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Sept. 18, 2022 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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Why Companies Went Woke — It's Not What You Think | Vivek Ramaswamy | POLITICS | Rubin Report
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vivek ramaswamy
Wall Street realized they could go from being the bad guys after the 08 crisis to being the good guys if they just said the right things.
Mews about diversity and inclusion.
Mews about the unjust impact of climate change after you fly in a private jet to Davos.
It's pretty good work if you can get it.
It was a cynical arranged marriage though between two Partners in that marriage that did not particularly love or respect one another.
Big business in the neo-progressive woke movement.
But together, they were each able to get something out of the trade.
It was more like mutual prostitution.
And that was what led to the birth of woke ink.
It wasn't just woke and it wasn't just the ink.
It was both of them.
dave rubin
I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is the co-founder of Strive Asset Management as well
as the author of the brand new book, Nation of Victims, Identity Politics, the Death of
Merit and the Path Back to Excellence, Vivek Ramaswamy.
Welcome, finally, to The Rubin Report.
vivek ramaswamy
Good to talk to you, man.
How are you?
dave rubin
I am doing well.
I have wanted to have you on for quite some time, and then about, I don't know, it was about four or five months ago, I was hosting a PragerU event in West Palm, and you were one of the keynote speakers, and you actually blew me away.
You're a phenomenal public speaker, great way of connecting with the audience.
Talking about all the things that I'm always yammering on about.
So that's what I want to dive into on the show today.
But before we get into business and why you're doing this and the book, give me a little Vivek 101, a little backstory of little Vivek and what got him to be this power player in business and culture.
vivek ramaswamy
Yeah, I don't know.
I can't promise all the answers, but I can tell you a little bit about my story.
I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio.
My parents were immigrants from India.
My dad came over in the late 70s, my mom in the early 80s.
And, you know, we would frequently joke around about why on earth you came halfway around the world to Southwest Ohio.
And my dad's reason for coming was that his older sister was in Fort Wayne, Indiana, which of course begged the question of why she came halfway around the world to Fort Wayne, Indiana.
And our family joke is that it is the only US state with the word India contained in the name of the state.
So that gives you a sense of what the upbringing was.
Corny jokes in the Midwest.
And that was the immigrant upbringing, which I could tell you all about.
Some of that's in the book, actually.
But anyway, I ended up going into science first.
I went to Harvard, studied molecular biology, thought I was going to be a scientist.
Ended up in the world of biotech investing, which I did for seven years from 2007 to 2014.
About three years in, I had this itch to study law and political philosophy.
I had been such a science-centric guy that I told my bosses that I was going to leave my hedge fund job and go to law school.
I had a seat at Yale.
They said, keep your job, keep managing a portfolio if you want.
I said, that sounds great.
So I did that for three years from 2010 to 2013.
When I graduated, I no longer had law school on my docket.
So I used the extra time.
For an ignominious short-lived stint as a stand-up comedian in New York City.
That did not work out well.
It was humbling.
What year was that?
unidentified
That was 2013 and early 2014.
dave rubin
What year was that?
vivek ramaswamy
That was 2013 and early 2014.
So 2013 was when I did my 10 shows.
dave rubin
I wonder, man, if we crossed paths at that time.
That was like right around when I was in the thick of it over there.
vivek ramaswamy
Do you remember what clubs you were doing?
dave rubin
Were you in comedy as well?
Oh yeah, I used to be funny, man.
Long time ago.
vivek ramaswamy
Okay, so I did like Broadway, Comedy Club, Gotham, a couple other places.
Yeah.
dave rubin
Yeah, yeah.
vivek ramaswamy
That's pretty funny.
dave rubin
10 shows and then you're retired, huh?
vivek ramaswamy
Yeah, and then I hung the jersey on that due to the better advice of friends and family who were, you know, very honest audience members.
But anyway, then I Yeah, it's a long story, but led me to the doorstep of founding my company, which was a biotech company that, you know, all the things that I saw from my career as an investor that frustrated me as an outside investor in biotech, I wanted to fix, decided to do it by starting a company.
And so built the company, led it as CEO from 2014 to 2021.
We developed a number of medicines, some of them failed, some of them worked, five of them are FDA approved products today, which I'm incredibly proud of.
But at the end of the day, I ended up having to step down in 2021 to focus on what I saw as a new cancer, a cultural cancer that threatened the very dream that allowed me to achieve everything I ever had in my life.
And, you know, look, I was worried about this new trend about the merger of corporate power and state power to advance political agendas through the private sector.
I had some of those firsthand experiences myself in my experience as a CEO of a multi-billion dollar biotech company, there were some demands that came with it that I thought were threatening to the system of American capitalism and democracy.
And so that led me to step aside to write my first book, which was Woke Inc., which I think you might be familiar with.
I published that book, enjoyed for a year and a half traveling around the country, no agenda, just Speaking my mind freely without any corporate agenda, any political agenda.
Really enjoyed that.
That led to my second book as well, which was a sequel to Woke Inc.
That's the one that we're talking about now.
But I decided that I wasn't going to just change the world by writing books.
I needed to do something about the problems I was describing.
And that's what led me also more recently to found Strive, which is our new firm competing directly against BlackRock.
So that's sort of the life career journey in a nutshell.
unidentified
All right.
dave rubin
You gave me a lot of avenues to go down.
So let's back up for a second, because obviously I want to talk about Strive and I want to talk about the new book.
But Woke Inc., I mean, basically, you know, you were laying out that this woke thing that we were all seeing It's going through the universities, it's on television everywhere, you turn on Apple TV, that it's not just sort of this organic thing coming from kids off Tumblr, that there actually is an organizational ideology behind it.
So can you talk about that a little bit?
Because people always ask me, either when I do Q&As on the show or I go out publicly, where is it coming from?
unidentified
What is driving it truly?
vivek ramaswamy
Yes, I mean, look, that took a whole separate book length work to describe.
But one of the things I said in that book was that it was when wokeness met capitalism, that it actually became unstoppable.
And it was supercharged with the dollars that flow through our system of free market American capitalism.
That's when it really became not just a challenge to the system, it became the system.
And it happened in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.
And I saw this firsthand, right?
Got my first job at that hedge fund in New York City in the fall of 2007, on the eve of the 08 crisis.
And the long story short, and it is a long story, and it was, you know, it was my last book, so we could go on for hours about this one, but the short version of it is that Wall Street realized they could go from being the bad guys after the 08 crisis to being the good guys if they just said the right things.
Muse about diversity and inclusion.
Muse about the unjust impact of climate change after you fly in a private jet to Davos.
It's pretty good work, if you can get it.
It was a cynical arranged marriage, though, between two partners in that marriage that did not particularly love or respect one another.
Big business in the neo-progressive woke movement.
But together, they were each able to get something out of the trade.
It was more like mutual prostitution.
And that was what led to the birth of Woke Inc.
It wasn't just woke, and it wasn't just the Inc.
It was both of them.
And that's what that whole tale was about.
I will tell you that over the course of writing that book, though, I was interested in both the corporate cynicism behind it, which is what that book ended up being about.
But I was also interested in the content of the underlying ideology as well.
And so the publisher kind of told me and advisors who helped me put that book together said, Look, you got to pick one or the other.
Start with the first one.
And then and then actually, the unfinished work was what led to Nation of Victims, which is which is the book that I'm putting out now.
So that was that was a bit of the journey of the two books.
The first one was really about The corporate financial fuel.
And the second book is really about the underlying flyer, the fire, the conflagration on which corporations threw that fuel.
dave rubin
And together, I think- I assume that the irony should not be lost on anyone that as you describe it, it was capitalism that allowed this thing to be unleashed, which is virulently anti-capitalist?
vivek ramaswamy
Of course.
And you know what?
Ludwig von Mises, a famous economist, you know, Schumpeter, Joseph Schumpeter himself, you know, said very similar things.
This is early 20th century stuff from von Mises that capitalism creates a psychological need filled by anti-capitalism.
You know, Schumpeter kind of predicted the same thing, the system of creative destruction, but first capitalism gives rise, necessarily paves the way to socialism.
That was kind of Schumpeter's thesis.
And it's interesting, you know, we see their predictions play out in the moment that you and I live in.
I mean, you're technically a millennial.
You're a millennial as well.
dave rubin
I'm, I believe I'm 46, my friend.
I am.
vivek ramaswamy
So you're on the other side of the bridge.
dave rubin
I am Gen X. I am Gen X. You look good, man.
vivek ramaswamy
So I don't know, but I'm a millennial.
So I'm, what, 37 now.
My generation, I was going to say our generation, but we'll call it my generation.
dave rubin
I have a lot of younger friends.
unidentified
That's good.
vivek ramaswamy
You know, whatever.
You get it.
It's a spectrum anyway.
Your generation, sort of the younger part of your generation counts in this.
But the millennials in particular, we're on the receiving end.
I mean, I'm personally not on the receiving end of this.
Millennials as a generation on the receiving end of the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in human history.
And there's something about that that creates the psychological need for self criticism and criticism of the very system that created the wealth that you're otherwise going to be on the receiving end of, but without actually making the sacrifice of giving up that inheritance, be able to apologize for it with this new self found consciousness of your of your privilege or whatever it is that lies at the heart of the apologism that characterizes, and I don't even use the word woke
anymore because it's sort of become a tired word, but the modern neo-progressive movement, the apologist
culture that's really at the heart of my next book, which is the victimhood culture that permeates
our American fabric today.
dave rubin
Are you surprised that it rampaged through so many businesses?
I mean, businesses that were or should be based on actual numbers.
It's one thing, okay, it rampages through an entertainment company, you know, somebody making movies, TV shows, et cetera, but like seemingly everything, accounting firms and banks, like the whole freaking thing that, you know, these are people that actually have to look at numbers and make sense based on reality, or at least they're supposed to.
vivek ramaswamy
Yeah, you know, at first it's surprising.
Of course, it's counterintuitive, right?
That's why it made for an interesting book.
But when you examine it, it's actually not surprising at all, because it serves the interests of many of the people who are the biggest propagators of this new ideology.
I mean, look, Larry Fink at BlackRock used this as a philosophy to aggregate over $10 trillion, creating the world's assets under management.
That's something that he couldn't have done if it weren't for filling the void created by the 2008 financial crisis and telling people that this was actually the new capitalism itself.
And so, you know, I think the people on top, by the way, without saying an iota about those same words in China, how do you know it's in their self-interest?
You talk about ESG or DEI or CSR or whatever your three favorite three letter acronym is.
When they go over to the other three letter acronym, from ESG, DEI and CSR to CCP, to be able to do business in China without saying a peep about ESG or DEI, because that's what it pays to do over there.
And the United States had paid to do it because pension funds like California, CalPERS, State of New York, they said, we're only going to do business with firms that adopt these progressive commitments.
Well, they said, you know what, those are where the biggest checks are coming from.
That's the tune we're going to dance to.
And so in a certain sense, when the economic incentives were set up that way, it wasn't altogether surprising that people responded to those incentives.
I think, you know, in my new book, Nation of Victims, we sort of talk about that.
I talk about that at the individual level as well.
Why is victimhood culture so rampant in the United States?
It's a bit of a curiosity, right?
You know, we have living in the most prosperous moments in human history, in American history.
Why is it then that we fashion ourselves to think of ourselves as victims in every given direction?
Black victims, white victims, second generation Asian victims.
I mean, it's everywhere.
We've in certain senses created an incentive structure in our country that rewards someone for characterizing themselves as a victim, rather than as a victor.
And so I think that, you know, it doesn't, it's not, it's not a sort of a cheesy humans respond to incentives kind of argument all the way down.
But that is an important part of the story.
And it's certainly a part of the story that makes it less surprising than you'd otherwise think.
dave rubin
So I want to get to some of that psychology behind that.
Real quick, just to back up, I think most of my audience is following you on BlackRock and ESG and some of the other stuff, but for some of the people that are missing maybe some of the pieces here, first off, can you explain sort of what BlackRock is and how that is connected to ESG?
We've talked a bit about ESG on the show, but I think if we kind of lay it out somewhat simply, I think that'll help some people.
vivek ramaswamy
Yeah, absolutely.
So look, you know, the ESG movement, people hear this acronym, what is it?
Okay, so it stands for environmental, social and governance factors.
And it basically is a close cousin of a broader movement called stakeholder capitalism, which refers to the idea that businesses should not just sell products and services for profit, but they should also advance other societal agendas and other social interests.
Okay, that's the philosophy.
Agree or not, that's what it says.
Now, What that's become is a vehicle for government actors to effectuate through the private sector what they could not effectuate through the front door of policymaking.
So one example let's take is the climate agenda, the Green New Deal, whatever you may want to call it.
The Green New Deal did not muster political support to be passed through Congress.
Well, what the ESG movement offered was a vehicle to lean on many companies to sign what you call a climate pledge.
Instead, get every company to voluntarily, voluntarily by the way, I use that in air quotes because it's with the invisible fist of government behind it, but to voluntarily adopt net zero standards and pledges by 2050.
Unilateral pledges to support the Paris Climate Accords and abide by its demands, even though the US did not ratify the Paris Climate Accords, the Paris Climate Agreement, The private sector effectively ratifies it instead.
Actually, this is an aside.
I sent a public letter as a shareholder to the board of Chevron earlier this week, complaining amongst other things about a corporate behavior about Chevron embracing the Paris climate agreement, reminding them that the U.S.
did not ratify this.
It is not Chevron's job to use shareholder capital to ratify it instead, especially when it's not even in the best interest of that business.
So anyway, that's that's a bit about what this is, is, you know, let's just even the Silicon Valley censorship, I actually view that as a subset of this broader problem of stakeholder capitalism, and the ESG movement, people think about that as a separate issue.
I've written extensively about, you know, about that issue about how government actors About how private actors actually ought to be bound by the First Amendment if they're responding to government threats.
I was talking about that before that was cool, back when it was ridiculed as an idea about a year and a half ago.
dave rubin
Sort of like when Jen Psaki is admitting that the government flags posts about disinformation for Facebook, in essence.
unidentified
Absolutely.
vivek ramaswamy
And then threatens companies if they don't take down the posts that they're going to be, you know, they're going to be broken up that they're going to bring antitrust action, then companies do it.
But they say, hey, it's not the government doing it's just the free market.
And the First Amendment doesn't apply to the free market.
It's another example of government actors using private companies to do through the backdoor, the dirty work of government that it could not accomplish through the front door under the Constitution, or with political accountability.
So that's what this movement effectively represents.
Now, It's sort of in a takes two to tango spirit.
It only works if the consumers and individual investors, et cetera, in the economy still fall for it.
At the end of the day, if consumers would still resist this and not buy those products or individual investors who exercise their voice, not going to stand by this behavior, you know, this, this couldn't have existed.
But I think some of that relates to a culture, a moment of cultural weakness.
And so I think, I think there's, I think there's not one story here, but two storylines that are really important.
One is the top down problem where, you know, actors like Blackrock, You asked who they are.
They're the world's largest asset manager managing over $10 trillion of everyday citizens' money.
What they do is they manage that money by investing in American companies, but then to show up in the boardrooms of those companies and say that, you know what, we're not going to promote you, or we're not going to pay you, or we're going to vote your directors off unless you adopt these environmental and social agendas that we demand.
But they're using the money of everyday citizens To do it, most of those everyday citizens actually disagree with that agenda.
So that's the top down problem.
It's a, you know, it's a big breach of fiduciary duty using $10 trillion of someone else's money to advance political agendas that the everyday citizen, the owner of capital disagrees with.
That's the top down problem.
But the bottom up problem is we have a culture that's also falling for it and saying that, you know what, we actually do demand that companies behave in ways that align with our Neoprogressive values.
And then that gives those boardrooms cover to be able to say, well, this is what consumers are demanding.
And that's what allows Nike or Disney to behave in the way that it does.
So it's complicated.
And so the first book was basically woke Inc was about the top down problem, the problem of the woke capitalist, the use and abuse, the use, I should say, the abuse of capital to be able to effectuate these political agendas through the back door.
that government couldn't effectuate through the front door in that cynical arranged marriage.
But the second half of it is this other problem, the generational cultural problem,
that the victimhood cancer, that's the heart of Nation of Victims, the next book that explains
this cultural deficit that allows companies and government actors to cynically prey
on our cultural insecurities as a as a generation, and I think that's equally
an important part of the story.
dave rubin
Okay, so we'll get to that in a sec, because I think that's sort of the spiritual part of this
that I think many people are missing right now.
They keep thinking the answer to this problem is some sort of government answer,
and it's like, no, that's kind of how we got here.
But just to jump back for a second, you mentioned the fiduciary responsibility that these boards have to their shareholders.
Are you surprised or was there an example of a company where the shareholders were able to fight this effectively?
I mean, I remember literally on my show five or six years ago when Google AdSense was clamping down on everybody.
I had a couple guests in a row and I was calling for it too.
It's like, where are the shareholders who are going, well wait a minute, put censorship aside for a second.
If they are not putting ads on certain things, am I being hurt as a shareholder?
Like, are there any examples where the shareholders actually accomplish anything or lawsuits or anything?
vivek ramaswamy
Not a ton yet.
That's what I'm working on, man.
I started Strive.
So, Strive is a new firm competing with BlackRock.
We just sent a public letter to Chevron calling out a lot of these, you know, a lot of these behaviors that, crucially, though, were forced on them by BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard.
In many cases, Chevron actually said initially that they opposed these proposals, but then the large shareholders vote for them anyway.
And this is the problem, Drew, is that A lot of the movement that you would advocate for, shareholder-centric power, what they miss is that the 21st century version of this problem is different.
They've thrown a tripwire that a lot of us fell for, which was that they said, okay, Milton Friedman, you said that shareholders rule, right?
And company management teams report to shareholders.
Well, guess what?
We are the shareholder.
And we're demanding that you the company management adopt these social agendas.
You're not betraying your fiduciary duty to us.
You're actually working for us because we the shareholder Milton Friedman all along said it rule and you owe the duty to us and we the shareholder are demanding it.
So here's the fallacy in that argument.
But but but that's that's effectively what allowed this this problem to spread like wildfire.
Let's roll, let's roll.
of fiduciary duty to shareholder misses the fact that the shareholder, I use shareholder air quotes,
is actually the one pushing the agenda.
So to do this, we have to get a little academic for a second.
dave rubin
Do you- Let's roll, let's roll.
I got a bright audience.
You'll be all right.
vivek ramaswamy
I'll stop.
But okay.
So the whole shareholder primacy doctrine came from, it was a vestige of 20th century corporate law
and even Friedmanite thinking in the late 20th century that solved a problem called the separation of ownership
and control.
Okay, so the CEO has control of the firm, but the shareholder owns the firm.
They're not the same person that gives rise to what's called a principal agent conflict.
The shareholder is the principal, the CEO is the agent.
leads to the private jet problem of, you know, CEOs that are flying on private jets flying using the shareholder capital to do it, you know, that RJR Nabisco problem overspending.
Well, how do you close that gap?
It's by imposing a fiduciary duty on the CEO to the shareholder.
So Milton Friedman said the CEO can't pursue these social agendas without serving the interest of the shareholder.
That's where the fiduciary duty came from.
That's 20th century stuff.
It's called the separation of ownership and control.
The 21st century version of this problem is different.
It is not the separation of ownership and control.
It is the separation of ownership and ownership.
And what I mean by that is the parties who now then claim to be the owners, the shareholders of these companies, like BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, they are not the actual owners of those companies because they launched these so-called passive index funds that aggregated trillions of dollars in the last 15 years That are the money of everyday citizens who are the actual owners of the company, but invest in vehicles that were managed by a managerial clink that then showed up in the boardrooms of those companies and said, you know what?
I am the shareholder and I'm demanding you behave this way.
dave rubin
So basically, in essence, though, the average shareholder probably didn't even know what was going on.
vivek ramaswamy
They didn't know what was going on.
So the way I talk about this is no longer as shareholders, but as the owners of the company, the actual end owner of capital, the everyday citizen whose money is being invested Through a plinko chips mediated financial system that then goes into a pension fund, that then asks an investment consultant where to invest, that then invests in a fund managed by BlackRock, that then invests in a company.
It's such an intermediated system that the actual owner of capital has no idea that that state pension fund and its board member and its investment staff and BlackRock were betraying their interests by representing viewpoints in corporate America's boardrooms, in the boardrooms of companies like Chevron, the one I wrote to earlier this week.
in ways that the owner of capital had no idea was actually happening.
So that's really how this plays out in reality, where the parties who claim to be the shareholders are not the actual shareholders.
And that's the big problem.
dave rubin
Okay, so with that in mind, let's shift a little bit to the sort of spiritual part of this or the generational, the cultural part that you're talking about.
You mentioned before from Indian background, you grew up in the Midwest.
I mean, I suspect that whether it was your parents or great-grandparents or whatever it might be that came from India, I'm guessing they didn't come with a lot and they probably had to work really hard and I'm guessing that they don't feel very guilty about your success.
vivek ramaswamy
No, they don't.
And that's the thing.
Whether you're a Republican, Democrat, the thing you'll find about immigrants who come to this country through the front door, and I distinguish that, you know, for coming through the back door, but legal immigrants to the front door, by and large, come to this country to pursue excellence, to pursue their dreams, to pursue excellence without having to apologize for it.
Leaving places that were anti-meritocratic to come to a meritocratic nation where regardless of your creed or skin color, you can achieve anything you want with your own hard work and commitment and dedication.
That used to be our national identity.
We now have a new national identity built on victimhood instead.
And one of the things, you know, my parents taught me from a young age is that hardship is not the same thing as you're going to encounter hardship in your life.
It's part of what teaches you who you are.
But we live now in a moment where kids are taught, the next generation, by the way, I was first generation, my parents were the immigrants, I was born in America, the second and third generation, even in the Asian American communities, are being taught this new narrative to say that, you know what, the more you think of yourself as a victim, as a person of color, or whatever your victim of narrative is, that's how you get ahead in life, not by actually unapologetically embracing the pursuit of excellence.
And that's become our new national identity, a national idea that was built on the shared pursuit of excellence has since perverted into this new national identity that that's taken the form of this victimhood grievance Olympics, where there is no gold medalist, it is our nation and our national identity that loses in the end.
And that's the heart of this whole new book you know that that's why I wrote the book is someone who needed to expose this in some ways as a first generation American looking at this not as somebody who inherited America but whose parents came to this country voluntarily with their two feet to to be part of that national identity and yet now 40 years later found a new national identity centered on on this black hole of victimhood instead.
dave rubin
Did the neolibs, or the libs, or the neoprogressives, or whatever version, whatever language you wanna use around that, is there some reason that they inherently failed with this?
That they didn't defend the ideas that their ancestors came here for well enough?
vivek ramaswamy
Yes, I think some of it was this generational insecurity.
I think it's this idea that when you haven't encountered hardship, actually, you begin to hunger for it.
You know, there's something about the human psyche that's a funny thing.
We require hardship and the experience of overcoming it to remind ourselves the contours of our soul of who we are.
I gave the high school commencement address to my own high school where I graduated.
I gave a commencement address when I graduated in 2003.
They invited me back to give an updated address last year at last year's commencement.
And it struck me that was the first graduating class that had an in-person graduation, where not a single member of that class was even born on the day that those twin towers were hit by those two planes.
And that defined part of my high school experience.
When I was in high school, I was AP History class or US History class.
At that particular time, it was a defining moment.
You're looking at a generation where not a single person had been through that experience.
And I'm not saying that it had to be 9-11, but No, I think a generation that actually has is on the receiving end of that intergenerational wealth transfer that hasn't had to necessarily as either as a citizen or as an individual fight for the kind of right to be able to be proud.
needs to then see themselves as the victim of some other hardship instead.
And so you could argue, maybe it's not even their fault.
This is just what the arc of history has dealt our generation, millennials, Gen Z and younger, to have to think of themselves as encountering hardships that don't even actually exist, and then reinvent that victimhood narrative until a new one is dealt in its place instead.
But the problem is, if you live in that victimhood narrative for long enough, you're not even going to have the fortitude to fight that hardship when it actually comes.
Maybe that's China.
Maybe it's something else.
Whatever it is, if we don't turn this culture around, I think we will have actually lost the very fortitude that we might have gotten from actually encountering more part of the diagnosis for me.
dave rubin
Yeah, it's interesting.
You're making a distinction that I try to bring up all the time, that it's perceived oppression, not necessarily even real oppression.
That's right.
It's something that's made up in their mind.
So where do you think big tech fits in this?
You know, when we hear things like, well, okay, all of this gender stuff and all of this woke stuff, it's pushed on all of kids in America through TikTok, but it's banned in China.
Do you think that there might be a connection there?
vivek ramaswamy
Yeah, or even the parent company that owns TikTok in China actually uses it to like educate kids on math and science and reading, which is different than the way we're educating people here.
So look, I mean, mostly when I'm talking about, you know, big tech or the term big tech, I'm usually talking about the censorship debate, which, you know, I have views on, but that's not what I'm going to talk about here.
This is a different issue.
And I think that I think it's an important one where Look, one of the things I often say, not to get too philosophical here, but just for a second, is that virtue is not a product of capitalism.
Virtue is a precondition for capitalism to do its work.
And what I mean by that is that, look, a simpler way of saying that is capitalism would be the perfect system for organizing a society's affairs if our wants actually matched our needs.
And to the extent that there's anything wrong with negative externalities with capitalism, it can be explained entirely, I believe, by the daylight between our wants and needs.
And I think part of what the stakeholder capitalism movement gets wrong is that it demands of these capitalist actors.
The need to cultivate virtue that should have been cultivated through institutions that predate capitalism, capital into society, the family, religion, whatever it is, you know, where you pray, national identity, patriotism, at the level of the community, at the level of family, absolutely.
So what do we see this play out as it relates to tech companies?
And where does the debate even get confused, even by conservatives over the last year, for example, was when I saw the story break out by, you know, the Wall Street Journal doing reporting that, you know, Facebook knew that the young teen girls who were using Instagram had body image insecurity issues that were fueled and made worse by Instagram, and they didn't do anything about it.
And by the way, they knew that they were making anger management issues amongst their angry users even worse, but didn't do anything about it.
And so, you know, conservative media called me to talk about We should not, as a society, want Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey to be our priests and rabbis.
So, okay, let's hit them hard.
They knew it, they didn't do anything about it.
unidentified
Actually, my view is, actually, no, no, no, you're getting this all wrong, actually.
vivek ramaswamy
We should not, as a society, want Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey to be our priests and rabbis to virtue.
In fact, we should want a society that cultivates the kind of self-confidence among young teen girls
that don't leave them vulnerable to the insecurities that these algorithms are designed to prey on.
And I think that we miss the fact that we can cultivate that sense of psychic fortitude and virtue
in the offline world so that these professionally created algorithms aren't so well-equipped to pick at
and prey on those insecurities by knowing what you click on versus what you don't click on and use that
to create a window to your soul that sees your soul with greater clarity than you see yourself.
That's just the antecedent condition of the divergence of your want and need, that deficit of virtue that allowed the modern demonic algorithmic version, algorithm-empowered version of modern capitalism and technology, the industry part of it, to prey on those insecurities.
It's kind of like the equivalent of a teen girl in the 1990s.
You know, a Virginia Slims manufacturer selling cigarettes to that teen girl who had body image insecurity issues back then, it's the same thing all over again when the thing we need to be addressing is the generational insecurity in the first place and cultivating that psychic fortitude that actually allows capitalism to then do its work, to sell us the goods and services we want more effectively when we already have a deep-seated self-confidence and understanding of who we are as people that predate our identity as capitalists.
And so this is one of the solutions I talk about in the book is You know, one of the ways I want to see the conservative movement do better is to provide an affirmative answer to those questions about identity, about national identity, about individual identity, and to talk not just about the revival of freedom through a system of free market capitalism, where I'm one of the greatest champions for exactly that model,
But also to talk about a revival of, let's say, civic identity, our identity as citizens and the psychic fortitude that we require as citizens and the civic duty that comes in our capacity as a citizen from our identity as just a capitalist who's a participant in that economy.
And so what did big tech do?
They called that bluff.
This modern social media called the bluff of a generation that didn't know what they actually wanted.
And then preyed on those psychic insecurities to build multi trillion dollar companies that were not tech companies.
They were psychologically, there were psychologically shrewd companies that understood that they could understand you better with their algorithms than you could understand yourself.
And maybe if you understood yourself, Even more effectively, that might have actually prevented modern social media from having the toxic effects that it's since had.
dave rubin
Vivek, am I a crazy conspiracy theorist or is it possible that for all those years that BuzzFeed had everyone clicking on those nonsensical polls of what do they like better, this or that?
That perhaps that had a little something.
BuzzFeed and many of these other sites, but BuzzFeed, which is now completely collapsed, was like the prime purveyor of all of us clicking all these things and they would, as you sort of alluded to there, ultimately they would know what we actually want more than we can even understand.
vivek ramaswamy
That's not a conspiracy.
That's a reality.
I mean, look, even look at Mark Zuckerberg.
I mean, his genius was not his technical aptitude.
The predecessor to Facebook, I mean, I was at Harvard with him at the same time.
He was a year ahead of me back then.
It was hot or not.
You know, this or this.
Sort of taking these native base human instincts and just picking at them and exploiting them.
You know, does that mean that we should regulate the companies and prevent them from doing that?
No, no, no, you're getting it all wrong.
We need to revive the very institutions at the level of the family, at the level of the nation, at the level of the community, at the level of even our religious institutions to fill that void of meaning and purpose and identity that then prepares us for a society where In free market capitalism, we don't need to apologize for the fact that some guy ends up with more green pieces of paper than the other.
Who cares?
If we fetishize those green pieces of paper, the thing that really matters is that we have civic equality as citizens, that we're grounded in the forms of identity that really matter.
And that's where I want to see the conservative movement do better in stepping up to fill that void in a way that it's completely abdicated any interest in actually taking on.
That's part of what motivated me to say that, you know, I just wasn't done with just woke ink.
You know, Nation of Victims was about taking a crack.
I'm not saying I have all the answers, but taking a crack at what fills that void of identity.
What does it mean to be an American in the year 2022 if we don't have a good answer to that question maybe we as a movement need to be stepping up to avoid and answer that question or else you're gonna have the same black that same poison continuing to fill that black hole of a vacuum of identity rather than just taking a jackhammer to sort of weed out that poison one at a time maybe you try a different strategy of diluting the poison to irrelevance by filling it with a new rich vision for what that identity could be that dilutes the poison to irrelevance that's the approach I'm interested in taking
dave rubin
So before we finish with Strive, which is the culmination of all this, are you enthused or do you see markers that some of what you're calling for is happening?
I mean, as you know, I toured with Jordan Peterson for two years.
The level of exactly what you're asking for there in terms of personal responsibility Family, belief, all of these things.
I mean, he's spreading that across the world.
I see that coming now out of other corners of conservatism.
So it's not just, ah, government off our back and low taxes.
There's actually something more robust.
I see that kind of happening.
Do you agree with that?
vivek ramaswamy
Yeah, I do.
I do see a potential shift in the tide.
You know, it's interesting.
One of the things I cover in my, in Nation of Victims, the second book, is actually I take a look at history.
Not just our national history, a lot of it goes into the parts of the Civil War history that I hadn't reminded myself of since high school, but even through a lot of Roman history.
And one of the things I reminded myself of is we often talk about the rise and fall of Rome and then draw the analogies to the rise and fall of the American experiment.
And one of the things that I reminded myself as part of the research for the book, and it's in a couple of the chapters there now, is that there was no one fall of Rome.
There were many rises and many falls.
And there were moments in what you thought might have been the fall where the idea of Rome reinvented itself, right?
Not just the place.
Rome was an idea.
In a certain sense, America was that idea.
Both were built on this idea of exceptionalism.
In a certain sense, you can even, you know, I, you know, not to get wax too philosophical about it, but maybe Rome was reborn.
Maybe Rome was reborn in 1776.
And I think the idea of unapologetically leading in the way that the American experiment sought to lead, these are ideas.
Nations don't die the way that human beings do.
They're constantly reborn as something else.
I was actually raised in a Hindu upbringing.
We weave some Hindu philosophy into the book about the idea of individual reincarnation into the reincarnation Of the idea of a nation, the reincarnation of America itself.
You know what?
It's not, it's not, it's not this bilateral tug of war where the tides are changing, but rather if you look through the arc of history, if you look through the history of Rome and then even look at the history of this own country, this country that we live in, that we consider ours, it has an opportunity to not just have one rise and one fall, but to constantly be reborn and to rediscover itself.
And as there were many rises and falls of Rome, I predict that there will be many rises and falls Of this version of Rome of America as well and I don't think that I'm optimistic that we're not in we're in what feels like a decline but is actually just the beginning of a new revival and you know I hope we each do our small part and play in a role in making making that happen.
dave rubin
There's that positivity I'm always looking for on this show.
So now bring us home with Strive, because you don't just talk about this stuff and just write books about it.
You actually do real-world stuff, and my audience is always trying to figure out real ways to combat this nonsense.
And I think most of my audience has done a lot of the spiritual and cultural work already, so they're ready for the, hey, what's the business end of this thing?
vivek ramaswamy
Well, I think some of this can be done through the market.
I never imagined I was going to start another business again.
But when I looked at myself in the mirror and said, look, how are we going to address this problem?
I really saw an underutilized avenue to solve this through the market.
So Strive is a new investment firm.
We're competing with BlackRock.
We're offering index funds just like BlackRock does.
We listed our first index fund in the New York Stock Exchange last month.
But the key difference is we have a different voice and vote to the table, where we tell companies to focus exclusively on delivering excellent products and services to their customers over any other agenda, social or political agenda.
Actionation of Victims, the end of the subtitle of the book, is the path back to excellence.
I think part of the path back to excellence runs through the market.
That's actually what STRIVE is all about as well.
So just to give you a tangible example, The first index fund we listed is a U.S.
Energy Index Fund.
It trades in the New York Stock Exchange.
Its ticker is DRILL.
And it's a very simple message to the U.S.
energy industry.
You should drill, frack, do whatever allows you to be most successful.
Without having to apologize for it.
If that's what allows you to be successful over the long run, you don't need to advance somebody else's social or political agenda.
So that's why we picked, you know, DRLL drills was to send a very clear message.
But I also want to practice what I'm preaching.
And so, you know, that fund raised $300 million in its first three weeks, its first month or so.
Of trading.
But it's not just about doing this for the sake of making a point.
It's to bring a different shareholder voice to the table.
And I was alluding to this earlier.
That's why, you know, even in recent days, I sent a letter to the board of Chevron questioning a lot of their politicized behaviors that were influenced by the likes of BlackRock.
But the problem isn't just to sit around and complain about this.
Well, let's bring a different shareholder voice to the table and to the boardroom and actually Go back to resolving these through free speech and open debate, both in the public square as citizens on political questions, and then back in the boardrooms.
Bring real debate back into the boardrooms.
Bring actual diversity of thought.
Something in the name of diversity that we've missed in corporate America.
Bring actual diversity of thought back to the corporate boardroom to set this culture right, starting with our economy.
So that's what I was doing with Strive.
But, you know, in some ways it's an embodiment of what I wrote about, not just in Woke Inc., which is the problem, but even in Nation of Victims, And the path back to excellence, you know, I think I think hopefully it's not there's no end all be all silver bullet solution, but I think market solutions are going to be an important part of it.
And that's where I chose to focus my attention in the next chapter.
dave rubin
Love it, man.
As simple as that.
We will link to the book down below and I'd keep you longer, but you're clearly a busy guy and you got things to do.
It was good to see you, man.
vivek ramaswamy
Good to see you.
Thank you for having me.
We'll see you.
dave rubin
If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist.
And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlists all right over here.
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