00:03:06.400Well, 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.
00:03:26.680I kept notes every time I had something that I saw in the biotech or pharma industry that really annoyed me as an investor.
00:03:33.640And eventually that list got long enough that I decided to leave my career as an investor and start a biopharmaceutical company in 2014.
00:03:40.140So that's what I did. I started Royvent Sciences. It was a heck of a journey.
00:03:44.220I've built the company from scratch and there's now many employees around the world.
00:03:49.520It's a company that's gotten a number of medicines through the development process, a couple of which are FDA approved medicines today.
00:03:55.740The one I'm probably most proud of is an FDA-approved drug for prostate cancer.
00:03:59.720But 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,
00:04:07.580but 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.
00:04:17.200And, 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.
00:04:25.600And 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.
00:04:41.740And 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.
00:04:53.300And I'm sorry to say it's actually working out pretty well for them.
00:04:55.880I'm not sure it's working out for civilized society and for democratic societies around the world.
00:05:00.900And 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.
00:05:07.780Well, 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?
00:05:35.400This 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.
00:05:45.200And 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.
00:06:01.540Yeah. So look, there's an age old adage of once you get to the destination you want to get to,
00:06:07.480you build a wall right behind you so somebody else can't get there, too. I think there's a bit
00:06:11.580of that going on here. But I think the essence of what happens actually is what I describe in the
00:06:15.800book. It begins with the 2008 financial crisis. I alluded to it before. I had a front row seat.
00:06:21.440I worked at a hedge fund that was one of the few firms named in Michael Lewis's book, The Big Short.
00:06:26.420I saw this play out and I watched the aftermath of it as well. I lived in New York City at the time.
00:06:30.900And 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.
00:06:52.120But there was this new left, a new breed of the left that was born right around the same time.
00:06:58.180Barack Obama had been elected as the first black president of the United States.
00:07:01.360There was a lot of discussion about diversity and the appearance of diversity in many of our institutions.
00:07:06.660And 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.
00:07:18.920So 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.
00:07:32.840And so this actually ended up being a pretty good trade where they could actually be the good guys.
00:07:37.180They were happy to lend their money, their legitimacy to this new woke movement, but they didn't quite do it for free.
00:07:44.580You 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.
00:07:52.000And 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.
00:07:59.420Together, they birthed woke capitalism, and they put Occupy Wall Street up for adoption.
00:08:04.500And that game worked so well that Silicon Valley did the same thing, censor content that the woke left doesn't want to see online.
00:08:10.540In 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.
00:08:20.920And 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.
00:08:41.020And 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.
00:08:52.360And 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.
00:09:03.720Well, look, I think I think there's a draw from Christopher Nolan's movie, The Prestige.
00:09:08.360By 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.
00:09:21.200I 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.
00:09:35.080But once you piece it together, there's a really woke premise at the heart of that movie.
00:09:46.060Well, you know, you travel backwards and forwards through time.
00:09:50.220it's sort of summarized at the very end of the movie where there's the there's sort of the white
00:09:55.140anti-hero and sort of the black hero that are crossing paths and one of them is the white guy
00:10:00.500is the one traveling backwards in time and the black hero is the one who's traveling forward in
00:10:05.480time and he looks back and says why aren't you coming with me and and the white anti-hero looks
00:10:09.620back and but he's a good guy too but but sort of looks back and says hey i'm going that way you're
00:10:14.900going that way. And it was just an encapsulated moment of the velocity of time in terms of where
00:10:21.980the different racial identities of the white man going in one direction and sort of the black hero
00:10:26.520going in the other direction that, you know, I think typified and captured part of the message
00:10:30.900of what the anti-racist movement is all about, what the woke ideology is all about, is being
00:10:35.320conscious to the historical power structures that may have held one class of people back and what
00:10:40.060they must do in terms of bearing their obligation to send that disempowered class forward.
00:10:46.320And I thought he captured the moment in a physics-laden, time-twisted plot in a way
00:10:51.040that only Christopher Nolan can. But if you saw that movie, I think you'll know what I mean.
00:10:55.360Now, anyway, I'm a big Christopher Nolan fan, and one of his movies that I also quite enjoy
00:10:59.240is The Prestige, where, again, he plays with notions of time, as he often does. But the
00:11:04.660beginning of the prestige is a description of what a magic act is all about and and there's
00:11:09.940three parts to the act there's the pledge the turn and the prestige the pledge is where the magician
00:11:14.980shows you something that you like something like a bird or something that might something like that
00:11:20.500might be an animal might be a rabbit shows you pledges to you what the trick is going to be all
00:11:24.820about the second part of the act is the turn where he makes that disappear but no trick is complete
00:11:31.980until you bring back that which you made disappear. And that's the prestige where you bring it back.
00:11:38.200And no magic trick is complete without the prestige. And what I talk about is 21st century
00:11:43.040capitalism. I break it down in larger ways than I want to go through. And right now in this short
00:11:48.940form, you can read the book. Basically, the pledge is identifying a market where ordinary people sell
00:11:53.940ordinary things. The turn is finding an arbitrage in that market. And arbitrage is the ability to
00:11:59.180buy something for one price and instantaneously sell it for a higher price in that same market.
00:12:03.920That's the turn. But the real prestige is covering up that entire act with what I call
00:12:08.780the new brand of woke smoke, blowing progressive values to cover up steps number one and two,
00:12:14.460to pretend like you care about something other than profit and power, as I said earlier,
00:12:18.600precisely to gain more of each. And the best version of the pledge, the turn and the prestige
00:12:24.380that I described earlier came in the form of what one of the U.S. mutual funds, State Street,
00:12:29.460did in the last couple of years, where they were actually facing a lawsuit from their female
00:12:35.660employees, alleging that they didn't pay the female employees at the firm as much as they
00:12:40.440paid the male counterparts. And so State Street did, of course, the natural thing that you'd
00:12:44.840expect them to do when faced with employees who claim that they're not being paid equally as their
00:12:49.040male counterparts. They built a statue for the women. They built a statue for the Wall Street
00:12:54.420bull in Wall Street, New York. And they built a little statue of a little girl who stands up to
00:13:00.920that bull. And at the placard at the bottom of the statue said that she, capital S-H-E,
00:13:07.020she makes a difference. Turns out that S-H-E didn't just describe fearless girl as the young
00:13:13.560girl in the statue was known to be. It also described the ETF or the exchange traded fund
00:13:19.020S-H-E, which traded as a ticker on the stock exchange, which you could buy. And if you buy,
00:13:24.000you know, that's money managed by State Street that they charge a nice fee for. So it's actually
00:13:27.100another nice little win for the marketing department. Now, to put a topping off flourish
00:13:32.660on all of it, Kristen Visble, the feminist who authentically created Fearless Girl,
00:13:37.500she believed in female empowerment and fempowerment on Wall Street. She created the
00:13:42.280statue. She was so excited about it that she made a couple extra copies of the statue too.
00:13:46.120This is what female empowerment needed to be about. And Fearless Girl was the face of female empowerment.
00:13:51.460Well, guess what? State Street sues Kristen Visible, the statue's creator, for creating three unauthorized reproductions of the statue that they had commissioned.
00:13:58.880Because 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.
00:14:05.760They have to bring it back. And so they sued her for making the unauthorized reproduction.
00:14:09.880So 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.
00:14:15.820But I thought I would leave you guys with a sense for what the magic trick is all about.
00:14:20.360What is the problem with woke capitalism?
00:14:23.120And let's just explore it a little bit, because there is an argument to say, hang on a minute.
00:14:27.780Look, at one point, all these organizations were stuffed with rich white people from privileged backgrounds.
00:14:34.680Isn't this just a much needed correction?
00:14:37.000And isn't it a good thing that these corporations are pushing this?
00:14:40.220Yeah. 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.
00:14:53.360Sounds pretty benign on its surface. Milton Friedman, by the way, didn't love that model 50 years ago.
00:14:59.880He 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.
00:15:10.220He had some valid concerns, but I will tell you that that is not my core concern.
00:15:16.480My 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.
00:15:38.340And 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.
00:15:45.280But 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.
00:15:51.760And 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.
00:16:05.980And 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.
00:16:18.920And 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.
00:16:30.760But 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.
00:16:39.480Democracy works according to the principle that we decide as citizens together what that common good is.
00:16:45.240And we have a commitment to live and abide by the by the results of that process.
00:16:49.420And to me, this is the most flagrant violation of democracy of all.
00:16:52.660When 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.
00:16:58.860I'm fine with that. But they shouldn't be able to exercise more moral power or normative power
00:17:03.660than my neighbors here in Ohio. And I think that that's a big part of what I'm fighting for in the
00:17:07.780book is to restore the integrity of democracy defined as such. Integrity of democracy, you say,
00:17:14.840but you mentioned in the book, the Hunter Biden scandal, where Twitter effectively suppressed that
00:17:21.840story. Oh, they did. I mean, I think there's no doubt that Twitter made a value judgment that,
00:17:27.780of course, Jack Dorsey, when he's pressed in front of Congress about it, says that, oh, that was a
00:17:31.100mistake. Every time these guys are pressed on one of their egregious forms of overreach, they claim
00:17:36.520that it was a mistake in retrospect, but the damage is already done. You now have these social
00:17:40.340media companies today that are able to do what no company in human history has been able to do,
00:17:46.100which is to control the acceptable bounds of what can and cannot be discussed. And once you affect
00:17:51.880what can't be discussed, you affect what can't even occur in one's own thoughts. And I think
00:17:57.660that's the most dangerous kind of corporate power of all, where America at its founding
00:18:02.120didn't want to see the Dutch East India Company reborn here in the United States. That was a
00:18:06.740company in Europe that, as you all well know, wielded not just market power, but wielded state-like
00:18:12.340power. They had their own militia. They had their own currency. Think of Facebook's cryptocurrency
00:18:17.000ambitions today. They had their own hospitals, their own charitable institutions. They were
00:18:21.240like a quasi-state. The American system was born on the idea that we did not want
00:18:26.060corporate-like states. We had a constitutional democracy, a constitutional republic that
00:18:32.380ultimately served as our state. We didn't want to create a corporatocracy in its wake. And so
00:18:37.320that's why we created, even though we created powerful corporations through benefits like
00:18:41.100limited liability and other concepts that the state created to allow corporate shareholders
00:18:45.000to have a lot of special advantages, we said that in return for that, we want you to stay in your
00:18:49.800lane. We demand that the directors of a corporation owe a fiduciary duty only to shareholders,
00:18:54.340not just to protect those shareholders
00:18:56.620as Milton Friedman might have surmised
00:26:57.480well, hey, if you're an NBA fan like me,
00:26:59.780you have to make a conscious decision every time.
00:27:01.920Do you want 20 minutes of social justice
00:27:04.100shoved down your throat before every game
00:27:05.720Or 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.
00:27:15.020I think it is the path to civil war. And I don't say that lightly, but I think and we're not there yet.
00:27:19.880But I think that if we do get there, I think that would be a dangerous, dangerous harbinger of bad things to come.
00:27:27.120If 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.
00:27:35.700nations get through that when nations don't get through that is when there's no cultural cohesion
00:27:41.340to bind people together across their divided politics and and i worry that as the private
00:27:47.360sector goes woke as it becomes politicized we lose the necessary apolitical spaces that bind
00:27:54.140us together as one people regardless of whether we're democrats or republicans conservatives or
00:27:58.920liberals black or white we require those spaces american solidarity i think i think western
00:28:04.120liberal solidarity as we know it requires those spaces to bind us together. And I think that that
00:28:09.780cultural fragility, I think, is one of the greatest dangers of all as we become more fragile
00:28:14.100when divisive politics infects otherwise unifying activities like our places of work,
00:28:19.820the places we go to play sports, the places we go to listen to music. Once those become politicized
00:28:24.700to the movie theaters, for that matter, it is, I think, the beginning of the end of Western
00:28:28.900liberalism and the project of Western liberalism as we know it. And worst of all, the people who
00:28:33.940are rooting for the end of Western liberalism in other parts of the world. And, you know,
00:28:38.020I'm not shy about naming names. I'm going to put the Chinese Communist Party at the top of that
00:28:42.660list, are exploiting that to drive their own advantage. And I'll tell you a joke I told
00:28:51.040recently. And, you know, I think it's meant in good humor, but I think at the heart of it is,
00:28:56.360I think, a very dark turn in the story where, let's just say Mao Zedong comes back to the
00:29:01.220Chinese countryside in year 2021, and he sees a farmer on the countryside, and he has a conversation
00:29:07.580with the farmer. And he says, OK, well, farmer, what happened to those food shortages that we
00:29:12.280used to have when I was ruling? Do we still have those food shortages? And the farmer says,
00:29:16.400Chairman, no, we don't have those food shortages. In fact, we have the opposite problem.
00:29:19.700We have too much food, and our people are dying of diabetes today. And so Chairman Mao says,
00:29:24.660very good, very good. That's good to hear. Now, what about our steel production targets? We were
00:29:28.900going to produce more steel than the United Kingdom as part of our 50-year plan. 50 years
00:29:34.140later, have we now achieved that? To which the Chinese farmer says, oh, no, forget about beating
00:29:40.100the United Kingdom as China. One of our provinces alone defeats the United Kingdom in steel production
00:29:46.620every year, to which Chairman Mao says, that's very good to hear. But tell me, what happened to
00:29:52.060that Chinese cultural revolution where we were going to have that proletariat uprising? Whatever
00:29:57.360happened to that to which the farmer laughs and says chairman we don't do that here anymore
00:30:03.340we've outsourced that to the united states and i say that jokingly but i think that there's a
00:30:09.240version of this in which the chinese leadership deeply understands the kinks in our armor they
00:30:16.360have a word for western wokeness bites will literally refers to woke white people in the
00:30:22.540united states and in other western countries and they use it to laugh at us but now they're using
00:30:26.480that progressive front to actually co-opt companies that criticize relentlessly the
00:30:31.780United States over Black Lives Matter or whatever. You brought the NBA. The NBA is in this category,
00:30:36.320but they don't say a peep in China. In fact, they supplicate to China. They lie prostrate like
00:30:41.300lapdogs to their CCP overlords while consistently biting the United States in the process. And that
00:30:46.980creates a false moral equivalence between Chinese nihilism and let's call it Western idealism.
00:30:52.360And 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.
00:31:17.460lends moral legitimacy to the claims that they make. And I actually think that's probably the
00:31:21.920most dangerous threat to democracy is not even the philosophical one from within that I described,
00:31:26.080though I think that's a problem, but actually a dangerous one backed up through not soft power,
00:31:30.560but hard power through the use of force as exercised by the CCP over the course of the
00:31:34.820next 10 years. And you can mark my words today, the day that Taiwan is invaded by China, Nike
00:31:41.400and Disney and the NBA are not going to say a peep. They might even praise them and implicitly
00:31:47.000help them do it. That's the state of the world we live in, is they've turned these corporations
00:31:51.000into Trojan horses where Western countries like the United States and the United Kingdom thought
00:31:55.440for 30 years that they could send Big Macs and Happy Meals to China and somehow spread democracy.
00:32:00.720And instead, autocratic nations like China have turned that on its head. And instead of using our
00:32:05.500money on the West to get them to be more like us, they've actually used their money to make us
00:32:10.980behave more like them. And I'm sorry to say that it is working in a way that both progressives and
00:32:15.600conservatives need to wake up to, but even well-minded progressives need to recognize that
00:32:19.340once they've turned corporations into vectors to drive social change, those corporations then
00:32:23.900become vehicles to bid for someone else's agenda too. And nobody's mastered that game better than
00:32:29.760the CCP. It's actually my book is, if I may say, the first book that I believe is laying out the
00:32:35.420geopolitical implications of wokeism. And I think that that's probably one of the most illuminating
00:32:39.700parts of the book, I thought for me in the process of writing it, but I hope for the readers who read
00:32:44.000as well. And one of the best examples of that was the case of Disney and the Uyghurs. Would you
00:32:50.640mind expanding into that a little bit? Yeah, look, I mean, Disney, my blood's already boiling. I
00:32:56.080want to keep myself in check here. But Disney says it could not film in the United States a
00:33:03.680couple of years ago in the state of Georgia if Georgia passed the equivalent of a new abortion
00:33:07.960restriction or whatever. Yet last year, they go to the Shenzhen province of China, literally ground
00:33:13.140zero of the Uyghur human rights crisis, over a million Uyghurs detained in concentration camps,
00:33:18.260subject to forced sterilization, communist indoctrination, in what I view as some of
00:33:22.080the worst human rights atrocities committed by a major nation since the Third Reich of Germany.
00:33:26.360And Disney does not say a peep until they get to the end of the film. And in the film's credits,
00:33:31.060I'm not even kidding you, they go out of their way to publicly thank the local CCP authorities
00:33:36.200in the Shenzhen province for allowing the privilege of filming there, when in fact,
00:33:40.400those are some of the very authorities responsible for enslaving the Uyghurs today. So I just think
00:33:45.380that that two-faced behavior is, you know, really revealing about the way in which much of the West
00:33:51.740will supplicate to the guy who pays them their last dollar or their last yuan, as the case may be.
00:33:59.440Top Gun is a film coming out later this year where Tom Cruise in the original movie was a real
00:34:05.180maverick. And he actually had in one of the scenes, a jacket that had a number of US allies on his
00:34:10.360sleeve, including the nation of Taiwan, including Japan. And in the revised version of the film,
00:34:16.420you'll see him wear his jacket coming out this fall. You won't see Taiwan's flag. You won't see
00:34:20.860Japan's flag. And I'll let you guess exactly why. That is the world we live in. They have invaded
00:34:25.780the movies we watch, the universities our kids are educated at, the companies we buy our products
00:34:30.860from there are trojan horses from within and the battle of troy was won not through the front door
00:34:36.400but when actually one of the sides was invaded by the other through the back door with a trojan horse
00:34:41.860that they accepted and the horses that were the trojan horses today look every bit as appealing
00:34:46.580as the trojan horses in the battle of troy in the form of nike in the form of disney in the form of
00:34:51.340the nba the movies we watch the clothes we wear the sports we play yet those trojan horses are
00:34:56.620actually the vectors of actually advancing the agenda of what I view as the enemy. And we have
00:35:01.600not seen it happen in plain sight. That's a big part of what I'm laying out in the book.
00:35:06.180That being the case, Vivek, how do we fight back then against these corporations?
00:35:10.640How do we persuade the ordinary person on the street? Because there is a heartening example
00:35:14.740of this when Gillette did their toxic masculinity advert and their share prices dropped massively
00:35:22.820as a result because nobody wanted to buy their products. Yeah, look, I think sometimes
00:35:27.540consumer boycotts could be a short-term answer. I'm not a big fan of that in the long run because
00:35:31.500I think that takes us back on the path to two economies, which then puts us back on the path
00:35:36.540to civil war. I'm not a big fan of that approach, though I'm sympathetic to those who feel like they
00:35:41.020need to resort to that as a mechanism to fight back. I think the right answer has to be not to
00:35:47.820just cancel wokeism in return, to adopt illiberal methods to fight illiberalism. I think it has to
00:35:54.940be to dilute that agenda to irrelevance by reviving a shared identity that runs so deep
00:36:01.320that it makes wokeism seem silly by comparison. I think that the right way to fight racism,
00:36:07.100by the way, and this would be my advice to the left, would be the same thing. It's not to get
00:36:11.920that last burning ember and go to the person who might harbor one last racist thought as you define
00:37:30.160So the ratio of administrators at universities to professors
00:37:33.780has actually rapidly grown like a cancer in universities around both the U.S.
00:37:39.440and I think the same is true in the United Kingdom,
00:37:40.960though I haven't looked at the same numbers in the same precision as I have in the U.S.
00:37:43.660What you see is these administrators, the associate deans, the diversity administrators, are now outstripping faculty by ratios like 10 to 1.
00:37:52.860And 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.
00:38:10.040I 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.
00:38:22.220But 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.
00:38:33.260In 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.
00:39:02.040And 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.
00:39:16.820They were pummeled with quasi violence as a consequence. And the administrators stand by as the students do it.
00:39:22.620So I actually think the bigger problem universities is this managerial cancer in the administrative class of the university, even beyond the professors themselves.
00:40:12.400That's part of what made wokeism so attractive over the course of the last couple of decades.
00:40:16.120But today, now that wokeism is the system, there's a new pitch for that new generation
00:40:20.440that if you want to stand up to the system, there's a new way to do it.
00:40:22.580And 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.
00:40:44.380I 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.
00:40:52.580I 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.
00:41:09.040And I think that, you know, from an American perspective, America is nothing if it is not bound together across its diversity.
00:41:16.180We can celebrate our appearance of diversity until we're blue in the face.
00:41:19.380We'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.
00:41:30.020That isn't what this country was supposed to be.
00:41:32.120We'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.
00:41:39.140I think it takes leaders to be able to lead people back to that vision of what binds them together.
00:41:46.680I think the conditions that we've created create selective pressure for those kinds of leaders to emerge.
00:41:51.960I 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.
00:42:00.920I view us as being in somewhat of an analogous place here now at the end of the 2010s.
00:42:04.840And so it's going to be a combination of factors that drive the cultural change.
00:42:08.080I do lay out some policy proposals in the book that I think can create the conditions
00:42:28.000If 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.
00:42:38.780We couldn't go anywhere. There were billions of eyeballs on a screen.
00:42:42.820Do you not worry that we're simply too far down the road now?
00:42:46.100I don't think we're too far down the road. I think we're getting close, though.
00:42:48.620I mean, if you look at big tech, look at who the biggest beneficiaries of the pandemic were, was, of course, big tech.
00:42:52.800Stock prices are through the roof. Guess who actually censored any content on the Internet?
00:42:58.000about anti-lockdown speech. Facebook, YouTube, you could post about anti-lockdown. This is one
00:43:04.160of the most important public policy questions of our time, whether or not to lock down an economy.
00:43:07.880And there's many ways to fight the pandemic. You could debate masks, you could debate vaccines,
00:43:10.560you could debate social distancing. But lockdowns, talking about economic lockdowns of businesses,
00:43:15.000in retrospect, it doesn't even look like a particularly good way of having fought the
00:43:17.740coronavirus. Yet debates were censored by the likes of YouTube, by the likes of Facebook,
00:43:23.620and yet they were the biggest beneficiaries of all. So I think that big tech and China
00:43:27.460represent the two defining threats to Western liberal democracies as we know it. And I, you
00:43:32.260know, I don't think it's, I don't think, to answer your question, I don't think we're past the point
00:43:36.280of no return yet. But if the kids who are in first grade now graduate from 12th grade before we fix
00:43:42.240the problem, then I think we lose an entire generation. And I don't think we have a generation
00:43:46.500left before the existence of not only America, but sort of the Western liberal democracy and
00:43:52.140Western liberal edifice as we know it is brittle enough to withstand the loss of an entire
00:43:57.300generation in between. So I think that's kind of the clock we're working with is within the 2020s,
00:44:02.220we need to have fixed this or else we will have done permanent irreparable damage. And that's a
00:44:06.260big part of why I'm writing. It's a big part of why I stepped aside as CEO to make a move that
00:44:10.360I wouldn't have imagined myself making a couple of years ago to be able to be among the voices
00:44:14.580that I think are going to be needed to drive change. It's part of why I wrote the book.
00:44:17.960But 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.
00:44:34.500and you know i know we're running towards the end of time here but i just want to say thank
00:44:38.060you for having me and being able to have this conversation not just here in the american
00:44:40.820context but but across the pond with all of you i think is every bit as as important you know i
00:44:46.120think that uh you know i think that there's a deep relationship between between our two countries
00:44:50.140in a way that you know i think allows the ideas that reverberate on one side that that that sort
00:44:56.020of echo on one side to reverberate on the other so that's why we hope we hope you sort your shit
00:45:00.500out because we keep importing it and this is what we end up with here uh we we've got a little bit
00:45:05.420of time go for it yeah the question that i want to ask is this and i think it's a key question
00:45:11.880and libertarians don't like it and people on the right don't like it but divide decisive action is
00:45:17.720needed isn't part of the problem like i said before big tech they're too big they're too
00:45:23.460powerful don't we need the government to go in and again i know the right and the libertarians
00:45:28.020They 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.
00:45:33.640But anyway, yeah. But yeah. But just to break up the companies.
00:45:36.980So so I'm not a big breakups guy. I understand the impulse. I'm sympathetic to it.
00:45:41.420I certainly don't want to live in a world where the biggest technology companies in the world are Chinese rather than American,
00:45:47.220because that's going to be a very different kind of problem than the one we're grappling with today.
00:45:50.200And 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.
00:45:57.040Now, I think that that's one reason not to.
00:45:58.920I think the other reason not to is, look, I think that there's a better version that
00:46:02.540we had lived even in the 1990s, the original promise of a free and open internet, what
00:46:06.260Google was supposed to have represented as opposed to the perverted thing it's become
00:46:36.380And I can tell you from firsthand experience, talking to venture capitalists in Silicon
00:46:39.040Valley, having raised money from some of them, being actually in the context of smaller
00:46:43.260startups, all of them, many of them at least, bend the knee to that same ideology.
00:46:47.400So if you take four big companies and break it up to 40 small companies, but they all
00:46:50.760still subject themselves to the same ideology. You still have an ideological cartel rather than
00:46:55.820an ideological monopoly, but I'm not sure we're that much better off in the marketplace of ideas.
00:47:00.360So both from an efficacy perspective and from a risk avoidance perspective, if you will,
00:47:05.320on the Chinese risk and on the risk side and on the efficacy side, I don't know that we're actually
00:47:10.780going to solve the problem of the monopoly of ideas. We're not going to, if we're going to
00:47:13.380change our culture, breaking up big tech isn't going to do it. I'm not a big breakups guy.
00:47:17.200I 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.
00:47:38.300They're working hand in glove with government to censor free speech and open debate that
00:47:41.860the government doesn't want to see online, but the government technically can't censor,
00:47:44.680so it's using their censorship bureau in Silicon Valley to do it.
00:47:47.420And by the way, give them special legal immunity in the form of Section 230 protection, which
00:47:51.080is a statutory protection available to technology companies in the United States that I won't
00:48:13.220I also say, by the way, that if we live in a world where you can't discriminate, at least
00:48:16.600in the American context, on the basis of race or gender or sexual orientation or religion
00:48:21.060or national origin, which is the case in the U.S. today, then you should not be able to
00:48:26.640discriminate on the basis of political belief or political expression either.
00:48:30.200If 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.
00:48:46.940Well, 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.
00:49:04.320Yeah, 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.
00:49:30.360So 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.
00:49:58.520All 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.
00:50:08.060Very quickly, before we let you go, we've got one final question and we'll do a couple of questions for locals.
00:50:13.320And the final question is always, what's the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be?
00:50:17.760hmm yeah look i think that i think we should talk about the way in which our cultural fragility at
00:50:27.520home begets fragility abroad i just think about i look at what happened in afghanistan in recent
00:50:33.880weeks in the u.s's disastrous exit from afghanistan is that deeply related to or is it
00:50:40.100not related to the kinds of issues we've talked about here actually they're deeply related i think
00:50:45.440there's exactly one way that President Biden could have deterred the Taliban from doing what
00:50:49.160they did, which was to issue a credible threat of total decimation and annihilation if they came
00:50:53.800anywhere near Kabul. He didn't do that. But the reason he didn't do it is that even if he did do
00:50:57.560it, they would have never believed it because he lacked the moral standing to use extraordinary
00:51:03.200force precisely when we needed it most because he's obsessed with self-criticism. And that's
00:51:07.100part of what the woke ideology does is it undermines moral fortitude from within. And I
00:51:12.020think one of the things we need to understand as we head into this brave new world of the new
00:51:15.080decade ahead is to recognize that cultural fragility at home begets fragility abroad and i
00:51:22.080think that in some ways it's counterintuitive that we will see more the rise of of the thing
00:51:28.620that we none of us want to see which is the rise of evil on the global stage the weaker we are at
00:51:33.300home both in places like the united states and the united kingdom and i think that's something we
00:51:37.180need to be talking more about is the relationship between fragility at home and the rise of
00:51:41.900fragility abroad. Vivek, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the
00:51:47.560show. If people want to find you online, where's the best place to do that? They can find me on
00:51:51.420social media. I reluctantly joined Twitter a year ago. I wasn't on social media for years,
00:51:56.600but starting last year, ahead of publishing the book, I'm back on social media. Vivekramaswami.com
00:52:02.300is my website. You can check out some of my work and get the book there as well. And most
00:52:08.960importantly read the book i'm not doing this as a commercial endeavor i'm doing this to get the
00:52:12.520message out but i hope that it starts a conversation that we need to be having in every segment of our
00:52:17.180society it's a brilliant book we thoroughly recommend everybody read it of course we do
00:52:22.500we'll ask you a couple of questions for our locals uh but for the moment thank you so much
00:52:26.640for joining us and thank you guys for watching and listening at home we'll see you very soon
00:52:31.000with another brilliant interview like this one and they always go out wednesdays and sundays 7
00:52:36.000p.m uk time 2 p.m eastern standard and tuesdays thursdays fridays and saturdays are our raw
00:52:42.960shows at the same time take care and see you soon guys we hope you've enjoyed this incredible
00:52:50.220interview remember to subscribe and hit the bell button so that you never miss another fantastic
00:52:56.220episode and if you believe that the work we do here at trigonometry is important
00:53:01.020support us by joining our locals community using the link below