00:00:30.000Phoenix, Arizona, December 18, 19, 2021.
00:00:36.000Tucker Carlson, Kaylee McIneney, Ted Cruz, Jesse Waters, Candace Owens, Jim Jordan, Donald Trump Jr., Madison Cawthorne, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Jack Pasobik, Benny Johnson, Sean Foyt, Sarah Palin, and special musical performances by Brantley Gilbert, Russell Dickerson, Adam Doliak, Ray Lynn, DJ Silver, and Lee Greenwood.
00:03:11.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:04:28.000I grew up, was born and raised in Ohio, where actually I live today.
00:04:31.000My parents were both immigrants from India.
00:04:34.000I often jokingly asked my dad why he came halfway around the world to Southwest Ohio.
00:04:39.000And he said that actually it was the only place in the world where he could get a job in the United States to be near his older sister who was in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
00:04:47.000And that, of course, begged the question of why she came to Fort Wayne, Indiana.
00:04:50.000And we joke around it's the only U.S. state with the word India contained in it.
00:05:05.000I was a nerdy guy in the lab the whole time.
00:05:08.000Ended up getting into biotech investing after I graduated.
00:05:11.000Did that for seven years from 2007 to 2014.
00:05:15.000Spent three of those years at the same time in law school at Yale, where I met my wife.
00:05:19.000It's probably the most productive thing that came out of it.
00:05:22.000She was in med school and lived next door to me.
00:05:24.000And when I came back to New York City after I finished law school and having a fun job on the side, now it was just a fun job.
00:05:30.000I ended up having a gap in my schedule, took up stand-up comedy for six months before I decided that that wasn't my calling and left my job to start a biotech company.
00:05:39.000I led the company as CEO for seven years.
00:05:42.000And during that time, we got a number of medicines developed.
00:05:45.000The one I'm probably most proud of is a new drug to treat prostate cancer.
00:05:49.000But I stepped down from my job as CEO this January.
00:05:53.000And, you know, thankfully, the company runs well today.
00:05:57.000But I stepped down as CEO to work on what I thought was a different kind of cancer, not a biological cancer, but a cultural cancer that I thought threatened to kill the dream that allowed me to achieve everything I ever had in my life as a first generation American.
00:06:12.000And that was the new orthodoxy, what I guess we could call the new woke orthodoxy that had really taken control of one elite institution after another.
00:06:21.000And though I wasn't born into elite America, I had lived it for the last 15 years.
00:06:26.000And I felt compelled to not only tell my story, but to reveal the problem that I saw, which I viewed as a defining scam of our time.
00:06:34.000And that's what led me to write Woke Inc.
00:06:55.000And I'd love to do it for woke culture and cancel culture because I think these are terms that get bandied around too much and are often used a little imprecisely.
00:07:01.000And I'm going to give a definition that I, at best I can, not be judgmental about the claims of the woke movement, but let's understand what it actually has to say.
00:07:18.000Well, it borrows from Marxist thought.
00:07:20.000Marxists said that actually there were these invisible power relationships between human beings, but they were based on economic class relationships, that people who had more money exerted invisible power over people who didn't have much money.
00:07:33.000Woke culture had a slightly different theory of the case.
00:07:36.000And they said that there are these invisible power structures, but what we need to do is wake up to the real power structures, which weren't based on how much money you have quite.
00:07:44.000It was based on your genetically inherited attributes that you got on the day you were born, whether you were male or female, whether you were black or white, whether you were gay or straight.
00:07:54.000These were the factors that really governed the invisible power relationships between us as human beings.
00:07:59.000And what woke culture calls on us to do is to wake up to those invisible power structures so we can correct the injustices arising from them.
00:08:08.000The short version, if you want a shorthand version, is obsessing over race, gender, and sexual orientation, maybe climate change too.
00:08:15.000And that would be an equally good definition.
00:08:18.000Now, yeah, I could pause there or I could go on for a while, Charlie, but maybe I'll wrap up on woke culture for a second, just to say that the way I think about it is that if I take the two most toxic ideologies of the 20th century, Marxism, which was an oppressor-oppressed relationship on steroids, and German Nazism, which was identity politics on steroids, you mix the two together, you get their love child, which is modern wokeism here on American soil.
00:08:44.000And this, I believe the recent election results that favored Republicans was a woke lash in a way where people started to realize that this pathogen, this virus, this tumor, it needs to be confronted and it needs to be removed.
00:09:01.000And you saw this all the way from New Jersey to Seattle to Minneapolis.
00:09:04.000It's making America a much more dangerous place.
00:09:37.000Thank you for defining it, waking up to pre-existing power structures, oppressor versus oppressed.
00:09:42.000You know, we could even go to Herbert Marcuse or Espinoza, one-dimensional man, all that sort of stuff.
00:09:47.000But what people don't understand, and this is a good segue to your book, how is it that the people who are in the business of making money and taking risks and allocating capital, how do they either have the time, the bandwidth, or the interest to dwell in these sort of petri-dish social experiments?
00:10:13.000That's what most of the book is about.
00:10:15.000So what I do a little bit of in the book, Charlie, is actually lay out a little bit of a history.
00:10:19.000I think a lot of this began with the 2008 financial crisis.
00:10:23.000And I know the 08 financial crisis, believe me, because I lived it.
00:10:26.000I got my first job in New York City at a hedge fund in the fall of 2007 that got an honorable mention in Michael Lewis's book, The Big Short.
00:10:34.000What happened after the 08 crisis was that corporations in this country were viewed by the old left as the bad guys.
00:10:40.000And what the old left wanted to do was to take money from those wealthy corporate fat cats and redistribute it to poor people to help poor people.
00:10:47.000Agree or not, that's what the old left wanted.
00:10:52.000And there was this Occupy Wall Street movement, which actually threatened the structure of big banks, which they said that we're going to come after you.
00:10:58.000And if you're a big bank in 2008, Occupy Wall Street was a tough pill to swallow.
00:11:02.000But it turned out the new woke stuff, which was born right around the same time, the beginning of our diversity decade, Barack Obama elected as president of the United States, there was this new woke left that said, actually, the real problem wasn't poverty.
00:11:19.000That presented the opportunity of a generation for Wall Street and big business in this country to say that actually we could go from being the bad guys to being the good guys if we just said the right things.
00:11:31.000You put your token minorities on your boards.
00:11:34.000You muse about the racially disparate impact of climate change after you fly in a private jet to a fancy ski town.
00:11:39.000You criticize capitalism as a racist system all the while climbing a ladder that you kick out from under you so other people can't climb up.
00:11:46.000This was a pretty good game, but they didn't do it for free.
00:11:49.000They effectively expected that the new left look the other way when it came to leaving their own corporate power structures intact.
00:11:56.000And so the way I tell it in the book is you have a bunch of woke millennials that get in bed with a bunch of big banks.
00:12:01.000Together, they birth woke capitalism and they use that to put Occupy Wall Street up for adoption.
00:12:08.000And then Silicon Valley does it and the rest of corporate America does it.
00:12:10.000That's really what the heart of the book's all about.
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00:13:00.000Take back control of your privacy by visiting squadpod.com slash Charlie.
00:13:13.000I've never heard it before, which is that the Zuccotti Park unwashed people where I went to Zuccotti Park, actually when I was in high school, I walked through it.
00:13:20.000I didn't grow up in New York, I grew up in Chicago, but I visited.
00:13:23.000And I remember seeing firsthand the energy, the enthusiasm.
00:13:27.000And what you're trying to say, though, is that some of the activists intentionally or unintentionally thought of a way that they could redistribute corporate profits towards their social movements through kind of racketeering.
00:13:58.000In my opinion, some that you and I might have been sympathetic to, which is the idea they bailed out these bankers lived well in the good times and wanted public bailouts in the bad times.
00:14:07.000There was real heft to, I think, the good, sincere basis for wanting to reorder crony capitalism, right?
00:14:14.000So the thing that happened, though, Charlie, is that there was the birth of a new strand of that movement.
00:14:20.000And speaking of Zuccotti Park, you go down to Virginia in 2011.
00:14:24.000The Occupy Wall Street movement had started to spread across the country.
00:14:27.000There's a video about the progressive stack that emerged right around that time.
00:14:31.000You might have seen it, where there's a woman speaking to a crowd of Occupy Wall Street activists, but she says that actually the people who are going to speak at this rally are going to be ordered on the basis of whether they're empowered or disempowered.
00:14:48.000And there was kind of an awkward murmur in the crowd.
00:14:50.000And this guy raises his hand in the back and says, hey, aren't we all here because we're all disempowered?
00:14:55.000And another guy, a white guy, steps up on stage and says that you don't get it.
00:14:58.000You need to step up and then step back.
00:15:01.000And there was kind of an awkward murmur where the crowd didn't know what to make of it.
00:15:04.000And that was kind of to me, the embodiment of the beginning of where the Occupy Wall Street wheels started coming off the bus, where they were no longer about representing economic disempowerment for everyone, but about also beginning to talk specifically about racial disempowerment and gender-based disempowerment and sexual orientation-based disempowerment.
00:15:23.000That's what corporate America loved because they could get on board with that.
00:15:27.000Because you see, for Goldman Sachs, you don't want to talk about systemic financial risk, but talk about systemic racism.
00:15:32.000Yeah, give me more of that so that I don't have to talk about systemic financial risk.
00:15:36.000And so just last year, Charlie, you get Davos, which is the place where they make these declarations.
00:15:41.000Goldman says it won't take a company public in the United States if it doesn't have a sufficiently diverse board along the axes of race and gender.
00:15:48.000Forget political viewpoint diversity, but guess what?
00:15:51.000Goldman Sachs does that at the same time that they are not reviewing their mortgage practice reviews that relate to the 2008 financial crisis.
00:15:59.000That they're settling for $5 billion for a bribery scandal that defrauded the Malaysian people when Elizabeth Warren, an identity politics-obsessed politician, was at the frontrunner of a primary that was actually a threat to Goldman Sachs's power structure.
00:16:11.000And this is not a partisan issue, it's a cultural issue and a marriage between big business in this country and a new strand of the left that ultimately put the old strand of the left up for adoption.
00:16:24.000Yeah, there's so many different directions I want to go with this, but let's start here.
00:16:28.000So, in 2008, you saw the financial crisis, which was a mixture of many different dynamics, lowering of interest rates artificially to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to the awful behavior of a couple of Wall Street banks, the bailing out of such the you know, Ben Bernanke to Geithner to Hank Paulson from the Treasury Department, you know, heavily subsidizing the behavior, and I think designing an incredibly corrupt bailout package for every single bank,
00:16:57.000even if even if they don't want to take the money using the FDIC to try to actually engineer it.
00:17:01.000And people lost began to lose trust in kind of corporations as a whole, but also power systems, right?
00:17:14.000Because this is something that I'm legitimately curious about.
00:17:17.000When was the kind of the fulcrum moment or instances you can point to where all of a sudden you have Goldman is one example, but Goldman, they're directionless, right?
00:17:42.000So Occupy Wall Street, the 2008 financial crisis, that was the equivalent of the Big Bang, but things proceed from the Big Bang at the beginning.
00:17:48.000So then, you know, you begin, let's talk about Silicon Valley and I'll get to the rest of corporate America.
00:17:51.000Silicon Valley sees what Wall Street did and recognizes that the old left used to be the threat to their power structure, just like Wall Street.
00:17:58.000But what they recognize is if they could then lend it's like it's like a loaning relationship.
00:18:02.000If they could lend their corporate power to advance certain of that strand of the left's objectives, then they would expect that the new left look the other way when it came to leaving their own monopoly power intact.
00:18:14.000And so then you begin to see the rise of content moderation, their code word for censorship, really, to be able to censor certain ideas that that new woke left doesn't want to see online.
00:18:24.000But again, they did not do it for free.
00:18:26.000They effectively expect that that new ascendant strand of the left looks the other way when it came to leaving their monopoly power intact.
00:18:33.000And that worked so masterfully that the rest of corporate America gets in on the act.
00:18:49.000It's an employee training that they provided via LinkedIn earlier this year.
00:18:53.000Or you'd rather preach about new voting laws in Georgia that make you sound more like a super PAC than a software manufacturer.
00:18:59.000But that is a great way, Charlie, of changing the subject away from, say, the impact of your own products on the nationwide epidemic of diabetes and obesity, including in the black community, by the way, that they profess to care so much about.
00:19:13.000So it's kind of the Wall Street, Silicon Valley game.
00:19:18.000I mean, the list of examples goes on, but that's the way this game is played.
00:19:22.000So what you're saying in the Coca-Cola example is that it is public relations smokescreen, right?
00:19:28.000They could pull the grenade and they can distract the audience and they can send a flare in the other direction, like, oh, look at us because we're being equitable.
00:19:37.000By the way, don't look at how we're making America really obese or overweight, right?
00:19:41.000That exactly, which could invite public ire, which could invite regulation.
00:19:53.000So, but so, but I'm sure every company is a little bit different, but they have many similarities, right?
00:19:59.000So, what you're saying, though, is that the two kinds of places of incubation that this was happening was the Wall Streets and the Silicon Valley.
00:20:08.000My thesis, which is expanding thanks to your contribution and others, is that our campuses and the radicalization of colleges played, it was a contributing factor in this, meaning that the supply of labor was so increasingly radical.
00:20:24.000So, Charlie, you're clearly thinking deeply about this stuff, so we can maybe get right into it.
00:20:29.000This whole woke capitalism thing isn't just one phenomenon, right?
00:20:32.000And there's no silver bullet explanation.
00:20:34.000It's not just the Occupy Wall Street thing.
00:20:35.000That's one of many strands that kind of conspired at the same time.
00:20:39.000Around the same time, Charlie, what you also have is bottom-up consumer demand.
00:20:43.000And many companies are doing this not to betray their shareholders, but because they think and they may actually make more money by signaling their virtue, because you now have an entire generation graduating from colleges, millennials, people my age, Gen Z, presumably your age.
00:20:57.000I mean, these are people who are hungry for a cause, hungry for a sense of purpose, hungry for identity.
00:21:04.000But the kinds of things that used to fill that moral identity for a generation-faith, patriotism, hard work, family, as they have receded in our generation's consciousness, what you see is a new moral void that we need to fill with something.
00:21:19.000And that's part of what makes wokeism so appealing to fill that void, especially when you're secular religion.
00:21:24.000You're exactly, it's an absolutely secular religion.
00:21:39.000You know, speaking about the Inquisition, I can tell you a funny analogy about the Spanish Inquisition later that I talk about in my book, but that's effectively what's going on in this new generation: we have a moral hunger that we're trying to fill with the equivalent of fast food of wokeism.
00:22:24.000From baby boomers to millennials and Gen Z. That's just a fact.
00:22:27.000Now, Ludwig von Mises, one of the famous Austrian economists of the last century, said it better than I ever could when he described the fact that anti-capitalism is born of capitalism itself.
00:22:38.000It fulfills a psychological need created by capitalism.
00:22:43.000If you're the son of a great man, there's two ways to exceed your father.
00:22:47.000One is on his own terms, which is by definition hard to do.
00:22:50.000And the other is by exhibiting moral superiority, which is easier to do because it's subjective.
00:22:55.000What do you have on a generational scale writ large?
00:22:59.000Effectively, what you're seeing now in the largest intergenerational transfer between a generation of baby boomers and a generation of millennials in Gen Z who may not be able to live up to the accomplishments of their predecessors.
00:23:09.000Through moral superiority by blaming them for your inherited whiteness or whatever.
00:23:13.000And it fits the bill perfectly, by the way, because you don't even have accountability for it.
00:23:16.000It's some genetic trait that's the fault of your ancestors.
00:23:19.000So I think that's kind of the psychic issue that we see in an entire generation today, combined with the diversity decade, combined with the 2008 financial crisis and corporate America feeding and preying on those moral insecurities of a generation, like a Virginia Slims manufacturer trying to advertise to teenage girls in the 1990s.
00:23:37.000That is what corporate America is doing to an entire generation, preying not on our body image insecurities, but our moral insecurities.
00:23:43.000So it's all complicated, but these are all contributing factors to getting to a complicated place where we are as a culture.
00:23:53.000You're in luck because Buy Optimizer's Black Friday deal starts now and not only giving you a huge discount all month long, they are now giving over $200 worth in free gifts.
00:25:53.000You say that some of their consultants are probably doing these, you know, exhausting 300-page PowerPoint slideshows that people fall asleep in in boardrooms of their market research that they did about how young 16-year-old girls want to be part of a purpose and they want to be virtue signaled to.
00:26:09.000And, you know, they want to see that you stand with Planned Parenthood, whatever sort of nauseating thing.
00:26:13.000But I'm curious, though, is that all the smart people from McKinsey and all these soulless apparatchiks that run our corporations, do they ever worry about the cost?
00:26:24.000Do they ever worry about how this might be bad for business?
00:26:54.000And here's why I still think it's a good strategy.
00:26:56.000Here's what I think could work: corporate America will respond to one thing, getting hit where it hurts in their pocketbook.
00:27:01.000And I think right now there are 70 plus, 75 plus million Americans who are disaffected from their economy, who are disaffected from their culture, who are quietly kind of forced to buy products or to work at places that don't actually respect them and they know it.
00:27:16.000And I think that's bad for our culture.
00:27:18.000Now, what does that mean in terms of a business opportunity?
00:27:21.000Black Rifle Coffee just listed or announced a deal to go public via SPAC for $1.7 billion, whatever it was a couple of days ago.
00:27:28.000That's the right-wing version of Starbucks coffee.
00:27:31.000Do I really want to live in a country where there's a Republican form of coffee and a Democratic form of coffee?
00:27:36.000Or dare I say one day a Republican or a right-wing version of baseball and a left-wing version of baseball?
00:27:44.000I want to live in an economy that brings us together across our political divisions, across our cultural divisions, across our racial or other divisions.
00:27:53.000That's the real private sector we ought to live in in America to thrive.
00:27:56.000And so, as an entrepreneur, I'm really skittish about the idea of creating a right-wing alt version of an economy.
00:28:02.000That being said, I think the next step has to be to create market solutions and alternatives that respect that group of 70, 75 million Americans with companies that do share their values, to tell them that they're important and valued, to bring them back in to steal customers, to take those customers from the rest of corporate America, which will then, I hope, have the effect of not allowing those alternative businesses to succeed massively unchecked.
00:28:28.000But the rest of corporate America, they then wake up and say, oh my God, we missed that.
00:28:31.000We got that wrong and swing the pendulum back.
00:28:33.000That's where I'd like to go, not to two economies, but to use that to be able to catalyze a return to normalcy of what our private sector is supposed to represent in a political space that brings us together.
00:28:44.000So now I want to talk about the internal dynamics, because part of what you talked about is how they outwardly express themselves, right?
00:28:54.000But now I want to talk about how it's becoming more and more difficult for an American economy to compete if you have internal woke dynamics.
00:29:02.000The best example I could use is Activision Blizzard, which is the video game company.
00:29:06.000You may or may not be following this drama right now, but where they say they need to hire more women programmers and that they need to have, you know, more time off to be able to center themselves because the extra pressure in work.
00:29:19.000Can you talk about how this actually makes the American economy at a competitive disadvantage?
00:29:25.000It actually makes our companies kind of into these outgrowths of college campus kind of places of mediocrity that aren't necessarily pushing the boundaries of new breakthroughs or patents, but are just kind of basically checking boxes.
00:29:42.000Talk about the internal dynamics of how damaging this is.
00:29:45.000So this is near and dear to my heart, Charlie.
00:29:47.000And this actually, I've just started to write my second book.
00:29:50.000And this is at the heart of that question, which is the pursuit of excellence in America.
00:29:53.000So, you know, even if you just think about it in sports, to take even some trivial examples, Simone Biles withdraws at the peak of the Olympics this year, representing the U.S., and the media culture celebrates her for making that decision.
00:30:05.000I do fault a media culture that celebrates it.
00:30:07.000Naomi Osaka, a tennis player from the United States, does nearly the exact same thing just two months earlier.
00:30:13.000Is that entirely unrelated to Naomi Osaka's decision to give up her U.S. citizenship a few years earlier or the rise of intersectionality as a theory of identity amongst young black women?
00:30:29.000Asian American kids now in the classroom are taught to pretend to not pursue something other than excellence in math and science because it's not cool to be number one anymore.
00:30:38.000Standardized testing is ridiculed as racist.
00:30:41.000Talking about American exceptionalism is now considered gauche.
00:30:45.000What I think has happened is we have this inner animal spirit at the heart of the American soul.
00:30:50.000That animal spirit has been domesticated and tamed by this new culture that penalizes excellence and celebrates mediocrity and victimhood.
00:31:00.000And the old American spirit has now traveled oceans to lift up places like China, while the old communist spirit from China has actually come over here to the United States to tame our culture of excellence.
00:31:11.000And I think the country is in our culture is hungry for a revival of that excellence in a way that transcends political boundaries.
00:31:18.000Personally, I think that when a lot of Americans rallied behind the cry to make America great again, they didn't hunger for a single man.
00:31:25.000They hungered for reviving that unapologetic pursuit, uninhibited pursuit of excellence in this country and by this country on the global stage.
00:31:36.000But I don't think the solution is just to complain about it or to see the spread of victimhood culture, Charlie, which is something I worry about, not just in the black victimhood context, though I think that's a problem that I want to be open about.
00:31:47.000I also worry about now the emergence of white victimhood culture in response to say that, oh, yeah, well, you guys are victims.
00:31:53.000We're bigger victims too and play the victimhood Olympics that second generation Asian American kids are now getting in on too by reinventing themselves as persons of color or whatever disempowerment narrative they want to foist on themselves.
00:32:03.000going through struggles that actually their parents went through, but they never went through in the first place.
00:32:07.000That's the moment we're in in America where victimhood has become a currency.
00:32:13.000Everybody's cashing it in before that bubble bursts.
00:32:16.000I want to see that bubble burst because I'd like to see the revival of an excellence first culture that goes to the heart of what it means to be American.
00:32:23.000And so if you can't tell, I'm pretty passionate about this topic.
00:32:42.000You mentioned this earlier that only capitalism can breed anti-capital.
00:32:46.000Anti-capitalism is only a symptom of capitalism, which is that at, you know, we look at the state of affairs in America that the ability to be woke is made possible thanks to the affluence and the incredible wealth we have in this country, which affluence covers a multitude of sins or the abundance or the amount of stuff that we have.
00:33:10.000If I could just be as blunt as possible.
00:33:13.000Can you talk a little bit about how this is a luxury that, of course, we are abusing?
00:33:18.000But also, I want you to go a level deeper, which is that the way our economy is currently structured is that we have companies that I think have unrealistic and quite honestly unearned profit margins that have been able to largely subsidize these social movements because they just, they don't want to deal with it.
00:33:40.000I'm talking about JP Morgan, where the guy that's running a 55-person restaurant in the Woodlands, Texas, he's like, I don't have time to see my kids, let alone worry about social movements.
00:33:52.000Talk about those two things, the wealth component, but then also the actual, how our economy has been digitized and how that frees up people for purpose-filled social movements.
00:34:09.000I think the first point is a simple one, which is that wokeness is actually an indicator of affluence in a society.
00:34:16.000It is a symptom of a lazy turpitude that comes from affluence.
00:34:20.000There's a reason that you don't see the woke movement popping up in poor countries is they have bigger concerns to be able to put food on the dinner table.
00:34:28.000It is the ultimate privilege to be woke.
00:34:34.000Did you know that if you shop at Nike, they turn around and give your hard-earned dollars to pro-abortion groups like Planned Parenthood and the Population Council?
00:34:43.000Did you know that Airbnb gave $500,000 to the Marxist BLM incorporated organization?
00:34:51.000Your first vote is at the ballot box, but that isn't enough to defend our traditional Judeo-Christian values.
00:34:59.000Left-wing corporations are subverting our nation and our republic by taking money from conservative customers and giving it to radical organizations that support abortion, gun control, and critical race theory.
00:35:12.000You have another vote, a second vote at the checkout line, which is why there's a massively important organization called Second Vote that comes in.
00:36:53.000Go to secondvote.com and subscribe with promo code Charlie today.
00:37:00.000The question is, though, in what way did we generate that privileged status, that temporary mirage of prosperity, which I actually think is itself partly a mirage, driven by something that people on the left and the right, I think, don't understand enough to be able to talk about today well.
00:37:14.000But I think it's one of the issues that we ought to talk about, which is chronic easy money policy from the Fed.
00:37:20.000You actually have, I personally think that trickle-down economics works when it's an economic gain and productivity gain that's driven by real productivity gains in a real economy.
00:37:33.000Where it doesn't quite work is where that wealth is generated in a society through a government that prints money, which allows certain people to ski on artificial snow.
00:37:43.000If you follow me on the analogy, the way it works is the banks that are closest to the Fed get to borrow most of that money and there's a rake taken at every step down the system.
00:37:52.000It doesn't filter down as well where everybody else gets to ski once a year, but the people who sit next to the artificial snow get to sticky on deep snow all year long.
00:38:00.000So I think that that's part of our culture that we haven't talked enough about.
00:38:05.000And there's another dimension to it as well, which is the rise of monopolies.
00:38:09.000The rise of monopolies in a corporate culture actually creates a culture that insulates you from accountability.
00:38:15.000Because if you're an engineer at Google today, it doesn't matter if you're male, female, trans, cis, gay, straight, it doesn't matter.
00:38:24.000It doesn't even matter if you're competent because whether or not you do what you do, Google's still going to print the same cash flow that it did last year is it's going to print next year because that's the nature of a monopoly business.
00:38:33.000But that actually creates a different kind of laziness inside Silicon Valley and inside these monopoly organizations that used to have to be challenged by startups.
00:38:41.000But now many of those startups are flush with so much cash because the Federal Reserve keeps printing it every day That fosters a new form of excess in even the startup corporate culture today.
00:38:49.000So, one of the things I've studied a lot is actually the fall of Rome and the fall before the fall.
00:38:54.000That's actually the name of a book about the fall of Rome that I'd recommend to folks.
00:38:57.000You know, I'm going to read it in the context of rereading it in the context of writing my next book.
00:39:01.000But there's a lot in America that ought to remind us about some of the indicators of the fall of an empire that were present in the fall of ancient Rome.
00:39:09.000And I view as leading indicators of what's present in the United States today.
00:39:12.000If we don't wake up to that and reverse course, the new culture of laziness that doesn't just come from woke culture, though that's a big part of it, but it also comes from policies that make the generation of temporary paper wealth too easy due to Federal Reserve policy, due to easy money policies, due to the rise of monopolies as the leading businesses in our sectors that foster a generational culture of laziness.
00:39:34.000Now, later on to that over the last year, government policy that sends people's checks, it's like showering cocaine on a bunch of drug addicts that ultimately, when you even stop sending those checks, people have forgotten how to work and don't want to go back to work.
00:39:45.000So, this is a cultural issue that runs deep.
00:39:48.000And not a lot of people, either on the right or on the left, are really understand the root causes or are able to get to the heart of what's happening in a way that could help drive our change for the better.
00:39:56.000It's part of why I'm doing what I'm doing.
00:40:11.000Let's let's have a little bit of a diagnostic conversation.
00:40:14.000I think this conversation here has been super healthy in that regard.
00:40:18.000To your Roman analogy, the question is: where on the Roman arc are we?
00:40:21.000Are we at the first triumphant, the second triumphant?
00:40:24.000You know, the transition from the emperor empire to the uh from the republic to the empire, or are we a little bit more kind of near Marcus Aurelius, which would be the last gasp of Rome?
00:41:05.000And so, so I, but in our culture, like in Roman culture, I don't think it's just about the leadership, it's also about the culture that preceded that leadership.
00:41:12.000Now, in exceptional circumstances, great leaders can make a difference, even in the American context.
00:41:18.000I think we're going through an American identity crisis now.
00:41:21.000I think we went through an identity crisis in the 70s, at the end of the 70s.
00:41:25.000I think we were in the midst of an American identity crisis, a crisis for the identity of American greatness.
00:41:30.000Yes, and out of that, you create the selective conditions for the emergence of a great leader.
00:41:36.000Reagan at the end of the 80s ultimately set the tone from the top that created not just an economic revival or a legal or governmental revival, but a cultural revival in this country that made everybody proud to be American today.
00:41:47.000And the intangible benefits that come from that sort of revival of positivity in our culture is something that we continue to enjoy the fruits of to this day.
00:41:56.000What I worry about is if we're in the 70s again without Reagan to save the day, I think that's going to be a very difficult path ahead for us in the next decade.
00:42:05.000But I'm optimistic, Charlie, that actually the condition that we're in, as defeatist as it may seem to some, actually create the conditions for great leaders to step up.
00:42:15.000And that's not just political leaders, that's cultural leaders, it's business leaders, it's civic leaders at every level.
00:43:35.000I know you say the products, but what else?
00:43:37.000Start new businesses, talk about this.
00:43:39.000What can people do to push back against the woke industrial complex?
00:43:44.000Yeah, so look, I think there's a political limb to the solution, and I think there's a private sector cultural limb to the solution.
00:43:49.000I think the political solutions are simpler, but not ones I'm banking on.
00:43:53.000I think we should make political belief a civil right, both at the state level and national level, to say that if you can't fire somebody or de-platform somebody because they're black or gay or Muslim or white or Christian or Jewish or whatever, you should not be able to fire somebody or de-platform somebody just because they're an outspoken conservative or liberal for that matter either.
00:44:11.000So I think there's some simple policy solutions.
00:44:17.000I also think there's an opportunity for real entrepreneurs to build businesses that are built with the values of the 75 million in mind, with the unapologetic idea that we are one nation under God, that the Bill of Rights is non-negotiable, that the content of your character trumps the color of your skin, and that capitalism is the best system to have ever lifted people up out of poverty.
00:44:43.000I don't want to see two economies, but if done the right way, I think that could actually bring us together.
00:44:48.000And then I think the most important part, though, Charlie, is really reviving the idea of American identity in the next generation, because that's ultimately where the most important battle line rests today.
00:44:58.000And we have come off of a decade of celebrating our diversity and our differences that I think we've actually forgotten all of the ways in which we're the same as one people.
00:45:07.000And make no mistake, I think our diversity is a beautiful thing.
00:45:10.000But if our last decade was the diversity decade, I think the next decade ought to be about celebrating and reviving those few ideals that actually bind us together as one people to make that the hallmark of civic education in a new generation that ultimately make the struggles of even our generation now when we're older men, you know, be able to seem trivial by comparison relative to what we will have cultivated in the next generation.
00:45:33.000That's what I'd like to see is the revival of that shared national, common American identity.
00:45:40.000It's a nationalism of ideas that ultimately define what it means to be American that hopefully dilutes this woke agenda and its postmodern cousins to irrelevance.
00:45:49.000Woke Inc., everyone, go buy it right now inside corporate America's social justice scam.
00:45:56.000Every person listening, if you have kids going into corporate America, if you work in corporate America, you've got to check it out.