In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, two strange bedfellows got in bed. They each got something out of the trade. 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. In this episode, we trace the mystery of the origin of this bizarre arranged marriage between corporate America and a woke movement that is far more insidious than just big government alone through the front door engaging in a trampling on individual rights in the 1980s version of the plot. There s something altogether different going on today. And I think that there s a little bit of a mystery beneath it, where if you scratch the surface, it starts to make sense more sense. And so today we have two foot soldiers, I would say, in the fight back against that trend in corporate America who have been leaders in their own right. Kenny Zhu, author of his great book, An Inconvenient Minority, and Nick Williams, a friend of Kenny s, who's actually worked at one of the companies that Kenny has actually highlighted in his work. We ll get right into it, and we ll get into a chat and let loose a bit about it. We ll talk about what s going on, and why it s important to have your voice heard, and how it s so important to be a voice in the conversation. and why you should speak up and have your say your mind. And why it's important to speak up. You can t be silent, and you have a voice. and have a say in what s important, and that s not important to your voice, and your voice should be heard. It s not only heard, but your voice is not just your voice. And it s not just a voice, it s your voice and your opinion, and it s also your truth and your truth. If you ve got a voice and you want to be heard, you can have a platform to have a place to tell your story and you can tell it, so you can make a voice heard. You can have your story heard, whether it s loud and your name is loud and clear and your story is heard, or not, or it s just not loud and loud enough, or you don t have it, you re not going to be silent anymore. - VaynerSpeaker - Why it s Important to be the voice you ve been silenced?
Transcript
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00:00:02.000So, we've traced the mystery of the origin of this bizarre arranged marriage.
00:00:22.000So 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.
00:00:40.000But in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, you had some strange things happen in this country.
00:00:45.000And one of them was that two strange bedfellows got in bed.
00:00:49.000They each got something out of the trade.
00:00:52.000And 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.
00:01:14.000There's something altogether different going on today.
00:01:18.000And 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.
00:01:24.000But on the face of it is, I think, the cultural mystery of our generation.
00:01:30.000Two 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.
00:01:40.000Kenny Zhu, who's author of his great book.
00:01:44.000Actually, it's how I first got to know Kenny, An Inconvenient Minority, who's with us today.
00:01:48.000Someone 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.
00:01:57.000We'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...
00:02:11.000As 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.
00:02:23.000It's hard to think about in the abstract.
00:02:25.000I mean, I've written books and whatnot about it, but you've seen an element of that In a very first personal way.
00:02:32.000So why don't you tell us about it and, you know, what animates your new mission now?
00:02:37.000And then three of us, why don't we just get into a chat and let loose a little bit?
00:02:42.000I appreciate the opportunity to be here.
00:02:44.000And 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.
00:02:55.000You don't have to raise a lot of eyebrows.
00:02:59.000It'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.
00:03:11.000They had a thought, but they stayed quiet.
00:03:14.000I had to make the hard decision when I was forced to exit American Express.
00:03:19.000Am I going to take the money, which went up three times before I finally got it across?
00:03:32.000And 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.
00:03:41.000And 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.
00:03:58.000And 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.
00:04:12.000And it's like, well, the answer is no, no, no, no.
00:04:16.000You all are a violator of what happened to me.
00:04:40.000There could be 13 lawyers retained to fabricate a story so that I'm confused what even happened to me.
00:04:46.000And 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.
00:05:04.000So, 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.
00:05:17.000And that's actually how we discovered Nick.
00:05:20.000And just to give people who don't know Nick's story at all, what happened to Nick.
00:05:27.000He was the number one sales performer at American Express.
00:05:33.000For their global commercial services business.
00:05:36.000This was during Steve Squarey, the new CEO's tenure.
00:05:40.000After 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.
00:05:50.000And he, you know, Nick was the number one sales performer in that culture.
00:07:27.000Steve Squarey was calling card members and canceling their cards for how the recorded call went with our customer servicing agents who were African American.
00:07:37.000And so there was a big call to action.
00:07:40.000As in if a customer was- On the phone.
00:08:28.000And 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.
00:08:39.000And again, what really happened is hard because these companies spent a lot of money to confuse the employee of what actually happened.
00:08:49.000And 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.
00:08:57.000But day one, if you would have asked me in March of 2021, when I lost my job, what happened?
00:09:07.000I was being made to believe something else, you know, but obviously all of this is happening.
00:09:13.000So 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?
00:10:12.000I mean, Kenny, you've looked at this a long time, and what do you think is driving?
00:10:16.000You 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.
00:10:38.000It 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.
00:11:06.000And 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.
00:11:31.000And I spent a long time piecing together what happened at American Express.
00:11:36.000American Express has been under these federal regulations, under several investigations.
00:11:43.000This 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.
00:11:59.000And there are three more investigations that American Express is undergoing and this falls in line with what you talk about, Vivek, which is...
00:12:07.000They need to find some way to protect their hide and look good and to say to the federal government, well, we're doing something.
00:12:14.000We're doing something to be socially just, you know, so that maybe the federal government could relax some of their charges against them.
00:12:23.000And the way that they decided to do it was to go woke.
00:12:25.000You know, Steve Squarey made a huge...
00:12:27.000CEO, Steve Squarey, made a huge push to go woke.
00:13:44.000What 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?
00:15:11.000You 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.
00:15:21.000And when that one happened for Ken Chenault at a time, one at a time, it was the biggest deal ever.
00:15:28.000Well, there was three at this time, piling the fourth with the IRS. That is unprecedented.
00:16:06.000You 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.
00:16:18.000You could make $800,000, $900,000 a year.
00:16:22.000Do 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.
00:16:28.000He was the director of development for the Boy Scouts before he came to American Express.
00:16:35.000So, he knows what top performance is all about and he just wanted to be an individual contributor, no more.
00:16:40.000You 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.
00:16:49.000They want to know that they'll be rewarded for their merit.
00:16:59.000I 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?
00:18:13.000And what's interesting is you guys did some research on that.
00:18:17.000They 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.
00:18:46.000You would think that this is a sort of civil rights violation.
00:18:51.000Now, the civil rights laws have been read in really perverse ways.
00:18:54.000My 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.
00:19:05.000It's still by definition, racist and discrimination.
00:19:09.000It's discrimination on the basis of race.
00:19:36.000And, you know, we reached out to American Express leaders, you know, asking them, do you understand what you're doing to your companies?
00:19:44.000And, 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.
00:19:59.000They actually used the word merit when they responded to Fox News.
00:20:03.000So there was something at Fox slightly, apparently, allegedly misquoted, so they used that as a straw man to sort of distinguish themselves from that.
00:20:14.000Then 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?
00:21:01.000Because merit has, you know, one one route.
00:21:04.000And 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.
00:21:16.000So Rick, so one is Latin and the other one is is in Gothic and old Gothic.
00:21:28.000So 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.
00:21:42.000I think there's something to be said about the relationship between merit and work, merit and effort.
00:21:50.000You know, merit's really about rewarding results, but results often correlate tightly to the amount of effort that one puts in.
00:21:57.000And it just makes me think about a case like this.
00:21:59.000I mean, what does that do to the culture of a workforce and a sales force?
00:22:05.000I'm curious how, because you get a black colleague who's working with you who was on the front lines of this.
00:22:10.000Like, what was his reaction to all of this?
00:22:45.000From 100,000 to 500 million in gross annual revenues.
00:22:50.000So 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.
00:23:28.000Because 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.
00:24:34.000So that's not the account he and I discussed before I sent the email where I was going to back my colleague.
00:24:41.000You know, you get tough skin in sales.
00:24:43.000I 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.
00:24:54.000Not every deal is worth the paycheck that comes with it because this behavior doesn't go away.
00:24:59.000I 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.
00:25:09.000Well, there's this much money we're going to pay to Nick.
00:25:42.000Get on with the job, move ahead and say, ah, maybe it wasn't as bad as I thought.
00:25:46.000Everyone goes home happy, except you're hanging out to dry.
00:25:49.000That seems like the pawn sacrifice that is an easy one for corporate America to make.
00:25:53.000And 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.
00:26:04.000But 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.
00:26:13.000And you nearly – Could have wrecked.
00:26:17.000They could have had to sell their house.
00:26:42.000Because 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.
00:26:51.000I 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.
00:27:12.000I guess I can't imagine a world where this doesn't foster more anti-black racism.
00:27:17.000Nick and I discussed this before we came on this podcast, but I have two examples for that.
00:27:22.000One's in my book and one I just want to say right here.
00:27:25.000If 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.
00:27:36.000You know, you do it out of the goodness of your own heart.
00:27:38.000You do it because you want to be part of the culture.
00:27:40.000And 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?
00:28:19.000And that's the worst part because remember what Nick's story was.
00:28:22.000I'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.
00:28:31.000And 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.
00:28:37.000Now, how does this remind you – you mostly focused on – you had a broader focus, but mostly focused on college admissions in your book.
00:28:45.000Actually, I quoted you in Nation of Victims in my second book.
00:28:48.000I thought some of that – some of the facts were so good.
00:28:51.000Talk 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.
00:29:06.000So, 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.
00:29:24.000And you know, if you're going to take a math PhD at Princeton, you better be the top tier quality.
00:29:37.000So, and he describes her basically getting discouraged from the get-go because yeah, should more people mentor her, pay attention to her?
00:29:49.000Yeah, but there's only so much you can do.
00:29:51.000You 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.
00:29:58.000And 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.
00:30:54.000And unfortunately, that's what a lot of businesses in corporate America are doing.
00:30:59.000And 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.
00:31:08.000It's not systemic racism, but it is a system.
00:31:11.000We 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.
00:31:42.000If 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.
00:31:57.000And 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.
00:32:25.000Your African-American colleague will get that chance to speak first, and then you can speak.
00:32:30.000And then be aware while you do of all of these microaggression behaviors of what you can and can't say in that meeting.
00:32:39.000It just feels like this is an assault on the American soul.
00:32:45.000Either we or our parents or someone in our lineage, we left in another country.
00:32:51.000Left comforts to come to this one, to pursue excellence, to be at the frontier, to be the pioneers.
00:32:59.000I mean, that is what the country is founded on.
00:33:01.000And 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.
00:33:18.000What's the essence of what we're doing?
00:33:20.000I actually had this conversation with Douglas Murray recently.
00:33:23.000He 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.
00:33:38.000We'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.
00:33:57.000Maybe your ancestors were people who were subjugated by somebody else across some other ocean somewhere else in some other century.
00:34:07.000But you look like somebody who at some point in time did something wrong.
00:34:11.000And 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.
00:34:20.000And 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.
00:34:29.000Seems like a formula for creating that exact social structure of racism once again that supposedly this was supposed to liberate us from.
00:34:43.000There'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.
00:34:56.000Folks said maybe she'll be the next CEO eventually of American Express on that path.
00:35:05.000But 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.
00:35:12.000She would challenge ideas and she would put the time in to come up with her reasoning of why the challenge made sense.
00:35:19.000Well, 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.
00:35:39.000Well, as she described this doll and why she loves it because of its hair, it ended up being the reason why she was fired.
00:35:46.000And that doll was African American and she was her favorite doll in her collection.
00:35:50.000What I felt unbelievable- Wait, wait, wait.
00:35:54.000So very quickly- Close the look for me because that didn't make sense to me.
00:35:56.000So 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.
00:36:15.000And you want to know where it gets better.
00:36:18.000Two months after that, we're sitting in a training.
00:36:23.000I mean, there was messaging sent out about it.
00:36:25.000And everyone was shocked because that was the least racist person anybody know.
00:36:30.000Mentored many, many African-Americans in her career.
00:36:34.000But 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.
00:36:41.000And she described herself as the dark skinned with nappy hair.
00:36:55.000That 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.
00:37:22.000It's okay until it's not okay what's going on inside American Express.
00:37:26.000And we're going to cover all the bones up and we're going to scapegoat a group of people and move on.
00:37:31.000And I love that the classic piece of that, you see this crop up so often, some employee feels uncomfortable.
00:37:39.000I mean, you have a company with 100,000 plus employees, not everyone's going to agree with every decision.
00:37:43.000But when you retrofit it into these alleged civil rights allegations, then it changes the picture.
00:37:49.000So 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.
00:37:58.000Now, I'm skeptical of adding one more regulation onto what businesses already can and can't do.
00:38:05.000But what's actually happened in reality is that you take these protected classes.
00:38:12.000Race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, national origin.
00:38:17.000The 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.
00:38:42.000And so what is one of the ways that somebody can create a hostile work environment?
00:38:46.000It's by saying something, expressing themselves, expressing a viewpoint.
00:38:50.000So 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.
00:39:07.000So you can't have it both ways, right?
00:39:09.000Say 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.
00:39:20.000Or 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.
00:39:42.000Well, 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.
00:40:23.000The question isn't even, are you Republican or Democrat?
00:40:25.000Are you pro-American or are you anti-American?
00:40:27.000And 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.
00:40:44.000They said it's a political hill they didn't want to die on.
00:40:46.000There's something about this issue that makes this sacred cow you can't touch I disagree with that.
00:40:53.000I 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.
00:41:03.000And really like also remember how much we have done and tried to do as a country to help minorities in our country.
00:41:14.000And actually, I am writing a new book.
00:41:18.000And my next book, actually, we're signing the same publisher, Vivek, School of Woke.
00:41:24.000How critical race theory infiltrated our schools and why we need to save them, why we need to reclaim them.
00:41:31.000We 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.
00:42:06.000Had 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.
00:43:01.000That'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.
00:43:11.000The best way we give them that space to start talking openly again is by doing it ourselves.
00:43:17.000And so, you know, my only ask of you guys as citizens is keep at it.