1870: Money vs Politics, Censorship & Woke, Inc. by Vivek Ramaswamy - Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

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Welcome to episode 1871-870. And today our guest is the author of Woke Inc. Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam. I want to highly recommend this book. There are many nuances I did not understand or comprehend and he does a fantastic job in illustrating them and talking about the censorship problem, which as I've said many times before over the years, I think is possibly the biggest problem facing Humanity, and I really mean that. It is a bigger problem than war, than pandemic, anything. Because if people cannot communicate, they cannot solve the problems. The problems will be, quote, solved, unquote, by the elite class. Hopefully. You listened to my interviews with the author of Davos Man a couple of weeks ago, and that's what we'll have if we don't have a free press, as the founding fathers wanted us to have, right? The First Amendment, so incredibly important. And that press is now in the hands of tech companies. So that's where we are. But this book is really good. I'd highly recommend it. This is a 10th episode show today where we go off topic and discuss something of general interest. And this should be of interest to every human in the world. It is an incredibly important topic. It's a fantastic book. And we'll have the author here in just a moment. Vivek will be with us. But first, I want to start with what I've called many times life's most important question. And that is, of course, compared to what? Compared to what? And just in thinking about this over the weekend and thinking about the inflation trade, if you will, or the interest rate trade, or the cost of money, the time value of money, and also opportunity cost, these things aren't the same, but they are very closely related. So I wanted to just talk about that for a few minutes. We'll touch on some financial stuff here and then we'll get to Vivek talking about his book, Woke Inc. Okay, so let's dive in. So here is the issue with many people, of course, they've been saying this since the beginning of time. I'm going to time the market. It's too overheated. I'm going to wait until it crashes and then I'm going to go in and buy everything and keep my powder dry. Right? Keep my powder dry. They always say, you know, got to have my cash ready, cash on hand. Because this time, unlike last time, I'm not going to miss out. In 2008, I missed out. They all say I wasn't ready. They'll say I didn't appreciate it. They will say, right. And of course, that's because it's impossible to know where in that curve, in that trough, or on the peak or the valley or the top of the mountain where you are in the cycle.

Nobody really knows.

I mean, nobody really knows, not even the elites, because the economy is so complex, the marketplace is so complex. There are billions of actors. They're acting on mostly emotion. And it's Just very hard to predict which way anything is going in any market, whether it be real estate, stocks, cryptocurrencies, you know, foreign currencies. I mean, whatever, anything, precious metals, anything you want, right? It's very difficult to understand that. So let's talk about timing the market just for a moment here. And if you're watching this on video, you see the screen, you know, where I say, good luck timing the market, right? Say in 2022 this year, you have $100,000 sitting around and you got this $100,000 and it's burning a hole in your pocket. You don't know what to do with it. Do you keep it in the bank? Do you stick it in the stock market? Do you buy some rental properties? Do you invest in your business? Do you buy some gold or silver or something else? Right? Do you buy bonds? Right? Well, this hundred thousand dollars is in the bank and it is ready to be deployed. It's liquid cash. So it's the dry powder waiting for the market correction. Now, I cannot tell you the number of people, including many, who have been on this show before. One of them is our client, Drew Baker. He won't mind if I pick him. You know, I just remember having all of these conversations with him about how the market's too overheated. He's going to wait for it to change. And, you know, he's been great in helping you learn about self management and just managing your properties, managing your managers better. And of course, he's active in our formerly called Empowered Investor inner circle. The new name, Empowered Investor Pro, cut out a few syllables there to make it easier. So, yeah, you've heard Drew on the show many times. He's a, he's a client of ours and an old friend of mine. You know, he was saying this in the 2015 era, 2016, 17, 18, 19, he was saying, hey, Jason, you know, I know there's going to be a correction. I'm going to wa. Just going to wait for the market to crash before I buy properties. I got 10 properties now, 10 rental properties, plus my own home. You know, I'm just going to wait, right? And here's the problem. Very few people, when they're waiting and keeping their powder dry, consider the cost of waiting, okay? They don't look at it like that. As humans, our mind just doesn't work that way. It's. It's strange phenomenon, but it is the way it is. So you have this hundred thousand dollars in the bank just as a nice number example. If it's A million dollars, then add a zero. If it's 10 million, add two zeros, whatever, doesn't matter. The concept is the same. And you know, I say that real inflation now is easily 15%, if not 17 or 18%, because, hey, the government says it's 9.1%, so it's got to be at least, you know, almost double that. Right? That's what most experts will tell you. So 15%, let's go with that number. 15%. So the cost of waiting one year is $15,000. In 2023, your 100,000 will now be be debased. It will shrink in value to 85,000 constant dollars or real dollars or consistent dollars. So don't just think about what you get or lose by making an investment choice. Also think about, and that would be called the opportunity cost. But also think about the for sure hundred percent. Well, look at, nothing's 100%. I can't say that. No one can say that. But you know, this is just my opinion, folks, okay? I'm just, I'm just a hack here with a lot of opinions, right? A lot of you don't like my opinions. But hey, you don't have to listen. There are other shows with people who are less informed than me that you can listen to, especially when it comes to politics. I just love these political comments I get, like, you know, these like low information people, you know, we don't care about your politics. Well, if you think that money and politics are like separate issues, oh my God, seriously, how could anybody be so delusional? Politics, the political environment is like the air we breathe. It is the context in which we live. Almost everything comes out of the political environment. Interest rates, deficits, budgets, national debt, like everything, it all comes from the political environment. So for people that listen to the show and think we don't want to hear political stuff. Political stuff is financial stuff. Political stuff is investing stuff. Politics is like the air. It is the context. Look, fish. Fish live in water, but they don't really think much about the water. I'm, I'm guessing, hey, listen, I don't know, you know, the fish. I know they've never mentioned it to me. Maybe, maybe the fish, you know, say, oh, yeah, they think about water all the time, but, but everything in their life is generated out of the water. The context. All content comes from context. And that's the political environment. It is the context from which all our content comes. Are we rich? Are we poor? The wealth of Nations. Adam Smith, you know, wrote that more than 200 years ago. And it all comes out of the political environment. So if you think you can separate politics from finance, really it's just a delusional, immature idea. I mean, I don't know how people think that. I know the vast majority of you don't think that. But you know, it's always that small minority of people who don't get it. That kind of drive you crazy, right? Anyway, whatever. So you're going to lose 15% of your money by waiting, right? Okay, now here's, here's a funny thing in the. Compared to what? Question. We talked about negative interest rates many, many times on the show. And now CPI, the official inflation rate, 9.1%. Let's just go with the government's number. Let's just go with, with their number. 9.1%. Absolutely staggering. And mortgage rates, hey, they ticked down a little bit in the last week or two. So that's good news. But, you know, let's call it 6% for nice round numbers. That means you're literally without earning any rental income on your property without any appreciation, without any mortgage pay down, and without any tax benefits, and without inflation induced debt destruction just on the spread or the arbitrage between these numbers, you have a negative interest rate of 3.1%. You're getting paid to borrow money. But wait, there's more. So Let me introduce Mr. Spock. Now, Mr. Spock from Star Trek was my favorite character for some reason when I was a kid growing up watching Star Trek reruns. And I was clearly a nerd. That's why I did not get the girls. Okay? Mr. Spock was my favorite character. I was Mr. Spock for Halloween on more than one occasion. Okay? Because I just appreciated his logic. I just thought logic was the ultimate truth. And of course it's a big part of truth. It's not all truth. It's not the ultimate truth. You know, when you grow up, you realize that there's a lot of shades of gray in everything in life, right? But it was easy for me to glom on to the Mr. Spock ideology because it was just cut and dry. It was simple, logical, right? So here is how illogical we are as humans. And over the last 10 years or so, I have seen so many of you listening make this trade. And you thought it was a good trade. And I thought it was a good trade. Listen, I made the trade myself. I made the trade with you. This is the trade, right? And when I say the trade, I mean the trade is like you think of it as trading Stocks or trading currencies on the Forex exchange or, you know, whatever. Right, Trading commodities. What I'm saying here is you made an investment decision and it had certain characteristics and the trade was, well, you used money to buy it and you got certain characteristics with it. Well, one characteristic you commonly got, you know, give or take, I mean, it bounced around a bit. But let's call it 4% on your mortgage rate. A 30 year fixed rate mortgage at 4% in June 18th of 2015, which if you're watching on the video, you see the chart here with Mr. Spock and the chart from the FRED website. On June 18, 2015, the mortgage rate on a 30 year fixed rate mortgage was 4%. 4%. Okay, great. Well, at the exact same time, the inflation rate, the official rate, by the government standards, the official rate of inflation, the CPI told us that the rate was 2.11473%. We'll call it 2.1 for round number sake. So basically your trade was you took a 4% mortgage and you had an inflation rate where. I'm only going off official rates here, right, because the example I gave you was the official rate of inflation at 9.1% today. So the trade you made there was this, you know, well, let's just round it off. Let's call it 2% inflation and 4% mortgage rate, meaning you had a positive interest rate, a cost. The net effect was that you were paying 2% interest. So that represents a loss. Now, thankfully, this is not the sole characteristic of a real estate investment because it's a beautiful multidimensional asset class and we earn our return on investment in many ways. But everybody pretty much universally over the last decade thought this was a fantastic deal. And they were not wrong. They were right. I took the deal myself, okay? I agreed with the deal. I took the deal. This was a good deal. But you were paying a positive interest rate of approximately 2%. Now, you had other benefits from the property, of course, you had cash flow, tax benefits, mortgage pay down, your principal reduction, inflation induced debt destruction, etc. Right. Benefits were great, but just on the arbitrage between the inflation rate and the mortgage rate, you were losing 2%. Today you're gaining 3.1%. I mean, of course it depends on the rate you actually end up with, and it depends on, you know, where inflation goes in the future. Now here's a fair question. Here is a very fair question that I've been asked, and it's a good question. Unlike the political comments. Oh gosh, don't Drive me crazy here, whoever you are out there, you know, if you think politics and money is not connected, oh my gosh, really, I can't do. I can't help you. I really can't help you. I wish I could, but I can't. Anyway, many of you have asked, well, you know, what if the inflation rate goes down? What happens when they get inflation under control? Well, that's a great question and I'm going to address that a lot more in upcoming episodes. But suffice it to say that inflation will go down likely as a result of an economic contraction or a recession. Now, a recession has a sort of technical definition and there's a committee that decides if we're in a recession or not. And you know, we're possibly in a recession now, although it's complicated because employment is so good and you know, the academic definition usually is just, you know, two quarters in a row of declining gdp. Okay, well, that's not really the whole picture. And that's why there's a committee of mysterious elite people that get to say whether or not we're in a recession. Right, whatever. That's a another rabbit hole to go down. But look, as that happens, then the central planners, Jerome Powell and his, you know, open market committee at the Federal Reserve will make different decisions and they will reduce interest rates and at that time you can refinance. And you might be saying, well, there's a cost to refinancing. Well, you're right. Most of the time now, there are no cost refis out there. At times, you know, the market varies where sometimes they'll pick up your cost of refi, which basically means they just build your points into the equation. You know, they give you a higher rate. It's essentially a buy down or buy up in that case. But you know, the rate could still be good, a lot better than maybe 6% that you agreed to today or whatever you agreed to. Six and a half, 6.75, I don't know. You know, whatever you agree to. Right. Depending on the loan you chose. And this is why adjustable rate mortgages really could be a very good decision right now. Not always. It depends. Talk to your investment counselor that you're working with through Jason hartman.com or you called at 1-800-hartman-US only for the phone calls. Otherwise you got to just go see us on those Internet thingies, Jason hartman.com and they'll help you work through this and analyze it. But this is the basic deal. You take this deal that everybody took over the last 10 years and they were happy to take it where they're losing 2%, they're paying a positive interest rate, an interest rate cost, a cost to them of 2% to get the mortgage or the deal we have today, which is negative in interest rate payment. A negative interest rate, but that's positive to you because you're borrowing at a negative interest rate at 3.1% in this example. So the choice is yours, of course. Do what you will, but that's how it lays out and I hope that's helpful to you. Let's get to our guest. Let's talk to Vivek and we're going to hear about Woke Income. Fascinating interview, Fascinating book. Here we go. It is my pleasure to welcome Vivek Ramaswamy to the show. He is the author of Woke Inc. A fascinating book that looks in today's business climate and I guess culture war. Would that be a fair statement, Vivek?

The combination of the two, that's about right.

Yeah. Good stuff. Where are you located by the way?

I'm in Columbus, Ohio. I was born and raised in Cincinnati, but that's where I am now with the new business we've started here as well.

Fantastic. And you've got a background in biotech. What prompted you to write the book? As you saw, I guess, companies veering away from what's important, merit, getting the best people, et cetera. Tell us how the evolution came about.

Yeah, I mean the long story short, I mean the longer story is in the book, but the long story short is that I was a biotech CEO for seven years. I built a company from scratch that developed a number of medicines that became FDA approved medicines. It was a multi billion dollar company. And I had been an investor before that. That was my focus. I was trained in science. I would tell you that I grew concerned that there was a new cancer both in our culture and in our private sector that threatened to kill the dream that had allowed bluntly me to achieve what I had in my career as the kid of immigrants who came to this country with almost no money to being the founder of a successful company. There are certain conditions that require that story to be possible. Conditions of meritocracy, conditions where politicians stay out of business and businesses stay out of the business of politics. And what I worried was that this new cultural cancer, this combination of political forces even in the private sector infecting the system of American capitalism itself threatened to kill the dream that made my story possible, frankly, threatened to kill the dream that Martin luther King had 60 years ago. That his children would be judged not on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character. I grew increasingly worried that that dream was at risk. And so I decided that I wasn't going to be free to speak about it as a citizen while also occupying the seat of a CEO, filtering what I had to say through the filter of corporate self interest. So I stepped down as CEO, decided to write the book, and spent the last year and a half really speaking freely as a citizen without a particular agenda. And only recently, more recently, did I come back around to saying that, look, I want to help solve that problem beyond just writing books. And that's why I put my entrepreneurial hat back on again to start a business that tackles some of these issues as well.

Now it's, it's interesting that you say that because it would almost seem counterintuitive, wouldn't it? I mean, you know, wouldn't this wokeness, if you will, isn't that supposed to be in line with the dream of King and you know, equality and so on and so forth and giving everybody a shot? I'm just arguing for the left here, but go ahead.

I think that that's a, you know, I mean, I think that you make, you make a point that I frequently encounter. And you know, at the end of the day, I don't even use the word wokeness anymore. It means so many different things in different contexts. I'm a, I'm a stickler for precision. But at the end of the day, I think this new philosophy that says that your identity is based on your race, your sex, your religion, or your sexual orientation, you know, I think that that is reductive. I think it takes the true diversity of our country, the true diversity of voices in our country, the true diversity of perspectives within each of us, and reduces us to nothing more than the embodiment of a group identity on the tectonic plates of group identity, I don't think that that's what it means to be an agent and an individual in the world. That's not what it means to be a free person. And I think, yes, it does betray that dream that Martin luther King had 60 years ago. But even more so than the content of that philosophy, the thing that bothered me was companies using market power to tilt the scales of debate on those very questions. And what I grew really concerned about wasn't this other perspective that we could debate and discuss as citizens in the open. I think that's a good thing. I don't have to agree with the so called WOKE worldview any more than the so called WOKE worldview has to agree with mine. As long as we're able to speak openly and respectfully as citizens in the public square. That I'm a fan of. But what I'm not a fan of is when companies then use economic force to effectively substitute for free speech and open debate to settle those same questions. And that's what we started to see. I mean, people fired from their jobs for wearing the hat of the wrong political candidate to work. People who were fired or demoted or lost their promotions because they refused to bend the knee to a politicized agenda that they had to sign onto through a three letter acronymized form of training, be it ESG or DEI or CSR or CCP for that matter. And I only say that jokingly, that to me was the problem where Americans should not be forced to to choose between putting food on the dinner table and speaking their minds freely. This is a country where you get to enjoy both of those things at once. And once the private sector becomes politicized, we lose the apolitical sanctuary in our society where we can come together at a biotech company to innovate together or at a sports company to play sports together. We lose that apolitical space if that private sector also becomes politicized. So that was actually the main topic of interest in the book. Not necessarily critiquing progressivism or woke culture, but critiquing the merger of that force with big business that actually made any dissent effectively impossible. And that's what I began to worry about most.

Yeah, yeah. Very, very appropriate thing to be worrying about. As you're talking, you reminded me of that great Ayn Rand quote about rights and the left and the woke culture seems to want to be all about group rights. And she says something to the effect of there's no such thing as group rights. There are only individ rights because the smallest minority in the world is the individual.

That's exactly right. She said it often better than most did. The thing, Jason, that we kind of miss a little bit now though, in the post Ayn Rand, the post Milton Friedman era, is that some of those doctrines have been turned upside down because let's say Milton Friedman or Ayn Rand, what they would have said is companies have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders.

I was going to ask you about Friedman's philosophy. I'm thinking that you would agree with that, but I'm not sure. Go ahead.

No, I think I would agree with it, but it needs to be Modernized. It needs to be modernized to recognize the way in which it's been perverted and turned upside down. And this is the way it works. Where back in the Friedman night or Ayn Rand era, you know, the CEO who veered from the purpose of making great products and services and making a profit that way, they were going to distract themselves from achieving that mission to serve their shareholders. Well, the problem today is that the other side, if you will, have, has subverted that logic to say that you know what? We are the shareholders. BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, just three institutions there who manage over $20 trillion that are telling companies that if you don't adopt these particular politicized environmental agendas or social agendas or racialized agendas or whatever they may be, if you don't adopt those, then we're going to fire you as CEO, then we're going to dock your pay. We, the shareholder, are demanding that you, the CEO, behave this way. And so they've taken that shareholder primacy doctrine but turned it upside down. And what I'm focused on now, the book explores this. My new business, Strive Asset Management, explores this as well, is to say that you know what, the people who claim to be the shareholders in the year 2022, large institutions like BlackRock and Vanguard, they're not the actual shareholders in the sense they're not the actual owners of capital. And the owners of capital are the clients of those firms who unwittingly have a voice represented on their behalf that they would actually disapprove of if they actually knew what was going on. If they knew that these investment managers were forcing oil companies to adopt emissions caps and forcing companies like Apple to adopt racial equity audit proposals and quota systems based on race and gender. On our boards, many owners of capital would strongly disapprove of that. Yet what we see today in this so called system of free market capitalism is that the owners of capital are represented by agents who are betraying their own interests but claiming to be the shareholders when they show up in the boardrooms of corporate America. So I think it needs to be modernized. And that's what I'm on a quest to do.

Okay, great, great. And I definitely want to ask you to hit on some of the entries in your table of contents of the book, which by the way, is great. But one question on that is it has puzzled me to no end why it seems that these companies and these professional sports teams, their wokeness is acting against their own interest. I mean, it just makes you wonder what is behind these crazy agendas some of these companies have.

So there's two answers to that. But the deeper answer goes back to the 2008 financial cris. I lived this, I saw this. I was my first job in New York City at a hedge fund in the fall of 2007 is when I took that job. I saw this firsthand. What happened is in the wake of the 08 crisis, all right, government bailouts and all, bailing out Wall street banks, right when the tides had turned against them, the public bailed them out. There was an outcry against the greed is good version of capitalism. There was a demand for a new form and a reinvention of capitalism or else tearing it down altogether. Occupy Wall street was on Wall Street's doorstep. And what financial institutions, and eventually the rest of corporate America realized behind them was that Occupy Wall street was a pretty tough pill to swallow. But there was this new woke left that had a slightly different theory of the case that said that you know what, the real problem isn't poverty or economic injustice. It was racial injustice and misogyny and bigotry and climate change. And that we can get on board with. Don't talk about systemic financial risk, let's talk about systemic racism instead. I'm saying half jokingly, but that was the trade that they made and it worked masterfully for both sides. So this was kind of a cynical arranged marriage, right? It was not a marriage of love between big business and this neo progressive movement. It was really an act of mutual convenience. A marriage of convenience, more like mutual prostitution where each side got something out of the trade even though they didn't really love each other. But the net birth of that was this new uncomfortable movement that combined some of the forces of progressive big government with the forces of historically conservative powered big business to create this new hybrid force that in some ways duped both sides into submission. Right? Liberals used to be skeptical of corporate power. Well, they said that no, no, no, don't be skeptical of corporate power if we use that to advance the right causes. And then conservatives meanwhile used to recite slogans like the free market can do no wrong. The Ayn Rands and the Milton Friedman's of the world without recognizing that that free market does not exist when it's been co opted to advance a political agenda. And so both sides in some ways were duped by the rise of this new, this new version of big business that defanged the historical threats to its power structure, the Occupy Wall street movement, et cetera. They completely took the air out of that movement. But the dowry in return in this marriage was to adopt these progressive values. That may be a little inconvenient in the short run, but we can live with that and fake it till you make it at the end of the day. And then that's what led to the birth of the ESG movement, where BlackRock Larry Fink steps into the void and says, you want a new capitalism? I'll give you a new capitalism. We'll be the leaders of the ESG movement and rode that money train to the top, raising a family of funds that together comprise $10.5 trillion. It's about half the GDP of the United States under the watch of one firm that used this cultural current to ride to prominence. And so it worked. And as long as it keeps working, that momentum continued to fuel that same trend. That's how you get to where we are today. Were even now the top shareholders of America's public companies. Those three firms managing more than the GDP of the United States. If you count those three firms, BlackRock, State street and Vanguard, telling public companies that this is the new capitalism. This is how you're supposed to behave. And then it becomes the new norm. And over 10 years, that's how the story changed. This new norm becomes codified. Now, what I will say is the last year has revealed the ways in which that movement falls short. This is part of what's contributed to gas prices being high, cutting oil production, being conscious of the racially disparate impact of climate change. Well, guess what? People are paying for it literally through their pocketbook. Higher prices at the pump paid for it literally through their investment accounts, which have declined precipitously over the last year. Speaking of that table of contents, one of the titles of one of the chapters of my book published last August was the ESG Asset Bubble. The ESG bubble. We're watching that burst in plain sight. I somewhat predicted this last year. I didn't know that it was going to be this summer, but I said it was coming in the coming years. Now I think the tides are changing and we're looking for. I think the people are correctly looking for something different. And I think the right answer isn't to be anti ESG or anti woke or anti dei. It's to revive something else more meaningful, to be what I call pro excellence. And so that's what kind of led me to the doorstep of founding, you know, this new asset manager. To not solve the problem by complaining, not solve the problem through government regulation or reaction in the other direction. I think those are Less preferred as solutions. If you ask me, the right answer was to just solve the problem the old fashioned way through competition. Stop complaining. I mean, in a sense I've been complaining myself, but part of it was shining a spotlight in the problem. But stop complaining and actually offer an affirmative alternative. And that's what led to the birth of strive, which is where I spend my time today.

So you've got a chapter about critical diversity theory, and of course that's, I'm sure, a play on critical race theory. Is diversity in and of itself a good thing? Yeah, I'm not, I'm not sure that's been proven.

You know what depends on what kind of diversity. Right? Like so many of these terms, we have to define what they actually mean. Diversity of thought is generally a good thing for innovation.

That I'd agree with. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it generally is.

Right, but do different races bring diversity of thought? Necessarily?

Well, necessarily, Absolutely not. Because if you were to say that, I think you're committing the cardinal sin of first order racism to say that you can look at the color of my skin and I can look at the color of yours and predict something about the content of the ideas that you are permitted to have. That is the cardinal definition of what it means to be a bigot, a racist. That I could tell you something about the content of your character by looking at the color of your skin. That betrays everything that Martin Luther King's vision stood for when he said we ought to be judged on the color of our. Not in the color of our skin, but in the content of our character. And so I reject the idea that skin deep diversity tells us something about true diversity, tells us something meaningful about true diversity of perspective. But even when it comes to true diversity of perspective, I think generally it's good, but we have to be more precise about what we mean. And so this is what I talk about in the critical diversity theory chapter. An organization has to be precise about where it wants diversity, including diversity of thought and behavior, and where it does not want diversity of thought and behavior. For example, I'm building a company. I've built companies before. I expect people to be able to work hard to achieve the mission. Do I want a diversity in approaches to how hard people work? No, I actually want, I want, I want a commitment for how hard people are willing to work. Do I want a diversity of commitments to the mission of the company? No, I don't want a diversity of views on the validity of the mission of the company. I respect the diversity of views out in the country. But for people who work at the company, we want a unified commitment. We want a diversity of skills, a diversity of perspectives that better allow us to achieve that mission. So I just think one of the things we have to do in this diversity debate is to be precise about what types of diversity matter and what types don't and what types of diversity we want. And in certain cases, you don't want a diversity of commitments to a mission. And to be precise about that, rather than using capital D diversity, that's this new quasi religious movement that encompasses actually a monolith of thought. And in the name of diversity, what we've done is we've actually sacrificed true diversity of thought at the altar in the name of inclusion. We have actually created this exclusionary culture where certain groups just aren't welcome. But again, I'm done complaining about it. And at the end of the day, we need to demonstrate through action how we can lead a better way forward. And that's what has my focus today.

Yeah, and you know, you, you see it in Hollywood, you see it in the music industry. I mean, listen to some of the lyrics of like a Lily Allen song and, and you'll see how completely bigoted she is. It's unbelievable. Yet she's under the guise of wokeness. It's, it's just unbelievable how hypocritical this is. Who are some of the henchmen of the woke industrial complex? Maybe you alluded to that already when you mentioned Black, BlackRock, et cetera. But I just want to make sure you, you get a chance to cover that.

Yeah, I mean, look, I think that this is part of why I, in the book, I refer to it as a multi layered problem where it's, it's about the relationship not just between this neo progressive movement and big business through that arranged marriage I described earlier. There are other cynical forces exploiting that relationship too. One of those include government actors. Those include government actors in the United States. Those include government actors in China, which I think are actually exploiting this trend masterfully to their advantage. Getting companies to relentlessly criticize the United States while using market access to Chinese, to the Chinese market as a carrot to make sure those same companies don't criticize China. What does that do? Well, it takes America's greatest geopolitical asset of all, not our nuclear arsenal, but our moral standing on the global stage and quietly erodes it by using the voices of American companies to do that bidding. So that's a beautiful be a geopolitical move. That's Part of this complex as well. There's nonprofits, multinational institutions that often are paid by the very actors that, you know, use them as independent voices when in fact they've been captured. So this is why it sort of takes an entire book to write about it.

Yeah, right.

A lot of this, when you talk about it at a high level, sounds like a conspiracy theory. There's nothing conspiratorial about just describing the realities hiding in plain sight. I think one of the things I've been really pleased about is, you know, a lot of books, when they come out, especially if they're in controversial themes, will have waves of reviews that are written about them that pick apart the factual research in the book. We haven't had any of that with respect to Woking. And I think that that's because the facts are what they are. We can debate about what we do about them. And I think there's room for reasonable debate about it, by the way. But I think that one of the things that we have to do is at least see the same facts with clear eyes. And once we have a shared foundation of those of those facts, we can then debate what, what the right solutions are, whether they're market solutions, whether they're state driven solutions, whether they're solutions in our educational system, whether they're solutions that arise from bold action in our culture, or whether, as I believe it's some combination of all of those things. That's what my mission is.

I know we've got to wrap it up here pretty quick, but just a couple more things. Directors becoming stakeholders, dictators becoming stakeholders. Okay, sorry. Yeah, okay.

So this is, this, this is referring to the China problem, basically. But I mean, it applies to other countries too, where once corporations become vehicles for advancing a progressive agenda, they can become a vehicle for advancing anyone's agenda, even a dictator's agenda. And that's what we're beginning to see with the Chinese government deputizing companies like Trojan horses in the United States to do their bidding in ways that the government of China never could have actually done through the front door. And I lay out a lot of examples ranging From Airbnb to BlackRock to Nike, the way this plays out. And it is a. I would recommend not reading that chapter before you go to bed at night.

It is really scary that a company like Airbnb cancels bookings around Trump rallies to try and keep people from an.

Instagram account, but hands over user data of American users, private messages between hosts and renters through their platform to the CCP as A condition for doing business in China. It is chilling. Like I said, don't read it before you go to bed at night because you will not be able to fall asleep if you're like me. But. But I do think at some point in time it's important to see that problem with clear eyes.

Yeah, very chilling. The bastardization of service. Is this just because we're not hiring the best people? Is that what you mean when you say that?

Well, no, what I mean by that this is a good topic for us to close with.

Actually.

I think it goes to. Goes to the heart of where I see the better way forward is that I think that one of the problems is we've raised an entire generation of kids, my generation, your generation even, and, and the next generation that never really learned how to do service in its own right as a citizen. And I think that one of the things that we can do is separate this idea of doing service as a citizen by reviving civic duty. I'm a big fan of reviving the idea of civic duty in our American culture, but to separate that from the pursuit of self interest through free market capitalism. And what we now have is a generation that neither knows how to do self interest, pursue their self interest nor how to do service because they've always had the two commingled from doing community service to put on their college application, all the way to engaging in progressive signal virtue signaling while they're pursuing their self interest as capitalists. The case I make in the book is we need to separate capitalism and democracy to be able to really preserve the integrity of both. And that requires within each of us separating the side of us that wants to be a civic minded citizen. As I think more of us should do a better job of being. But to be able to say that we can separate that from the capitalist within each of us too without having to apologize for that. And that's really the heart of the cultural movement. As I say that yes, civic service is important. In fact, conservatives or liberals for that matter, don't talk enough about it. But what we need to do is separate the citizen side of the house, the civic side of the house, the house being the country or the house even being the south, from the capitalist side of the house. And the better we do that, the better we restore the elements of both of America's parents, democracy and capitalism. The wealth of nations and the Declaration of Independence, Both written in 1776. By the way, that is the heart of American identity. It's not one of those things, but it's both of them at the same time. And that's also the vision at the heart of the new asset management firm I founded in a Strive Asset Management here in Columbus where I'm talking to you from, hopefully reviving that message as a shareholder and as a vocal advocate in corporate America. That's a big part of where I see the solution delivered through the market as well.

Fantastic. Well, Vivek, thank you for joining us. The book, of course, is in all the usual places. Looking at one of them now. It has 2,600 reviews and 4.5 stars. I'm sure you get a little bit of hate. So those are probably the few bad reviews.

A lot of five stars and a few one stars is whatever.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We really appreciate it. Do you have a website you want to share?

Yeah, I mean, the website of my new company is strivefunds.com my bio's on there and you can look me up under my own name and on social media, on Twitter, et cetera. You could find me.

But.

But at the end of the day, I hope people read the book. My goal was not economic with the book by any means. It was to spread this message. I was really grateful it's been as widely read as it has one of the more successful New York Times bestsellers of last year. I was really grateful for the readership that was frankly, thankfully, even broader than I could have hoped for. And the goal is to start a conversation that we otherwise weren't having. So if you're able to read the book and agree or disagree, as long as you're talking openly about these issues, you know that's a win for me. So thanks.

I couldn't agree more. Vivek, thank you for joining us.

Thank you very much. Take care.

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