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April 3, 2023 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
01:06:30
“Wokeness” Silences Voices with Jennifer Sey | The TRUTH Podcast #2
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So, we're seeing the rise of this debate about what is the definition of the word woke.
Woke comes up a lot now as the new battle cry from the left saying that conservatives can't define woke.
Well, I'll admit that many conservatives and many.
I think we're good to go.
What's wrong with it and the culture of fear that it creates.
OK, so being woke refers whoever's defining it from the left to right to waking up to invisible societal injustices and then taking whatever action is required to address those injustices grounded generally in race, gender or sexual orientation or other injustices that are perceived to have an effect on race, gender or sexual orientation.
That's how the proponents of wokeness would define it.
That's how I think the opponents of wokeness ought to understand it.
But I think the real danger behind this is that it leaves us more divided in the end.
We see one another as the products of our genetic attributes rather than on the basis of the content of our character and our contributions.
But the other thing that it does is because it calls on human beings to do whatever is needed, including through culture, not just through government, but through the private sector or through their own private action to do whatever they need to correct for these alleged invisible injustices.
It also creates a culture of fear in our country.
And I think a big way you see this culture of fear play out is in corporate America, where if you're an economic actor, but you're called upon to address these invisible societal injustices, what do you use?
You use the economic toolkit that's available to you.
What does that mean?
It means not just what the civil rights advocates once meant when the civil rights laws were passed that you can't discriminate on the basis of race or sex or sexual orientation.
But now it means something else altogether.
It means that if you say something that a member of a protected class, for example, finds offensive, well, then you might be liable for a hostile work environment lawsuit.
What does that mean?
That means if you're an employer and you don't fire someone who created a hostile work environment, then you could be liable.
What does that mean?
You fire somebody who creates a hostile work environment.
Well, how does one actually create a supposed hostile work environment?
Today, it means it could just be expressing a viewpoint.
That's unpopular to those held by others in the workplace.
So what does that mean?
It means we've created the very conditions for viewpoint discrimination While leaving viewpoints themselves unprotected as a category.
And that's the real danger of the woke culture that we have not yet discussed in full.
It is a threat to a free speech culture in this country.
It says that certain ideas cannot be expressed because certain ideas are more protected legally, financially, economically than others.
And I think that's a danger because free speech itself is a precondition for truth.
You know what, if we had a culture of free speech in this country, we would have gotten to certain answers more quickly than we otherwise did.
You take the COVID lab leak.
Well, a couple of years ago, you say it on social media that COVID-19 originated in a lab in China.
You would have been censored.
Your account would have been locked down.
Your post on YouTube would have been removed.
What do we now know two years later?
COVID-19 likely originated in a lab in China.
And had we known that sooner, we could not only delivered accountability, but potentially even dealt with the problem sooner.
But we didn't.
People suffered, including the very people who we were supposedly protecting from racism or whatever from this one-sided view.
Well, another example of that actually relates to the school closure debate.
COVID school closures, COVID-19 related school closures in America.
I don't think anybody can today with a straight face say that we don't regret what we did in this country.
In public schools across America, by shutting down kids in K through 12, kids who were at a low risk, very low risk for either getting or even spreading COVID-19.
And telling them that they couldn't show up in the classroom for over a year.
We're not going to fix that.
We're going to have a generation of, you guessed it, societal inequity as a consequence of the fact that kids in public schools versus kids in select private schools had a year apart in whether or not they were educated in the classroom.
But you know what?
You weren't allowed to talk about it.
You weren't allowed to talk about it because of that culture of fear in America.
And today I'm joined by somebody who unfortunately learned that the hard way.
From the front lines, somebody who was a successful executive in corporate America, somebody who worked her way up the ladder, the way we're taught to in this country, that if you work hard, and you're dedicated, and you're earnest, and you make contributions, and you make a business grow that you'd be rewarded for it in our system of capitalism, did things the way you're taught to do them in this country.
But in her capacity as a citizen, Nonetheless, expressed an opinion, an opinion that was unpopular at the time, that these school closures were the wrong policies.
As time has passed, an opinion that has actually aged really well, one that reminds us that we make mistakes when we censor free speech, but who lost our job for it?
And she made a significant sacrifice for it, a sacrifice that many other Americans were unwilling to make.
And her story will teach you why, as to why they were unwilling to make it.
But what we're going to talk about today with my guest and friend Jennifer Say is not only what her experience was, But what it teaches us about a better way forward in our country.
So with that, Jennifer, I want to welcome you to the podcast and talk to you openly today about not only your experience, but hopefully what we can learn as a country about it and how we can be better going forward.
That's actually why we're here.
Excellent.
I'm excited to talk about it with you.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you for coming.
I know, you know, you've been through a lot in the last couple of years.
I know you.
I think most of the people watching this might not.
And it is the first time we're sitting down in person anyway.
Tell me a little bit about what your journey was in climbing the corporate hierarchy that you were in, how you achieved success, and then what led it to all really fall apart?
Yeah, it did fall apart.
I worked at Levi's Strauss& Company since 1999. It was not my first job, but certainly an early one.
How old were you when you joined?
I was 29. Maybe I'd just turned 30. Okay, so you had some experience before then.
I did.
I'd worked at an advertising agency for three years.
I worked at The Gap for three years, but then I found myself at Levi's.
And I loved it.
You know, it was a product I'd worn since I was a child.
The brand, it stands, I think, in most Americans' minds and people around the world.
It stands for rugged individualism and freedom and kind of the best of what America represents.
That's Levi's Jeans ads growing up.
That's what I remember from it.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, I had, you know, memories of Levi's that really meant that.
I traveled to Moscow in 1986 as a gymnast representing the national team, and I brought 501s to trade with the Russian athletes.
I mean, that's what Levi's meant to me.
Yeah.
I didn't know that.
You were a national gymnast for the United States?
Yeah, I was on the national team for seven years.
I was the national champion in 1986. Really?
Yeah.
So does that mean like Olympics level?
Yes.
And this will – I'll come back to it because it definitely factors into the – It actually makes me even view your pursuit of excellence story through a different light.
I didn't know that about you.
Yeah.
You know, if I start with this briefly, I was very outspoken in 2008. I wrote my first book about the culture of abuse and cruelty in gymnastics, and that was not a popular view either.
Oh, interesting.
So my advocacy— Like, what do you mean by that?
Emotional, physical, and sexual abuse.
So you touched on that in your book even?
Oh yeah, I was the first one to talk about it.
Oh really?
I didn't know that.
And I was dragged across the internet.
Early days of social media, didn't know what I was signing up for.
So you could talk about the sexual abuse issue back then.
See, I didn't think that was in the public consciousness until much later.
Wow.
It was.
I mean, I was the first.
You're too far ahead of your time.
I was too far ahead.
It took about 10 years and I was redeemed for about five minutes before I started my COVID open schools advocacy.
But it's an important lesson and I think part of my journey because...
I spoke the truth.
I had lived this experience.
I knew from the inside what the sport was like.
But that was not a message that the powers that be wanted out there.
Not USA Gymnastics.
Not the U.S. Olympic Committee.
Not the, you know, practitioners of the sport.
You know, everybody was invested in this image of the sport as these shiny, happy little girls dancing around.
And I sort of punctured that.
And so all the same tactics that were, well, slightly different.
Not a good gymnast and all these things were used until the story could not be held back anymore because we had the case of Larry Nassar, which you're probably somewhat familiar with.
the doctor for Team USA Gymnastics who abused over 500 young athletes.
So at that point, I was redeemed.
But, you know, my advocacy for children goes back to that.
And I know all the ways in which adults will sacrifice children to maintain, you know, a In the sport of gymnastics, it was about money and medals, and they were perfectly willing to sacrifice young children to achieve that.
And, you know, children need our protection.
They're least likely to speak up for themselves.
They don't have a platform.
They can't vote.
They want to please the adults around them.
I lived this.
And so all of that was with me as I advocated for children during COVID in terms of open schools.
But essentially, professionally, I started at Levi's in 99.
I loved the brand.
I wore the brand.
It was always important for me to work in a place where I believed in the product.
You know, I didn't want to have to kind of lie and make that up.
It wasn't an easy environment for women coming up in the 90s and 2000s.
It was, you know, I'll just say it's a testament to how far we've come.
Just to say a little more about it.
In what ways was that difficult?
It was a very male-driven culture.
It wasn't uncommon to find yourself at a sales meeting batting away drunken advances from sales guys.
None of that would be acceptable anymore, and I think that's great.
It's a pre-Me Too kind of thing.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's great that it's changed.
I think it's important that we know it.
It's not the same as it ever was.
Things have improved.
You know, when I had my first baby in 2000, I have four children.
I had my first in 2000. I came back after, you know, a handful of weeks.
There was no parental leave.
There was no maternity leave.
And I think I had to pump in a closet with a curtain on it.
You know, there was no locked door.
Like, they just didn't...
It just didn't matter.
And I certainly toiled in jobs far longer than many of my male peers.
But I found as I moved up, I had the opportunity to change the culture and create something that was more inclusive.
So I'm not complaining about it.
I'm sort of stating a fact.
And I wanted to change it.
So I worked my way up the ladder, mostly in marketing, but beyond that as well.
I led e-commerce for a time.
I was strategy, all sorts of stuff.
And eventually in 2013, I became the chief marketing officer, which is a big, very public facing role.
And I stepped into this role at a time when the brand and business were really floundering.
I mean, we were near bankruptcy in 2011, this storied brand.
But the CEO believed in me, put me in the role, and I helped bring us back from the depths.
I led.
We really reinvented the brand and reconnected with not just Americans, but fans all around the world.
We IPO'd in 2019 successfully, and I eventually got promoted to brand president.
So I then oversaw Alport.
Product, design, all of that, stores.
But in 2020, from the get-go, March, right away, I was outspoken about the harms that would be done to children from prolonged school closures and other restrictions.
Closed playgrounds.
We had playgrounds closed for nine months in San Francisco.
Nine months.
In the city, where do kids play?
Where do they run?
Where do they get out in the sunshine and get exercise if not at the playground?
The masking of toddlers.
Two-year-olds were the only country in the world that did that.
Clearly harmful.
You could see it with your own eyes and ears.
These children are learning to talk and connect.
They can't put their shoes on.
How are they going to wear a mask?
I have a three-year-old.
I get it.
They're in diapers.
Even if it worked, how are they going to mask correctly?
Let alone the fact that it wasn't working.
It's nonsensical as a proposition.
Exactly.
Things we could see with our own eyes and ears were harmful.
We sacrificed children.
And it was premised on a lie that there was no age stratification of risk, that this wouldn't harm the most vulnerable among us children if we closed the schools.
And I couldn't Barrett.
You know, I have children in public school, which made me unique.
And where were they at that point in time, like age-wise or grade-wise?
Well, one was in college.
Junior, I think, in college.
Another in high school.
And then another starting kindergarten and another in preschool.
Oh, you had the full gamut.
I got all of it.
I can tell you what it was like for young adults.
I can tell you what it was like for high schoolers and very young children.
So this is a couple years ago when that's where they were.
Yeah, it was 2020. That's where they were.
Yeah, exactly.
And it wasn't just my children I was thinking of.
Of course, but you had a perspective based on that.
My children were probably going to be okay.
We had plenty of privilege to use the parlance of the day.
We had strong Wi-Fi, a parent at home to help.
But it's not hard to imagine.
That of the 50,000 public school students in San Francisco, 60% of whom are low income, that that was not the case.
It was not hard to imagine that some of them weren't getting food, that they were home alone, they didn't have Wi-Fi, that they just weren't learning at all.
And I... Didn't understand why everybody couldn't see that.
It didn't take much imagination.
So I was outspoken.
I didn't have much of a following on social media, but I built one because those who were willing to kind of speak out first, you know, were like a beacon.
Lots of people weren't willing to say it.
How did you speak out?
What was your modality?
Was it online?
Well, it wasn't just online.
I mean, I started.
I was active on Twitter.
That's when you started.
Yeah.
Well, I started on Facebook and I left that because I just ended up arguing with my family.
So I moved to Twitter, which enabled me actually to connect with...
People, doctors who, you know, were sort of pushing back on the view.
I asked questions incessantly.
I mean, that is the cool thing about Twitter, right?
It's a good platform for that.
It's real dialogue.
It's one of the few places we have in this country.
It's pretty cool.
I would reach out and they would explain things to me.
They would explain studies to me, the few willing to speak out.
But eventually I was on the local news and I started to lead rallies in San Francisco in the fall of 2020. And I would attend school board meetings.
All of it.
You know, I mean, I wasn't just a keyboard activist.
I was really working to try to make a change.
So you had your day job, mostly working from home, it seemed at that point.
All working from home.
Okay.
And so you did your Zoom meetings or whatever for Levi's.
All day.
But then you would go to – and even going to those school board meetings were also virtual?
Yeah.
That was online in the evenings.
So a lot of Zoom.
Okay.
So much Zoom.
And so you would just – you'd weave some of that into the day and then – Yeah.
I mean, I was in a global world, so I have no hours, right?
Yeah, yeah, right.
Yeah, I'm working from like 6 a.m., meeting with Europe, you know, 10 p.m.
So that's late 2020. Okay.
Yeah.
And I didn't really get any – no one said anything until the fall of 2020.
What happened then?
And at this point, I'm the brand president.
In the fall of 2020, a peer of mine in corporate communications called and said, people are noticing they don't like what you're saying.
And I said, so?
Yeah, we have different opinions.
Yeah.
So I'm not using my title.
I don't even say I work at Levi's.
When I'm on the local news, I in fact tell them my, you know, say mom of four.
That's it.
That's all.
And sometimes I would say, don't say I work at Levi's.
And they say, oh, you do?
Like no one even knew.
It was like crazy.
They were so worried about it.
But employees were upset.
You know, this very vocal, very punitive attitude.
Mob.
I don't really have another word for it.
We're complaining incessantly.
There were people externally complaining about me, and they don't like that kind of noise.
And to your point, I don't know that hostile work environment was used, but that's the intimation, is that I had these views that were Racist, misogynist, because my definition of woke, which I think is very complementary and the same as yours, is it is sort of defining and reorganizing the world through the lens of oppressor versus oppressed.
That's about right.
Yep.
You know, and you not really look, not every issue can be defined that way.
But if you start with that and back into it, and so school closures for saying school should be open, I was a racist because I didn't care if black children died.
And that was creating a hostile work environment.
Even though I said it outside of work, it had no bearing on my work, didn't matter.
That was hostile because my words were literal violence.
Again, To further the point you were making.
And if somebody, if your brand president is inflicting violence on the employee community, well, gosh, I guess you do need to get rid of them, you know?
But that's a lie, as we know.
So I got the one call.
She asked me to stop.
Well, I said, are you telling me to stop?
She said, I can't really do that.
And I said, well, then I'm not going to.
This is too important.
You know, these children matter to me.
It's not interfering with my work.
Our business is recovering in a really strong way from lockdowns and store closures.
So it's not impacting my work.
Thank you for your call.
I'm going to hang up now.
And then I got one every two weeks for the next year and a half.
You got what?
A call like that every two weeks for the next year and a half from some member of the executive team or the board.
Oh, the board?
One member of the board who they assigned— I mean, this is actually nutty.
Yeah.
They gave him the task of calling me, I suspect.
So you were on the executive team of the company?
Oh, top two members of the executive team.
Okay.
I'm the brand president.
I mean, I'm the obvious next in line for CEO, provided I don't, you know, screw up.
And when they would make these phone calls to you, which of the effects did it have make you less likely to want to keep speaking, not change, or actually tell you that it was important for you to actually be doing more of it?
It told me it was important to do more.
And you know, I'll tell you this, because the people calling me were sending their own children to in-person private school.
So it just...
They were sitting here telling me I could not advocate for the same thing for low-income children in San Francisco that their children had.
And they were doing this while taking all of these, you know, I'm denouncing my privilege stances because it's after the summer of 2020, right?
And so every company in America denounced their privilege and said they were going to fight for equality and through anti-racism.
And yet this policy was the opposite of that.
And they were availing themselves of their privilege by sending their children.
They weren't too scared to send their own kids to school.
And yet they're saying, you can't say this.
You can't defend these 50,000 public school children in San Francisco and, you know, however many million across the country because people don't like it.
So it strengthened my resolve and I got more and more comfortable with each call saying, no, thank you.
I was always very diplomatic.
And what exactly would they say?
Like, I want to just, I mean, there's like double click on because people hear about this idea of woke capitalism, of use of corporate force, cancel culture, but these are just words, right?
You actually have an experience and you're unshackled to be able to talk about it.
I think that's useful.
Yeah.
I've had these experiences too and talked about them, but we're talking about yours today.
What would that conversation, get as specific as you can, what would that conversation look like?
Generally, it went like this.
Jen, do you realize and understand when you speak, you speak on behalf of the company?
No, I do not, is what I would say.
I am a citizen.
When I speak in my capacity as the Levi's brand president, when I speak in front of the company about the brand strategies, or I go on X show to talk about the brand direction, then I speak in my capacity as brand president.
Now I'm speaking as a mom of public school children and a children's advocate.
Well, but you do.
You are the face of the brand.
You're the face of the company.
And I said, but I'm not.
And I'm not using my title.
This matters to me too much.
If you're saying this is a problem, then let's have this conversation.
But I have no contract I've signed that says I cannot speak out about my views.
I've done it in the past.
They were just more aligned with yours.
Because you wrote a book?
Yeah.
Yeah.
About the gymnasts.
I wrote a book about abuse in gymnastics, which while it wasn't popular in the Olympic movement- It had become popular by then.
For the broader culture, people were like, that's terrible.
You can't abuse children.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So it's very interesting.
When did you join Levi's?
But even my politics, I had been outspoken.
I joined in 99. So you wrote a book while you were at Levi's- Ten years in.
And that was because it was in a space that was not- Contradicting the cultural orthodoxy of the time was totally fine, but you had a—this is a pretty interesting case—a demonstrated track record at Levi's of separating your voice as a citizen from your voice as a corporate executive.
So this is not a new concept to them.
Yeah, and I had— That's fascinating.
That's interesting.
I had also spoken out about my politics.
If anything, I was further left than, you know, the—was—than the executive team and the sort of culture at Levi's.
What's an example?
Oh gosh, without embarrassing myself?
No, it's fine.
Embarrass yourself.
You're not, because there's nothing to be embarrassed about.
No, there's not, because you can change your mind.
Exactly.
I think that's fine.
I mean, I had, I supported Elizabeth Warren.
Okay.
I had.
And they mocked me for that.
They're, oh, she's going to kill business.
And I was like, oh, I think, you know.
So this was back when?
Like in the 20-teens?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So you came out, you were a vocal proponent of Elizabeth Warren.
Yeah, I mean, nobody cared what I said, but yeah.
It's a pattern of speaking as a citizen.
That's right.
Jen the citizen versus Jennifer Say, the corporate executive.
And that was fine when it was in line with left-wing orthodoxy.
Yeah, exactly.
And I'll just say it.
When it was in line with – when it fell – Left-wing specifically.
Yeah.
Democrats!
You know?
It was fine then.
When it wasn't, then it wasn't fine anymore.
So it is clearly viewpoint discrimination, right?
That's exactly what it is.
I mean, there's no other word for it, right?
And political speech is protected speech.
It's of note.
I also – I had no contract with the company.
I had nothing saying you can't talk on social media.
What did you say political speech is protected speech?
Political speech is protected speech in California, actually.
Yeah.
It actually isn't in much of the rest of the country, but you were in California, right?
Yeah.
So you're in a state.
Okay, so let me give you another good example.
Where it's actually protected speech, and that's the irony.
Yeah, here's another good example.
You ready for this?
Yeah.
So it became more and more fraud.
I kept getting these calls.
You speak, you speak on behalf of the company.
No, I don't.
I'm a mom.
I care about kids.
Are you telling me I have to stop?
I would say, they would say, no, we can't do that.
We're urging you.
But then, eventually, my boss, the CEO, engaged me on the issue.
And...
intimation was you could be CEO if you stop doing this.
Use the carrot now.
Yes, exactly.
And I think it's true.
I mean, I certainly was capable in delivering the results that would have put me on that path.
I think by the time he was offering it, he was using it as the carrot to get me to stop.
And he was never going to because screen grabs live forever.
But most of my tweeting during this time, I was very focused on children.
I was opposed to lockdowns more broadly, but I felt like that was a third rail.
I thought kids were something we could all get behind.
Isn't that apolitical?
There's a big cost and benefit that you have to weigh, and the cost-benefit was clearest in the case of kids going back to school.
Exactly.
Every once in a while, I veered slightly.
At one point in 2021, I posted an article, no commentary, just a quote, about the recall election in California.
You remember, there was a recall of Governor Gavin Newsom.
That, I was told, I really needed to take down.
So, talk about political speech.
And the reason, they weren't even shy about it.
I mean, I have the text in my book.
We have connections.
The Haas family, majority shareholders of Leroy Strauss& Co., Unbelievable.
That was the reason they did not want you to speak out against the governor, is that the company itself Had ties to the governor.
So admitting a sort of crony capitalist, cronyist justification for the suppression of speech itself.
Just admitting it.
It's pretty staggering, actually.
It is staggering.
I mean, how far does this go?
You know, there's a new congressman, Dan Goldman, who I'm sure you know, in New York, District 10 in New York.
He's an heir of the Levi Strauss fortune.
He funded his campaign with the...
You know, the wealth generated from the IPO. So does this mean if you're an employee in New York, you have to vote for him?
Like, how far does this go?
What if you campaign for another one of the Democratic or God forbid Republican candidates?
Can you not work at Levi's?
We have employees in New York.
And, you know, the argument that, well, you are a high-level executive.
There's a different sort of standard for you.
That's not a real argument.
It's not a real argument.
And I would push back pretty aggressively on that.
If a well-liked, beloved executive with influence in the company can't have an opinion...
What about somebody who actually has risk of being able to put food on the dinner table?
Exactly.
Totally right.
Exactly.
So that's a...
It's a bullshit answer.
It really is.
It really is.
You know, and the whole thing just got noisier and noisier.
And at one point in this journey, I, you know, parents like me who were advocating for open schools, we were shadow banned and blacklisted and not included in any of the stories.
If you watch CNN or, you know, read the New York Times, it was, you know, the only view represented was open schoolers are racist and they don't care if children and teachers die.
And so, you know, you had public health represented.
You had teachers, unions, leaders, but you never had a parent who had a different view.
So at a certain point in March of 21, I got a call from Laura Ingram's show to come on and express this view.
And she had been right from the beginning on this.
She was very outspoken.
I think she was.
I think you remember.
As I remember, that sounds about right.
Yeah.
I mean, it was, I think, as early as April 2020. I think she might have been the first national sort of news person pundit.
On the schools issue.
Yes, on schools specifically.
So I went on.
Why wouldn't I? Yeah, why not?
I've done it countless times.
It's a national platform.
And also, you can actually reach millions of people with a viewpoint that challenges an orthodoxy.
Why is that not good in our country?
It is good.
And why do I have to agree with her on everything she's ever said to go on her show?
And good for her, bringing an Elizabeth Warren one-time supporter onto her show.
Yeah, exactly.
So be it.
So that just blew everything up, as you might imagine, because now I had consorted with the enemy.
And so the employees at this point just went mad.
Being not just on Fox, but her.
So I was now associated with all of her views, which I didn't even know what they were.
It didn't matter, you know.
I had consorted with the enemy and now I was the enemy.
I held all of her views.
I was a wolf in sheep's clothing.
I was all of these terrible things and I was asked to prove that I was one of us, not one of them, in an apology tour in the summer of 2021 after the Ingram appearance.
What does that mean?
What did that entail?
You might ask why I agreed to it.
I agreed to it because I did not intend to apologize and I did not.
I intended to explain myself.
It meant standing in front of a couple hundred employees virtually and explaining why I held these views so strongly and why I went on Fox.
And I was sent an email to prepare for it.
And it literally said, you know, prove that you are one of us, not one of them.
Yeah.
One of us, not one of them.
Yeah.
You need to show that you are one of us, not one of them.
Who's them?
What do you think they meant?
The bad people.
The bad.
The other.
Right, alt-right QAnon Trumpers.
Prove that you are not one of them.
And what if you were one of them?
Well, that's a really good point.
What if I was?
Yeah, what if you are like half the country?
Do I not get to have a job?
Apparently.
Apparently it's an HR violation to be a Republican, which I wasn't even, but assumed to be one.
Yeah.
An HR violation to not only be a Republican, but to appear to be mistaken for one.
Okay.
Yeah.
And to talk to somebody who holds different views.
So you went around, you explained yourself.
I explained myself.
I have to admit, even part of that makes me cringe.
I'm sure it makes you cringe too.
Yeah, it does.
But you're a leader.
Yeah, and I had faith in my ability to communicate.
Yes, and persuade and bring people along.
And I wasn't going to seem like some angry, ranting lunatic.
This was June of 21. People were starting to get a little frustrated because The schools still had not opened in San Francisco.
Keep in mind, this isn't late 2020 anymore.
It was a year and a half.
They didn't open until September of 21. Unbelievable.
Unreal.
So the view was – it was by no means embraced, but it was starting to get a little more traction, if you see what I'm saying.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It wasn't because of first principle.
It was the fact that they had actually quietly started to potentially agree with you on the substance.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yes, exactly.
So I just explained.
I gave my background, my history as a gymnast and child advocate in sports, explained, you know, my understanding of, you know, how a child if abused or enduring cruel circumstances won't always speak up for themselves and it's incumbent upon us as adults.
Sure.
In fact, it's a moral abomination not to do it.
If you're not going to stand up for kids, who are you going to stand up for?
I explained my children had all gone to public school or were in public school.
I explained why it wasn't racist to think this.
And then I took questions.
Why it was not racist to, say, open the schools.
Who do you think bore the brunt of school closures in this country?
Low-income black and brown children.
Totally.
In cities.
Yeah.
But you had to explain why it was not racist.
I know.
It's so dumb.
It's hard to not laugh.
It's really kind of dumb.
I couldn't laugh at the time because I knew my job was on the line, but now I laugh.
It's like so dumb.
So you did this little explanation tour via Zoom, 20 employees at a time or whatever, and then what happened?
It was a few hundred at once.
A few hundred at a time, okay, fine.
The other issue they made me talk about was my husband's views, because he was more aggressive on some of the other issues, and so I had to answer for- Be married to one of them.
I was married to one of them.
You can't be married to- So you can only, can you not be one of them?
Even if you are one of us, you can't be married to one of them.
Yeah, you can't associate.
You have to disconnect.
Disassociate, yeah.
Yeah, it's like Scientology.
You have to disconnect with anyone that doesn't uphold those views.
But I did not apologize.
And in fact, the response was quite good.
Cool.
You know, I got a nice – a few emails after saying, I understand your view now.
If I had children, I probably would do the same.
And I was like, oh, whew.
Okay.
Maybe we're coming out of this.
We're also bringing people – we're engaging in persuasion, something we've lost in this country, open discourse.
Yeah.
I can imagine that being pretty heartening actually.
It really was.
I heaved a sigh of relief, you know?
Yeah.
And people even acknowledged in the meeting, you know, when you went on Ingram, I don't disagree with anything you said.
I just disagree with the fact that you said it to her.
Like, I had a choice.
You know, I had no choice.
Yeah, but I think there's no shame in – I mean, maybe I'm biased because I go on Evening Fox all the time and I'm proud of it and I'm happy about that because you reach people and engage in dialogue, which we need more of in this country.
Yeah.
I agree.
I do the same.
I mean, the other thing that's so dumb is the assumption that you're talking to those people when you go on.
I'm like, but you guys saw it.
That's actually kind of funny, too.
Anyway, so I had a brief reprieve where it kind of quieted for a while.
And then it just kicked back up again a few weeks later.
What happened?
Well, at this point, I had a little bit more of a following on social media.
So I had a few trolls.
But none of it got traction.
That's the crazy part.
But what caused it to kick up against that?
You didn't say something different.
I didn't.
I was very consistent.
And there was just this new wave.
And just, again, double-click here.
What does that mean?
Just give people the reality of the experience here.
Inside the company, it meant a small group of employees were emailing the head of HR and my boss, the CEO, And saying we don't like what she's saying.
Outside the company, there were a few cohorts.
So there was this group of gymnastics fans that started calling the ethics hotline at my work to say she's an ethics violation.
How?
I was challenging public health guidelines, which meant I didn't care if people died.
But from the gymnastics world.
Because they followed me.
There's no reason other than they followed me.
And then there were others.
And so then how did it go down after that?
Well, after that, at this point, that first call, the head of CorpCom is taking a dossier of the things that I say publicly in my tweets to the CEO, like on a weekly basis.
Okay.
And then what happens though?
Where do they cut the cord?
They asked to do a background check on me in October of 21 saying, oh, you could be CEO, but we need to do a background check on you and your husband.
I said, this is going to be the thing that you use to get rid of me.
You said it.
I did.
And what did they say?
I said, it's going to be gray because at this point, sentiment had really shifted, but you're not going to want to put up with it.
So this is how it's going to go down.
I basically said, January 22, I got the call.
You can't work here anymore.
From HR? No, my boss is CEO. What did he tell you?
What exactly did he tell you?
He said, we finished the background check and there's not a path forward for you here.
And he offered me severance.
He offered me a million dollars.
I didn't say anything on the phone.
You know, I didn't say yes.
I didn't say no.
I said, okay, I wanted to get off the phone.
He said, give you a million to sign the separation, release of claims, and shut up.
And don't talk about the terms of the separation.
Exactly, of course.
I know how these things work.
Yeah, of course.
That's always how it works.
People challenge that that happened.
It's always how it works.
I did not...
Except that.
I resigned on February 13th, and then I publicly wrote a letter on Barry Wise's substack explaining what had happened on the 14th.
And did you pursue legal action?
No.
I don't want money.
I just want freedom.
And I want to be able to talk with folks like you about the illiberalism and the censorship that's taken – it's gone from college campuses to corporate America.
I think it's incredibly dangerous, and I just wanted to be able to talk about that.
Yeah, well, thank you for being as brave as you have been.
You've made some real sacrifice.
I often say this in a different context.
It doesn't have to do with this one, but – You can make a sacrifice if you know what you're sacrificing for.
I think it's part of what we've lost in this country.
You used the word citizen.
It stood out to me.
It's a concept we've lost in modern American life, the ability to think of yourself as a citizen.
But I think you have to know what sacrifices you're willing to make as a citizen.
I think of you as somebody who's serving your country, actually.
Living out the First Amendment, called the First Amendment for a reason.
It's not just about protecting you from the government.
It's about creating a culture in this country where citizens sort out their differences in opinion through free speech and open debate in the public square, not through the use of force, including even economic force or an economic sword of Damocles hanging over your head.
To use self-interest as a cudgel, economic self-interest as a cudgel to get you to shut up.
And you refused to.
And you paid the price.
I did.
And it's not easy, you know.
You were a high income earner, right?
Even at the time, too.
Yeah, apparently not as high as some people in my equivalent role, so it's not like I don't need to get back to work.
And I am the breadwinner in the family.
I got four kids.
I got, you know, one in college, another just graduated.
You know, I gotta forge a path.
This wasn't...
Easy.
Yeah.
A million dollars is not something that – I know a lot of billionaires wouldn't sniff at a million dollars they'd take for signing a piece of paper either.
It would make my life much easier financially.
But I wouldn't sacrifice my freedom.
Can I just kind of go into one area though?
Why not pursue legal action?
Yeah.
It's a good question, and I've certainly had moments where I'm like, maybe that was a bad choice.
I don't think it's a final choice.
I think this is just a couple years ago still, right?
Well, it is, but I quit.
So at this point...
Well, you know, talking about hostile workplace, this can actually...
I don't think you've closed the door on that at all, actually.
Okay.
It's possible, and I've had others advise me as such.
It's a personal choice, though.
It is, and I'm not really interested in protracted legal action.
It's never been my goal was to extract as much money from them as possible.
I just wanted to leave and have the freedom.
I agree with you there, and this is a deeply personal choice, and I think...
Being in litigation is unpleasant and you live life once and so you want to think about how you use that life.
The only thing I'll say in favor of it beyond the money, which is not what I had in mind when I was saying it, is you got to impose some cost on these guys.
I mean, these guys are going mostly – I know you impose some PR cost on them.
But if somebody doesn't make them pay for what they did, we can just expect even worse in the future.
I hear that perspective.
I do.
You have to draw the lines of what sacrifice.
You've already made enough of a sacrifice.
That is it.
I didn't want that to take over my life for the next few years.
And it could.
And it would.
And it would be ugly and painful.
And I had, you know, the last two years at the company were difficult.
I always stood up and I had poise, but it was hard.
It was emotionally difficult.
I've lost all my friends.
I mean, these people were my friends, I thought.
I was there 20 years.
My life is unrecognizable from what it was.
I don't have the city that I lived in.
I don't have the company I worked in.
I don't have the future that I'd planned for myself.
And so...
I wanted a clean break for my life.
And you're right.
These people only listen, care about, think about money.
That's the punishment that matters most.
That's why what I did was so unfathomable to them because no one gives up money.
Is it the same CEO still in church?
I might pick up where you left off, not through legal action, but I just think someone needs to impose money.
A social cost at the minimum on these people.
I know you've done that.
I'm just so taken by your story that, you know, as long as it's not going to cause hell for you, I mean, you've already been out there.
You can't.
Yeah.
What's the guy's name?
Chip Berg.
Chip Berg.
What a coward.
What a pathetic embodiment of an American leader.
Yeah.
Is Chip Berg.
This is a person who...
This is an opportunity.
He could have had an opportunity to say that we're a company that actually stands for the daring, that stands for the American way, which is that anybody who wants gets to express their opinion so long as their neighbor doesn't return.
That's what it means to wear a pair of Levi's and be daring and to go out into the American frontier.
He missed...
I mean, it's probably a business opportunity that he missed, but what a coward.
And this is a person, military...
Tainting that brand.
I agree.
Military would consider himself this sort of like brave, decisive, courageous leader.
Would he serve in the military?
Yes.
So what?
I know!
You serve in a military, you go through the motions, wear a uniform, serving out a hollowed-out husk of the thing you're supposed to represent.
That's not brave.
I'm sorry.
But here's the thing, and I'm sure you know this and have experienced it.
We make certain assumptions about leaders in this country, that there are a high percentage of them that are courageous, decisive.
I don't anymore.
I don't at all.
It's a very low percentage.
And the longer they are in leadership, the less they think for themselves.
They look left and right.
They get their talking points from CorpCom, legal, or HR. They don't even know what they think anymore.
And they were all telling him, this is really bad.
I got two- What's his name?
Chip Berg.
Chip Berg.
Charles V. Berg.
Charles V. Berg.
You're an American coward.
You had an opportunity to actually serve your country.
Yeah, I'm grateful that you put on a uniform and served like tens of thousands of Americans do every year in the military.
But what is the point of fighting or preparing to fight if you lose the very thing you're fighting for?
And I'm not asking you to make a sacrifice as a job as a CEO. I'm asking you to wake up to the opportunity that's hiding in front of you as a CEO, that there's a hundred plus million Americans just like Jennifer, okay, who agree with what she has to say, who history has vindicated, actually, what she had to say, who could have rallied behind you and your now pathetic brand to actually get behind making your company more successful.
People who would have come to work for you with an allegiance that goes beyond what you're going to get out of them just because you write their paycheck and sign their paycheck.
That is the opportunity you missed as a capitalist.
But in your capacity as a citizen, You also actually showed this country and the next generation of Americans what not to be, what not to aspire to.
The fact that you think you live the American dream becoming a CEO of a company is actually a farce that makes a comedy of the American dream when the person who achieves that height only gets there in order to actually have a piece of tape over their mouth, handcuffs over their hands.
You don't have to have physical handcuffs and be locked up to live a life of enslavement.
You're enslaved, but you're teaching other Americans that you know what people like Jennifer who are brave enough to speak up get enslaved by people like you too.
Shame on you.
Shame on what you're teaching the next generation of Americans.
And I hope you actually...
Learn from your own experience to be able to talk about your cowardice in the open.
And when you do, I will praise you for it.
I hope you do at some point, because until then, you're a pathetic example of what actually creates the problem in our country.
And I hope you either stand up or step aside, not just from Levi's, but from any position of leadership in this country, because we don't have room for more leaders like you.
People like you need to step aside so the real leaders are actually able to step up and deliver our culture.
That's what you need to hear.
And I'm sorry, it's not a personal insult to you.
It is just a statement of truth.
It would have been so easy.
Imagine it goes like this.
He stands up.
Some of you are upset with things that Jen is saying outside of work.
That's fine.
She gets to say them.
She's a citizen.
You can stand up for what you care about as a citizen, as a citizen.
Now let's get back to work.
Can we please just get back to work?
Let's focus on this great brand.
We're emerging from difficult business conditions during COVID.
We got to focus on great product, great marketing, discipline, financial management.
That's what we're going to spend our time on.
And we're not going to talk about this anymore.
How is that hard?
No.
That's natural.
It's the American way.
It's actually something that can be unifying.
Exactly.
I mean, I think that this culture is actually divisive.
It's a big part of what's wrong with it.
You know, Tocqueville, he traveled this country 160 some odd years ago, whatever it was, and he made an interesting observation.
He said that a diverse democracy is not supposed to survive more than a generation.
Right.
It's supposed to crumble under the weight of its own division unless there are certain apolitical spaces that can bind us together across those divisions.
He called them intermediary or intermediating institutions.
Capitalism is high on that list, right?
So people think of capitalism at a conversation with someone else this morning about, you know, Adam Smith and Joseph Schumpeter.
And yes, capitalism is the best known system known to mankind to lift people up from poverty.
I agree with that.
I embrace it.
We all know that to be true.
But the secret role that capitalism plays in a diverse democracy is that it is also one of these apolitical sanctuaries where we're able to come together.
Man or woman, black or white, Democrat or Republican, Elizabeth Warren supporter or Joe Biden supporter, the spectrum of what might have been acceptable in San Francisco at the time.
But we can come together and create things together, build things together, sell things, market things, invent things together in common cause.
And when that itself becomes politicized, That's really the beginning of the end as we know it, right?
You wonder why people, you tell, I sometimes say this, you tell people they can't speak, that's when they scream.
You tell people they can't scream, that is when they tear things down.
That's right.
Because you know what else happened during that same period?
It was January 6th, 2021. Yep.
You can point your finger to the other, one of them all you want.
Look in the mirror and ask yourself what role this guy Chip or whatever his name is, Joker, what's his name?
Chip Berg.
Chip Berg, whatever it is.
Look yourself in the mirror.
Ask yourself what role you played.
In that attack on the Capitol, I think people like you actually get to have the luxury of pointing the finger at the other without actually looking inside and asking yourself what responsibility you bear for not only what came, but that's a friendly parley compared to what's to come if we don't turn this culture around.
Well, yeah.
If you demonize half of the citizenry and you – I mean that's part of the problem is the geographic distribution.
In San Francisco, left of left of left of center, bluest city and the bluest state, these people that were telling me to stop, they didn't know a single person.
Besides me that said these things, it was easy to say, oh, she's a Trumper.
That's what they called me.
And, you know, public meetings, my boss called me a Trumper, knowing full well that that was a lie.
But that is just, if you violate- My first Elizabeth Warren support on this podcast, so that's great.
If you violate one tenet of the party, the orthodoxy, then you get associated with all the other things.
So I was called Q&A, which I had to look up, which I don't even think is real to this day.
I think it's just a made up.
Sometimes somebody called me that very recently.
There's like four people.
I'm still confused what that exactly means.
I think it's fallen out of favor.
But all those things, I was anti-trans.
I was anti-everything.
I was a racist, even though two of my children are mixed race.
It doesn't matter.
The arc of your life doesn't matter.
You get demonized.
And the ad hominems, as you know, are the purview of those with no argument.
But it works because it keeps others quiet.
No one wanted to go endure what I was enduring.
People are right to be scared.
But my message is...
We're the majority, people who have common sense, who can see a lie for what it is, who would like us to get back to some degree of open debate and dissent in this country.
And if we all stood together, I really think that's most people.
That is most people in this country.
And I think that we can...
I think most people agree with what you just said.
I think most people think their neighbors and their colleagues agree with what you just said but they can't be sure anymore because you're not allowed to talk about it.
And so once we start talking openly again, what do we realize?
We realize that we actually share these values in common, which is the whole bet and premise of my campaign for president.
Is that, you know what, we can actually – I think that could be the subject of a landslide election in 1980 style, 1984 style, let it be 2024 style.
That could be the single most unifying thing we do for the country.
And I am optimistic that people are so hungry with this pent-up sense of suppression.
They're hungry for a revival, but it's not going to happen automatically.
It's going to happen because people like you, frankly, are willing to make the sacrifices needed to get there.
You know – Yeah, not to sort of overly put myself on a pedestal, because there's a lot like me, but someone has to go first, and you have to kind of puncture the bubble or the delusion, and then slowly people will join you.
That's what happened to me in the world of sport, and I held that close.
But it took 10 years in gymnastics, and I... You know, I couldn't beat the clock in this case.
I thought people are going to come around on the school closures.
And, you know, ironically, the day after I resigned publicly, three members of the San Francisco Board of Education were recalled decisively.
Seventy to seventy five percent of San Francisco showed up and voted to recall these people because they did not open the schools.
I think shareholders or Levi's need to come back and recall, you know, Chip, our Joker CEO. But they agreed with me if they'd come to the rallies.
That's right.
That's right.
But they were too afraid to do it publicly.
They did it at the ballot box.
We need people to come out and do it publicly.
I think they're going to soon.
I'm optimistic that's going to – We're on the cusp of that.
I think 2024 can be a referendum on this culture of fear.
I agree with you.
And I think, you know, what I tell people is just defend your neighbor's right to say a thing.
You don't even have to agree with them.
Because you know what?
You're actually fighting for it.
You're not fighting for your neighbor.
That's right.
You're fighting for yourself.
That's right.
They can do it to them.
If they can do it to them today, they can do it to you tomorrow.
And they will.
No one's pure enough.
And they will.
Exactly.
No one's victim enough.
The French Revolution left no one untouched, right?
And so that's the lesson of history.
But I think that we are now learning that lesson of history in our own country today.
Yeah.
I'm optimistic.
It's not going to happen automatically, but I think if we have leaders who are willing to step up, I think that we're hopefully on the cusp of graduating from this weird adolescence we've gone through as a country.
I think so.
I think cusp might be still a little bit of time, but I think people are getting tired of, you know, being forced to pretend a lie is true, not even to be able to question it.
I mean, you mentioned the lab leak, but like everyone knew if you had any sense that closed schools were going to be harmful for children.
There's no seeing it any other way, and yet it could not be uttered.
The lies abound.
I mean, I could step outside of COVID and the schools narrative and the lockdown and the lab leak narrative.
I mean, everybody knows.
Let's go to the body positivity movement for a second.
Fraught also.
I'm sorry, everybody knows it's not healthy to be morbidly obese.
It is not healthy to be 400, 500 pounds.
You are not a bad person.
You are a good person.
You have value.
What you think matters.
But you can't talk about the fact that that is unhealthy.
It is considered fatphobic.
And in fact, you know, that was another thing I got in trouble for.
I would say, you know, obesity is linked to poor health outcomes from COVID, among other things.
And creates all these other health issues.
Why doesn't the CDC, why doesn't the government do a Get Healthy campaign?
Get out, get exercise, get sunshine.
Instead of locking yourself inside and eat better, we would have saved a lot more lives.
That made me a fat phobe.
I mean, I think that part of the reason is that you were already wrapped up in this other fraught debate.
Part of the reason is that becomes the next frontier.
It's a lot of what's going on in the trans movement where we can't have empathy for a kid who's going through some difficulty because as soon as they've uttered the magic words, then you're transphobic if you actually have empathy for the real thing that you could have helped them on, but you can't anymore because of your own self-interested fear as an adult.
Transphobic, transphobic, same story.
Yes, of course.
And that whole arena around gender ideology is also founded on a lie that there is no biological difference between the genders, between the sexes.
Everybody knows that there is.
But in the oppression hierarchy, trans folks fall lowest.
They are the most victimized.
And so their rights, according to the movement, have to trump.
I think the way that hierarchy works today is actually it's inverse in terms of who actually wields social power.
The most power, which is why when you take it to the arena of sport, women's sports, which were protected, created through title, protected through Title IX for a real reason, that doesn't matter anymore.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, but so it's sort of a – it relieves the religiosity of this as I point out.
I mean this is a side current.
But on one hand, you have to abide by the orthodoxy that the sex of the person you're attracted to is hardwired on the day you're born.
At the same time, you're asked to believe that your own biological sex can be completely fluid over the course of your own lifetime.
These two things can't make sense at the same time.
And with very little variation, you have to be able to espouse both of those convictions at the same time to be still within the modern acceptable window.
I think it's also, to address your first point, considered anti-trans.
If you are a straight male that doesn't want to date a That's actually very new, actually.
That's new.
Which is different than the entire premise for classifying gay rights as civil rights.
Yeah.
There's a lot of logic in the whole thing.
But that reveals the religious quality of it.
If gender is a construct and it's how you feel, why do you need any life body-altering surgeries?
Just say you are.
That's the contradiction at the heart of it, which is actually what's put pressure on also the fact that you can't be feminine without having...
Physically, outwardly feminine qualities.
It's like the kind of thing that would have irked...
Yeah, exactly.
Irked a feminist...
Me.
Maybe you.
Maybe 10, 20 years ago.
I don't know.
Probably my wife feels the same way that you can be a woman any way you know how.
And the trans movement says, no, you can only do it by having a body shape and lips of a certain shape and a voice of a certain type.
And not only that, if you have those behaviors as a young boy...
You must be a girl.
Yeah.
You can't be a boy with feminine...
That's right, which reinforces the very gender stereotypes that I thought...
It's such a circle.
...women's rights activists were.
Exactly.
Yeah, it melts my brain if I go around it too much.
But yeah, anyway.
I gotta say, I'm really...
I'm personally empathetic to your story.
I'm an entrepreneur but – so I didn't, you know, spend most – I didn't, you know, report into someone for most of my career.
I started my career as an investment analyst at a hedge fund.
So I had a boss then and I learned early on that I didn't do too well with having a boss.
But, you know, I think that it's not – it's not specific to a corporate hierarchy, the deeper cultural problem.
Did you ever come across – I wrote Woke Inc.
Did you read the book?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So you know my story I guess.
I mean I think I had – bottom line is a very similar experience.
Except this time I was the CEO of a company.
Black Lives Matter movement kicks off on the streets of this country following the tragic death of George Floyd.
There was demand.
In the ether, it wasn't by any one person, right?
I'm running the company, but from employees, from people on the outside, nebulous stakeholders, the public, peers, fellow CEOs, to come out and make a statement in support of Black Lives Matter, something that I couldn't do in good conscience.
It's call at the time for decimating the nuclear family structure.
There's a lot I just couldn't get behind personally.
But that was the one thing that was acceptable to say.
As opposed to what I ended up saying was, let's focus on the mission of our company.
There's a lot of strife in the world and we can make the world better through the medicines that we develop, which I'm proud of.
That wasn't good enough.
enough.
It didn't meet the moment and led to a journey where advisors to my company six months later step off prominently and ceremoniously after I write in my personal capacity against the very same situation as you.
I was a former law student.
I went to law school.
I wrote with a former law professor about the ways that technology companies, when they engage in online censorship, if they're doing so at behest of the government, might be running afoul of the First Amendment.
I mean, like relatively abstruse legal academic theories at the time.
And that was a basis for prominent advice for my company stepping aside.
So in my case, there was no threat from on high.
I could have just stayed in that position.
But functionally, there's no doubt it would have had an adverse impact on my company.
This is the biotech industry.
Even though I wasn't actually using my own corporate seat to do it, like Mark Benioff at Salesforce or whatever does, they're in the habit of doing it through their company.
I'm not doing that, but in my capacity as a citizen, which is different from my capacity as a capitalist, expressing certain viewpoints, made the decision to separate my voice as a CEO from my voice as a citizen by not being a CEO anymore.
And I have to admit, it was liberating, actually.
It was liberating.
I guess that's easy for me to say because I guess I'm not in a position to have to worry about me or my kids or whatever putting food on the dinner table.
It's probably part of what gave me a sense of obligation to make sure I did it.
There's a bittersweetness about it, but it was – the thing that matters most to me at least as a human being is – sounds like to you too is freedom.
Yeah.
Being my own man.
Being your own woman.
It is freeing.
I have no employer to mind.
I can say whatever I think.
People don't come after me anymore because they can't take anything really from me anymore.
And I reside somewhere in the middle between probably financially where you are and where sort of a – Work a day employee who doesn't have much savings.
I have a nest egg.
I can't not work for the rest of my life.
I got to figure it out.
But I'm going to chart my...
I am not going to shackle myself.
Again, not that anyone who wanted to control my voice would hire me because it's become very clear that's probably not going to happen.
So I got to figure it out.
But I think there are...
Companies out there that do want brave, courageous leaders who speak in their own voice and, you know, come find me.
I'm here.
In the meantime, I'll do my own thing.
And the freedom is, that's what I wanted.
That's what I got.
It mattered more to me than financial security.
It just did.
It seemed too important.
If we all commit to furthering lies, we commit in exchange for our own safety, then we don't live in a democracy anymore.
And that to me just seemed too, too dangerous.
And I will give up some of my own financial security to be part of that conversation.
I hope you'll be rewarded in spades.
I don't know if that's how the world works.
I would like to think it is.
I'm running for president to make sure that our country is a place where courage can be as contagious as fear has been for the last...
I'll say this.
We talk a lot about the American dream or we used to at least in this country.
The idea that no matter who you are or where you came from or what your skin color is, that you can achieve anything with your own hard work and commitment and dedication.
I hope that dream is revived once again and if it is, I've no doubt that you and people like you will achieve everything you ever want to but To me, it's also part of the American dream to say that, you know what, you're also free to speak your mind at every step of the way and that no American should be forced to choose between speaking their mind freely and putting food on the dinner table.
Between that American dream and the First Amendment, that is the new American dream.
And I'm optimistic that we can revive it, but it's not going to happen automatically.
It's going to happen because we make it so.
It's going to be a fight.
Look, I think that most people would rather stand with the group and take cover in the group and feel the safety of the group and, guess what, feel morally virtuous for touting the group's mantras, right?
Whether it's the summer of 2020 or whether it's COVID, stay home to stay safe or whatever.
Most people, and I think this is true across geographies, across time, Plenty of experiments have proven this out.
You know, most people will obey authority and stand with the group, stand for prison experiment, Milgram experiment.
We've seen it.
But if enough people advocate, like, we can make standing with the group standing for free speech.
That's the goal, right?
Is that we bring people out, we bring them forward, and they want to defend freedom and not mock freedom.
Again.
I mean, you remember in 2020. We made a mockery of it.
But people were mocking it.
It was freedom.
Really?
This is the premise this country was- Oh, really?
I never heard that.
Maybe it was a California thing.
Oh, you didn't hear it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But, but, but, but, but, but effectively the culture was operating in a way as though that were true anyway.
Yeah, the free dumb people were the people who cared about speech, who cared about freedom of religion and being able to worship, sending their kids to school.
And we were being offered safety in exchange for our freedom, and that was not a deal I was willing to make.
But it's alarming how many people are.
And yet, I came to realize...
It's not alarming.
That has happened since the beginning of time.
And so we have to fight for it and someone has to go first.
And eventually you can make that the cool thing to stand for and everybody will want to stand for it.
I think so too.
Yeah, exactly.
I think you might give more of an inspiration to young Americans than our friendship.
Because, you know, I think young people actually, they want to...
Stand up to the system.
Stand up to the man.
And maybe 20 years ago, that was being woke.
Today, you're going to stand up to the system.
Try actually doing what you did.
And, you know, say what you're not allowed to say in the presence of polite company.
And the thing you'll probably realize is that you weren't actually the only one who believed what you did.
And, you know, I think if people are willing to take that bet, I think we have a lot of pleasant surprises we might discover on the other side.
I think so, too.
We need to keep going.
Well, thanks for coming out, Jen.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, yeah.
Nice to meet you in person.
Yeah, yeah.
I've been following you, so it's cool to have you.
I'm Vivek Ramaswamy, candidate for president, and I approve this message.
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