Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - Why Woke Capitalism Is a $21 Billion Scam | Vivek Ramaswamy - Biotech Billionaire & Author

Transcript

Lessons - Why Woke Capitalism Is a $21 Billion Scam | Vivek Ramaswamy - Biotech Billionaire & Author · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  In this lessons episode, explore how wokeness evolved from social awareness into a powerful
• 0:05
  cultural system. Discover how the 2008 financial crisis merged activism with corporate interest
• 0:10
  to form woke capitalism, understand how virtue signaling and hypocrisy divide society and weak
• 0:15
  and shared spaces, and uncover why separating capitalism from democracy may be key to preserving
• 0:21
  American freedom.
• 0:30
  How did wokeness get to this point where it started with, in theory,
• 0:39
  there was good thought behind why we should be woke, why we should be more accepting,
• 0:43
  why we should do all of these things to perhaps get rid of some latent ideologies that are not so
• 0:50
  great that we see in society, how has it got to the point where it's almost gone to the other
• 0:55
  end of the spectrum, and now what you're stating is that it's actually negatively impacting society to
• 1:03
  a point. Yeah, look, I think that when wokeness was born, it was about challenging the system,
• 1:10
  about standing up to the system, and agree or not. There's something about that that I respect
• 1:15
  for somebody who has the courage to stand up to what the prevailing system is. Okay,
• 1:22
  but today, I think a couple decades later, wokeism is no longer about challenging the system,
• 1:29
  wokeism has become the system. And I think that the untold story of how that took place
• 1:36
  actually traces back to the 2008 financial crisis when corporations were the bad guys.
• 1:42
  The old left wanted to take money from the wealthy corporations and redistribute it to poor people,
• 1:48
  agree or not, that's what the old left had to say. But there was the beginning of this new
• 1:52
  woke movement that began to say actually the real injustice in society wasn't
• 1:59
  in poverty, was it poverty per se? It wasn't economic injustice per se. No, it was racial injustice
• 2:08
  and misogyny and bigotry. And after 08, that actually presented the opportunity of a generation
• 2:15
  for big business and for Wall Street, because they could go in one fell swoop from being by
• 2:19
  definition the bad guys in the eyes of the old left to being the good guys if they wielded their
• 2:23
  corporate power in the right way. And so they started adapting these woke values, applauding
• 2:28
  diversity and inclusion, putting token minorities and women on boards. And as I said earlier,
• 2:33
  musing about the racially disparate impact of climate change in fancy ski towns.
• 2:38
  And that actually worked out pretty well because corporations were happy to lend not just their money,
• 2:42
  but they're legitimacy to this new woke movement. They were happy to use their market power to
• 2:47
  effectively propagate these woke values, but they didn't want to do it for free. They had a new
• 2:54
  expectation that this new left would look the other way when it came to leaving corporate power
• 3:00
  intact. They recognized that maybe they don't love corporate power, but at least they would
• 3:04
  leave them alone if they were using corporate power to advance the goals of the new progressive
• 3:09
  woke left. And that's how this arranged marriage came to be. And so to answer your question about
• 3:13
  how wokeness went from being about a fringe theory that challenged the system to becoming the
• 3:17
  dominant system. In my telling of it, certainly in the book, and I believe it to be true, it is when
• 3:23
  wokeness met capitalism that it truly became unstoppable, that it went from being about challenging
• 3:29
  the system to becoming the system. And if you trace back to the 2008 version of it or the
• 3:34
  post 2008 version of it, what I like to say is a bunch of big banks met a bunch of woke millennials
• 3:40
  together, they birthed woke capitalism. And they put Occupy Wall Street up for adoption.
• 3:44
  You better not bet many people remember what that was. That was what the old left represented
• 3:49
  wokeness represented a new vision that proved convenient for big business. And the funny thing
• 3:53
  about it is that, you know, the the woke left in big business, I don't think this is really an
• 3:58
  arranged marriage of love. It isn't arranged marriage, but I don't think it's an
• 4:01
  marriage of love. I think it's more like mutual prostitution where each side has secret scorn
• 4:07
  for the other. And any marriage in which each side has a scorn for the other is not going to end
• 4:14
  well, but it's a marriage that's working right now as long as each side gets something out of the
• 4:19
  trade. And Silicon Valley has now copied the same thing saying they're going to sense their
• 4:23
  content that the far woke left doesn't want to see online. But in return, they expect the new
• 4:28
  democratic party to look the other way when it when it comes to leaving their monopoly power intact.
• 4:32
  That's how this arranged marriage is working out right now really well for both sides. But the net
• 4:37
  child, the bastard child of that arranged marriage has been the rise of this new woke
• 4:42
  industrial complex that I think is far more powerful than either big business or big government alone.
• 4:48
  It's a hybrid, a combination of the two, because each is able to do what the other cannot.
• 4:53
  And I personally think that's actually the biggest threat to liberty today, not just big government
• 4:57
  per se, but the new birth of this new woke industrial love. I want to highlight specific
• 5:05
  examples because people are listening to this like, oh, yeah, well, you know, it makes sense. And
• 5:09
  but where can you point to where a company sort of virtue signaled just to placate,
• 5:16
  you know, the masses. And one example you brought out was with with Solomon, David Solomon,
• 5:21
  taking companies public that have a woman on their board of directors or what not. And that's a great
• 5:27
  that's a great thing. It sounds like, you know, in theory that that's a great initiative. But you
• 5:30
  brought out a data point that was something along the lines of the fact that most of these organizations
• 5:35
  already had a woman on the board of directors and it actually didn't really impact any organizations
• 5:42
  that were already IPOing. So I mean, Goldman Sachs made a declaration. Yeah. In 2020 that it
• 5:49
  would not front from the mountaintops of Davos, by the way, that's Davos tends to be a place where
• 5:53
  people go to make these proclinations I've learned. So from Davos, he says that Goldman will not take
• 5:59
  a company public in the United States. By the way, they don't apply these standards in Asia that
• 6:02
  they just kind of look the other way over there. But in the United States won't take a company public
• 6:06
  unless it has at least one diverse board member where they didn't really say what Kevin has
• 6:12
  diverse, but then they kind of said, our focus is on women. Okay. Well, it turns out that in 2019,
• 6:20
  by the end of 2019, certainly, there wasn't a single one of the 500 companies in the S&P 500 that
• 6:26
  did not have a woman on their board, let alone one diverse board member. And so they ultimately
• 6:33
  managed to exhibit courage precisely when the thing they were doing lacked any modicum of courage
• 6:39
  at all. They were just conforming what I like to say is that's just Goldman Sachs doing what
• 6:43
  Goldman Sachs does earning another great risk adjusted return, taking no downside risk,
• 6:47
  but getting all the PR benefit, taking an already popular social value, and prominently
• 6:52
  emblazoning the Goldman Sachs logo on the very front of the social cause. But the list of
• 6:58
  examples just goes on and on. I mean, it's in some sense unfair to pick on Goldman Sachs because
• 7:03
  basically every major company in corporate America is doing the same thing. If you're Coca-Cola,
• 7:07
  it's a lot easier to complain about voting laws in Georgia that make you sound more like a
• 7:12
  super PAC than a soft drink manufacturer or have employee trainings on how to be less white. By the
• 7:19
  way, that's an actual LinkedIn learning module that they sent out to their employees until they
• 7:22
  were called out on it. It's a lot easier to do those things than to reckon with the impact of your
• 7:28
  own products on the nationwide epidemic of diabetes and obesity. By the way, in the very black
• 7:34
  community that they profess to care so much about, or if you're Nike, it's great to criticize
• 7:38
  slavery 250 years ago. It's a lot harder to give up your reliance on slavery in the present day
• 7:43
  through your supply chains reaching out in Asia. It's a lot easier to criticize the United States and
• 7:48
  take down the Betsy Ross flag sneaker that they wanted to release in 2019 because Colin Kaepernick
• 7:53
  thought it was indisha of racism without saying a peep in China where we see true human rights atrocities
• 8:00
  today over a million weakers in concentration camps. Nike doesn't say a word, and in fact,
• 8:05
  John Donahoe just in the last month, CEO of Nike goes to China and says that we are a company
• 8:10
  of China and for China. That's his quote, not mine. This is actually how this game is played,
• 8:15
  is this two-faced behavior in the United States and abroad, supplicating to the CCP lying
• 8:21
  prostrate like a lap dog, but that same lap dog bites the United States at every possible turn.
• 8:26
  And I think that hypocrisy reveals the essence of what's going on. They're doing whatever allows
• 8:31
  them to make the most money or aggregate the greatest power in China that's behaving one way by
• 8:36
  not criticizing injustice. And nowadays in the woke moment in the United States, it's doing the exact
• 8:41
  opposite, finding injustices to criticize as a way of exhibiting moral superiority.
• 8:46
  Now, you make another statement that this is not just placating masses, but also detrimental to
• 8:55
  traditional American ideology. Potentially, you said, pursuing the American dream and having
• 9:01
  opportunities and all these things that are so congruent with what Americans hold so true and
• 9:08
  dear to them. Now, how is this going to potentially negatively impact these traditional American
• 9:17
  ideologies? What's the bridge between them? I'll give you a simple low-hanging fruit,
• 9:22
  because some people may disagree on the importance of certain American ideals over others.
• 9:26
  We can get into that. But I actually think that this new trend undermines American solidarity
• 9:33
  as we know it, because in a divided politic body politic like ours, in America, in a healthy
• 9:40
  democracy where people disagree and debate one another and have fierce disagreements in the
• 9:45
  sphere of politics, the thing that we need in order to bind ourselves together as one people
• 9:51
  is other spheres of our lives, a political spaces where we can all come together irrespective
• 9:56
  of whether we're black or white, irrespective of whether we're Democrat or Republican.
• 10:01
  To me, the baseball stadiums of America are a perfect example of where people come together
• 10:06
  for their love of sport, for their love of watching sport, and you don't have to know whether the
• 10:10
  fan next to you supports your politics or not, you probably don't. And that's a beautiful thing
• 10:15
  about it. The private sector, running a biotech company, one of the beautiful things about it is
• 10:19
  that you come together because you care about developing medicines for patients who need them,
• 10:24
  not because you have one view or another on a particular political hot button issue of the day.
• 10:29
  And now with the spread of this woke capitalist brand, we lose those apolitical spaces.
• 10:36
  No one can go to a major league baseball game anymore without also implicitly endorsing
• 10:42
  the major league baseball stand on moving its all-star game from Atlanta to Colorado this year
• 10:48
  in a flagrant display of virtue signaling without actually probably even having read the voting
• 10:53
  statute that they were protesting in Georgia, going to a state that actually doesn't have
• 10:57
  dramatically different voting laws in the first place, but did it just because it was an
• 11:01
  opportunity to signal virtue. Maybe that benefits the MLB in the short run, maybe it doesn't,
• 11:06
  we can debate that. But it hangs America out to dry because it again, it viscerates one more space
• 11:14
  that could have brought us together in a divided moment that we have now lost too. As biotech
• 11:19
  companies go, oh, the same thing happens where people, whether you're on the left or the right,
• 11:24
  black or white, you could come together say, I want to pursue the development of medicines for
• 11:27
  patients who need them. But now the biotech industry association, Bio, the lobby group that
• 11:32
  represents the biotech companies, says that it encourages companies to consider this investment
• 11:36
  in states that pass laws like the ones in Georgia. And that effectively have forces people to
• 11:41
  signal what political tribe they're in, where I personally think that the thing we need to do
• 11:47
  isn't to force capitalism and democracy to share the same bed. What we actually need is to keep
• 11:53
  them apart from one another in order to preserve the integrity of each. And I think that if we continue
• 11:58
  to force capitalism to mix with democracy, we will be left with neither. And in my mind, those are
• 12:04
  the two parents of America, capitalism and democracy, both in 1776, the year of the Declaration of
• 12:10
  Independence and the year of the wealth of nations, individualism, unity, all in one. That is what
• 12:16
  America is at its best. And we need both of those parents of America. Sometimes those parents may
• 12:21
  run rough shot over the other. And sometimes in order to save the baby, you actually need to keep
• 12:25
  the parents apart. This may be one of those cases where America needs to do the same thing.
• 12:29
  Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you
• 12:33
  never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links
• 12:38
  in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.