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Success Story with Scott D. Clary
Lessons - Why Woke Capitalism Is a $21 Billion Scam | Vivek Ramaswamy - Biotech Billionaire & Author
00:14:19
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- [00:00]
A
In this Lessons episode, explore how Wokeness evolved from social awareness into a powerful cultural system. Discover how the 2008 financial crisis merged activism with corporate interest to form Woke capitalism. Understand how virtue signaling and hypocrisy divide society and weaken shared spaces. And uncover why separating capitalism from democracy may be key to preserving American freedom. How did Wokeness get to this point where it started in. It started. It started with, in theory, good. You know, there was. There was good thought behind why we should be woke, why we should be more accepting, why we should do all of these things to perhaps get rid of some latent ideologies that are not so great that we see in society. How has it got to the point where it's almost gone to the other end of the spectrum and now what you're stating is that it's actually negatively impacting society to a point.
- [01:04]
B
Yeah. Look, I think that when Wokeness was born, it was about challenging the system, about standing up to the system. And agree or not, there's something about that that I respect for somebody who has the courage to stand up to what the prevailing system is. Okay? But today, I think a couple decades later, Wokeism is no longer about challenging the system. Wokeism has become the system. And I think that the untold story of how that took place actually traces back to the 2008 financial crisis, when corporations were the bad guys. The old left wanted to take money from the wealthy corporations and redistribute it to poor people. Agree or not, that's what the old left had to say. But there was the beginning of this new Woke movement that began to say, actually the real injustice in society wasn't impoverished, wasn't poverty per se. It wasn't economic injustice per se. No, it was racial injustice and misogyny and bigotry. And after 08, that actually presented the opportunity of a generation for big business and for Wall street, because they could go in one fell swoop from being by definition the bad guys in the eyes of the old left to being the good guys if they wielded their corporate power in the right way. And so they started adopting these Woke values, applauding diversity and inclusion, putting token minorities and women on boards, and, as I said earlier, musing about the racially disparate impact of climate change in fancy ski towns. And that actually worked out pretty well, because corporations were happy to lend not just their money, but their legitimacy to this new WOKE movement. They were happy to use their market power to effectively propagate these Woke values, but they didn't want to do it for free. They had a new expectation that this new left would look the other way when it came to leaving corporate power intact. They recognized that maybe they don't love corporate power, but at least they would leave them alone if they were using corporate power to advance the goals of the new progressive woke left. And that's how this arranged marriage came to be. And so to answer your question about how wokeness went from being about a fringe theory that challenged the system to becoming the dominant system, in my telling of it, certainly in the book, and I believe it to be true, it is when wokeness met capitalism that it truly became unstoppable. That it went from being about challenging the system to becoming the system. And if you trace back to the 2008 version of it or the post 2008 version of it, what I like to say is a bunch of big banks met a bunch of woke millennials. Together they birthed woke capitalism and they put Occupy Wall street up for adoption. You better. Many people remember what that was. That was what the old left represented. Wokeness represented a new vision that proved convenient for big business. And the funny thing about it is that the woke left and big business, I don't think this is really an arranged marriage of love. It is an arranged marriage, but I don't think it's in a marriage of love. I think it's more like mutual prostitution where each side has secret scorn for the other. And any marriage in which each side has a scorn for the other is not going to end well. But it's a marriage that's working right now as long as each side gets something out of the trade. And Silicon Valley has now copied the same thing, saying they're going to censor content that the far woke left doesn't want to see online, but in return, they expect the new Democratic party to look the other way when it. When it comes to leaving their monopoly power intact. That's how this arranged marriage is working out right now, really well for both sides. But the net child, the bastard child of that arranged marriage has been the rise of this new woke industrial complex that I think is far more powerful than either big business or big government alone. It's a hybrid, a combination of the two, because each is able to do what the other cannot. And I personally think that's actually the biggest threat to liberty today. Not just big government per se, but. But the new birth of this new woke industrial leviathan.
- [05:03]
A
I want to, I want to highlight specific examples because people are listening to this. Oh yeah, well, you know, it makes sense and. But where can you point to where a company sort of virtue signaled just to placate, you know, the masses? And one, one example you brought out was with, with Solomon, David Solomon, taking companies public that have a woman on their board of directors or whatnot. And that's a great, that's a great thing. It sounds like, you know, in theory that that's a great initia. But you brought out a data point that was something along the lines of the fact that most of these organizations already had a woman on the board of directors. And it actually didn't really impact any organizations that were already ipoing.
- [05:44]
B
So Goldman Sachs made a declaration in 2020 that it would not from the mountaintops of Davos, by the way, Davos tends to be a place where people go to make these proclamations, I've learned. So from Davos, he says that Goldman will not take a company public in the United States, by the way. They don't apply these standards in Asia, they just kind of look the other way over there. But in the United States won't take a company public unless it has at least one diverse board member. Where they didn't really say what counted as diverse, but then they kind of said our focus is on women. Okay, well, it turns out that in 2019, by the end of 2019, certainly there wasn't a single one of the 500 companies in the S&P 500 that did not have a woman on their board, let alone one diverse board member. And so they, they ultimately managed to exhibit courage precisely when the thing they were doing lacked any modicum of courage at all. They were just conforming. What I like to say is that's just Goldman Sachs doing what Goldman Sachs does. Earning another great risk adjusted return, taking no downside risk, but getting all the PR benefit, taking an already popular social value and prominently emblazoning the Goldman Sachs logo on the very front of the social cause. But the list of examples just goes on and on. I mean, it's in some sense unfair to pick on Goldman Sachs because basically every major company in corporate America is doing the same thing. If you're Coca Cola, it's a lot easier to complain about voting laws in Georgia that make you sound more like a super PAC than a soft drink manufacturer or have employee trainings on how to be less white. By the way, that's an actual LinkedIn learning module that they send out to their employees until they were called out on it. A lot easier to do those things than to reckon with the impact of your own products on the nationwide epidemic of diabetes and obesity. By the way, in the very black community that they profess to care so much about. Or if you're Nike, it's great to criticize slavery 250 years ago. It's a lot harder to give up your reliance on slavery in the present day through your supply chains reaching out in Asia, it's a lot easier to criticize the United States and take, take down the Betsy Ross flag sneaker that they wanted to release in 2019 because Colin Kaepernick thought it was indicia of racism without saying a peep. In China, where we see true human rights atrocities today, over a million weakers in concentration camps, Nike doesn't say a word. And in fact, John Donaho just in the last month, CEO of Nike goes to China and says that we are a company of China and for China. That's his quote, not mine. This is, this is actually how this game is played. Is this two faced behavior in the United States and abroad supplicating to the ccp? Lying prostrate like a lapdog. But that same lap dog bites the United States at every possible turn. And I think that hypocrisy reveals the essence of what's going on. They're doing whatever allows them to make the most money or aggregate the greatest power. In China, it's behaving one way by not criticizing injustice. And nowadays in the woke moment in the United States, it's doing the exact opposite. Finding injustices to criticize as a way of exhibiting moral superiority.
- [08:47]
A
Now you make another statement that this is not just, not just placating masses but also detrimental to traditional American ideology potentially. You said like, you know, pursuing the American dream and having opportunities and all these things that are, you know, they are so congruent with what Americans hold so true and dear to them. Now how, how is this going to potentially negatively impact these traditional American ideologies? What, what's the, what's the bridge between.
- [09:20]
B
I'll give you, I'll give you a simple low hanging fruit. Because some people may disagree on the importance of certain American ideals over others. We can get into that. But I actually think that, that this new trend undermines American solidarity as we know it. Because in a divided politic, body politic like ours, okay, in America, in a healthy democracy where people disagree and debate one another and have fierce disagreements in the sphere of politics, the thing that we need in order to bind ourselves together as one people is other spheres of our lives, apolitical spaces where we could all come together, irrespective of whether we're black or white, irrespective of whether we're Democrat or Republican. To me, the baseball stadiums of America are a perfect example of where people come together for their love of sport, for their love of watching sport. And you don't have to know whether the fan next to you supports your politics or not. You probably don't. And that's a beautiful thing about it. The private sector running a biotech company. One of the beautiful things about it is that you come together because you care about developing medicines for patients who need them, not because you have one view or another on a particular political hot button issue of the day. And now with the spread of this woke capitalist brand, we lose those apolitical spaces. No one can go to a Major League baseball game anymore without also implicitly endorsing the Major League Baseball stand on moving its All Star Game from Atlanta to Colorado this year in a flagrant display of virtue signaling, without actually probably even having read the voting statute that they were protesting in Georgia. Going to a state that actually doesn't have dramatically different voting laws in the first place, but did it just because it was an opportunity to signal virtue? Maybe that benefits the MLB in the short run, maybe it doesn't. We can debate that, but it hangs America out to dry because it again eviscerates one more space that could have brought us together in a divided moment that we have now lost to as biotech companies go woke. The same thing happens where people, whether you're on the left or the right, black or white, you could come together, say, I want to pursue the development of medicines for patients who need them. But now the biotech industry association bio, the lobby group that represents the biotech companies, says that it encourages companies to consider disinvestment in states that pass laws like the ones in Georgia. And that effectively half forces people to signal what political tribe they're in where I personally think that the thing we need to do isn't to force capitalism and democracy to share the same bed. What we actually need is to keep them apart from one another in order to, to preserve the integrity of each. And I think that if we continue to force capitalism to mix with democracy, we will be left with neither. And in my mind, Those are the two parents of America, capitalism and democracy, both in 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence and the year of the wealth of Nations. Individualism, unity, all in one. That is what America is at its best. And we need both of those parents of America. Sometimes those parents may run roughshod over the other, and sometimes, in order to save the baby, you actually need to keep the parents apart. This may be one of those cases where America needs to do the same thing.
- [12:29]
A
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