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Lessons - Improving Corporate Conduct | Vivek Ramaswamy - Presidential Candidate, Entrepreneur and Author · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  How do we actually hold companies accountable to be better when all they're doing is just
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  virtual signaling and have millions of dollars and billions of dollars behind their comms
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  department, behind their marketing department, and they know what to say and they know
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  exactly how to say it.
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  What's the fix for this?
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  Yeah, so I think the fix is twofold, right?
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  I think one is, well, I think it's threefold.
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  I think a lot of companies aren't inherently political at the top, but their CEOs just
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  do whatever makes life easiest for them, okay?
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  So if there's going to be one vocal stakeholder group that they need to appease and there's
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  no cost to appeasing them, they do the cost benefit analysis and say, okay, we'll go
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  well.
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  Well, I think that we, as citizens, as consumers, shouldn't make it so easy for a CEO to make
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  that decision.
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  I think that they haven't been to CEO myself.
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  I can tell you, that's the way somebody thinks about a decision.
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  What's the cost and benefit for the business?
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  Okay, well, if the cost of compliance with the woke demand of the day isn't costless
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  anymore, I think that that's one method of getting back on track.
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  Another method of getting back on track involves actually recognizing some of the legal
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  benefits that corporations enjoy for the pursuit of profit because we say that that's
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  what we need to do in order to incentivize great people to build great things, things
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  like limited liability for shareholders, things like the business judgment rule, which
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  prevents an executive or a director from being sued for a business decision, which goes
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  badly in retrospect.
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  That's the rules of the game when you expect that companies are making products and providing
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  services for the pursuit of profit.
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  But when we use those corporate benefits to not just make products for profit, but to pursue
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  a social agenda much much in the way a political campaign would.
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  Well, political campaigns don't have those benefits.
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  Neither should a company when it's effectively waging the equivalent of a political campaign,
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  but hiding behind the veneer of limited shareholder liability or the business judgment rule,
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  which are favorable treatment corporations that get in court that ordinary people or ordinary
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  activists or ordinary political figures don't.
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  So I think that we need to roll backs the scope of some of those legal protections to make
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  sure that they're only covering the scope of activities they were initially intended
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  to cover.
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  That's something I talk a lot more about in my book or maybe relatively technical, but
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  the effects could be far reaching.
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  But I think the third answer is there is no denying that the fact that some of the demand
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  for what companies are doing comes from newly woke consumers.
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  Consumers who say that I want to find meaning in the products that I buy and to buy them
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  from companies that share my values.
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  And there's no legal fix for that, you know, that's in part the way a free economy works.
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  I think the deeper problem there though is a generational cultural problem where you
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  have an entire generation, people my age and your age, maybe younger than each of us,
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  that are so hungry for a purpose, hungry for a cause, hungry for identity, really, that
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  they are going to latch on to the first thing that someone sells them rather than doing
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  the hard work of finding that purpose, that sense of that sense of a cause, that sense
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  of identity from within.
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  And as we have seen patriotism decline over the last decade as religion, if I'm going to
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  say it has nearly disappeared in our country, we have relocated those religious impulses
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  to the sphere of commercialism, to the sphere of wochism, to the combination of wochism
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  and commercialism to say that I'm going to find the meaning in the product that I buy
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  be it a cup of coffee or be it a brand of shoes rather than recognizing that actually
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  the thing that may fill my moral void isn't going to be the thing that I buy at the store.
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  It might actually have to be something far deeper that teaches me actually to believe
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  in something that's far deeper and possibly far more unifying across Americans and across
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  human beings than the divisive tribal identity politics that might divide us into better
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  consumers, good for market research and for targeting, but might leave us worse off as
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  citizens in the end.
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  And I think that's the hardest work we're going to have to do as an American people is
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  reviving the shared sense of identities and causes that bind us as Americans and as
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  human beings and as people rather than the skin deep social causes and the skin deep
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  identities that many corporations are willing to sell us to meet that superficial demand
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  to make an extra buck much like a Virginia Slim's manufacturer might have targeted insecure
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  teenage girls in the 1990s.
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  Now companies are targeting a morally insecure generation as a way of praying on those insecurities
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  to make a buck and I think that there's nothing illegal about that, but I think that what
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  we need to do in our culture is revive a shared sense of finding causes and meaning and
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  purpose and identity in things that go beyond the things that we take out our pocketbook
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  to buy at the store.