it's amazing to get that kind of feedback. The other thing, though, is spread the word about it with as many influential people as possible.

And this includes you, my viewers and listeners. So I would love you to pre-order the book. I think there's a great chance that you have already done that, but I'd also like you to encourage others to pre-order it. And I'll just walk you through what that gets you, what that gets them, and why it's... I've just really tried to break the bank in terms of what I'm giving, just so that as many people as possible can learn about this

book as quickly as possible. And we can take advantage of the fact that we're really in a unique educational moment in terms of energy, because we have an energy crisis, people are open to learning about energy, and it's just a huge, huge opportunity. So if you look on the screen, and you can just see this by going to fossilfuture.com,

The first thing is I had a 90 minute discussion recently with the legendary investor and entrepreneur, billionaire, initial outside funder of Facebook, Peter Thiel. Peter, I'm happy to say, has endorsed both of my major books, Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and Fossil Future.

And he was gracious enough to join me at a live event at the house of Palmer Luckey, who's one of the entrepreneurs today that I admire most. He founded Oculus VR, sold it to Facebook, I think when he was 21 for a couple billion dollars. Could have just done whatever he wanted, but instead what he did was start a revolutionary defense company called Ondaril that's really trying to integrate Silicon Valley level technical ability,

And at the same time, a love of America and American freedom. So I admire Palmer a lot. He hosted the event. If you see the video footage of it, it was at Palmer's home. It's this amazing, amazing location. So it's very beautiful to watch. We also had a great moderator, a guy named Chris Williamson, who's one of my favorite podcast hosts. That's why I asked him to come from Austin, where he's living right now, to Newport Beach, California to do it. And he came out and he did it.

And it turned out really amazingly. And then also on top of doing the discussion with Peter, I had a 10 minute follow-up discussion with Palmer, which was also awesome. It's really fascinating to get his perspective as somebody who knows so much about the inner workings of defense, about how important energy is to defense and how important defense

a productive economy more broadly is. So again, how important energy is and how important a productive economy is. So that's fascinating. So for a while, we're making that exclusively available to people who pre-order Fossil Future, as well as, by the way, if you're a premium subscriber to my Substack, alexepstein.substack.com, you will also get these bonuses and you'll see that you actually become a premium subscriber for free for six months

by doing this. So I'd highly recommend the Peter Thiel discussion. One thing that might particularly entice you, one of the questions from the audience was, why don't you get Elon Musk and Alex Epstein? What would happen? And Peter had a very interesting answer to that. So I won't tell you what it is, but just another incentive to hear Peter Thiel, who of course was involved along with Elon Musk with the success of Facebook, so knows him very well.

The second thing is I'm going to do a live event in several weeks called How to Talk to Anyone About Climate. And what this is going to do is this is going to utilize everything that I've learned about how you talk about the issue of quote unquote climate change with people who expect to disagree with you and are starting out as very, very anti-fossil fuels. I've learned a lot about this. I talk a lot about this in chapter 11 of the book. The whole book is just filled with ammunition, but

But this live event, and I'll record it and make it available to anyone who pre-orders, this is really going to give you a lot of step-by-step guidance based on what I've found really works. And I think once you get this, you'll really, really see how to be much more effective when discussing a very, very difficult issue to discuss. The third bonus is...

is something that I've thought about a lot because I'm a big outliner and I have a very, very detailed outline for Fossil Future. And I think that's part of what makes it so valuable. And I sometimes think, well, I should share the outline. In the sense the outline is, in some ways it has value that the book doesn't because it really gives you the essentials of the book.

in a unique way. So what I decided to do is for people who pre-order, I am going to make available an Alex Notes, which is essentially a version of my outline that you can have that will really distill the key ideas and arguments in the book

So that you can understand them better yourself and so that you can explain them to others. You know, there are services that do this like Blinkist and I don't know what the others are, but very rarely are they done by the author themselves and themselves. So this is going to be cool because I will definitely be writing every word of the Alex notes.

And then the final thing is a six month premium subscription to my energy talking points, um, sub stack. And that most of my sub stack is free and you can benefit from that. But increasingly I'm going to be sharing transcripts of a lot of interviews that I do, including some power hours. And I'm going to be sharing these bonuses. So this is something that costs you, I think about $50, $54. If you were just to do it on your own, you know, the book costs right now, $27 on Amazon retails at $30, um,

retails for $30. There are ways of getting bulk discounts, but you're basically paying under 30 bucks to get a book in addition to this really valuable premium subscription. So

I hope that that is enticing to you, but also enticing to other people, because at least at first, these are only going to be available to people who pre-order the book. And I can definitely tell you they're all going to be really, really good and things you're not going to see elsewhere. So please do that. The way to do this, you can just go to the website, fossilfuture.com, and it'll walk you through it, or you can do what I'm telling you right now on the screen.

Basically just buy Fossil Future. You can do it from Amazon. That's kind of the easiest way for most people, but any other retailer is fine. Then you just capture the receipt, take a picture, screen cap it, whatever, and then just send it to FossilFuture at alexepstein.com. We have an automated process there.

If you've done this earlier, by the way, to another address, that's fine. We still have your records and we'll process them soon. But if you're doing it a new, go to fossil future at alexepstein.com. And this will get you all set up and you'll be briefed on when are the bonuses coming out. You'll be added to the Substack newsletter, our premium newsletter very quickly, and it'll be awesome. So I hope that in addition to, uh,

The book is the main thing, just it's very valuable. I think it's really going to help you think much more clearly about energy, help you become much more persuasive. That's the main thing. I hope that is enticing to get it as early as possible. But if it's not, or if you need to be pushed over the edge, or more likely if others need to be pushed over the edge,

Definitely go to, definitely direct them to this, direct them to fossilfuture.com and encourage them to get all of these bonus resources. In addition to what I think is the ultimate energy resource, which is Fossil Future. All right. With that very long introduction, let me start talking.

Let's start talking about today's topic. So today's topic is really the ESG movement and what to do about it. And I recently got to know somebody who's come on the scene for a couple of years, but I had not yet communicated with him until the last two weeks.

His name is Vivek Ramaswamy. He wrote the book Woke Inc. And in this episode, we're going to learn about an amazing initiative that he has, which when I heard about it, I thought, okay, I'm super busy right now, but I really want to publicize this to the world because he has the most credible idea I've heard so far of

of how to counteract so much of the destructive behavior of these very large asset managers like BlackRock and Vanguard and State Street that are using their anti-fossil fuel political ideas to manipulate companies in ways that I think are very, very unhealthy. And it's been really hard to counteract them. And I think Vivek has come up with

a very, very vivac. Sorry. Um, I'm going to get it right in the future. Um, although I, you know, Epstein Epstein, I'm Epstein. He's vivac like cake. That's what he told me. So remember that, um,

I think he's come up with a really good idea where he is trying to out-compete them. What they're doing, what they've announced so far makes a lot of sense. And as he says, they'll tell us more in the future. But I wanted to get people excited about this now, spread the word. And also, he happens to have read, I think he read the first quarter of Fossil Future. So you'll hear him talk about that. And we have a really interesting discussion about that. So enjoy the conversation with Vivek Ramaswamy. And I will be back on the other side.

Vivek Ramaswamy, welcome to Power Hour. Yeah, good to be here, Alex. Good to see you. All right, so let's jump in. So one thing that strikes me about your biography, which I admit I didn't expect, was that you were very successful in business before this new initiative. What I find is a lot of people who comment on business were sort of mediocre. They might have had a decent business. They didn't do that well. And then they sort of, it's a natural thing. They might even make more as a commentator.

but you were doing really, really well. So could you just, without making yourself uncomfortable via bragging, could you tell us just particularly about the company that you founded and then left in 2021? Because it's really impressive. And I think it speaks to, you're definitely not somebody who resents the business world for lack of your own success. You have a different kind of motivation.

Yeah, I have to admit, I'm also having, after about a year and a half of doing commentary, I'm finding that a little bit old too. And that's why I've gotten back into the world of doing things again. We can talk about that a little bit. But in a nutshell, you know, I was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. My parents were immigrants. They came to this country in the late 70s and early 80s. But I spent most of my professional career in the Northeast, on the East Coast until a few years ago when I came back to Ohio. And I think that's

That journey looked like by way of an academic background, went to Harvard, studied molecular biology, thought I was going to be a scientist, ended up getting into the world of biotech hedge funds instead. And so was a hedge fund investor doing biotech portfolio management for the better part of seven years from 2007 to 2014. And I had some success doing that, joined a fund that had a really small slice of its total pie in biotech. By the time I left, it was the predominant strategy.

I spent three of those years in the same time at Yale Law School, just because I had this itch at the intersection of law and political philosophy. This is a really weird part of your story. It's just, there are a lot of weird parts of the story. You mentioned it in the book. It was just, you mentioned it in a sentence. And it's like-

Well, how could you have such an itch that you would do that for three years? You know, I actually really enjoyed it. I mean, I was so science centric. I was like really single minded, you know, molecular biology focus, you know, graduated top of my class or close to it, whatever. It was like the academic guy ended up taking a detour in the world of hedge funds. But I had this, you know, I'd never really fully scratched this intellectual itch. I had it. It was particularly focused on the intersection of political philosophy and law.

And I thought if I wasn't going to do it at the age of 25, I probably wasn't going to do it any later than that either. And so I told my bosses at the hedge fund, I was going to leave. I said, I'll take a few years and maybe I'll see you guys later after that. They actually said, keep your job, just manage a portfolio separately. And that actually got me some autonomy on the job too. And they ended up being three of my most productive, lucrative, whatever years while I was in law school. So they were three great years from 2010 to 13.

The part I didn't mention in the book is when I briefly came back to New York, then I then had my hedge fund job that I'd set up managing my portfolio, whatever, in a way that didn't also had a lot of excess time with law school. Now I didn't have law school on my hands. And so I had some excess time when I came to New York.

in the spring of 2013. And so I tried my hand for a six-month stint in stand-up comedy in New York, which was- You did not mention that. I did not mention that. It was too much of a detour. It was too embarrassing, really, because it was not a very illustrious career. Let's just say it was 10 shows, the audiences were not packed, and there was a reason for why. But regardless, that caused me to do some introspection and realize that I was probably-

had some angst that I needed to redirect in a more productive direction, which among other factors conspired to cause me to leave my job as an investor. And I started a biotech company in 2014. I built that for seven years, served as CEO till 2021. It was a multi-billion dollar enterprise that I built. It was a company that developed a number of medicines. I

I had the privilege of working on several that are FDA approved products today. Those are probably the highlights of my career to have worked on medicines along the way that today are approved products for prostate cancer, to women's health conditions, to a rare genetic condition in children for genetic disease that kills many children, kills a small handful of children, I should say, per year. But anyway, that was a chapter of my career that I enjoyed found

found incredibly rewarding, and yet at the same time led me to the doorstep of the next phase of my career, which was to address what I began to see not as a biological cancer, but as a cultural cancer. Not to be cheesy about it, but in an authentic way that threatened to kill the dream that allowed me to achieve everything I ever had up to that point in my career, this antiquated idea we call the American dream. I began to worry about the cultural forces that

risk sacrificing that dream at the altar. And so I stepped aside from my position as CEO and

to talk openly about issues that I found many of my peers, certainly thinking about, willing to say things about in private, but weren't really willing to say things in public about in ways that reinforced that same cultural danger. And that's effectively what I spent the better part of the last couple of years speaking out about, writing books about. I wrote one book, it came out last year. I have another one coming out this fall. And hopefully I've had somewhat of an impact by shining a spotlight on the

arranged marriage is what I call it in my book, between this neo-progressive orthodoxy, this new apologist culture in American cultural life that conspired with capitalism itself, with corporate America, to create a new force that quietly I thought was really robbing our culture in a way that worried me. And so that's what I spent a couple of years doing without an agenda, without any idea of where I was going to take all of this.

What I did more recently then was, you know, I think as I alluded to before, I kind of grew tired of just talking about. I want to talk about the woke ink stage. I know you're sort of moving past it and you're creating, not moving past it, but you're, I'd say building on it in a very exciting way. But I do think it's notable again that you were part of the establishment, like the successful establishment. So again, this wasn't somebody who was spurned.

You know, you are somebody who was at the highest levels of, you know, university, corporate America, the investment world. And it really disturbed you, the kind of influence they were having on government, but not in the usual kind of anti-capitalism sense of it's bad for companies to fight for their freedom, but rather these actors like BlackRock are really exercising an incredible degree of control and the executives are

exercising an incredible degree of control. So I'd love to hear about how that realization came to you and why it was so important to you. Well, this is where actually the stand-up comedy part of the journey fits in. Actually, I learned a useful lesson in my short-lived stint in stand-up comedy, and that was to carry around a notebook wherever you go. I actually have it handy today. I mostly carry it around wherever I go.

And the thing you're supposed to do is anytime something strikes you, especially if something you find annoys you, you're supposed to write it down. That actually led me to start the company I did. I carry around the notebook during my time as an investor. There were a bunch of things that annoyed me about the managerial class and big pharma that effectively gave me the blueprint for starting the company that I did. But anyway, I kept up that practice. And one of the things I found myself jotting down a lot in late 2019, in early 2020, was the

180 degree shift in corporate culture where all of a sudden every company, every peer, every startup founder, every venture investor was just saying the exact same thing at the same time about how businesses had to serve not just their shareholders, but their so-called stakeholders. And I was

Not in a diminishing way, but just in a very curious way, not in a diminutive way, but just very curious way. What does this mean? What's behind this trend? Why is everyone saying the exact same thing at the same time? There was something that annoyed me and got under my skin about the sheer conformity of it. And I jotted down some thoughts in my notebook, typed them up, and that ended up

providing the backbone for something I sent into the Wall Street Journal that they published, which was a critique of stakeholder capitalism that in many ways ended up being the inverse of what Milton Friedman worried about 50 years ago. Milton Friedman was worried that businesses taking on social agendas or causes or stakeholder interests that didn't have to do with the shareholder, that they would make the businesses less effective at serving their shareholders. It's a concern that I shared, no doubt. But I thought that there was a piece of the story that he missed, which was

Actually, the inverse problem, the way in which the expansive role of corporations in America and elsewhere to take on problems that were supposed to be solved by other spheres of our lives, by the democratic process, through the political process, through free speech and open debate as citizens in the public square, those kinds of questions, like how you fight climate change, how you fight systemic racism, pick your pill of choice,

Those were questions that I felt every citizen, be it the elite corridors, the people who inhabited the elite corridors of America that I'd inhabited for the last 15 years, or be it the people in Southwest Ohio, closer to where I had been born, had an equal stake in answering. And I began to worry that the people who I had surrounded myself with, the people who muse about the racially unjust impact of climate change in Davos,

ended up co-opting for themselves greater moral power, normative power, the power to determine our moral norms in ways that betrayed my understanding of what it meant to be a citizen of a democratic republic like the United States. And that bothered me. I put it out there. It was supposed to be a one and done in the Wall Street Journal. I didn't imagine that it was going to take me totally off my course as a biotech CEO.

But one of the things I learned is once you start writing, you've probably had this experience too. You write more, you have more to say, you got to go deeper. It started when I was 16, so yeah. Yeah, yeah. So you know a little something about this. And that eventually led me to the doorstep of writing the book that I did. One of the things that I learned though was that there was no way I was going to write that book

and be true to what I actually had to say without having an adverse impact on the company that I was running, at least so long as I was CEO. And there was one piece I published in the Wall Street Journal in January of 2021. This was the real triggering event where within 72 hours of publishing that event, multiple members of this advisory board to the company had resigned. And I will be glad to tell you what the piece was. I didn't think it was, I did not expect it was going to provoke that response, but that was a wake-up call to me that

I could either speak on these issues as a citizen or I could speak on them as a CEO

But even if I was claiming and authentically trying to speak as a citizen while I was a CEO, that was going to have an adverse impact on people who had followed me on that mission and that journey as a business. And so what I viewed as the right thing, I still do today, to step aside from that role as a biotech CEO to speak out as a citizen, which is what I've done for the better part of the last couple of years in ways that I hoped should

trying to spotlight on the kinds of issues that my fellow peers in elite America weren't really talking openly about. I mean, so obviously the issue you brought up that's most relevant to what we think about on the show is the climate issue and how it connects to the energy issue. And one thing that struck me that your particular chapter on Goldman of your book really illuminated was when I read Larry Fink's letters and I read them as somebody who's been immersed in energy for the last 15 years,

And when I read them, I think like either this guy knows nothing about energy or he's being deliberately manipulative or both. So even something like in his 20, I think it was 2021 letter, he talked about China's historic commitment to being net zero. Right.

Right. No, seriously, that's the one mention of China that he made. So you could say he's being opportunistic because that's a big market for them or he's ignorant or both. But, you know, China. Yeah. China had, you know, dramatic increases in fossil fuel. A lot of aspects of fossil fuels, even in 2020, even in the pandemic, let alone 2021. You know, they have.

100 plus coal plants in the pipeline. And yet this guy is guiding the world. It's not just, hey, this guy runs, he's an expert in how to run a passive investment fund, which I think he is. But it's no, this guy is literally telling all the corporations what to say, and they are deliberately trying to manipulate the governments in their direction. And it's considered totally okay. Like,

But he's sort of acting like a king. Oh, yeah, he's acting like an emperor. Yeah, an emperor. And you point that out in your book even more than I had realized it before. I mean, BlackRock is like the Dutch East India Company on modern American soil. It is a company that wields state-like power through the, in BlackRock's case, in the sheer magnitude of assets they have aggregated.

And yet they're using that to use that capital as a tool of force, as a tool of force that's a substitute for free speech and open debate for settling fraught questions that ought to be settled where every citizen's voice is weighted equally. And the thing about the American founding is that

We were built, even our corporate law, beyond just the constitution, even our system of corporate law was built on the idea that we did not want to see the Dutch East India Company emerge here on American soil. We did not want to see companies wielding that kind of moral power

in our lives as citizens. And yet that's where we've gotten with BlackRock in the modern day. To your question about China, I think there's a little bit of both going on. I think some of it is ignorance. Some of it is more cynical than that. BlackRock is actually, I believe, the first asset manager with a foreign ownership to be able to have a domestic subsidiary that's able to do asset management in China.

as we know, to gain those licenses from the CCP. Those are not free. Those come with strings attached. So it should be no surprise to see him supplicating in his annual letter to CEOs in the way that he does. And by the way, just- So we've got an emperor in the US supplicating to China. That's particularly scary. That is particularly scary. It is the reality that we suffer today. And by the way, just think about the hubris embedded in the idea that one man is writing a letter

to America's CEOs. We'll get to the content of those letters. Those also deserve discussion. But just the hubris embedded in that presumption. And by the way, it's well-placed hubris because most of those CEOs read that like it is their guide to how they're actually supposed to behave.

And therein lies, I think, the defining fraud at the heart of 21st century capitalism. And it's a loaded word, but I use it purposefully to make a certain point where the people who claim to be the shareholders of these companies, people like Larry Fink, institutions like BlackRock and Vanguard and State Street along with them,

are not the actual shareholders of those companies. It's the everyday citizens whose capital they're using as a pedestal from which they're preaching to those companies. Ironically, Alex, preaching values and preaching agendas and forcing agendas that would make those very citizens' blood boil if they actually knew how their capital was being used, but they don't. That's the fraud. That's the fiduciary breach, to use clients' capital in ways that would

make in ways that those very clients would disapprove of without being transparent about what's actually happening. I think it's the largest scale fiduciary breach in the 21st century. No one's tackled it. To me, that was the, there's not one cause for this new trend of stakeholder capitalism, but that was definitely the most important invisible cause.

the invisible, it's not the invisible hand of the free market. It's not quite the invisible fist of government. It's sort of a hybrid of the two that Adam Smith to George Washington to Thomas Hobbes never envisioned this hybrid of governmental force and private market corporatist force that conspired to create the BlackRock invisible hand behind the scenes of corporate America that guide behavior in a way that the true free market never would. But

masquerades in the avatar of the free market in a way that dupes both liberals and conservatives alike. That's part of what I wanted to shine a spotlight on with my book, but shining a spotlight was only going to move the needle a little bit, which is why I became intent on bringing true competition to forces like BlackRock to help fix the problem.

Yeah. And so that's why I'm pretty busy at the moment, but I really wanted to bring you on now because I'm super excited by what you're doing. Just give you background on my experience. Maybe four or five years ago, all the CEOs start talking about ESG. So you work with a lot of people. I have no background in the fossil fuel industry, but-

I have become an expert and I would consult on messaging and that kind of thing. And people just talk, nobody talked about ESG and then everyone talked about ESG. And ESG in the realm of environmental, in the realm of energy, means rapid elimination of fossil fuels. Also hostility toward nuclear, interestingly, but definitely rapid elimination of fossil fuels. That is considered coextensive with the environmental issue.

component. And I just saw this as this massive threat. And it's really hard to know what to do about this threat because you can comment on it. I think you can intellectually do certain things, which I tried to do. But what you're doing, and I want you to tell us about it, is just you have a really, in my view, the best idea I've heard that seems viable for actually countering this thing in a way that, again, in a way that could actually work. So tell us about what you're doing and why.

Yeah, sure. So look, I've spent the last couple of years thinking about this problem, the problem posed by the concentration of capital in the hands of an ideological cartel that's wielding $20 trillion of capital. That's more than the US GDP in ways that advance this monolithic politicized viewpoint under the banner of three-letter acronymized capitalism, be it CSR, corporate social responsibility, DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion, ESG, environmental social governance factors, CCP, pick your favorite three-letter acronym of choice.

That was a Chinese Communist Party for those CSR to CCP it's kind of it's kind of a spectrum ESG sits somewhere in between, but, but the interesting thing is that there was there was no clear answer of how we, if you believe there's a problem and we can talk about all of the ways in which we believe these trends when weaponized by firms like BlackRock are a problem.

The solution is less clear because all state action, in my opinion at least, has unintended consequences. Even well-intentioned state action, even state action that all things considered is the right kind of action still inevitably comes with some unintended consequence. All policies do, all laws do. I spent a lot of time over the last couple of years thinking about what's the right way to counteract the problem. One of the ways that helped me get to the solution was one framing of the problem that I'll share with you.

Let's talk about your domain in the energy industry. Let's say the CEOs of Exxon, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Shell got in a room, and they coordinated with each other for some reason that they believe was for the betterment of humanity to cut gas production, and the gas prices went up at the pump and consumers paid more for their gas.

That would be a cut and dry antitrust violation. It would be cut and dry price fix. It would be cut and dry behavior that probably could be the stuff of movies that results in people showing up in handcuffs. Okay. That's what case one. Case two is now suppose we live in a world where the owners of those firms, the top owners are the exact same three parties. By the way, these are competing companies, but they have the same owners.

who effectively forced those firms to do the exact same thing, somehow we celebrate that as ESG instead. And I wasn't alone in making this observation or viewing it this way. The Attorney General of Arizona recently called ESG as practiced by these firms, the largest antitrust violation in human history. But if that's the real problem,

then it clicked for me. The right answer has to be bringing competition to solve an anti-competitive problem. Yes, is there state action as a, let's just say, counteracting force to antitrust? Potentially, it's

But that comes with all kinds of unintended consequences. It's a slippery slope. It's complicated. I'm happy to delve into that. But to me, rather than pitching to policymakers or becoming one myself, I thought a much better solution was to bring competition to the table. If you have an anti-competitive problem in the market, great. How about trying market competition as an answer? So that's the journey I embarked on by starting a new firm that is competing directly with those big three asset management firms that represent the ideological cartel, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street. We have a new firm called Strive Asset Management.

that is built on a very similar principle of investing capital in the markets, but with one key distinguishing feature to our mission. That is to represent the voice of the everyday citizen in corporate America's boardrooms,

by telling companies to focus exclusively on excellent products and services for their customers over any other agenda, including political or social agendas. That includes the kind of agendas that BlackRock is pushing on much of corporate America, including the energy industry. And I hope that by the time we are done, there will be no such thing as a big three left

in asset management, there will be a true diversity of viewpoints represented in the boardrooms of America's companies, including in important industries like the one that you're focused on, that better track the true diversity of the views of actual citizens in a way that cures that fiduciary breach. So that's a big part of what we're doing.

So the thing I just want to make sure we zoom in on is particularly what impressed me about the idea was just that you're competing in particular, at least in large part in passive investments, because, you know, like I like many people, I have index funds, you know, a lot of us invest a lot of our money in index funds, we don't play the stock market. There's other things you can invest in, obviously, but, and what happens is where do we go?

I mean, historically, I had a lot of my money in Vanguard. Now it's currently in Dimensional just based on where I am. But a lot of people have it in Vanguard, State Street, and I think above all, BlackRock. And the thing that they're so good at is they're just incredibly efficient at representing the market, charging you a very, very low fee. And so for many people, probably most people, it makes sense to invest in those. And yet it's dominated by these political actors. So my understanding is you're really competing in that space.

There's an analogy here, just even in the ideology of this here. Think about what technology companies, large social media companies and internet companies over the course of the last couple of decades. This is a similar ideological cartel, but it doesn't track the John D. Rockefeller style monopolies because they've made their products available for free.

Facebook access, Google access, et cetera, these are free, but the cost is invisible. You trade that in return for your data. And more importantly than your data, even the ability to have governed by a centralized body, what you can and cannot see on the internet with the self-appointed monopoly on truth. It's that

It's the ideological cartel. It's that monopoly on ideas, not quite the product monopoly that matters. It is not quite price fixing. It is idea fixing. On the price side, this is great. You couldn't complain. These are cheap products. That's well-trodden territory. But I use that as an analogy to seeing what's happened in passive indexation in this country as well, in the asset management industry, where I don't think anyone can reasonably complain that the index funds provided by Vanguard or even BlackRock or anyone else are too high cost, if anything. Right.

These products were widely made available for free, but it comes at a cost. And the cost here isn't the cost you experience in the technology sector where you're ultimately supplicating to the authority of a small handful of firms that decide what is and isn't true and what you can and cannot see on the internet. That's the devil's bargain there. Here, the devil's bargain is that you are handing over voting power as a shareholder

But not just the voting power, because very small number of issues ever make it to a shareholder vote. The soft influence, what these firms call today in their vernacular engagement with corporate America, the soft advocacy they're able to engage in on your behalf with your capital in ways that you would disapprove of if you actually knew the kinds of policies they were mandating.

with your capital. That was the devil's bargain. And so what are we doing about it? Given that we're where we are in our registration process and everything, I'm not going to talk specifically about our products. What we said was we're going to launch a third product. We're going to launch our first product in the third quarter of this year. But the principles are absolutely to...

compete head-to-head with those firms, not by reinventing the model, but by taking that model to its logical conclusion by at least closing the loop and allowing the actual voices of those clients and those citizens to be represented in everyday corporate America's boardrooms.

By the way, does that mean that every client out there is eventually going to be a good client for Strive? No. In the same way that every client out there isn't a good client for BlackRock or for Vanguard, but the steady state we at least want to get to is a place where the asset management industry reflects the true diversity of ideas.

that is represented in their actual client base, which is constituted of the true citizens of this country. And if we're there, then I think the right ideas can compete in the marketplace for ideas in a way that we don't have the same problem that we do today, where there's a monolithic view, not only represented, but weaponized and enforced through the use of raw force in corporate America's boardrooms by those three asset managers. That's the problem we're tackling.

So, I mean, this really resonates with me for so many reasons, including I used to have most of my assets in Vanguard. And I remember I was so upset by some of the stuff that they were doing in the realm of energy and climate. I just told my mom, my mom is a securities lawyer. She just retired, but kind of an elite securities lawyer for a long time. She's like,

Don't do that, right? You're going to like, they're so good and they're so efficient and who's better, right? Is BlackRock better as states? No, there's this monolith and yet they're all voting and otherwise utilizing your shares for these values that you totally disagree with. Literally, you think it threatens the future of the world and the country. So yeah, you guys are just getting started. I don't know exactly what you'll do, but I'm just very excited by...

somebody being in this realm really trying to compete there versus just commentary type stuff or just trying to come up with legislation? Well, I think we're going to, you know, it is my hope, certainly. I would not be on this mission if I did not believe that this were the single greatest lever for me as a human being to be able to drive the kind of change we need to see. I think it is different from being a policymaker where, you know, as the expression goes, right, if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

As a policymaker, what can you do? You can pass laws. Well, for problems that originate in the market, the tailored solution to those problems may be better served as market solutions nonetheless. And so, you know, I think what can you do as a media commentator? You can offer comments, but ultimately somebody else has to step up to the plate and actually solve the problem, either through policy or market action. So, you know, I think that this is why I'm so motivated to take this next step.

And, you know, I hope before too long, Alex, you're going to see, you know, real impact in our culture. And the good news is, I don't think that you have to, you have to change every behavior at once. I think that undoing some of the damage that's been done by BlackRock and Vanguard, even in a select number of cases, creates the shadow within which everyone else is going to make their own decisions accordingly as well. I actually think

if I'm being perfectly honest, even on the eve of us getting started, the tides are already starting to change a little bit in corporate. So I think that we're at this moment where hairs trigger away from a new movement. If the last decade was the three-letter acronymized capitalism decade of apologist models for American ingenuity and human ingenuity and the success of free market capitalism, the next decade, I think, can be a decade that revives what's

One of the things that binds us together as a people, but also allows that system to work, which is the unbridled, unapologetic pursuit of excellence. And this is one of the things I love about your book, which I had the privilege of reading an advanced copy of, is that actually that spirit of human ingenuity may be not the source of the problems, though every action has an unintended side effect, no doubt. But it can also be the source of deliverance from those very side effects in a way that

if we allow inhuman ingenuity as achieved through a system of free market capitalism and innovation, can actually provide the very source of deliverance from the supposed problems that the apologist three-letter acronymized version of capitalism was supposed to solve. Be that racism, be that climate change, be that

whatever it is you want to fill in the blank is the social ill that you want to tackle, the irony is our best chance of addressing many of those very problems is through an apolitical and flourishing private market itself. And that's what we lose when we ultimately blame that market for the sources of the very problems that we're trying to tackle today. So-

I'd love to talk about my book in a second, but I want to know on behalf of the listeners, because I happen to have your email address so I can contact you, but the listeners want to know like, okay, where is this? And how do I, how can I get on board? Like when, when can I buy something? When can I invest in something? Cause yeah, that's how I felt. I appreciate you. I appreciate you flagging that Alex. So we should, we should chat again in a few months time, but we said what we said in the press release is the first,

the first product is going to launch in the third quarter of this year. Frankly, the goal this week was just to, you know, we're hiring people rapidly. We don't want the project to be a secret anymore. And so, you know, I, we, we announced the existence of this, of our new company strive asset management. I think we were in the best of ways, uh,

overwhelmed with the level of inbound interest that we receive from every angle, including people from the big three who want to come work for us in all kinds of roles. And I was really humbled by that. But in the third quarter this year, it's our intention to talk about what our first product is. And even that will be just the beginning of

of what I hope is a broader cultural revival in corporate culture in the United States. So hopefully we can chat again in a few months. And we definitely can. Should people just follow you on Twitter? Yeah, that's a good place to start. Exactly. It won't be hard to find. Google my name, Google Strive Asset Management, follow the happenings and

And I hope we're going to be doing some big things that not only create a new asset manager, but the reason I picked asset management as the entry point for this project is it is the one industry that is upstream of all of the others. I think it has a trickle-down effect on one sector at a time. I know you're focused on the energy sector. Arguably, that's the sector that's been most affected by the three-letter acronymized apologist form of capitalism. But

It affects every other sector too. And I think that if you want to solve a cancer, you go to the root cause of that cancer. You don't address the metastasis. You address the original tumor. That tumor starts, that tumor is, in my opinion, the big three cartel in asset management, starting with BlackRock.

that's where we're focused with laser focus maniacally focused and i think that that's going to have a trickle-down effect on the culture so yeah anyway you know i mean do people know my name where to find me you know google me and follow me on twitter and yeah we'll bring it back you'll hear about what's going on when you can buy something um so uh so i'm honored that you read at least some of fossil future i know you've been just totally swamped with other stuff and you just got it recently so yeah how was your experience with that how much have you gotten through

I've only gotten through the first three chapters. I have to admit that. Last week, I was going to read it, and then we ended up being subsumed with the tidal wave, which I'm gratified for, but the tidal wave of interest we got. I did have a chance to page through it over the weekend, though. And look, I hope your audience all has the opportunity to read that book very shortly when it comes out. I assume that many people may be familiar with your prior book or some of the ways of thinking about these issues.

here's what I love about it. And also we can, if you're open to it, talk openly about some of the things that I hope will help you in getting that message out, taking my two cents for what it's worth. Yeah, anytime, including now. I just think that

I'm not saying this to flatter you or anything. I just think every American needs to read this book. I actually think every American needs to read this book because it affects the subject matter of this book affects the way that they live their lives and will be living their lives over the course of the next decade in a way that they deserve to be empowered with because they're, as I care about, their own capital, their own savings, their own investment dollars are today being used in a way that creates outpouring

outcomes in the world and in our country that harmed them as consumers of energy and as consumers full stop. So what stood out to me? What stood out to me was one of the things you do really well is you point out some factual deficits in the argument for the anti-fossil fuel agenda. But

You also offer, I think, a coherent hypothesis for what might be underlying that agenda. All right. So look, are the benefits of fossil fuels dramatically understated, if not ignored in the argument? Absolutely, they are. And you do a good job of laying out what those benefits are from economic benefits to even human impact and health benefits. How can we ignore that set of benefits when focusing maniacally and narrowly and exclusively on a narrow set of side effects?

Oh, and by the way, are the same people who are going to have understated the impact of those benefits going to be at risk of overstating those side effects? Yes, they are. And you lay out a great empirical case on both counts for how those side effects were overstated, as well as those benefits being understated. But what's behind that agenda? And I think you do a good job of

of smoking out at least some reason why we should have suspicion for that agenda if the very people who are anti-fossil fuel are also anti-nuclear and are also anti-hydroelectric. So there's something else going on here. And this is where I think the book and further discussion about it can get really interesting. What is that lurking agenda?

And, you know, maybe you get there further in the book. One of the things I loved about your third chapter is you offer one coherent hypothesis is that it's this anti-human impact impulse. It's this pro-nature as an end in itself impact. And this leads to the suggestion I had for you, but also leads to, I think, a lot of further conversation, which is one of the things that everyone going into this book needs to know.

And everyone who's evaluating your arguments needs to know is that you are engaging on terms that say, here's Alex Epstein's assumptions, if I may, you know, as I read them, at least as it stood out to me, is that human, it's the impact on human flourishing that matters most. And what does that mean? It means human lives globally, where every life is weighted equally.

what's going to be the best policy for human life and human flourishing as defined as such. And I think what you'll find if you put that at the front end is that the people who are on the other side of the debate from you, from us, if I may say, are going to say they agree to that.

And once they say they agree to that, yeah, I think you've already won the battle because your book already makes the empirical case for why any account of human flourishing that puts human flourishing first has to depend on a future that's heavily reliant on fossil fuels and proudly and should be proud to be embracing fossil fuels as an important part of that future.

But what you find later on is there's other agendas lurking beneath the surface that have very little to do with human flourishing and have to do with other agendas that I think if you smoke that out up front, you've already won the debate even before you've started because the facts are already on your side. What I find kind of interesting is what is that lurking agenda? And to me, it's some of the same agendas at work, at the heart of Woke Inc, at the heart of the spread of postmodernism more broadly in modern American life. And I think it has to do with

something deeper than just the pro-nature view or the anti-human impact view. Okay, fine. If that's part of it, that's what you put on offer. What's the intuition underlying that? What's the social and psychological force powering that movement? And I think it has to do with this deeper 21st century generational dilemma where human beings today, as ever, are hungry for a cause and hungry for purpose and meaning and identity.

And as we live in a moment where we have lost the kinds of things that used to fulfill that hunger for purpose and meaning, things like religion or national identity or patriotism or hard work, even as hard work as a concept recedes, people derive some level of meaning and identity and purpose and fulfillment from hard work or family, whatever fills in the blank or historically filled in the blank, as we lose those things,

human beings don't lose that still hunger for purpose. And what you're left with is this black hole, this identity vacuum, this void, that the thing that's filled that fills that void instead is this thing that we broadly can call postmodernism. Maybe it's wokeism. Maybe it is scientism, which is different from science, mind you. Maybe it is this culture of

an assault on anything that allows that human being to flourish, the thing that you're filling that black hole with is this indulgent apologism, this indulgent self-criticism, this quasi-religious impulse to wear a hair shirt.

that leaves yourself worse off to apologize for your sense, your own lack of purpose and meaning and direction. That's what I think is actually going on. And I think that's what connects the dots between where I focused my intellectual work, where you focused your intellectual work is this deeper vacuum of human purpose that we fill through this agenda. That's not just anti-fossil fuel. It's also anti-nuclear and it's also anti-hydroelectric because the thing that we're actually doing is we're

picking apart human flourishing itself, because that human flourishing is the very thing we're supposed to feel the impulse to apologize for at a moment where we lack that meaning. And that's what I've connected with most in your work, actually, is that this was yet another, I'm writing about symptoms, you're writing about symptoms, I'm solving symptoms of a deeper problem through some of my work now in capital markets, but it's all symptomatic.

of this deeper failure of human purpose that leaves this black hole vacuum that the new apologist culture, pick your favorite three letters to put together to represent that culture, filling the void. That's what I think is going on and fascinates me so much about your work and its intersection with mine.

Well, okay. There's a lot there. So just a couple of comments. First of all, I was super happy with how you summarized what you liked because it felt like, oh, this is somebody who's really read the first couple of chapters of my book. Because you really got, chapter one is called Ignoring Benefits and chapter two is Catastrophizing Side Effects. And then chapter three is trying to explain why, why the leaders, what I call our knowledge system and designated experts.

do this. So it's very satisfying to hear somebody really smart, like really pick up what I was saying. Because one thing I worked on a lot with this book after the first one was really trying to make it retainable because it's very frustrating when you write something or say something and then people just, they just take their own version of it, but they don't really get it. And

And so it's very exciting.

If you can't explain it to a high schooler, then you probably don't understand what you actually wanted to say. And I looked at it and there was no way I school was going to read that paper. And it wasn't the fault of the high school or it was it was actually a reflection of my own lack of understanding. I think a high schooler can read this book and understand it. And I think that that reflects not the simplicity of your ideas, but your command over ideas that are actually far more complicated. And so I think I think the ability to explain it in those simple terms is

is actually evidence of your actual command of the underlying subject matter, rather than the other way around where people often hide in the complexity of their communication, the reality of the fact that they didn't have true command over the thing that they actually wanted to say. And so I commend you for that. It's part of why I'm keen on making sure a lot of people read this.

I still think there are, there are, it's, it's a, I wouldn't call them unanswered questions. Hey, I haven't even read the whole book yet. So maybe it's later in the book, but I think it's, it's a, it's a, it's a jumping off point for a deeper discussion of what's going on in this modern American cultural moment that surfaces in so many different ways in the, in the apologist, uh,

attitudes and behaviors that characterize the modern American moment to live in. And this is a good account for that. It's a good interim to that question. I mean, I don't know how many podcasts you want to do, but this might be a really fun, like hour long discussion sometime. Cause I have a lot of views about this and the broader thing, but one thought is, I mean, one way to look at this. So I'm not a religious person. Many,

So I think of it more in terms of philosophy and I think of religion as a type of philosophy. So I do think there's a very deep need for philosophy. I mean, an essential need, including the element of purpose, which I think you're right to single out.

And this is definitely something, and I do regard modern environmentalism as a religion in many ways, but it's a particularly dangerous one because it trades on being scientific. So it gives you a bunch of like views that you're supposed to take on faith. And unlike say Judeo-Christian or certain other religions, it's very anti-human in its view of our relationship with the rest of nature. So it's very dangerous because anti-human and it has you take these false anti-human things on faith.

And yet it's viewed as, oh, all the scientists say this, which is why I spend so much time trying to break what that means. What does it mean when we're told all the scientists say it, all the experts say it? It's not what you think it means. So I do definitely agree with that. There's one, but just one thing I wanted to ask you about with this, because it, it,

occurs to me a lot is people ask me all the time, okay, I agree that say this anti-impact framework that you identify, and I talk a lot about it through the book and connect it to all the false ideas. And so I really regard it as this is the operating thing, but why do human beings

believe anti-human ideas? That's one of the really interesting questions I get. And one thing I talk about is people often are drawn to ideas that even if it makes them look somewhat bad, it makes other people look really bad.

And an analogy I use is the 99% fetish of, or the 1% is evil. It's like, why do people love that idea? It's well, because you can be superior to Steve Jobs. And even if you know, like, cause people know Steve Jobs earned a lot. He did this. And why am I demonizing the 1%? Well, it sort of makes me feel good. And I, with a lot of the environmental people I've met, the anti-impact people, they love the idea that, yeah, sure. I'm a sinner.

But the industrialists, the successful people, they're real sinners. And so it's this free superiority and free status. Yeah, I mean, this is something I have spent a lot of time thinking about, I write about in my last book a little bit in my next one too. I think there's no silver bullet of an answer. Some of this has persisted for much of human history, certainly modern American history. I think we're at a,

We're at a point in our history where there's a confluence of a lot of different factors that conspire to create a particularly acute form of this illness. I do think it is an illness. One of them is kind of interesting. We don't spend a lot of time talking about it, but we're also in the middle of the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in human history, all right?

And Ludwig von Mises, actually one of my favorite economists, certainly. Mine too. Okay, good. I was making sure you had some familiarity with who he was. But I think about a century ago, he wrote something to the, I may get the date wrong, but give or take. He said something to the effect of, if you're the son of a great man, there are two ways to exceed your father.

One is through actual superiority, which by definition, by the premises, is difficult for the son of a great man. That's by definition hard. The other is through moral superiority, or at least the experience of moral superiority. And that's easier to achieve because it's subjectively defined by oneself. And what happens when you sort of take that lesson embedded in that, buy it or not,

on a generational scale writ large, you get the millennial and Gen Z descendants of baby boomers. That's sort of what gets you to where you are in post 2008 American life. And then some empirical vindication of that moral superiority in the form of the 2008 financial crisis, which I think was, if not the Big Bang, the closest thing to the Big Bang that set this new apologist culture into motion, especially through free market American capitalism itself.

And then you have cynical forces that preyed on that as an opportunity to fill the void. You know, I think Larry Fink and BlackRock fit that description, effectively taking the moral insecurities of an entire generation and somewhat preying on them in ways that were profitable and power aggregating to be able to do.

Kind of like a Virginia Slims manufacturer might have preyed on the insecurities of a teenage girl back in the 1990s, this is the moral equivalent of that writ large with the stakeholder capitalism movement. The good news is, though, I think that fire is now starting to burn itself out. And, you know, you have a generation that's starting to realize that they had this moral hunger.

that they didn't quite fill by going to Ben and Jerry's and ordering a cup of ice cream with a cup of morality on the side. It's like fast food. It fills you temporarily, but you realize that when your hunger runs really deep, first the fast food makes you feel good, then it makes you feel nauseated. I think people are starting to feel nauseated. They're in search of what else it is that might fulfill that answer. And

Look, I mean, it might take a religious figure to fill that answer. That's beyond my pay grade. But what I'm aiming to do is to fulfill at least part of that void with something that I think is at the heart of what's true about America, what's true about our system of free market capitalism, what's true about the human condition that free market capitalism depends upon to

create the kind of ingenuity that lifts people up. And that is the revival of this idea of the pursuit of excellence, the unapologetic pursuit of excellence. If you're a company, if you're an individual, if you're an artist, if you're a writer, that's an idea we've lost in modern American life. And you know what?

I will say is we've exported that idea and it happens to be lifting other places up. But we've exported that more than solar power isn't lifting China up. But the American idea of excellence might actually be lifting China up even if it's administered through this bureaucratized, centralized, I think, fascist state. And that might be crumbling on its own two feet for different reasons that we can talk about another time.

But I think we need to re-import that idea back into at least American capitalism. And that's part of what this new excellence capitalism movement is all about to me. That's what this new mission at Strive is all about to me, is to send that mandate

back to corporate America using the capital of the very people who are hungering for corporate America to return back to that mission, the energy industry included, the idea that you should focus exclusively on providing these excellent products and services for your customers rather than on these orthogonal, often apologist agendas that undermine your very purpose. And it is that self-criticism is a form of indulgence, Alex, that prevents those

companies or institutions or other organizations from being able to realize their true purpose. It's not that it's just risks distracting them and makes them worse.

It is a moral substitute for the actual moral purpose. As you called your last book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, I think it was something like it was called. I like that title because this is not an amoral agenda that morality is getting in the way of. It is an affirmative moral agenda and moral calling to fulfill one's moral purpose as an institution. If you're a company, that's a company. If you're an energy company, that's an energy company. If you're a coal company, that means being a coal company. It is a moral calling to

that you're ultimately able to sidestep the moral purpose of that endeavor by engaging in the appearance of morality, by engaging in the indulgent form of self-criticism that's taken the form of this three-letter acronymized form of capitalism. And here's the thing about virtue signaling. This is why I have a problem with virtue signaling. It's not just annoying. It's not just that thing that the standup comic writes down in his notebook. It is...

It is a deeper failure. At some point, if you're in the business of virtue signaling, the appearance of virtue becomes more important than virtue itself.

And that's, I think, the problem with the modern American cultural moment, with modern American capitalism, with the modern American energy sector itself, which I know you're focused. And those are the kinds of things that I'm now on a mission to fix. And I'm sorry I couldn't tell you more about it in detail today, other than to say that we're doing it and the new firm is called Strive. But hopefully, sooner than later, you're going to see, hopefully, how we're

everyday citizens can be a part of delivering that solution. Since you're also into comedy, I mean, I'm very into comedy, although I've never tried standup. I forget it was Seinfeld either repeated this or said it. I think he repeated it from somebody, but it was, if you want to save the world, write better jokes.

which I just loved as excellence. That's excellence as a standup comic. That's your product. Focusing on excellent products and services for your customer. That's how you do it as a standup comic. Yeah, not by getting, not by like writing a tweet about global warming, which you know nothing about.

Or by an oil company trying to decide that it doesn't want to be an oil company anymore. It wants to be what some person on Twitter told them to be on a given day. That's not quite, or what some cynical capital aggregator sitting in New York City told them to do either. I think that's the part of our cultural fabric that we've lost is a sense of true institutional purpose. The pursuit of that institutional purpose, I call that excellence unapologetically.

And once we're able to revive that, I think we revive true American pluralism, that not every institution will have the same purpose as a different institution. Not every company should have the same purpose as a different company. A solar company should be a solar company and an oil company should be an oil company. And we want both to be the excellent version of each without conflating and reducing them to some sort of amalgamated purpose that is neither one nor the other, but a bastardized version of both. That's the condition that obtains today.

But I think that, as I said, in the ether, I can feel it. There's a hunger among consumers, shareholders, citizens for something different. It's going to fill that hunger for purpose, I think, in a more meaningful way than just fast food. And I'm actually as optimistic as I've been over the last couple of years that we're on the cusp of this changing tide. And if we're successful in helping create that world five years from now, two years from now even, I

I will tell you now, Xandy, I will not be in a position to take credit for it because even in the process of just getting started right now, I can already tell you that there's a running start in the culture. I mean, look at the kinds of things that Netflix was saying this last week about telling employees that if you don't want to be in the business of providing, creating content that people want to see, even if you disagree with it, show yourself the door.

I don't agree with everything Netflix has done, by the way, as a company. I don't agree with a lot of the social positions they've adopted as a company, but I will be the first person to praise every company that wants to rectify its prior actions by changing course and setting the ship in the right direction. And I think we're already starting to see that. What we're going to do is, what we aim to do as a firm is to fuel that trend in corporate America and in our capital markets in a way that I think will be, you know, hopefully, you

you know, hopefully cathartic, I think, for our culture. So just to wrap up my thoughts on why I think this is so important for listeners to get involved with and to be interested in, obviously, we'll see what you guys exactly do. But I love the idea of competing with these asset managers and attacking the issue that way. I love the concept of excellence. And it's certainly like huge source of purpose in my own life. And I think that's really inspiring to a lot of people. And then rhetorically, it fits in with the

big topic of chapter 11 of my book, which I call reframing the conversation and arguing to 100. And one of the premises there is that persuading people effectively involves having an inspiring goal

and then arguing that your policies will get them there. And in this case, ESG is interesting because it's not an inspiring goal at all. But even by having some pseudo-inspiring goal, they can argue that everything, hey, this is ESG, this is ESG. But excellence is way more inspiring than ESG. But you notice so much of the reaction to ESG was just ESG is bad, which I call arguing to zero. It's like they have their ideal, their 100%.

And then you're saying, oh, it's not good versus saying, no, I'm throwing the board away. I'm reframing it. And it's all about excellence. And that's my 100. So I love that reframing. And I think that'll be

I mean, I think you knew what you're doing because you came up with it. But when I see somebody come up with a new 100, even with Trump, whom I disagree with on many things, like when he reframed the conversation from one about inequality to one about American greatness, it's like, oh, I saw that. Like this guy, that hat, he knows what he's doing with that. Make America great again, because he just created a new 100. And you guys have done one. I agree much more with an American greatness, which is ambiguous. And.

And critiquing the old one is insufficient, right? Because some other poison is going to fill the void. The right answer to that black hole is to fill it with something more rich and meaningful and true that dilutes the poison to irrelevance. And it was a couple of years of a journey for me to this place, but I couldn't feel better. I have never felt more certain about

pursuing a mission that I believed was going to deliver something that was important at a time when it was needed. Now, I just hope we're successful in doing it. And, you know, I'll take intellectual partnership from folks like yourselves to partnership of every kind from the kind of people who want to be part of this mission. So thanks a lot for having me. Awesome. And yeah, from experience, that kind of mission is very fun to be involved with where, you know, you know, you got into it for the right reasons and you did all your homework and it

And you're really sure that you're right. And if you succeed, it'll make the world a lot better. So that's awesome. Thank you, man. Appreciate you having me. We'll talk again soon. Sounds good. All right. Thanks again to Vivek Ramaswamy for coming on. I think we covered just about everything. Super glad to see he's doing what he's doing. Very grateful for him reading part of Fossil Future and praising it and encouraging everyone to get it, particularly young people. Really appreciate that.

And we will definitely keep you posted on what he's doing. But as he said, you can follow him on Twitter and that's a pretty efficient way. Final reminder for today, I'm going to be reminding you a few more times, but definitely take advantage of the pre-order bonuses for Fossil Future. So again, you can go to FossilFuture.com or just buy the book from Amazon or any other retailer, send it to Fossil Future, send the receipt rather to FossilFuture.com.

at alexepstein.com, and you will be all set, and you will help this book be a blockbuster, which will be particularly great because we know from the Washington Post saga, for those of you who have followed that, that there are a lot of people trying to cancel this book. It's May 18th right now. There was another attempt yesterday to try to pressure my publisher into pulling the book. It wasn't by the Washington Post, but it was by a major Forbes columnist on climate. So

The more of these people buy, the more this book will become known, the more it will counteract these totally unjust cancel attempts. That's one other incentive on top of all the amazing bonuses like the 90-minute discussion with Peter Thiel, plus follow-up discussion with Palmer Luckey, how to talk to anyone about climate, the Alex Notes written by me, and then the six-month premium subscription to my Energy Talking Points sub-stack.

All right. I got a couple of really good episode ideas for the next week and a half for launch week. Michael Schellenberger should be coming on. He's running for governor of California. If you didn't know, looking forward to that discussion. Plus, I have a lot of cool content from the book that I want to talk about and expand on. So keep checking for new Power Hours, and I will be back soon. But until then, I'm Alex Epstein. This has been Power Hour.

Power Hour. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of energy. Power Hour. The antidote to shallow thinking about energy issues.