Vivek Ramaswamy: I Left Corporate America. Now I'm Fighting Its Woke Takeover | Stories of Us

even as a ceo of a successful company i didn't actually feel free to share my own views my name is vivek ramaswamy and this is my story i'm an investor i'm an entrepreneur i was a biotech ceo i'm the author of woke inc inside corporate america's social justice scam i am a proud father and a proud husband as well wear a lot of hats born in cincinnati ohio my parents were immigrants from india they came here in search of an education that they weren't fully able to get in india and i had the first generation immigrant american dream of a story they didn't come here with much money we had an upbringing that was really focused on our own education from a pretty young age which shaped a lot of my views ever since so my dad was actually always left leaning but i kind of became probably quietly a conservative back then because it was a contrary and instinct to my dad [Music] i was the nerdy guy with glasses walking from one science class to another math class and one day actually when i was in eighth grade i got pushed down a flight of stairs that was a wake-up call to my family and in fact one of my teachers pulled my parents aside and said you need to get him out of this school and so they ended up sending me to a private school and the best one in the area that we thought was a good fit was actually a catholic high school it was a financial burden on the family but they did it nonetheless and to be among the lone non-christian kids are often the lone hindu kid by being surrounded by people who actually had different experiences and at times different world views and backgrounds it was something that taught me how to get comfortable with being a little bit uncomfortable i graduated in 2003 went to harvard that fall and actually fell in love with science but i'd also begun to wear the more enterprising side of my brain then and so i had actually gotten together with another guy to found a business in college that was about connecting actually other young entrepreneurs with capital using a simple website that was the beginning of the enterprising side of my brain and those wheels starting to turn but uh it was a rich four years that i think really tested me and for the first time put me in an environment with a lot of people who were just a lot better than me at a lot of different things and it was humbling in a lot of ways it was back then a place where yes all ideas were welcome that you could try on different perspectives without fear of being castigated as a pariah or without fear of having social consequence of the jobs you would be able to get afterwards that's not the environment that exists today i think you now have the beginnings of an informant-like culture at harvard and on other college campuses that really stigmatize students whose views may fall outside of the mainstream though they say you get to the pursuit of truth through exploring all ideas actually what they mean is maybe certain ideas just aren't welcome and if that's true of harvard and yale i think it's true of countless other campuses across this country so i ended up doing a short stint actually in standup comedy in new york city it didn't go very well but i did learn to carry around a notebook wherever i go it didn't serve me too well on stage but it did serve me pretty well in leading me to found a company eventually when that notebook got full that ended up being my business plan to leave my job as an investor to found royvent and that was a pharmaceutical company that i led as ceo which i built from scratch that was designed to go faster through the drug development process it irked me that it took so darn long to get a medicine from start to finish if it was really an important medicine by the end of my time at royvent i had lived in the highest corridors of elite capitalist america i wasn't born into it but i had seen how it worked on the inside and one of the rules of the game was that you couldn't actually share your views about matters that ultimately had one party line for where you had to come out there was this new arranged marriage between one wing of the progressive movement and elite business circles in this country even as a ceo of a successful company i didn't actually feel free to share my own views on some of the most important social and political questions of our time and i started to recognize that if i as somebody who had lived the full arc of the american dream been as successful as i'd been didn't feel free to express myself man did we have a problem in our country for the confining culture that we created for everybody else one of the wake-up calls for me was actually what happened in the wake of the tragic death of george floyd in 2020 when there was an expectation of every ceo in this country of me included to come out and say the same things standing in solidarity with the black lives matter movement and fundamentally i didn't want to do that because i didn't believe in the core tenets of the black lives matter organization even though i of course like every one i know believes that black lives matter i don't believe that the black lives matter movement was actually advancing that agenda in the right way claiming that they wanted to disrupt the nuclear family structure something that i actually think empowered all kinds of families of every skin color including black families i think a lot of people in in my position in ceo positions were perfectly comfortable saying what they needed to say and moving on i didn't feel comfortable doing that authentically as a leader it demonstrated for me the ways in which this new culture had become really quite dangerous and to me the question was where did i want to have an impact and i thought that at that point i could have more of a unique impact by addressing cultural cancer rather than biological cancer and i felt called to in some ways practice what i preached to say that if you don't want to mix business and politics you want to focus on social and cultural issues great go do that and drive that change be the change you want to see in the world that was i think something that meant a lot to me and i wanted to to live by that principle one of the things that's interesting about this new phenomenon of woke capitalism is it is not just limited to the united states it's actually become a feature of liberal democracies around the world in western europe in england in france in india in countries like israel these are places where we begin to see the rise of this new woke movement too including companies that embrace that new work orthodoxy to appear to do good while actually doing a lot of harm along the way and we have sacrificed the actual acts of virtue in the guise of caring about it when in fact the only thing that these companies care about is the appearance of virtue so i talk in my book a lot about a lot of different solutions i think they come in several different categories i think there's a role for politicians and lawmakers to be able to make laws that say that you know what your political belief is actually a civil right in this country that if you can't be fired for your race or your gender or your religion you shouldn't be able to be fired for your expressed political beliefs either so anyway i think there's a role for lawmakers i think there's ways that actually existing laws protect people far more than you might recognize at first blush in hinduism that's the you know faith that i was brought up and there's a concept of your dharma of your duty you ultimately do your part and you let what comes of it on the other side you don't control the outcome but you do control your own ability to pursue your calling the way i've lived my life is to say that actually if you feel called to do something then you do it and that's it's really that simple and that's part of why i felt compelled to defect from that orthodoxy to actually speak up without fear to hopefully give other people the courage to do the same thanks so much for watching this video to help keep prageru videos free please consider a tax deductible donation