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April 26, 2023 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
43:51
American Express Exposed: The Dark Side of Woke Policies | The TRUTH Podcast #18
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So, we've traced the mystery of the origin of this bizarre arranged marriage.
So we've traced the mystery of the origin of this bizarre arranged marriage between corporate America and a woke movement that you would think of as normally in tension with corporate America and its goals.
But in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, you had some strange things happen in this country.
And one of them was that two strange bedfellows got in bed.
They each got something out of the trade.
And even though they probably didn't really love each other, They nonetheless engaged in an act of mutual prostitution that gave rise to this new woke industrial complex in America that is far more insidious than just big government alone through the front door engaging in a trampling on individual rights in the 1980 version of the plot.
There's something altogether different going on today.
And I think that there's a little bit of a mystery beneath it where if you scratch the surface, it starts to make a little bit more sense.
But on the face of it is, I think, the cultural mystery of our generation.
And so today we have...
Two foot soldiers, I would say, in the fight back against that trend in corporate America who have been leaders in their own right, who I've gotten to know pretty well over the last year.
Kenny Zhu, who's author of his great book.
Actually, it's how I first got to know Kenny, An Inconvenient Minority, who's with us today.
Someone I've gotten to know more recently, Nick Williams, who's a friend of Kenny's as well, who's actually worked at one of the companies that Kenny has actually highlighted in his work.
We'll get right into it, guys, in terms of we'll start with your experience, maybe with you, Nick, talking about what you faced at American Express as a...
As an example of this broader trend of a politicization of corporate America that befuddles a lot of people, consumers, employees, etc., but now has become the new norm in America.
It's hard to think about in the abstract.
I mean, I've written books and whatnot about it, but you've seen an element of that In a very first personal way.
So why don't you tell us about it and, you know, what animates your new mission now?
And then three of us, why don't we just get into a chat and let loose a little bit?
Yeah, well, thanks, Vivek.
I appreciate the opportunity to be here.
And I'll tell you, growing up in Iowa and, you know, being a guy that was kind of just taught to stay in line and don't get out of line and, you know, keep your thoughts to yourself.
You don't have to raise a lot of eyebrows.
It's kind of how I lived life up until the last few years, where all of a sudden I realized that as I looked out, a lot of folks that represented my political affiliation were doing the same thing.
They had a thought, but they stayed quiet.
I had to make the hard decision when I was forced to exit American Express.
Am I going to take the money, which went up three times before I finally got it across?
You can't buy my silence.
Or am I going to fight?
And am I going to bear the cross?
And am I going to Take on the voice of those who aren't in a position to be a voice or right now are too weak who hopefully will become stronger to be the voice.
And I'd say that's what I'm most happy about in linking arms with Color Us United and launching the unamericanexpress.com website where people can have a platform to have their voice heard whether they want to sign their name or not, they can tell their story.
And I was empowered by all of the stories that have flooded in from the Fortune 500. You know, at first I thought this was just a big bank issue, you know, as I'm trying to be recruited by all the other banks when they find I'm on the market.
And it's like, well, the answer is no, no, no, no.
You all are a violator of what happened to me.
I realize my eyes are open.
And I guess I never thought that something like this could happen to me.
It bothers me that I was naive.
I feel like this guy from Iowa who has never been sued and never sued anybody and All of a sudden, something like this could happen to me.
I could be pushed out the door.
There could be 13 lawyers retained to fabricate a story so that I'm confused what even happened to me.
And so I've spent, I prayed on it with my wife and my kids, and I've educated my kids as well, my four children, including the seven-year-old, of why it's important to have your voice, why it's important to speak for what you believe, why it's important to not be silenced, and that's what this country was built upon.
So, I wanted to step in because we were, I was the, I'm the president of Color Us United and we were the, we're the group that is fighting Amex's woke policies.
And that's actually how we discovered Nick.
And just to give people who don't know Nick's story at all, what happened to Nick.
He was the number one sales performer at American Express.
For their global commercial services business.
This was during Steve Squarey, the new CEO's tenure.
After he arrived during Kenneth Chenault, when Kenneth Chenault was CEO of Amex, he was one of the world's most respected CEOs, also an African-American man.
And he, you know, Nick was the number one sales performer in that culture.
But what happened was...
He refused to extend a line of credit to a black woman who failed all of the standard credit checks.
And she got very resentful and really attacked Nick's character, complained about racism.
I don't know if that's what the backdrop was.
Okay.
Yes.
And even complained about his black male colleagues' racism against her.
And so he...
Decided to stick up for him, himself and his black male colleague.
And as a result, Amex put him through 73 days of legal harassment and ultimately terminated him.
Yeah, and it was interesting because it was during that George Floyd era.
I mean, it was the call to action.
This was back in, what, 2020, was it?
Well, the training started in 2020 that we were going through.
When was this incident?
March of 2021 was my last day.
So, investigations started.
When did this happen?
Oh, this was in March of 21. Yeah, I sent the email right after Christmas when my colleague came- Saying that she didn't get credit.
Yeah, and just not only that, that her behavior and her actions will not be tolerated.
They violate the blue box values and you won't speak to my colleague that way who took a phone call from her on Christmas Eve.
And when I found out about that, I thought- What is my African American colleague who I'm mentoring right now?
What's he gonna think of me if I just let that behavior happen?
And we're in a call to action.
Steve Squarey was calling card members and canceling their cards for how the recorded call went with our customer servicing agents who were African American.
And so there was a big call to action.
As in if a customer was- On the phone.
On the phone.
Needing help with their card and speaking in a manner that was not appropriate or in a tone or upsetting to the employee.
American Express would call that card member up and cancel their card as a result of that.
The action we were taking to back our black colleagues.
Not all of our colleagues.
It was our black colleagues at the time.
Oh, that was specific.
Interesting.
And that's how the banners of their trainings read, backing our black colleagues.
And so I have no problem with that.
You know, I have a multiracial family.
I was raised that a rainbow needs all its colors.
Ken Chenault's diverse company attracted me to American Express at the beginning.
So I had no problem with that.
And as a matter of fact, the woman who I refused service to, I didn't even know the color of her skin because she never turned the camera on in the era of Zoom calls.
So I didn't know any of this.
And again, what really happened is hard because these companies spent a lot of money to confuse the employee of what actually happened.
And I have spent a lot of my own personal money in legal fees to actually understand what has actually happened to me, what did happen to me.
But day one, if you would have asked me in March of 2021, when I lost my job, what happened?
No clue.
You know, I didn't understand.
I was being made to believe something else, you know, but obviously all of this is happening.
So the sequence of events was basically she was denied credit by a – what would your subordinate's name – what would the name of his title be?
Our risk and underwriting.
Risk and underwriting department.
No, they told me no.
For a loan.
You need more.
For a loan.
Yeah.
Like maybe start with your business matching the address and having that same thing on your utility bill.
Like that's a great place to start.
And so all those boxes, red flags were apparent.
Yeah.
She was denied credit.
And then – She complained to one of your superiors that it was the result of racism.
I can't confirm that.
Okay.
You know, I wasn't privy to all the conversations afterwards.
But I do know a lawsuit was raised by her.
And I did see her initial email claiming all of the damages.
And I do know that it never showed up after that.
It just magically went away.
Just like I magically went away.
At the same time.
Fascinating.
I mean, what do you think is driving?
I mean, Kenny, you've looked at this a long time, and what do you think is driving?
You studied American Express, and I love the term Un-American Express, by the way, because if you're going to put American in your title as a company and own that as part of your brand, you better, as far as I see it, you open the door to criticism on the back of that brand when your behavior is, as you so aptly put it, Un-American.
What do you think drove this?
It is a pretty mysterious thing to say that we want to be a company that competes in the market, that makes loans in a competitive way, but then says for this particular racial objective, if you don't relax your standards and somebody is dissatisfied, we're going to sacrifice if you don't relax your standards and somebody is dissatisfied, we're going to sacrifice you And when it comes to employees, we're only going to back our black employees.
What's going on there?
What's the essence of it?
Yeah.
And by the way, if you want to hear more of Nick's story, you should go to unamericanexpress.com and you can see all of the evidence that we put out showing Amex did things like give a 15% bonus for firing white males from their company and hiring POC, minorities of people of color. you should go to unamericanexpress.com and you can see all So that's on their documents.
We have it.
It's on unamericanexpress.com.
But here's what I think happened.
And I spent a long time piecing together what happened at American Express.
American Express has been under these federal regulations, under several investigations.
This is just one Wall Street Journal article about an investigation that the federal government has conducted against American Express for extending tax breaks to individuals sort of misleadingly.
And there are three more investigations that American Express is undergoing and this falls in line with what you talk about, Vivek, which is...
They need to find some way to protect their hide and look good and to say to the federal government, well, we're doing something.
We're doing something to be socially just, you know, so that maybe the federal government could relax some of their charges against them.
And the way that they decided to do it was to go woke.
You know, Steve Squarey made a huge...
CEO, Steve Squarey, made a huge push to go woke.
He even invited...
Khalil Muhammad, who was the grandson of Elijah Muhammad, who was an extremist.
Racist, violent, extremist.
Right.
Racist.
Pro-violence extremist.
Yes.
To give a corporate speech at American Express on how capitalism was racist.
And I assume he was paid to do it.
Oh, and he was paid a ton of money to do that.
And we were all forced to sit through the training.
Yeah, I can imagine that.
Or you can move along.
Oh, totally.
So you think – but this is interesting because it's just – it is the Woke Inc.
thesis.
I mean, that is the heart of the book.
I didn't cover – I don't think I covered American Express in my book and you have exposed American Express like none other.
But you think it's the classic case of – They're on our backs.
Classic critique comes from the left.
Blow woke smoke to deflect accountability.
Cultivate the new persona.
Yeah.
You don't think it was like the personal values of the CEO so much.
It was just kind of a naked self-interested, cynical play here.
And I want to add one other layer to this, which was after this...
Tax Break was pitched.
What American Express CEOs and some of their top staff, CEO Steve Squarey, Anna Mars, Sean Hines, what they- When was Chanel, when was he there?
Until what year?
I think it was around 2015. Oh, so he's been long gone.
So he's just been long gone.
He was like chairman or something like that or not.
He was Steve Squarey.
He was the CEO and chairman.
Yeah, I don't know.
But did he stand, he's out of the picture.
He's out of the picture.
Yeah, at this point, he's out of the picture.
What they did after this story blew up on the Wall Street Journal was they actually fired some of their...
Most of their salesmen who were pitching this sort of illicit slash misleading tax break.
But what they didn't do was they didn't fire their top executives who authorized this tax break, who authorized these illegal plans.
So in a way, they shifted the blame to the little guys.
Classic move.
They took all the credit and claimed blindness.
How do you claim blindness, Steve Squirey, Anna Mars, to a product that's driving $6 billion of revenue?
How do you not know about that?
And also to the legal team at American Express, how does any product that's new to the market get approved without all the sign-offs?
Everybody signs off on it.
They know what it is.
And then the training starts of what everybody is supposed to pitch.
It was unprecedented times.
You know, my attorneys did some research and found out that there was only one investigation going on at any given time in the history of American Express's 174 years of existence.
And when that one happened for Ken Chenault at a time, one at a time, it was the biggest deal ever.
Well, there was three at this time, piling the fourth with the IRS. That is unprecedented.
So they need to make a move.
They need to show we're one of the good guys.
We're self-flogging.
We're beating ourselves, not just American Express, but what we symbolize, the essence of American capitalism.
We're a credit card company with the word American in it.
We're the ones that need to apologize.
That's kind of what played out.
Yes, but what they didn't realize or they didn't care was the real effects that their woke policies would have on their employees.
On their high performers, their top performers like Nick Williams.
I'll just give you one example.
You know, it used to be under Ken Chenault's regime, under Ken Chenault's stewardship, if you were a top performing salesman, you could make a really good living being a top performing salesman.
You could make $800,000, $900,000 a year.
Do very well for yourself because you were a top performer, you were a top individual contributor and that's what Nick has been his entire life.
He was the director of development for the Boy Scouts before he came to American Express.
So, he knows what top performance is all about and he just wanted to be an individual contributor, no more.
You can't make more than like $250,000 a year which You know, that's a comfortable living, but that's not why the top guys go to these companies.
They want to know that they'll be rewarded for their merit.
So it's changed now.
Yeah.
It's changed.
Do they even use the word?
Do they use words like merit?
I mean, do they sort of pay homage to it, or is it more or less that's even out of the lexicon because it's so incompatible with the way the company's operating?
That's now all gone.
I bet you.
It's one thing like you get anti meritocratic companies, you'll say merit enough times, but it's not this bad.
It's just sort of like a dilute version.
And then they're just sort of apologizing for when you're behaving like this.
I don't even think you can say the words because it's so antithetical to the way they're actually behaving.
There's so many people who rely on, you know, being a leader within the company by delivering results, not actually like managing people.
I was one of them.
I was a catalyst for so many new exciting things from my colleagues.
I pushed them because of what I was delivering.
That's leadership to me.
It's leadership through delivering quality and like above anybody else and putting the time in and getting paid for that.
That was where The American dream really survived and lived and thrived in American Express.
It was one of the most coveted B2B sales roles in the whole United States at that company.
And talk about another book.
It's how to destroy the sales culture, the B2B sales culture overnight.
Because that's what Amex did.
And what's interesting is you guys did some research on that.
They looked at the ranking report, you know, 250 of us, and they said, let's take a look at the top 50. The Global Commercial Services Division, their most profitable division.
Yeah.
The top 50 individual performers in their most profitable division.
That's what we looked at.
Go ahead.
And I don't remember what the results were.
How many of those were fired?
Two-thirds of them.
And the color of their skin.
They were all white.
One was Hispanic.
I mean, it's unbelievable, right?
You would think that this is a sort of civil rights violation.
Now, the civil rights laws have been read in really perverse ways.
My general view of whether something's racist or not is if you could turn the tables and fill in a blank of a different race, and it would still be wrong.
It's still by definition, racist and discrimination.
It's discrimination on the basis of race.
That's exactly what's happening here.
You could turn the tables and imagine any other scenario where that would have been the basis for civil rights litigation.
Now, has American Express actually gotten sued on the back of this yet?
Because of our efforts to expose the information, by the way, it's all on AmericanExpress.com.
Yeah, which has been heroic, by the way, on your part.
So I think exposing it is half the battle.
I hope somebody picks up that baton and actually does something with it.
Yeah.
And, you know, we reached out to American Express leaders, you know, asking them, do you understand what you're doing to your companies?
And, you know, the best they could come up with are some false statements they made on Fox News saying, our leadership bonuses are only awarded on the basis of leadership qualifications and individual performance and merit.
They actually used the word merit when they responded to Fox News.
Yeah.
So there was something at Fox slightly, apparently, allegedly misquoted, so they used that as a straw man to sort of distinguish themselves from that.
That's kind of the tactic?
Yeah, something like that, their communications tactic.
And I was like, oh, really?
Then why does it say in your document right here, you give a 15% bonus to your hiring managers for ensuring a diverse workforce, meaning firing white people, promoting people of color?
That's what it means.
So that's what happened.
Interesting.
I gave a speech recently where we talked about the origins of the word merit.
I'm just trying to think about One of the things I say is we're going to put the merit back into America.
I'm a big believer in the idea that language teaches us a lot about truth.
I kind of was on a wild goose chase for figuring out whether the etymology of merit overlapped with the etymology of America.
Initially, I hit Wall.
Because merit has, you know, one one route.
And America has a different route actually that dates back to America Vespucci, whose grandfather was actually had his name derived from a word called Amalric.
So Rick, so one is Latin and the other one is is in Gothic and old Gothic.
And Rick means master.
But Amal actually means work.
So even though it didn't have the same historical etymology, there's something more deeply connected about it, where literally the name America is derived from a phrase that refers to the master of work.
I think there's something to be said about the relationship between merit and work, merit and effort.
You know, merit's really about rewarding results, but results often correlate tightly to the amount of effort that one puts in.
And it just makes me think about a case like this.
I mean, what does that do to the culture of a workforce and a sales force?
I'm curious how, because you get a black colleague who's working with you who was on the front lines of this.
Like, what was his reaction to all of this?
Well, it's interesting.
I mean, he's been told how to react after they gave him my job.
He's been reprogrammed, yeah.
After they gave him my job.
Okay.
You know, I'm based in Des Moines, Iowa, in the capital of the state.
And this employee is in Omaha, Nebraska, across the state line.
How do you support small businesses as the extension of their finance team with working capital from Nebraska?
You know, we were an in-person resource.
Local small businesses in Iowa.
From 100,000 to 500 million in gross annual revenues.
So that's a huge- And let's remind people who aren't familiar with Iowa geography, Omaha is on the other side of the western part of the state.
Yes.
Des Moines is smack dab in the middle.
In the middle.
I'll tell you, presidential campaign, a lot of driving in Iowa.
That is a long drive.
It is.
It's not even the same vicinity.
You could have a state or two separating them if you're talking about the northeast.
With no cell service in between.
Absolutely, yeah.
It's interesting.
So what was his reaction?
You think he's been reprogrammed?
Yeah, he's been reprogrammed.
He was a great guy.
That's the reason why I volunteered to be a mentor to him.
You know, there was many people that I was asked, well, why don't you lead this call, Nick?
Why don't you tell people how you're doing this?
I'll tell you why.
I'm not.
Because they go to sleep on their couch at 2.30 every afternoon, and they wake up at 4.30 to make their light green on their computer, and then they sign off.
I put the work in.
I'm putting in 60 to 80 hours a week to figure out these strategies.
I'm not going to give it to them when they're putting in 30 hours a week.
So talking about merit, that's what it's all about.
So the culture was destroyed.
This employee needs to provide for his family, right?
He's not going to get out of line.
He's going to stay in line.
He's going to be told how to think.
And he's black.
He's black.
And he was the one that you were sort of going to bat for.
Yeah, 100%.
Because it was his decision, in part, that the customer alleged some sort of malfeasance about.
I asked him, why would you take a phone call on Christmas Eve?
But that's how hard of a worker he was.
And that's why I had interest in mentoring him.
Does his sort of...
Account of this though, like right now he's kind of cruising on his own path.
The account of this is he never ever felt threatened.
The most recent account.
Yeah.
So that's not the account he and I discussed before I sent the email where I was going to back my colleague.
You know, you get tough skin in sales.
I can handle somebody speaking this way to me and I can deal with the emails, but you know what I've learned is, and I taught him this lesson before I sent the email, not every deal is a fit.
Not every deal is worth the paycheck that comes with it because this behavior doesn't go away.
I mean, I wouldn't be shocked if there was, you know, there was the amount of money that you've put yourself in the hat of the company, let's say capital allocator, head of the division, CEO, whatever.
Well, there's this much money we're going to pay to Nick.
Nick, you got to shut up.
Okay, we'll pay him 3x that.
Nick, you got to shut up.
Nick refused to shut up.
Well, that's still my reservation price and my dollar value to make this go away.
Let me just give a portion of that to this other guy.
Reprogram him.
He's black.
I'm back in black.
And by the way, we can hang Nick out to dry.
That seems like a reasonable thing to do.
And I don't fault your colleague in any first personal sense.
Most people probably behave the same way.
Take a little extra cash.
Get on with the job, move ahead and say, ah, maybe it wasn't as bad as I thought.
Everyone goes home happy, except you're hanging out to dry.
That seems like the pawn sacrifice that is an easy one for corporate America to make.
And you stay in the game and you stay in the hunt and you stay in your rung on the ladder where American Express and every other fortune company wants you to be in that rung on the ladder to make the machine work.
But what gets – the story that gets left behind is all of those who were silenced to not tell their story, who you destroyed their families.
And you nearly – Could have wrecked.
They could have had to sell their house.
They could have not got married.
They went on medications for the stress.
All these stories exist from my hundred plus colleagues who were, you know, dismissed as a result of this.
And Kenny, you probably have good perspective on this, you know, from the book you wrote too, even in the college admissions setting.
Oh, yeah.
Like, do you think that this, I've got to think that this Actually fosters racism.
Anti-black racism in this country.
Because you take somebody's job away, you take somebody's seat away from college, somebody who's worked hard, has good reason to believe they earned it, but then get fired, don't get that spot in college.
I can't think of actually – I probably can't think of a more effective way to spawn vitriolic, virulent, Toxic anti-black racism across this country than to take something away from members of every other race on account of their skin color.
I guess I can't imagine a world where this doesn't foster more anti-black racism.
Nick and I discussed this before we came on this podcast, but I have two examples for that.
One's in my book and one I just want to say right here.
If you are mentoring a black colleague and everything like that, and you're doing it out of the goodness of your own heart, a minority colleague, black, female, minority, somebody, I get it.
You know, you do it out of the goodness of your own heart.
You do it because you want to be part of the culture.
And then people like Nick are made publicly within the company, hung out to dry because a black woman, you know, sued him and American Express took this woman's side Without listening to Nick, and everybody knows Nick and the kind of performer that he was, and this guy has suddenly made an example in the company, are you more or less likely to take that invitation to mentor your black colleague?
You're less likely.
Less likely.
Absolutely.
Because now you're afraid of the risk.
And the whole thing is fostering them to think about them as my black colleague.
Right.
Capital B black colleague.
And that's the worst part because remember what Nick's story was.
I'm not going to mentor somebody who's going to put 30 hours a week of work, but his colleague who happened to be black put in 60 hours of work and that's why Nick mentored him.
And it's a shame because that's going to foster this new wave of anti-black racism, which in some ways we see in our country.
Now, how does this remind you – you mostly focused on – you had a broader focus, but mostly focused on college admissions in your book.
Actually, I quoted you in Nation of Victims in my second book.
I thought some of that – some of the facts were so good.
Talk to me a little bit about some of the parallels you see and what do you think is different in the corporate setting versus in the kind of affirmative action that we see in college admissions and what the impact has been on the Asian American community.
That's a good question.
So, the other example I was going to bring up was about a Princeton professor who, because of racial preferences, was asked to take this math PhD, who was a black woman, who was good at math, but she just wasn't at that level, at that excellent level.
And you know, if you're going to take a math PhD at Princeton, you better be the top tier quality.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
John Nash on down, you know, exactly.
John Nash is the standard, right?
So, and he describes her basically getting discouraged from the get-go because yeah, should more people mentor her, pay attention to her?
Yeah, but there's only so much you can do.
You have to put in you as that person still, if you are not at that level, if you're below that level, you're going to get left behind very quickly.
And what happened was she got very discouraged and really lashed out at the system that accepted her, that tried to admit her without the requisite qualifications and she became a net liability to Princeton even after she was gone.
And so, that's the issue.
And it's not because she was a race of any kind.
It's because we have a system right now that says, you know, that basically denies merit and basically says, oh, everybody is equal.
Everybody can be treated in the same way.
No, that's not the case.
Mm-hmm.
And unfortunately, that's what a lot of businesses in corporate America are doing.
And that brings me to something that I wanted to say earlier, which is we're living in a system now, and this is a system.
It's not systemic racism, but it is a system.
We are living in a system where people are no longer being rewarded on their merit and their individual contributions, but are being rewarded on compliance.
Compliance.
Now the only way you can get that million dollar salary at American Express is to go up the C-suite executive hierarchy, which is what?
Compliance.
Administration.
You know, those are the kinds of things.
No longer are top individual performers who just want to be top individual performers rewarded.
That's...
If I had to distill the essence of what our culture is turning into, and yes, it started at Ivy League colleges and it's continuing on corporate America, which is why you have to read my book, An Inconvenient Minority.
It is a good book.
Thank you.
Yep.
That's what it is.
And I can remember a critical race theory training in the fourth quarter of 2020 that I sat through, appalled to hear this concept that if I'm in a team meeting, whether it be my local district team, a region, a national call, and I have a black colleague in that meeting with me, as a white male, as a white privileged male, I was told, You will not speak first when you have an idea.
Your African-American colleague will get that chance to speak first, and then you can speak.
And then be aware while you do of all of these microaggression behaviors of what you can and can't say in that meeting.
It just feels like this is an assault on the American soul.
In America, in this country, right?
Either we or our parents or someone in our lineage, we left in another country.
Left comforts to come to this one, to pursue excellence, to be at the frontier, to be the pioneers.
I mean, that is what the country is founded on.
And now, for us to say that we're going to tame that spirit, we're going to stand down because of the color of your skin and because you look at somebody else's color of their skin and anticipate something about their lived experience as opposed to the other kinds of experiences.
Right.
That's what we're going to do.
What's the essence of what we're doing?
I actually had this conversation with Douglas Murray recently.
He actually encapsulated it really well where he said, look, I think what we're doing is we're not restoring justice from somebody who committed an injustice against somebody who had the injustice committed against them.
We're just taking people who look like someone who had something bad to happen to them and I mean, We don't know if they're your ancestors for all you know.
Maybe your ancestors were people who were subjugated by somebody else across some other ocean somewhere else in some other century.
What do we know?
Maybe you don't know.
You probably don't.
I don't.
But you look like somebody who at some point in time did something wrong.
And that person, though you couldn't see them on the Zoom screen, apparently, it turns out if she had turned on the camera, looks like somebody who might have had something once done wrong to someone like her.
And then we're making decisions in the present day of how we treat one another based on an optical artifice of something that may or may not have happened a long time ago.
Seems like a formula for creating that exact social structure of racism once again that supposedly this was supposed to liberate us from.
Yet here we are.
There's a story of a female, well, she was a GM, got to the level of GM, you know, and to everybody else, this means really nothing at the band levels at American Express, but been there, put the time in 20 plus years.
Folks said maybe she'll be the next CEO eventually of American Express on that path.
Bled blue, drank the Kool-Aid.
She was a leader.
But what I loved about her is that she was fearless and she put the time and you could tell she worked and she would challenge the status quo.
She would challenge ideas and she would put the time in to come up with her reasoning of why the challenge made sense.
Well, she got a big promotion in the Phoenix branch and was welcoming everybody virtually, finding out a way to make her thousand plus team feel good about her coming on to lead And one of the things her daughter asked her in the interview was to talk about the favorite doll of hers because she collected them when she traveled.
Well, as she described this doll and why she loves it because of its hair, it ended up being the reason why she was fired.
And that doll was African American and she was her favorite doll in her collection.
What I felt unbelievable- Wait, wait, wait.
Why?
So very quickly- Close the look for me because that didn't make sense to me.
So very quickly as the video is pushed out to the new team welcoming, this comment about the doll gets called into HR because it made someone feel uncomfortable that she would speak that way and talk about the doll's hair and call out that African-American doll's hair and how it was.
And you want to know where it gets better.
Two months after that, we're sitting in a training.
And that was big news, right?
I mean, there was messaging sent out about it.
And everyone was shocked because that was the least racist person anybody know.
Mentored many, many African-Americans in her career.
But what was crazy to me was we went through a training where this very, very dark skinned woman was talking about her childhood growing up.
And she described herself as the dark skinned with nappy hair.
And I thought...
That's confusing to me.
She's describing herself.
In exactly the way.
That this person, and I don't even think to that level of that's how she described her doll, but it was okay here for the whole company to hear in this mandated training, but not here.
It ended her career.
They'll get you for going and they'll get you for coming in the sense that let's say it had been a white doll or whatever.
Well, that wasn't very racially conscious of you.
Yeah.
And so it goes back to these federal regulators.
It does.
It's okay until it's not okay what's going on inside American Express.
And we're going to cover all the bones up and we're going to scapegoat a group of people and move on.
And I love that the classic piece of that, you see this crop up so often, some employee feels uncomfortable.
I mean, you have a company with 100,000 plus employees, not everyone's going to agree with every decision.
But when you retrofit it into these alleged civil rights allegations, then it changes the picture.
So that's one of the things I've said I was going to do as president is, let's make at least viewpoint expression a civil right in this country.
Now, I'm skeptical of adding one more regulation onto what businesses already can and can't do.
But what's actually happened in reality is that you take these protected classes.
You mentioned compliance earlier, Kenny.
Race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, national origin.
The way they've now grown to be interpreted by government bodies like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the EEOC, is to say that not only does the prohibition on discrimination against race mean that you can't actually discriminate against somebody on the basis of their race – it also means that a member of that protected class cannot be subject to what's called hostile work environment.
And so what is one of the ways that somebody can create a hostile work environment?
It's by saying something, expressing themselves, expressing a viewpoint.
So ironically, these civil rights statutes as broadly construed by the EEOC created the very conditions for viewpoint discrimination while leaving Political viewpoints themselves or viewpoints of any kind, unprotected.
So you can't have it both ways, right?
Say that, okay, either you will let the market work, and we're just going to be, this is the way I would like it, and we're colorblind and race and gender blind and everything else, applying principles of pure merit, how effective you are in advancing the mission.
Or you apply the standards even handedly to say that if you're going to say you can't fire somebody or de-platform somebody or whatever for black, gay, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, whatever, then you shouldn't be able to fire somebody or de-platform somebody or punish somebody in the workforce just because they express a viewpoint that a member of a protected class then you shouldn't be able to fire somebody or de-platform somebody or punish We got to apply the standards evenly.
Well, in my opinion, you go ahead and implement that policy because as you implement that, you've talked about, and this is why you will make the next greatest president of the United States, is you're going to get rid of one that you've challenged every Republican and Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson for not getting rid of.
Affirmative action.
Affirmative action.
And that is why you will make a good president because you're not seeing it as a left or a right issue.
You're seeing it as an American issue.
First principles.
And that's what this stuff is.
It's an American issue.
It's taking the un-American spirit.
And it really is.
I mean, there's an anti-American strain in this country.
Yeah.
The question isn't even, are you Republican or Democrat?
Are you pro-American or are you anti-American?
And if you're pro-American, you believe that you get ahead in this country, not in the color of your skin, but in the content of your character and contributions, full stop.
That is what it means to be American.
And every president, since Lyndon Johnson had a chance to take a pen, stroke a pen, cross that out.
I pushed Trump's people on this.
They said it's a political hill they didn't want to die on.
There's something about this issue that makes this sacred cow you can't touch I disagree with that.
I think if you have the courage to address that head on, you're actually going to liberate the country from the psychological slavery that we have since been shackled in.
Yeah.
Can I give you the last word?
That's great.
And really like also remember how much we have done and tried to do as a country to help minorities in our country.
And actually, I am writing a new book.
And my next book, actually, we're signing the same publisher, Vivek, School of Woke.
How critical race theory infiltrated our schools and why we need to save them, why we need to reclaim them.
We have been teaching our minority children, especially our black children, a horrible philosophy that society is structured against them, that society is racist, and we've beaten them into them in our public education system.
That's absolutely right.
I mean, I went to public school with...
You know, I think a lot of poor black kids, I think it might have been majority black or close to it.
There isn't a single one of those black kids that could not have achieved everything I have in my life.
I found a multi-billion dollar companies running for president at 37. I tell you, not a single one of them couldn't have done it.
Yeah.
Had it not been for, let's actually talk about this, two parents in the household putting an emphasis on education, cultural change in a community that doesn't value education or achievement in the same way.
That's what we need to focus on.
Because everybody has the capability in them.
The question is the culture you create in this country.
That's very uncomfortable for a lot of people to say.
People are mad.
I just said it just now.
It doesn't matter.
I think if you want to solve the problem, you got to be willing to speak those hard truths.
So I respect the two of you guys.
I mean, you made a personal sacrifice, Nick.
And I think that the definition of courage, I think, is having conviction.
Yes.
But being willing to act and make a sacrifice to advance your conviction, that's courage.
And I think, Kenny, in your own way, you've done it too, is willing to take a risk to advance your conviction.
That is what it means to be courageous.
And yes, fear spreads like a virus.
Courage can be contagious too.
That's part of why I want to have you guys on because I think your story speaks to what so many Americans want to do, wish to do today, but feel constrained from being able to.
The best way we give them that space to start talking openly again is by doing it ourselves.
And so, you know, my only ask of you guys as citizens is keep at it.
Do not relent.
I don't have a feeling that you will, but do not.
I'm looking forward to that next book, man.
And I think that people should prepare for it by reading this one.
It was a great book, very first personal, inconvenient minority.
But I think we're on the beginning of a turning point here.
And if we do cross that bend, it'll be because of people like you guys.
So thanks a lot, guys.
Appreciate you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I'm Vivek Ramaswamy, candidate for president, and I approve this message.
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