TRIGGERnometry - How Big Business Went Woke - Vivek Ramaswamy

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00:00:15.100 I don't think we're past the point of no return yet.

00:00:18.940 But if the kids who are in first grade now

00:00:20.620 graduate from 12th grade before we fix the problem,

00:00:23.940 then I think we lose an entire generation.

00:00:25.780 And I don't think we have a generation left

00:00:27.660 before the existence of not only America, but sort of the Western liberal democracy

00:00:32.420 and Western liberal edifice as we know it, is brittle enough to withstand

00:00:36.480 the loss of an entire generation in between.

00:00:44.900 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

00:00:49.240 I'm Constantine Kissin.

00:00:50.740 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:00:56.100 Our brilliant guest today is a biotech entrepreneur and the author of Woking, Vivek Ramaswamy.

00:01:01.240 Welcome to Trigonometry.

00:01:02.560 Thanks for having me, guys.

00:01:03.920 It's great to have you on the show.

00:01:05.520 Before we get into your brilliant book, which we both really enjoyed, tell everybody who

00:01:10.340 are you, how are you, where you are, what has been the journey through life that brings

00:01:13.620 you to be here sitting talking to us?

00:01:15.800 Yeah, sure.

00:01:16.360 So I tell a bit of it in the book, but the long story short is that I was born and raised

00:01:21.120 in Cincinnati, Ohio, about an hour and a half drive from where I am today in Columbus, Ohio,

00:01:26.360 in the middle of the Midwest. My parents were immigrants from India. They came over in the

00:01:30.900 late 1970s and early 1980s, my dad and my mom, respectively. They didn't have a ton of money,

00:01:36.540 but they did come for an education in this country and raised us with values that I would

00:01:41.520 say put education first. And so fast forward, you know, 18 years later, I was a student at Harvard

00:01:46.860 studied molecular biology, graduated near the top of my class. I was a nerdy science guy

00:01:51.280 for much of college. After I graduated, I got into the world of biotech investing at a hedge

00:01:56.920 fund in New York City in the fall of 2007, right before the 08 financial crisis, which I'll tell

00:02:02.700 you impacted a lot of my views on capitalism, the relationship between capitalism and politics,

00:02:08.100 and in many ways that are reflected in the book that I wrote. In any case, I stated that firm

00:02:12.700 for seven years as an investor. Three of those years I spent simultaneously in law school at

00:02:17.960 Yale, I actually had an itch to study law and public policy and political philosophy that I'd

00:02:23.000 never fully scratched as a science guy. So I did that from 2010 to 2013. I never practiced law. I

00:02:29.100 didn't intend to. Probably the most tangible thing about it was I met my wife, who was my next door

00:02:33.440 neighbor there. She was a med student. And so that was, you know, that was decidedly the most

00:02:37.680 productive thing that came out of law school, though there were three fun years. And then when

00:02:41.360 I came back to New York City, I actually had a lot of spare time on my hands because I had been

00:02:44.960 managing a portfolio for a hedge fund while going to law school at the same time. This was something

00:02:49.800 that left a busy schedule in its wake. But now I had the entire law school block open. So I briefly

00:02:56.020 tried my hand at stand-up comedy, actually, in New York. I mentioned that since I know your

00:02:59.920 guys' background. I wasn't as successful a comedian as you guys are. That is to say, I was-

00:03:04.980 You haven't seen our material, mate.

00:03:06.400 Well, I was decidedly mediocre. I probably did fewer than 10 shows and decided that it was time to hang the jersey, which I did. But I learned a few things in the process. One of them was a habit I created of writing down anytime something annoyed me. And it was a habit that led me to a mediocre stand-up comedy career, but actually a much better career as an entrepreneur.

00:03:26.680 I kept notes every time I had something that I saw in the biotech or pharma industry that really annoyed me as an investor.

00:03:33.640 And eventually that list got long enough that I decided to leave my career as an investor and start a biopharmaceutical company in 2014.

00:03:40.140 So that's what I did. I started Royvent Sciences. It was a heck of a journey.

00:03:44.220 I've built the company from scratch and there's now many employees around the world.

00:03:49.520 It's a company that's gotten a number of medicines through the development process, a couple of which are FDA approved medicines today.

00:03:55.740 The one I'm probably most proud of is an FDA-approved drug for prostate cancer.

00:03:59.720 But that being said, I stepped down from my role as CEO earlier this year to work on a different kind of cancer, not a biological cancer,

00:04:07.580 but what I see as a cultural cancer that was really infecting every major institution that I had seen or been a part of in corporate America and academic America and beyond.

00:04:17.200 And, you know, as you probably gathered from my story, I wasn't born into elite America, but I have lived in elite America for the last 15 years.

00:04:25.600 And I felt some sense of responsibility to speak with candor from the inside to really put a spotlight on what I saw as the defining scam of our time that the American people and I think people in democracies around the world really needed to see for what it was.

00:04:41.740 And that was something that I describe in the book as a sort of magic trick, where a lot of my peers pretend like they care about something other than profit and power precisely to gain more of each.

00:04:53.300 And I'm sorry to say it's actually working out pretty well for them.

00:04:55.880 I'm not sure it's working out for civilized society and for democratic societies around the world.

00:05:00.900 And I hope the book that I wrote offers a little bit of a path towards a better way forward that I lay out in the book.

00:05:07.780 Well, indeed. And the issues that you talk about is something we've covered on the show quite extensively. But one of the things we haven't really got into is the very subject of your book, which is corporate America, corporate Britain, etc. And what we wanted to talk to you about is one of the strands of what we want to talk about was this very thing. I think 10, 15 years ago, we all thought of the CEO, our image of a CEO, if you had to stereotype, it would be Mr. Burns from The Simpsons, right?

00:05:35.400 This guy who didn't care about anything except money, who would happily dump toxic waste in his own water supply if it meant making a buck, etc.

00:05:45.200 And yet we are now here, 2021, in an environment where the CEOs are the ones who are social justice, donating money to BLM, lecturing the public about masculinity, all of this stuff.

00:06:00.300 How did that happen, Vivek?

00:06:01.540 Yeah. So look, there's an age old adage of once you get to the destination you want to get to,

00:06:07.480 you build a wall right behind you so somebody else can't get there, too. I think there's a bit

00:06:11.580 of that going on here. But I think the essence of what happens actually is what I describe in the

00:06:15.800 book. It begins with the 2008 financial crisis. I alluded to it before. I had a front row seat.

00:06:21.440 I worked at a hedge fund that was one of the few firms named in Michael Lewis's book, The Big Short.

00:06:26.420 I saw this play out and I watched the aftermath of it as well. I lived in New York City at the time.

00:06:30.900 And I think what happened is in the wake of the 08 financial crisis, you had to occupy Wall Street movement. You had a movement that was skeptical of corporate power and capitalism in America. And what the old left wanted to do was to take money from those wealthy corporations and redistribute it to poor people for the benefit of poor people. Agree or not, that's what the old left wanted to do.

00:06:52.120 But there was this new left, a new breed of the left that was born right around the same time.

00:06:58.180 Barack Obama had been elected as the first black president of the United States.

00:07:01.360 There was a lot of discussion about diversity and the appearance of diversity in many of our institutions.

00:07:06.660 And what corporate America realized is that actually they could go from being the bad guys to being the good guys if they just said the right things about this new left movement, the new woke left movement.

00:07:18.920 So that's when you had big banks and other big businesses start to applaud diversity and inclusion, start to put token minorities on their boards and on their committees, started to muse about the racially disparate impact of climate change after flying on a private jet to Davos.

00:07:32.840 And so this actually ended up being a pretty good trade where they could actually be the good guys.

00:07:37.180 They were happy to lend their money, their legitimacy to this new woke movement, but they didn't quite do it for free.

00:07:44.580 You see, what they expected in return is that the new left would look the other way when it came to leaving their corporate power intact.

00:07:52.000 And I'm sorry to say it's actually worked out masterfully for both sides, where you had a bunch of big banks get in bed with a bunch of woke millennials.

00:07:59.420 Together, they birthed woke capitalism, and they put Occupy Wall Street up for adoption.

00:08:04.500 And that game worked so well that Silicon Valley did the same thing, censor content that the woke left doesn't want to see online.

00:08:10.540 In return, the new Democratic Party looks the other way when it comes to leaving our monopoly power intact. And again, it works out masterfully for both sides. So the rest of corporate America follows suit.

00:08:20.920 And so in some sense, it's a cynical arrangement. It's an arranged marriage. It's not a marriage of love. It is more like mutual prostitution. And the net result was the birth of this new woke industrial complex that was far more powerful than either big government or big business alone because it was a hybrid of the two that could do what either of those couldn't do on its own.

00:08:41.020 And I think that's the real force. I think the real threat to liberty and prosperity today, more so than big government, is this new woke industrial complex. And that's a big part of what I discuss in the book.

00:08:52.360 And in the book, you actually compared it to a magic trick. We've touched on that. Would you manage to break it down, please? Because it comes in three parts. And I find that idea particularly compelling.

00:09:03.720 Well, look, I think I think there's a draw from Christopher Nolan's movie, The Prestige.

00:09:08.360 By the way, Christopher Nolan, one of the great movie makers of all time, actually produced probably the most woke movie I've ever seen in my life, which is a recent movie produced during the pandemic called Tenet.

00:09:19.680 I don't mean that disparagingly.

00:09:21.200 I actually mean it mostly as a compliment for its artistic merit in laying woke ideology out on the table in the form of a movie that's actually really complicated to watch it a couple of times, at least I did, in order to understand even what was going on in terms of the plot.

00:09:35.080 But once you piece it together, there's a really woke premise at the heart of that movie.

00:09:39.280 So I offer that as an aside.

00:09:41.060 Well, hold on.

00:09:41.680 I watched that movie.

00:09:42.780 What's the woke premise of the movie?

00:09:44.360 I'm curious now.

00:09:46.060 Well, you know, you travel backwards and forwards through time.

00:09:50.220 it's sort of summarized at the very end of the movie where there's the there's sort of the white

00:09:55.140 anti-hero and sort of the black hero that are crossing paths and one of them is the white guy

00:10:00.500 is the one traveling backwards in time and the black hero is the one who's traveling forward in 0.85

00:10:05.480 time and he looks back and says why aren't you coming with me and and the white anti-hero looks

00:10:09.620 back and but he's a good guy too but but sort of looks back and says hey i'm going that way you're

00:10:14.900 going that way. And it was just an encapsulated moment of the velocity of time in terms of where

00:10:21.980 the different racial identities of the white man going in one direction and sort of the black hero

00:10:26.520 going in the other direction that, you know, I think typified and captured part of the message

00:10:30.900 of what the anti-racist movement is all about, what the woke ideology is all about, is being

00:10:35.320 conscious to the historical power structures that may have held one class of people back and what

00:10:40.060 they must do in terms of bearing their obligation to send that disempowered class forward. 0.95

00:10:46.320 And I thought he captured the moment in a physics-laden, time-twisted plot in a way

00:10:51.040 that only Christopher Nolan can. But if you saw that movie, I think you'll know what I mean.

00:10:55.360 Now, anyway, I'm a big Christopher Nolan fan, and one of his movies that I also quite enjoy

00:10:59.240 is The Prestige, where, again, he plays with notions of time, as he often does. But the

00:11:04.660 beginning of the prestige is a description of what a magic act is all about and and there's

00:11:09.940 three parts to the act there's the pledge the turn and the prestige the pledge is where the magician

00:11:14.980 shows you something that you like something like a bird or something that might something like that

00:11:20.500 might be an animal might be a rabbit shows you pledges to you what the trick is going to be all

00:11:24.820 about the second part of the act is the turn where he makes that disappear but no trick is complete

00:11:31.980 until you bring back that which you made disappear. And that's the prestige where you bring it back.

00:11:38.200 And no magic trick is complete without the prestige. And what I talk about is 21st century

00:11:43.040 capitalism. I break it down in larger ways than I want to go through. And right now in this short

00:11:48.940 form, you can read the book. Basically, the pledge is identifying a market where ordinary people sell

00:11:53.940 ordinary things. The turn is finding an arbitrage in that market. And arbitrage is the ability to

00:11:59.180 buy something for one price and instantaneously sell it for a higher price in that same market.

00:12:03.920 That's the turn. But the real prestige is covering up that entire act with what I call

00:12:08.780 the new brand of woke smoke, blowing progressive values to cover up steps number one and two,

00:12:14.460 to pretend like you care about something other than profit and power, as I said earlier,

00:12:18.600 precisely to gain more of each. And the best version of the pledge, the turn and the prestige

00:12:24.380 that I described earlier came in the form of what one of the U.S. mutual funds, State Street,

00:12:29.460 did in the last couple of years, where they were actually facing a lawsuit from their female 0.95

00:12:35.660 employees, alleging that they didn't pay the female employees at the firm as much as they 0.99

00:12:40.440 paid the male counterparts. And so State Street did, of course, the natural thing that you'd

00:12:44.840 expect them to do when faced with employees who claim that they're not being paid equally as their

00:12:49.040 male counterparts. They built a statue for the women. They built a statue for the Wall Street

00:12:54.420 bull in Wall Street, New York. And they built a little statue of a little girl who stands up to

00:13:00.920 that bull. And at the placard at the bottom of the statue said that she, capital S-H-E, 0.89

00:13:07.020 she makes a difference. Turns out that S-H-E didn't just describe fearless girl as the young

00:13:13.560 girl in the statue was known to be. It also described the ETF or the exchange traded fund

00:13:19.020 S-H-E, which traded as a ticker on the stock exchange, which you could buy. And if you buy,

00:13:24.000 you know, that's money managed by State Street that they charge a nice fee for. So it's actually

00:13:27.100 another nice little win for the marketing department. Now, to put a topping off flourish

00:13:32.660 on all of it, Kristen Visble, the feminist who authentically created Fearless Girl,

00:13:37.500 she believed in female empowerment and fempowerment on Wall Street. She created the 0.99

00:13:42.280 statue. She was so excited about it that she made a couple extra copies of the statue too.

00:13:46.120 This is what female empowerment needed to be about. And Fearless Girl was the face of female empowerment. 1.00

00:13:51.460 Well, guess what? State Street sues Kristen Visible, the statue's creator, for creating three unauthorized reproductions of the statue that they had commissioned.

00:13:58.880 Because as I said earlier, it's not good enough to make the money disappear as they do when they commission the statue in the first place.

00:14:05.760 They have to bring it back. And so they sued her for making the unauthorized reproduction. 0.70

00:14:09.880 So there's countless stories just like this in the book. It's just one of the first ones that I happened to tell early on in the introduction to the book.

00:14:15.820 But I thought I would leave you guys with a sense for what the magic trick is all about.

00:14:20.360 What is the problem with woke capitalism?

00:14:23.120 And let's just explore it a little bit, because there is an argument to say, hang on a minute.

00:14:27.780 Look, at one point, all these organizations were stuffed with rich white people from privileged backgrounds.

00:14:34.680 Isn't this just a much needed correction?

00:14:37.000 And isn't it a good thing that these corporations are pushing this?

00:14:40.220 Yeah. So, look, I think that there's a lot of compelling arguments in favor of stakeholder capitalism or the new woke brand of woke capitalism, which says that companies are responsible not just to their shareholders, but to other societal interests, too.

00:14:53.360 Sounds pretty benign on its surface. Milton Friedman, by the way, didn't love that model 50 years ago.

00:14:59.880 He thought that was going to make businesses run less efficiently and be less profitable for their shareholders and that that was going to economically leave everyone worse off and reduce the size of the economic pie.

00:15:10.220 He had some valid concerns, but I will tell you that that is not my core concern.

00:15:16.480 My core concern is the opposite, is the way in which corporate overreach actually renders our democracy hollow in the process by converting a one person, one vote system into a one dollar, one vote system where the people who wield the greatest power in the marketplace of products then are empowered to wield even disproportionate power in the marketplace of ideas.

00:15:38.340 And I'm fine living in a market where the best products get voted to the top based on the number of dollars that are deployed in the market.

00:15:45.280 But I'm not fine with the best ideas in the marketplace of ideas getting voted to the top based on the number of dollars that one controls.

00:15:51.760 And what this new philosophy effectively demands is that a small group of investors and CEOs, people like me, get together in closed door rooms and decide what's best for society at large on matters ranging from racial justice to climate change.

00:16:05.980 And I think those questions ought to be adjudicated in a democracy, in the open public square, through free speech and open debate without the distortions of economic power tilting the scales on that conversation.

00:16:18.920 And so to me, not to offend you guys on the other side of the pond here, but that might have been a model for old world Europe, where a small group of church leaders and labor elites and business elites would get in a room and decide what was right for the rest of society at large.

00:16:30.760 But that wasn't America. And it wasn't modern democracy, even in Britain or Canada or anywhere else in the in the Western democratic complex or in India, for that matter, too.

00:16:39.480 Democracy works according to the principle that we decide as citizens together what that common good is.

00:16:45.240 And we have a commitment to live and abide by the by the results of that process.

00:16:49.420 And to me, this is the most flagrant violation of democracy of all.

00:16:52.660 When a small group of capitalist elites get to tell everybody else how they're supposed to live their lives, they can sell their products, they can get rich.

00:16:58.860 I'm fine with that. But they shouldn't be able to exercise more moral power or normative power

00:17:03.660 than my neighbors here in Ohio. And I think that that's a big part of what I'm fighting for in the

00:17:07.780 book is to restore the integrity of democracy defined as such. Integrity of democracy, you say,

00:17:14.840 but you mentioned in the book, the Hunter Biden scandal, where Twitter effectively suppressed that

00:17:21.840 story. Oh, they did. I mean, I think there's no doubt that Twitter made a value judgment that,

00:17:27.780 of course, Jack Dorsey, when he's pressed in front of Congress about it, says that, oh, that was a

00:17:31.100 mistake. Every time these guys are pressed on one of their egregious forms of overreach, they claim

00:17:36.520 that it was a mistake in retrospect, but the damage is already done. You now have these social

00:17:40.340 media companies today that are able to do what no company in human history has been able to do,

00:17:46.100 which is to control the acceptable bounds of what can and cannot be discussed. And once you affect

00:17:51.880 what can't be discussed, you affect what can't even occur in one's own thoughts. And I think

00:17:57.660 that's the most dangerous kind of corporate power of all, where America at its founding

00:18:02.120 didn't want to see the Dutch East India Company reborn here in the United States. That was a 1.00

00:18:06.740 company in Europe that, as you all well know, wielded not just market power, but wielded state-like

00:18:12.340 power. They had their own militia. They had their own currency. Think of Facebook's cryptocurrency

00:18:17.000 ambitions today. They had their own hospitals, their own charitable institutions. They were

00:18:21.240 like a quasi-state. The American system was born on the idea that we did not want

00:18:26.060 corporate-like states. We had a constitutional democracy, a constitutional republic that

00:18:32.380 ultimately served as our state. We didn't want to create a corporatocracy in its wake. And so

00:18:37.320 that's why we created, even though we created powerful corporations through benefits like 0.93

00:18:41.100 limited liability and other concepts that the state created to allow corporate shareholders

00:18:45.000 to have a lot of special advantages, we said that in return for that, we want you to stay in your

00:18:49.800 lane. We demand that the directors of a corporation owe a fiduciary duty only to shareholders,

00:18:54.340 not just to protect those shareholders

00:18:56.620 as Milton Friedman might have surmised

00:18:58.020 but to protect the rest of society

00:19:00.000 from corporate overreach

00:19:01.000 that was the vision

00:19:02.680 for the limited form of corporate power

00:19:05.200 and what we see today in Silicon Valley

00:19:07.300 is a perversion of that

00:19:08.580 where we have now the modern

00:19:09.700 Dutch East India company on steroids

00:19:11.740 that control not only power in the market

00:19:13.900 but the power to determine

00:19:15.480 what each of us can and cannot discuss

00:19:17.760 in the modern public squares

00:19:19.120 and I think that's something that

00:19:20.740 represents one of the two great threats

00:19:22.780 to Western idealism as we know it.

00:19:24.840 I think China is at the top of the list, 1.00

00:19:26.700 but I put the growing power of big tech

00:19:29.140 at number two on that list.

00:19:30.760 And that's a big part of it.

00:19:31.560 I discuss both extensively in the book,

00:19:33.580 but I think it's a big part of what I think can be fixed

00:19:36.500 if the citizens in everyday democracies around the world

00:19:40.100 begin to see what's going on with clear eyes.

00:19:43.040 Well, Vivek, we'll come back to China in a second,

00:19:45.180 but I wanted to go back a little bit

00:19:46.840 and talk about how this has all happened

00:19:49.080 because I'm not sure that I'm necessarily persuaded

00:19:52.160 that this is these kind of CEOs, you know, skillfully manipulating the situation. Like,

00:19:58.940 I'll give you an example. I was talking to an executive in the publishing industry,

00:20:04.220 one of the biggest publishers in the world. And I was asking him about the situation with freedom

00:20:08.060 of expression in publishing, wokeness. And he said that one of the biggest challenges for him

00:20:13.560 was actually dealing with younger employees because he himself has a commitment to publishing

00:20:19.600 people across the political spectrum with different opinions but he said to me imagine if you at

00:20:24.640 trigonometry if your cameraman came up to you and was like you know what i don't agree with having

00:20:28.940 vivek on the show and i think we need to have a three-hour meeting to thrash out the details of

00:20:33.320 my disagreement uh and you know he's tougher than both of us so we'd have to agree yeah even so at

00:20:39.380 trigonometry that would never happen but but in a big corporation somehow these these older uh

00:20:45.980 kind of experienced, higher status CEOs, they're now feeling like they have to, for some reason,

00:20:52.140 answer to a 20-year-old. And we saw ourselves in the comedy industry when Francis used to

00:20:56.800 work in a comedy club. You'd see people in their early 20s coming in and their expectation of what,

00:21:02.960 as a junior person in an organization, you're entitled to say, to want to control, to want to

00:21:09.600 influence. But by our standards, and we're sort of very, very early millennials, are just off the

00:21:16.020 charts entitlements. But that's how those people think. So is it not a case of this is actually

00:21:21.180 democracy in action, younger people coming through and imposing the moral standards on old biggers 0.99

00:21:27.320 like me, you and Francis? So I don't think it's democracy in action, that's for sure. But I do

00:21:31.920 think that you have a point that, of course, it's why I took a whole book to expose, that there's a

00:21:36.700 lot of nuances to this. And it's not a one size fits all bill. I think in some cases, it is a

00:21:40.560 purely cynical, top down phenomenon driven by a lot of executives on Wall Street and powerful big

00:21:46.200 business. I mean, the CEO of Goldman Sachs goes to Davos and declares he's not going to take a

00:21:49.600 company public unless its board is sufficiently diverse. I think that is just a game to deflect

00:21:54.120 accountability and potential consequence from a newly ascended political left in America.

00:22:00.160 These are really, I think, a scammy kind of woke capitalism, completely inauthentic, 0.96

00:22:04.380 hypocritical all the way down. That's not the entire story, though. And I talk about the other 0.95

00:22:08.460 nuances and dimensions of this, too. There's woke executives, there's woke investors, there's also

00:22:13.100 woke consumers, and many of whom are themselves employees in these firms, too. I think one of the

00:22:18.320 things I've seen in the publishing industry is somehow the CEOs of these publishers have mistaken

00:22:21.680 their own employees as being their top customers that they're accountable to. I don't quite

00:22:26.620 understand that model of leadership. Reminds me of parents who vie to be friends with their teenage

00:22:31.700 kids. But putting that to one side as a model of leadership, I think there is a real phenomenon

00:22:36.280 here that I faced, too. By the way, I was CEO of a company, nearly 1,000 employees, many of them

00:22:41.400 young. Many of them come from top universities that we recruited from for years. And I detailed

00:22:45.480 this in one of the early chapters in the book in the wake of George Floyd's death were frustrated

00:22:49.620 with me as CEO for not saying or doing enough to condemn systemic racism in the United States

00:22:55.780 rather than doing what I thought we needed to be doing, which is developing medicines for all

00:22:58.860 people who needed them, including black people, but all people. So I'm really sympathetic to that

00:23:04.160 challenge. It actually gets to the heart of what I think is the real cultural solution that we need

00:23:10.700 to be grappling with, not just as Americans, but I think as members of Western liberal democracies

00:23:15.260 more thoroughly, is that you brought up the fact that we're all millennials. Okay, fine.

00:23:20.100 You said you guys are millennials too, as defined on the other side of this conversation. Is that

00:23:24.460 right? Yeah, just about. So all three of us count us in that bucket. I think we're part of a

00:23:29.260 generation and even a generation younger than us in Gen Z that's hungry for a cause. We're hungry

00:23:34.820 for purpose. We're hungry for meaning. We're hungry for identity. The same things human beings

00:23:39.320 have always hungered for, for time immemorial. But we live in a moment where the kinds of things

00:23:44.300 that used to fill that moral hunger, notions like faith, patriotism, hard work, and identity built

00:23:51.880 through hard work have receded in our consciousness. But we're still human beings. And so we don't lose

00:23:57.660 those impulses. We just relocate them to new philosophies, to new religions, to postmodernism,

00:24:02.760 to wokeism instead, without recognizing that we're actually submitting to just a new form of

00:24:07.220 religion that effectively becomes our opium for the masses. And, you know, I think that many 0.99

00:24:12.600 businesses then, you could argue, are doing what they need to do by servicing millennial customers

00:24:17.580 that demand that, okay, we're hungry for a cause. Well, we want to go to Ben and Jerry's and order

00:24:22.740 an ice cream with some morality on the side, or we want to go to Nike and buy a pair of sneakers,

00:24:27.220 but buy a pair of sneakers with shoelaces that come with a flourish of social justice

00:24:31.280 at the tips. That's what we sort of determine when we're buying as consumers. And I think the

00:24:35.960 real answer there isn't necessarily to criticize the businesses who fulfill that demand, either in

00:24:40.520 their consumer base or to placate their employees, but to really take an aim at the culture that

00:24:45.560 makes the mistake that we can mix morality with commercialism as our means of satisfying our true

00:24:51.300 moral hunger. It's like we're feeding our moral hunger with the equivalent of fast food, when in

00:24:56.480 fact, the thing we're really hungering for is more substantial fare. And we got to this farcical

00:25:00.880 point where our politics determines the sandwiches that we buy and our sandwich makers have to pick

00:25:05.720 their politics, when in fact, what we really need to recognize is that you can't solve morality,

00:25:11.780 the problems of morality by just buying the right kind of t-shirt. You have to grapple with the

00:25:16.700 hard work of understanding who we are as individuals and as a people and how we're

00:25:21.860 bound together as a people across our diverse attributes and characteristics. That's real hard

00:25:26.360 cultural work that there's no silver bullet for. I offer the beginnings of some reflections towards

00:25:30.420 solutions in the book. But you're right that I think that in many ways, businesses are responding

00:25:35.240 to cultural conditions that businesses as neutral actors take as given and then try to hide the

00:25:40.860 fact that they're neutral actors by wearing the guard of morality in the form of postmodern

00:25:45.180 progressivism. But actually, the essence of what's really going on is a cultural change in our

00:25:49.760 society that is not just top-down driven, though in some cases it is. That's the Goldman Sachs and

00:25:54.480 the Black Rocks of the world. But there's also a bottom-up change, too, that many other businesses

00:25:59.360 in the middle that are otherwise neutral actors are really appearing to bend the knee to. And I

00:26:04.780 think that we have to take aim at that bottom-up cultural change that we need to drive that

00:26:08.000 is easier said than done,

00:26:10.180 but I think it's the work that we need to do.

00:26:12.180 Vivek, I'm going to make this a little dark and go deep

00:26:16.780 because I think you make such a profound point

00:26:18.760 about the lack of these superior things

00:26:22.960 that we used to fill our lives with

00:26:25.140 and we no longer do, and so we need a replacement.

00:26:27.420 One of the consequences of that,

00:26:28.800 and I've heard you talk about it in the past,

00:26:30.860 is that you create two economies.

00:26:33.800 And if conservatives only buy black rifle coffee

00:26:37.760 and progressives only buy Starbucks or whatever it is.

00:26:41.120 If that spreads through society,

00:26:44.400 then anyone with half a brain can see

00:26:46.740 that the long-term consequence of that

00:26:48.900 is the tearing of society apart

00:26:51.700 because the things that used to unite us,

00:26:54.420 the football games that you'd go to

00:26:56.040 irrespective of your politics,

00:26:57.480 well, hey, if you're an NBA fan like me,

00:26:59.780 you have to make a conscious decision every time.

00:27:01.920 Do you want 20 minutes of social justice

00:27:04.100 shoved down your throat before every game

00:27:05.720 Or do you just watch something else? Right. And I think once we have two NBAs and two two major league baseballs, it's the beginning of the end as we know it.

00:27:15.020 I think it is the path to civil war. And I don't say that lightly, but I think and we're not there yet.

00:27:19.880 But I think that if we do get there, I think that would be a dangerous, dangerous harbinger of bad things to come.

00:27:27.120 If you look at the U.S. Civil War, civil wars in other societies, actually, they begin not just when you have a divided polity that's existed for a lot of human history.

00:27:35.700 nations get through that when nations don't get through that is when there's no cultural cohesion

00:27:41.340 to bind people together across their divided politics and and i worry that as the private

00:27:47.360 sector goes woke as it becomes politicized we lose the necessary apolitical spaces that bind

00:27:54.140 us together as one people regardless of whether we're democrats or republicans conservatives or

00:27:58.920 liberals black or white we require those spaces american solidarity i think i think western

00:28:04.120 liberal solidarity as we know it requires those spaces to bind us together. And I think that that

00:28:09.780 cultural fragility, I think, is one of the greatest dangers of all as we become more fragile

00:28:14.100 when divisive politics infects otherwise unifying activities like our places of work,

00:28:19.820 the places we go to play sports, the places we go to listen to music. Once those become politicized

00:28:24.700 to the movie theaters, for that matter, it is, I think, the beginning of the end of Western

00:28:28.900 liberalism and the project of Western liberalism as we know it. And worst of all, the people who

00:28:33.940 are rooting for the end of Western liberalism in other parts of the world. And, you know,

00:28:38.020 I'm not shy about naming names. I'm going to put the Chinese Communist Party at the top of that

00:28:42.660 list, are exploiting that to drive their own advantage. And I'll tell you a joke I told

00:28:51.040 recently. And, you know, I think it's meant in good humor, but I think at the heart of it is,

00:28:56.360 I think, a very dark turn in the story where, let's just say Mao Zedong comes back to the

00:29:01.220 Chinese countryside in year 2021, and he sees a farmer on the countryside, and he has a conversation

00:29:07.580 with the farmer. And he says, OK, well, farmer, what happened to those food shortages that we

00:29:12.280 used to have when I was ruling? Do we still have those food shortages? And the farmer says,

00:29:16.400 Chairman, no, we don't have those food shortages. In fact, we have the opposite problem.

00:29:19.700 We have too much food, and our people are dying of diabetes today. And so Chairman Mao says,

00:29:24.660 very good, very good. That's good to hear. Now, what about our steel production targets? We were

00:29:28.900 going to produce more steel than the United Kingdom as part of our 50-year plan. 50 years

00:29:34.140 later, have we now achieved that? To which the Chinese farmer says, oh, no, forget about beating

00:29:40.100 the United Kingdom as China. One of our provinces alone defeats the United Kingdom in steel production

00:29:46.620 every year, to which Chairman Mao says, that's very good to hear. But tell me, what happened to

00:29:52.060 that Chinese cultural revolution where we were going to have that proletariat uprising? Whatever 0.82

00:29:57.360 happened to that to which the farmer laughs and says chairman we don't do that here anymore

00:30:03.340 we've outsourced that to the united states and i say that jokingly but i think that there's a

00:30:09.240 version of this in which the chinese leadership deeply understands the kinks in our armor they 0.95

00:30:16.360 have a word for western wokeness bites will literally refers to woke white people in the

00:30:22.540 united states and in other western countries and they use it to laugh at us but now they're using

00:30:26.480 that progressive front to actually co-opt companies that criticize relentlessly the

00:30:31.780 United States over Black Lives Matter or whatever. You brought the NBA. The NBA is in this category, 0.56

00:30:36.320 but they don't say a peep in China. In fact, they supplicate to China. They lie prostrate like

00:30:41.300 lapdogs to their CCP overlords while consistently biting the United States in the process. And that 0.97

00:30:46.980 creates a false moral equivalence between Chinese nihilism and let's call it Western idealism.

00:30:52.360 And I think when you equate the two, then nihilism wins every time. That's what allows Xi Jinping when he's pressed on your side of the pond by EU leaders on the Shenzhen human rights crisis with the Uyghurs right now. The first thing Xi Jinping says is that actually Black Lives Matter shows the United States is no better, which would be laughable if it weren't for the fact that Nike and Disney and the NBA and BlackRock and every other major American corporation that does business in China criticizes the United States without saying a peep in China. 0.91

00:31:17.460 lends moral legitimacy to the claims that they make. And I actually think that's probably the

00:31:21.920 most dangerous threat to democracy is not even the philosophical one from within that I described,

00:31:26.080 though I think that's a problem, but actually a dangerous one backed up through not soft power,

00:31:30.560 but hard power through the use of force as exercised by the CCP over the course of the

00:31:34.820 next 10 years. And you can mark my words today, the day that Taiwan is invaded by China, Nike

00:31:41.400 and Disney and the NBA are not going to say a peep. They might even praise them and implicitly

00:31:47.000 help them do it. That's the state of the world we live in, is they've turned these corporations

00:31:51.000 into Trojan horses where Western countries like the United States and the United Kingdom thought

00:31:55.440 for 30 years that they could send Big Macs and Happy Meals to China and somehow spread democracy.

00:32:00.720 And instead, autocratic nations like China have turned that on its head. And instead of using our 0.57

00:32:05.500 money on the West to get them to be more like us, they've actually used their money to make us

00:32:10.980 behave more like them. And I'm sorry to say that it is working in a way that both progressives and

00:32:15.600 conservatives need to wake up to, but even well-minded progressives need to recognize that

00:32:19.340 once they've turned corporations into vectors to drive social change, those corporations then 0.59

00:32:23.900 become vehicles to bid for someone else's agenda too. And nobody's mastered that game better than

00:32:29.760 the CCP. It's actually my book is, if I may say, the first book that I believe is laying out the

00:32:35.420 geopolitical implications of wokeism. And I think that that's probably one of the most illuminating

00:32:39.700 parts of the book, I thought for me in the process of writing it, but I hope for the readers who read

00:32:44.000 as well. And one of the best examples of that was the case of Disney and the Uyghurs. Would you 0.98

00:32:50.640 mind expanding into that a little bit? Yeah, look, I mean, Disney, my blood's already boiling. I

00:32:56.080 want to keep myself in check here. But Disney says it could not film in the United States a

00:33:03.680 couple of years ago in the state of Georgia if Georgia passed the equivalent of a new abortion

00:33:07.960 restriction or whatever. Yet last year, they go to the Shenzhen province of China, literally ground

00:33:13.140 zero of the Uyghur human rights crisis, over a million Uyghurs detained in concentration camps,

00:33:18.260 subject to forced sterilization, communist indoctrination, in what I view as some of

00:33:22.080 the worst human rights atrocities committed by a major nation since the Third Reich of Germany.

00:33:26.360 And Disney does not say a peep until they get to the end of the film. And in the film's credits,

00:33:31.060 I'm not even kidding you, they go out of their way to publicly thank the local CCP authorities

00:33:36.200 in the Shenzhen province for allowing the privilege of filming there, when in fact,

00:33:40.400 those are some of the very authorities responsible for enslaving the Uyghurs today. So I just think 1.00

00:33:45.380 that that two-faced behavior is, you know, really revealing about the way in which much of the West

00:33:51.740 will supplicate to the guy who pays them their last dollar or their last yuan, as the case may be.

00:33:59.440 Top Gun is a film coming out later this year where Tom Cruise in the original movie was a real

00:34:05.180 maverick. And he actually had in one of the scenes, a jacket that had a number of US allies on his

00:34:10.360 sleeve, including the nation of Taiwan, including Japan. And in the revised version of the film,

00:34:16.420 you'll see him wear his jacket coming out this fall. You won't see Taiwan's flag. You won't see

00:34:20.860 Japan's flag. And I'll let you guess exactly why. That is the world we live in. They have invaded 1.00

00:34:25.780 the movies we watch, the universities our kids are educated at, the companies we buy our products

00:34:30.860 from there are trojan horses from within and the battle of troy was won not through the front door

00:34:36.400 but when actually one of the sides was invaded by the other through the back door with a trojan horse

00:34:41.860 that they accepted and the horses that were the trojan horses today look every bit as appealing 0.56

00:34:46.580 as the trojan horses in the battle of troy in the form of nike in the form of disney in the form of

00:34:51.340 the nba the movies we watch the clothes we wear the sports we play yet those trojan horses are 1.00

00:34:56.620 actually the vectors of actually advancing the agenda of what I view as the enemy. And we have

00:35:01.600 not seen it happen in plain sight. That's a big part of what I'm laying out in the book.

00:35:06.180 That being the case, Vivek, how do we fight back then against these corporations?

00:35:10.640 How do we persuade the ordinary person on the street? Because there is a heartening example

00:35:14.740 of this when Gillette did their toxic masculinity advert and their share prices dropped massively

00:35:22.820 as a result because nobody wanted to buy their products. Yeah, look, I think sometimes

00:35:27.540 consumer boycotts could be a short-term answer. I'm not a big fan of that in the long run because

00:35:31.500 I think that takes us back on the path to two economies, which then puts us back on the path

00:35:36.540 to civil war. I'm not a big fan of that approach, though I'm sympathetic to those who feel like they

00:35:41.020 need to resort to that as a mechanism to fight back. I think the right answer has to be not to

00:35:47.820 just cancel wokeism in return, to adopt illiberal methods to fight illiberalism. I think it has to

00:35:54.940 be to dilute that agenda to irrelevance by reviving a shared identity that runs so deep

00:36:01.320 that it makes wokeism seem silly by comparison. I think that the right way to fight racism,

00:36:07.100 by the way, and this would be my advice to the left, would be the same thing. It's not to get

00:36:11.920 that last burning ember and go to the person who might harbor one last racist thought as you define

00:36:16.840 and yell at them, don't be racist.

00:36:18.980 I can tell you the best way to throw kerosene 0.98

00:36:22.060 on those last burning embers

00:36:23.300 is to try to cancel something in reverse

00:36:25.940 as opposed to letting it atrophy to irrelevance

00:36:28.360 as it has over the last six decades.

00:36:30.520 My advice to the right is the same in reverse,

00:36:32.680 is the right way to fight wokeism

00:36:33.980 isn't to try to cancel it or pummel it into submission.

00:36:36.980 It is to dilute it to irrelevance through civic education,

00:36:40.180 through a revival of civic identity,

00:36:42.220 through a revival of the kinds of things

00:36:43.820 that used to give us meaning

00:36:45.180 and fill that black hole of hunger for moral meaning and purpose.

00:36:49.180 That's the hard work that we do.

00:36:50.340 Vivek, I'm sorry to interrupt, but it's an important point to interrupt

00:36:53.880 because you talk about educating the next generation.

00:36:57.640 We've just had Christopher Rufo on the show talking about CRT.

00:37:01.520 You obviously educated at Yale and Harvard.

00:37:04.460 I imagine you would agree with me that the overwhelming majority of the faculty

00:37:09.580 at America's elite colleges and universities and likewise here in the UK

00:37:13.660 are quite sympathetic or at least willing to tolerate wokeness.

00:37:17.900 So when we talk about that, how is that going to happen?

00:37:20.700 Let me double click on that for a second, just the point that I make in the book.

00:37:23.920 I think that that's true.

00:37:25.680 I think it actually misses even the bigger problem in the universities,

00:37:28.420 which is a managerial cancer.

00:37:30.160 So the ratio of administrators at universities to professors

00:37:33.780 has actually rapidly grown like a cancer in universities around both the U.S.

00:37:39.440 and I think the same is true in the United Kingdom,

00:37:40.960 though I haven't looked at the same numbers in the same precision as I have in the U.S.

00:37:43.660 What you see is these administrators, the associate deans, the diversity administrators, are now outstripping faculty by ratios like 10 to 1.

00:37:52.860 And even when faculty or conventional faculty lean left, in an environment that's not checked by sort of an administrative state within the university itself, the equivalent of what I call deep corporate in corporate America, it's sort of the deep state in the university itself, they're able to at least engage in an open marketplace of ideas.

00:38:10.040 I mean, Harvard, you know, at the time I went there a decade and a half ago, was really a different place than it is today, where, yes, conservatives may have been in the intellectual minority, but there was still a marketplace of ideas where people could debate in the open without fear of reprisal.

00:38:22.220 But I think the managerial cancer in universities is actually a much bigger problem, is the growth of people whose job it is to administer a diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda, which, in fact, is anything but the things that they mean.

00:38:33.260 In the name of diversity, they actually mean no diversity of thought. In the name of inclusion, they actually mean creating an exclusionary culture where certain points of view aren't welcome. And the problem with people who occupy those seats is once you give them a job, they want to permanently keep that job, keep getting a paycheck, which, by the way, contributes to the increasing cost of higher education in this country, subsidizing these toxic diversity administrators that reign supreme at our universities, that even look down on and silence professors who might be liberal, but who even permit contrary thought.

00:39:02.040 And so those professors then bend the knee because they want to be able to, you know, at least keep their jobs without actually being abused as many as some professors were at Yale just a couple of years ago for making the controversial statement that students should be able to make adult choices in how they dress for Halloween.

00:39:16.820 They were pummeled with quasi violence as a consequence. And the administrators stand by as the students do it.

00:39:22.620 So I actually think the bigger problem universities is this managerial cancer in the administrative class of the university, even beyond the professors themselves.

00:39:30.380 Now, you're right.

00:39:31.460 Now, I think the question actually begins with primary education upstream of the universities,

00:39:35.080 though, to create and fill that moral hunger for a new generation.

00:39:38.020 Because what's happened today is that though wokeness used to be about challenging the

00:39:42.660 system, today, there's no doubt about it, wokeness is the system.

00:39:46.080 It controls, as an ideology, nearly every major institution that we know about in the

00:39:49.960 Western world, from universities to nonprofits to museums to companies to government to military.

00:39:54.960 Now it's ubiquitous.

00:39:56.560 And I actually think that creates an opportunity, though, on the other side for a new generation

00:40:00.240 of kids who are turning 18 or turning 19 today who want to be countercultural.

00:40:06.080 It's what you want to do when you're 19.

00:40:07.260 You want to stand up to the system.

00:40:08.680 You want to be countercultural. 0.97

00:40:09.800 You want to be rebellious.

00:40:10.740 You want to be heterodox.

00:40:11.480 You want to be a hippie.

00:40:12.400 That's part of what made wokeism so attractive over the course of the last couple of decades.

00:40:16.120 But today, now that wokeism is the system, there's a new pitch for that new generation

00:40:20.440 that if you want to stand up to the system, there's a new way to do it.

00:40:22.580 And I think that meeting that demand and cultivating that demand with the right kinds of leaders who are able to set that cultural tone of being heterodox through actually thinking independently rather than reciting the same slogans as your peers, that could create an opportunity for new generation through civic education that begins in primary education that really creates, I think, the conditions for a turn of the pendulum in the opposite direction culturally.

00:40:44.380 I think some of that's driven first personally, too. I think great leaders are going to have to step up. The Reagans and the Thatchers of the world, you know, they cured the 1970s. 1.00

00:40:52.580 I think that we're going to have to figure out somebody who cures the people, real leaders who cure the diversity decade of the 2010s that elevated in our consciousness all of the ways in which we're different and somehow celebrate that to revive the commonality that binds us together as one people across those skin deep differences.

00:41:09.040 And I think that, you know, from an American perspective, America is nothing if it is not bound together across its diversity.

00:41:16.180 We can celebrate our appearance of diversity until we're blue in the face.

00:41:19.380 We're nothing if we aren't bound across that diversity by something greater or else we're just a bunch of different looking people occupying a common space, looking at our iPhones and doing what our smartphones tell us to do on a given day.

00:41:30.020 That isn't what this country was supposed to be.

00:41:32.120 We're supposed to be a country built on idealism and a shared set of ideals that bring together an otherwise divided polyglot group of people.

00:41:39.140 I think it takes leaders to be able to lead people back to that vision of what binds them together.

00:41:46.680 I think the conditions that we've created create selective pressure for those kinds of leaders to emerge.

00:41:51.960 I think it's no accident that Reagan came in the 80s after the doldrums of the identity crisis that America and similar countries faced under the conditions of the 70s.

00:42:00.920 I view us as being in somewhat of an analogous place here now at the end of the 2010s.

00:42:04.840 And so it's going to be a combination of factors that drive the cultural change.

00:42:08.080 I do lay out some policy proposals in the book that I think can create the conditions

00:42:11.420 for that cultural change.

00:42:13.460 But even those policies are really just a form of symptomatic therapy.

00:42:16.140 And what I really think we need is the beginnings of a cultural cure. 0.67

00:42:20.220 Vivek, aren't you worried that it's gone too far now?

00:42:24.100 And particularly with big tech.

00:42:26.140 Big tech is so powerful.

00:42:28.000 If you look back at what happened over the pandemic, the reason that BLM came to public prominence was because of social media, because we were all physically locked in our homes.

00:42:38.780 We couldn't go anywhere. There were billions of eyeballs on a screen.

00:42:42.820 Do you not worry that we're simply too far down the road now?

00:42:46.100 I don't think we're too far down the road. I think we're getting close, though.

00:42:48.620 I mean, if you look at big tech, look at who the biggest beneficiaries of the pandemic were, was, of course, big tech.

00:42:52.800 Stock prices are through the roof. Guess who actually censored any content on the Internet?

00:42:58.000 about anti-lockdown speech. Facebook, YouTube, you could post about anti-lockdown. This is one

00:43:04.160 of the most important public policy questions of our time, whether or not to lock down an economy.

00:43:07.880 And there's many ways to fight the pandemic. You could debate masks, you could debate vaccines,

00:43:10.560 you could debate social distancing. But lockdowns, talking about economic lockdowns of businesses,

00:43:15.000 in retrospect, it doesn't even look like a particularly good way of having fought the

00:43:17.740 coronavirus. Yet debates were censored by the likes of YouTube, by the likes of Facebook,

00:43:23.620 and yet they were the biggest beneficiaries of all. So I think that big tech and China

00:43:27.460 represent the two defining threats to Western liberal democracies as we know it. And I, you

00:43:32.260 know, I don't think it's, I don't think, to answer your question, I don't think we're past the point

00:43:36.280 of no return yet. But if the kids who are in first grade now graduate from 12th grade before we fix

00:43:42.240 the problem, then I think we lose an entire generation. And I don't think we have a generation

00:43:46.500 left before the existence of not only America, but sort of the Western liberal democracy and

00:43:52.140 Western liberal edifice as we know it is brittle enough to withstand the loss of an entire

00:43:57.300 generation in between. So I think that's kind of the clock we're working with is within the 2020s,

00:44:02.220 we need to have fixed this or else we will have done permanent irreparable damage. And that's a

00:44:06.260 big part of why I'm writing. It's a big part of why I stepped aside as CEO to make a move that

00:44:10.360 I wouldn't have imagined myself making a couple of years ago to be able to be among the voices

00:44:14.580 that I think are going to be needed to drive change. It's part of why I wrote the book.

00:44:17.960 But I think laying eyes on this problem, I'm optimistic, will allow, I think, the right kinds of people amongst our everyday citizenry to galvanize, to create a new cultural response, a cultural revival that I think renders this postmodernism of the last decade irrelevant by comparison.

00:44:34.500 and you know i know we're running towards the end of time here but i just want to say thank

00:44:38.060 you for having me and being able to have this conversation not just here in the american

00:44:40.820 context but but across the pond with all of you i think is every bit as as important you know i

00:44:46.120 think that uh you know i think that there's a deep relationship between between our two countries

00:44:50.140 in a way that you know i think allows the ideas that reverberate on one side that that that sort 0.99

00:44:56.020 of echo on one side to reverberate on the other so that's why we hope we hope you sort your shit 0.96

00:45:00.500 out because we keep importing it and this is what we end up with here uh we we've got a little bit 0.95

00:45:05.420 of time go for it yeah the question that i want to ask is this and i think it's a key question

00:45:11.880 and libertarians don't like it and people on the right don't like it but divide decisive action is

00:45:17.720 needed isn't part of the problem like i said before big tech they're too big they're too

00:45:23.460 powerful don't we need the government to go in and again i know the right and the libertarians

00:45:28.020 They get their panties in a twist. Actually, there's a lot of people on the right now who are calling for people to break up the companies.

00:45:33.640 But anyway, yeah. But yeah. But just to break up the companies.

00:45:36.980 So so I'm not a big breakups guy. I understand the impulse. I'm sympathetic to it.

00:45:41.420 I certainly don't want to live in a world where the biggest technology companies in the world are Chinese rather than American, 1.00

00:45:47.220 because that's going to be a very different kind of problem than the one we're grappling with today.

00:45:50.200 And as I said earlier, I'll keep saying it again. Two biggest threats to the Western liberal edifice, China and big tech in that order. 0.96

00:45:57.040 Now, I think that that's one reason not to.

00:45:58.920 I think the other reason not to is, look, I think that there's a better version that

00:46:02.540 we had lived even in the 1990s, the original promise of a free and open internet, what

00:46:06.260 Google was supposed to have represented as opposed to the perverted thing it's become

00:46:08.860 today.

00:46:09.680 You know, I think that there's a better way forward than breaking it up.

00:46:11.880 And also, by the way, I don't think breaking it up solves the problem, because the real

00:46:15.700 problem in Silicon Valley today isn't a monopoly on products.

00:46:19.140 It isn't the idea that they're somehow using this to gouge price like the Rockefellers or

00:46:23.360 Carnegie's or Vanderbilt's might have done in monopoly eras in the past, they're actually

00:46:28.280 making many of their products available for free, consumer choices widespread.

00:46:31.560 The real problem is different.

00:46:33.060 It's a monopoly on ideas.

00:46:34.820 It is an ideological cartel.

00:46:36.380 And I can tell you from firsthand experience, talking to venture capitalists in Silicon

00:46:39.040 Valley, having raised money from some of them, being actually in the context of smaller

00:46:43.260 startups, all of them, many of them at least, bend the knee to that same ideology.

00:46:47.400 So if you take four big companies and break it up to 40 small companies, but they all

00:46:50.760 still subject themselves to the same ideology. You still have an ideological cartel rather than

00:46:55.820 an ideological monopoly, but I'm not sure we're that much better off in the marketplace of ideas.

00:47:00.360 So both from an efficacy perspective and from a risk avoidance perspective, if you will,

00:47:05.320 on the Chinese risk and on the risk side and on the efficacy side, I don't know that we're actually

00:47:10.780 going to solve the problem of the monopoly of ideas. We're not going to, if we're going to

00:47:13.380 change our culture, breaking up big tech isn't going to do it. I'm not a big breakups guy.

00:47:17.200 I do think, though, that we do need real action. One of the actions in the United States that we need to take is to teach these companies that you can't have it both ways. Either you operate as an actual private company and you get the special benefits of being a private company, or we recognize a big part of what these companies are doing today, which is to act as an agent of the state, to do through the back door what government can't directly do through the front door.

00:47:38.300 They're working hand in glove with government to censor free speech and open debate that

00:47:41.860 the government doesn't want to see online, but the government technically can't censor,

00:47:44.680 so it's using their censorship bureau in Silicon Valley to do it.

00:47:47.420 And by the way, give them special legal immunity in the form of Section 230 protection, which

00:47:51.080 is a statutory protection available to technology companies in the United States that I won't

00:47:54.880 go into here.

00:47:56.160 I say you can't have it both ways.

00:47:57.920 Either you operate as a private company and you get treated as a private company, or you

00:48:01.800 operate in coordination with the government with special government privileges, but then

00:48:04.780 you come and operate according to the same constraints as the government, including in

00:48:08.100 the U.S., the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which protects free

00:48:11.260 speech.

00:48:11.880 You can't have it both ways.

00:48:13.220 I also say, by the way, that if we live in a world where you can't discriminate, at least

00:48:16.600 in the American context, on the basis of race or gender or sexual orientation or religion

00:48:21.060 or national origin, which is the case in the U.S. today, then you should not be able to

00:48:26.640 discriminate on the basis of political belief or political expression either.

00:48:30.200 If race, gender, sexual orientation and national origin are protected classes, then so should political belief and political expression be too. So those are some of the bolder solutions that actually libertarians won't like. But nonetheless, I sort of apply in the book to say that you can't have it both ways. We need even handed applications in policy.

00:48:46.940 Well, that makes sense. But again, again, the question for me, if you don't mind, is who are you going to elect to do that? Right. Because some of those changes will require elected officials. So, you know, you had Donald Trump. He didn't do anything about it.

00:49:04.320 Yeah, he started a conversation. He didn't really finish the work that needed to be done. Look, I think the next, as I said, the next decade is really important. Reagan was born out of necessity on the back of the 70s. But I think a decade like the one we've been through create the conditions for selective pressure that hopefully create generational leaders that are able to drive that change. And so I'm hopeful for what we will see in the next decade. But if we're in the 70s without Reagan, I think we're in a tough spot.

00:49:30.360 So I think that the emergence of real political leadership and not just one among 450 congressmen or one among 100 senators, but really starting at the top and not just at the White House, but governors at every state level and even at local levels need to step up to be able to drive real change as executives, not just as legislators that have the potential through what they do, not just through policy, but through the cultural tone that they set to hopefully restart a cultural revival of the kind that we need.

00:49:58.520 All right, Vivek, it sounds like someone's trying to break into your house to let you address that and defend yourself as a true American.

00:50:08.060 Very quickly, before we let you go, we've got one final question and we'll do a couple of questions for locals.

00:50:13.320 And the final question is always, what's the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be?

00:50:17.760 hmm yeah look i think that i think we should talk about the way in which our cultural fragility at

00:50:27.520 home begets fragility abroad i just think about i look at what happened in afghanistan in recent

00:50:33.880 weeks in the u.s's disastrous exit from afghanistan is that deeply related to or is it

00:50:40.100 not related to the kinds of issues we've talked about here actually they're deeply related i think

00:50:45.440 there's exactly one way that President Biden could have deterred the Taliban from doing what

00:50:49.160 they did, which was to issue a credible threat of total decimation and annihilation if they came

00:50:53.800 anywhere near Kabul. He didn't do that. But the reason he didn't do it is that even if he did do

00:50:57.560 it, they would have never believed it because he lacked the moral standing to use extraordinary

00:51:03.200 force precisely when we needed it most because he's obsessed with self-criticism. And that's

00:51:07.100 part of what the woke ideology does is it undermines moral fortitude from within. And I

00:51:12.020 think one of the things we need to understand as we head into this brave new world of the new

00:51:15.080 decade ahead is to recognize that cultural fragility at home begets fragility abroad and i

00:51:22.080 think that in some ways it's counterintuitive that we will see more the rise of of the thing

00:51:28.620 that we none of us want to see which is the rise of evil on the global stage the weaker we are at

00:51:33.300 home both in places like the united states and the united kingdom and i think that's something we

00:51:37.180 need to be talking more about is the relationship between fragility at home and the rise of

00:51:41.900 fragility abroad. Vivek, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the

00:51:47.560 show. If people want to find you online, where's the best place to do that? They can find me on

00:51:51.420 social media. I reluctantly joined Twitter a year ago. I wasn't on social media for years,

00:51:56.600 but starting last year, ahead of publishing the book, I'm back on social media. Vivekramaswami.com

00:52:02.300 is my website. You can check out some of my work and get the book there as well. And most

00:52:08.960 importantly read the book i'm not doing this as a commercial endeavor i'm doing this to get the

00:52:12.520 message out but i hope that it starts a conversation that we need to be having in every segment of our

00:52:17.180 society it's a brilliant book we thoroughly recommend everybody read it of course we do

00:52:22.500 we'll ask you a couple of questions for our locals uh but for the moment thank you so much

00:52:26.640 for joining us and thank you guys for watching and listening at home we'll see you very soon

00:52:31.000 with another brilliant interview like this one and they always go out wednesdays and sundays 7

00:52:36.000 p.m uk time 2 p.m eastern standard and tuesdays thursdays fridays and saturdays are our raw

00:52:42.960 shows at the same time take care and see you soon guys we hope you've enjoyed this incredible

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TRIGGERnometry - September 23, 2021

How Big Business Went Woke - Vivek Ramaswamy

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