The ESG Backlash

so stem I am the COVID dodger and still COVID free. Yeah, I'll give it to you. You're you're the chosen one, Okay. So Eric, we've long talked about e s G on the program Environmental Social Governance. It's it's a space that

you've expressed caution about a business week. We've done a lot of reporting about it, both on the positive and the negative, and we've got a couple of interesting guests today, the Vague Ramis Swami and Anson Fraris, who the VIK has written a book called Woke Inc. That came out last year. But the two of them have a new uh financial company called Strive that's coming out. How did you find out about them? Yeah, just through some people in the industry. I've got a conversation UM with the

VEC and um, this is a fascinating situation. This is a part of how I think the stock market and companies have become sort of a battleground for the cultural wars. And as you know, I my whole thing about E s G is not so much the virtue signaling, although there's a lot there, but more just I don't want investors to have a nasty surprise. Um. We all, that's our whole mission is just to avoid investors buying something

they don't realize they're buying. And I think this year we saw E s G. Clearly people are now seeing that it's overweight tech and underweight oil and it's underperforming. And that was That's been my main mission overall. Although I think in E s G s k is it becomes weird when you put your values into the stock market and everybody's values are different, So how do you standardize that. It's just a it's a really complicated space

full of inconsistencies. But then on the other side you've got black Rock and Vanguard now have seven percent ownership of the stock market, of all stocks, they have a lot of power concentrated in a small number of people. And Elon Musk was just on Twitter talking about this.

I'm gonna go into the details. He got a few things wrong, but one thing he did say, and I think he's right, is you know, have somebody like Larry Fink who probably owns point o one percent of all these stocks, yet he has voting power that is seven percent um, And so how much power are we going

to put. It's concentrated into certain people. And because they've come out a little bit on the E. S. G front um, there's been a little bit of a pushback, and today we're we're going to talk to somebody who has a plan to push back, this time on brilliants but g backlash the vic ants and woke neutrillians. Thank you, Thanks guys. Okay, can you explain what you're up to because this is gonna be kind of a surprise for a lot of people that you want to take on

black rock. Yeah. So, so thanks for the opportunity. And this is the beginning of a long journey. We see that eyes wide open. We're addressing what I see as a fiduciary breach in the asset management industry where the three largest asset managers in the world, and it's Black Rock, but it's State Street in Vanguard too. What they're doing today is they're using the money of everyday citizens of their clients to advocate for policies in corporate America that

most of their clients disapprove of. That is a fiduciary breach. It is not representing the best interests of their clients. And it's happening on a systematic scale. Where here's the problem. It's not happening at a small scale. These largest terms in the world have so much concentrated power that they're only representing one viewpoint in the boardroom. That that's also verging on what the Arizona Attorney General actually is recently

called the largest antitrust violation in history. Those were his words. Where if you if you run through this thought experiment, and you imagine the CEOs of Exxon and Shell and Conical, Phillips and Chevron getting together in a room and deciding, for example, that they wanted to cut gas production and gas prices spike as a result. That would be the stuff of movies, right you see handcuffs, you see antitrust violations,

price fixing allegations. Yet when the largest owners of those competing firms effectively mandate them to do the same thing, somehow we as a culture have come to celebrate that as E S G. And our mission is to restore the voice of what we see as the every day So it is in the actual client, the firefighter, the nurse, the doctor, the business owner whose money Black Rock is investing to say that we bring a different message to

Corporate America's boardrooms that those citizens and those clients actually want us to deliver, which is to pursue product excellence over politics. That's our message. Okay. So, and the plan essentially is to offer sort of replica E T f s that would you know, Engine number one is a firm that you almost remind me of the inverse of them. They're a firm that is small putting out. They have a beta product called vote. It's just basically the S and P or you know, market beta large cap something

like that, five basis points. It's basically like I VV, except they are going to vote in a very E. S G. Activist kind of way. So they're saying put your money with us and we'll go do this. You're almost the opposite saying we're going to do these replica products, but give us your money and we will vote. So the companies just act like themselves and will keep all the will separate church and state completely. Is that? Do

I have that right? And you're going to actually have a full line of products that are sort of, um, very similar to Black Rocks. But promise this new voting a way of a way of voting that is a little more I guess, um, not anti E s G,

but just more focused on profits. Yes, So, Eric, what We're entering the registration process soon and so I'm not going to talk specifically about product about product details here, but what I will say is that yes, we will be launching E T F S. Yes, as we said in the press release, the first one is coming the

third quarter of the year. But the key hallmark difference of our firm and everything that we do well, the key differentiator for our mission is bringing a different voice and vote to corporate America's boardrooms, bringing a vote, a pro excellence voice that is distinguished from the stakeholder capitalism voice represented by the Big Three, including Black Rock today, and no one is bringing that voice to the table. And it's not just focusing on profits, right, That's that's

a Melton freemnite phrasing of the problem. One of the things that I think shareholder capitalism as a philosophy lacked was any guidance to companies on how they are actually supposed to go about this task of maximizing value for shareholders.

And so we we phraise it. More precisely, we stand for this movement that we call excellence capitalism as a counterpart the stakeholder capitalism, where what excellence capitalism says is focus exclusively on delivering excellent products and services to your customers above all other agendas, including political and social agendas. And that's different than stakeholder capitalism, which says you're supposed to take into account twelve or twenty stakeholders at the

same time. Which stakeholders, you might ask, No one knows the answer. It seems to be what Larry Fink or the CEOs of Van Garden State Street decide on a given day. That's the problem we're addressing. Okay, so wait, excellence, how do you define excellence? Then? Yeah, and so this is gonna be you know, we're gonna have our own voting guidelines. We're gonna have our own statement of unpacking what excellence capitalism means. Yeah, I could do that here,

but we could go on for hours. But mission orientation, for example, is something that's very high on that list. Having a clear mission, staying true to that mission in a way that doesn't deviate from that mission. I'll give you an example. Excen's mission stated mission I'm gonna get this almost right. For the last number of years, for the last number of decades, has been to be a

successful oil and gas company. Black Rock, in their letters to Corporate America's CEOs, think about the presumption embedded in this. By the way, one asset manager writing an annual letter to America's CEO s just that this the hubrist break

into that as a separate conversation altogether. But in that letter he says, pursue your purpose, but in the same letter will tell them all of the ways in which effectively they need to change their purpose to not be an oil and gas company to meet these carbon emation caps, to meet the standards of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board. And our message to Exxon will be different if you're an oil company, be an excellent oil company. We will not tell you not to be an oil company. Be

an excellent oil company. And guess what. If there's a different company that's a solar company, our message to you will be equally equally powerful. Be an excellent solar company. We will not tell you not to be a solar company, but we will not tell oil companies not to be oil companies. Disney, let's just take Disney, a company that's been in the news recently. I think it bears mentioned. It's it's a top of mind for me. Frankly, I bring up Disney several times, even in the book that

I wrote last year. And you know, Disney is a company that I think has veered from its mission in the near term. It has veered from its mission of serving its customers, where it took political stances in recent weeks that survey data suggest over sixty percent of its

customers were alienated by. If we're a shareholder of Disney in the future, our message to Bob Chatpick would be clear three words, knock it off and focus on serving your customers today his top three shareholders, as I understand it, or black Rock State Street in Vanguard, they're not delivering that message. If anything, if you lead read through their language. If anything, they're delivering the opposite message to engage on political issues like the contingents ones that he's engaged in.

So so that gives you some sense of the difference of what our pro excellence message stands for. And so, Mum, I got a copy of your book late last week. I read through some of it. It's a UM, it's very well written. Um. And the stuff about you know, you're growing up and stuff I think was really interesting. Um. Some of the stuff you talk about here does resonate

with me a little bit. We've had we've had E S G Debate podcasts, probably three of them in the past couple of years, and sometimes I bring up this hipoc or the issue, which is that people will buy an E. S G. T F and they won't own Amazon and x On. Yet they're going to take five vacations that year. Uh, they're gonna still shop at Amazon. And this interesting. It's this interesting I guess difference between how someone acts in their own life and how they

sort of present themselves. And I think E. S G. T s almost in a way let them off the hook. And in your book you talk about how some of these CEO s um in the Goldman Sacks and some of these big companies, by by taking these virtuous stances, they're able to sort of like cover up or keep the light off of the things they do that might

not be be in conflict with that. You bring up State Street and the Fearless Girl, which is the statue for she and yet they had lawsuits about not paying female employees as much, and you go through several examples, and that's one of my other problems with E s G in general. I feel there and the and the virtue virtuousness of some of the eos is there is hypocrisy in almost every case UM, and I think that

does not pass. I think people sense that. UM. On the flip side, I think people want companies to to do good things too. So I don't know, I just want to throw that out there and see what you have to say about that. Yeah, I think your spot on.

And first of all, I want to congratulate you guys on actually opening up the E s G debate because I think I think that's one of the things that's been lacking, is just debate in the public square, small personal funny story of mine that might have subconsciously led me to this mission. A couple of years ago the Manhattan Institute might have been a year and a half ago. Manhattan Institute invited Larry Think and I to have an open debate on stakeholder capitalism. I tend to think that

debate is a good thing. Agree or not. Let's get the ideas out in the open, and we're a better society for it, I accepted, He declined. I think that's part of for me, the motivation of putting this to the market, to actually let the market decide and let the actual participants in that market be able to have

that debate in the marketplace of ideas. Now to your question hypocrisy, I think your spot on, and I think one of the things that I would encourage you to ask every E s G linked asset manager in the US is how they're implementing those same policies, say in China or via their Chinese funds. You take the Xon

example that we talked about before. I am willing to wager a bet that most of those projects are proceeding the ones that they're talking about dropping off the coast of Mozambique or elsewhere, which are expensive, expensive projects, right, I mean, like, just to stay with this for a second, this idea of excellence, Like you're gonna drop billions of dollars on a project that you might not see a return on that investment for years and in that time,

like you know, you mentioned solar before, the cost of solar has only come down, Like is that going to be the best use of excellence? Yeah? And and by the way, if you just take take a look at where we are today, if Exon had stuck to its plan of increasing oil production, with oil prices being what they are, there's no doubt that both x IN and the externalities for the U S would have been better off.

If anything, Russia's collecting higher oil and gas revenue with the recent oil and gas spike because of the lack of US reliance and the reliance of S companies and being able to self sustain on energy production. But the point I was gonna bring up in response to Eric's remark was, guess who gets to pick up those projects? Now? It's firms like petro China, and then guests who also

owns approximately seven percent of petro China. Some of the same E s G kings who are proclaiming that ex Son should actually get out of the oil and gas business, and so that hypocrisy E s G for the China. For me, that's not a hypocrisy that I think we

can abide. And I think we see that regularly with these firms doing what they need to do to be able to capture profit for themselves at their parent company by expanding into the Chinese market, but leaving even the US holders, their clients, of some of their U S

funds holding the bag as a consequence. And I think that those are conflicts of interests that run really, really deep, and the hypocrisy is something that it's really worth paying attention to here because in many cases, these firms aren't even doing what they say they're supposed to do. I don't even know what s G means today. Nine weeks ago, weapons manufacturers didn't count as E s G. Somebody decided nine weeks ago, in the last few weeks that should

the definition immediately changes. Our main objection is that it should not be a concentrated group of monarchs, really European style monarchs on American soil deciding what does and doesn't count as the moral thing to do. We should sort those questions out as citizens through free speech and open debate. But if you're using client capital do it you better darn well represent the interests of those clients in your shareholder advocacy efforts and in your shareholder voting. That's what

we're setting out to do. Well, you know, you brought up the idea of the shareholder capital, the stakeholder capital, that being I think that conversation has taken place in the public square, and where it landed was, you know what we have over indexed on on appeasing shareholders at the expense of stakeholders, right, and and that is you know, I think E. S. G sort of in the current form rose out of this way of like how do we attempt to validate some of these other stakeholders? Right?

So I'm curious, like, in your in your version of excellence here, how much stakeholder capitalism do you think is appropriate for any business to account for? Because this could come at the expensive employees. We're in a tight la labor market. We're seeing what how how powerful labor labor is all of a sudden, right, Yes, so I think you make some valid points. I think that it was in the aftermath of the two thousand eight financial crisis,

and I write about this extensively in the book. It was in the aftermath of the eight crisis that there was a demand for a new look for American capitalism. E. S G and stakeholder capitalism filled that void. However, I don't think that debate took place amongst the everyday citizens. It took place amongst a handful of c e O s and asset managers in cloistered corner offices, some of

whom approached that in very well intentioned ways. But even those well intentioned acts, I think I've had adverse consequences by using the actual client capital, the firefighters, the nurses of small business owners, as a tool to implement an agenda that most of those end users of capital disagree with. And that's created a new negative externality as a consequence, which is political division, which is rampant institutional mistrust, especially when they look at the hypocrisy of some of those

same actors. And I think that might be one of our greatest social crises of all, is that institutional mistrust, that political divide, that partisan divide, that we see tearing

our country apart. That's a big part of what we're setting out to fix by now taking this in the new decade in a new direction, to de politicize the private sector so that it's actually a place where we can come together in transacting in that private sector, whether or not we're black or white, whether or not we're Democrat or Republican, and a political private sector can actually solve that problem created by stakeholder capitalism by bringing us

all together again. And to answer your question very specifically, we have a theory of the case here. Okay, I'm not saying that this should be the only theory in the public square, but this is the theory that we believe in and that we want to represent, and we think a lot of clients agree with us too. Is how do you sort out the debate about who which stakeholders interests to prioritize. That's a tough question. I'm empathetic to that decision. I've been a CEO before for seven years.

I understand that that's a tough seat to be in. I had to make some of these decisions about what I said after the George Floyd incidents back I'm really empathetic to how you trade these factors off. Our theory at Strive and with our theory of excellence capitalism is that the number one stakeholder is the customer, and you focus exclusively on delivering excellency in products and services to your customer. Now, of course, do you need great employees

to be able to achieve that goal. Of course you do. That goes without saying, but maybe it bears bears mentioned too. But that's that's our theory, and we think that's more useful. We also think it's more unifying. Unifying companies with their customers is also something that actually we think is going to do a better job of unifying companies with their workers too. I'll tell you one of the things that we hear is the workers are demanding. This is something

that you'll frequently hear from CEOs who make proclamations. The workers, like the customers and citizens of this country, are not a monolithic body. In fact, they're often very representative of their customer base. The workers you hear on social media and on Twitter are not necessarily representative of the actual true workforce or the actual true customer base. And I think that's why when you look at this Twitter disconnect between how the Disney issue got adjudicated versus an actual

survey of Disney's customers. You get the results of where most of the citizens, customers, and workers really are. We think we're actually gonna be better representing those views through our mission at Strive. Yeah, it's interesting. So we actually had a note saying that, um, we encourage Vanguard and black Rock to democratize the voting. We had a note that said, not all your investors live in Williamsburg, UM.

And this because the loudest voices in E. S G and the media are in New York City and they tend to think similarly. And that's fine, but there this is a company that has investors all over the country. So we showed this huge map and they have thirty million investors. I think at least Vanguard does, UM and there's so I want to get your take on two things. One is just this idea of instead of doing what you're doing, what about if they were to somehow democratize

the voting process. Now a lot of the votes are boring and administrative and people could care less, but maybe they pull the investors to find out where their heads are at you know, just capital uh, which is Paul Tutor Jones company did this and the polling brings up some interesting things. It puts UM worker pay number one. Basically, all the top things are, hey, CEO should get paid less, workers should get paid more. Then like number five or

six is climate change stuff. And I guess I would be curious if your take on UM just what if these companies tomorrow said we're gonna pull and we're going to get the consciousness of our base and we're gonna vote accordingly. Would you like shut down immediately or you think that that wouldn't solve the problem? Well, look, I think that would be forward progress and I would applaud

it if it happened. I think that voting and focusing on the shareholder vote alone, though, is in some ways a fall slightening rod because most of the change that these firms are driving are not through proposals that necessarily make it to the ballot. It's through soft influence. It's what the corporate governance firms of these big three firms call engagement. That's the new word of the day, and I think that it's the combination of why we talk

about a voice and a vote. Here's the other thing about shareholder voting is one of the solutions that I contemplated, and I've been on this journey for two years really thinking about the right way to solve this problem. Was it to advocate for giving the vote to every shareholder.

That sounds elegant. The reality I found is that it's it's it's harder than it sounds, and it's less desirable than it sounds, because there could be tens of thousands of votes that a shareholder, an individual is burdened with over the course of years of holding a broad portfolio of et f and index funds and securities that they're just not going to be equipped to be able to

vote on well. I then came to the conclusions the right solution, and that's what we've set out on here and strive to bring to the table, is competition in the marketplace of ideas. And so the structural change that I think we're gonna see and we should see in

the asset management industry is a slightly different one. It's one were investment advisors and other fiduciaries in the middle, the intermediaries like state treasurers, like pension fund boards that look at capital allocation, and they look at attributes like

risk and diversification and sector exposure. They're going to have to add voting exposure and advocacy exposure too, and make sure that their clients and constituents views and the true diversity of those views are represented in the true diversity and diversification of that capital allocation too. And black Bart, black Rock, and Vanguard, let's say they did go to serving their clients, they have to keep in mind the clients are not the pension fund necessarily, they're the next client.

We view the client as the ultimate client, the citizen of the fiduciaries as intermediaries in that chain too, And so in some ways our critique here is not just directed or even principally directed at black Rocker Vangard, State Street, but to a system that allocates their client's capital to firms that are known to advocate in ways that the end user client absolutely disagrees with in most cases. So our focus is on how do we restore the voice of that end user client, not just the quote unquote

clients who are intermediaries in that system. And we think that this is going to be a structural change. We see in asset management where acid allocators registered investment advisors across the country. Pension fund board members, state treasurers are going to have to start thinking about not just risk and diversification and sector exposure, but voting an advocacy exposure to representing the true diversity of the underlying views of

the constituents capital that they represent. Okay, I think I have an understanding of how the vague plays into strives business plan, But Anson, what do you do? Yes to myself. So so it's a quick background vivicul I. We've known each other since high school, which is great, and we had very similar backgrounds by backgrounds in private equity at a school for a couple of years and to the

last eleven years Mark at Anahzzar Bush. And one of the things that really drew me to come back to work with him is I had the absolute privilege and honor of selling some of the most iconic American brands that were out there, things like bud Wise, which sold the American dream really in a bottle, things like Nikoloboltrup

which this work hard, play hard type of brand. We had a lot of craft brewers that's really the entrepreneur spirit of America, and I was really excited about taking that message to a broader audience and to more to more companies that frankly had maybe lost the way a little bit in terms of using their brands to advance through the universal type of principles. So for VIC and myself, Vivic is going to be doing a lot of the thought leadership, and for myself, I'm building the team kind

of on the day to day basis. So right now, we're based in Columbus, Ohio, we're fast growing, we have a lot of people that are very hungry to spread this message. But then also we're building the team. So it's putting a lot of the processes, putting a lot of the right controls, putting on a lot of the right compliance, but actually building the company to make sure this is a company that's gonna be built to last

for a hundred years. Because that's really what we're doing, to build the foundation and make sure that we're doing this the right way. Okay, so you've gotta have money to do that. What kind of backing do you have? Yeah, So we've started with our seed round of over twenty million dollars that included some of the backers that you guys are familiar with, that were, by the way, a politically diverse base of well known backers. That's just the seed round that more than well capitalized us to the

point of getting to our early product launches. But we expect to, you know, build as ants and said, well, a company, it's gonna last for a hundred years and then some and that's going to be a long journey and and and you know, I would not be surprised if that takes a lot more capital, a lot more human resources, a lot more of every resource along the way. Well, you had some big names, Peter Teele, Bill Ackman. How

did those conversations go? So a lot of these folks have become I would say, if not friends, allies in thinking about how to revive the soul of both American capitalism and democracy. I think a lot of the writing I've done in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, in my book, etcetera. Started an intellectual current that culminated

in the creation of this company. One of the things I'm proud of is how ideologically diverse, from in the partisan sentence, at least ideologically diverse, our base of backers is they're all unified in our mission. There's no diversity on that, but there's a lot of diversity on whether you identify as a Democratic, Republican or none of the above. And by the way, the same thing goes for our

employee base too. That's something I'm proud of too. Is our mission to restore a pro excellence voice in corporate America and to better represent the citizens of this country is something that rises above the otherwise partisan divides and currents. And you know, we were I was very important to me see that reflected in our investor base. It's very important for me to see that reflected in our employee base. True diversity is a big part of our mission, bringing

a true diversity of voices back to the table. And so yeah, there are some big names there, but more important than the big names to me is also the thoughtfulness and even the diversity of perspectives that they bring to this mission. Here's two things I think you're up against. Number one is apathy. I just wrote a book um about a lot of vanguard basically, and one section looks at voting and a lot of the advisers I I interviewed, they said, you know, none of my clients care how

vanguard votes and I don't even care. And I found that there was largely apathy. Not everybody, but the majority were apathetic, but they just wanted low fees and you know, returns to the market. That's one. Number Two. Black Rock has some of the most liquid, low cost famous popular e t f s and an army of wholesalers. Um, you know, Europe against apathy and black Rock, which are two massive hurdles. And what's your plan to sort of

break through and try to get through that with this message? Yeah? So I agree with you on the second. The second is a tall mountain to climb. I disagree with you respectfully on the first. And I think that, yes, I think there's a history of apathy with respect to shareholder voting of end user clients. I think something changed in the last five years. Right when black Rock achieved the scale that it did, it only started weighing in on the E and the S as opposed to the G.

The G is classical shareold rewarding, staggered board stuff. You're right, everyday citizens could care less, even many registered investment advisors could care less. But in the last five years something has changed, and the votes that they're casting on these environmental and so called social issues are actually at odds with their end user clients in a way that look. I've traveled the country over the last couple of years.

I have been shocked. I've been overwhelmed by how moved people are by the idea that their voice isn't represented, especially when you're using their money to do it. I will tell you, in the last forty eight hours, I have been overwhelmed by the flood. And it it has been nothing sort of a flood we've received since the Walster Journal first broke the story. It was a little earlier

than we expected that they broke the story. We I mean, including people from black Rock, from Vanguard, from State Street, from the world's largest asset managers telling us these are their words, not mine. They're fed up with the nonsense. I didn't expect to see that from the employee base. I expected to see it from the eventual end client base.

I think that we are on a cultural tidal wave where I think I think, if you think about talking about every day Americans across this country, you don't mess with two things. That that better, there's you don't mess with their kids. You saw a lot about that last year and what played out in the school boards in this country. But the thing is, you don't mess with their money, and you don't mess with their money to

weaponize back against them. The things that they're donating to, the organizations they're volunteering for, the place, the ways they're raising their children. You don't use their own money to implement policies through the back door, using corporate voting or corporate advocacy to do it. Once they wake up to that fact, this is a genie that you will not be able to put no one will be able to put back in the bottle. And your question of how we're going to be able to compete, look, there's a

vestiges of lobbying that favor the incumbent. Black Rock and other firms have been masterful at lobbying, at carving distribution channels, at being exclusionary in their business practices. As I said earlier, a lot of even Arizona attorney generals talked about antitrust violations for these large e SG link managers. But the one thing we have going for us is the desire of the everyday citizen to be heard and to make sure that their capital is not weaponized back against the

values that they hold most dear in their heart. And I think that's going to be the competitive advantage that matters most in the end. And if we're doing our jobs right, we're fixing a lot of those structural obstacles along the way. And if we fail to do that, it's not going to be for because of the failure of the demand. It's's going to be because we fail to do our job in fixing a broken system. That's the job we're taken on its strive. But the everyday

citizens voice is every there, every bit there. There's a damn waiting to break for them to actually be heard in our economy and our corporate boardrooms. Again. Wow, yeah, I mean it's really if I've been covering ets for fifteen nearly twenty years, and I remember when everything was like, oh whichevery e t F is cheaper, I'll pick that, it'd be It's gonna be interesting to see if now e t F s are now picked, because the cost will be all else equel, the holdings all else equel,

which is how they vote. Um, it's going to be fascinating to watch. This is a droll This is going to be uh, one really interesting experiment to see play out. Yeah, and so just to bring him back to E t F S, what are we gonna expect to see from you? So so at a high level, what you said is our our products are launching in the third quarter of the year as a firm, and we'll say more about

that at the right point in time. That as a firm, our mission is about restoring that everyday voice of the citizen in the boardroom, and we're gonna be launching this as a movement. Think about this as as movement marketing, not E T F marketing. Okay, the movement we're marketing

is excellence capitalism in the American economy. This new idea that the stakeholder you put first is the customer, and it is not just the apologetic pursuit of excellence, because I think that's a lot of what's behind this three letter achronymized capitalism. Pick your three letter acronym of choice.

It's about apologizing for the pursuit of excellence. The thing that's different about Strive is that we strive for excellence unapologetically, and we will encourage every major company in America to do the same thing. That isn't a company. That is a movement, and we're building that movement. And we think that not all, but most of the citizens of this

country are gonna behind us. And I have a message for those of us, for those who disagree with us too, It's that we respect their decisions to go in a different direction. It is okay for someone to say that they want to embrace the stakeholder capitalism agenda. There should be a choice for everyone. We just think we're building a choice that's the right choice for what we believe will be most Americans. And as Eric said, it's it's it's time will tell as we as we run this

experiment over the course of the next year. Okay, closing question that we always ask on trillions, what's your favorite ticker other than your own? You don't have one yet, but like, what's your favorite et F ticker? I like, actually, you know, I'm gonna give you uh answer here that maybe a little surprising. I like the name the O T E vote. I think that it stands for something powerful.

And you know what, we can all agree or disagree on underlying merits, but if we can all come back together and agree that it's important to represent the views of citizens in the boardroom. That's a mission I'm going to be behind, not one that I would have expected, but also expected expected and on it also at the same time, yes, exactly, yes, all right, the veg Anson thanks for joining us on Trillions. Thanks guys, thank you,

thanks for listening to Trillions. Until next time. You can find us on the Bloomberg terminal, Bloomberg dot com, Apple Podcast, Spotify, and wherever else you'd like to listen. We'd love to hear from you. We're on Twitter, I'm at Joel Webber Show. He's at Eric Baltunas. This episode of trans was produced by Magnus Hendrickson. Frincessica Levy is the head of Bloomberg Podcast by h