 Interesting article in the Wall Street Journal today about ESG. We've been talking about this quite a bit over the last few months. That is that things like ESG have become unsexy. I guess unpopular. And it's as a consequence investment funds that tout being ESG funds are closing because there's just no interest by investors there to invest in ESG companies. Companies themselves are starting to walk away from the ESG programs, the ESG titles. Now so you know there's a statistic, for example, on earnings calls. How many times is ESG mentioned on earning calls of the S&P 500 companies, 150 of them, over 150 of them mentioned ESG in 2021, well during 2021, first, second and fourth quarters of 2021. But since then, 2021 is like the peak ESG. It's again, right after BLM, crazy left was considered the ideology that everybody needed to embrace, that everybody needed to be part of. And the reality is that since 2021, there's been a steady systematic decline into 2023 in the number of mentions of ESG. Now in some cases, this is purely cosmetic. That is, nothing's really changed. Whatever programs were instituted for, quote, ESG are still, you know, are still in place. But in some cases, it's real. In some cases, you know, the original ESG was cosmetic. That is, they talked about ESG, but they were doing nothing in the background. Now it's cool not to do anything. So CEOs, I think companies feel much more emboldened not to have to play the game. So I think this is a really good move. We'll have to really watch it closely to make sure that the consequence of this are not just finding another name for all of it. The consequence is not keeping the same programs, just not calling it ESG. But it really does represent a change in the way CEOs and in the way management thinks about issues. And I think for many of them it does. Look, and all of this is, it didn't just happen by itself. This is a consequence of a real backlash, a real effort by a variety of different groups, mainly by, I'd say, business leaders who found this as offensive, rejected the whole ESG label, rejected the idea that they should do socially responsible, stakeholder theory type stuff, a focus by certain business leaders, a re-emphasis by certain business leaders on shareholder wealth maximization, putting pressure on certain companies, but also putting pressure on politicians in Texas and Florida, in red states, where these politicians then went to people like BlackRock and said, BlackRock, the big investment firm, we're pulling our funds. If you're going to invest based on ESG, we're pulling our funds from you. So it started to hit investment firms bottom line. It also is the case that the SEC started to tell companies and investment funds, if you're advertising yourself as ESG, we want proof that it's really ESG and we're going to come up with standards, real ESG standards. So kind of just pretending to be ESG, just doing virtue signaling became really dangerous for a lot of companies, particularly for a lot of investors. But I'd say a big part of this was really businessmen, business leaders, intellectuals who fought against this and who made a big deal out of this and who told and made it clear to businesses that if they continued to invest based on ESG, if they continued to function based on these principles, then they would withdraw their capital. And again, this happened with BlackRock and even the CEO of BlackRock who used to be a big time advocate for ESG and traveled around the world talking about ESG and how important it was. It has now backed off of it completely and never mentions it. Now, ESG stands for environment, society and governance. Environment is pretty clear. It means kind of programs around zero carbon and not being environmentalist friendly. The S and the G were always more ambiguous, but the S, society and governance were primarily focused on DEI, on diversity, equity and inclusion programs. So the decline of ESG is probably a decline in DEI as well in many of these businesses. So you're going to see, I think some of the DEI infrastructure in many of these companies shrink. They won't fire them all outright, but they will shrink them, they'll deemphasize them, they'll just ignore them. And maybe we're seeing a shift here, I think a more sustainable model of actually running businesses for profit and actually hiring people based on merit and actually engaging in energy transaction based on the energy needs of the company and price. But we're going to have to watch out for new terminology, new marketing pitch and kind of an institutionalization of DEI without calling it DEI. So vigilance is going to be key here, but it is good to see the terminology of the left, of the extreme left in particular, be undermined, undercut and go out of favor. And that is definitely what happened. I mean, you're going to see a lot less people talking about Woke, DEI, ESG and kind of the terminology that was so everywhere just two years ago. And then we need a challenge, we need to make sure, or those of us monitoring this to make sure that it's not just in language, but it's also a change in behavior. And that is going to be, I think that is going to be crucial. And I'll be watching that and keeping you updated about that as we move forward. All right, that is ESG, one of the more corrupting influences. Remember, ESG too, just this point, was a version of something that's been in corporate America for a long time, corporate social responsibility, stakeholder capitalism. John Mackie called it conscious capitalism, although because he's a more of a capitalist, he probably tongued it down a little bit. But all of the stakeholder and corporate social responsibility, all of that, ESG really accelerated it, really made it more substantial, really made it, gave it a framework that a lot of businesses rallied around. And what really got them rallied around it is when investment funds, and I know this even from my hedge fund, that investment funds that invest in you started saying, what are your ESG practices? What do you do with regard to ESG? That never really happened with regard to stakeholder and with regard to corporate social responsibility. ESG gave everybody kind of a framework of how to judge and how to evaluate and had a lot of power. And the diminishing of that, and hopefully ultimately the disappearing, the disappearance of that, I think has the potential of having a profound effect on corporate America.