Ben Gilbert: uncertainty

Transcript context

…-shareholder, and sort of being active shareholders and holding management to account. And right now it's actually pretty interesting the way that each of these companies and each of these funds handles how to vote the shares of the index funds is all over the board. Some of them literally let individual index holders vote on individual issues. That's incredibly rare. Usually what they say is, "I wanna pick one of these 5 options and vote with management, with the majority, with a set of ESG guidelines," and you can kinda...That's the common thing. Most of the time it's suggestions of how we should vote the shares, but I get where you're going that the fund manager of, let's say, one of these Vanguard or BlackRock grows to be, I don't know, 60% ownership of every company in America. Suddenly they have voting control over those companies and it's a big responsibility to decide how they're gonna vote those. Right. Or in aggregate, a set of 3 or 4 of these large index funds and then their fund holder base, which is the American public. It's like we've turned the board of directors of every company into an election on the order of a US political election.…

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