TRIGGERnometry - How Big Business Went Woke - Vivek Ramaswamy

Episode Date: September 23, 2021

Vivek Ramaswamy is a former American entrepreneur in the biotechnology sector and the author of Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam Get TICKETS to TRIGGERnometry Live with Peter Hitchens here: https://leicestersquaretheatre.ticketsolve.com/shows/873620658 Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod​​​ Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I don't think we're past the point of no return yet. But if the kids who are in first grade now graduate from 12th grade before we fix the problem, then I think we lose an entire generation. And I don't think we have a generation left before the existence of not only America, but sort of the Western liberal democracy and Western liberal edifice as we know it, is brittle enough to withstand the loss of an entire generation in between. Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

I'm Constantine Kiss. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is a biotech entrepreneur and the author of Woking. Vivek Varek Ramoswami, welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks for having me, guys. It's great to have you on the show. Before we get into your brilliant book, which we both really enjoyed, tell everybody who are you, how are you where you are, what has been the journey through life that brings you to be here sitting talking to us?

Yeah, sure. So I tell a bit of it in the book, but the long story short is that I was, born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, about an hour and a half drive from where I am today in Columbus, Ohio, in the middle of the Midwest. My parents were immigrants from India. They came over in the late 1970s and early 1980s, my dad and my mom, respectively. They didn't have a ton of money, but they did come for an education in this country and raised us with values that I would say put education first. And so fast forward, you know, 18 years later, I was a student at Harvard studying molecular biology, graduated near the top of my class. I was a nerd.

science guy for much of college. After I graduated, I got into the world of biotech investing at a hedge fund in New York City in the fall of 2007, right before the 2008 financial crisis, which I'll tell you impacted a lot of my views on capitalism, a relationship between capitalism and politics, and in many ways that are reflected in the book that I wrote. In any case, I stated that firm for seven years as an investor. Three of those years I spent simultaneously in law school at Yale, I actually had an itched to study law and public policy and political philosophy that had never fully scratched as a science guy. So I did that from 2010 to 2013. I never practiced law I didn't intend to. Probably the most tangible thing about it was I met my wife, who was my next door neighbor there.

She was a med student. And so that was decidedly the most productive thing that came out of law school, though there were three fun years. And then when I came back to New York City, I actually had a lot of spare time on my hands because I had been managing a portfolio for a hedge fund while going to law school at the same time. This was something that, you know, left a busy schedule in its wake. But now I had the entire law school block open. So I briefly tried my hand at stand-up comedy, actually, in New York. I mentioned that since I know your guys' background.

I wasn't as successful a comedian as you guys are. That is to say, I was... You haven't seen all material, mate. Well, I was decidedly mediocre. Probably did fewer than 10 shows and decided that it was time to hang the jersey, which I did. But I learned a few things in the process. One of them was a habit I created of writing down anytime something annoyed me.

And it was a habit that led me to a mediocre stand-up comedy career, but actually a much better career as an entrepreneur. I kept notes every time something that I saw in the biotech or pharma industry that really annoyed me as an investor. And eventually, that list got long enough that I decided to leave my career as an investor and start a biopharmaceutical company in 2014. So that's what I did. I started Royvent Sciences. It was a heck of a journey. I've built the company from scratch, and there's now many employees around the world. It's a company that's gotten a number of medicines through the development process,

a couple of which are FDA-approved medicines today. The one I'm probably most proud of is an FDA-approved drug for prostate cancer. But that being said, I stepped down from my role as CEO earlier this year to work on a different kind of cancer, not a biological cancer, but what I see as a cultural cancer that was really infecting every major institution that I had seen or been a part of in corporate America and academic America and beyond. And as you probably gathered from my story, I wasn't born into elite America, but I have lived in elite America for the last 15 years.

And I felt some sense of responsibility to speak with candor from the inside, to really put a spotlight on what I saw as the defining scam of our time that the American people, and I think people in democracies around the world, really needed to see for what it was. And that was something that I described in the book as a sort of magic trick where a lot of my peers pretend like they care about something other than profit and power precisely to gain more of each. And I'm sorry to say it's actually working out pretty well for them. I'm not sure it's working out for civilized society and for democratic societies around the

world. And I hope the book that I wrote offers a little bit of a path towards a better way forward that I lay out in the book. Well, indeed. And the issues that you talk about is something we've covered on the show quite extensively. But one of the things we haven't really got into is the very subject of your book, which is corporate America, corporate Britain, et cetera. And what we wanted to talk to you about is one of the strands of what we wanted to talk about was this very thing. I think 10, 15 years

ago, we all thought of the CEO, our image of a CEO, if you had to stereotype, it would be Mr. Burns from the Simpsons, right? This guy who didn't care about anything except money, who would happily dump toxic waste in his own water supply, if it meant making a buck, et cetera. And yet we are now here 2021 in an environment where the CEOs are the ones who are social justice, donating money to BLM, lecturing the public about masculinity, all of this stuff. How did that happen, Vivek?

Yeah, so look, there's an age-old adage of once you get to the destination you want to get to, you build a wall right behind you so somebody else can't get there too. I think there's a bit of that going on here. But I think the essence of what happens actually is what I describe in the book. It begins with the 2008 financial crisis. I alluded to it before. I had a front row seat. I worked at a hedge fund that was one of the few firms named in Michael Lewis's book, The Big Short. I saw this play out. And I watched the aftermath of it as well. I lived in New York City at the time. And I think what happened is in the wake of the 08 financial crisis, you had to occupy Wall Street movement. You had a movement that was skeptical of corporate power and capitalism in America.

And what the old left wanted to do was to take money from those wealthy corporations and redistributed to poor people for the benefit of poor people. Agree or not, that's what the old left wanted to do. But there was this new left, a new breed of the left that was born right around the same time. Barack Obama had been elected as the first black president of the United States. There was a lot of discussion about diversity and the appearance of diversity in many of our institutions. And what corporate America realized is that actually they could go from being the bad guys to being the good guys if they just said the right things about this new left movement, the new woke left movement. So that's when you had big banks and other big businesses start to applaud diversity and inclusion, start to put token minorities on their boards and on their committees, started to muse about the racially disparate impact of climate change after flying on a private jet to Davos.

And so this actually ended up being a pretty good trade where they could actually be the good. guys. They were happy to lend their money, their legitimacy to this new woke movement, but they didn't quite do it for free. What they expected in return is that the new left would look the other way when it came to leaving their corporate power intact. And I'm sorry to say, it's actually worked out masterfully for both sides, where you had a bunch of big banks get in bed with a bunch of woke millennials. Together, they birthed woke capitalism. And they put Occupy Wall Street up for adoption. And that game worked so well that Silicon Valley, did the same thing, censor content that the woke left doesn't want to see online. In return,

the new Democratic Party looks the other way when it comes to leaving our monopoly power intact. And again, it works out masterfully for both sides. So the rest of corporate America follows suit. And so in some sense, it's a cynical arrangement. It's an arranged marriage. It's not a marriage of love. It is more like mutual prostitution. And the net result was the birth of this new woke industrial complex that was far more powerful than either big government or big business alone, because it was a hybrid of the two that could do what either of those couldn't do on its own. And I think that's the real force. I think the real threat to liberty and prosperity today, more so than big government,

is this new woke industrial complex. And that's a big part of what I discussed in the book. And in the book, you actually compared it to a magic trick. We've touched on that. Would you manage to break it down, please, because it comes in three parts. And I find that idea particularly compelling. Well, look, I think there's – I draw off. from Christopher Nolan's movie, The Prestige.

By the way, Christopher Nolan, one of the great movie makers of all time, actually produced probably the most woke movie I've ever seen in my life, which is a recent movie produced during the pandemic called Tenet. I don't mean that disparagingly. I actually mean it mostly as a compliment for its artistic merit in laying woke ideology out on the table in the form of a movie that's actually really complicated if you watched it a couple times, at least I did, in order to understand even what was going on in terms of the plot.

but once you piece it together, there's a really woke premise at the heart of that movie. So I offer that as an aside. Well, hold on. I watched that movie. What's the woke premise of the movie? I'm curious now. Well, you know, you travel backwards and forwards through time.

It's sort of summarized at the very end of the movie where there's sort of the white anti-hero and sort of the black hero that are crossing paths. And one of them is the white guy is the one traveling backwards in time. And the black hero is the one who's traveling. forward in time and he looks back and says, why aren't you coming with me? And the white anti-yearer looks back and he's a good guy too, but sort of looks back and says, hey, I'm going that way. You're going that way. And it was just an encapsulated moment of the velocity of time

in terms of where the different racial identities of the white man going in one direction and sort of the black hero going in the other direction that, you know, I think typified and capture part of the message of what the anti-racist movement is all about, what the woke ideology is all about is being conscious to the historical power structures that may have held one class of people back and what they must do in terms of bearing their obligation to send that class of that that disempowered a class forward. And I thought he captured the moment in a physics laden, time-twisted plot in a way that only Christopher Nolan can. But if you saw that movie, I think you'll know what I mean. Now, anyway, I'm a big Christopher Nolan fan. And one of his movies that I also quite

enjoy is the prestige, where again, he plays with notions of time, as he often does. But the The beginning of the prestige is a description of what a magic act is all about. And there's three parts to the act. There's the pledge, the turn, and the prestige. The pledge is where the magician shows you something that you like, something like a bird or something like that might be an animal, might be a rabbit, shows you pledges to you what the trick is going to be all about. The second part of the act is the turn where he makes that disappear.

But no trick is complete until you bring back that which you. made disappear, and that's the prestige where you bring it back. And no magic trick is complete without the prestige. And what I talk about is 21st century capitalism. I break it down, you know, in larger ways than I want to go through right now in this short form. You can read the book. You know, basically the pledge is identifying a market where ordinary people sell ordinary things. The turn is finding an arbitrage in that market. An arbitrage is the ability to buy something for one price and instantaneously sell it for a higher price in that same market. that's the turn, but the real prestige is covering up that entire act with what I call the new brand of

woke smoke, blowing progressive values to cover up steps number one and two, to pretend like you care about something other than profit and power, as I said earlier, precisely to gain more of each. And, you know, the best version of the pledge of the turn and the prestige that I described earlier came in the form of what one of the U.S. mutual funds, State Street, did in the last couple of years, where they were actually facing a lawsuit from their female employees, alleging that they didn't pay the female employees at the firm as much as they paid the male counterparts. And so State Street did, of course, the natural thing that you'd expect them to do when faced with employees who claimed that they're not being paid equally as their male counterparts. They built a statue for the women. They built a iconic bull in Wall Street, New York, and they built a little statue of a little girl who stands up to that bull.

and at the placard at the bottom of the statute said that she, capital S-H-E, she makes a difference. Turns out that S-H-E didn't just describe Fearless Girl, as the young girl in the statue was known to be. It also described the E-T-F or the exchange-traded fund, S-H-E, which traded as a ticker on the stock exchange, which you could buy. And if you buy, you know, that's money managed by State Street that they charge a nice fee for. So it was actually another nice little win for the marketing department. Now, to put a topping off flourish on all of it, Kristen Visible, the feminist who authentically created fearless girl. She believed in female empowerment and fempowerment on Wall Street.

She created the statue. She was so excited about it that she made a couple extra copies of the statue, too. This is what female empowerment needed to be about, and fearless girl was the face of female empowerment. Well, guess what? State Street sues Kristen Visible, the statue's creator, for creating three unauthorized reproductions of the statue that they had commissioned. Because as I said earlier, it's not good enough to make the money disappear as they do.

When they commission the statue in the first place, they have to bring it back. And so they suit her for making the unauthorized reproduction. So there's countless stories just like this in the book. It's just one of the first ones that I happened to tell early on in the introduction of the book. But I thought I would leave you guys with a sense for what the magic trick is all about. What is the problem with woke capitalism? And let's just explore it a little bit. Because there is an argument to say, hang on a minute, look, at one point,

all these organizations were stuffed with rich white people from privileged backgrounds. Isn't this just a much-needed correction? And isn't it a good thing that these corporations are pushing this? Yeah, so look, I think that there's a lot of compelling arguments in favor of stakeholder capitalism or the new woke brand of woke capitalism, which says that companies are responsible, not just to their shareholders, but to other societal interests too. Sounds pretty benign on its surface. Milton Friedman, by the way, didn't love that model 50 years ago.

He thought that was going to make businesses run less efficiently and be less profitable for their shareholders and that that was going to economically leave everyone worse off and reduce the size of the economic pie. He had some valid concerns, but I will tell you that that is not my core concern. My core concern is the opposite. It is the way in which corporate overreach actually renders our democracy hollow in the process by converting a one-person, one-vote system into a $1-vote system, where the people who wield the greatest power in the marketplace of products

then are empowered to wield even disproportionate power in the marketplace of ideas. And I'm fine living in a market where the best products get voted to the top based on the number of dollars that are deployed in the market. But I'm not fine with the best ideas in the marketplace of ideas getting voted to the top based on the number of dollars that one controls. And what this new philosophy effectively demands is that, that a small group of investors and CEOs, people like me, get together in closed-door rooms and decide what's best for society at large on matters ranging from racial justice to climate

change. And I think those questions ought to be adjudicated in a democracy in the open public square through free speech and open debate without the distortions of economic power tilting the scales on that conversation. And so to me, not to offend you guys on the other side of the pond here, but that might have been a model for old world Europe, where a small group of church leaders and labor elites and business elites would get in a room and decide what was right for the rest of society at large. But that wasn't America.

And it wasn't modern democracy, even in Britain or Canada or anywhere else in the Western Democratic complex or in India, for that matter, too. Democracy works according to the principle that we decide as citizens together what that common good is and we have a commitment to live and abide by the results of that process.

And to me, this is the most flagrant violation of democracy. all when a small group of capitalist elites get to tell everybody else how they're supposed to live their lives, they can sell their products, they can get rich, I'm fine with that. But they shouldn't be able to exercise more moral power or normative power than my neighbors here in Ohio. And I think that that's a big part of what I'm fighting for in the book, is to restore the integrity of democracy defined as such. Integrity of democracy, you say. And you mentioned in the book, the Hunter Biden scandal, where Twitter effectively suppressed that story.

Oh, they did. I mean, I think there's no doubt that Twitter made a value judgment that, of course, Jack Dorsey, when he's pressed in front of Congress about it, says that, oh, that was a mistake. Every time these guys are pressed on one of their egregious forms of overreach, they claim that it was a mistake in retrospect, but the damage is already done. You don't have these social media companies today that are able to do what no company in human history has been able to do, which is to control the acceptable bounds of what can and cannot be discussed. And once you affect, what can't be discussed, you affect what can't even occur in one's own thoughts. And I think that's the most dangerous kind of corporate power of all where America had its founding didn't want to see the Dutch East India Company reborn here in the United States. That was a company in Europe that, as you all well know, wielded not just market power, but wielded state-like power. They had their own militia. They had their own currency. I think of Facebook's cryptocurrency cryptocurrency ambitions today. They had their own hospitals, their own charitable institutions. They were like a quasi- state. And the American system was born on the idea that we did not want corporate-like states.

We had a constitutional democracy, a constitutional republic that ultimately served as our state. We didn't want to create a corporatocracy in its wake. And so that's why we created, even though we created powerful corporations through benefits like limited liability and other concepts that the state created to allow corporate shareholders to have a lot of special advantages, we said that in return for that, we want you to stay in your lane. We demand that the directors of a corporation owe a fiduciary duty only to shareholders, not just to protect those shareholders, as Milton Friedman might have surmised, but to protect the rest of society from corporate overreach. That was the vision for the limited form of corporate power. And what we see today in Silicon

Valley is a perversion of that, where we have now the modern Dutch East India company on steroids that control not only power in the market, but the power to determine what each of us can and cannot discuss in the modern public squares. And I think that's something that represents one of the two great threats to Western idealism as we know it. I think China is at the top of the list, but I put the growing power of big tech at number two on that list. And that's a big part of, I discuss both extensively in the book, but I think it's a big part of what I think can be fixed if, you know, the citizens in everyday democracies around the world begin to see what's going on with clear eyes. Well, Vivek, we'll come back to China in the second, but I wanted to go back

a little bit and talk about how this has all happened, because I'm not sure that I'm necessarily persuaded that this is these kind of CEOs, you know, skillfully manipulating the situation. Like, I'll give you an example. I was talking to an executive in the publishing industry, one of the biggest publishers in the world, and I was asking him about the situation with freedom of expression in publishing, wokeness, and he said that one of the biggest challenges for him was actually dealing with younger employees because he himself has a commitment to publishing people across the political spectrum with different opinions. But he said to me, imagine if you at Trigonometry, if your cameraman came up to you and was like, you know what, I don't agree

with having Vivek on the show. And I think we need to have a three-hour meeting to thrash out the details of my disagreement. And, you know... He's tougher than both of us, so we'd have to agree. Yeah, even so at Trigonometry, that would never happen. But in a big corporation, somehow, how these older kind of experienced, higher status CEOs, they're now feeling like they have to, for some reason, answer to a 20-year-old. And we saw ourselves in the comedy industry when Francis used to work in a comedy club. You'd see people in the early 20s coming in. And their expectation of what, as a junior person in an organization, you're entitled to say, to want to control, to want to influence. But by our standards, and we're sort of a very very, very important. And we're sort of a very

very, very early millennials are just off the charts entitlements. But that's how those people think. So is it not a case of this is actually democracy in action, younger people coming through and imposing the moral standards on old biggest like me, you and Francis? So I don't think it's democracy in action, that's for sure. But I do think that you have a point that, of course, it's why I took a whole book to expose,

that there's a lot of nuances to this. And it's not a one-size-fits-all bill. I think in some cases it is a purely cynical, top-down phenomenon driven. by a lot of executives on Wall Street and powerful big business. I mean, the CEO of Goldman Sacks goes to Davos and declares he's not going to take a company public unless its board is sufficiently diverse. I think that is just a game to deflect accountability and potential consequence from a newly ascendant political left in America. These are really, I think,

a scammy kind of woke capitalism completely inauthentic, hypocritical all the way down. That's not the entire story, though. And I talk about the other nuances and dimensions of this, too. There's woke executives, there's woke investors. There's also woke. consumers and many of whom are themselves employees in these firms too. I think one of the things I've seen in the publishing industry is somehow the CEOs of these publishers have mistaken their own employees as being their top customers that they're accountable to. I don't quite understand that model of leadership reminds me of parents who vie to be friends with their teenage kids. But putting that to one side as a model of leadership, I think there is a real phenomenon

here that I faced too. By the way, I would see a company, you know, nearly a thousand employees, many of them young, many of them come from top universities that we recruited from for years. And I detailed this in one of the early chapters in the book in the wake of George Floyd's death, were frustrated with me as CEO for not saying or doing enough to condemn systemic racism in the United States rather than doing what I thought we needed to be doing, which is developing medicines for all people who needed them, including black people, but all people. So I'm really sympathetic to that challenge. It actually gets to the heart of what I think is the real cultural solution that we need.

to be grappling with, not just as Americans, but I think as members of Western liberal democracies more thoroughly is that you brought up the fact that we're all millennials. Okay, fine. You said you guys are millennials, too, as defined on the other side of this conversation, is that right? Yeah, just about. So all three of us count us in that bucket. I think we're part of a generation and even a generation younger than us in Gen Z that's hungry for a cause. We're hungry for purpose. We're hungry for meaning. We're hungry for identity. The same thing as human beings have always hungered for. for a time immemorial, but we live in a moment where the kinds of things that used to fill that moral hunger, notions like faith, patriotism, hard work, and identity built through hard work,

have receded in our consciousness. But we're still human beings, and so we don't lose those impulses. We just relocate them to new philosophies, to new religions, to postmodernism, to wokeism, instead, without recognizing that we're actually submitting to just a new form of religion, that effectively becomes our opium for the masses. And I think that many businesses, then, you could argue, are doing what they need to do by servicing millennial customers that demand that, okay, we're hungry for a cause. Well, we want to go to Ben and Jerry's and order an ice cream with some morality on the side.

Or we want to go to Nike and buy a pair of sneakers, but buy a pair of sneakers with shoe laces that come with a flourish of social justice at the tips. That's what we sort of determine when we're buying as consumers. And I think the real answer there isn't necessarily to criticize the businesses who fulfill that demand, either in their consumer base or to placate their employees, but to really take an aim at the culture that makes the mistake that we can mix morality with commercialism as our means of satisfying our true moral hunger. It's like we're

feeding our moral hunger with the equivalent of fast food when in fact the thing we're really hungry for is more substantial fare. And we got to this farcical point where our politics determines the sandwiches that we buy and our sandwich makers have to pick their politics when in fact what we really need to recognize is that you can't solve morality, the problems of morality by just buying the right kind of T-shirt. You have to grapple with the hard work of understanding who we are as individuals and as a people and how we're bound together as a people across our diverse attributes and characteristics. That's real hard cultural work that there's no silver bullet for.

I offer the beginnings of some reflections towards solutions in the book. But you're right that I think that in many ways businesses are responding to cultural conditions that businesses as neutral actors take as given and then try to hide the fact that they're neutral actors by wearing the guard of morality in the form of postmodern progressivism. But actually the essence of what's really going on is a cultural change in our society

that is not just top-down driven, though in some cases it is, that's the Goldman Sachs and the Black Rocks of the world. But there's also bottom-up change, too, that many other businesses in the middle that are otherwise neutral actors are really appearing to bend the need to. And I think that we have to take aim

at that bottom-up color. cultural change that we need to drive that is easier said than done, but I think it's the work that we need to do. Vivek, I'm going to make this a little dark and go deep, because I think you make such a profound point about the lack of these superior things that we used to fill our lives with and we no longer do, and so we need a replacement. One of the consequences of that, and I've heard you talk about it in the past, is that you create two economies. And if conservatives only buy, black rifle coffee and progressives only by Starbucks or whatever it is. If that spreads through society, then anyone with half a brain can see that the long-term consequence of that is the

tearing of society apart because the things that used to unite us, the football games that you'd go to irrespective of your politics, well, hey, if you're an NBA fan like me, you have to make a conscious decision every time. Do you want 20 minutes of social justice shoved down your throat before every game or do you just watch something else, right? Exactly. I think once we have two NBAs and two major league baseballs, it's the beginning of the end, as we know it. I think it is the path to civil war.

And I don't say that lightly, but I think, and we're not there yet, but I think that if we do get there, I think that would be a dangerous, you know, dangerous harbinger of bad things to come. If you look at the U.S. Civil War or Civil Wars in other societies, actually they begin, not just when you have a divided polity. That's existed for a lot of human history. Nations get through that. When nations don't get through that is when there's no cultural cohesion to bind people together across their divided politics.

And I worry that as the private sector goes woke, as it becomes politicized, we lose the necessary apolitical spaces that bind us together as one people, regardless of whether we're Democrats or Republicans, conservatives, or liberals, black or white. We require those spaces. American solidarity, I think Western liberal solidarity, as we know it, requires those spaces to bind us together. And I think that that cultural fragility, I think, is one of the greatest dangers of all as we become more fragile when divisive politics infects otherwise unifying activities like our places of work, the places we go to play sports, the places we go to listen to music. Once those become politicized, too, the movie theaters, for that matter, it is, I think, the beginning of the end of Western liberalism and the project of Western liberalism as we know it. And worst of all, the people who are rooting for the end of Western liberalism in other parts of the world. And, you know, I'm not shy about naming names. I'm going to put the Chinese Communist Party at the top of that list are exploiting that to drive their own advantage.

And I'll tell you a joke I told recently. And, you know, I think it's meant in good humor. But I think at the heart of it is, I think, a very dark turn in the story where, let's just say Mao Zedong comes back to the Chinese countryside. in year 2021, and he sees a farmer on the countryside, and he has a conversation with the farmer, and he says, okay, well, farmer, what happened to those food shortages that we used to have when I was ruling?

Do we still have those food shortages? And the farmer says, Chairman, no, we don't have those food shortages. In fact, we have the opposite problem. We have too much food, and our people are dying of diabetes today. And so Chairman Mao says, very good, very good, that's good to hear. Now, what about our steel production targets?

We were going to produce more steel than the United Kingdom as part of our 50-year plan. Fifty years later, have we now achieved that? To which the Chinese farmer says, oh, no, forget about beating the United Kingdom as China. One of our provinces alone defeats the United Kingdom in steel production every year, to which Chairman Mao says,

that's very good to hear. But tell me, what happened to that Chinese cultural revolution where we were going to have that proletariat uprising? Whatever happened to that? To which the farmer laughs and says, chairman, we don't do that here anymore. We've outsourced that to the United States. And I say that jokingly, but I think that there's a version of this in which the Chinese leadership deeply understands the kinks in our armor. They have a word for Western wokeness, Baitzuel,

literally refers to woke white people in the United States and in other Western countries, and they use it to laugh at us. But now they're using that progressive front to actually co-op companies that criticize relentlessly the United States over Black Lives Matter or whatever, he brought up the NBA. The NBA is in this category, but they don't say a peep in China. In fact, they supplicate to China. They lie prostrate like lapdogs to their CCP overlords while consistently biting the United States in the process.

And that creates a false moral equivalence between Chinese nihilism and let's call it Western idealism. And I think when you equate the two, then nihilism wins every time. That's what allows Xi Jinping when he's pressed on your side of the pond by EU leaders on the Shenzhang human rights crisis with the Uekers right now. The first thing Xi Jinping says is that actually Black Lives Matter shows the United States is no better, which would be laughable if it weren't for the fact that Nike and Disney and the NBA and Black Rock and every other major American corporation that does business in China

criticizes the United States without saying a peep in China lends moral legitimacy to the claims that they make. And I actually think that's probably the most dangerous threat to democracy is not even the philosophical one from within that I described, though I think that's a problem, but actually a dangerous one backed up through not soft power but hard power through the use of force as exercised by the CCP over the course of the next 10 years. And you can mark my words today. The day that Taiwan is invaded by China, Nike and Disney and the NBA are not going to say a peep.

They might even praise them and implicitly help them do it. That's the state of the world we live in, is they've turned these corporations into Trojan horses where Western countries like the United States and the United Kingdom thought for 30 years that they could send Big Macs and Happy Meals to China and somehow spread democracy. And instead, autocratic nations like China have turned that on its head. And instead of using our money on the West to get them to be more like us, they've actually used their money to make us behave more like them. And I'm sorry to say that it is working in a way that both progressives and conservatives

need to wake up to. But even well-minded progressives need to recognize that once they've turned corporations into vectors to drive social change, those corporations then become vehicles to bid for, for someone else's agenda too, and nobody's mastered that game better than the CCP. It's actually my book is, if I may say, the first book that I believe is laying out the geopolitical implications of wokeism, and I think that that's probably one of the most illuminating parts of the book I thought for me in the process of writing it, but I hope for the readers who read it as well. And one of the best examples of that was the case of Disney and the Uighas.

Would you mind expanding into that a little bit? Yeah, look, I mean, Disney, my blood's already boiled. I want to keep myself in check here, but Disney says it could not film in the United States a couple of years ago in the state of Georgia, if Georgia passed the equivalent of a new abortion restriction or whatever. Yet last year, they go to the Shenjin province of China, literally ground zero of the Uyghur human rights crisis, over a million Uyghurs detained in concentration camps, subject to forced sterilization, communist indoctrination, in what I view as some of the worst human rights

atrocities committed by a major nation since the Third Reich of Georgia. Germany, and Disney does not say a peep until they get to the end of the film. And in the film's credits, I'm not even kidding you, they go out of their way to publicly thank the local CCP authorities in the Shenzhenjang province for allowing the privilege of filming there, when in fact, those are some of the very authorities responsible for enslaving the Uyghurs today. So I just think that that two-faced behavior is, is, you know, really revealing about the way in which much of the West will supplicate to the guy who pays them their last day. dollar or their last Juan, as the case may be, top gun is a film coming out later this year

where Tom Cruise in the original movie was a real maverick. And he actually had in one of the scenes a jacket that had a number of U.S. allies on his sleeve, including the nation of Taiwan, including Japan. And in the revised version of the film, you'll see him wear his jacket coming out this fall. You won't see Taiwan's flag. You won't see Japan's flag. And I'll let you guess exactly why. That is the world we live in. They have invasible. They have invasible. the movies we watch, the universities our kids are educated at, the companies we buy our products from, there are Trojan horses from within, and the Battle of Troy was one, not through the front door, but when actually one of the sides was invaded by the other through the back door

with a Trojan horse that they accepted. And the horse that were the Trojan horses today look every bit as appealing as the Trojan horses in the Battle of Troy in the form of Nike, in the form of Disney, in the form of the NBA, the movies we watch, the clothes we wear, the sports we play, yet those Trojan horses are actually the vectors of actually advancing the agenda of what I view as the enemy. And we have not seen it happen in plain sight. That's a big part of what I'm laying out in the book. That being the case, Vivek, how do we fight back then against these corporations? How do we persuade the ordinary person on the street? Because there is a heartening example of this when Gillette did their toxic masculinity advert, and their share

price has dropped massively as a result because nobody wanted to buy their products. Yeah, look, I think sometimes consumer boycotts could be a short-term answer. I'm not a big fan of that in the long run because I think that takes us back on the path to two economies, which then puts us back on the path to Civil War. I'm not a big fan of that approach, though I'm sympathetic to those who feel like they need to resort to that as a mechanism to fight back. I think the right answer has to be not to just cancel wokeism in return, to adopt illiberal methods to fight illiberalism. I think it has to be to dilute that agenda to irrelevance by reviving a shared identity that runs so deep that it makes wokeism seems silly by comparison.

I think that the right way to fight racism, by the way, and this would be my advice to the left would be the same thing. It's not to get that last burning ember and go to the person who might harbor one last racist thought as you define it and yell at them, don't be racist. I can tell you the best way to throw kerosene on those last burning embers is to try to cancel something in reverse as opposed to letting it atrophy to irrelevance as it has over the last six decades. My advice to the right is the same in reverse, is the right way to fight wokeism isn't to try to cancel it or pummel it into submission. It is to dilute it to irrelevance through civic education, through a revival of civic identity,

through a revival of the kinds of things that used to give us meaning and fill that black whole of hunger for moral meaning and purpose. That's the hard work that we do. I'm sorry to interrupt, but it's an important point to interrupt because you talk about educating the next generation. We've just had Christopher Rufo on the show talking about CRT. You obviously educated at Yale and Harvard. I imagine you would agree with me that the overwhelming majority of the faculty at America's elite colleges and universities and likewise here in the UK are quite sympathetic or at least willing to tolerate wokeness. So when we talk about that, how is that going to happen? Let me double click on that for a second. Just the point that I make in

the book. I think that that's true. I think it actually misses even the bigger problem in the universities, which is a managerial cancer. So the ratio of administrators at universities to professors has actually rapidly grown like a cancer of universities around both the U.S. and I think the same is true in the United Kingdom, though I haven't looked at the same numbers in the same precision as I have in the U.S. What you see is these administrators, the associate deans, the diversity administrators, are now outstripping faculty by ratios like 10 to 1. And even when faculty or conventional faculty lean left, in an environment that's not checked by sort of an administrative state within the university itself, the equivalent of what I call deep corporate in corporate America, it's sort of

the deep state in the university itself, they're able to at least engage in an open marketplace of ideas. I mean, Harvard, at the time I went there a decade and a half ago was really a different place than it is today where, yes, conservatives may have been in the intellectual minority, but there were still a marketplace of ideas where people could debate in the open without fear of reprisal. But I think the managerial cancer in university is actually a much bigger problem is the growth of people whose job it is to administer a diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda, which in fact is anything but the things that they mean. In the name of diversity, they actually mean no diversity of thought. In the name of inclusion, they actually mean creating an exclusionary culture where certain points have been. view aren't welcome. And the problem with people who occupy those seats is once you give them a job, they want to permanently keep that job, keep getting a paycheck, which by the way contributes to the increasing cost of higher education in this country, subsidizing these toxic diversity administrators that reign supreme at our universities that even look down on and silence professors who might be liberal, but who even permit contrary thought. And so those professors then bend the knee because they want to be able to at least keep their jobs without actually being abused as many as some professors

at Yale just a couple of years ago for making the controversial statement that students should be able to make adult choices in how they dress for Halloween. They were pummeled with quasi-violence as a consequence, and the administrators stand by as the students do it. So I actually think the bigger problem in the universities is this managerial cancer in the administrative class of the university, even beyond the professors themselves. Now, you're right. Now, I think the question actually begins with primary education upstream of the universities, though, to create and fill that moral hunger for a new generation. Because what's happened today is that, though wokeness used to be about challenging the system, today, there's no doubt about it,

wokeness is the system. It controls, as an ideology, nearly every major institution that we know about in the Western world, from universities to nonprofits, to museums, to companies, to government, to military. Now it's ubiquitous. And I actually think that creates an opportunity, though, on the other side for a new generation of kids who are turning 18 or turning 19 today, who want to be countercultural. It's what you want to do when you're 19. You want to stand up to the system. You want to be counterculture. You want to be counterculture. You want to be be rebellious. You want to be heterodox. You want to be a hippie. That's part of what made wokeism so attractive over the course of the last couple of decades. But today, now that

wokeism is the system, there's a new pitch for that new generation that if you want to stand up to the system, there's a new way to do it. And I think that needing that demand and cultivating that demand with the right kinds of leaders who are able to set that cultural tone of being heterodox through actually thinking independently rather than reciting the same slogans as your peers, that could create an opportunity for new generation through civic education that begins in primary education that really creates, I think, the conditions for a turn of the pendulum in the opposite direction culturally. I think some of that's driven first personally, too. I think great leaders are going to have to step up. The Reagan's and the factors of the world, you know, they cured the

1970s. I think that we're going to have to figure out somebody who cures the people, real leaders, who cure the diversity decade of the 2010s that elevated in our consciousness all of the ways in which we're different and somehow celebrate that to revive the commonality that binds us together is one people across those skin-deep differences. And I think that, you know, from an American perspective, America is nothing if it is not bound together across its diversity. We can celebrate our appearance of diversity until we're blue in the face. We're nothing if we aren't bound across that diversity by something greater or else we're just a bunch of different looking people occupying a common space, looking at our iPhones and doing what our smartphones tell us to do in a given day.

That isn't what this country was supposed to be. We're supposed to be a country built on idealism and a shared set of ideals that bring together an otherwise divided polyglot group of people, you know, I think it takes leaders to be able to lead people back to that vision of what binds them together. I think the conditions that we've created create selective pressure for those kinds of leaders

to emerge. I think it's no accident that Reagan came in the 80s after the doldrums of the identity crisis that America and similar countries faced under the conditions of the 70s I view us as being in somewhat of an analogous place here now at the end of the 20th. tens. And so it's going to be a combination of factors that drive the cultural change.

I do lay out some policy proposals in the book that I think can create the conditions for that cultural change. But even those policies are really just a form of symptomatic therapy. And what I really think we need is the beginnings of a cultural cure. Vivek, aren't you worried that it's gone too far now? And particularly with big tech, big tech is so powerful. If you look back at what happened over the pandemic, The reason that BLM came to public prominence was because of social media, because we were all physically locked in our homes.

We couldn't go anywhere. There were billions of eyeballs on a screen. Do you not worry that we're simply too far down the road now? I don't think we're too far down the road. I think we're getting close, though. I mean, if you look at big tech, look at who the biggest beneficiaries of the pandemic were, was of course, big tech, stock prices are through the roof.

Guess who actually censored any content on the internet about anti-lockdown speech, Facebook, YouTube. You could post about anti-lock. This is one of the most important public policy questions of our time, whether or not to lock down an economy. And there's many ways to fight the pandemic.

You could debate masks, you debate vaccines, you could debate social distancing, but lockdowns. Talking about economic lockdowns of businesses. In retrospect, it doesn't even look like a particularly good way of having fought the coronavirus. Yet debates were censored by the likes of YouTube, by the likes of Facebook,

and yet they were the biggest beneficiaries of all. So I think that big tech and China represent the two defining threats to Western liberal democracies as we know it. And I don't think it's, I don't think, to answer your question, I don't think we're past the point of no return yet. But if the kids who are in first grade now graduate from 12th grade before we fix the problem, then I think we lose an entire generation.

And I don't think we have a generation left before the existence of not only America, but sort of the Western liberal democracy and Western liberal edifice as we know it, is brittle enough to withstand the loss of an entire generation in between. So I think that's kind of the clock we're working with is within the 2020s, we need to have fixed this or else we will have done permanent irreparable damage. And that's a big part of why I'm writing. It's a big part of why I stepped aside as CEO to make a move that I wouldn't have imagined myself making a couple of years ago to be among the voices that I think are going to be needed to drive change. It's part of why I wrote the book. But I think laying eyes on this problem, I'm optimistic, will allow, I think, the right kinds of people amongst our everyday citizenry to galvanize, to create a new cultural response. A culture. revival that I think renders this, this, you know, postmodernism of the last decade irrelevant by comparison. And, you know, I know we're running towards the end of time here, but I would just want to say, thank you for having me and being able to have this conversation, not just here in the American context, but across the pond with all of you, I think is every bit as important. You know,

I think that, you know, I think that there's a deep relationship between between our two countries in a way that, you know, I think allows the ideas that reverberate on one side, that sort of echo on one side to reverberate on the other. Well, that's why we hope you sort your shit out, because we keep importing it, and this is what we end up with here. We've got a little bit of time. Go for it, Francis.

The question I want to ask is this, and I think it's a key question. And libertarians don't like it, and people on the right don't like it, but decisive action is needed. Isn't part of the problem, like I said before, big tech, they're too big, they're too powerful. Don't we need the government to go in

And again, I know the right and the libertarians. They get their panties in a twist about this. Actually, there's a lot of people on the right now who are calling for people to break up the companies. But anyway, carry on. But yeah, just to break up the companies. So I'm not a big breakups guy. I understand the impulse I'm sympathetic to it.

I certainly don't want to live in a world where the biggest technology companies in the world are Chinese rather than American because that's going to be a very different kind of problem than the one we're grappling with today. And as I said earlier, I'll keep saying it again. Two biggest threats to the Western liberal edifice. China and big tech in that order.

Now, I think that that's one reason not to. I think the other reason not to is, look, I think that there's a better version that we had lived even in the 1990s, the original promise of a free and open internet when Google was supposed to have represented as opposed to the perverted thing it's become today. I think that there's a better way forward

than breaking it up. And also, by the way, I don't think breaking it up solves the problem. Because the real problem in Silicon Valley today isn't a monopoly on products. It isn't the idea that they're somehow using this to gouge price like the Rockefellers or Carnegie's or Vanderbilt's might have done in monopoly eras in the past.

They're actually making many of their products available for free, consumer choices widespread. The real problem's different. It's a monopoly on ideas. It is an ideological cartel. And I can tell you from first-hand experience, talking to venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, having raised money from some of them,

being actually in the context of smaller startups, all of them, many of them, at least, bend the need to that same ideology. So if you take four big companies and break it up to 40 small companies, but they all still subject themselves to the same ideology, you still have an ideological cartel rather than an ideological monopoly, but I'm not sure we're that much better off in the marketplace of ideas. So both from an efficacy perspective and from a risk avoidance perspective,

if you will, on the Chinese risk and on the risk side and on the efficacy side, I don't know that we're actually going to solve the problem of the monopoly of ideas. If we really got to change our culture, breaking up big tech isn't going to do it. I'm not a big breakups guy. I do think, though, that we do need real action. One of the actions in the United States that we need to take is to teach these companies that you can't have in both ways. Either you operate as an actual private company and you get the special benefits of being a private company. Or we recognize a big part of what these companies are doing today, which is to act as an agent of the state to do through the back door what government can't directly do through the front door.

They're working hand in glove with government to censor free speech and open debate that the government doesn't want to see online, but the government technically can't censor so is using their censorship bureau and Silicon Valley to do it. And by the way, give them special legal immunity in the form of Section 230 protection, which is a statutory protection available to technology companies in the United States that I won't go into here. I say you can't have it both ways. Either you operate as a private company and you get treated as a private company or you operate in coordination with the government with special government privileges, but then you come and operate according to the same constraints as the government,

including in the U.S., the First Amendment to the Constitution in the United States, which protects free speech. You can't have it both ways. I also say, by the way, that if we live in a world where you can't discriminate, at least in the American context on the base of race or gender or sexual orientation or religion or national origin, which is the case in the U.S. today, then you shouldn't be able to, you should not be able to discriminate on the basis of political belief or political expression either. If race, gender, sexual orientation, and national origin are protected classes, then so should

political belief in political expression be too. So those are some of the bolder solutions that actually libertarians won't like. But nonetheless, I sort of apply in the book to say that you can't have it both ways. We need even handed applications in policy. Well, that makes sense. But again, again, the question for me, if you don't mind, is who are you going to elect to do that, right? Because some of those changes will require elected officials. So, you know, you had Donald Trump. He didn't do anything about it. Right. Yeah, he started a conversation. He didn't really finish the work that needed to be done. Look, I think the next, that's I said, the next decade is really important. Reagan was born out of necessity on the back of the 70s.

But I think, and decade like the one we've been through, create the conditions for selective pressure that hopefully create generational leaders that are able to drive that change. And so I'm hopeful for what we will see in the next decade. But if we're in the 70s without Reagan, I think we're in a tough spot. So I think that the emergence of real political leadership and not just one among 450 congressmen or one among 100 senators, but really starting at the top and not just at the White House, but governors at every state level and even at local levels need to step up to be able to drive

real change as executives, not just as legislators that have the potential through what they do, not just through policy, but through the cultural tone that they set to hopefully restart a cultural revival of the kind that we need. All right, Vivek, it sounds like someone's trying to break into your house. Yeah, yeah, there's a construction going on. To let you address that and defend yourself as a true American, very quickly before we let you go, we've got one final question, and we'll do a couple of questions for locals. And the final question is always, what's the one thing we're not talking about, but we really

should be? Hmm. Yeah. Look, I think that I think we should talk about the way in which our cultural fragility at home begets fragility abroad. I just think about, I look at what happened in Afghanistan in recent weeks, and the U.S. disastrous exit from Afghanistan. Is that deeply related to, or is it not related to,

the kinds of issues we've talked about here. Actually, they're deeply related. I think there was exactly one way that President Biden could have deterred the Taliban from doing what they did, which was to issue a credible threat of total decimation and annihilation if they came anywhere near Kabul. He didn't do that, but the reason he didn't do it is that even if he did do it, they would have never believed it because he lacked the moral standing

to use extraordinary force precisely when we needed it most because he's obsessed with self-criticism. And that's part of what the woke ideology does is it undermines moral fortitude from within, And I think one of the things we need to understand as we head into this brave new world of the new decade ahead is to recognize that cultural fragility at home begets fragility abroad. And I think that in some ways it's counterintuitive that we will see more the rise of the thing that we, none of us want to see, which is the rise of evil on the global stage, the weaker we are at home, both in places like the United States and the United Kingdom. And I think that's something we need to be talking more about is the relationship between fragility at home and the rise of fragility abroad. Vivek, it's been an absolute pleasure.

Thank you so much for coming on the show. If people want to find you online, where's the best place to do that? I can find me on social media. I reluctantly joined Twitter a year ago. I wasn't on social media for years. But starting last year, ahead of publishing the book, I'm back on social media. Vivekramaswami.com is my website. You can check out some of my work.

and get the book there as well. And most importantly, read the book. I'm not doing this as a commercial endeavor. I'm doing this to get the message out. But I hope that it starts a conversation that we need to be having in every segment of our society. Vivek, it's a brilliant book. We thoroughly recommend everybody read it.

Of course we do. We'll ask you a couple of questions for our locals. But for the moment, thank you so much for joining us. And thank you guys for watching and listening at home. We'll see you very soon with another brilliant interview like this one. And they always go out Wednesdays, and Sunday, 7pm UK time, 2pm Eastern Standard, and Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays are our raw shows at the same time.

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