Vivek Ramaswamy Tells Us How He’s Taking on Woke Corporate America

BUCK: Our friend Vivek Ramaswamy is with us now. He’s the founder and executive chairman of Strive and the author of the very excellent book, Woke, Inc. Vivek, great to have you on.

RAMASWAMY: How you doing?

BUCK: I’m good, man. Look, before we talk about the solution to a form of corporate wokeness — a very powerful, very broad-scale one — can you put into just layman’s terms for all of us the problem here when it comes to wokeness, woke capital, and how it affects places — massive asset managers, financial institutions like BlackRock, State Street, what’s going on?

RAMASWAMY: Yeah. So look, I think that there is a fiduciary duty problem here where what’s happening with these large asset managers — BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, you name them — they manage over $20 trillion. That is more than the GDP of the United States. But here’s the problem. That money belongs to everyday citizens whose capital they’re using to advocate for policies in corporate America that most of those everyday citizens would disapprove of.

And I think that is the greatest fiduciary betrayal of our time that no one has paid attention to, no one has woken up to, and certainly no one has stepped up to solve. That’s the problem we’re stepping up to solve, and it runs pretty deep, and I’ll say how deep it runs is, I think it’s gotten so bad that it borders on an antitrust problem. The Arizona attorney general’s actually launched an antitrust investigation.

He called it — boldly, in my opinion, and possibly correctly — the greatest antitrust violation, the biggest antitrust violation in history where I was running through a thought experiment here. Imagine the CEOs of, say, Exxon and Shell and Chevron got together in a room and decided that they were going to cut gas production, and gas prices at the pump spike as a result.

That’d be the stuff of movies, right? The people are walking out with handcuffs. That’s not what’s happening here, but it’s pretty close where the top asset managers in the world who own those same types of firms are basically mandating that they do the same thing — and somehow, we celebrate that at EFG?

I think that’s a problem. And so what we’re doing is we’re bringing a different voice to the table saying that, you know what? If you’re a company, you should focus exclusively on delivering excellent products and services to your customers, not on political agendas and not on social agendas. And I hope that’s gonna be good for restoring the heart of our economy.

CLAY: Yeah. Thanks for coming on the show. The book was fantastic, Vivek. And I actually have been… I’m gonna be honest with you. Until you started raising the red flag here and pointing out some of these issues, I went and did my own research, and the guy who’s probably the most powerful in America that most people don’t know in terms of having influence here on corporate woke politics is Larry Fink.

He’s the CEO of BlackRock, and I think people are still learning what all of this means. Can you explain where Larry Fink — a guy who is the CEO of BlackRock — derives his power from and what he’s able to do basically to bend many of these companies towards his own political will, when many people out there are not even aware of the power that he wields?

RAMASWAMY: Yeah, and look, I’ll quote Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett who said, “Larry Fink is not my emperor.”

CLAY: Yeah.

RAMASWAMY: More reasonably, I think CEO is an inappropriate title. I think emperor might be more appropriate. So what happened here? Let’s take a walk through history lane here of the last decade and a half. After the 2008 financial crisis, right, there was a new demand of American capitalism, saying that greed is no longer good, you know, we need to find a new model.

Larry Fink is the guy who stepped into that void and turned that into an opportunity. He said that, you know what? We just have to play a different game here that we call this “stakeholder capitalism.” The old left used to be Occupy Wall Street left knocking on our doorsteps. Let’s put them to one side by now start talking about social responsibility and preach about the racially disparate impact of climate change — after you fly on a private jet to Davos.

This is pretty good work. You blow a smoke screen that distracts people from the essence of what they were mad about and use corporate power to actually advance the very progressive agendas that used to come after corporate power in the first place. And it turned out he used that as a marketing tool to create the world’s largest asset manager today, managing over $10 trillion.

And what they do is they show up as the shareholder and say that, you know what? Milton Friedman might have said that you, the CEO, owe a duty to the shareholders and you shouldn’t be pushing social agendas. Well, guess what? I am the shareholder, and I’m telling you that you must push these social agendas or else I’m going to dock your pay, or else I’m going to fire you as CEO, or else I’m gonna replace your board of directors.

Until most CEOs bend the knee and do it. A real factual example, Disney, people think that this guy is just bending the knee to his progressive employees. Well, not so fast. It’s actually a deeper problem. You look at the top shareholders of Disney, it’s none other than those big three: BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard. So this runs pretty deep, and you think we live in a system of free market capitalism with competition?

Well, guess who the top shareholders of Microsoft and Apple are? Competitors, right — or Coke and Pepsi, or let’s just say any companies, Shell and Exxon or Chevron. These are supposed to be competitors in the economy? Turns out they all have the same top shareholders. That’s the problem here, and so what I’m aiming to expose — and the problem not only to expose, but solve — is that actually even though folks like Larry Fink or BlackRock claim to be the shareholders of those companies and dictate what those companies do, actually they’re not the real shareholders.

The real shareholders are the firefighters, the nurses, the doctors, the small business owners of this country who unknowingly see their money directed through their 401(k) accounts, their pension fund accounts, et cetera, to the hands of these firms that are voting their shares and advocating for policies in the boardroom that would make their blood boil if they actually knew what was going on, but they don’t.

And that’s why I think transparency is gonna be the key here. And that’s why I think we have a big mountain to climb. And, believe me, it’s a big mountain ’cause BlackRock and the other firms have mastered the lobbying game, have mastered the game of government capture. Look at the number of BlackRock alumni that staff the administration and the White House and the Treasury department and the Council of Economic Advisors.

It’s crony capitalism today. So it is a big hill to climb. But the thing we have on our side is that, at the end of the day, the voices of the American people and the desires of the American people — not just as citizens, but as shareholders — are demanding, once they’re aware of it, a new direction. That’s what we’re providing.

BUCK: We’re speaking to Vivek Ramaswamy. Woke, Inc. is his book, and he’s the founder of Strive Capital. To that end more on the solution, Vivek, which you’re trying to build. You’ve already raised $20 million, I believe, for this venture. What’s it going to do and how does it affect the folks out there? As you mentioned you got a 401(k), it’s probably with one of these financial giants. You want to build an alternative to those woke financial, gargantuan companies.

RAMASWAMY: Yeah. So look, that’s just the seed capital. The Wall Street Journal broke the story so we ended up announcing it a little bit earlier than expected. But at the end of the day, we should probably talk again in the third quarter of this year, because that’s when we’re gonna launch our first product. And these are gonna be products that live out our mission, that allow everyday shareholders to have a choice, that give them an opportunity to be able to help us realize our mission of bringing a different voice to the table in corporate America.

So I’m limited in what I can say about it right now, but let’s come back in in the third quarter when we said we’re gonna launch our first product, and I hope that this is the beginning of a long journey that actually represents the voice that most Americans want to bring to corporate America, which they don’t want capitalism to be political. They don’t want the places where they shop or where they work or where they invest to be political.

And you know what? I think… It’s really important to me, too, that this is not just a left-wing or a right-wing movement. This is about reviving the heart and soul of American capitalism itself, is that by depoliticizing the private sector, I think the thing that we’re gonna be able to do is hopefully recreate solidarity between different people, irrespective of whether they’re on left or right or black or white.

We come together in an apolitical private sector that’s supposed to bring us together. We lost that with the rise of stakeholder capitalism and BlackRock-led capitalism over the last decade. We want to restore a new type of capitalism — the classical kind of capitalism — at the heart of American capitalism in the next decade ahead. So I’ll be happy to say more about that in a few months.

CLAY: I think your battle is an important one. Also, do you believe that there was a significant message sent based on what you wrote about in Woke, Inc. when Ron DeSantis fired back against Disney and basically let it be known that the right was not just gonna continue to kowtow to a tiny percentage on the left that is woke that had been driving the trajectory of our country?

RAMASWAMY: Yeah, I think it sent a powerful message. Disney is just a great example to look at where there’s good survey data on this — over 60% of their own customers were put off by their decision, okay? So if we were a shareholder of Disney, the thing we would tell Disney is, “Knock it off.” Three words to Bob Chapek: “Knock it off. You’re alienating your customers.

“Customer volume is down. Your stock is down more than the S&P 500 over the same period. And you have had clear losses of business benefits in the state of Florida. That’s not what you should be doing if you’re focusing on excellence for your customers,” and yet the top three shareholders of Disney, they don’t give them that message.

Instead, if anything, if you read between the lines of their comments in other contexts, it actually seems to encourage them to exactly take the kinds of harmful positions that they have. So, yeah, I do think there’s room for political responsiveness and even legal responsiveness here. But actually the solutions that I prefer the most are competition through the market itself.

All state actions have unintended consequences, even ones that are necessary to be taken. That’s why I generally prefer, whenever possible, let’s sort these things out through the marketplace of ideas and through the market itself, and actually leave it to consumers to make the decisions. And I think that’s gonna be the way that we hope to reform the asset management industry, and not just the asset management industry. That is the one industry that’s upstream of every industry in the American economy, which is what my real motivation is.

CLAY: I think the battle that you’re fighting is an incredibly important one. Encourage you to check out Woke, Inc. It’s a fantastic book. He is Vivek Ramaswamy, and he is fighting the battles that many of us need to be fighting in both the marketplace of ideas and also the capitalistic marketplace in general. Look forward to talking to you again, Vivek.

RAMASWAMY: Thanks for having me, guys. Talk to you.