The ESG Dragon and the State Treasurers | Derek Kreifels | EP 344

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It's hard for people to understand what ESG means. And if you first hear about it, you know it sounds kind of good because you think, well, those damn greedy corporations should be incentivized to serve more than their narrow self-interest. But then when you start to look at exactly what that means—like the devil's always in the details—you see very clearly that this is just another variant of deeply socialist centralized state planning. These policies are actually making everything worse by the criteria of the people who put the policies in place, and that's just absolutely unacceptable.

What we're doing is we're saying, look, some of our states, the signature industry is oil, coal, or gas. And we're saying, look, we're market participants too! We don't have to use your bank or your fund manager to manage our billions of dollars in business if we think that you're actually trying to hurt the primary industry of our state.

Hello everyone! So I'm talking today with Derek Kreifultz, who is CEO of the State Financial Officers Foundation. Under normal conditions, that might not be something notable for all concerned, but in the crazy upside down cloned world that we all currently inhabit, this has become incredibly relevant. I met Derek a couple of days ago, although I've been retweeting a lot of what he's been putting out on Twitter for quite a while, and I wanted to talk to him today so that everybody watching and listening can be brought up to date about what's going on on the financial front in relation to states and their investment strategies.

So Derek, let's start with a little bit about your background and about your situation, your position right now, and then we'll talk in some detail about exactly what it is that you're doing with the other state financial officers. So, who are you?

Well, thank you for the opportunity to be here first of all. It's an honor to get to talk to you, and I had an opportunity to see your show. It's just inspiring to see the young generation respond to truth and courage the way that you've demonstrated it, so thank you. I'm just a guy from Kansas, from a small town in Kansas. I served as the Deputy Treasurer of Kansas for six years. During that time, I worked with a group of state treasurers, and we realized that there was a need for an opportunity to come together to talk about some of the state financial issues, public finance issues both at the federal and state level from an unapologetically free market perspective.

And so there were other treasurers' organizations operating, but none of them really were excited to talk about it from that free market perspective like we were. So myself and eight other state treasurers co-founded the State Financial Officers Foundation 11 years ago, and together, we've just been raising awareness and educating the public and these officials as they get elected on issues of public finance, whether it's dealing with 529 college savings plans that a lot of the treasurers administer, unclaimed property that they administer. Some of them sit on boards of state pensions; some manage enormous state banking contracts; some manage short-term treasuries.

We have a saying in our world that if you've seen one state treasurer's office, you've seen one state treasurer's office because they're all a little bit different based on state statutes. I have this honor to work with all of them across the country and kind of bring them together and help connect the ones that might have another idea that might work in another state. I try to connect them and be the glue relationally.

How many state treasurers are now part of this State Financial Officers Foundation?

Great question! So we started with eight; now today, we're at 35 state financial officers. We say financial officers, Jordan, because we have state treasurers, state auditors, state controllers. Everybody's got a little bit different title. In Florida, it's CFO Jimmy Patronus; in Texas, it's a comptroller, Glenn Hager. So we have a total of 35 officials from 28 states.

How many of those are Republican?

All of them.

Okay, so it's fundamentally a Republican organization? Is that purposeful, or is it the fact that because it's free market-oriented, the Democrats are less likely to involve themselves? Do they have their own equivalent on the Democrat side?

Yeah, there is a group called the Democratic Treasurers Association. We are not blatantly Republican, though we've had an independent treasurer be a part of our group. I think in the beginning when we would invite other Democratic treasurers, you know, use the phrase 'free market'—it just tended to attract a certain kind of elected official. And so, you know, we have opened our doors and invited multiple folks from different parties in, but of course, the ones that are really interested in keying on that free market perspective are usually Republicans.

Right. So do you want to tell everybody broadly speaking what a state treasurer and the other individuals involved in your organization are primarily responsible for? And also how that relates to the elected officials and then also why that's relevant for citizens who are listening? Because people need to know, well, why they should care about what state treasurers do. What impact is it going to have on their day-to-day lives?

Absolutely! The easiest way to think about a state treasurer or one of these financial officers is that they really are the chief financial officer for their state. They see the inflows and the outflows; they see the revenues coming in from tax revenues or other sources, and they see the way that the state spends the money. Most of them manage the state's checkbook, right? So they really see the day-to-day transactions.

One thing that we did when we first started SFOF was we did a poll and we asked in several states, who do you trust more on state financial matters? We gave them the choice of their governor, their state treasurer, or their member of Congress. The lowest that a state treasurer received was 60 percent. The governor was usually 20 to 25 percent, and the member of Congress, regardless of party, was trusted less than 10 percent of the time on issues of public finance.

So we knew that we had a powerful tool to leverage. A lot of people don't think about these down-ballot offices very much. You know, that's not as sexy as being governor or U.S. senator, but these men and women are on the front lines watching the dollars and cents, and frankly watching how decisions made in Washington impact the lives on the ground in the state from a financial perspective.

So why do you think that the treasurers were more trusted?

You know, I think it's just simply because they don't get involved in a lot of other issues. If you take into account a governor or member of Congress—well, at first, I'd say that when it comes to a member of Congress, very few people would say that they can trust the United States Congress in terms of financial restraint or financial responsibility. I think for governors, they're just involved in such a breadth of issues that, you know, it's much easier to make friends or foes depending on where they land on social issues or financial issues. I think just the fact that most state treasurers, state auditors really are focused on fiduciary duty, fiduciary responsibility, I think that's why the general public tends to gravitate towards those officials when it comes to money in their state.

How would you define fiduciary responsibility?

I'd say fiduciary responsibility is when someone is in a position of authority responsible for some pool of money or an organization of money that they are required by law, many times, at least in theory, to do what's in the best interest of that organization or in this example for a state. There's also something kind of local about that. If you're involved in a corporation and you have a fiduciary responsibility within the corporation, your responsibility to the shareholders is to do what you can ethically at the level of that institution.

Your proper role is to serve the interests of the shareholders, however that might be constituted, rather than the interests of some third party or alternative organization, which would mean you're in some sense operating as a fifth column. So if you do your fiduciary duty, you're undertaking the role that's being assigned to you at the level that's been assigned to you.

That's going to be a crucial issue as we progress with this conversation because what's been happening—and this is partly why you've become active on Twitter, I would say—in other social media chapters is that the fiduciary responsibility of states and corporations alike has started to become subordinated to other interests, let's say. And that's particularly true on the ESG front. So maybe you could walk everybody who's listening through that. We could talk about what ESG means; we just need a definition for it and then also why the existence of these principles might constitute a conflict with fiduciary duty.

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That's a lot to unpack! It's a good thing we've got some time. But ESG stands for environmental, social, and governance, and it's frankly a type of investing where a group of activists are weaponizing public capital money to advance a political agenda. It could be done in the name of numerous issues. Lately, it's been focused on environmental climate change issues. The social part of ESG tends to cover some of the biggest social issues of our time, whether it's abortion, whether it's Second Amendment rights, it can even be connected to some of the issues of anti-Semitism happening around the country.

And then governance is just making sure that you have good governance, that you're not maybe making racial quotas, but you're getting good fiduciary members, you're getting good board members that have the experience to be able to make those decisions for the shareholder in the best way they can.

So the people who've been putting this forward are operating—please correct me at any time when I haven't got this right. They're putting forward a vision that the corporate enterprise, regardless of at what level it's operating, should be subordinated to a set of hypothetically ethical principles. And that's often brought forward under the guise of stakeholder capitalism. Is that merely serving the shareholders' interests insufficient? That corporations should be required or at least encouraged, but generally required to take a much broader view of the world and they should subordinate their corporate concerns to let's walk through it.

Environmental issues—what does that mean? Well, in principle, what it means is that we accept that the corporations are required to accept the story that the world on the environmental front is hovering on the brink of disaster. Positive feedback or tipping point-induced disaster—that's uni-dimensional and the cause essentially is the overproduction of carbon dioxide. That's such a pressing problem; all other issues should be subordinated to its diminishment as rapidly as possible.

So that's—and then there are other environmental concerns that might come out of that, but the fundamental issue here is that all corporate enterprises and activities should be subordinated to this radical environmentalist viewpoint. And then on the social front, what you have brought into the fold is essentially the diversity, equity, and inclusivity movement in all its tentacular splendor. There’s an association with a particularly quite radical left-wing view of the world that gets brought into the corporate domain on that front, insisting that people should be identified primarily by their race or their sex or their gender or their sexual preference, and that that identification constitutes grounds for the distribution of resources and position.

What's happening with ESG on the governance front is somewhat more unclear, I would say, as opposed to environmental social, but the fundamental proposition here is that merely serving the interests of the corporation and the shareholders is insufficient; that has to be subordinated to a broader view. And you know, there's something kind of compelling about that because we know that local mere greed on the part of corporate entities can cause a substantial amount of problems.

But the emergent problem seems to be that subordinating that fiduciary duty to something like central planning oriented along a radical left environmental apocalyptic scheme is not going to redress those problems and by any measure that I know of is likely to make them worse. And this has become particularly crucial in recent years for everyone watching and listening because there are major hedge funds in particular, BlackRock and Vanguard foremost among them, who have—and they control a staggering amount of investment money, an almost incomprehensible amount of investment money.

They've joined the ESG club, so to speak, and are punishing corporations and states who don't abide by ESG mandates. Is that now, if I got any of that wrong?

Well, I was just—there are a few things I would clarify. I think that you're right that these giant fund managers, you know, BlackRock was worth about eight trillion dollars as of the first of this year. I think State Street is the other one that's really big; it's three to four trillion dollars. They're really leveraging the money that they manage on behalf of these state pensions, which is everyday Americans' money, and they're then leveraging them to advance these social causes.

Our issue isn’t necessarily the fact that someone would choose to invest this way, to invest their personal dollars—if they wanted to invest in a fund that protects the environment or that does something on a social issue, that's their choice, and that’s the great thing about America. But what we have a real problem with is when the billions of dollars that are being invested by BlackRock, by State Street, by some of these other companies—I think Vanguard has been one of those players, but they've recently just made some public comments. Their CEO, Tim Buckley, was just making some comment about that ESG is not a winning proposition from a financial perspective.

Let's point out very clearly, which means that it is not a winning proposition. It’s like there’s no—it's a winning proposition, except on the financial front. It’s like, no, no, no, that’s the measure!

So your argument is people can invest in whatever the hell they want, and absolutely fair enough! You know, if you want to invest in a corporation or buy the products of a corporation that purports to be serving the environment, that’s all well and good. But when it starts to become mandatory and failure to do so results in punitive consequences, that’s a whole different ball of wax. And of course, that’s exactly the problem that you guys are dealing with at the state treasury level.

The reason for that, just so everyone’s clear, is that part of your fiduciary duty is to ensure that such things as people's pension programs are properly funded and invested from an investment perspective because your job is to make bloody well sure that the money in the pension funds, for example, is stable and hopefully also growing. And if there are any outside influences that are going to interfere with that, then it’s appropriate for you to be, what would you say, to oppose that in every manner that you possibly can.

So that’s sort of where we’re at at the moment, as far as I can tell. And so what are the—what is your organization’s concern about and stance with regards to ESG investing, and what have you done about it?

Yeah, so we have made a very public stance. Our members, our state treasurers, our public officials are really working in each of their states to do what they think is best for their state. Backing up, and just say that there is this movement internationally that came out of the Glasgow Accords—that's climate action for net zero. There’s a group called the Global Financial Alliance for Net Zero, which are basically all of the big banks and fund managers that are making commitments on their websites.

They're saying, you know, that they're going to be net-zero by 2030 or 2040; they're all making a little bit different commitments. What we’re doing is saying, look, some of our states, the signature industry is oil, coal, or gas. And we’re saying, look, we’re market participants too. We don’t have to use your bank or your fund manager to manage our billions of dollars in business if we think that you're actually trying to hurt the primary industry of our state.

Take example a state treasurer, Riley Moore, in West Virginia, who one year ago was able to work with his legislature to pass legislation to say, look, if you are a state bank working with any level of state government, university systems, etc.—that was one of the authorities that he had—he could say we're not going to work with you anymore if you're choosing to not work with coal, for example.

It’s one thing if it’s not a good business decision. Maybe the company is having issues, and it’s just not a good business model. You get the business plan; it’s not good, you know, bankers can do that; that’s their right. But to say flat out, we’re just not going to do business with anybody that touches coal? We had a problem with that, and treasurer Moore had a really big problem with that.

So the law passed; he put six banks on notice, including BlackRock, Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, I think Goldman Sachs was in there, and U.S. Bank ended up changing their position to say, okay, we’re going to back off of our prohibition of coal; we’ll do business with the coal industry. And they were allowed to stay in the mix of state contractors who managed the state's money.

We’ve seen other solutions that have popped up, again, there’s not like a one-size-fits all. We’re not pushing out some, you know, we’re not pushing out some one-size solution for every state; each one’s a little different. Kentucky passed a similar law, but theirs is more on all state contractors who work with the state. To a certain financial level, if they are actively discriminating against—and that’s what it is, really.

We’re talking about energy discrimination. These corporations are choosing to discriminate against the fossil fuel industry in this mad rush to go to net-zero.

People talk about that mad rush too because people listening might think, well, you know, wouldn’t it be good if we could move away from coal? I think you can make an argument on that front in some ways, if you're very careful, that the careful replacement, for example, of coal with liquid natural gas might be a net good, all things considered in some situations.

Then the possible replacement of liquid natural gas even with nuclear, but you have to be willing to allow liquid natural gas and encourage nuclear. You also have to understand that liquid natural gas is also necessary for the production of ammonia, for example, which only feeds four billion people.

This notion—that net zero on the carbon front is necessary—is a lie. The idea that we’re going to manage it by 2030 is preposterous beyond comprehension. I mean, the Biden Administration itself has already admitted that it will be 240 years, with optimistic projections, before we can approximate anything like net zero.

So all this is just a complete bloody lie. You might say, well, you know, it’s no worse a lie than many other lies than we've been told, and I suppose that might be true, except that what we're seeing in places like Germany, for example, is that as we move hypothetically towards these idiot pathological net zero sloganeering propositions, we get more unreliable power at a much higher cost—like four to five times as high.

So that industry starts to move to places like China, which by the way don’t have the best environmental regulations, and it’s made Germany hyper-reliant on Russia. More to the point, even on the environmental front, there’s no evidence whatsoever that what Germany has done—well, they’ve devastated their reliable sources of power—has improved the environment one bit. In fact, quite the contrary; the world used more coal last year than it ever has in the entire history of the planet.

That’s partly because countries like Germany have been forced to rely on coal as a backup for their idiot renewable projects because they’re too unreliable, and they’ve shut down their nuclear plants. So anybody who’s listening who thinks, well, you know, maybe the environmentalists are going too far, but coal should be off the table—it’s like you simply don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.

It’s also the case that for many people around the world, especially in developing nations, coal is a hell of a lot better and a lot less polluting than wood. The option isn’t coal or nothing; or coal or liquid natural gas or nuclear. In many developing countries, the option is coal or wood, or dung, which is, you know, one of the world's lower quality sources of energy, let’s say.

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So one of the reasons I’m on this rant is because I want to make sure that everybody who’s listening knows perfectly well that even by the standards of the environmentalists themselves, this ESG movement, especially combined with net zero, is not only not going to work—it’s not going to work! There’s not a chance it’ll work! It will absolutely make things worse on the environmental front, as well as propelling a lot of people into poverty, undermining the stability that we take for granted on the industrial front, making power more unreliable, and also tilting the world towards dependence on dictatorial sources of power like energy obtained in Russia at the moment.

Well, I’m really glad you bring up the issue of poverty because American energy, energy around the world, has done more for human flourishing than any other sector. You take away a country’s ability to produce coal, natural gas, or oil, and you can—the great case study would be to look at the country of Sri Lanka and what developed last summer, right? Where they didn’t even have gas to cook on little stoves in their homes because of the federal regulations that had been implemented that were pushed down on the people. They couldn’t pay for gas for their cars; it’s an island nation, and it was an absolute disaster.

So we know that this is—a lot of people are talking about this, and how that translates here. There was actually a video that came out just I think today on Fox News with the National Homebuilders Association talking about a proposition that’s being voted on in the Bay Area of California where they’re trying to basically say no more gas stoves, no more gas hot water heaters, no more gas, you know, anything. And the Homebuilders Association is basically saying, look, that’s going to drive prices so high that the homeless problem is going to increase.

It’s a really big misnomer to think that we can get to this net-zero fantasy world and still have human flourishing and modern technologies. There’s a great organization that I have to give credit to—Life Powered, part of the Texas Public Policy Foundation—has this great video that shows from the time that you wake up in the morning until you get to your office, just in that first one and a half hours of your day, how many petrochemical products are involved in your life, whether it’s your alarm clock, your bed sheets, your clock, and your toothbrush.

This idea that we would somehow—this is where the struggle really is for these treasurers and auditors. We have companies like BlackRock and State Street who are actively saying and actively encouraging the companies that they invest in that they want this net-zero by a certain date, and they want that for America. But what they’re not telling the American people is that they’re taking those dollars that they’re investing on behalf of all these pensioners in America, and they’re trying to invest and leverage them so they can do business in China.

It’s a huge new retail audience. China is the largest polluter on Earth; they have five times the number of coal-fired power plants than America does. We had about 225 in 2021; they have about 1,118, I believe. I think I found that China is planning to build more coal plants than there are coal plants in the world.

Yeah, and the other thing—they’re building one about every two weeks, right? We don’t want it to be that they’re building. China—precisely, too, because had we not been so utterly clueless on the energy front in the West, we would have been able to supply the Chinese with a much more reliable supply of liquid natural gas.

That’s a particularly egregious sin on the Canadian front because our idiot Prime Minister Trudeau has done everything he possibly could to shut down the Canadian fossil fuel industry. And all that means is that, as you already pointed out, that China has found it necessary, so its people don’t starve to produce more and more coal plants, which is exactly also what’s happening in India.

We could have remediated that to a large degree if we hadn’t been damned foolish for the last 60 years, especially on the nuclear front, but also in relationship to liquid natural gas. And then for all of you who still might be residual environmentalists listening—you better bloody well understand that if we don’t build a coal plant in North America or Australia, but we build one in China, it’s the same damn air!

So the fact that we’re making it impossible for any of these things to occur in the West just means it’s offloaded into another country. And that might be fine if it was only a matter of pollution of rivers, because then the Chinese could deal with that, and, you know, that’s a peripheral problem for us, even though it’s not trivial. But since they’re dumping carbon dioxide into the same damn atmosphere, that all this ethical posturing is doing nothing!

It’s not just not doing good—that’s the thing we’ve got to get clear here. These policies are actually making everything worse by the criteria of the people who put the policies in place, and that’s just absolutely unacceptable. And it’s hard for people—it’s hard for people to understand what ESG means. And if you first hear about it, you know, it sounds kind of good because you think, well, those damn greedy corporations should be incentivized to serve more than their narrow self-interest.

But then when you start to look at exactly what that means—like, the devil’s always in the details—you see very clearly that this is just another variant of deeply socialist centralized state planning. And here’s a question for you: you know you would expect that someone like Larry Fink, for example, who’s CEO of BlackRock, would be enough of an evil capitalist not to saw off the branch that he sits on. It’s like, what the hell is going on with these corporations who are bending over backwards to adopt these idiot ideological woke policies when they’re clearly enabling like fifth columns of ideologues who are antithetical to absolutely everything they stand for?

How do you understand this? Or do you guys even bother trying to sort that sort of thing out?

Well, you know, I would say I guess that Larry Fink would probably say it is capitalism that’s driving him to do more business in China, right? It’s this huge audience of untapped retail investors. And the real, again, the height of hypocrisy on this issue, if we take the social issues—you know, the left is always talking about how important it is to bring up the little guy and the left out and the Forgotten—but they’re not talking about, you know, the Uyghur, the Muslim Uyghurs in China.

They’re not talking about the African children in the People’s Republic of the Congo that are having to mine cobalt for China, you know, in order to produce all of the electric vehicles, all of the lithium batteries for our iPads, phones. There’s a great new book out—I don’t profit at all by promoting it! I’m reading it right now—called Cobalt Red. Siddharth Kara, I think is the author, who went there and saw these atrocities of these, you know, African children who are making maybe, you know, a dollar or two a day to mine this dangerous mineral that China now operates and controls about 60 percent of the world’s cobalt supply.

China has been much smarter about owning and buying rich minerals than the United States has, and it’s putting us at a huge disadvantage. And that’s the other thing that I think a lot of our men and women are concerned about, is just the position that ESG investing puts us in compared to countries like China.

Well, I don’t have as much of a problem with BlackRock dealing with the Chinese because I think the issue of how to include the Chinese in a broad free market economy is one that still requires a tremendous amount of debate. You know everybody hoped that China would sort of sort itself out on the democratic front, at least quasi-democratic front, as their population became wealthier and less prone to starvation.

I think to a limited degree that’s occurred, although the Chinese have backslid terribly with the pronouncement of Xi as like ruler till the end of time, and they’re slide back into a real communist totalitarianism. I mean, so it’s not exactly as if I’m a China fan, especially not one of the Chinese Communist Party, but, you know, I can see BlackRock investigating investment decisions.

I’m more curious about why in the world they bought the entire environmental apocalypse narrative along with the DEI nonsense on the social front. What is it about these capitalist enterprises that is tilting them in this woke policy direction? Why and how can they not see how counterproductive that is, given that they’re fundamentally capitalist enterprises?

I don’t understand that.

I don’t either, other than they believe it, right? I mean, that’s the conclusion you have to come to—is they absolutely believe that it’s the right way to go. I think the other thing that I would say is the conservative movement in America has been slow to respond to a lot of this, as they have on other issues.

But, you know, I talk to CEOs and C-suite executives on a regular basis who, frankly, privately will tell me “thank you! Thank you for giving us leverage now to say we’re hearing now from both sides, so we’re going to stay neutral on this issue.”

At the end of the day, that’s what these men and women want. That’s what these state treasurers and auditors want: they want banks to be banks, right? Doing fund managers to be fund managers. That’s right! Their fiduciary duty calls for them to only work with those companies that are willing to maintain and protect that idea of fiduciary responsibility, and C-level—C-level officers are not part of that fiduciary responsibility.

That’s the argument that the left is trying to make, is that that is fiduciary responsibility. And that’s what this Biden administration is trying to push out, you know, through the Department of Labor, through rule changes through the Securities and Exchange Commission, requiring ESG disclosures. They’re trying to say that it is fiduciary responsible of you to pay attention to and know how…

That would be fine if they were investing their own money!

That’s right! Because maybe, you know, if you could make a case that keeping a corporate eye cast on a 20-year horizon or 30-year horizon on the environment front is going to guide your investment decisions in a manner that increases your profitability, no problem, man! If people want to bet on that, that’s just fine!

But when it starts to become a matter of compulsion and regulation, then nope, you’ve definitely gone too far. I think people like Larry Fink, for example, and all the corporate types who are pursuing this ESG nonsense out of guilt, for example, here’s what I think is going on: it isn’t the problem that they’re capitalists; the problem is that they’re evil capitalists, and what I mean by that is that they’re pursuing their ill-gotten gains in an unethical manner fundamentally.

And you know the left criticizes gigantic corporate structures for having this happen all the time, and it happens all the time. So it’s certainly the case, for example, that big pharma falls into that category, and you can tell that because the biggest lawsuits in the history of the world have been successfully brought against big pharma. There’s no shortage of evil on the capitalist front.

But to attribute that to capitalism is foolish. Now I think what happens with the CEO types who go along with ESG and and DEI movements is they’re guilty because of their ill-gotten gains—of which I am not attributing to capitalism, by the way—and so then they look for an easy moral out. Either that or they look for a moral out that they think the population is gullible enough to buy.

So they’ve banner wave and flag wave about net zero and about the fact that we’re going to adopt our corporate responsibility on the environmental front, and they do that because it’s easier than actually atoning for their greedy sins, let’s say. Or they do that because they think it’s a good way of pulling the wool over the public’s eyes, or some appallingly malevolent combination of both, because otherwise I don’t understand it!

You have to be daft, if you're a CEO, not to notice that the DEI squad, diversity, equity, and inclusivity, and the ESG squad put forward an ideology that is absolutely antithetical to the principles upon which your company are based. So then you say, well, why the hell would you do that? And one excuse is ignorance—you just don’t know better—but this unattainable guilt is another good explanation. The lefties like Russell Brand and Joe Rogan, to some degree, have been pretty good at pointing this out, saying, yeah, well, you guys have bent the system in your favor for a long time, and now you’re guilty about it.

So you’re going to comply in this daft manner with these idiot—the ideologies to everyone’s discredit, including yourself, and that’s not going to atone for your sins, and it’s going to make everything a hell of a lot worse.

Yeah, and I would say, too, that a lot of the students graduating from universities today, unfortunately, are pretty left of center. And so the really loud ones go to work for these big publicly traded companies, and that’s how this whole idea of stakeholder capitalism comes in. Suddenly your employee is a stakeholder even if they’re not a shareholder, that they have some say.

I think that’s part of why they get caught up in these decisions as well, is they’re listening to this younger generation who may have this idealistic thought of change. It may be a really small, very loud minority that is definitely that screaming.

I’ve seen that in my own dealings with corporations. So, for example, in Canada, I publish with Penguin Random House, and there was a bit of a rebellion among the younger people at Penguin Random House when they decided to publish my next popular book, right? So I have a two-volume series now, the first book, which was 12 Rules for Life, was one of the most profitable books that Penguin Random House in Canada ever published by a huge margin, and so I was responsible for a substantial fraction of PRH’s revenue over the last six years.

And yet when my second book was announced, before anyone had read it, there was a rebellion among the younger people, and then Penguin Random House had a town hall where a number of them cried about it. I mean literally cried about what a terrible monster I was, despite the fact they hadn’t read the damn book.

Instead of firing all those people—which is exactly 100 percent what should have instantly happened since they lined themselves up to identify themselves as people who should be fired, because they wanted to implement censorship on a book they hadn’t read in a publishing house—all that happened was that PRH hand-waved about how upset their new people were and tried to, what would you say, listen compassionately to their concerns and move forward.

And you know, they didn’t end up canceling my book, which I don’t regard precisely as a favor. But the same thing happened also at PRH in New York.

But again, I see no excuse for it! It’s like, why the hell would you go along with the radicals? You’re so uncertain about your own moral principles even as a publisher that you won’t fire people within your organization who are outright calling for censorship?

Yeah, stunning. Well, and I would just add too, one of the things that we’ve realized over the last year and a half as we’ve pushed back is that, you know, the three companies that we would like to mention a lot, you know, BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard—if you look at the ownership that they have in the top 500 publicly traded companies in America, they own anywhere from 18 to 20 percent on average of every one of those publicly traded companies.

So they leverage this tremendous amount of authority. We have, you know, when we have publicly traded companies, we have this whole thing that’s getting ready to start, the proxy, the shareholder voting season this spring, right? And that’s what we’ve seen them do is start to direct behavior of companies that they’re going to invest in.

If buying BlackRock, and I’m going to invest in your company, you’re going to make sure that you don’t invest in coal, that you don’t invest in dirty agriculture. You don’t invest in, you know, and they’ve got this checklist that—all in the name of ESG. So it’s very correct; it’s coercion, right? It’s preventing farmers and small businesses from growing food.

That’s right, I mean there’s this whole, you know, cattle methane mitigation. Oh yeah, right? You know, it’s a big part of BlackRock had some involvement with this data in Nebraska, for example, where there was question about which company they were going to invest in because big cattle ranchers, you know, cows poop and produce methane.

But, you know, that’s part of this movement, to kind of eliminate that industry.

Yeah! Well, that feeds people!

Yes! Yes! And feeds poor people cheaply! Okay, so let’s talk about exactly how this came about because people aren’t going to understand this either.

Okay, so now you just said BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard own between 15 and 25 percent of the shares in the top 500 companies. Okay, so now how the hell did they manage to accumulate all that capital?

So why don’t we, why don’t you just walk through that backstory so that people understand what’s happened over the last 20 years with regards to these huge—I mean, I think the very simple answer is just that over time, they’ve accumulated huge amounts of wealth and invested it back in these publicly traded funds.

How did they accumulate? So what are people doing with their money that turns it over to Blackrock?

Well, they’re investing in BlackRock, right? There’s, walk us through what BlackRock is and why that’s put their position so powerfully because people aren’t going to understand that.

Yeah, so BlackRock manages everybody’s 401(k) retirement fund. You know, almost every registered advisor uses BlackRock; they use iShares, and they are basically accumulating all of this wealth from private individuals who are, you know, unknowingly investing money with their retail advisor at their local office on Main Street, USA.

And then they’re taking those dollars and investing them in ways that they want to drive this agenda. So that’s actually why we started our educational campaign on December 1st. We started a campaign called Our Money, Our Values because what we realized was there was this huge, you know, aside from ESG being a little wonky and hard to explain to the average American, we needed to make sure that they understood how it affected their bottom line.

And yeah—

Well, so if you have a retirement—well, so what’s happening is people have their pension savings, and there’s reason to invest that in the stock market, let’s say, to buy companies.

Now, when you invest in a stock in the stock market, and you become a shareholder, you also have voting rights. Now what’s happened is that companies like BlackRock, as they’ve aggregated individual investor capital, have accrued the voting rights to themselves, right?

And so they can wield disproportionate influence pretending to be the voice of the individual investors, but in reality pushing forward this ESG agenda that we've been describing often in a manner that runs contrary to the fiduciary interest of their investors. And that means all of you who are watching and listening who have pension funds.

That’s put a tremendous amount of power—like an almost unlimited amount of financial power—in the hands of very few actors, and you laid out BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street. And so that’s what we’re talking about. And people need to always know why this is relevant to them.

It’s relevant to them because this is your pension money. But not only that, this is your voting right that is being secretly, in some real sense, and in an underhanded manner if you’re a shareholder.

Yep! If you’re a shareholder, yes! Yeah, and most people aren’t voting; they’re not voting their shares, they’re not voting their proxy. Most states weren’t, frankly, they were depending on companies like ISS and Glass Lewis, who are, you know, also owned a percentage owned by BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, to basically vote those shares of—and for this—on behalf of the state pensions.

And that’s been part of the rub and part of the pushback from some of our states now is, you know, either bringing just a blatant transparency to how those shares are being voted, what the issue is, and how the state pension representative voted on those shares, or asking and pushing to change contracts with companies like BlackRock so that they can’t vote the state shares anymore, and that they have personnel in these state offices that can do that.

The problem that we have are some state treasurer’s offices, you know, employ thousands and thousands of state employees—8,000 employees in one case. And then, you know, there might be 8 employees in a smaller state, and so it’s not a one-size-fits all. It’s a big issue.

We’ll be right back! First, we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan’s new series Exodus. So the Hebrews created history as we know it. You don’t get away with anything! And so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the tyrant and violate your conscience without cost. You will pay the piper. It’s going to call you out of that slavery into freedom even if that pulls you into the desert.

And we’re going to see that there’s something else going on here that is far more cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine. The highest beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of freedom against tyranny. I want villains to get punished. But do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price? That’s such a Christian question.

This probably would have worked originally even if BlackRock would have been voting on behalf of the investors, as long as what BlackRock was doing was pursuing their local fiduciary interest, right?

Because if your goal as a pension investor is to make money, and your manager’s goal is to make money, well then your interests are aligned. But if your goal is to make money so that you’re doing well for your retirement, and your manager’s goal now is to implement ESG requirements, then there’s an instant conflict of interest there.

And that’s exactly what’s emerged, especially in the last 10 years. It’s hard to alert well to the danger of this, but it’s a signal danger. When I started to become aware of ESG, I thought, well, I’m already preoccupied with diversity, inclusivity, and equity because that’s an absolute catastrophe, especially on the equity front; it’s devastated the universities. But I think ESG is, if anything, worse. It’s like DEI on steroids with much larger pools of capital.

Well, they’ve learned that they can weaponize money. You know, and we saw that first in your country with the trucker protests. That’s where our men and women first really became aware that, hey, here’s a federal government that is literally shutting down individual bank accounts so that they can’t fund protestors that they don’t agree with.

I mean, it was absolutely shocking to see that happen. And then we’ve seen that here now in the United States, where there are certain banks who are de-platforming, debanking companies if they don’t like what you’re selling. You know, if they’re a small gun owner, gun shop owner—and there was a case of a small gun shop owner in Florida that had been in business for 20 some years.

And they got shut down by their primary bank because they didn’t want to be in the gun business anymore; not because of anything that owner did, not because they committed a crime; they didn’t do any of that. And this guy was a veteran.

So it’s absolutely ridiculous! You know, former U.S. ambassador for religious freedom, Sam Brownback, started an organization, a non-for-profit organization for religious freedom; the organization was told that they couldn’t have a bank at the bank that they wanted to bank at because they didn’t like what they were doing.

So this idea of weaponizing capital is very dangerous, and it is probably the largest issue that our country is going to face over the next couple of years because now that we’ve seen how one side can do it, you know it’s going to be really easy for federal bureaucracies for Congress, depending on who’s in control, to start leveraging public capital to force a political agenda.

Yeah, well, it’s better on by the development of anything approximating a centralized digital currency. So, yeah, you know, Canadians have absolutely no idea what the Trudeau government’s lockdown of bank accounts did to Canada’s international reputation or what sort of precedent it served.

You know, I regard that as an act of outright treachery. I couldn’t believe that our government could do something that utterly appalling. And I also still can’t believe that about 50 percent of Canadians feel that it was justified. They have no idea what that means! They have no idea that we now have a precedent in Canada such that if you have a political opinion that’s unpopular—no, worse—if you support someone indirectly who has a political opinion that runs contrary to that of the government, that you can now lose access to the entire financial system.

You know, when people think, well, if you didn’t do anything wrong, you wouldn’t have anything to worry about, and the right rejoinder to that is, you’ve never done anything wrong in your whole life, eh? And you think that the government is so bloody virtuous that they’re only going to punish people who are the real wrongdoers?

You’re that naive, and Canadians have no idea what—that’s what I said, they have no idea whatsoever how shocking it was across the world that our government actually dared to suspend the financial rights of people who were contributing to the trucker convoy with no trial. Right? By government fiat! Top-down coercing the banks to do so, one of the banks actually apologized, which was quite the remarkable occurrence!

Yeah, I think it was the Bank of Nova Scotia apologized for doing it. But, yeah, thanks, guys! You shouldn’t have done it to begin with! But, yeah, well, that action and that awareness to our men and women that are in these offices became—we became very acutely aware and hypersensitive.

We started reading. There was a proposal that the United States Treasury Department put out. It didn’t even have a chance to become an official bill in Congress, but the idea was that we’re going to start monitoring every American’s bank accounts, whether it’s a bank account or credit union, for 600 transactions, inflow or outflow, right? So if you take a deposit of 600 or more—boom! That bank is required to report that to the IRS.

If you write a check for a refrigerator that’s more than 60 or a gas stove. Yes! We—a lot of our men and women really went to the front line. Nebraska treasurer John Moranti really led the charge on that and said, look, you know, we cannot allow that to go unnoticed. We’ve got to raise awareness.

So we did a very strategic move with the bankers, the American Bankers Association and the credit unions of America to get the word out to every blogger, every newspaper, every radio show, every TV in the states that we were in to raise awareness.

The wonderful thing about that experience, Jordan, was that the average American, whether they were Democrat or Republican, they all hated the idea of having the IRS monitoring every transaction in their bank account over $600 or more.

We got phone calls from people that said, I don’t want the government or the IRS to know how much medicinal marijuana I buy on a monthly basis. We had Republicans calling and saying, I don’t want the government to know how much ammunition I buy on a regular basis!

And you know, I don’t want the government to know what I buy, period! So, keep your government out of my business!

And the fact that we’re going to be able to track this digitally—people have no idea what that means. It will mean that decentralized controllers will start to decide what it is that you need and what you don’t need.

And their answer will be: Well, because the planet is going to come to an end in 20 years, you really don’t need much at all! You know, you read—I suppose you know a little bit about these 15-minute cities, and the right-wing conspiratorial trolls have got all their panties in a knot about 15-minute cities.

And the lefties, of course, declaim that that’s nothing but a conspiracy theory. But if you go to the C40 website—and C40 is the website that’s put forward by the consortium of municipalities that are adopting the 15-minute city vision—they state very, very straightforwardly that their goals are the radical minimization of private car ownership by 2035.

Gas or electric, it doesn’t matter because you damn peasants don’t need vehicles. That people should be limited to one flight every three years on the vacation front because you damn peasants really don’t need to go anywhere!

And caloric restriction is also on the cards, so first of all, no meat for you, that’s for sure, but you’re probably eating more than you should anyways, because after all, the planet’s at stake.

And so for everyone who’s listening and watching, if you think that having the government can monitor everything that you purchase is going to turn out well for you, you better bloody well wake up! If you don’t think that digital currency put forward by the government is going to facilitate that, you’re painfully asleep!

So, and what’s going to be done about that? What do you guys think on the digital currency front? Because it’s pretty damn obvious that essentially we already have a digital currency. That’s what a credit card is. And at least what’s happening with our credit card data is that mostly it’s being used by greedy corporations to sell us stuff that we hypothetically want.

And there’s a fair bit of manipulation in that, but at least the ethos there is to increase consumer consumption, and you might not think that’s the best possible use of data, but it’s not the worst now.

So the digital currency is already in place, and the data that it generates is basically controlled by corporate interests. If we put forward a digital currency that’s centralized, the fundamental recipient of the data is going to be the government, and God only knows what they’re going to do with that data. But this is definitely coming, so what is your organization—what are you guys suggesting on the digital currency front?

Well, we don’t have an answer yet. That’s an issue that we’re tackling later this year and have not spent a whole lot of time on, so I can’t really speak to it. I can tell you that we are watching—there’s a—I forget the name of it, there’s a European agency that makes recommendations on credit card coding for transactions.

One of the things that we’ve watched recently that has alarmed a lot of our treasurers is that they were coding—when someone makes a purchase that’s related to a gun or ammunition. And so we’ve seen that—that’s a model that’s ripe for potentially being able to track someone’s expenditures in that area.

Now we work closely with some of the largest credit card companies in the world to help make sure that that kind of tracking doesn’t happen, and we have great relationships with them and open lines of communication where we can be honest with one another when something is happening like that.

But we’re not at that place yet where we’ve got a whole lot to say about the digital currency.

Yeah, well it’s a real conundrum because, well, because the digital currencies are definitely coming. You know, and this is one of the things that makes me interested in Bitcoin, because Bitcoin is a digital currency, and it literally is decentralized. That’s actually true!

And so, you know, if I had to choose between Bitcoin as a digital currency or any state-issued digital currency, I’d take Bitcoin hands down, instantly, because at least it’s distributed, and that takes control over currency and its monitoring out of the hands of, you know, do-gooder state or corporate institutions for that matter.

Because I think at a certain level of gigantism, you know, corporations are just as—it's reasonable to distrust them just as much as you distrust overreach in government. And so, you know, that’s one place where I think the genuine left has it right, which is that once corporations reached the point where they can start to engage in regulatory capture, which is essentially what BlackRock is doing nonstop, they pose a threat to the integrity of society itself.

Yeah, and my assumption is that we’ll have 50 states. We’ll have 50 different answers on how states should handle that and handle digital currency. That’s kind of where we’re at. What we’re seeing, you know, there’s already some exploratory committees that have been formed by state legislatures.

I think there’s one or two states that are already accepting digital payments for different state-related payments that people make to the state government. And I think there’s been some issues with some of that, so I think there’s a lot—the government always falls, you know, is always a few steps behind the private sector in terms of advancing, so we’re trying to catch up and get more up to date on that.

Yeah, well, it’s hard to stay—the technological transformations so—what are your ambitions and goals for your organization in the next six months to a year and maybe a little bit beyond that?

Yeah, I think we continue to make sure that every American, you know, the best anecdote to Wall Street is Main Street in America. We help Americans understand that this absolute war on American energy has caused higher gas and diesel prices, combined with the logistics issues that we had during the COVID pandemic. That’s why we’re experiencing inflation—that’s why your eggs cost so much more, that’s why gas at the pump costs much more—and your bottom line is that your paycheck isn’t going near as far as it used to be two years ago.

We’re going to continue to—our states, I think, are still going to continue to watch companies like BlackRock. You know, in the last year, eight of our states divested almost $5 billion—a little over $5 billion—from BlackRock in a move to find other fund managers or banks that were willing to take their fiduciary responsibility seriously. I think you’ll see more of that.

I think you’ll see last year five states passed legislation to start to move federal state funds away from this ESG movement. Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Texas— I think you’re going to see more of that this year.

We’re also educating— you know, as we talked about China a little bit, we’re helping just Americans to make sure they understand, by this website that we’ve created, ourmoneyourvalues.com, to go and understand the impact that puts America in the position that it puts America compared to China when we become so interdependent on them or dependent on them and other countries for our sources of energy and where we’ve got plenty here that we could be energy independent.

Yes, and doing it so and doing it more cleanly by any measure! Right? Absolutely! You know, the free market is the fix for not only the financials, but some of the cleanest markets in the world are run by free market governments.

So, you know, it’s a—I think you’re going to see more creative solutions. I think you’re going to see more solutions on banking, you know, pushing back against banks that want to drive a political agenda.

When do they do business? Have you guys—You talked about Vanguard pulling back a little bit on the ESG front in the last couple of weeks. I noticed that as well. Have you noticed any impact of your organization or the broader pushback? I know Florida has been instrumental on this front as well. Have you seen any change in the pushing forward of the ESG agenda as a consequence of your concerted actions?

I think so! You know, I think BlackRock was worth $10 trillion this time last year; today they're worth $8 trillion. They had to lay off 3 percent of their workforce. They’ve spent more money on lobbying than they ever have in the history of the company. They’ve got a multimillion-dollar ad campaign on Fox News reminding Americans how invested they are in their future.

But it’s all a sham, right? It’s all smoke and mirrors to show that they are really trying to save face as the truth is being exposed about, again, how they’re weaponizing all these other people’s money to advance their political agenda. It’s like this new dark shadow government, you know, that’s operating—that isn’t part of our democratic system!

Let’s face it! You know, these guys know they can’t get it passed into courts in America anymore. They know they can’t get it passed in Congress, so this is the way they’re going to try to get new policy advanced. And we’re just not going to sit by and let them do it, all to atone falsely for their unearned privilege. Pretty bloody pathetic!

Yeah! So have you guys looked into what Vivek Ramaswamy has been doing on the Strive front?

Absolutely! You know, Vivek has actually been a speaker at our meeting a couple of times in the last year. He has a friend, and we’ve talked had numerous conversations. Vivek is the beauty of the free market, right? Where the free market can correct itself when things go bad.

He launched this company called Strive Asset Management a year ago. You know, he’s got a fund that is focused on fossil fuels called the ticker letters or DRLL. He’s got a fund that will not do any business with China. And so, you know, he’s very much taking an opposite approach to what BlackRock is doing, and I know that he’s getting some traction. Some of our—I believe some of our states are beginning to work with his company.

Great! Well, it’s going to be very interesting watching him operate on the presidential campaign front, because he’s a real wild card. You know, this next presidential election is going to be something to watch, assuming we last that long given the Russia-Ukraine situation. But it’s very interesting to see someone like Vivek step into the ring given what he’s done on the capital front already to try to push back—not to push back against BlackRock exactly, but to provide a market-based alternative that’s grounded in fiduciary responsibility.

Very interesting move on his part, I thought. Extremely daring! And so it’s interesting to know that he’s on your—well, on the radar of your organization. What do you think—and there’s other—

Sorry, please go ahead!

I was just going to say there are other companies aside from Strive, like Second Vote Asset Managers. There are other companies out there that are springing up that are becoming a legitimate alternative to some of these big fund managers, which is great to see!

I’ll let you go ahead.

Yeah, well, I mean, from the Canadian perspective, it’s always heartening to see you bloody Americans try sorting these things out like you do. I mean, one of the things that’s so lovely to watch in the U.S. in general is your culture is so diverse, and there are so many different pockets of power with that distribution of power that checks and balances that, no matter what insane thing is going on in part of your country, there’s some sane things going on somewhere.

That seems to be a constant source of renewal on the American front, and it is especially heartening for a Canadian to see that, because we’re so bloody captured in Canada that it’s just beyond comprehension. I think that’s why Vivek’s message is really getting traction.

This isn’t an endorsement for Vivek—I love him; he’s a great guy! But I will say that when you speak about American exceptionalism and that America is a place that anybody can come to, and that we all have the same opportunity to build something great, to work hard, you know, to come from nothing—to be the son of immigrants, to come over and build a business or build a company—that’s his story.

And I’d say that that’s why we fight so hard is that we want that America that guarantees not equity for all but opportunity for all that want it, that want to work hard and work to provide for their families and do what’s right.

Yeah, well, equity for all is opportunity for none. That’s how you make everyone right, and you just reduce them to zero. And you know, the radical left governments of the 20th century were damn good at that—except they didn't reduce themselves to zero!

It’s not even true because, so often, they ended up victims—like often murdered victims—of their own idiot ideology. So they all ended up equal in the ground. And you know, that's the story of a hundred million lives in the 20th century.

So, all right, well, it’s very interesting having you lay all this out. If people are interested in learning more about this and also in what do they need to do and to contribute, what can people do who are watching and listening that’s practical, that would be helpful on the fiduciary responsibility front?

Great question! Well, they can go to ourmoneyourvalues.com. One, they can share—a there’s about a four and a half minute educational primer video on that website that explains in plain English what ESG investing is and how harmful it can be. There’s also a 60-second version of that that we’re trying to get out in digital media. Since December 1st, we’ve reached 32 million Americans and had several million views on our video, and that’s where we’re trying to get support—financial support—to go towards that so we can continue to educate all Americans on the danger of this.

We have some resources that they can download so they can take questions into their registered advisors on their—and you know, on Main Street, USA.

We are asking small business owners and farmers to share their stories with us on that website on how ESG is impacting their lives or hurting their business. And so there is an opportunity needed to donate on that. They can follow us on Twitter at SFOF_States and they can go to our website, our primary website is sfof.com.

They can go and see if their state treasurer is one of our members, and if they’re not, they can call them and ask them why.

Okay, excellent! Well, we’ll put all those URLs and contact points in the description for this video. And so, all right, well, that’s a good overview for everybody who’s watching and listening.

And you know, if you want to ensure your financial stability on the pension front and if you want to stay abreast of the relevant events, both corporate and government, that are important in the present day and age, then you need to know a fair bit about ESGs because that’s not a trivial issue here.

As we pointed out here, BlackRock and State Street and Vanguard own something approximating 20 percent of the biggest 500 companies in the U.S., and that gives them tremendous leverage. It's very necessary for people to be aware of this and to understand that these organizations—which are duty-bound to operate in their financial interest—are no longer doing that.

And that’s explicit. It’s an explicit part of the matter in which they govern themselves. And that, you know, maybe they should be doing a bit of a check on the governance front, you might say.

And of all the organizations that I’ve seen that are doing what they can to bring people's attention to this problem and to do something about it, your organization is certainly in the top one or two. And so, you know, that’s been very interesting to me to watch that unfold, and I’d certainly like to wish you well in your continuing endeavors.

We can stay in touch, and I’ll do what I can to help.

I’d like that!

Public attention to what you’re doing.

All right, so for everyone watching and listening, we're going to switch over to the Daily Wire Plus platform for half an hour. That’s pretty much standard practice with regards to my video.

We’re going to continue our conversation a little bit more on the personal front, because I’m curious about the development of your career and your political and philosophical interests. And so we’ll delve into that in more detail, more autobiographical detail on The Daily Wire Plus platform.

Thank you all for watching and listening! Please spread this around as much as you are inclined to, and well, thank you to the film crew here in Calgary, Alberta—that's a pretty good place to be doing that, right? Home of the fossil fuel industry in Canada, that’s for sure!

Which has been devastated by our idiot Prime Minister, who’s planning to do a lot worse in the future. And so, it’s a good place to be doing this interview, and thanks again for your time and for the information you’ve provided to everyone. We’ll definitely stay in touch in the future.

I’d like that! Thank you so much, Dr. Peterson, for having me today.

You bet, you bet! Hello everyone! I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.