Below is the transcript of David Bahnsen’s recent interview with author Vivek Ramaswamy, from the October 27 episode of Capital Record. You can listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Please excuse any errors in the copy, which may not be in its final form.
David: With that said, welcome to another Capital Record and welcome yet another first-time guest on the podcast. A very great opportunity for us to welcome today, Vivek Ramaswamy. Vivek, welcome to Capital Record.
Vivek: Good to be here man.
David: You’ve been doing a lot of press lately. You’re covering the rounds and out making the case. I want to spend a little time today talking about what’s got you animated in what you’re talking about and why, why we find ourselves in this current cultural moment. Why don’t we start backing up a little even before that to just your background, your story, and let listeners get a little familiar with who you are.
Vivek: For sure. I’ll keep it brief unless you want me to go into that a little longer. I was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. Not far from where I’m talking to you from today. I’m in Columbus, Ohio, talking to you from Strive’s headquarters. My wife and I live here now, by way of a long detour in New York, in the East coast.
I went to Harvard for college. I studied molecular biology, began my career thinking I would go into science. I ended up going into biotech investing instead. I was a biotech investor at a hedge fund in New York from 2007 to 2014. I spent three of those years in law school. I had this itch to study and explore law and political philosophy, which I had never fully scratched in college.
I took 2010 to 2013 to do that. I kept my job at the hedge fund as well. That was fun to balance life as an investor and as a intellectually curious law student. After I got out and done with that, though, I ended up still having my job at the hedge fund without law school, which gave me a lot of spare time that I filled for six months with, I would say, a pretty humbling experience as a standup comedian in New York. I did about six months of that. Did about ten shows.
That is what led me to the doorstep of figuring out that I needed something else to do with my energy. I’d also seen some failures in the biotech industry that I thought no one was addressing. I decided to leave my job as an investor in 2014. I founded a company called Roivant that I had the privilege of leading as CEO for the seven years thereafter, 2014 to 2021.
I oversaw the development of a wide range of drugs. Five of them are FDA-approved drugs today. One of the ones I’m proud of is a drug for prostate cancer. There’s a few others as well. Company’s a multi-billion-dollar business. It was quite a journey. There were successes and failures that I learned from along the way, but I stepped down from my job as CEO in 2021 to go into what I thought was a new adventure: Writing books and exploring debates that I cared a lot about during my later years as a CEO but didn’t have time to fully think about. The rise of stakeholder capitalism, the merger of political and business questions. That led me to do some writing on this topic on the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Wrote a pair of books. I’ve done a lot of media, as you said, even over the last couple of years, speaking nationally.
I really enjoyed that, but at a certain point, I felt like writing about these themes was not going to be sufficient to actually address the underlying problems themselves. I considered a career in politics. Decided that there were some limitations to driving positive change that way, and instead decided to actually address some of these issues through the market. That’s where my attention is focused today.
I founded Strive at the start of this year, which is a new asset-management firm competing with the likes of BlackRock and Vanguard, but bringing a different voice and vote to corporate America’s boardrooms. Telling companies to allow politics to be left to the politicians so companies can focus on delivering excellent products and services for profit. I’m sure we’ll talk more about that mission and the philosophy underlying it. In a nutshell, that’s what I’m doing these days.
David: Well, we will talk more about it. In fact, we’ll even have to talk about why we have to talk about it, which is I think itself the story. There was a time in which you could just take for granted when you’re talking to a business owner that they’re going to be talking about how their company is focused on producing goods and services that meet needs and try to derive a profit from that activity.
Now, it seems that we do have to have a separate conversation about why there’s something terminally unique about that very philosophy. If you don’t mind, before we go down the path of all the current events, I’m a nerd for this stuff. I run a $4 billion private wealth-management firm, and when I see someone who’s writing books and speaking and is passionate about certain issues of the day but came from the hedge-fund side, I always want to dig in a little bit more to the past side because I think it’s fascinating.
I’m incredibly critical of a lot of my colleagues on Wall Street who do not spend enough time defending the tree that bears the fruit from which they live, the fruit that they have very successfully and carfully planted, in many cases. Was your biotech-investor experience at a hedge fund long-short, or were you entirely on the long side looking for development opportunity? What was the focus you guys had in your time at QVT?
Vivek: QVT was a sprawling hedge fund with a lot of different strategies. Biotech was a small piece of it at the time I joined. By the time I left in 2014, it was, I think, a major part of the firm’s strategy. I began my career there. In some ways, in the early days, I was just an analyst taking for granted what the firm was already doing. They had a small portfolio of private investments, and I think they were beginning to dip their toes into more public market investing back in ’07, public-markets biotech investing, I should say, back when I joined in ’07.
I think they were doing some of it, but my goal was to, hopefully, help them as an analyst. That’s where I began. By the time I left, the principle focus for me was on public long-short investing, as you said, with a long bias in biotech, but that bias was, I think, in part where we were in the cycle of innovation in biotech. I think there were good reasons to be long biased.
We were in a low interest rate environment where — what happens in a low interest rate environment is that the value that you’re willing to attribute or investors are willing to attribute, and ought to be willing to attribute to distant cash flows in the future. It’s like a seesaw. It goes up if the opportunity cost of capital in the present is low. I told you when I got my job was in the fall of 2007. I did that through 2014.
That was a period of chronically low interest rates. For example, it was also a period where there were a lot of other levers that unlocked new innovation in the biotech sector. There were a lot of reasons to be long biased, but the strategy was long-short in biotech equities, principally, publicly traded equities. That’s where my focus was during this time.
David: Then obviously, becoming a CEO of your own company, development-focused, number of products have come to market. Was there M&A or was all of the product that came to market a byproduct of in-house development?
Vivek: Yes, it’s a good question. There’s a distinction in drug development between discovery and develop. Discovery generally, colloquially, here will refer to discovering new drugs in a lab. Development generally refers to the process of running clinical trials in human beings, going through phase one, phase two, phase three, in order to win an FDA approval. Roivant firmly began, and then, of course, there’s commercialization, which you just — A lot of M&As. You buy a commercial drug and then you try to sell it more effectively than the last guy.
Roivant’s focus was decisively and certainly in the early days, for much of the period that I led the company, was on the development phase. The way I built the company in the early days was to in-license drugs. I wouldn’t call that M&A, but I would call it in-licensing drugs, rights to drugs, including from pharma companies. Sometimes from universities, but even from pharma companies, that were in therapeutic areas that were out of favor in pharma. That were drugs that had gotten developed up to a certain point, but then floundered inside a big bureaucracy.
If you had, especially, a scientist or a drug developer who was excited about it but the company as a whole might have had a new CEO who shifted the strategy or whatever, that created opportunities to relatively, economically, in-license those drugs for low upfront costs. A royalty-sharing agreement on the back end such that it’s a win-win if it reaches the market, the company who gave it away participates in some of the upside.
That was the business model for building the first generation of Roivant’s development stage portfolio. Then some number of those drugs made it through the process and are commercial drugs. Some of the commercial drugs actually were sold to other companies that are selling them. Roivant has subsequently launched a drug of its own under its own umbrella. Then Roivant has subsequently, also in more recent years gotten into the business of drug discovery. During the time I led it in getting the business off the ground, the focus was squarely on development.
David: You fast forward to the end of the, what was it, seven years you were running the company. I look now at some of the things that you’ve written. Obviously, you had to have felt strongly about these topics. Not only do I think — Woke Inc. in particular, it’s just an absolutely outstanding book, but you gave up a great opportunity, a great career to come into this realm. Now . . . there’s an asset-management firm that has a distinctive ethos and belief system behind it. Was there a particular catalyst or was it the overarching slow drip of what you saw taking place in the culture in these last few insane years? What really prompted you to make that transition? That’s a big leap especially for a man of your age.
Vivek: I think it was closer to the slow-drip model, for sure. I don’t put in the category of a major sacrifice necessarily. I think that yes there are tradeoffs, but this was affirmatively what I wanted to do. I didn’t feel like I was some great sacrificial lamb that had to make some big sacrifice. I had achieved financial success at that point in time. I can’t remember the exact dates now, but late 2019 early 2020. I think it was late 2019. The company that I led had a $3 billion deal. It involved selling a number of subsidiaries that it achieved success.
The business that I woke up to then on the back of that deal was a very different business. It was mature all of a sudden. It didn’t require my day-to-day involvement in the same way, at least, that it did in the early days. At the same time, it allowed me to take my head out of the sand of the day-to-day to think about some issues that had been percolating in the back of my mind watching the business round table in late 2019 right around that same time in October of 2019, restate the purpose of the corporation.
The following January, I think it was Airbnb, another hip, trendy, cool company that was the standard bearer for what a venture-back company like mine was supposed to aspire to saying that it was going to pay its executives based on the achievement of social goals not just the financial goals of the company. There was a couple of incidents in which there was an industry statement that I was expected to sign something related to like one of Trump’s immigration orders. I remember not signing it, not because I put a whole ton of thought into it and decided not to sign it but it was like I didn’t really know much about it and I was focused on building a company and so I didn’t want to sign something that I didn’t know a ton about.
David: In that case, you were the CEO and so some people could say what you just said–
Vivek: Yes, I was the CEO.
David: It’s because they’re a senior VP at Citibank and they’re being asked to sign something by their boss. You’re referring to what? A network.
Vivek: Yes, an industry association, a network of CEOs. Exactly.
David: [unintelligible 00:12:30] The only reason I make that distinction is because the woke moment–
Vivek: That’s important
David: –has a number of different tools at their disposal. Downward pressure on people who drive their paycheck from an institution is one and that affects a lot of people listening to it, but guys like you and me that run our own business, they think, “We don’t experience the pressure.” Of course, horizontally, there’s peer groups, networks, vendors.
Vivek: Industry associations, peer groups, all the CEOs, closed door meetings, networks, all that. Actually, it’s funny bring it up. I remember I didn’t sign that one. I got criticized for it. Now, here’s one that I don’t remember but it came up recently. Some reporter who doesn’t particularly like some of the things I’m saying now wrote a story on me recently where among the things — we had lunch for the interview, and among the things she wrote that was critical of me in the interview is that I ordered too much food and didn’t finish it and left it on the table. I said, “Okay, that was probably true.”
That was one part of the criticism, but another part of the criticism though was interesting to me. I’m actually grateful. I didn’t know about this. She pulled up some statement that had like the signatures of 80 biotech CEOs and my name was on the list. I don’t remember it, but I have no doubt that I must have unthinkingly signed it. It was some statement around board diversity or diversity in hiring in the ranks of whatever. If I look at it now, there’s no way that I believe in that.
I don’t even remember signing this thing but I’m not denying that I did. I probably did. My name showed up on there, but I wasn’t thinking about these issues when I was building the company, but it was percolating in the back of my mind. I’m working 120 hours a week getting a new biotech company off the ground. That’s where my focus was. Starting in 2019, it arrived at a point where the business had achieved success.
I was less involved in the day-to-day, right around the time that these cultural tides also started to change from the business round table to Larry Fink getting far more aggressive, I would say. That’s happened only in about 2018. People forget that BlackRock really only started changing its behaviors more aggressively around then.
I would say a steady drip. Where I was in my life and career coincided with I think a sharp turn that the business culture in this country took that I decided the thing I was going to do about it wasn’t to leave my job and to make this my new passion. I did say what I’m going to defect from the ranks a little bit and write about this. I wrote an op-ed in the February of 2020 in the Wall Street Journal. Actually, I wrote it down — This is a funny story I haven’t told before but it’s a small detail.
I jotted down my thoughts and then I send it to some guy who was like a PR guy for advice on just like, “Hey how does one get this out?” I had never written, and now regularly, the Wall Street Journal, but I’d never done such a thing. I was like “Hey, who do you think might be interested in publishing this? Do you think I should send it to Wall Street Journal or New York Times? What do you think?”
He just was rolling and laughter. He’s like, “Are you kidding me? You need to get yourself a Medium account first and just start. Actually, you have no idea how hard it is to get published in those places.” I’m grateful because at that point I was like, “Oh, now I got to get this thing published.” I particularly made it better than it was and then I sent it into the Wall Street Journal, and they ran it, and I thought it was going to be a one and done.
That sparked a lot of debate on the issue. It was an argument that’s commonplace today but was not commonplace at the time, that the threat that stakeholder capitalism presented was not just a threat to capitalism, which is Milton Friedman’s focus or at least part of his focus that he’s remembered for, but that it’s actually equally a threat to democracy. Since Woke Inc. and otherwise, that argument has since become popularized, but in February of 2020, it was a bit of a head spinner.
Anyway, that generated some waves and one thing led to another. An agent said, “You should turn this into a book” and so we turned that into a book. Then I think that as I started to write that book, I realized that, you know what, I wasn’t necessarily free to remain a biotech CEO and really say what I wanted to say.
Either I could attenuate it a little bit and make it a passable balance or I could really say what I had to say, but I couldn’t do it while I was a CEO without having a negative consequence on the business. I made the choice I did. I stepped aside as CEO at the start of 2021, published the book, and really haven’t looked back in terms of advancing, hopefully, at least, in a small way advancing the debate on this issue.
David: Is you publisher Center Street an imprint of a larger publisher?
Vivek: Yes, it’s a part of Hachette Book Group which is one of the top three or four publishers.
David: The reason I ask is, ironically, there’s a difficulty for people writing books about corporate censorship from the corporate book publishers these days. Kudos to them to have the courage to publish it and in fairness, even to some of the others, Simon & Schuster. My books have been distributed through Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins.
A lot of these have had examples of refusing to publish certain things that went against the grain but being willing to publish others and take criticism for it. It’s a mixed record. Your book was well timed and has a lot of profound insights. I’ll point out to listeners that are longtime parts of the National Review family about a number of fantastic articles that we’ve published at National Review which woke capitalism that came out in the middle of 2021, generate a lot of attention.
I wonder when you wrote Woke Inc., did you anticipate it being a commercial success which it proved to be? Very rare for a book of this underlying ethos to get the — I think it hit number two New York Times bestseller. Is that correct?
Vivek: Yes. That’s right.
David: Did you anticipate a commercial success, and then did you anticipate the ongoing perpetuity of the cause that you would become a spokesman for the anti-woke and really anti-market insanity of the moment? What were your thoughts at the time it was happening versus where it’s come?
Vivek: I wasn’t sure is the answer to your question. I was less sure about me and the role I was going to play in it, but what I did have a higher conviction in though was that this was going to be a big theme. I think that it was an invisible problem that I think bothered people on the left and right for sometimes some of the different reasons and sometimes the same reasons.
The concentration of undo political power in the hands of a small group of politically unaccountable actors. That’s not a left wing or a right-wing concern per se, but I knew it was part of the motivating force for the rise of populism, particularly in the United States but globally, too, at the time, that no one else had yet put their finger on. I had a pretty bone-deep conviction that this was an important part of the story. I knew this was going to be a bigger theme. My role in it, I was less certain about. First time author waiting into a new domain.
I was having fun. I knew that, but I probably had an instinct. Many people were skeptical that a book, any given book is going to do well. I had an instinct that this was hitting on a theme that was hiding. It was a sleeping giant beneath the surface, the merger of corporate power and government power in ways that befuddled orthodoxies, both on the left and the right.
The Left’s dogma is that we were supposed to be skeptical of corporate power, but what do we do when those very corporations are advancing the goals we wanted to pursue? Maybe we like them after all. The right, it’s, you know what, the free market can do no wrong without realizing that actually it’s not a free market if the government is using private companies to do through the door what it can’t accomplish through the front door.
I thought that there was, with some careful explication, with some careful explanation of the problem, there was a chance that this was going to be resonant with a wide base of audiences that went beyond the partisan boxes that you might have expected it to fall into. Of course, conservatives love this book for most. Actually, I think it’s reached a lot of unexpected audiences too. I had a knack that the issue was going to be big, that Woke Inc. or my own position in that movement I didn’t necessarily anticipate. I immediately felt some sense of obligation after launching the book.
Look, if I’ve spent a year and a half writing this and thinking about these issues, a lot of counter arguments that come up. If you spent your time thinking through five layers of counter arguments and responses, you might as well make the best use of that time to make sure you’re leading the conversation in a productive way.
That’s the position I found myself in. I did not imagine, by the way, I was going to be starting an asset venture. I thought I was done in business. If you told me the time I wrote Woke Inc that the next thing I was going to be doing is starting another business, I would’ve said you were crazy. Politics was something that I thought was more likely in the cards.
Nonetheless, I think you go through a journey and look in the mirror and ask yourself how you think you actually can have the most impact, rather than to stay tethered to some vision of how it is you’re supposed to have impact. That’s what led me to the doorstep of saying that, “You know what? There’s a problem in the market. Let’s give it a fair shake to solve it through the market first, rather than to resort to top-down government solutions or regulation as a counter movement to address what is fundamentally a market problem for the market.”
David: Let’s talk about that because it’s a big theme I’ve had. There’s a lot of my friends that are really mad at Larry Fink, and they’re really mad at Vanguard, and they’re really worried about the same thing you and I are worried about, which is this marriage of power companies to affect the ends of political or governmental agenda versus honoring their fiduciary duty to their owners and so forth. We have to start with what you started with initially, a critique of Business Roundtable, the philosophical problem between those that would dare pit the needs of the “stakeholders” against the shareholders.
The idea that Milton Friedman somehow never realized that taking care of employees would be a good thing for an entrepreneur to do. Creating this false dilemma, and even very smart people who do know better, like Jamie Dimon signing onto it. There were a lot of ideologues that signed on to the Business Roundtable that I think believe in a flawed view of markets.
What’s worse to me is people who I don’t think even believe it that signed onto it. Be that as it may, the errant philosophy behind this moment. Right now, you mention a market solution to, for lack of a better word, we’ll just call it the Larry Fink problem. This idea that there is a separation, a disintermediation of the underlying beneficiary of ownership through ETF vehicles and the voting rights. I don’t believe it is complexity that’s created by liberals or leftist or Larry Fink or Bernie Sanders.
It’s a complexity created because this is a unique structure and it’s a unique evolution in capital markets, that there are trillions of dollars of equity ownership that are effectively owned by people who don’t own the company. It creates this complexity about where voting rights ought to be. Then you take that complexity and combine it with Larry Fink jumping on it to harness it.
You see an activist effort at Exxon for them to become a non-oil company or whatever other nonsense of the day is happening. My point is, when you say market solution to that problem, that’s different than those on the right that say, “We got to shut Larry Fink down,” or, “We got to stop BlackRock or something.” What’s a market solution to this market problem?
Vivek: This comes from a general philosophical view of the world and problems in the world that even goes beyond political philosophy, which is to say that if there’s a more parsimonious way to solve a problem, then you ought to take the more parsimonious route before you get to a more complicated route, because complicated solutions to problems like policy solutions all have unintended consequences. If you can solve a problem in the marketplace without resorting to law making, you’d rather solve the problem in the marketplace without resorting to law making.
What does that mean? The problem we’re solving is a pretty simple one. You called the Larry Fink problem. Let me define that. The Larry Fink problem, as you called it aptly, is that there’s a small group of asset managers, BlackRock among them, State Street among them, Vanguard, Invesco among them, who are using the capital of everyday citizens to vote their shares and to advocate for policies in corporate America’s boardrooms that don’t always advance the financial interests of those capital owners.
Even worse, that many of those capital owners actually disagree with. Worst of all, most of them don’t know that it’s happening. That’s a market failure. How do you solve that market failure through the market? Competition is a good place to start. What’s missing today, I think, is all of the large asset managers basically bend the knee to this new orthodoxy.
Climate-change policies implemented through the boardroom, scope three emissions caps at companies like Chevron. Net-zero pledges across the U.S. oil and gas sector. Modern diversity, equity, inclusion standards foisted on the U.S. tech industry and other sectors across the United States. These are proposals, agendas that are not principally motivated by creating value. They’re not agendas that most capital owners actually want to see advanced with their capital, yet it’s happening. I founded Strive, it’s a new firm, that aims to compete with firms like BlackRock and State Street and Vanguard, but with a different voice and vote.
The voice and vote that Strive brings to the table as a shareholder using clients’ capital to vote proxies and speak on their behalf, is to say that companies should focus exclusively on delivering excellent products and services to their customers for profit without regard to any other social or political agenda other than maximizing shareholder value, period. Now, we think that’s going to be good for capitalism. We also think it’s going to be good for democracy, but we’re doing it because that’s what’s good for clients, or at least the clients who [crosstalk].
David: Is the intent of how you get there active or passive? Are you using an active methodology or passive?
Vivek: We’ve started with passively managed funds. We’ve launched three funds. We launched our first fund in August, so this is very new. We’ve launched three funds that are exchange traded funds, passive exchange traded funds, index funds. One’s the U.S. energy index fund. The second is the Strive 500 Index Fund, an index fund of the 500 of the largest gap U.S. companies. Then most recently, we launched a U.S. semiconductor index fund. They all track an underlying index. We’re not picking individual stocks.
David: The underlying index is your intellectual trying to property, the methodology.
Vivek: Actually, the underlying index is provided by a company called Selective. Literally, the preparation and selection of the stocks is not what differentiates what we’re doing. What we’re doing is bringing a different voice and vote to the table as a shareholder. The way we vote proxies, the way we engage with management teams, that’s the difference. Why do we start that way? I wanted to isolate for that. I didn’t want to start with the wave of products that ask investors or capital allocators to say, “I agree with your voice and your vote, but I also like your stock selection. There’s too many different variables. Let’s isolate for this.”
That’s why we started with passive fund management. We expect to launch actively managed products as soon as next year. That’s part of building a large-scale asset manager. I’m a big believer in focus. You got to start somewhere. We decided to start with passive index funds, differentiating on voice and vote as expressed through proxy voting and shareholder engagement. What does shareholder engagement mean? You can see the letters that I’ve written, the public letters that I’ve written to them as a shareholder to the boards of directors of companies like Chevron, Apple, Disney to, hopefully, drive changes in corporate behavior using our voice as a shareholder. What we think of as a pro fiduciary voice that encourages them to get politics out to the boardroom and to go back to focusing exclusively on financial value creation.
David: Those of you that are long time listeners are well aware of my very dear friend who I’ve had on the podcast several times, Jerry Boyer, who has talked about this idea several times. What Vivek’s doing here is not saying we’re going to avoid the companies that are doing the things we don’t like or that are a little too wokie-woke in their 10Ks or put out a press release that says ESG a few too many times. All of which I’m a little sick of and all of which I’m a little tired of these companies, doing their virtue-signaling crap.
I don’t get any say in it when I’m not a shareholder. What Jerry has long advocated is to not retreat from the companies that make you mad but engage. What Vivek’s doing here with this Strive Asset Management is saying, we’re going to be shareholders in these companies but we’re going to bring voice and vote to the process, and theoretically, at some level of AUM, have leverage.
Vivek: That’s exactly right. I’m just reminded, my wife and I went, here in Columbus, to Hamilton last weekend at the musical. A famous little line attributed to Alexander Hamilton that you don’t get a say in the game unless you play in the game. That’s kind of our approach, engagement, not divest. Teach their own but I’m not a big fan of divestiture as a way of making a statement. I think making a statement is a pretty good way to make a statement, and you make a statement as a shareholder not for the sake of just making a statement, but for the sake of actually driving positive change.
David: From that thus far, you mention — It sounds like then there’s an energy, a sector focus, there’s a semiconductor, a sector focus, then there’s 500. Is it essentially S&P oriented at some waiting or is it different?
Vivek: It’s basically a market-cap-weighted index of the top 500 publicly traded U.S. companies. Almost every major asset manager has their version of a 500 fund. There’s the labels of them in terms of which index provider you got a license from [crosstalk].
David: It’s not exactly standard polls but it’s 500 and it is cap weighted so you end up with a–
Vivek: Yes, most definitely. If you look at the companies — you could look for yourself. I think you would look at those.
David: You ended up with a large weighting in Apple in Amazon and in Meta and all these names.
Vivek: Sure.
David: Let me ask you a question. Have you gotten feedback yet from companies that appreciate what you’re doing? Even if it’s off the record and you can’t say who, and if they’re on the record and you can say, that’s even better. I have had HR guys, Chief GCs, CFOs, board members come and say, “Thank you. We do believe that it is untrue that a profit motive in the boardroom drives prosperity and better moral and cultural and social results and that pretending otherwise is bad for markets, bad for the country, bad for democracy.” They can’t—
Vivek: I love closing with an optimistic note and so I’ll close with this one. I’ve actually been positively surprised by how many people in the C-suites, in these boardrooms, some of whom have found us independently and reached out, quietly want to do the thing that we’re effectively encouraging these companies to do. Even if you take the Chevron example. This one I’ve talked about publicly. It leaves you with an optimistic note as well. Mike Wirth, the CEO of Chevron, responded that night.
They proactively reached out to set up dinner with their CFO and another executive. He gave an interview in Bloomberg, the day after I sent the letter or maybe a couple days after I sent the letter where — I think it was approximately his words what he said — This is him speaking, “I’ve been trying to take a more balanced approach to the energy debate and engagements like this allow us to take a more balanced approach.”
I think that most people who work in the U.S. energy industry, do not work in the U.S. energy industry because they believe that their job contributes to global calamity. They believe they’re doing it because they advance human prosperity and that it’s okay to make a profit, because that’s how capitalism works, if you contribute to human prosperity through that system. That’s what they believe.
That’s not what their corporate statements believe. That’s not what their corporate statements say. That’s not what their corporate proclamations say. That’s what these ESG policies they’re forced to adopt say. That’s what most of them in their heart of hearts actually believe. I think in most companies, in most industries in the United States, I think we’re going to be surprised by how many of those executives and board members quietly want to go in the direction that we are using our shareholder voice and power to guide these companies to go.
I think that that should leave us optimistic about the fact that change could happen actually a lot more quickly than it might seem. You may not be turning super tankers 180 degrees. You might just be having to turn them 10 or 20 degrees. This is, I think, pretty encouraging and gets me going every day to think about how we can have the biggest positive impact we can. We’re doing it for clients to maximize financial value, but I hope that the positive externalities of that, to bring this conversation full circle, I think that too will have positive externalities, including for American capitalism, to restore the integrity of capital markets, and even for American democracy.
One of the things that Alexis de Tocqueville observed is you need a political space to bind people together across their partisan divisions. Well, guess what? That’s what the private sector provides, is not a red economy or a blue economy, but an economy that binds people together across partisan divisions if we can keep it apolitical. I hope that’s what we’re able to accomplish. I’m optimistic about it.
David: As wrap up, I think your point there is vital. I think it’s at the heart of this very podcast when our mission is to defend capital markets in a time where most on the left and even some on the right are failing to do so to defend the concept of free enterprise. I think your point there, from a cultural standpoint, it’s very Tocquevillian. We believe in markets in the sense that they not only out of the profit motive enhance prosperity and wealth creation, but they do drive a better cultural environment.
They encourage mutual cooperation. They enhance civility, peace, and other dynamics of good communities. This was very Tocquevillian, and it was Burkeian, and ultimately, I believe in the Christian tradition, it is very faithful, but regardless of one’s own faith background and even political, as you said, it’s not red or blue. This is the market economy that we built, the present prosperous milieu in which we live, and we are acting as if we didn’t.
I appreciate your efforts to fight back. I appreciate your voice. I’ll put into the show notes information on your asset management firm, what you guys are doing. I’d love to just stay in touch, continue working together as we continue towards this goal of being a voice of courage and conviction and the moment of insanity that we find ourselves.
Vivek: Well, thank you. Appreciate you having me, man. Look forward to continuing the dialogue.