Road map
The ship of humanity is veering dangerously off course. We are planning a mutiny. Today, CEO's are muzzled. They can’t oppose the ESGs on their own, even using data and reason. They would be thrown out or sued. They need an alternative platform that is reasonable, practical, and science based. Similar to the Great Barrington Declaration for Covid. Here are the elements of a road map that will lead us out of the trap.
Root and branch
The ESGs have been grown out of the United Nations, the EU, and the World Economic Forum. They are a worldwide pandemic that must be stopped at the root. This is going to take a lot of effort.
Change agents
We are looking for agents of change. They will be scientists, engineers, geologists, business people, executives, marketers, etc. They will be from think tanks, nonprofits, companies, and retired. Together, we will work in a Slack group to put a plan together, to craft our platform and our launch strategy. We will start as volunteers, mapping out the components needed.
Most important is to get officers from corporations who want to change. We also need fundraisers who can help us get the resources we need to create our platform.
Board of directors
We need a board who can help make this a reality. Eventually, they will “come out” and identify themselves, but for now, we will keep it quiet and just meet among ourselves. These will be CEOs, boardmembers, and retired leaders from various industries. People who can help put all this together. These will be our charter sponsors and barrier breakers.
Leadership
David, our founder, is very strong on environment and climate.
We also need an expert leader for social issues. Someone who is already a champion of free enterprise and is strongly against woke capitalism and woke signaling. Someone like Vivek Ramiswamy, who has written a book and is starting a company to create change at the board level. We need someone who can rise to that level.
We also need an expert leader in governance — both corporate and political. Again, we are looking for someone very progressive, who does not want to take us back to the pre-woke days but can propose a better way forward. Probably the best form of governance for all types of organizations is futarchy, which we will talk about here at some length, but futarchy isn’t going to be accepted in developed countries for some time, if ever. We need someone who understands various frameworks and proposals, someone who understand’s the financial markets’ need for transparency and proper incentives. We must be willing to stand for small but very progressive steps, like making insider trading legal (a good form of information), yet highly transparent.
We don’t plan to sweep these issues under the rug. We want to propose better solutions than ESG scoring — solutions that can evolve and change over time to meet the needs of the market. We want less regulation, not more. If we do it properly, like the Great Barrington Declaration, our framework will let companies disclose what they need to and make the changes necessary for well-functioning markets, even as society continues to evolve and change. We won’t be held hostage to smug elite know-it-alls and their giant consulting partners and governments.
We need think tanks, white papers, and a sharp team to put this together.
Funding
We need money to build this. We are outspent by many billions. Asking for charity money doesn’t work (we tried that). Our plan is to create a set of educational offerings that companies will pay for to send their people to learn about these issues. This is doable, because we are right. But we need help. We need people who can help us put these programs together and sell them to corporations.
Imagine a CEO of a company with 2,000 employees. Her ESG compliance costs are already over $10 million per year, probably several times that. Plus, her greenwashing PR budget, climate pledges, diversity consultants, and other fake programs easily cost another $10 million. We want that company to pay us $1 million a year to get out of that trap. We want enlightened CEOs around the world to join us and get us the funding we need, even as they continue to play the compliance game and give politically correct signals.
Profit vs Nonprofit
We can do this as a for-profit company or a nonprofit. That choice is ours to make now. Either way, we will make our own money, rather than rely on donations. A nonprofit is not difficult to set up and gives us an instant back-office.
Nonpartisan
We are looking for critical thinkers without regard to political affiliation. We want to encourage people from all belief “platforms” to become independent thinkers. There is too much tribalism and political extremism in today’s debate on ESGs. We want to be rational, level-headed, creative, and practical. We want to care about poor people and the environment as much as we care about the middle class. We do not want to alienate smart people by being affiliated with a “platform” that has a different agenda.
Bayesian
We are committed to Bayesian reasoning. We follow the data wherever it leads us. We are not allowed to throw out valid data and cherrypick. We are here to challenge assumptions and the status quo, but we must always be open to changing our views when we see new data that challenges our prior beliefs.
Cost/Benefit
Unlike most companies, think tanks, and governments, we must do cost/benefit analysis to understand smart policy. There are always trade-offs. Things will evolve. New technologies will arrive, prices will change, demand and supply are dynamic. We will start with unbiased data and clear values that lead to rigorous cost/benefit analysis. We will make our data, methods, and goals transparent. We must always be willing to recalculate and reallocate resources as society changes.
Budget
We would like to have a budget exceeding $10 million per year as soon as possible. A drop in the bucket compared to the foundations of the ESG movement. What we can spend depends on what we can raise. We will need leaders, officers, trainers, communications, event organizers, fundraising, and more.
We can run lean and agile, but we can’t do it as pure volunteers. As soon as we have a few million in revenues, we can start ramping up. That’s why this website is so important. It will help us find the change agents who can work with their executive teams to help us find the money and get the support we need. As you can see from the deliverables below, we have a lot of work to do.
We are looking for our charter members now. If we can find a few companies to contribute $1 million each - either for stock or as grants - we will be able to move quickly.
The platform
There are serious issues here. If a company or its contractors is violating human rights, investors should know that. If a company or its contractors is polluting an ecosystem, investors should understand that in context. We are not against reporting and transparency. We are against rigorous nonsense. We are against compliance with rules and regulations that make no sense.
Our platform will include:
A high-level declaration (summary).
A credible body of evidence and reason supporting the summary.
Ongoing research in many areas.
A weekly video podcast interviewing business people, researchers, activists, and more.
Antagonistic cooperation, to help us listen to weak signals and strengthen our beliefs.
Red teams, to help companies make data-driven decisions.
Cost/benefit analysis according to our scientific findings.
A PR firm we educate and work with to help raise the level of conversation from sensationalism to reason.
Responding to claims and new stories in a timely way.
A network of experts ready to be interviewed on a moment’s notice.
Money for whistleblowers.
A marketing department to measure and deliver messages to people in corporations, the media, and the public.
We’ll want partnerships to support others, like the Richard Dawkins Foundation, Human Progress, Copenhagen Consensus Center, Heterodox Academy, and others.
Web site, videos, podcasts, and other media.
Educational outreach to companies.
Educational outreach to media and journalists.
Educational outreach to young people and young future leaders.
Experiments and pilot projects — work with companies and governments to try new evidence-based approaches.
Events - conferences, pop-ups, educational displays, etc.
Lobbying to help eliminate many of the useless regulations we have today.
Lobbying to change the frameworks governments use to reinforce the status quo.
Launch
If things go well, if we can raise money to really build an organization, we should be ready for a public launch by sometime in 2024 or 2025. We need that time to put the platform together. We are always working toward the day when anyone in any company can stand up and say: “I’m with them. They make more sense than anything else I know.”
Our first programs
See our programs page to learn about our collaborative mastermind group and our first conference.
Call to action
We are mostly looking for corporate officers who can help us get the funding we need to get off the ground. To help get those people, we also want people from all walks of life who believe in what we are doing and understand the magnitude of the mission.
If you can help us get off the ground, fill out the form below.