Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - American Express Exposed: The Dark Side of Woke Policies | The TRUTH Podcast #18

00:00:02.000 So, we've traced the mystery of the origin of this bizarre arranged marriage.

00:00:22.000 So we've traced the mystery of the origin of this bizarre arranged marriage between corporate America and a woke movement that you would think of as normally in tension with corporate America and its goals.

00:00:40.000 But in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, you had some strange things happen in this country.

00:00:45.000 And one of them was that two strange bedfellows got in bed.

00:00:49.000 They each got something out of the trade.

00:00:52.000 And even though they probably didn't really love each other, They nonetheless engaged in an act of mutual prostitution that gave rise to this new woke industrial complex in America that is far more insidious than just big government alone through the front door engaging in a trampling on individual rights in the 1980 version of the plot.

00:01:14.000 There's something altogether different going on today.

00:01:18.000 And I think that there's a little bit of a mystery beneath it where if you scratch the surface, it starts to make a little bit more sense.

00:01:24.000 But on the face of it is, I think, the cultural mystery of our generation.

00:01:28.000 And so today we have...

00:01:30.000 Two foot soldiers, I would say, in the fight back against that trend in corporate America who have been leaders in their own right, who I've gotten to know pretty well over the last year.

00:01:40.000 Kenny Zhu, who's author of his great book.

00:01:44.000 Actually, it's how I first got to know Kenny, An Inconvenient Minority, who's with us today.

00:01:48.000 Someone I've gotten to know more recently, Nick Williams, who's a friend of Kenny's as well, who's actually worked at one of the companies that Kenny has actually highlighted in his work.

00:01:57.000 We'll get right into it, guys, in terms of we'll start with your experience, maybe with you, Nick, talking about what you faced at American Express as a...

00:02:11.000 As an example of this broader trend of a politicization of corporate America that befuddles a lot of people, consumers, employees, etc., but now has become the new norm in America.

00:02:23.000 It's hard to think about in the abstract.

00:02:25.000 I mean, I've written books and whatnot about it, but you've seen an element of that In a very first personal way.

00:02:32.000 So why don't you tell us about it and, you know, what animates your new mission now?

00:02:37.000 And then three of us, why don't we just get into a chat and let loose a little bit?

00:02:41.000 Yeah, well, thanks, Vivek.

00:02:42.000 I appreciate the opportunity to be here.

00:02:44.000 And I'll tell you, growing up in Iowa and, you know, being a guy that was kind of just taught to stay in line and don't get out of line and, you know, keep your thoughts to yourself.

00:02:55.000 You don't have to raise a lot of eyebrows.

00:02:59.000 It's kind of how I lived life up until the last few years, where all of a sudden I realized that as I looked out, a lot of folks that represented my political affiliation were doing the same thing.

00:03:11.000 They had a thought, but they stayed quiet.

00:03:14.000 I had to make the hard decision when I was forced to exit American Express.

00:03:19.000 Am I going to take the money, which went up three times before I finally got it across?

00:03:26.000 You can't buy my silence.

00:03:29.000 Or am I going to fight?

00:03:30.000 And am I going to bear the cross?

00:03:32.000 And am I going to Take on the voice of those who aren't in a position to be a voice or right now are too weak who hopefully will become stronger to be the voice.

00:03:41.000 And I'd say that's what I'm most happy about in linking arms with Color Us United and launching the unamericanexpress.com website where people can have a platform to have their voice heard whether they want to sign their name or not, they can tell their story.

00:03:58.000 And I was empowered by all of the stories that have flooded in from the Fortune 500. You know, at first I thought this was just a big bank issue, you know, as I'm trying to be recruited by all the other banks when they find I'm on the market.

00:04:12.000 And it's like, well, the answer is no, no, no, no.

00:04:16.000 You all are a violator of what happened to me.

00:04:19.000 I realize my eyes are open.

00:04:22.000 And I guess I never thought that something like this could happen to me.

00:04:26.000 It bothers me that I was naive.

00:04:29.000 I feel like this guy from Iowa who has never been sued and never sued anybody and All of a sudden, something like this could happen to me.

00:04:37.000 I could be pushed out the door.

00:04:40.000 There could be 13 lawyers retained to fabricate a story so that I'm confused what even happened to me.

00:04:46.000 And so I've spent, I prayed on it with my wife and my kids, and I've educated my kids as well, my four children, including the seven-year-old, of why it's important to have your voice, why it's important to speak for what you believe, why it's important to not be silenced, and that's what this country was built upon.

00:05:04.000 So, I wanted to step in because we were, I was the, I'm the president of Color Us United and we were the, we're the group that is fighting Amex's woke policies.

00:05:17.000 And that's actually how we discovered Nick.

00:05:20.000 And just to give people who don't know Nick's story at all, what happened to Nick.

00:05:27.000 He was the number one sales performer at American Express.

00:05:33.000 For their global commercial services business.

00:05:36.000 This was during Steve Squarey, the new CEO's tenure.

00:05:40.000 After he arrived during Kenneth Chenault, when Kenneth Chenault was CEO of Amex, he was one of the world's most respected CEOs, also an African-American man.

00:05:50.000 And he, you know, Nick was the number one sales performer in that culture.

00:05:55.000 But what happened was...

00:05:58.000 He refused to extend a line of credit to a black woman who failed all of the standard credit checks.

00:06:08.000 And she got very resentful and really attacked Nick's character, complained about racism.

00:06:16.000 I don't know if that's what the backdrop was.

00:06:17.000 Okay.

00:06:18.000 Yes. 0.82

00:06:18.000 And even complained about his black male colleagues' racism against her. 0.82

00:06:25.000 And so he...

00:06:26.000 Decided to stick up for him, himself and his black male colleague.

00:06:31.000 And as a result, Amex put him through 73 days of legal harassment and ultimately terminated him.

00:06:43.000 Yeah, and it was interesting because it was during that George Floyd era.

00:06:47.000 I mean, it was the call to action.

00:06:48.000 This was back in, what, 2020, was it?

00:06:50.000 Well, the training started in 2020 that we were going through.

00:06:53.000 When was this incident?

00:06:54.000 March of 2021 was my last day.

00:06:56.000 So, investigations started.

00:06:58.000 When did this happen?

00:06:59.000 Oh, this was in March of 21. Yeah, I sent the email right after Christmas when my colleague came- Saying that she didn't get credit.

00:07:05.000 Yeah, and just not only that, that her behavior and her actions will not be tolerated. 1.00

00:07:10.000 They violate the blue box values and you won't speak to my colleague that way who took a phone call from her on Christmas Eve.

00:07:16.000 And when I found out about that, I thought- What is my African American colleague who I'm mentoring right now?

00:07:22.000 What's he gonna think of me if I just let that behavior happen?

00:07:25.000 And we're in a call to action.

00:07:27.000 Steve Squarey was calling card members and canceling their cards for how the recorded call went with our customer servicing agents who were African American.

00:07:37.000 And so there was a big call to action.

00:07:40.000 As in if a customer was- On the phone.

00:07:42.000 On the phone.

00:07:43.000 Needing help with their card and speaking in a manner that was not appropriate or in a tone or upsetting to the employee.

00:07:52.000 American Express would call that card member up and cancel their card as a result of that.

00:07:57.000 The action we were taking to back our black colleagues. 0.98

00:08:00.000 Not all of our colleagues.

00:08:02.000 It was our black colleagues at the time.

00:08:04.000 Oh, that was specific.

00:08:04.000 Interesting.

00:08:05.000 And that's how the banners of their trainings read, backing our black colleagues.

00:08:12.000 And so I have no problem with that.

00:08:15.000 You know, I have a multiracial family.

00:08:18.000 I was raised that a rainbow needs all its colors.

00:08:21.000 Ken Chenault's diverse company attracted me to American Express at the beginning.

00:08:25.000 So I had no problem with that.

00:08:28.000 And as a matter of fact, the woman who I refused service to, I didn't even know the color of her skin because she never turned the camera on in the era of Zoom calls. 0.99

00:08:36.000 So I didn't know any of this.

00:08:39.000 And again, what really happened is hard because these companies spent a lot of money to confuse the employee of what actually happened.

00:08:49.000 And I have spent a lot of my own personal money in legal fees to actually understand what has actually happened to me, what did happen to me.

00:08:57.000 But day one, if you would have asked me in March of 2021, when I lost my job, what happened?

00:09:04.000 No clue.

00:09:05.000 You know, I didn't understand.

00:09:07.000 I was being made to believe something else, you know, but obviously all of this is happening.

00:09:13.000 So the sequence of events was basically she was denied credit by a – what would your subordinate's name – what would the name of his title be?

00:09:21.000 Our risk and underwriting.

00:09:22.000 Risk and underwriting department.

00:09:23.000 No, they told me no.

00:09:24.000 For a loan.

00:09:24.000 You need more.

00:09:25.000 For a loan.

00:09:25.000 Yeah.

00:09:26.000 Like maybe start with your business matching the address and having that same thing on your utility bill.

00:09:32.000 Like that's a great place to start.

00:09:33.000 And so all those boxes, red flags were apparent.

00:09:36.000 Yeah.

00:09:36.000 She was denied credit.

00:09:38.000 And then – She complained to one of your superiors that it was the result of racism.

00:09:45.000 I can't confirm that.

00:09:46.000 Okay.

00:09:47.000 You know, I wasn't privy to all the conversations afterwards.

00:09:50.000 But I do know a lawsuit was raised by her. 0.99

00:09:54.000 And I did see her initial email claiming all of the damages.

00:09:59.000 And I do know that it never showed up after that.

00:10:04.000 It just magically went away.

00:10:06.000 Just like I magically went away.

00:10:08.000 At the same time.

00:10:10.000 Fascinating.

00:10:11.000 I mean, what do you think is driving?

00:10:12.000 I mean, Kenny, you've looked at this a long time, and what do you think is driving?

00:10:16.000 You studied American Express, and I love the term Un-American Express, by the way, because if you're going to put American in your title as a company and own that as part of your brand, you better, as far as I see it, you open the door to criticism on the back of that brand when your behavior is, as you so aptly put it, Un-American.

00:10:37.000 What do you think drove this?

00:10:38.000 It is a pretty mysterious thing to say that we want to be a company that competes in the market, that makes loans in a competitive way, but then says for this particular racial objective, if you don't relax your standards and somebody is dissatisfied, we're going to sacrifice if you don't relax your standards and somebody is dissatisfied, we're going to sacrifice you And when it comes to employees, we're only going to back our black employees. 0.74

00:11:03.000 What's going on there?

00:11:04.000 What's the essence of it?

00:11:06.000 Yeah.

00:11:06.000 And by the way, if you want to hear more of Nick's story, you should go to unamericanexpress.com and you can see all of the evidence that we put out showing Amex did things like give a 15% bonus for firing white males from their company and hiring POC, minorities of people of color. you should go to unamericanexpress.com and you can see all So that's on their documents.

00:11:27.000 We have it.

00:11:27.000 It's on unamericanexpress.com.

00:11:29.000 But here's what I think happened.

00:11:31.000 And I spent a long time piecing together what happened at American Express.

00:11:36.000 American Express has been under these federal regulations, under several investigations.

00:11:43.000 This is just one Wall Street Journal article about an investigation that the federal government has conducted against American Express for extending tax breaks to individuals sort of misleadingly.

00:11:59.000 And there are three more investigations that American Express is undergoing and this falls in line with what you talk about, Vivek, which is...

00:12:07.000 They need to find some way to protect their hide and look good and to say to the federal government, well, we're doing something.

00:12:14.000 We're doing something to be socially just, you know, so that maybe the federal government could relax some of their charges against them.

00:12:23.000 And the way that they decided to do it was to go woke.

00:12:25.000 You know, Steve Squarey made a huge...

00:12:27.000 CEO, Steve Squarey, made a huge push to go woke.

00:12:32.000 He even invited...

00:12:34.000 Khalil Muhammad, who was the grandson of Elijah Muhammad, who was an extremist. 0.98

00:12:41.000 Racist, violent, extremist. 0.97

00:12:43.000 Right. 1.00

00:12:44.000 Racist. 0.98

00:12:44.000 Pro-violence extremist. 0.98

00:12:46.000 Yes.

00:12:46.000 To give a corporate speech at American Express on how capitalism was racist.

00:12:54.000 And I assume he was paid to do it.

00:12:56.000 Oh, and he was paid a ton of money to do that.

00:12:57.000 And we were all forced to sit through the training.

00:12:59.000 Yeah, I can imagine that.

00:13:00.000 Or you can move along.

00:13:02.000 Oh, totally.

00:13:04.000 So you think – but this is interesting because it's just – it is the Woke Inc.

00:13:08.000 thesis.

00:13:08.000 I mean, that is the heart of the book.

00:13:10.000 I didn't cover – I don't think I covered American Express in my book and you have exposed American Express like none other.

00:13:16.000 But you think it's the classic case of – They're on our backs.

00:13:20.000 Classic critique comes from the left.

00:13:22.000 Blow woke smoke to deflect accountability.

00:13:25.000 Cultivate the new persona.

00:13:27.000 Yeah.

00:13:28.000 You don't think it was like the personal values of the CEO so much.

00:13:31.000 It was just kind of a naked self-interested, cynical play here.

00:13:35.000 And I want to add one other layer to this, which was after this...

00:13:41.000 Tax Break was pitched.

00:13:44.000 What American Express CEOs and some of their top staff, CEO Steve Squarey, Anna Mars, Sean Hines, what they- When was Chanel, when was he there?

00:13:55.000 Until what year?

00:13:56.000 I think it was around 2015. Oh, so he's been long gone.

00:13:58.000 So he's just been long gone.

00:13:59.000 He was like chairman or something like that or not.

00:14:00.000 He was Steve Squarey.

00:14:02.000 He was the CEO and chairman.

00:14:03.000 Yeah, I don't know.

00:14:04.000 But did he stand, he's out of the picture.

00:14:05.000 He's out of the picture.

00:14:06.000 Yeah, at this point, he's out of the picture.

00:14:09.000 What they did after this story blew up on the Wall Street Journal was they actually fired some of their...

00:14:17.000 Most of their salesmen who were pitching this sort of illicit slash misleading tax break.

00:14:27.000 But what they didn't do was they didn't fire their top executives who authorized this tax break, who authorized these illegal plans.

00:14:36.000 So in a way, they shifted the blame to the little guys.

00:14:40.000 Classic move.

00:14:41.000 They took all the credit and claimed blindness.

00:14:44.000 How do you claim blindness, Steve Squirey, Anna Mars, to a product that's driving $6 billion of revenue?

00:14:52.000 How do you not know about that?

00:14:54.000 And also to the legal team at American Express, how does any product that's new to the market get approved without all the sign-offs?

00:15:03.000 Everybody signs off on it.

00:15:04.000 They know what it is.

00:15:05.000 And then the training starts of what everybody is supposed to pitch.

00:15:08.000 It was unprecedented times.

00:15:11.000 You know, my attorneys did some research and found out that there was only one investigation going on at any given time in the history of American Express's 174 years of existence.

00:15:21.000 And when that one happened for Ken Chenault at a time, one at a time, it was the biggest deal ever.

00:15:28.000 Well, there was three at this time, piling the fourth with the IRS. That is unprecedented.

00:15:35.000 So they need to make a move.

00:15:36.000 They need to show we're one of the good guys.

00:15:38.000 We're self-flogging.

00:15:39.000 We're beating ourselves, not just American Express, but what we symbolize, the essence of American capitalism.

00:15:45.000 We're a credit card company with the word American in it.

00:15:48.000 We're the ones that need to apologize.

00:15:50.000 That's kind of what played out.

00:15:50.000 Yes, but what they didn't realize or they didn't care was the real effects that their woke policies would have on their employees.

00:15:59.000 On their high performers, their top performers like Nick Williams.

00:16:03.000 I'll just give you one example.

00:16:06.000 You know, it used to be under Ken Chenault's regime, under Ken Chenault's stewardship, if you were a top performing salesman, you could make a really good living being a top performing salesman.

00:16:18.000 You could make $800,000, $900,000 a year.

00:16:22.000 Do very well for yourself because you were a top performer, you were a top individual contributor and that's what Nick has been his entire life.

00:16:28.000 He was the director of development for the Boy Scouts before he came to American Express.

00:16:35.000 So, he knows what top performance is all about and he just wanted to be an individual contributor, no more.

00:16:40.000 You can't make more than like $250,000 a year which You know, that's a comfortable living, but that's not why the top guys go to these companies.

00:16:49.000 They want to know that they'll be rewarded for their merit.

00:16:52.000 So it's changed now.

00:16:53.000 Yeah.

00:16:54.000 It's changed.

00:16:55.000 Do they even use the word?

00:16:58.000 Do they use words like merit?

00:16:59.000 I mean, do they sort of pay homage to it, or is it more or less that's even out of the lexicon because it's so incompatible with the way the company's operating?

00:17:07.000 That's now all gone.

00:17:08.000 I bet you.

00:17:09.000 It's one thing like you get anti meritocratic companies, you'll say merit enough times, but it's not this bad.

00:17:14.000 It's just sort of like a dilute version.

00:17:16.000 And then they're just sort of apologizing for when you're behaving like this.

00:17:18.000 I don't even think you can say the words because it's so antithetical to the way they're actually behaving.

00:17:25.000 There's so many people who rely on, you know, being a leader within the company by delivering results, not actually like managing people.

00:17:33.000 I was one of them.

00:17:34.000 I was a catalyst for so many new exciting things from my colleagues.

00:17:39.000 I pushed them because of what I was delivering.

00:17:41.000 That's leadership to me.

00:17:43.000 It's leadership through delivering quality and like above anybody else and putting the time in and getting paid for that.

00:17:50.000 That was where The American dream really survived and lived and thrived in American Express.

00:17:56.000 It was one of the most coveted B2B sales roles in the whole United States at that company.

00:18:02.000 And talk about another book.

00:18:05.000 It's how to destroy the sales culture, the B2B sales culture overnight.

00:18:11.000 Because that's what Amex did.

00:18:13.000 And what's interesting is you guys did some research on that.

00:18:17.000 They looked at the ranking report, you know, 250 of us, and they said, let's take a look at the top 50. The Global Commercial Services Division, their most profitable division.

00:18:29.000 Yeah.

00:18:29.000 The top 50 individual performers in their most profitable division.

00:18:34.000 That's what we looked at.

00:18:35.000 Go ahead.

00:18:35.000 And I don't remember what the results were.

00:18:37.000 How many of those were fired?

00:18:38.000 Two-thirds of them.

00:18:39.000 And the color of their skin.

00:18:41.000 They were all white.

00:18:42.000 One was Hispanic.

00:18:44.000 I mean, it's unbelievable, right?

00:18:46.000 You would think that this is a sort of civil rights violation.

00:18:51.000 Now, the civil rights laws have been read in really perverse ways.

00:18:54.000 My general view of whether something's racist or not is if you could turn the tables and fill in a blank of a different race, and it would still be wrong.

00:19:05.000 It's still by definition, racist and discrimination.

00:19:09.000 It's discrimination on the basis of race.

00:19:12.000 That's exactly what's happening here.

00:19:13.000 You could turn the tables and imagine any other scenario where that would have been the basis for civil rights litigation.

00:19:18.000 Now, has American Express actually gotten sued on the back of this yet?

00:19:22.000 Because of our efforts to expose the information, by the way, it's all on AmericanExpress.com.

00:19:29.000 Yeah, which has been heroic, by the way, on your part.

00:19:31.000 So I think exposing it is half the battle.

00:19:33.000 I hope somebody picks up that baton and actually does something with it.

00:19:36.000 Yeah.

00:19:36.000 And, you know, we reached out to American Express leaders, you know, asking them, do you understand what you're doing to your companies?

00:19:44.000 And, you know, the best they could come up with are some false statements they made on Fox News saying, our leadership bonuses are only awarded on the basis of leadership qualifications and individual performance and merit.

00:19:59.000 They actually used the word merit when they responded to Fox News.

00:20:02.000 Yeah.

00:20:03.000 So there was something at Fox slightly, apparently, allegedly misquoted, so they used that as a straw man to sort of distinguish themselves from that.

00:20:09.000 That's kind of the tactic?

00:20:10.000 Yeah, something like that, their communications tactic.

00:20:13.000 And I was like, oh, really?

00:20:14.000 Then why does it say in your document right here, you give a 15% bonus to your hiring managers for ensuring a diverse workforce, meaning firing white people, promoting people of color?

00:20:26.000 That's what it means.

00:20:29.000 So that's what happened.

00:20:32.000 Interesting.

00:20:33.000 I gave a speech recently where we talked about the origins of the word merit.

00:20:38.000 I'm just trying to think about One of the things I say is we're going to put the merit back into America.

00:20:43.000 I'm a big believer in the idea that language teaches us a lot about truth.

00:20:49.000 I kind of was on a wild goose chase for figuring out whether the etymology of merit overlapped with the etymology of America.

00:20:58.000 Initially, I hit Wall.

00:21:01.000 Because merit has, you know, one one route.

00:21:04.000 And America has a different route actually that dates back to America Vespucci, whose grandfather was actually had his name derived from a word called Amalric.

00:21:16.000 So Rick, so one is Latin and the other one is is in Gothic and old Gothic.

00:21:21.000 And Rick means master.

00:21:23.000 But Amal actually means work.

00:21:28.000 So even though it didn't have the same historical etymology, there's something more deeply connected about it, where literally the name America is derived from a phrase that refers to the master of work.

00:21:42.000 I think there's something to be said about the relationship between merit and work, merit and effort.

00:21:50.000 You know, merit's really about rewarding results, but results often correlate tightly to the amount of effort that one puts in.

00:21:57.000 And it just makes me think about a case like this.

00:21:59.000 I mean, what does that do to the culture of a workforce and a sales force?

00:22:05.000 I'm curious how, because you get a black colleague who's working with you who was on the front lines of this.

00:22:10.000 Like, what was his reaction to all of this?

00:22:12.000 Well, it's interesting.

00:22:13.000 I mean, he's been told how to react after they gave him my job.

00:22:16.000 He's been reprogrammed, yeah.

00:22:17.000 After they gave him my job.

00:22:18.000 Okay.

00:22:19.000 You know, I'm based in Des Moines, Iowa, in the capital of the state.

00:22:25.000 And this employee is in Omaha, Nebraska, across the state line.

00:22:30.000 How do you support small businesses as the extension of their finance team with working capital from Nebraska?

00:22:40.000 You know, we were an in-person resource.

00:22:43.000 Local small businesses in Iowa.

00:22:45.000 From 100,000 to 500 million in gross annual revenues.

00:22:50.000 So that's a huge- And let's remind people who aren't familiar with Iowa geography, Omaha is on the other side of the western part of the state.

00:22:56.000 Yes.

00:22:57.000 Des Moines is smack dab in the middle.

00:22:59.000 In the middle.

00:22:59.000 I'll tell you, presidential campaign, a lot of driving in Iowa.

00:23:02.000 That is a long drive.

00:23:03.000 It is.

00:23:03.000 It's not even the same vicinity.

00:23:04.000 You could have a state or two separating them if you're talking about the northeast.

00:23:07.000 With no cell service in between.

00:23:08.000 Absolutely, yeah.

00:23:09.000 It's interesting.

00:23:10.000 So what was his reaction?

00:23:12.000 You think he's been reprogrammed?

00:23:14.000 Yeah, he's been reprogrammed.

00:23:16.000 He was a great guy.

00:23:17.000 That's the reason why I volunteered to be a mentor to him.

00:23:20.000 You know, there was many people that I was asked, well, why don't you lead this call, Nick?

00:23:25.000 Why don't you tell people how you're doing this?

00:23:26.000 I'll tell you why.

00:23:27.000 I'm not.

00:23:28.000 Because they go to sleep on their couch at 2.30 every afternoon, and they wake up at 4.30 to make their light green on their computer, and then they sign off.

00:23:36.000 I put the work in.

00:23:38.000 I'm putting in 60 to 80 hours a week to figure out these strategies.

00:23:42.000 I'm not going to give it to them when they're putting in 30 hours a week.

00:23:46.000 So talking about merit, that's what it's all about.

00:23:50.000 So the culture was destroyed.

00:23:52.000 This employee needs to provide for his family, right?

00:23:56.000 He's not going to get out of line.

00:23:58.000 He's going to stay in line.

00:23:59.000 He's going to be told how to think. 0.99

00:24:01.000 And he's black. 0.99

00:24:02.000 He's black. 0.98

00:24:02.000 And he was the one that you were sort of going to bat for. 0.98

00:24:06.000 Yeah, 100%.

00:24:07.000 Because it was his decision, in part, that the customer alleged some sort of malfeasance about.

00:24:14.000 I asked him, why would you take a phone call on Christmas Eve?

00:24:17.000 But that's how hard of a worker he was.

00:24:19.000 And that's why I had interest in mentoring him.

00:24:22.000 Does his sort of...

00:24:25.000 Account of this though, like right now he's kind of cruising on his own path.

00:24:29.000 The account of this is he never ever felt threatened.

00:24:32.000 The most recent account.

00:24:34.000 Yeah.

00:24:34.000 So that's not the account he and I discussed before I sent the email where I was going to back my colleague.

00:24:41.000 You know, you get tough skin in sales.

00:24:43.000 I can handle somebody speaking this way to me and I can deal with the emails, but you know what I've learned is, and I taught him this lesson before I sent the email, not every deal is a fit.

00:24:54.000 Not every deal is worth the paycheck that comes with it because this behavior doesn't go away.

00:24:59.000 I mean, I wouldn't be shocked if there was, you know, there was the amount of money that you've put yourself in the hat of the company, let's say capital allocator, head of the division, CEO, whatever.

00:25:09.000 Well, there's this much money we're going to pay to Nick. 0.97

00:25:12.000 Nick, you got to shut up. 0.98

00:25:13.000 Okay, we'll pay him 3x that. 1.00

00:25:15.000 Nick, you got to shut up. 0.98

00:25:16.000 Nick refused to shut up. 0.98

00:25:17.000 Well, that's still my reservation price and my dollar value to make this go away.

00:25:22.000 Let me just give a portion of that to this other guy.

00:25:24.000 Reprogram him. 0.98

00:25:26.000 He's black. 0.97

00:25:27.000 I'm back in black. 0.94

00:25:28.000 And by the way, we can hang Nick out to dry.

00:25:32.000 That seems like a reasonable thing to do.

00:25:34.000 And I don't fault your colleague in any first personal sense.

00:25:37.000 Most people probably behave the same way.

00:25:39.000 Take a little extra cash.

00:25:42.000 Get on with the job, move ahead and say, ah, maybe it wasn't as bad as I thought.

00:25:46.000 Everyone goes home happy, except you're hanging out to dry.

00:25:49.000 That seems like the pawn sacrifice that is an easy one for corporate America to make.

00:25:53.000 And you stay in the game and you stay in the hunt and you stay in your rung on the ladder where American Express and every other fortune company wants you to be in that rung on the ladder to make the machine work.

00:26:04.000 But what gets – the story that gets left behind is all of those who were silenced to not tell their story, who you destroyed their families.

00:26:13.000 And you nearly – Could have wrecked.

00:26:17.000 They could have had to sell their house.

00:26:18.000 They could have not got married.

00:26:19.000 They went on medications for the stress.

00:26:22.000 All these stories exist from my hundred plus colleagues who were, you know, dismissed as a result of this.

00:26:29.000 And Kenny, you probably have good perspective on this, you know, from the book you wrote too, even in the college admissions setting.

00:26:34.000 Oh, yeah.

00:26:35.000 Like, do you think that this, I've got to think that this Actually fosters racism.

00:26:40.000 Anti-black racism in this country.

00:26:42.000 Because you take somebody's job away, you take somebody's seat away from college, somebody who's worked hard, has good reason to believe they earned it, but then get fired, don't get that spot in college.

00:26:51.000 I can't think of actually – I probably can't think of a more effective way to spawn vitriolic, virulent, Toxic anti-black racism across this country than to take something away from members of every other race on account of their skin color.

00:27:12.000 I guess I can't imagine a world where this doesn't foster more anti-black racism.

00:27:17.000 Nick and I discussed this before we came on this podcast, but I have two examples for that.

00:27:22.000 One's in my book and one I just want to say right here.

00:27:25.000 If you are mentoring a black colleague and everything like that, and you're doing it out of the goodness of your own heart, a minority colleague, black, female, minority, somebody, I get it.

00:27:36.000 You know, you do it out of the goodness of your own heart.

00:27:38.000 You do it because you want to be part of the culture.

00:27:40.000 And then people like Nick are made publicly within the company, hung out to dry because a black woman, you know, sued him and American Express took this woman's side Without listening to Nick, and everybody knows Nick and the kind of performer that he was, and this guy has suddenly made an example in the company, are you more or less likely to take that invitation to mentor your black colleague?

00:28:08.000 You're less likely.

00:28:09.000 Less likely.

00:28:10.000 Absolutely.

00:28:11.000 Because now you're afraid of the risk.

00:28:12.000 And the whole thing is fostering them to think about them as my black colleague.

00:28:17.000 Right. 0.92

00:28:18.000 Capital B black colleague. 0.90

00:28:19.000 And that's the worst part because remember what Nick's story was.

00:28:22.000 I'm not going to mentor somebody who's going to put 30 hours a week of work, but his colleague who happened to be black put in 60 hours of work and that's why Nick mentored him.

00:28:31.000 And it's a shame because that's going to foster this new wave of anti-black racism, which in some ways we see in our country.

00:28:37.000 Now, how does this remind you – you mostly focused on – you had a broader focus, but mostly focused on college admissions in your book.

00:28:45.000 Actually, I quoted you in Nation of Victims in my second book.

00:28:48.000 I thought some of that – some of the facts were so good.

00:28:51.000 Talk to me a little bit about some of the parallels you see and what do you think is different in the corporate setting versus in the kind of affirmative action that we see in college admissions and what the impact has been on the Asian American community.

00:29:05.000 That's a good question.

00:29:06.000 So, the other example I was going to bring up was about a Princeton professor who, because of racial preferences, was asked to take this math PhD, who was a black woman, who was good at math, but she just wasn't at that level, at that excellent level. 0.65

00:29:24.000 And you know, if you're going to take a math PhD at Princeton, you better be the top tier quality.

00:29:30.000 Oh, absolutely.

00:29:31.000 Yeah.

00:29:33.000 John Nash on down, you know, exactly.

00:29:35.000 John Nash is the standard, right?

00:29:37.000 So, and he describes her basically getting discouraged from the get-go because yeah, should more people mentor her, pay attention to her?

00:29:49.000 Yeah, but there's only so much you can do.

00:29:51.000 You have to put in you as that person still, if you are not at that level, if you're below that level, you're going to get left behind very quickly.

00:29:58.000 And what happened was she got very discouraged and really lashed out at the system that accepted her, that tried to admit her without the requisite qualifications and she became a net liability to Princeton even after she was gone.

00:30:17.000 And so, that's the issue.

00:30:20.000 And it's not because she was a race of any kind.

00:30:23.000 It's because we have a system right now that says, you know, that basically denies merit and basically says, oh, everybody is equal.

00:30:33.000 Everybody can be treated in the same way.

00:30:36.000 No, that's not the case.

00:30:39.000 Mm-hmm.

00:30:54.000 And unfortunately, that's what a lot of businesses in corporate America are doing. 0.86

00:30:59.000 And that brings me to something that I wanted to say earlier, which is we're living in a system now, and this is a system.

00:31:08.000 It's not systemic racism, but it is a system.

00:31:11.000 We are living in a system where people are no longer being rewarded on their merit and their individual contributions, but are being rewarded on compliance.

00:31:22.000 Compliance.

00:31:22.000 Now the only way you can get that million dollar salary at American Express is to go up the C-suite executive hierarchy, which is what?

00:31:30.000 Compliance.

00:31:31.000 Administration.

00:31:32.000 You know, those are the kinds of things.

00:31:35.000 No longer are top individual performers who just want to be top individual performers rewarded.

00:31:40.000 That's...

00:31:42.000 If I had to distill the essence of what our culture is turning into, and yes, it started at Ivy League colleges and it's continuing on corporate America, which is why you have to read my book, An Inconvenient Minority.

00:31:53.000 It is a good book.

00:31:54.000 Thank you.

00:31:54.000 Yep.

00:31:55.000 That's what it is.

00:31:57.000 And I can remember a critical race theory training in the fourth quarter of 2020 that I sat through, appalled to hear this concept that if I'm in a team meeting, whether it be my local district team, a region, a national call, and I have a black colleague in that meeting with me, as a white male, as a white privileged male, I was told, You will not speak first when you have an idea.

00:32:25.000 Your African-American colleague will get that chance to speak first, and then you can speak.

00:32:30.000 And then be aware while you do of all of these microaggression behaviors of what you can and can't say in that meeting.

00:32:39.000 It just feels like this is an assault on the American soul.

00:32:43.000 In America, in this country, right?

00:32:45.000 Either we or our parents or someone in our lineage, we left in another country.

00:32:51.000 Left comforts to come to this one, to pursue excellence, to be at the frontier, to be the pioneers.

00:32:59.000 I mean, that is what the country is founded on.

00:33:01.000 And now, for us to say that we're going to tame that spirit, we're going to stand down because of the color of your skin and because you look at somebody else's color of their skin and anticipate something about their lived experience as opposed to the other kinds of experiences.

00:33:15.000 Right.

00:33:17.000 That's what we're going to do.

00:33:18.000 What's the essence of what we're doing?

00:33:20.000 I actually had this conversation with Douglas Murray recently.

00:33:23.000 He actually encapsulated it really well where he said, look, I think what we're doing is we're not restoring justice from somebody who committed an injustice against somebody who had the injustice committed against them.

00:33:38.000 We're just taking people who look like someone who had something bad to happen to them and I mean, We don't know if they're your ancestors for all you know.

00:33:57.000 Maybe your ancestors were people who were subjugated by somebody else across some other ocean somewhere else in some other century.

00:34:04.000 What do we know?

00:34:04.000 Maybe you don't know.

00:34:05.000 You probably don't.

00:34:06.000 I don't.

00:34:07.000 But you look like somebody who at some point in time did something wrong.

00:34:11.000 And that person, though you couldn't see them on the Zoom screen, apparently, it turns out if she had turned on the camera, looks like somebody who might have had something once done wrong to someone like her.

00:34:20.000 And then we're making decisions in the present day of how we treat one another based on an optical artifice of something that may or may not have happened a long time ago.

00:34:29.000 Seems like a formula for creating that exact social structure of racism once again that supposedly this was supposed to liberate us from.

00:34:42.000 Yet here we are.

00:34:43.000 There's a story of a female, well, she was a GM, got to the level of GM, you know, and to everybody else, this means really nothing at the band levels at American Express, but been there, put the time in 20 plus years.

00:34:56.000 Folks said maybe she'll be the next CEO eventually of American Express on that path. 1.00

00:35:01.000 Bled blue, drank the Kool-Aid.

00:35:03.000 She was a leader.

00:35:05.000 But what I loved about her is that she was fearless and she put the time and you could tell she worked and she would challenge the status quo.

00:35:12.000 She would challenge ideas and she would put the time in to come up with her reasoning of why the challenge made sense.

00:35:19.000 Well, she got a big promotion in the Phoenix branch and was welcoming everybody virtually, finding out a way to make her thousand plus team feel good about her coming on to lead And one of the things her daughter asked her in the interview was to talk about the favorite doll of hers because she collected them when she traveled.

00:35:39.000 Well, as she described this doll and why she loves it because of its hair, it ended up being the reason why she was fired.

00:35:46.000 And that doll was African American and she was her favorite doll in her collection.

00:35:50.000 What I felt unbelievable- Wait, wait, wait.

00:35:52.000 Why?

00:35:54.000 So very quickly- Close the look for me because that didn't make sense to me.

00:35:56.000 So very quickly as the video is pushed out to the new team welcoming, this comment about the doll gets called into HR because it made someone feel uncomfortable that she would speak that way and talk about the doll's hair and call out that African-American doll's hair and how it was.

00:36:15.000 And you want to know where it gets better.

00:36:18.000 Two months after that, we're sitting in a training.

00:36:20.000 And that was big news, right?

00:36:23.000 I mean, there was messaging sent out about it.

00:36:25.000 And everyone was shocked because that was the least racist person anybody know.

00:36:30.000 Mentored many, many African-Americans in her career.

00:36:34.000 But what was crazy to me was we went through a training where this very, very dark skinned woman was talking about her childhood growing up.

00:36:41.000 And she described herself as the dark skinned with nappy hair. 0.52

00:36:47.000 And I thought...

00:36:49.000 That's confusing to me.

00:36:52.000 She's describing herself.

00:36:54.000 In exactly the way.

00:36:55.000 That this person, and I don't even think to that level of that's how she described her doll, but it was okay here for the whole company to hear in this mandated training, but not here.

00:37:07.000 It ended her career.

00:37:08.000 They'll get you for going and they'll get you for coming in the sense that let's say it had been a white doll or whatever.

00:37:13.000 Well, that wasn't very racially conscious of you.

00:37:17.000 Yeah.

00:37:17.000 And so it goes back to these federal regulators.

00:37:21.000 It does.

00:37:22.000 It's okay until it's not okay what's going on inside American Express.

00:37:26.000 And we're going to cover all the bones up and we're going to scapegoat a group of people and move on.

00:37:31.000 And I love that the classic piece of that, you see this crop up so often, some employee feels uncomfortable.

00:37:39.000 I mean, you have a company with 100,000 plus employees, not everyone's going to agree with every decision.

00:37:43.000 But when you retrofit it into these alleged civil rights allegations, then it changes the picture.

00:37:49.000 So that's one of the things I've said I was going to do as president is, let's make at least viewpoint expression a civil right in this country.

00:37:58.000 Now, I'm skeptical of adding one more regulation onto what businesses already can and can't do.

00:38:05.000 But what's actually happened in reality is that you take these protected classes.

00:38:10.000 You mentioned compliance earlier, Kenny.

00:38:12.000 Race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, national origin.

00:38:17.000 The way they've now grown to be interpreted by government bodies like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the EEOC, is to say that not only does the prohibition on discrimination against race mean that you can't actually discriminate against somebody on the basis of their race – it also means that a member of that protected class cannot be subject to what's called hostile work environment.

00:38:42.000 And so what is one of the ways that somebody can create a hostile work environment?

00:38:46.000 It's by saying something, expressing themselves, expressing a viewpoint.

00:38:50.000 So ironically, these civil rights statutes as broadly construed by the EEOC created the very conditions for viewpoint discrimination while leaving Political viewpoints themselves or viewpoints of any kind, unprotected.

00:39:07.000 So you can't have it both ways, right?

00:39:09.000 Say that, okay, either you will let the market work, and we're just going to be, this is the way I would like it, and we're colorblind and race and gender blind and everything else, applying principles of pure merit, how effective you are in advancing the mission.

00:39:20.000 Or you apply the standards even handedly to say that if you're going to say you can't fire somebody or de-platform somebody or whatever for black, gay, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, whatever, then you shouldn't be able to fire somebody or de-platform somebody or punish somebody in the workforce just because they express a viewpoint that a member of a protected class then you shouldn't be able to fire somebody or de-platform somebody or punish We got to apply the standards evenly.

00:39:42.000 Well, in my opinion, you go ahead and implement that policy because as you implement that, you've talked about, and this is why you will make the next greatest president of the United States, is you're going to get rid of one that you've challenged every Republican and Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson for not getting rid of.

00:40:03.000 Affirmative action.

00:40:04.000 Affirmative action.

00:40:04.000 And that is why you will make a good president because you're not seeing it as a left or a right issue.

00:40:11.000 You're seeing it as an American issue.

00:40:13.000 First principles.

00:40:14.000 And that's what this stuff is.

00:40:16.000 It's an American issue.

00:40:17.000 It's taking the un-American spirit. 0.57

00:40:19.000 And it really is.

00:40:21.000 I mean, there's an anti-American strain in this country.

00:40:23.000 Yeah.

00:40:23.000 The question isn't even, are you Republican or Democrat?

00:40:25.000 Are you pro-American or are you anti-American?

00:40:27.000 And if you're pro-American, you believe that you get ahead in this country, not in the color of your skin, but in the content of your character and contributions, full stop.

00:40:35.000 That is what it means to be American.

00:40:37.000 And every president, since Lyndon Johnson had a chance to take a pen, stroke a pen, cross that out.

00:40:42.000 I pushed Trump's people on this.

00:40:44.000 They said it's a political hill they didn't want to die on.

00:40:46.000 There's something about this issue that makes this sacred cow you can't touch I disagree with that.

00:40:53.000 I think if you have the courage to address that head on, you're actually going to liberate the country from the psychological slavery that we have since been shackled in.

00:41:00.000 Yeah.

00:41:01.000 Can I give you the last word?

00:41:02.000 That's great.

00:41:03.000 And really like also remember how much we have done and tried to do as a country to help minorities in our country.

00:41:14.000 And actually, I am writing a new book.

00:41:18.000 And my next book, actually, we're signing the same publisher, Vivek, School of Woke.

00:41:24.000 How critical race theory infiltrated our schools and why we need to save them, why we need to reclaim them.

00:41:31.000 We have been teaching our minority children, especially our black children, a horrible philosophy that society is structured against them, that society is racist, and we've beaten them into them in our public education system.

00:41:48.000 That's absolutely right.

00:41:49.000 I mean, I went to public school with...

00:41:52.000 You know, I think a lot of poor black kids, I think it might have been majority black or close to it.

00:41:55.000 There isn't a single one of those black kids that could not have achieved everything I have in my life.

00:42:00.000 I found a multi-billion dollar companies running for president at 37. I tell you, not a single one of them couldn't have done it.

00:42:05.000 Yeah.

00:42:06.000 Had it not been for, let's actually talk about this, two parents in the household putting an emphasis on education, cultural change in a community that doesn't value education or achievement in the same way.

00:42:18.000 That's what we need to focus on.

00:42:20.000 Because everybody has the capability in them.

00:42:22.000 The question is the culture you create in this country.

00:42:24.000 That's very uncomfortable for a lot of people to say.

00:42:26.000 People are mad.

00:42:26.000 I just said it just now.

00:42:27.000 It doesn't matter.

00:42:28.000 I think if you want to solve the problem, you got to be willing to speak those hard truths.

00:42:33.000 So I respect the two of you guys.

00:42:34.000 I mean, you made a personal sacrifice, Nick.

00:42:37.000 And I think that the definition of courage, I think, is having conviction.

00:42:41.000 Yes.

00:42:43.000 But being willing to act and make a sacrifice to advance your conviction, that's courage.

00:42:48.000 And I think, Kenny, in your own way, you've done it too, is willing to take a risk to advance your conviction.

00:42:53.000 That is what it means to be courageous.

00:42:56.000 And yes, fear spreads like a virus.

00:42:58.000 Courage can be contagious too.

00:43:01.000 That's part of why I want to have you guys on because I think your story speaks to what so many Americans want to do, wish to do today, but feel constrained from being able to.

00:43:11.000 The best way we give them that space to start talking openly again is by doing it ourselves.

00:43:17.000 And so, you know, my only ask of you guys as citizens is keep at it.

00:43:21.000 Do not relent.

00:43:23.000 I don't have a feeling that you will, but do not.

00:43:25.000 I'm looking forward to that next book, man.

00:43:26.000 And I think that people should prepare for it by reading this one.

00:43:30.000 It was a great book, very first personal, inconvenient minority. 0.99

00:43:33.000 But I think we're on the beginning of a turning point here.

00:43:39.000 And if we do cross that bend, it'll be because of people like you guys.

00:43:43.000 So thanks a lot, guys.

00:43:45.000 Appreciate you.

00:43:45.000 Thank you.

00:43:46.000 Thank you.

00:43:47.000 I'm Vivek Ramaswamy, candidate for president, and I approve this message.

Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - April 26, 2023

American Express Exposed: The Dark Side of Woke Policies | The TRUTH Podcast #18

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript