The Charlie Kirk Show - WOKE Inc. with Vivek Ramaswamy

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:00.000 Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, one of the most fun conversations I've had recently with Vivek Ramaswamy, author of Woke Inc.

00:00:07.000 What has happened to our companies?

00:00:08.000 Why have they been taken over by these social justice movements?

00:00:12.000 He explains it in a very articulate fashion.

00:00:16.000 Do you want to meet somebody?

00:00:18.000 Do you want to have some fun?

00:00:20.000 Are you tired of just being cooped up all the time?

00:00:22.000 Do you want to get out of the house?

00:00:24.000 Do you want to come see some of the conservative heroes in person?

00:00:29.000 Well, you can do that.

00:00:30.000 Phoenix, Arizona, December 18, 19, 2021.

00:00:36.000 Tucker 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.

00:01:01.000 Phoenix, Arizona.

00:01:03.000 It's an amazing time of year in Phoenix, everybody.

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00:01:31.000 If you show up, it's going to be amazing.

00:01:33.000 That time of year, it's unbelievably nice.

00:01:37.000 And I had someone say, Charlie, how do I meet my future husband?

00:01:39.000 How do I meet my future wife?

00:01:40.000 I say, well, are you getting out there?

00:01:42.000 Are you meeting people?

00:01:43.000 No.

00:01:44.000 Well, maybe this might be a good chance for you to go out on a limb and go meet some new people.

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00:02:47.000 Vivek is here.

00:02:48.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:02:49.000 Here we go.

00:02:50.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:02:52.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:02:54.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

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00:03:01.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:03:02.000 He's an incredible guy.

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00:03:10.000 Turning point USA. 0.65

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00:03:23.000 Hey, everybody.

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00:03:51.000 Hey, everybody.

00:03:51.000 Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:03:53.000 I've been looking forward to this one for quite some time.

00:03:56.000 One of the most important books that has been authored in recent memory.

00:04:00.000 And it's all about kind of wokeism in corporate America and what we can do about it.

00:04:07.000 And it's a very interesting, very articulate guest, Vivek Ramaswamy.

00:04:12.000 Did I get that right?

00:04:13.000 You're pretty darn close, Charlie.

00:04:15.000 Good to see you.

00:04:15.000 All right.

00:04:16.000 I'm in the zip code.

00:04:18.000 Honored to have you on our show.

00:04:19.000 You're doing a wonderful job.

00:04:20.000 Introduce yourself first to our audience and then talk a little bit about your book and we'll go from there.

00:04:25.000 Yeah, sure.

00:04:26.000 Just a brief introduction.

00:04:28.000 I grew up, was born and raised in Ohio, where actually I live today.

00:04:31.000 My parents were both immigrants from India.

00:04:34.000 I often jokingly asked my dad why he came halfway around the world to Southwest Ohio.

00:04:39.000 And 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.

00:04:47.000 And that, of course, begged the question of why she came to Fort Wayne, Indiana.

00:04:50.000 And we joke around it's the only U.S. state with the word India contained in it.

00:04:55.000 There you go.

00:04:56.000 So that's a bit of my family background and how they came here on a joking note.

00:05:01.000 More seriously, I ended up going to Harvard for college.

00:05:04.000 I studied molecular biology.

00:05:05.000 I was a nerdy guy in the lab the whole time.

00:05:08.000 Ended up getting into biotech investing after I graduated.

00:05:11.000 Did that for seven years from 2007 to 2014.

00:05:15.000 Spent three of those years at the same time in law school at Yale, where I met my wife.

00:05:19.000 It's probably the most productive thing that came out of it.

00:05:22.000 She was in med school and lived next door to me. 0.98

00:05:24.000 And 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.

00:05:30.000 I 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.

00:05:39.000 I led the company as CEO for seven years.

00:05:42.000 And during that time, we got a number of medicines developed.

00:05:45.000 The one I'm probably most proud of is a new drug to treat prostate cancer.

00:05:49.000 But I stepped down from my job as CEO this January.

00:05:53.000 And, you know, thankfully, the company runs well today.

00:05:55.000 It's a multi-billion dollar business.

00:05:57.000 But 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.

00:06:12.000 And 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.

00:06:21.000 And though I wasn't born into elite America, I had lived it for the last 15 years.

00:06:26.000 And 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.

00:06:34.000 And that's what led me to write Woke Inc.

00:06:36.000 I completely agree with that.

00:06:37.000 So let's get our terms right before we get into your book.

00:06:40.000 How would you define woke?

00:06:42.000 It is used all the time.

00:06:43.000 We use it.

00:06:44.000 I have my own personal definition, but just explain in as much detail as you're comfortable.

00:06:49.000 What do we mean when we say woke?

00:06:52.000 Yeah, thank you for doing that, Charlie.

00:06:54.000 And I applaud you for doing it.

00:06:55.000 And 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.

00:07:01.000 And 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.

00:07:09.000 Okay.

00:07:10.000 So the woke movement is all about waking up to invisible power structures that govern the social universe.

00:07:17.000 What does that mean?

00:07:18.000 Well, it borrows from Marxist thought.

00:07:20.000 Marxists 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.

00:07:33.000 Woke culture had a slightly different theory of the case.

00:07:36.000 And 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.

00:07:44.000 It 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.

00:07:54.000 These were the factors that really governed the invisible power relationships between us as human beings.

00:07:59.000 And 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.

00:08:07.000 That's the long version.

00:08:08.000 The short version, if you want a shorthand version, is obsessing over race, gender, and sexual orientation, maybe climate change too.

00:08:15.000 And that would be an equally good definition.

00:08:18.000 Now, 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.

00:08:44.000 And 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.

00:09:01.000 And you saw this all the way from New Jersey to Seattle to Minneapolis.

00:09:04.000 It's making America a much more dangerous place.

00:09:07.000 It's making America unsafe.

00:09:09.000 It's making it also just an unpleasant place to live.

00:09:12.000 So, but let's go into now how the specifics of your book, because I could talk about the college campus part of it.

00:09:18.000 That's pretty simple and easy.

00:09:21.000 We could talk about the military part of it, which is incredibly horrifying, but we have other kind of guests for that.

00:09:28.000 I really am curious about this because I know exactly what our audience is going to be thinking.

00:09:34.000 And it's, okay, hold on a second, Charlie.

00:09:36.000 I get the woke thing.

00:09:37.000 Thank you for defining it, waking up to pre-existing power structures, oppressor versus oppressed.

00:09:42.000 You know, we could even go to Herbert Marcuse or Espinoza, one-dimensional man, all that sort of stuff.

00:09:47.000 But 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?

00:10:07.000 Exactly.

00:10:08.000 The question of our time.

00:10:09.000 And it's a bit of a scam, but it's a bit of a mystery too.

00:10:11.000 It works like a magic trick.

00:10:13.000 That's what most of the book is about.

00:10:15.000 So what I do a little bit of in the book, Charlie, is actually lay out a little bit of a history.

00:10:19.000 I think a lot of this began with the 2008 financial crisis.

00:10:23.000 And I know the 08 financial crisis, believe me, because I lived it.

00:10:26.000 I 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.

00:10:32.000 I saw this firsthand.

00:10:34.000 What happened after the 08 crisis was that corporations in this country were viewed by the old left as the bad guys.

00:10:40.000 And 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.

00:10:47.000 Agree or not, that's what the old left wanted.

00:10:49.000 This is very smart.

00:10:50.000 Keep going.

00:10:50.000 I see where you're going with.

00:10:51.000 I've never heard this.

00:10:52.000 And 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.

00:10:58.000 And if you're a big bank in 2008, Occupy Wall Street was a tough pill to swallow.

00:11:02.000 But 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.

00:11:14.000 It wasn't economic injustice.

00:11:15.000 It was racism and misogyny and bigotry.

00:11:18.000 And guess what, Charlie?

00:11:19.000 That 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.

00:11:29.000 You applaud diversity and inclusion.

00:11:31.000 You put your token minorities on your boards. 0.97

00:11:34.000 You muse about the racially disparate impact of climate change after you fly in a private jet to a fancy ski town.

00:11:39.000 You 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.

00:11:46.000 This was a pretty good game, but they didn't do it for free.

00:11:49.000 They effectively expected that the new left look the other way when it came to leaving their own corporate power structures intact.

00:11:56.000 And 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. 0.97

00:12:01.000 Together, they birth woke capitalism and they use that to put Occupy Wall Street up for adoption.

00:12:08.000 And then Silicon Valley does it and the rest of corporate America does it.

00:12:10.000 That's really what the heart of the book's all about.

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00:13:11.000 What you just said is really smart.

00:13:13.000 I'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.

00:13:20.000 I didn't grow up in New York, I grew up in Chicago, but I visited.

00:13:23.000 And I remember seeing firsthand the energy, the enthusiasm.

00:13:27.000 And 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.

00:13:37.000 Or is that part of it?

00:13:40.000 So let me break it down for the interesting.

00:13:42.000 You brought up the Zuccotti Park because I used to live in New York City.

00:13:44.000 I went to Zuccotti Park.

00:13:45.000 I saw what that looked like.

00:13:47.000 So what happened actually was there was that earnest Occupy Wall Street movement.

00:13:51.000 People of all colors were all genders.

00:13:54.000 And it had real complaints and real complaints.

00:13:57.000 Legitimate.

00:13:58.000 In 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.

00:14:07.000 There was real heft to, I think, the good, sincere basis for wanting to reorder crony capitalism, right?

00:14:14.000 So the thing that happened, though, Charlie, is that there was the birth of a new strand of that movement.

00:14:20.000 And speaking of Zuccotti Park, you go down to Virginia in 2011.

00:14:24.000 The Occupy Wall Street movement had started to spread across the country.

00:14:27.000 There's a video about the progressive stack that emerged right around that time.

00:14:31.000 You 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.

00:14:44.000 Women get to speak first. 1.00

00:14:46.000 People of color get to speak first. 0.99

00:14:48.000 And there was kind of an awkward murmur in the crowd.

00:14:50.000 And this guy raises his hand in the back and says, hey, aren't we all here because we're all disempowered?

00:14:55.000 And another guy, a white guy, steps up on stage and says that you don't get it.

00:14:58.000 You need to step up and then step back.

00:15:01.000 And there was kind of an awkward murmur where the crowd didn't know what to make of it.

00:15:04.000 And 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.

00:15:23.000 That's what corporate America loved because they could get on board with that.

00:15:27.000 Because you see, for Goldman Sachs, you don't want to talk about systemic financial risk, but talk about systemic racism.

00:15:32.000 Yeah, give me more of that so that I don't have to talk about systemic financial risk.

00:15:36.000 And so just last year, Charlie, you get Davos, which is the place where they make these declarations.

00:15:41.000 Goldman 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.

00:15:48.000 Forget political viewpoint diversity, but guess what?

00:15:51.000 Goldman Sachs does that at the same time that they are not reviewing their mortgage practice reviews that relate to the 2008 financial crisis.

00:15:59.000 That 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.

00:16:11.000 And 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.

00:16:23.000 That's kind of the complex story.

00:16:24.000 Yeah, there's so many different directions I want to go with this, but let's start here.

00:16:28.000 So, 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,

00:16:57.000 even if even if they don't want to take the money using the FDIC to try to actually engineer it.

00:17:01.000 And people lost began to lose trust in kind of corporations as a whole, but also power systems, right?

00:17:08.000 And like power structures.

00:17:09.000 I think some of that discontent is still around today.

00:17:12.000 But can you walk me through though?

00:17:14.000 Because this is something that I'm legitimately curious about.

00:17:17.000 When 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?

00:17:29.000 They're spineless.

00:17:30.000 Yeah.

00:17:31.000 But let's take a company like Coca-Cola.

00:17:34.000 Yeah.

00:17:35.000 Okay.

00:17:36.000 So you got to explain that one to me, right?

00:17:37.000 And not so you see what I'm saying?

00:17:39.000 Like, so let's that change.

00:17:41.000 Yeah.

00:17:42.000 So 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.

00:17:48.000 So then, you know, you begin, let's talk about Silicon Valley and I'll get to the rest of corporate America.

00:17:51.000 Silicon 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.

00:17:58.000 But what they recognize is if they could then lend it's like it's like a loaning relationship.

00:18:02.000 If 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.

00:18:14.000 And 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.

00:18:24.000 But again, they did not do it for free.

00:18:26.000 They effectively expect that that new ascendant strand of the left looks the other way when it came to leaving their monopoly power intact.

00:18:33.000 And that worked so masterfully that the rest of corporate America gets in on the act.

00:18:36.000 So you ask about Coca-Cola.

00:18:38.000 If you're Coca-Cola, you would rather teach your employees how to be less white. 1.00

00:18:38.000 Fine. 1.00

00:18:43.000 I'm quoting it exactly from a training module they ran earlier this year.

00:18:46.000 That's a real thing.

00:18:47.000 That's correct.

00:18:47.000 That's a real thing.

00:18:48.000 I'm not making that up.

00:18:49.000 It's an employee training that they provided via LinkedIn earlier this year.

00:18:53.000 Or you'd rather preach about new voting laws in Georgia that make you sound more like a super PAC than a software manufacturer.

00:18:59.000 But 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. 1.00

00:19:13.000 So it's kind of the Wall Street, Silicon Valley game.

00:19:15.000 They're just copying.

00:19:16.000 I've seen it in pharma.

00:19:17.000 I've seen it in apparel, Nike.

00:19:18.000 I mean, the list of examples goes on, but that's the way this game is played.

00:19:22.000 So what you're saying in the Coca-Cola example is that it is public relations smokescreen, right?

00:19:28.000 They 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.

00:19:37.000 By the way, don't look at how we're making America really obese or overweight, right?

00:19:41.000 That exactly, which could invite public ire, which could invite regulation.

00:19:45.000 I like the word smokescreen.

00:19:46.000 It's sort of the equivalent of blowing woke smoke to be able to deflect accountability from the issues they would rather not talk about.

00:19:53.000 Yeah.

00:19:53.000 So, but so, but I'm sure every company is a little bit different, but they have many similarities, right?

00:19:59.000 So, 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.

00:20:08.000 My 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.

00:20:21.000 Can you talk about that a little bit?

00:20:23.000 Absolutely.

00:20:24.000 So, Charlie, you're clearly thinking deeply about this stuff, so we can maybe get right into it.

00:20:29.000 This whole woke capitalism thing isn't just one phenomenon, right?

00:20:32.000 And there's no silver bullet explanation.

00:20:34.000 It's not just the Occupy Wall Street thing.

00:20:35.000 That's one of many strands that kind of conspired at the same time.

00:20:39.000 Around the same time, Charlie, what you also have is bottom-up consumer demand.

00:20:43.000 And 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.

00:20:57.000 I mean, these are people who are hungry for a cause, hungry for a sense of purpose, hungry for identity.

00:21:04.000 But 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.

00:21:19.000 And that's part of what makes wokeism so appealing to fill that void, especially when you're secular religion.

00:21:24.000 You're exactly, it's an absolutely secular religion.

00:21:26.000 It's a religion nonetheless.

00:21:27.000 It's a much less forgiving religion than conventional religion because there's no redemption in the risk of God.

00:21:32.000 Yes, no, it makes the it makes the Inquisition look like a magnanimous endeavor.

00:21:37.000 And I'm not kidding.

00:21:39.000 You 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.

00:21:39.000 Exactly.

00:21:54.000 That you go to Ben and Jerry's and get a cup of ice cream with a cup of morality on the side.

00:21:58.000 That is not the way virtue works.

00:22:00.000 It is a lot harder that you need to fill that with more substantial fare.

00:22:04.000 And that's what I think we're missing in the minds of an entire generation.

00:22:07.000 And Charlie, you've talked about all that stuff.

00:22:09.000 A lot of other smart people have commented on it.

00:22:11.000 So I'm going to try to point out some things that others haven't commented on that I think contribute to this generational factor too.

00:22:18.000 We are in the middle of the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in human history.

00:22:23.000 Let's go.

00:22:23.000 Okay.

00:22:24.000 From baby boomers to millennials and Gen Z. That's just a fact.

00:22:27.000 Now, 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.

00:22:38.000 It fulfills a psychological need created by capitalism.

00:22:42.000 What does that mean?

00:22:43.000 If you're the son of a great man, there's two ways to exceed your father.

00:22:47.000 One is on his own terms, which is by definition hard to do.

00:22:50.000 And the other is by exhibiting moral superiority, which is easier to do because it's subjective.

00:22:55.000 What do you have on a generational scale writ large?

00:22:59.000 Effectively, 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.

00:23:08.000 How do you achieve that?

00:23:09.000 Through moral superiority by blaming them for your inherited whiteness or whatever.

00:23:13.000 And it fits the bill perfectly, by the way, because you don't even have accountability for it.

00:23:16.000 It's some genetic trait that's the fault of your ancestors.

00:23:19.000 So 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. 0.55

00:23:37.000 That is what corporate America is doing to an entire generation, preying not on our body image insecurities, but our moral insecurities.

00:23:43.000 So it's all complicated, but these are all contributing factors to getting to a complicated place where we are as a culture.

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00:25:44.000 There's many separate elements that are all playing kind of at once in this.

00:25:49.000 And so, but also, I'm just curious.

00:25:53.000 You 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.

00:26:09.000 And, you know, they want to see that you stand with Planned Parenthood, whatever sort of nauseating thing.

00:26:13.000 But 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?

00:26:24.000 Do they ever worry about how this might be bad for business?

00:26:28.000 Yeah.

00:26:28.000 So I don't think they're worrying enough about it.

00:26:31.000 And the reason is they haven't been given occasion to have worried about it enough.

00:26:35.000 And so I'll tell you one of the struggles I'm going through, Charlie.

00:26:38.000 I mean, I'm not a, you know, I happen to have written a book.

00:26:40.000 I'm writing another one, but I don't think of myself as a commentator or an author.

00:26:43.000 I'm an entrepreneur.

00:26:44.000 I do things, right?

00:26:45.000 And so how can I sort of drive change in a positive direction?

00:26:49.000 And look, here's what I think could work.

00:26:52.000 And here's my reservation about it.

00:26:54.000 And here's why I still think it's a good strategy.

00:26:56.000 Here's what I think could work: corporate America will respond to one thing, getting hit where it hurts in their pocketbook.

00:27:01.000 And 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.

00:27:16.000 And I think that's bad for our culture.

00:27:18.000 Now, what does that mean in terms of a business opportunity?

00:27:21.000 Black 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.

00:27:28.000 That's the right-wing version of Starbucks coffee.

00:27:31.000 Do I really want to live in a country where there's a Republican form of coffee and a Democratic form of coffee?

00:27:36.000 Or dare I say one day a Republican or a right-wing version of baseball and a left-wing version of baseball?

00:27:43.000 I don't actually.

00:27:44.000 I want to live in an economy that brings us together across our political divisions, across our cultural divisions, across our racial or other divisions.

00:27:53.000 That's the real private sector we ought to live in in America to thrive.

00:27:56.000 And so, as an entrepreneur, I'm really skittish about the idea of creating a right-wing alt version of an economy.

00:28:02.000 That 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.

00:28:28.000 But the rest of corporate America, they then wake up and say, oh my God, we missed that.

00:28:31.000 We got that wrong and swing the pendulum back.

00:28:33.000 That'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.

00:28:44.000 So now I want to talk about the internal dynamics, because part of what you talked about is how they outwardly express themselves, right?

00:28:52.000 So they signal to consumers.

00:28:54.000 But 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.

00:29:02.000 The best example I could use is Activision Blizzard, which is the video game company.

00:29:06.000 You 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.

00:29:19.000 Can you talk about how this actually makes the American economy at a competitive disadvantage?

00:29:25.000 It 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.

00:29:42.000 Talk about the internal dynamics of how damaging this is.

00:29:44.000 Sure.

00:29:45.000 So this is near and dear to my heart, Charlie.

00:29:47.000 And this actually, I've just started to write my second book.

00:29:50.000 And this is at the heart of that question, which is the pursuit of excellence in America.

00:29:53.000 So, 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.

00:30:04.000 I don't fault her decision.

00:30:05.000 I do fault a media culture that celebrates it.

00:30:07.000 Naomi Osaka, a tennis player from the United States, does nearly the exact same thing just two months earlier.

00:30:13.000 Is 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?

00:30:25.000 I don't think so.

00:30:26.000 And I think you're putting your finger on the right pulse, Charlie.

00:30:28.000 This is pervasive.

00:30:29.000 Asian 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.

00:30:38.000 Standardized testing is ridiculed as racist.

00:30:41.000 Talking about American exceptionalism is now considered gauche.

00:30:45.000 What I think has happened is we have this inner animal spirit at the heart of the American soul.

00:30:50.000 That animal spirit has been domesticated and tamed by this new culture that penalizes excellence and celebrates mediocrity and victimhood.

00:31:00.000 And 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. 0.65

00:31:11.000 And I think the country is in our culture is hungry for a revival of that excellence in a way that transcends political boundaries.

00:31:18.000 Personally, 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.

00:31:25.000 They hungered for reviving that unapologetic pursuit, uninhibited pursuit of excellence in this country and by this country on the global stage.

00:31:35.000 That's what we've lost.

00:31:36.000 But 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. 0.89

00:31:47.000 I also worry about now the emergence of white victimhood culture in response to say that, oh, yeah, well, you guys are victims.

00:31:53.000 We'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. 1.00

00:32:03.000 going through struggles that actually their parents went through, but they never went through in the first place.

00:32:07.000 That's the moment we're in in America where victimhood has become a currency.

00:32:11.000 That currency is trading at a bubble.

00:32:13.000 Everybody's cashing it in before that bubble bursts.

00:32:16.000 I 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.

00:32:23.000 And so if you can't tell, I'm pretty passionate about this topic.

00:32:25.000 It means a lot to me.

00:32:26.000 It's part of why my parents came to this country.

00:32:28.000 It's part of why I think a lot of legal immigrants come to this country legally.

00:32:31.000 And I think it's something that we ought to revive in our culture.

00:32:34.000 Black, white, brown, gay, straight, man, woman.

00:32:37.000 That's part of what we need to bring back to life again.

00:32:39.000 For good reason.

00:32:40.000 And so now I want to talk.

00:32:42.000 You mentioned this earlier that only capitalism can breed anti-capital.

00:32:46.000 Anti-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.

00:33:10.000 If I could just be as blunt as possible.

00:33:13.000 Can you talk a little bit about how this is a luxury that, of course, we are abusing?

00:33:18.000 But 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.

00:33:38.000 And I'm talking about Facebook.

00:33:39.000 I'm talking about Google.

00:33:40.000 I'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.

00:33:52.000 Talk 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.

00:34:02.000 Yeah.

00:34:02.000 So, Charlie, we're going to go deeper than I usually do in these conversations because your questions are just getting there.

00:34:08.000 So, let's go there.

00:34:09.000 I think the first point is a simple one, which is that wokeness is actually an indicator of affluence in a society.

00:34:16.000 It is a symptom of a lazy turpitude that comes from affluence.

00:34:20.000 There'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.

00:34:28.000 It is the ultimate privilege to be woke.

00:34:30.000 There's no doubt about that.

00:34:31.000 That's exactly right.

00:34:34.000 Did 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?

00:34:42.000 Sinister folks, by the way.

00:34:43.000 Did you know that Airbnb gave $500,000 to the Marxist BLM incorporated organization?

00:34:51.000 Your first vote is at the ballot box, but that isn't enough to defend our traditional Judeo-Christian values.

00:34:59.000 Left-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.

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00:36:41.000 Maybe it's like, hey, I don't know if the car I'm buying, are they donating to Planned Parenthood?

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00:37:00.000 The 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.

00:37:14.000 But I think it's one of the issues that we ought to talk about, which is chronic easy money policy from the Fed.

00:37:19.000 Yes, that's exactly.

00:37:20.000 You 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.

00:37:31.000 Then everybody benefits.

00:37:33.000 Where 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.

00:37:43.000 If 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.

00:37:52.000 It 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.

00:38:00.000 So I think that that's part of our culture that we haven't talked enough about.

00:38:05.000 And there's another dimension to it as well, which is the rise of monopolies.

00:38:09.000 The rise of monopolies in a corporate culture actually creates a culture that insulates you from accountability.

00:38:15.000 Because 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.

00:38:24.000 It 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.

00:38:33.000 But 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.

00:38:41.000 But 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.

00:38:49.000 So, one of the things I've studied a lot is actually the fall of Rome and the fall before the fall.

00:38:54.000 That's actually the name of a book about the fall of Rome that I'd recommend to folks.

00:38:57.000 You know, I'm going to read it in the context of rereading it in the context of writing my next book.

00:39:01.000 But 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.

00:39:09.000 And I view as leading indicators of what's present in the United States today.

00:39:12.000 If 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.

00:39:34.000 Now, 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.

00:39:45.000 So, this is a cultural issue that runs deep.

00:39:48.000 And 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.

00:39:56.000 It's part of why I'm doing what I'm doing.

00:39:58.000 I couldn't agree with that more.

00:39:59.000 And I think that many Republicans that talk about this issue are so superficial, they're so surface-level.

00:40:04.000 Like, oh, businesses have to stop talking about politics.

00:40:07.000 Like, yeah, that's the result.

00:40:09.000 Okay, that would be a great end game.

00:40:11.000 Let's let's have a little bit of a diagnostic conversation.

00:40:14.000 I think this conversation here has been super healthy in that regard.

00:40:18.000 To your Roman analogy, the question is: where on the Roman arc are we?

00:40:21.000 Are we at the first triumphant, the second triumphant?

00:40:24.000 You 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?

00:40:33.000 I don't know.

00:40:34.000 I don't think we're at Marcus Aurelius yet.

00:40:34.000 We'll see.

00:40:36.000 I think, I think that might be about 10 years.

00:40:38.000 If the kids who are entering first grade today graduate from 12th grade before we fixed it, I think we're at Marcus Aurelius.

00:40:43.000 Okay, but I don't think we're I don't think we're quite there.

00:40:44.000 I think we're in the transition phase that preceded it.

00:40:47.000 Okay, the transition to sort of a decadent empire.

00:40:51.000 So, we're in Caligula, is what you're saying.

00:40:53.000 Yeah, yeah, I think that's about right.

00:40:54.000 That's kind of, I don't want to commit myself to that because I want to be really precise, but you're in the right zip.

00:41:00.000 The problem is Nero came after Caligula.

00:41:02.000 So, yeah, yeah, exactly.

00:41:04.000 Exactly.

00:41:05.000 And 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.

00:41:12.000 Now, in exceptional circumstances, great leaders can make a difference, even in the American context.

00:41:18.000 I think we're going through an American identity crisis now.

00:41:20.000 It's not our first identity crisis.

00:41:21.000 I think we went through an identity crisis in the 70s, at the end of the 70s.

00:41:25.000 I think we were in the midst of an American identity crisis, a crisis for the identity of American greatness.

00:41:30.000 Yes, and out of that, you create the selective conditions for the emergence of a great leader.

00:41:36.000 Reagan 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.

00:41:47.000 And 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.

00:41:56.000 What 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.

00:42:05.000 But 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.

00:42:15.000 And that's not just political leaders, that's cultural leaders, it's business leaders, it's civic leaders at every level.

00:42:20.000 That's what I'm thinking. 0.97

00:42:21.000 You know, the problem with Marcus Aurelius is his son was crazy. 0.98

00:42:23.000 Commodus was not and was absolutely nuts and never should have become emperor. 0.93

00:42:26.000 There's that's a whole different conversation for a different time. 0.96

00:42:29.000 Um, just read meditations, it'll tell you everything you need to know.

00:42:32.000 Okay, so let's let me close this conversation.

00:42:34.000 My wife's favorite book, actually.

00:42:35.000 Yeah, huh?

00:42:36.000 It's my wife's favorite book.

00:42:37.000 So I sometimes see it on the bed.

00:42:38.000 Stoic thing.

00:42:40.000 Yeah.

00:42:40.000 Very good.

00:42:41.000 Very much so.

00:42:41.000 Exactly.

00:42:42.000 She's a stoic.

00:42:43.000 I'm sympathetic to stoic philosophy and take some of it, channel some of its intuitions, but I'm too.

00:42:47.000 I believe in the power of passion.

00:42:49.000 The power of passion.

00:42:49.000 Yeah.

00:42:51.000 It sounds very Nietzschean.

00:42:52.000 Are you like a will to power, will to meaning, or the power of passion?

00:42:57.000 Yeah, I'm not a Nietzschean, but I learned a lot from reading Nietzsche.

00:43:00.000 But I think that the power of passion, I think he and I can share in common.

00:43:04.000 That's true.

00:43:05.000 The will is the most important thing, some would say.

00:43:08.000 I would, I, um, that's a different conversation at a different time.

00:43:11.000 Fascinating.

00:43:12.000 That actually connects a lot of dots of kind of your passion for this topic.

00:43:17.000 No pun intended.

00:43:18.000 Last thing, because I know that I want to be very precise on time.

00:43:23.000 You mentioned this briefly.

00:43:24.000 I want to mention secondvote.com.

00:43:26.000 Secondvote.com is a place that rates all these companies based on their wokeism and kind of their score.

00:43:33.000 What can people do?

00:43:35.000 I know you say the products, but what else?

00:43:37.000 Start new businesses, talk about this.

00:43:39.000 What can people do to push back against the woke industrial complex?

00:43:44.000 Yeah, 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.

00:43:49.000 I think the political solutions are simpler, but not ones I'm banking on.

00:43:53.000 I 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.

00:44:11.000 So I think there's some simple policy solutions.

00:44:13.000 I won't bore you with those here.

00:44:14.000 I lay out a lot of those in the book.

00:44:17.000 I 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.

00:44:35.000 And we won't apologize for it.

00:44:37.000 How's that for an alternative to an ESG or DEI orthodoxy?

00:44:40.000 I think that would speak to a lot of Americans.

00:44:42.000 I think there's opportunity.

00:44:43.000 I don't want to see two economies, but if done the right way, I think that could actually bring us together.

00:44:48.000 And 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.

00:44:58.000 And 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.

00:45:07.000 And make no mistake, I think our diversity is a beautiful thing.

00:45:10.000 But 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. 0.73

00:45:33.000 That's what I'd like to see is the revival of that shared national, common American identity.

00:45:38.000 Call it nationalism if you want.

00:45:40.000 I don't care.

00:45:40.000 It'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.

00:45:49.000 Woke Inc., everyone, go buy it right now inside corporate America's social justice scam.

00:45:56.000 Every person listening, if you have kids going into corporate America, if you work in corporate America, you've got to check it out.

00:46:02.000 The Vaik, Ramaswamy. 0.86

00:46:05.000 Do that okay?

00:46:06.000 You did well.

00:46:07.000 Thank you.

00:46:08.000 All right.

00:46:08.000 God bless you.

00:46:09.000 Thanks for coming on.

00:46:09.000 Thanks for having me.

00:46:13.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:46:14.000 Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:46:17.000 And if you want to support our podcast, you can do so at charliekirk.com slash support.

00:46:22.000 Thank you so much for listening, everybody.

00:46:23.000 God bless.

00:46:25.000 Speak to you soon.

00:46:28.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - November 05, 2021

WOKE Inc. with Vivek Ramaswamy

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