The Charlie Kirk Show - WOKE Inc. with Vivek Ramaswamy
Aired: 2021-11-05
Duration: 46:32


=== Supporting The Show (03:23) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey, everybody.
[00:00:00]  Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, one of the most fun conversations I've had recently with Vivek Ramaswamy, author of Woke Inc.
[00:00:07]  What has happened to our companies?
[00:00:08]  Why have they been taken over by these social justice movements?
[00:00:12]  He explains it in a very articulate fashion.
[00:00:16]  Do you want to meet somebody?
[00:00:18]  Do you want to have some fun?
[00:00:20]  Are you tired of just being cooped up all the time?
[00:00:22]  Do you want to get out of the house?
[00:00:24]  Do you want to come see some of the conservative heroes in person?
[00:00:29]  Well, you can do that.
[00:00:30]  Phoenix, Arizona, December 18, 19, 2021.
[00:00:36]  Tucker Carlson, Kaylee McIneney, Ted Cruz, Jesse Waters, Candace Owens, Jim Jordan, Donald Trump Jr., Madison Cawthorne, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Jack Pasobik, Benny Johnson, Sean Foyt, Sarah Palin, and special musical performances by Brantley Gilbert, Russell Dickerson, Adam Doliak, Ray Lynn, DJ Silver, and Lee Greenwood.
[00:01:01]  Phoenix, Arizona.
[00:01:03]  It's an amazing time of year in Phoenix, everybody.
[00:01:06]  The weather is spectacular.
[00:01:07]  And you can get your tickets today at tpusa.com slash AMF EST.
[00:01:16]  It's really simple.
[00:01:17]  tpusa.com slash amfest.
[00:01:19]  Get engaged, get involved, show up.
[00:01:22]  It's going to be so much fun.
[00:01:23]  Family friendly.
[00:01:24]  Bring your husband, bring your wife, bring your kids.
[00:01:26]  tpusa.com slash amf.
[00:01:29]  I'll try to meet as many of you as I can.
[00:01:31]  If you show up, it's going to be amazing.
[00:01:33]  That time of year, it's unbelievably nice.
[00:01:37]  And I had someone say, Charlie, how do I meet my future husband?
[00:01:39]  How do I meet my future wife?
[00:01:40]  I say, well, are you getting out there?
[00:01:42]  Are you meeting people?
[00:01:43]  No.
[00:01:44]  Well, maybe this might be a good chance for you to go out on a limb and go meet some new people.
[00:01:50]  tpusa.com slash amf.
[00:01:53]  Email us your thoughts as always freedom at charliekirk.com.
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[00:02:25]  People say, Charlie, what happens when I support CharlieKirk.com/slash support?
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[00:02:39]  So I just want to say thank you.
[00:02:40]  Thank you.
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[00:02:44]  We are deeply thankful and appreciative.
[00:02:47]  Vivek is here.
[00:02:48]  Buckle up, everybody.
[00:02:49]  Here we go.
[00:02:50]  Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
[00:02:52]  Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
[00:02:54]  I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
[00:02:57]  Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
[00:03:01]  I want to thank Charlie.
[00:03:02]  He's an incredible guy.
[00:03:03]  His spirit is love of this country.
[00:03:05]  He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
[00:03:10]  Turning point USA.
[00:03:11]  We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
[00:03:20]  That's why we are here.

=== A Cultural Cancer (03:16) ===

[00:03:23]  Hey, everybody.
[00:03:24]  This episode is brought to you by my friends at ExpressVPN, expressvpn.com/slash Charlie.
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[00:03:45]  Expressvpn.com slash Charlie.
[00:03:51]  Hey, everybody.
[00:03:51]  Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
[00:03:53]  I've been looking forward to this one for quite some time.
[00:03:56]  One of the most important books that has been authored in recent memory.
[00:04:00]  And it's all about kind of wokeism in corporate America and what we can do about it.
[00:04:07]  And it's a very interesting, very articulate guest, Vivek Ramaswamy.
[00:04:12]  Did I get that right?
[00:04:13]  You're pretty darn close, Charlie.
[00:04:15]  Good to see you.
[00:04:15]  All right.
[00:04:16]  I'm in the zip code.
[00:04:18]  Honored to have you on our show.
[00:04:19]  You're doing a wonderful job.
[00:04:20]  Introduce yourself first to our audience and then talk a little bit about your book and we'll go from there.
[00:04:25]  Yeah, sure.
[00:04:26]  Just a brief introduction.
[00:04:28]  I grew up, was born and raised in Ohio, where actually I live today.
[00:04:31]  My parents were both immigrants from India.
[00:04:34]  I often jokingly asked my dad why he came halfway around the world to Southwest Ohio.
[00:04:39]  And he said that actually it was the only place in the world where he could get a job in the United States to be near his older sister who was in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
[00:04:47]  And that, of course, begged the question of why she came to Fort Wayne, Indiana.
[00:04:50]  And we joke around it's the only U.S. state with the word India contained in it.
[00:04:55]  There you go.
[00:04:56]  So that's a bit of my family background and how they came here on a joking note.
[00:05:01]  More seriously, I ended up going to Harvard for college.
[00:05:04]  I studied molecular biology.
[00:05:05]  I was a nerdy guy in the lab the whole time.
[00:05:08]  Ended up getting into biotech investing after I graduated.
[00:05:11]  Did that for seven years from 2007 to 2014.
[00:05:15]  Spent three of those years at the same time in law school at Yale, where I met my wife.
[00:05:19]  It's probably the most productive thing that came out of it.
[00:05:22]  She was in med school and lived next door to me.
[00:05:24]  And when I came back to New York City after I finished law school and having a fun job on the side, now it was just a fun job.
[00:05:30]  I ended up having a gap in my schedule, took up stand-up comedy for six months before I decided that that wasn't my calling and left my job to start a biotech company.
[00:05:39]  I led the company as CEO for seven years.
[00:05:42]  And during that time, we got a number of medicines developed.
[00:05:45]  The one I'm probably most proud of is a new drug to treat prostate cancer.
[00:05:49]  But I stepped down from my job as CEO this January.
[00:05:53]  And, you know, thankfully, the company runs well today.
[00:05:55]  It's a multi-billion dollar business.
[00:05:57]  But I stepped down as CEO to work on what I thought was a different kind of cancer, not a biological cancer, but a cultural cancer that I thought threatened to kill the dream that allowed me to achieve everything I ever had in my life as a first generation American.
[00:06:12]  And that was the new orthodoxy, what I guess we could call the new woke orthodoxy that had really taken control of one elite institution after another.
[00:06:21]  And though I wasn't born into elite America, I had lived it for the last 15 years.
[00:06:26]  And I felt compelled to not only tell my story, but to reveal the problem that I saw, which I viewed as a defining scam of our time.
[00:06:34]  And that's what led me to write Woke Inc.
[00:06:36]  I completely agree with that.
[00:06:37]  So let's get our terms right before we get into your book.

=== Wall Street Redemption (15:18) ===

[00:06:40]  How would you define woke?
[00:06:42]  It is used all the time.
[00:06:43]  We use it.
[00:06:44]  I have my own personal definition, but just explain in as much detail as you're comfortable.
[00:06:49]  What do we mean when we say woke?
[00:06:52]  Yeah, thank you for doing that, Charlie.
[00:06:54]  And I applaud you for doing it.
[00:06:55]  And I'd love to do it for woke culture and cancel culture because I think these are terms that get bandied around too much and are often used a little imprecisely.
[00:07:01]  And I'm going to give a definition that I, at best I can, not be judgmental about the claims of the woke movement, but let's understand what it actually has to say.
[00:07:09]  Okay.
[00:07:10]  So the woke movement is all about waking up to invisible power structures that govern the social universe.
[00:07:17]  What does that mean?
[00:07:18]  Well, it borrows from Marxist thought.
[00:07:20]  Marxists said that actually there were these invisible power relationships between human beings, but they were based on economic class relationships, that people who had more money exerted invisible power over people who didn't have much money.
[00:07:33]  Woke culture had a slightly different theory of the case.
[00:07:36]  And they said that there are these invisible power structures, but what we need to do is wake up to the real power structures, which weren't based on how much money you have quite.
[00:07:44]  It was based on your genetically inherited attributes that you got on the day you were born, whether you were male or female, whether you were black or white, whether you were gay or straight.
[00:07:54]  These were the factors that really governed the invisible power relationships between us as human beings.
[00:07:59]  And what woke culture calls on us to do is to wake up to those invisible power structures so we can correct the injustices arising from them.
[00:08:07]  That's the long version.
[00:08:08]  The short version, if you want a shorthand version, is obsessing over race, gender, and sexual orientation, maybe climate change too.
[00:08:15]  And that would be an equally good definition.
[00:08:18]  Now, yeah, I could pause there or I could go on for a while, Charlie, but maybe I'll wrap up on woke culture for a second, just to say that the way I think about it is that if I take the two most toxic ideologies of the 20th century, Marxism, which was an oppressor-oppressed relationship on steroids, and German Nazism, which was identity politics on steroids, you mix the two together, you get their love child, which is modern wokeism here on American soil.
[00:08:44]  And this, I believe the recent election results that favored Republicans was a woke lash in a way where people started to realize that this pathogen, this virus, this tumor, it needs to be confronted and it needs to be removed.
[00:09:01]  And you saw this all the way from New Jersey to Seattle to Minneapolis.
[00:09:04]  It's making America a much more dangerous place.
[00:09:07]  It's making America unsafe.
[00:09:09]  It's making it also just an unpleasant place to live.
[00:09:12]  So, but let's go into now how the specifics of your book, because I could talk about the college campus part of it.
[00:09:18]  That's pretty simple and easy.
[00:09:21]  We could talk about the military part of it, which is incredibly horrifying, but we have other kind of guests for that.
[00:09:28]  I really am curious about this because I know exactly what our audience is going to be thinking.
[00:09:34]  And it's, okay, hold on a second, Charlie.
[00:09:36]  I get the woke thing.
[00:09:37]  Thank you for defining it, waking up to pre-existing power structures, oppressor versus oppressed.
[00:09:42]  You know, we could even go to Herbert Marcuse or Espinoza, one-dimensional man, all that sort of stuff.
[00:09:47]  But what people don't understand, and this is a good segue to your book, how is it that the people who are in the business of making money and taking risks and allocating capital, how do they either have the time, the bandwidth, or the interest to dwell in these sort of petri-dish social experiments?
[00:10:07]  Exactly.
[00:10:08]  The question of our time.
[00:10:09]  And it's a bit of a scam, but it's a bit of a mystery too.
[00:10:11]  It works like a magic trick.
[00:10:13]  That's what most of the book is about.
[00:10:15]  So what I do a little bit of in the book, Charlie, is actually lay out a little bit of a history.
[00:10:19]  I think a lot of this began with the 2008 financial crisis.
[00:10:23]  And I know the 08 financial crisis, believe me, because I lived it.
[00:10:26]  I got my first job in New York City at a hedge fund in the fall of 2007 that got an honorable mention in Michael Lewis's book, The Big Short.
[00:10:32]  I saw this firsthand.
[00:10:34]  What happened after the 08 crisis was that corporations in this country were viewed by the old left as the bad guys.
[00:10:40]  And what the old left wanted to do was to take money from those wealthy corporate fat cats and redistribute it to poor people to help poor people.
[00:10:47]  Agree or not, that's what the old left wanted.
[00:10:49]  This is very smart.
[00:10:50]  Keep going.
[00:10:50]  I see where you're going with.
[00:10:51]  I've never heard this.
[00:10:52]  And there was this Occupy Wall Street movement, which actually threatened the structure of big banks, which they said that we're going to come after you.
[00:10:58]  And if you're a big bank in 2008, Occupy Wall Street was a tough pill to swallow.
[00:11:02]  But it turned out the new woke stuff, which was born right around the same time, the beginning of our diversity decade, Barack Obama elected as president of the United States, there was this new woke left that said, actually, the real problem wasn't poverty.
[00:11:14]  It wasn't economic injustice.
[00:11:15]  It was racism and misogyny and bigotry.
[00:11:18]  And guess what, Charlie?
[00:11:19]  That presented the opportunity of a generation for Wall Street and big business in this country to say that actually we could go from being the bad guys to being the good guys if we just said the right things.
[00:11:29]  You applaud diversity and inclusion.
[00:11:31]  You put your token minorities on your boards.
[00:11:34]  You muse about the racially disparate impact of climate change after you fly in a private jet to a fancy ski town.
[00:11:39]  You criticize capitalism as a racist system all the while climbing a ladder that you kick out from under you so other people can't climb up.
[00:11:46]  This was a pretty good game, but they didn't do it for free.
[00:11:49]  They effectively expected that the new left look the other way when it came to leaving their own corporate power structures intact.
[00:11:56]  And so the way I tell it in the book is you have a bunch of woke millennials that get in bed with a bunch of big banks.
[00:12:01]  Together, they birth woke capitalism and they use that to put Occupy Wall Street up for adoption.
[00:12:08]  And then Silicon Valley does it and the rest of corporate America does it.
[00:12:10]  That's really what the heart of the book's all about.
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[00:13:11]  What you just said is really smart.
[00:13:13]  I've never heard it before, which is that the Zuccotti Park unwashed people where I went to Zuccotti Park, actually when I was in high school, I walked through it.
[00:13:20]  I didn't grow up in New York, I grew up in Chicago, but I visited.
[00:13:23]  And I remember seeing firsthand the energy, the enthusiasm.
[00:13:27]  And what you're trying to say, though, is that some of the activists intentionally or unintentionally thought of a way that they could redistribute corporate profits towards their social movements through kind of racketeering.
[00:13:37]  Or is that part of it?
[00:13:40]  So let me break it down for the interesting.
[00:13:42]  You brought up the Zuccotti Park because I used to live in New York City.
[00:13:44]  I went to Zuccotti Park.
[00:13:45]  I saw what that looked like.
[00:13:47]  So what happened actually was there was that earnest Occupy Wall Street movement.
[00:13:51]  People of all colors were all genders.
[00:13:54]  And it had real complaints and real complaints.
[00:13:57]  Legitimate.
[00:13:58]  In my opinion, some that you and I might have been sympathetic to, which is the idea they bailed out these bankers lived well in the good times and wanted public bailouts in the bad times.
[00:14:07]  There was real heft to, I think, the good, sincere basis for wanting to reorder crony capitalism, right?
[00:14:14]  So the thing that happened, though, Charlie, is that there was the birth of a new strand of that movement.
[00:14:20]  And speaking of Zuccotti Park, you go down to Virginia in 2011.
[00:14:24]  The Occupy Wall Street movement had started to spread across the country.
[00:14:27]  There's a video about the progressive stack that emerged right around that time.
[00:14:31]  You might have seen it, where there's a woman speaking to a crowd of Occupy Wall Street activists, but she says that actually the people who are going to speak at this rally are going to be ordered on the basis of whether they're empowered or disempowered.
[00:14:44]  Women get to speak first.
[00:14:46]  People of color get to speak first.
[00:14:48]  And there was kind of an awkward murmur in the crowd.
[00:14:50]  And this guy raises his hand in the back and says, hey, aren't we all here because we're all disempowered?
[00:14:55]  And another guy, a white guy, steps up on stage and says that you don't get it.
[00:14:58]  You need to step up and then step back.
[00:15:01]  And there was kind of an awkward murmur where the crowd didn't know what to make of it.
[00:15:04]  And that was kind of to me, the embodiment of the beginning of where the Occupy Wall Street wheels started coming off the bus, where they were no longer about representing economic disempowerment for everyone, but about also beginning to talk specifically about racial disempowerment and gender-based disempowerment and sexual orientation-based disempowerment.
[00:15:23]  That's what corporate America loved because they could get on board with that.
[00:15:27]  Because you see, for Goldman Sachs, you don't want to talk about systemic financial risk, but talk about systemic racism.
[00:15:32]  Yeah, give me more of that so that I don't have to talk about systemic financial risk.
[00:15:36]  And so just last year, Charlie, you get Davos, which is the place where they make these declarations.
[00:15:41]  Goldman says it won't take a company public in the United States if it doesn't have a sufficiently diverse board along the axes of race and gender.
[00:15:48]  Forget political viewpoint diversity, but guess what?
[00:15:51]  Goldman Sachs does that at the same time that they are not reviewing their mortgage practice reviews that relate to the 2008 financial crisis.
[00:15:59]  That they're settling for $5 billion for a bribery scandal that defrauded the Malaysian people when Elizabeth Warren, an identity politics-obsessed politician, was at the frontrunner of a primary that was actually a threat to Goldman Sachs's power structure.
[00:16:11]  And this is not a partisan issue, it's a cultural issue and a marriage between big business in this country and a new strand of the left that ultimately put the old strand of the left up for adoption.
[00:16:23]  That's kind of the complex story.
[00:16:24]  Yeah, there's so many different directions I want to go with this, but let's start here.
[00:16:28]  So, in 2008, you saw the financial crisis, which was a mixture of many different dynamics, lowering of interest rates artificially to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to the awful behavior of a couple of Wall Street banks, the bailing out of such the you know, Ben Bernanke to Geithner to Hank Paulson from the Treasury Department, you know, heavily subsidizing the behavior, and I think designing an incredibly corrupt bailout package for every single bank,
[00:16:57]  even if even if they don't want to take the money using the FDIC to try to actually engineer it.
[00:17:01]  And people lost began to lose trust in kind of corporations as a whole, but also power systems, right?
[00:17:08]  And like power structures.
[00:17:09]  I think some of that discontent is still around today.
[00:17:12]  But can you walk me through though?
[00:17:14]  Because this is something that I'm legitimately curious about.
[00:17:17]  When was the kind of the fulcrum moment or instances you can point to where all of a sudden you have Goldman is one example, but Goldman, they're directionless, right?
[00:17:29]  They're spineless.
[00:17:30]  Yeah.
[00:17:31]  But let's take a company like Coca-Cola.
[00:17:34]  Yeah.
[00:17:35]  Okay.
[00:17:36]  So you got to explain that one to me, right?
[00:17:37]  And not so you see what I'm saying?
[00:17:39]  Like, so let's that change.
[00:17:41]  Yeah.
[00:17:42]  So Occupy Wall Street, the 2008 financial crisis, that was the equivalent of the Big Bang, but things proceed from the Big Bang at the beginning.
[00:17:48]  So then, you know, you begin, let's talk about Silicon Valley and I'll get to the rest of corporate America.
[00:17:51]  Silicon Valley sees what Wall Street did and recognizes that the old left used to be the threat to their power structure, just like Wall Street.
[00:17:58]  But what they recognize is if they could then lend it's like it's like a loaning relationship.
[00:18:02]  If they could lend their corporate power to advance certain of that strand of the left's objectives, then they would expect that the new left look the other way when it came to leaving their own monopoly power intact.
[00:18:14]  And so then you begin to see the rise of content moderation, their code word for censorship, really, to be able to censor certain ideas that that new woke left doesn't want to see online.
[00:18:24]  But again, they did not do it for free.
[00:18:26]  They effectively expect that that new ascendant strand of the left looks the other way when it came to leaving their monopoly power intact.
[00:18:33]  And that worked so masterfully that the rest of corporate America gets in on the act.
[00:18:36]  So you ask about Coca-Cola.
[00:18:38]  Fine.
[00:18:38]  If you're Coca-Cola, you would rather teach your employees how to be less white.
[00:18:43]  I'm quoting it exactly from a training module they ran earlier this year.
[00:18:46]  That's a real thing.
[00:18:47]  That's correct.
[00:18:47]  That's a real thing.
[00:18:48]  I'm not making that up.
[00:18:49]  It's an employee training that they provided via LinkedIn earlier this year.
[00:18:53]  Or you'd rather preach about new voting laws in Georgia that make you sound more like a super PAC than a software manufacturer.
[00:18:59]  But that is a great way, Charlie, of changing the subject away from, say, the impact of your own products on the nationwide epidemic of diabetes and obesity, including in the black community, by the way, that they profess to care so much about.
[00:19:13]  So it's kind of the Wall Street, Silicon Valley game.
[00:19:15]  They're just copying.
[00:19:16]  I've seen it in pharma.
[00:19:17]  I've seen it in apparel, Nike.
[00:19:18]  I mean, the list of examples goes on, but that's the way this game is played.
[00:19:22]  So what you're saying in the Coca-Cola example is that it is public relations smokescreen, right?
[00:19:28]  They could pull the grenade and they can distract the audience and they can send a flare in the other direction, like, oh, look at us because we're being equitable.
[00:19:37]  By the way, don't look at how we're making America really obese or overweight, right?
[00:19:41]  That exactly, which could invite public ire, which could invite regulation.
[00:19:45]  I like the word smokescreen.
[00:19:46]  It's sort of the equivalent of blowing woke smoke to be able to deflect accountability from the issues they would rather not talk about.
[00:19:53]  Yeah.
[00:19:53]  So, but so, but I'm sure every company is a little bit different, but they have many similarities, right?
[00:19:59]  So, what you're saying, though, is that the two kinds of places of incubation that this was happening was the Wall Streets and the Silicon Valley.
[00:20:08]  My thesis, which is expanding thanks to your contribution and others, is that our campuses and the radicalization of colleges played, it was a contributing factor in this, meaning that the supply of labor was so increasingly radical.
[00:20:21]  Can you talk about that a little bit?
[00:20:23]  Absolutely.
[00:20:24]  So, Charlie, you're clearly thinking deeply about this stuff, so we can maybe get right into it.
[00:20:29]  This whole woke capitalism thing isn't just one phenomenon, right?
[00:20:32]  And there's no silver bullet explanation.
[00:20:34]  It's not just the Occupy Wall Street thing.
[00:20:35]  That's one of many strands that kind of conspired at the same time.
[00:20:39]  Around the same time, Charlie, what you also have is bottom-up consumer demand.
[00:20:43]  And many companies are doing this not to betray their shareholders, but because they think and they may actually make more money by signaling their virtue, because you now have an entire generation graduating from colleges, millennials, people my age, Gen Z, presumably your age.
[00:20:57]  I mean, these are people who are hungry for a cause, hungry for a sense of purpose, hungry for identity.
[00:21:04]  But the kinds of things that used to fill that moral identity for a generation-faith, patriotism, hard work, family, as they have receded in our generation's consciousness, what you see is a new moral void that we need to fill with something.
[00:21:19]  And that's part of what makes wokeism so appealing to fill that void, especially when you're secular religion.
[00:21:24]  You're exactly, it's an absolutely secular religion.
[00:21:26]  It's a religion nonetheless.
[00:21:27]  It's a much less forgiving religion than conventional religion because there's no redemption in the risk of God.
[00:21:32]  Yes, no, it makes the it makes the Inquisition look like a magnanimous endeavor.
[00:21:37]  And I'm not kidding.
[00:21:39]  Exactly.
[00:21:39]  You know, speaking about the Inquisition, I can tell you a funny analogy about the Spanish Inquisition later that I talk about in my book, but that's effectively what's going on in this new generation: we have a moral hunger that we're trying to fill with the equivalent of fast food of wokeism.
[00:21:54]  That you go to Ben and Jerry's and get a cup of ice cream with a cup of morality on the side.

=== Magnesium For Sleep (03:45) ===

[00:21:58]  That is not the way virtue works.
[00:22:00]  It is a lot harder that you need to fill that with more substantial fare.
[00:22:04]  And that's what I think we're missing in the minds of an entire generation.
[00:22:07]  And Charlie, you've talked about all that stuff.
[00:22:09]  A lot of other smart people have commented on it.
[00:22:11]  So I'm going to try to point out some things that others haven't commented on that I think contribute to this generational factor too.
[00:22:18]  We are in the middle of the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in human history.
[00:22:23]  Let's go.
[00:22:23]  Okay.
[00:22:24]  From baby boomers to millennials and Gen Z. That's just a fact.
[00:22:27]  Now, Ludwig von Mises, one of the famous Austrian economists of the last century, said it better than I ever could when he described the fact that anti-capitalism is born of capitalism itself.
[00:22:38]  It fulfills a psychological need created by capitalism.
[00:22:42]  What does that mean?
[00:22:43]  If you're the son of a great man, there's two ways to exceed your father.
[00:22:47]  One is on his own terms, which is by definition hard to do.
[00:22:50]  And the other is by exhibiting moral superiority, which is easier to do because it's subjective.
[00:22:55]  What do you have on a generational scale writ large?
[00:22:59]  Effectively, what you're seeing now in the largest intergenerational transfer between a generation of baby boomers and a generation of millennials in Gen Z who may not be able to live up to the accomplishments of their predecessors.
[00:23:08]  How do you achieve that?
[00:23:09]  Through moral superiority by blaming them for your inherited whiteness or whatever.
[00:23:13]  And it fits the bill perfectly, by the way, because you don't even have accountability for it.
[00:23:16]  It's some genetic trait that's the fault of your ancestors.
[00:23:19]  So I think that's kind of the psychic issue that we see in an entire generation today, combined with the diversity decade, combined with the 2008 financial crisis and corporate America feeding and preying on those moral insecurities of a generation, like a Virginia Slims manufacturer trying to advertise to teenage girls in the 1990s.
[00:23:37]  That is what corporate America is doing to an entire generation, preying not on our body image insecurities, but our moral insecurities.
[00:23:43]  So it's all complicated, but these are all contributing factors to getting to a complicated place where we are as a culture.
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=== Economic Identity Crisis (15:28) ===

[00:25:44]  There's many separate elements that are all playing kind of at once in this.
[00:25:49]  And so, but also, I'm just curious.
[00:25:53]  You say that some of their consultants are probably doing these, you know, exhausting 300-page PowerPoint slideshows that people fall asleep in in boardrooms of their market research that they did about how young 16-year-old girls want to be part of a purpose and they want to be virtue signaled to.
[00:26:09]  And, you know, they want to see that you stand with Planned Parenthood, whatever sort of nauseating thing.
[00:26:13]  But I'm curious, though, is that all the smart people from McKinsey and all these soulless apparatchiks that run our corporations, do they ever worry about the cost?
[00:26:24]  Do they ever worry about how this might be bad for business?
[00:26:28]  Yeah.
[00:26:28]  So I don't think they're worrying enough about it.
[00:26:31]  And the reason is they haven't been given occasion to have worried about it enough.
[00:26:35]  And so I'll tell you one of the struggles I'm going through, Charlie.
[00:26:38]  I mean, I'm not a, you know, I happen to have written a book.
[00:26:40]  I'm writing another one, but I don't think of myself as a commentator or an author.
[00:26:43]  I'm an entrepreneur.
[00:26:44]  I do things, right?
[00:26:45]  And so how can I sort of drive change in a positive direction?
[00:26:49]  And look, here's what I think could work.
[00:26:52]  And here's my reservation about it.
[00:26:54]  And here's why I still think it's a good strategy.
[00:26:56]  Here's what I think could work: corporate America will respond to one thing, getting hit where it hurts in their pocketbook.
[00:27:01]  And I think right now there are 70 plus, 75 plus million Americans who are disaffected from their economy, who are disaffected from their culture, who are quietly kind of forced to buy products or to work at places that don't actually respect them and they know it.
[00:27:16]  And I think that's bad for our culture.
[00:27:18]  Now, what does that mean in terms of a business opportunity?
[00:27:21]  Black Rifle Coffee just listed or announced a deal to go public via SPAC for $1.7 billion, whatever it was a couple of days ago.
[00:27:28]  That's the right-wing version of Starbucks coffee.
[00:27:31]  Do I really want to live in a country where there's a Republican form of coffee and a Democratic form of coffee?
[00:27:36]  Or dare I say one day a Republican or a right-wing version of baseball and a left-wing version of baseball?
[00:27:43]  I don't actually.
[00:27:44]  I want to live in an economy that brings us together across our political divisions, across our cultural divisions, across our racial or other divisions.
[00:27:53]  That's the real private sector we ought to live in in America to thrive.
[00:27:56]  And so, as an entrepreneur, I'm really skittish about the idea of creating a right-wing alt version of an economy.
[00:28:02]  That being said, I think the next step has to be to create market solutions and alternatives that respect that group of 70, 75 million Americans with companies that do share their values, to tell them that they're important and valued, to bring them back in to steal customers, to take those customers from the rest of corporate America, which will then, I hope, have the effect of not allowing those alternative businesses to succeed massively unchecked.
[00:28:28]  But the rest of corporate America, they then wake up and say, oh my God, we missed that.
[00:28:31]  We got that wrong and swing the pendulum back.
[00:28:33]  That's where I'd like to go, not to two economies, but to use that to be able to catalyze a return to normalcy of what our private sector is supposed to represent in a political space that brings us together.
[00:28:44]  So now I want to talk about the internal dynamics, because part of what you talked about is how they outwardly express themselves, right?
[00:28:52]  So they signal to consumers.
[00:28:54]  But now I want to talk about how it's becoming more and more difficult for an American economy to compete if you have internal woke dynamics.
[00:29:02]  The best example I could use is Activision Blizzard, which is the video game company.
[00:29:06]  You may or may not be following this drama right now, but where they say they need to hire more women programmers and that they need to have, you know, more time off to be able to center themselves because the extra pressure in work.
[00:29:19]  Can you talk about how this actually makes the American economy at a competitive disadvantage?
[00:29:25]  It actually makes our companies kind of into these outgrowths of college campus kind of places of mediocrity that aren't necessarily pushing the boundaries of new breakthroughs or patents, but are just kind of basically checking boxes.
[00:29:42]  Talk about the internal dynamics of how damaging this is.
[00:29:44]  Sure.
[00:29:45]  So this is near and dear to my heart, Charlie.
[00:29:47]  And this actually, I've just started to write my second book.
[00:29:50]  And this is at the heart of that question, which is the pursuit of excellence in America.
[00:29:53]  So, you know, even if you just think about it in sports, to take even some trivial examples, Simone Biles withdraws at the peak of the Olympics this year, representing the U.S., and the media culture celebrates her for making that decision.
[00:30:04]  I don't fault her decision.
[00:30:05]  I do fault a media culture that celebrates it.
[00:30:07]  Naomi Osaka, a tennis player from the United States, does nearly the exact same thing just two months earlier.
[00:30:13]  Is that entirely unrelated to Naomi Osaka's decision to give up her U.S. citizenship a few years earlier or the rise of intersectionality as a theory of identity amongst young black women?
[00:30:25]  I don't think so.
[00:30:26]  And I think you're putting your finger on the right pulse, Charlie.
[00:30:28]  This is pervasive.
[00:30:29]  Asian American kids now in the classroom are taught to pretend to not pursue something other than excellence in math and science because it's not cool to be number one anymore.
[00:30:38]  Standardized testing is ridiculed as racist.
[00:30:41]  Talking about American exceptionalism is now considered gauche.
[00:30:45]  What I think has happened is we have this inner animal spirit at the heart of the American soul.
[00:30:50]  That animal spirit has been domesticated and tamed by this new culture that penalizes excellence and celebrates mediocrity and victimhood.
[00:31:00]  And the old American spirit has now traveled oceans to lift up places like China, while the old communist spirit from China has actually come over here to the United States to tame our culture of excellence.
[00:31:11]  And I think the country is in our culture is hungry for a revival of that excellence in a way that transcends political boundaries.
[00:31:18]  Personally, I think that when a lot of Americans rallied behind the cry to make America great again, they didn't hunger for a single man.
[00:31:25]  They hungered for reviving that unapologetic pursuit, uninhibited pursuit of excellence in this country and by this country on the global stage.
[00:31:35]  That's what we've lost.
[00:31:36]  But I don't think the solution is just to complain about it or to see the spread of victimhood culture, Charlie, which is something I worry about, not just in the black victimhood context, though I think that's a problem that I want to be open about.
[00:31:47]  I also worry about now the emergence of white victimhood culture in response to say that, oh, yeah, well, you guys are victims.
[00:31:53]  We're bigger victims too and play the victimhood Olympics that second generation Asian American kids are now getting in on too by reinventing themselves as persons of color or whatever disempowerment narrative they want to foist on themselves.
[00:32:03]  going through struggles that actually their parents went through, but they never went through in the first place.
[00:32:07]  That's the moment we're in in America where victimhood has become a currency.
[00:32:11]  That currency is trading at a bubble.
[00:32:13]  Everybody's cashing it in before that bubble bursts.
[00:32:16]  I want to see that bubble burst because I'd like to see the revival of an excellence first culture that goes to the heart of what it means to be American.
[00:32:23]  And so if you can't tell, I'm pretty passionate about this topic.
[00:32:25]  It means a lot to me.
[00:32:26]  It's part of why my parents came to this country.
[00:32:28]  It's part of why I think a lot of legal immigrants come to this country legally.
[00:32:31]  And I think it's something that we ought to revive in our culture.
[00:32:34]  Black, white, brown, gay, straight, man, woman.
[00:32:37]  That's part of what we need to bring back to life again.
[00:32:39]  For good reason.
[00:32:40]  And so now I want to talk.
[00:32:42]  You mentioned this earlier that only capitalism can breed anti-capital.
[00:32:46]  Anti-capitalism is only a symptom of capitalism, which is that at, you know, we look at the state of affairs in America that the ability to be woke is made possible thanks to the affluence and the incredible wealth we have in this country, which affluence covers a multitude of sins or the abundance or the amount of stuff that we have.
[00:33:10]  If I could just be as blunt as possible.
[00:33:13]  Can you talk a little bit about how this is a luxury that, of course, we are abusing?
[00:33:18]  But also, I want you to go a level deeper, which is that the way our economy is currently structured is that we have companies that I think have unrealistic and quite honestly unearned profit margins that have been able to largely subsidize these social movements because they just, they don't want to deal with it.
[00:33:38]  And I'm talking about Facebook.
[00:33:39]  I'm talking about Google.
[00:33:40]  I'm talking about JP Morgan, where the guy that's running a 55-person restaurant in the Woodlands, Texas, he's like, I don't have time to see my kids, let alone worry about social movements.
[00:33:52]  Talk about those two things, the wealth component, but then also the actual, how our economy has been digitized and how that frees up people for purpose-filled social movements.
[00:34:02]  Yeah.
[00:34:02]  So, Charlie, we're going to go deeper than I usually do in these conversations because your questions are just getting there.
[00:34:08]  So, let's go there.
[00:34:09]  I think the first point is a simple one, which is that wokeness is actually an indicator of affluence in a society.
[00:34:16]  It is a symptom of a lazy turpitude that comes from affluence.
[00:34:20]  There's a reason that you don't see the woke movement popping up in poor countries is they have bigger concerns to be able to put food on the dinner table.
[00:34:28]  It is the ultimate privilege to be woke.
[00:34:30]  There's no doubt about that.
[00:34:31]  That's exactly right.
[00:34:34]  Did you know that if you shop at Nike, they turn around and give your hard-earned dollars to pro-abortion groups like Planned Parenthood and the Population Council?
[00:34:42]  Sinister folks, by the way.
[00:34:43]  Did you know that Airbnb gave $500,000 to the Marxist BLM incorporated organization?
[00:34:51]  Your first vote is at the ballot box, but that isn't enough to defend our traditional Judeo-Christian values.
[00:34:59]  Left-wing corporations are subverting our nation and our republic by taking money from conservative customers and giving it to radical organizations that support abortion, gun control, and critical race theory.
[00:35:12]  You have another vote, a second vote at the checkout line, which is why there's a massively important organization called Second Vote that comes in.
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[00:36:41]  Maybe it's like, hey, I don't know if the car I'm buying, are they donating to Planned Parenthood?
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[00:37:00]  The question is, though, in what way did we generate that privileged status, that temporary mirage of prosperity, which I actually think is itself partly a mirage, driven by something that people on the left and the right, I think, don't understand enough to be able to talk about today well.
[00:37:14]  But I think it's one of the issues that we ought to talk about, which is chronic easy money policy from the Fed.
[00:37:19]  Yes, that's exactly.
[00:37:20]  You actually have, I personally think that trickle-down economics works when it's an economic gain and productivity gain that's driven by real productivity gains in a real economy.
[00:37:31]  Then everybody benefits.
[00:37:33]  Where it doesn't quite work is where that wealth is generated in a society through a government that prints money, which allows certain people to ski on artificial snow.
[00:37:43]  If you follow me on the analogy, the way it works is the banks that are closest to the Fed get to borrow most of that money and there's a rake taken at every step down the system.
[00:37:52]  It doesn't filter down as well where everybody else gets to ski once a year, but the people who sit next to the artificial snow get to sticky on deep snow all year long.
[00:38:00]  So I think that that's part of our culture that we haven't talked enough about.
[00:38:05]  And there's another dimension to it as well, which is the rise of monopolies.
[00:38:09]  The rise of monopolies in a corporate culture actually creates a culture that insulates you from accountability.
[00:38:15]  Because if you're an engineer at Google today, it doesn't matter if you're male, female, trans, cis, gay, straight, it doesn't matter.
[00:38:24]  It doesn't even matter if you're competent because whether or not you do what you do, Google's still going to print the same cash flow that it did last year is it's going to print next year because that's the nature of a monopoly business.
[00:38:33]  But that actually creates a different kind of laziness inside Silicon Valley and inside these monopoly organizations that used to have to be challenged by startups.
[00:38:41]  But now many of those startups are flush with so much cash because the Federal Reserve keeps printing it every day That fosters a new form of excess in even the startup corporate culture today.
[00:38:49]  So, one of the things I've studied a lot is actually the fall of Rome and the fall before the fall.
[00:38:54]  That's actually the name of a book about the fall of Rome that I'd recommend to folks.
[00:38:57]  You know, I'm going to read it in the context of rereading it in the context of writing my next book.
[00:39:01]  But there's a lot in America that ought to remind us about some of the indicators of the fall of an empire that were present in the fall of ancient Rome.
[00:39:09]  And I view as leading indicators of what's present in the United States today.
[00:39:12]  If we don't wake up to that and reverse course, the new culture of laziness that doesn't just come from woke culture, though that's a big part of it, but it also comes from policies that make the generation of temporary paper wealth too easy due to Federal Reserve policy, due to easy money policies, due to the rise of monopolies as the leading businesses in our sectors that foster a generational culture of laziness.
[00:39:34]  Now, later on to that over the last year, government policy that sends people's checks, it's like showering cocaine on a bunch of drug addicts that ultimately, when you even stop sending those checks, people have forgotten how to work and don't want to go back to work.
[00:39:45]  So, this is a cultural issue that runs deep.
[00:39:48]  And not a lot of people, either on the right or on the left, are really understand the root causes or are able to get to the heart of what's happening in a way that could help drive our change for the better.
[00:39:56]  It's part of why I'm doing what I'm doing.
[00:39:58]  I couldn't agree with that more.
[00:39:59]  And I think that many Republicans that talk about this issue are so superficial, they're so surface-level.
[00:40:04]  Like, oh, businesses have to stop talking about politics.
[00:40:07]  Like, yeah, that's the result.
[00:40:09]  Okay, that would be a great end game.
[00:40:11]  Let's let's have a little bit of a diagnostic conversation.
[00:40:14]  I think this conversation here has been super healthy in that regard.
[00:40:18]  To your Roman analogy, the question is: where on the Roman arc are we?
[00:40:21]  Are we at the first triumphant, the second triumphant?
[00:40:24]  You know, the transition from the emperor empire to the uh from the republic to the empire, or are we a little bit more kind of near Marcus Aurelius, which would be the last gasp of Rome?
[00:40:33]  I don't know.
[00:40:34]  We'll see.
[00:40:34]  I don't think we're at Marcus Aurelius yet.
[00:40:36]  I think, I think that might be about 10 years.
[00:40:38]  If the kids who are entering first grade today graduate from 12th grade before we fixed it, I think we're at Marcus Aurelius.
[00:40:43]  Okay, but I don't think we're I don't think we're quite there.
[00:40:44]  I think we're in the transition phase that preceded it.
[00:40:47]  Okay, the transition to sort of a decadent empire.
[00:40:51]  So, we're in Caligula, is what you're saying.
[00:40:53]  Yeah, yeah, I think that's about right.
[00:40:54]  That's kind of, I don't want to commit myself to that because I want to be really precise, but you're in the right zip.
[00:41:00]  The problem is Nero came after Caligula.
[00:41:02]  So, yeah, yeah, exactly.
[00:41:04]  Exactly.
[00:41:05]  And so, so I, but in our culture, like in Roman culture, I don't think it's just about the leadership, it's also about the culture that preceded that leadership.

=== Roman Empire Decline (05:19) ===

[00:41:12]  Now, in exceptional circumstances, great leaders can make a difference, even in the American context.
[00:41:18]  I think we're going through an American identity crisis now.
[00:41:20]  It's not our first identity crisis.
[00:41:21]  I think we went through an identity crisis in the 70s, at the end of the 70s.
[00:41:25]  I think we were in the midst of an American identity crisis, a crisis for the identity of American greatness.
[00:41:30]  Yes, and out of that, you create the selective conditions for the emergence of a great leader.
[00:41:36]  Reagan at the end of the 80s ultimately set the tone from the top that created not just an economic revival or a legal or governmental revival, but a cultural revival in this country that made everybody proud to be American today.
[00:41:47]  And the intangible benefits that come from that sort of revival of positivity in our culture is something that we continue to enjoy the fruits of to this day.
[00:41:56]  What I worry about is if we're in the 70s again without Reagan to save the day, I think that's going to be a very difficult path ahead for us in the next decade.
[00:42:05]  But I'm optimistic, Charlie, that actually the condition that we're in, as defeatist as it may seem to some, actually create the conditions for great leaders to step up.
[00:42:15]  And that's not just political leaders, that's cultural leaders, it's business leaders, it's civic leaders at every level.
[00:42:20]  That's what I'm thinking.
[00:42:21]  You know, the problem with Marcus Aurelius is his son was crazy.
[00:42:23]  Commodus was not and was absolutely nuts and never should have become emperor.
[00:42:26]  There's that's a whole different conversation for a different time.
[00:42:29]  Um, just read meditations, it'll tell you everything you need to know.
[00:42:32]  Okay, so let's let me close this conversation.
[00:42:34]  My wife's favorite book, actually.
[00:42:35]  Yeah, huh?
[00:42:36]  It's my wife's favorite book.
[00:42:37]  So I sometimes see it on the bed.
[00:42:38]  Stoic thing.
[00:42:40]  Yeah.
[00:42:40]  Very good.
[00:42:41]  Exactly.
[00:42:41]  Very much so.
[00:42:42]  She's a stoic.
[00:42:43]  I'm sympathetic to stoic philosophy and take some of it, channel some of its intuitions, but I'm too.
[00:42:47]  I believe in the power of passion.
[00:42:49]  Yeah.
[00:42:49]  The power of passion.
[00:42:51]  It sounds very Nietzschean.
[00:42:52]  Are you like a will to power, will to meaning, or the power of passion?
[00:42:57]  Yeah, I'm not a Nietzschean, but I learned a lot from reading Nietzsche.
[00:43:00]  But I think that the power of passion, I think he and I can share in common.
[00:43:04]  That's true.
[00:43:05]  The will is the most important thing, some would say.
[00:43:08]  I would, I, um, that's a different conversation at a different time.
[00:43:11]  Fascinating.
[00:43:12]  That actually connects a lot of dots of kind of your passion for this topic.
[00:43:17]  No pun intended.
[00:43:18]  Last thing, because I know that I want to be very precise on time.
[00:43:23]  You mentioned this briefly.
[00:43:24]  I want to mention secondvote.com.
[00:43:26]  Secondvote.com is a place that rates all these companies based on their wokeism and kind of their score.
[00:43:33]  What can people do?
[00:43:35]  I know you say the products, but what else?
[00:43:37]  Start new businesses, talk about this.
[00:43:39]  What can people do to push back against the woke industrial complex?
[00:43:44]  Yeah, so look, I think there's a political limb to the solution, and I think there's a private sector cultural limb to the solution.
[00:43:49]  I think the political solutions are simpler, but not ones I'm banking on.
[00:43:53]  I think we should make political belief a civil right, both at the state level and national level, to say that if you can't fire somebody or de-platform somebody because they're black or gay or Muslim or white or Christian or Jewish or whatever, you should not be able to fire somebody or de-platform somebody just because they're an outspoken conservative or liberal for that matter either.
[00:44:11]  So I think there's some simple policy solutions.
[00:44:13]  I won't bore you with those here.
[00:44:14]  I lay out a lot of those in the book.
[00:44:17]  I also think there's an opportunity for real entrepreneurs to build businesses that are built with the values of the 75 million in mind, with the unapologetic idea that we are one nation under God, that the Bill of Rights is non-negotiable, that the content of your character trumps the color of your skin, and that capitalism is the best system to have ever lifted people up out of poverty.
[00:44:35]  And we won't apologize for it.
[00:44:37]  How's that for an alternative to an ESG or DEI orthodoxy?
[00:44:40]  I think that would speak to a lot of Americans.
[00:44:42]  I think there's opportunity.
[00:44:43]  I don't want to see two economies, but if done the right way, I think that could actually bring us together.
[00:44:48]  And then I think the most important part, though, Charlie, is really reviving the idea of American identity in the next generation, because that's ultimately where the most important battle line rests today.
[00:44:58]  And we have come off of a decade of celebrating our diversity and our differences that I think we've actually forgotten all of the ways in which we're the same as one people.
[00:45:07]  And make no mistake, I think our diversity is a beautiful thing.
[00:45:10]  But if our last decade was the diversity decade, I think the next decade ought to be about celebrating and reviving those few ideals that actually bind us together as one people to make that the hallmark of civic education in a new generation that ultimately make the struggles of even our generation now when we're older men, you know, be able to seem trivial by comparison relative to what we will have cultivated in the next generation.
[00:45:33]  That's what I'd like to see is the revival of that shared national, common American identity.
[00:45:38]  Call it nationalism if you want.
[00:45:40]  I don't care.
[00:45:40]  It's a nationalism of ideas that ultimately define what it means to be American that hopefully dilutes this woke agenda and its postmodern cousins to irrelevance.
[00:45:49]  Woke Inc., everyone, go buy it right now inside corporate America's social justice scam.
[00:45:56]  Every person listening, if you have kids going into corporate America, if you work in corporate America, you've got to check it out.
[00:46:02]  The Vaik, Ramaswamy.
[00:46:05]  Do that okay?
[00:46:06]  You did well.
[00:46:07]  Thank you.
[00:46:08]  All right.
[00:46:08]  God bless you.
[00:46:09]  Thanks for coming on.
[00:46:09]  Thanks for having me.
[00:46:13]  Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
[00:46:14]  Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:46:17]  And if you want to support our podcast, you can do so at charliekirk.com slash support.
[00:46:22]  Thank you so much for listening, everybody.
[00:46:23]  God bless.
[00:46:25]  Speak to you soon.
[00:46:28]  For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.