https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=1lHoOPgeOss
Hello everyone. I’m pleased to announce my new tour for 2024. Beginning in early February and running through June, Tammy and I and an assortment of special guests are going to visit 51 cities in the U.S. You can find out more information about this on my website jordanbpeterson.com as well as accessing all relevant ticketing information. I’m going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I’ve been working on. My forthcoming book out November 2024, We Who Wrestle with God. I’m looking forward to this. I’m thrilled to be able to do it again and I’ll be pleased to see all of you again soon. Bye bye. We have to worry about our air, land and water for sure. 10 billion people on the planet. There were 1 billion in 1800, 2 billion in 1900, 4 billion in 1985, 8 billion in 2022 and we’ll peek out at 10 billion by 2073 according to the Lancet. We’ve never had that circumstance before Jordan. We’re going to have to find ways to live differently, more inclusively and more sustainably while we continue to grow. Hello everyone. Today I have the privilege of talking to Mr. Terrence Keighley. Terry was a speaker at the recent art conference in London in the business stream. He’s an expert on so-called ESG investing of which he is quite skeptical, perhaps the world’s most foremost skeptic all things considered. We talked about the idea of ethical investing, exactly what that means, the perils, pitfalls and promises of pursuing so-called ethical investing strategies, investment strategies. We talked about the necessity of formulating a positive vision for the future, financial and otherwise, and delved into the details of the 2008 financial crisis and the role played in that by the blindness, willful and otherwise of people who were responsible for managing the world’s money. Welcome to the discussion. So Terry, let’s start this out with, I’d like to ask you some questions about your experience at ARC. Maybe you could tell everybody watching and listening what you experienced there and what the consequences for you generally were with regard to the conference as a whole before we turn our attention to the specific topics that you addressed in the panel that you participated in in London. Well, as you remember, Jordan, we met just this summer at Heather Higgins’ home and we ended up having a very interesting conversation on the role of business and finance in fashioning a better world. And you kindly extended an invitation to me to be part of an ESG panel. But what I didn’t realize in accepting that invitation was that I was going to be in the company of 1500 wonderful people from how many, 60 countries? I can’t remember. 72 countries. 72 countries with a very like mind. And that is how can we tell a better story and get humanity on a better path for the very severe challenges that lie in the decades ahead? And I have to say, through you and to all of the other organizers, I just have a profound sense of gratitude. I felt frankly like I was coming home. I live in a world where I have to be more careful with you about your pronouns and you have to be with me about my religious beliefs. And yet I found in London that I was with many like minded people who share a reverence for God and a reverence for humanity and a great desire to keep the planet on the right path, a sustainable path, but a path of growth and greater inclusivity. And the way you and Philippa and others brought together the themes of art, music, poetry, religion, as well as business themes, political themes. It was just a huge privilege for me in many ways. And I don’t know what the status is for many of your listeners, but it’s difficult to be a conservative in America today. You don’t really have a political party. You don’t really have a common home to go to. And at Arc in London, I felt I was with a global community of like believers, Jordan. And I came through very, very hopeful. Two weeks earlier, I had been at Mitt Romney’s E2 conference. I don’t know if you know, but Mitt Romney sponsors an annual event in Park City. E2 stands for enthusiasts and experts. And I felt similarly there that, you know, again, men and women of faith who have a very deep concern for humanity, a very deep concern for the trajectory that we’re on, but have solutions and ideas for a better way forward, for, as I wrote in that article for Real Clear Politics, a better story. Maybe I can share a very personal story already, which is that my niece who went to Stanford and graduated the 4.0 is one of many thousands, if not to say hundreds of thousands of individuals who are in their mid-20s who don’t want to have children, Jordan, don’t want to have children. Because how could you imagine bringing children into a world when on January 1st, 2050, the whole world’s going to blow up because of climate change? How could we be so thoughtless? And so to have a clear narrative, a much better narrative about how our future is not disastrous. Our future is up to us. We’re going to get the globe that we deserve. And quite candidly, with greater mindfulness, it’s going to be the greatest possible human achievement ever. And so that’s how I felt coming out of London and how I felt with the great program that you and your colleagues put together. Do you think, this takes us off our topic a bit, but I’m going to go there anyways. I mean, you stress two things that struck you when you were at the ARC conference, and that was that you were surrounded by people of faith. And you could read that religiously to some degree, but you could also read it as being surrounded by people who are willing to have the courage to put forward a positive vision of the future. Because that’s a form of faith too. And it’s very important for people who are watching and listening to understand that you can’t take a step into the future without faith. Because you can’t predict with anything approximating certainty what’s going to happen as you move forward. And so you have to adopt an attitude a priori that sees you through regardless of what happens. And you can adopt an attitude of corrosive cynicism and bitterness and pessimism and defend yourself that way. And there are times when that’s appropriate. But as a general stance towards the world, it tends to be counterproductive. And it’s also the case that what a fragmented or misplaced faith, religious faith even, seems to have as a consequence the development of something like an anti-human stance. As things that aren’t human, like nature itself, become worshipped instead of what’s properly put first and foremost. And there is a remarkable concordance, I would say, between the religious belief that each person is a divine locus of being, let’s say, and made in the image of God. And a pro-human stance. And one of the things that’s really terrified me about the environmentalist movement, which purports to be about the sanctity and security of the planet, is easily transformed into something that is clearly and demonstrably anti-human. Like I’ve watched in absolute open-mouthed amazement over the last 10 years as the Greens and the radical leftists, when push comes to shove, immediately demonstrate their willingness to sacrifice the poor to their planetary salvation delusions. And it’s so interesting, because in principle, the left has been the party that puts forward the demand for compassion towards the marginalized and the oppressed, economically and otherwise. But man, when you stack up the oppressed and marginalized against the hypothetical interests of the planet as such, the lefties will sacrifice the poor in a tenth of a second. And they do that, not least with their insistence that energy costs have to skyrocket and consumption come down, which to me is tantamount to saying, when consumption comes down, the poor starve. That’s a necessary consequence of decreased consumption. And anyone who thinks otherwise is either willfully blind or ignorant beyond any, what would you say, any morally acceptable degree. So, all right, so it was very- Let me take a moment to respond to that though, Jordan, because it’s absolutely clear that everyone implicitly or explicitly has a religious belief. For some people, their religious belief is that there is no religious belief. But that then becomes its own religion. That is to say, some form of massive moral relativism becomes what in fact is what they worshiped. I stood in awe of you speaking on the stage at a couple of times about Jacob’s Ladder and the Book of Job. And you know, Jordan, what’s fascinating about you, and I know this is your podcast, but priests, and I come from a Catholic background. I worked for Pope Francis. I co-chaired the Vatican Financial Reform Commission. I have quite a Catholic background. But priests cannot put people in pews. And yet you can fill the O2 arena with tens of thousands of young men to talk about the Book of Job and talk about Jacob’s Ladder and talk about the uphill struggle as being the moral struggle of our times. I just congratulate you and your colleagues, and I know you give a lot of credit to those around you as well, for just being able, Jordan, to enunciate this message in a way where it resonates to those who are genuinely lost, to those who are genuinely looking for a roadmap of how to have a better and more productive life. And I want to establish early on this call, I’m not a climate denier. I do believe that there are human influences that are very much putting our land, our air and our water at risk. By the way, the planet has never had 8 billion inhabitants before. We’re about to be 10 billion inhabitants. We’re going to have to find ways to behave much more sustainably. But I was looking through my book of notes from the art conference, and one of the things that I wrote down is it’s not the climate deniers. It’s the trade-off deniers. And even in La D’Auto Si, in the Papal Encyclical, written by Pope Francis on the climate crisis, he is very clear, Jordan, very clear, that there are trade-offs, that we need to have more prosperity. There are too many people that are left behind. The vast majority of human beings still use less electricity than one refrigerator uses in a year in the West. We need to find ways to improve access, improve availability, improve abundance of, and we’ve just finished this COP 28 conference this morning, as you know, and they’ve come off and finally been able to say, let’s phase out fossil fuels. But they’re very quick, right? They’re very quick to add that this must be done in a just way. Well, if it’s done in a just way, the only way we’re going to be able to get ourselves off of fossil fuels is by massively increasing nuclear, by massively increasing some other sources, and that is not plausible from now to 2050. We are simply going to be continuing to utilize this mix of fossil fuels that we’re dependent on for reasons of justice, for reasons of human need, for reasons of human necessity, and as you pointed out and others at the conference, if you look around the globe, the wealthiest countries are the ones that actually have the cleanest energy mix. So we must prioritize continued economic growth. This is the mantra that I come to in my book repeatedly. Yes, we need more economic growth, but it needs to be more inclusive, and it does need to be more sustainable. And I am a member of the church that says, let’s optimize between these various tradeoffs, growth and cleanliness and sustainability. There are tradeoffs, and we’re going to have to navigate them. It’s multivariable calculus. It’s not as easy as the only thing that matters is net zero by 2050. It’s not the only thing that matters. Many things matter. Well, that only thing that matters narrative, I’ve been thinking that through in some detail. And so part of what we’re facing on the pathological culture war front is oversimplification that occurs for two reasons. And the first reason is purely factual, is that there are human effects on the environment, some of which are deleterious. I was struck most particularly when investigating such effects on the effects of unrestricted coastal fishing on fish stocks, because I think that’s something we’ve done particularly disastrously. There’s a variety of problems like that. But the important thing is there’s a variety and that the solutions to those problems are actually, while they’re multi-dimensional and complex. And you can collapse all that into a single theory, which is that there’s one fundamental environmental emergency that’s climate related, and that can be attributed more or less solely to carbon dioxide. And so the temptation there is to take this overwhelming complexity on the factual side and reduce it to the kind of simple mantra that anyone can master really in about 15 minutes. And then you’re done with that whole problem. It’s like, well, no, the important thing is climate and the solution is carbon dioxide reduction. It’s like, now the benefit to you is that you don’t have to think anymore. But there’s an additional benefit to the oversimplification, which I think is even more nefarious. And it’s analogous to the oversimplification that’s part and parcel of the victim victimizer narrative. You know, if you view the world through a lens of power and you assume that every human relationship can be understood in terms of victim and victimizer, then all you have to do as a moral agent is claim your ally ship with the victim and you’ve solved your moral problem. The same thing applies on the environmental front is once you’ve established that carbon dioxide is the villain, then you can make yourself not only a moral agent, but something akin to the redeemer himself by merely proclaiming your, what would you say, your moral commitment to the goal of carbon dioxide reduction. And so you eliminate having to think in the factual world and you eliminate actually having to do all the work that accompanies genuine moral effort by swallowing in the environmentalist narrative. And then there’s even a darker part of it, as far as I’m concerned. And this is where things go from merely ignorant and blind to outright malevolent, which is that once you’ve identified the problem and the moral solution, you can also take aim at anyone who hypothetically stands in the way and you can demonize them. And as a consequence of your demonization, you can let the worst elements in your character have full reign in relationship to how you treat those people. And you certainly see that with the victim victimizer narrative that’s being played out with Hamas at the moment. The Jews are the victimizers, the Palestinians are the victims. And so that means the Jews are properly subject to whatever punishment you feel inclined to meet out. It’s the same with those who hypothetically are compromising the environment. And so it’s such an ugly mess, because it’s oversimplification factually, it’s ridiculous reductionism on the moral side. And then it’s the provision of a world that allows your desire for vengeful, resentment driven, hypothetical justice to have full reign over those you deem to be enemies of you and the planet. A very, very toxic combination. And so that’s the sort of thing. It’s that combination, I believe, that actually presents the apocalyptic danger and not whatever other problems, severe as they are, that might confront us on the environmental side. Well, I have to give again credit to the ARC organizers, because I think you had the most definitive speaker, Stephen Kuhnenn, talk about the science. And when I’m in, I just spoke at a climate symposium at Harvard two weeks ago, Jordan, and I always try to present facts calmly. There have been five mass extinction events on planet Earth in the last 500 million years. Every single one of them were caused by the planet cooling too quickly. That’s how we lost the dinosaurs, as you know. You can actually give a litany of statistics, some of which I’ve gotten from Bjorn Lomborg over the years from the Copenhagen think tank. The polar bear population is five times what it was 50 years ago. Total sea rise in the last 100 years has only been 23 centimeters. 23 centimeters. Meanwhile, a lot of these atolls in these island nations, they’ve grown 123 centimeters. Many of them are actually in better position than they were. We are having less violent storms. But I think that the Stephen Kuhnenn argument, which is really an important one, is yes, human beings have an impact. Yes, carbon dioxide matters. But it matters at such a small level relative to many other factors that are actually impacting the climate, many of which we don’t understand. So where I take that, and I try to not oversimplify the climate mess, but I always say that it’s a complicated two-part problem. One, it’s a collective action problem. That is to say, the greenhouse gases that are emitted by three countries only, China, India, and Russia, right now are two and a half times that emitted by the entire North American continent and European Union combined. So until India, China, and Russia are as serious about greenhouse gases as the rest of us are supposed to be, let’s not kid ourselves. We still have a greenhouse gas problem. And then the other one is the Laudato si Pope Francis. This is a multivariable calculus problem. What we have is people who are denying that there are trade-offs. Let’s recognize that there are trade-offs, and let’s have a calm, inclusive, fact-based conversation about what’s the best thing to do. I brought a prop today. This is a plastic bottle, right? It has water in it. Well, so I was telling the crew before we started, this bottle today, Jordan, has one-third the amount of plastic that it had in it three years ago. That’s not because of an ESG regulation. That’s because it’s cheaper to make it with less plastic, and you can do it with less plastic. This is the kind of progress that is being made because we are more mindful. Consumers are changing their investment decisions. We are seeing people that want to have greater sustainability. We can look at Patagonia, this company that now only does clothes that if you bring them back, they repair them for you. Patagonia’s products are flying off the shelves. People want to have a sustainable future. This is one of the reasons why we can be optimistic about humanity’s future. Jordan and I, I don’t downplay human influences. We have to worry about our air, land and water for sure. 10 billion people on the planet, there were 1 billion in 1800, 2 billion in 1900, 4 billion in 1985, 8 billion in 2022, and we’ll peak out at 10 billion by 2073, according to the Lancet. How are we all going to stay here on this planet together, allowing everyone to achieve their full potential? We’re going to have to live differently. We’re also going to have to live in an era of aging. In 2035, there will be more people over the age of 65 than under the age of 18. We’ve never had that circumstance before, Jordan. We’re going to have to find ways to live differently, more inclusively and more sustainably while we continue to grow. And all of that is possible. I wrote a book on it and I’m just so incredibly optimistic about humanity’s future. And the Art Conference really helped, for me, underscore a lot of those themes. Well, and so one of the things that we could derive from, let’s say, your discussion of Patagonia is that these new ways that we’re going to be required to find to live need to be offered to people as an invitation and not forced on them. And so here’s one of the things that happened in the aftermath of the Art Conference that I found extremely interesting. We had quite a range of speakers and quite a range of approach from speakers and political attitude. And what happened was that the speakers who were the most political and who were the most tendentious and accusatory, let’s say, in their approach produced the speeches that got by far the least attention. Who are you thinking of? Is that John Howard? Who are you thinking of? McCarthy. Okay, yeah, Kevin McCarthy. Particularly. And this isn’t an insult. He’s a politician. But, okay, but what happens, it’s so interesting to see, is because the talks that really offered a invitational metaphysical vision got exponentially more views in the aftermath of the Art Conference that’s, yeah, yeah. And so, but I think this is very much well worth noting is that, as you point out, people do understand quite broadly that we have to live in something approximating harmony with the broad natural environment. And people are interested in finding ways to do that. But if they’re forced or manipulated into doing that, which I think is, it tends to be the approach of organizations like the WEF and the UN and even the European Union to a large degree, if they’re forced to do that or connived into it, or even nudged into it, which is a very manipulative way of going about things, they’re going to resist, they’re going to fight back, and we’re not going to get anywhere. Whereas if people are invited and offered an alternative that they can undertake voluntarily, the probability that they’re going to first attend and then comply is extraordinarily high. Not comply, that’s not the right word, but participate. You see this in psychotherapy, it’s a psychotherapeutic truism, is that if you are setting up a situation where someone is pursuing positive behavioral change, they have to determine the direction of that change and come to develop and accept the strategies voluntarily, or all they do is kick back in all sorts of ways that are counterproductive and produce resistance. But it was so interesting to see that unfold at the ARC conference because the speakers who were visionary and invitational had by far the biggest effect. And they really set the tone for the conference too. And so we really tried to learn that lesson, right? This has to be an invitation. That could bring us to our discussion of ESGs. Do you want to outline for people watching? Let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, I just love to give an exclamation point to some of the points you’re making though, Jordan, because you worry about a top-down solution and there’s every reason for you to worry about top-down solutions. We see it right now, I don’t know if you know, but clean energy stocks this year are down 25%. While the stock market is up 25%. We’ve been forcing so much money into some clean energy solution, windmills off the coast of Maine and others that are simply not working out. Similarly, all these incentives to go buy electric vehicles are not working. So there’s General Motors, Ford, Stellantis, yes, they’re worried about a UAW strike, but they’re even more worried about the fact that California is mandating them to create electric vehicles that people are not buying, Jordan. People are not buying those cars. So what are we going to do? Have a bunch of EVs out in parking lots that nobody’s willing to buy and think that we’re solving our global climate crisis? We’re not. So there is this danger, as you say, as you enunciate, of top-down solutions that are not being met by bottom-up. And this is the beauty of the market. You know, Friedrich Hayek has a lot to say to us still. You know, I was thinking as I was preparing for the show this morning that God himself could not create a better system than the free markets. And the reason is that the free markets consist of billions and billions of decisions that are being made by consumers out of their own free will that are ultimately going to drive where we’re going to end up. And it’s so important to remember that consumers’ attitudes change. Consumers are going to want to have, for example, Louis Vuitton is right now designing all of these new luxury leather goods that are made out of mushrooms so that they can say this most, this next very luxurious bag is carbon negative. And I promise you, they’re going to sell a lot of those bags to people out there who really want to be able to say, look, I have a carbon negative bag. The beauty of the free markets governed by men and women of conscience who are mindful with their consumption patterns and investment patterns. And that’s why I say mindfulness. We’re going to get the world we deserve, either in this world or the next. Greater mindfulness will lead to greater outcomes. But we should let the markets work because they are better at delivering the future than anybody who’s guessing what the future will be. We’re going to have way too many EVs. Start off the new year with balance of nature, fruits and veggies. 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Plus get a free bottle of fiber and spice. That’s balanceofnature.com promo code Jordan for 35% off your first preferred order plus a free bottle of fiber and spice. Let’s delve into that a little bit. So the technical reason for that, so that everybody watching and listening understands, when people promote the free market, that can be an ideological promotion or it can be an observation of sheer computational power. So imagine that you’re trying to make pricing decisions and purchasing decisions, which you have to do all the time in this world when you’re trading one thing off against another. You could imagine either that you set up a system, just think about it computationally, you could set up a situation where there are literally millions or even billions of local computers gathering data about local circumstances, making trade-offs with regard to everything that’s available to them in terms of data in that local environment and then communicating in a network fashion to indicate trends and future probabilities. So what needs to be produced, for example, or you could replace that by a single computer or 10 of them that are trying to gather all of that information with no eyes on the ground, relying on their hypothetical ideological expertise. And that’s the central planning model. It’s like, why the hell would you exchange billions of distributed computers with sensory apparatus on the ground for a handful of centralized computers that can’t even in principle have access to the proper data? It’s a preposterous claim. It’s an absurd claim. And it’s not like there’s something magic about the free market except for the fact that it’s an optimized system of distributed computation. And there is no replacing that with centralized view. And you do get this problem that you just described. I mean, I think with regards to EVs, I’ve wondered this for a long time, electric vehicles is like, we know perfectly well, not least because of what happened to California when they announced that everybody couldn’t plug in their electric cars at the same time because the grid didn’t have the capacity. It’s like, I’ve been wondering, well, why are we being enjoined to buy electric cars when we don’t have the grid power to recharge them? Then I thought, oh, well, if the plan is actually like the C40 plan, which is the plan put forward by a consortium of large cities, if the plan is to reduce automobile ownership by 95% anyways, it doesn’t matter if you force people to buy electric cars that no one wants and that we won’t be able to recharge because the bloody plan is for people not to have cars at all. Anyway, that’s all right. And that’s such a terrible plan because cars, there’s very little difference between a car and freedom and wealth. It gives you such an unbelievable range of options at any given time, ridiculously efficient use of private time. And anybody who objects to that, I think is immediately to be viewed with extreme suspicion, especially if they’re trying to implement top-down compulsory controls. One of our principles at Arc is no policy that requires compulsion is optimized. There’s a mistake in it somewhere. That gets tricky when you’re dealing with criminals because sometimes people are in situations where they won’t behave socially or in a psychologically, in a manner that reflects psychological integrity without compulsion. But most of the time, the rule of thumb has to be, if I have to force you to do something, I’m putting forward the proposition improperly, at minimum improperly. Well, as you’re speaking, I’ll talk about a couple of different books today if I’m allowed to, but one that really did reach me, it was written by Ragh Rajan, who’s a professor of finance at University of Chicago, and it’s called The Third Pillar. And what the thesis that Ragh Rajan has, he’s also the former chief economist of the IMF and former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, but Jordan, what his thesis is, is that societies thrive when they have the three primary pillars of societal good in balance. One is the markets. If you don’t have markets, you’re not driving prosperity. The second is the state. You need good governments. I don’t know about you, but I like getting my driver’s license on time. I like it when the stoplights actually work. We need good government. The government that governs least is not necessarily the one that governs best, and I think Canada is an example of that. But the third one is actually community or civic society. And what the thesis that Ragh Rajan puts out, I think, very effectively, is that if you have societies that have either one of those out of kilter, where markets are too strong, then we run into environmental problems or we run into issues of distribution. We do have externalities, negative externalities in markets that need to be corrected by proper government. But the role of community and the role of NGOs and the role of the volunteer sector, the role of faith in a community, the role is equally important. If societies have any one of those missing, they are not in optimal balance. They tend towards crony capitalism, which is a topic that Paul Marshall spoke about, as you know, at ARC, or they tend towards inefficiencies. You have to have all three. We need markets, we need an optimal state, and we need the community thriving NGO sector, thrive at non-for-profits, which we do have in the United States. In the United States, we could use slightly better governments. This is where we’re falling down, quite candidly. I bring up Paul Marshall. I wrote two articles after the ARC conference, and one was inspired by Paul Marshall, but not in the way that he thinks. He actually spoke from the stage about the negative impact of Uber, as if it had demolished the lives of many livery drivers, which it has. It has interrupted the lives of many livery drivers. But Jordan, it has vastly expanded the market for livery driving around the world. There have been 4.2 billion Uber rides since it was first, and the number of markets, there are 5.5 million Uber drivers that turn on and off when they want to go to work. This was a wonderful market innovation, but it’s what EF Schumacher calls creative destruction. Markets need to be destructive, just as they need to be creative in order to maintain that efficiency. There’s going to be disruptions that take place. Uber is a good disruption. I was talking to Philippa about this afterwards. She said, well, it helps if you’re Paul Marshall because you always have a driver waiting for you. Those schmucks like me that come to Phoenix and need to find a way to get in from the airport, I’d rather just do it on my Uber app. Well, the advantage to the market, too, is that it allows those disruptive forces to operate at a comparatively micro level. I mean, there’s still radical transformations in market economies, but the problem with a centralized economy is that they’re so stodgy and blind that adaptation only occurs in catastrophic fits. Whereas in a dynamic market, there can be local small revolutions that are continuous. The way of conceptualizing it technically is that the environment transforms at a rate that slightly exceeds our adaptation. There’s always unexpected things happening as a consequence of the action of reality itself. Then we have to fight to keep up. We’re always a little slow on the uptake. The adaptation process can be disruptive, but the wider the distribution of responsibility for adaptation, the larger variety of revolutionary adaptations that can be on offer and the smaller and more matched they are to the environmental transformation they can be. It is frightening when you see a novel technological move forward like Uber, which does disrupt industries and cause a certain number of people grief, but that’s much better than refusing to adapt to the necessity for change and then having to involuntarily undergo a cataclysmic form of readaptation. I mean, that’s really what happened when the Soviet Union collapsed. It was that so many things had gone wrong that the only solution was that the whole system had to die. Well, that’s the obvious evidence of market failure. When huge things die, small things didn’t die fast enough. That’s really the rule of thumb. I think there’s so many interesting lessons too right now, Jordan, from AI and from the effective altruism movement. Many things that we can learn about the governance issues that just came out of OpenAI and I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole, but a lot of them, again, I think highlight the principle points we’ve been making. Markets are important. Let capital move freely. Let there be innovation. As you know, the whole idea between OpenAI was to have an open source platform that everyone was contributing to, make it altruistic so that it could be done in a good way, and then they found out, well, we still need billions of dollars. How are we going to raise the billions of dollars to create the computational capacity that AI and chat GBT really requires? They knew they had to have that in a for-profit arm. If they did not have that in a for-profit arm, they would not have found the capital. Important lessons, I think, yes, of course, we need to be mindful, but there’s no way to build the world that we want to build where the needs and aspirations of the trillions of people yet to come, because by the way, if you actually look at where homo sapiens are in the normal course, there are trillions of human beings yet to be born. This is the William McAllister arguments that you probably, what we owe the future, a famous philosopher from Oxford University that you need to have on your show if you haven’t had him on yet. And this is something that the Pope speaks about very, very eloquently also in Laudato Si, which is that we do have, in many ways, Jordan, we do have responsibilities to future generations. And we need to think, how often do you think about your grandchildren? How often do you think about your grandchildren’s grandchildren? Do you care about them? Do you love them? Is the life of your great, great, great, great grandchild any less important than your life? No, it’s not. So let’s go about this process of thinking how it is that we’re going to create this sustainable planet. And I spent a little bit of time talking about the broad philosophy of Ragrajan, but where I have spent a great deal of my life and work is in Catholic social teaching. And I’d love to come to Catholic social teaching at some point on this podcast, because as I say, it happens to be extraordinarily resident and pertinent for the times we live in, not because it’s Catholic, it just happens to be Catholic. It’s actually about 150 years old. And I think the broad principles of human dignity, subsidiarity, which you spoke about very eloquently from the stage, responsibility, personal responsibility, and then solidarity, the third principle of Catholic social teaching, which is that we are our brothers and sisters keepers. There are too many people, Jordan, that cannot take care of themselves. And it is the responsibility of the strong to help the weak. It is the responsibility for those of us who have more capacities and more capabilities to give that hand up to those who do not have it. That is Catholic social teaching. And what’s interesting is that subsidiarity argument, you know, turns out the Declaration of Independence is right. All men and women are created equal. They’re obviously in the image of God, and they are entitled to a life of liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their own fulfillment. But the simple fact of the matter is that that cannot be achieved without people taking personal responsibility and families taking responsibilities for their own families and then communities beyond that. That is how the system’s going to work. Subsidiarity and solidarity, though, are going to live in constant tension. We’re never going to have them resolved. There’s always going to be somebody else who needs to be helped. There’s always going to be somebody else who needs to have more responsibility. And that is that struggle uphill that you spoke so eloquently about time and again at AHRQ. Starting a business can be tough, especially knowing how to run your online storefront. Thanks to Shopify, it’s easier than ever. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. 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One out of every two human beings on the planet struggled to find a meal, struggled to find where they were going to live, would they have any heat overnight. That statistic today is one out of 10. And of course that transpired at a time when population growth was massive. Along with all of this material and economic abundance has come what always happens, greater social, educational and health advancements. So we’ve had a circumstance where life expectancy has expanded by 22% over that same period. Infant mortality dropped from 81 out of every 100,000 births to 25. So infant mortality fell 70%. Literacy rates massively improved. What happens when prosperity grows is other aspects of human existence improve as well. So what happened then, and I’m coming to ESG, I’m sorry for the prelude, but it’s necessary to have, there is no ESG without this material abundance. In 1999 and 2000, the United Nations convened the greatest collection of political leaders in history. And that collection included kings and prime ministers and they designed the millennial development goals. Do you remember the millennial development goals? The 2000. And the millennial development goals was let’s get rid of poverty completely. Let’s have a K to 12 universal education around the globe. Things that were unfathomable 50 years earlier. And let’s find a way to make sure that there is greater political freedoms, broadly speaking. What ended up happening though is continued progress was being made on those, Jordan, until about 2005 when Kofi Annan, who was the secretary general of the United Nations, convened a group of financiers. And he said, listen, I want there to be a group of financiers that come up with investment principles that would help promote these United Nations sustainable development goals and millennial development goals. Why don’t you, very smart people, 70 of them he picked, go in a room and come back and tell me what those principles for responsible investing are. This is where ESG came from. ESG emerged in 2005 with Kofi Annan ringing the bell at this New York Stock Exchange, announcing these investment principles. What were these investment principles? They were a series of principles relating to environmental, social, and governance factors that this group of financiers had assessed could present material risks. Material risks, if we don’t handle these things well enough, they will lead to financial failure. Stocks will go down. So ESG actually came out of the United Nations Declaration for Human Rights, the millennial sustainable and the millennial development goals and the sustainable development goals, and the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investing that first went public in 2005. Today, there are more than 6,000 signatories to the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment Jordan. Those institutions collectively manage 120 trillion in assets. That is to say, they manage one half of all the institutional assets that are available for investment in the world. What are these people doing? Well, they've come up with a series of products and ideas and corporate resolutions and any number of things that are intended to highlight various elements of these environmental, social, and governance issues of pertinence to them. So, you know, we tell the Bud Light story, right? Someone decided that it was very important for Bud Light to expand its market share. They need to be expanding in a DEI-sensitive way. What do they do? They have a commercial that was misconceived. It pissed off two-thirds of the people who were actually drinking their beer and didn't result in any... So, the ESG rules, as they've actually been applied, have had a very series of unintended consequences that haven't always been... Well, that have been deleterious. My principal criticism, though, of ESG as a financier and the work that I write about in the book and the reason why I believe ESG has neither done well nor much good is what I say. That was a Wall Street Journal op-ed that I wrote that was read 4.2 million times. It hasn't done well because in actual practice, Jordan, what people have done is here's these ESG rules. In the S&P 500, which, of course, is comprised of ostensibly the 500 best companies in the United States, typically what the ESG enthusiasts do is they take out 400 of those and only invest in 100 of the remaining stocks. In actual practice, that means they were no longer investing in oil and gas. They were no longer investing in what they regarded as non-virtuous companies. Well, this is just so silly. This is absolutely silly. The idea of you not owning Exxon Mobil is going to somehow change the temperature of the earth is just the silliest thing imaginable. In fact, it has the entire thesis on its head. There's been this concept of socially responsible investing that has been around for centuries, for centuries, many people avoided investing in the slave trade. Many people, religious groups, sounded absolutely abhorrent. But the slave trade continued, didn't it? Why? It continued because one quarter of humanity was still willing to invest in it. It turned out, as abhorrent as it was, it was incredibly lucrative. The same thing is true in modern society. There have been a number of investors, most likely religiously based, that have avoided what are called sin stocks. The sin stocks are in four areas, gambling, alcohol, tobacco, and firearms. So many religiously organized religious organizations have not invested in these words. But has that stopped smoking? Has that stopped people drinking? Has that stopped people from buying a firearm? Has that stopped people from gambling? Of course it hasn't. So the ESG movement, investment movement, is based on the same principle of if I don't invest in Exxon Mobil, somehow the temperature of the earth is going to improve. It's pure silliness, Jordan. It's pure silliness. So I gave quite an exposition there where I wanted to come out is that my criticism of the ESG as an investment movement is not that it shouldn't be trying to solve the problems of our times, but that it hasn't. It's done exactly the opposite of what needs to be done. And I'm a big proponent of impact investing, and I can give you literally a hundred examples, affordable housing, DEI opportunities for female minority entrepreneurs that genuinely address some of these issues of inclusivity and sustainability. There are ways to invest that genuinely takes carbon out of the air. You can do that with a green bond fund, but you cannot do it with these ESG equity funds. So let me ask you what might be a more fundamental question. I mean, it seems to me that Anand's recommendations were ill-founded a priori. And let me walk through this and tell me what you think about it. So because he's making the assumption that there is already irresponsible investing that can be rectified by conscious attention to a set of ethical principles. And see, this strikes me as an ill-posed problem because if you have any sense and you're investing, you invest as wisely as you possibly can. And the reason you'd all things considered, and the reason you do that is because, well, you don't want to lose your money, your hard-earned money. And so you're already very much motivated to invest wisely. Now, you could say, well, that would open the door to people making a short-term killing at other people's expense. And maybe that's what happens with so-called sin investing. But my sense is that, well, you can get away with making a short-term investment at other people's expense once or twice, but you're going to get hammered for it sooner or later. And so Anand's notion was predicated on the idea that there was a way of imposing an a priori ethical framework on the problem of investment that would produce investments that would somehow do better, which strikes me as highly improbable. And that would actually increase, what would you say, ethical behavior as such. I would say that people are already as motivated to invest wisely as they possibly can be if they're investing their own money or money they take stewardship of. And the imposition of some top-down ideological framework is only going to compromise the investment strategy. And not only the investment strategy, but also the market strategy of companies. I mean, look, we've seen, well, Budweiser is a great example of an absolute bloody catastrophe. Target put their neck in the same noose. I think Disney's stock is down something like 50% because they fired everybody who could actually tell a story and brought in people who did nothing but produce second-rate, ideologically oriented narratives of the sort that flew in the face of what their customers demanded and undermined their entire brand. And so how deep do you think the conflict between the ESG attitude and the fundamental free market principles of responsible investing actually runs? Because it looks to me that Anand took what was essentially a socialist or even a communist view, which is that, well, the market itself can't be trusted. And it's necessary to generate these a priori ideological frameworks, because that would direct everything much more effectively than it would be otherwise in a, you know, honest free market economy. The whole thing to me just strikes. First of all, there's no bloody way you're going to beat the market with a strategy like that. Nobody can beat the market, not continuously, because they just have all the money. So there is this problem that it doesn't work in practice. But I also think there's a problem that it doesn't work in principle, that it's the wrong way to go about it. It is certainly the wrong way to go about it. So much so that I have this article that I just shared with you. It's coming out next week with AI that I co-authored with Senator Phil Graham, where we talk, we call for the end of ESG. It's an irredeemable project at this stage, Jordan, because it is, as you say, falsely premised. And if something is falsely premised from the beginning, there's no way to adjust it to make it work. And you've said something that's very, very wise. And, you know, Warren Buffett, Charlie Mungo recently passed away. They've lived their lives at according to this maxim. It is extremely difficult to beat the S&P 500. You can own it for one basis point. That's what most people should do. But I'm someone, you know, and my career has been about advising people what to do with their assets, their investments. And I'm somebody who deeply believes, Jordan, that if you're willing to make an investment that's going to have a lower return, but it's going to result in, I don't, you know, affordable housing, or it's going to bring clean water to a village in Rwanda, or it's going to, and you're willing to take a lower return, my God, go at it. And a 51 trillion in wealth is about to be passed from the current generation of billionaires to their, let’s say, less hard working children. And that particular group of individuals are very mindful for double bottom lines. That is to say, they do want their money to do well and to do good. And an important part of my new business and all the work that I’m doing is to provide investors who have this double bottom line mindset that want to do well and do good, that are somehow willing to take a lower return as long as they somehow benefit some corner of society. Well, there’s going to be a lot of capital that’s looking to do that. And that’s going to be an important part of what creates this inclusive, sustainable growth world that we’re going to need. That’s going to be this important part of that community, that community, you know, we said, it’s the market, it’s the state and community that have to work together. And we’re going to need that community to be part of the solution. So let me ask you a question about that. I mean, I certainly understand the direction that you’re trying to aim a certain percentage of investors in. And I can imagine that that would also be a small percent, a very small percent. Well, and maybe a percent of someone’s portfolio. But I’m also wondering, you know, like one of the principles that I’ve abided by when attempting to produce even products that are of particular benefit to people psychologically, like I have a suite of psychological interventions online that I’ve been marketing to people for about two and a half decades. I mean, one of the principles that we established, my business partners and I, before we created these interventions, was that not only did they have to be useful, to do good, not only did they have to be of demonstrable good, but they also had to do competitively well. So if I said, well, maybe, so is it too much to ask for people, for example, who are providing affordable housing, let’s say, that they do it in such a canny manner that they also equal or beat what you might expect for standard market returns? And couldn’t you use that as an indication of the quality of their offering? Or do you feel that there are situations where placing both constraints on people, you know, you have to do good and you have to do well, makes movement forward too difficult? Well, let me give some numbers to frame the challenge and then answer your question directly. So as you probably remember, the name of my company is 1.6. 1.6% of institutional assets is 2 million in savings. How did I do that? You did it by not bothering with it. You just let it go. Be mindful about your savings patterns. Be mindful about your investment patterns. If you are so wealthy and you have so much time and you want to go for double bottom line investing, or you have a desire to have your money do well and do good, well, that’s fine too. But it’s still going to require mindfulness. It’s still going to require deep care. It’s still going to require discernment because there’s no easy way to… Just like you have to be careful about your physical health, you have to be careful about your financial health. Yeah. Well, I studied for a while the phenomenon of money managers because I was interested in investigating the possibility that there were statistical ways of predicting market behavior. And I basically concluded not that this was unique to me, but at least to my own satisfaction, that that was actually a technically impossible outcome to perform, except in very rare cases. And so that your best bet, and this is the advice that you gave earlier, is if you’re… Especially if you’re the average investor, is to buy something like an index fund with a low manager fee and just leave it the hell alone because you’re not going to beat that. Let me give you a statistic for that. Only one out of five managers beats the S&P 500 over a five-year period. Only one out of 10 over a 10-year period. And they aren’t the same manager. They aren’t the same manager. Right. Precisely. So the idea that somehow you’re smart enough, oh, I’m going to buy Netflix and Google and hang on to it and see what I can… It’s nuts. You cannot be smarter than the market. Something so easy. You can buy it for one basis point at Vanguard, Fidelity, any number of places, and just put it in place and forget it. The older you get, start buying some bonds and having an income stream. And then, but more importantly, volunteer your time, look after your community, be involved with those in need around you, be there for your brothers and sisters, your grandkids, and others. That’s where you’re going to want to spend your time. Right. Right. Right. Now, you said that Larry Fink wrote the intro to your book. And that’s interesting because Larry Fink is probably the world’s most famous proponent of the ESG strategy. And so how did that come about? And, well, I presume you obviously must know Larry. And what does he think of your ideas? And why did he write the foreword to your book? Well, how many people are listening to this podcast, Jordan, because this is quite a personal story? Oh, somewhere between 350,000 and a million. I’m going to tell the story. I’m going to tell the story. It’s a story worth telling. And it reflects very well on Larry Fink and my colleagues at BlackRock. So I was a very senior executive BlackRock. I went to the group executive board. I said, I wanted to write this book on ESG. I didn’t know where it was going to take me, Jordan. ESG was a relatively new thing. I wanted to spend time. I didn’t have my ideas so thoroughly. As I went into the book and as I started studying all these ESG ratings and the fact that they’re completely uncorrelated, and frankly, they’re a bunch of nonsense, they made no sense, I ended up becoming more critical of what was coming out on ESG. And I’m still submitting all of these chapters to my colleagues and Columbia University Press, Columbia is my publisher. And I’m thinking that I’m, you know, hunky dory on my way. Well, it turns out when the book finished, my senior executives at BlackRock said, you can’t publish this book. This book is a little too racy. I said, well, I’m sorry. I think that we agreed that we would. Well, go speak to the boss. So I went to speak to Larry and I said, Larry, Larry goes, and he said, this is very simple. I have a simple solution. I’ll write the forward to the book. And what does Larry write in the forward to the book? I commend it to you. He’s very complimentary of me. He’s very complimentary of the work that I do the book, but says, I don’t agree with everything Terry says. So very simple. Very, very simple. Get out of jail. And Larry, to his great credit, and I have nothing but great things to say about Larry Fink, he is a close friend, always welcomed the debate. Today, Larry Fink does not use the term ESG. He has stricken it from his vocabulary because he’s decided it is overly politicized and it means the wrong thing. So I would say I probably get some credit for that. Larry Fink’s not using ESG, one down, four billion to go. Let’s focus on impact investing. Let’s focus on true double bottom line. And let’s focus on making sure that asset owners, those who are investors, get what they really want. I mean, I advise the Pope on finances. I’ve advised the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds. I always only asked one question, Jordan. What are you trying to do? If I were your financial advisor, I would do the same thing. What are you, Jordan Peterson, trying to do? What are your goals? Lay it out. Give me your plan. What are you trying to do? And then it is my fiduciary duty to make sure that I devise the most cost-effective, efficient, and highest probability portfolio solution that will actually achieve what your goals are. That’s what being a fiduciary means. And I can say with my hand on my heart that in the 13 years that I was at BlackRock, I never did anything but that. I never sold a single ESG fund when I was at BlackRock and I did more than $130 trillion worth of transactions, which is a lot of transactions, and never once sold an ESG fund because they were never the right solution. They were never the right solution. You said that you had worked with Pope Francis and I’ve been struck, and I would say primarily negatively, by what I’ve seen as his emphasis on climate responsibility, let’s say. My sense is that the proper responsibility of the church is the salvation of individual souls and that that sort of thing is contentious and political enough so that it’s actually not the proper business of the church. Now, I don’t know much about Pope Francis and apart from that particular criticism, I would say, and the small knowledge that was required to generate it, I’m quite ignorant. Would you tell me and our viewers what your experience was in working with Pope Francis on such ideas? I will do so with joy. I always say, Jordan, that my Catholic church has the heart of Pope Francis, the brains of Benedict XVI, and the fortitude of John Paul II, and it turns out those three individuals didn’t agree on a lot. Pope Francis is someone who has definitely veered into a number of economic and social topics that I do not personally agree with, but having been a Catholic all 64 years of my life, I note that the church’s teachings evolve. Let me tell you, though, a personal story about Pope Francis. So during the time that I was working on this Vatican Financial Reform Commission, I lived in the exact same residence where he lived, which is Santa Marta, at the Vatican City State, and every morning I was allowed to go to Mass, and one morning I was at Mass, and there was just a horrible smell, and I couldn’t figure out what this horrible smell was. This is a fairly curated audience, and I look over my right shoulder and I see there’s a homeless guy with two dogs right behind me, and I’m thinking to myself, well, security was a little lax today, not sure how this happened. So we go out to breakfast, and breakfast at Santa Marta is served cafeteria style, so the pope is helping himself to eggs just as you’re leaning over for a piece of bacon, and you’re smiling with one another, and it’s a very cordial affair. But I sit down, I said, you know, there were some people in the back of the chapel this morning, does anybody know what’s going on? Oh yeah, you don’t know? No, I don’t know. I said, well, yes. Every night, Pope Francis sends one of his emissaries out to the bridges in Rome and finds homeless people and invites them to come to Mass the next morning. They usually do that between 11 and 1 o’clock in the morning, 11 p.m. or 1 o’clock in the morning, and this particular individual said, well, I’d like to come, but I can’t because I have two dogs, and they said, you’re allowed to bring the dogs. So this person was the personal invitee of Pope Francis to come and hear the word of the Lord. By the way, he was also given a shower, a shampoo, and a shave at the end of it. Pope Francis instituted in the Vatican City State a free barbershop for anybody in Rome who wants to come in and get cleaned up. That’s paid for by the Vatican. So I think this is a story that I hope, you know, reveals the heart of Pope Francis, who is a good man. I don’t know about you, Jordan, but being in charge of 1.2 billion souls on the planet, that’s one hell of a burden. Being in charge of an organization that is as political as the church is, with as wide views politically as you can possibly imagine, from liberation theologists who are full-blown Marxists to some of the most conservative people on the planet, all of those people are Catholics under one roof. To actually try to be the shepherd for that flock is not a task that I envy. And I’ll also just point out that there are only three monarchies left on the planet. Pope Francis is one of them, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia is another, and the Sultan of Brunei. What these three guys say goes in their country. Whatever they do, that’s the law. And so the heavy is the head that bears the crown, heavy is the head that bears the pontiff hat. And my respect for Pope Francis and what he’s trying to do is eternal. I respectfully disagree with him on things, but the Catholic church, like every church, like any listener or believer, it’s the community of believers that ultimately make that community. There is such a thing as the congregation of the laity. The laity within the Catholic church has a lot to say. And those of us who have disagreements with church, I’m writing this article with Erica Kasselow right now on the issue of children. Erica, by the way, another wonderful speaker at the art conference in London, somebody I had dinner with two nights ago with her husband. And we believe that we can push the church a little bit further. We should not have unwanted children, Jordan. We should not bring bringing people into this world that we cannot properly take care of. If that involves some form of birth control, will so be it. And so we’re going to have to have more of a grownup conversation inspired by the teachings of Jesus, inspired by the teachings of the church that takes into account that we live in this new world of 10 billion people, 10 billion people trying to make this little ball of mud and water and a little sliver of air on top of it work for centuries and centuries to come. Because like Abraham, we have to care about our great, great, great, great grandchildren. Well, you know, that’s a pretty good place to end. And it’s perfectly timed. So I think we’ll take that opportunity to do exactly that. I’m going to reiterate for the viewers and listeners, the websites that you described, the first one was www.1.6.com with one numeric and six written out. I’ve got that right, I hope. Point is also written out. One is numeric point is written out P O I N T S I X dot com. Okay, okay. And you you talked about the solutions form there. You also mentioned a site in the UK, make it click.com. If I got that right, we’ll put all this in the description of the video. Speaker notes. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. So, um, well, thank you very much for the discussion today. I cleared up a lot of things for me. I was very particularly curious about your comments about Larry Fink. And I’m very glad to hear that he had the largeness of mind of spirit, let’s say to, to enthusiastically promote your book, despite the fact that you had substantive disagreements with him. I thought you did a remarkable job of being even handed in your discussion of the ESG movement, pointing out that, you know, it’s a mistake to assume that the motivations that gave rise to the to the movement were all to be treated with cynicism. Exactly. Yeah. Well, and I think the same thing is true of the UN Millennium goals. I mean, the, we need ambitions and we need to figure out how to implement them without undue top down control. And that’s actually a very difficult problem, right? It’s something we’re wrestling with that arc is like, well, how can we provide leadership without dive, die, what transforming across even a few short years into just another organization that issues top down, you know, moral pronouncements. It’s very difficult thing to get right for any length of time. So I appreciate all that. I want to thank everybody who’s watching and listening for your time and attention. I repeat that after every episode, but it’s always true. I’m, I’m very thrilled to have the privilege to talk to as many people as I do get to talk to. And I’m also heartened by the fact that these podcasts, which are very technically complex and that I, what put forward at the highest level of my intellectual ability, that they meet with such a receptive audience and that all these people like you, sir, who can bring their wisdom out into the world are being welcomed in their attempts to do so. I think that’s absolutely remarkable. And, and another reason for hope in a, in a, in a future that’s going to be very challenging, but that is rife with an unbelievable amount of opportunities, which is also something that you made clear today. So, and thank you again to the daily wire plus people for making these conversations possible and the film crew here and on Vancouver Island, where I am with my family. I’m going to continue my discussion with Terry on the daily wire plus platform. I’d like to delve a little bit into his personal background, find out, I want to find out where he came from and why and what motivates him. And so if you want to join us on the daily wire plus side, that also offers you an opportunity to throw some support the daily wire way. And I think that’s a useful thing to do, given what they’re attempting to accomplish in the world. There’s an organization that’s trying to do good and do well at the same time. And my experience with them really indicates that that is what they’re attempting to do and quite successfully. So hopefully we’ll join some of you there. Thanks again, Mr. Keely, much, much appreciated. It’s an honor, Jordan, genuinely an honor. Thank you so much for having me.