Onto culture to increase profits he is interviewed at Harvard University craig mankin. After words is a weekly Interview Program with relevant guesthouse interviewing nonfiction authors about their latest work. Welcome and it is a delight tto be here to chat with you congratulations of the book congratulations on finishing in the Great Success ive been watching a fail in the amazon and obviously a lot of people are buying it, that isha great its a great book very interesting and provocative and on a very important topic im delighted to share with you. Before we get to the book. I think your biography shapes the things your writing in this book and one that i honestly did not know the offers many you i also live today, my parents were immigrants from india, by vacuum over the late 70s my mom in the early 80s, i asked my dad why did you come halfway across the world to Cincinnati Ohio of all places and he said his sister came over from india to fort wayne indiana which prompted us to ask him why she came halfway across the world to fort wayne indiana and we joke with our families is only u. S. State with the word india contained, that is the joke than we tell, we were born and raised in ohio, my parents did not come from much money but they had an education and thats one of the valuable things that they gave us, went to Public Schools through eighth grade at public liatprivate high school graduatn 2003, 9 11 took place when i was in high school something that shaped my worldview as a young y american i then went to harvard we didnt overlap there but i did take the class that you teach now economic among others i was mostly under the science guy through college when i graduated i got into the world of biotech investing in the fall 2007 just before the 2008 financial crisis, i will also say dramatically shapes my views of capitalism and the merger of capitalism and politics. I did that for several years, seven years, i told my boss as i was going to leave and go to Yale Law School because i had this itch of law and political philosophy that i never scratched itt turns out that got me ability and you can manage a portfolio and go do it from yell thats what i did i spent three years there and met my wife the most productive thing that came out when next w door neighbor ad when i graduated and came back to my job as an investor and realized i was much weremo interested in getting handson involved in addressing the fncs in parma that i could not address is a bystander investor, that is my job as an investor this time for real and started a Biotech Company which i built from 2014 2021 for seven years i was the company ceo i stepped on this january to give myself the latitude to speak freely in a inhibited way not only rolling out this book but addressing some of the contentious issues that are speaking openly about as a citizen. Building a company has a challenge was one of the most gratifying things ive gotten my career i did step down because i felt that aim to speak freely they didnt harm the company mpneeded to exercise my own civc duty and putting the spotlight on what i have seen behind closed doors in elite america over the past 15 years i was not born into elite america but ive lived in for the last decade and a half. Some of the things that i learned were experiences and insight and perspective that i needed too share shape the conversation as where we go as people from here thats with the state in the heart of this discussion about the relationship between capitalism and democracy. You did a great job summarizing the theme capitalism and democracy is trying to mix themselves up too much and we are very clear what each of those two pillars are and what they can do. You experience as a ceo and even before running a Major Company even as a student in the great story early on tell us a little bit about that. At Goldman Sachs is one of the architects that i keep coming back to my book that i talked about the relationship between the private sector and government and capitalism and democracy. Goldman sachs for better or worse in my opinion for worse simplifies that relationship. Oldman sachs is an official investment bank. Its one of the Financial Institutions thats really elite, getting a job atg goldmn sachs thats what we aim for for better or worse. Theres things i would like to have been better, one of the things i was really get is i giving myself protected corridors of elite america ive done over the last 15 years and theres better skills one canha have but that turned out that was a skill on accident with repeatedly practice i did 92006 included at Goldman Sachs and there is something i learned that summer. I didnt learn much about that, i did learn a lot about how to aggregate power how to aggregate power in a way that wasnt actually appearing to the aggregation of power. One way to do Goldman Sachs had a hallmark which was service day you plant trees, the thing i noticeds nobody was interested n plain trees everyone showed up except for the boss they were telling investment stories and catching up on office gossip, the thing that we went to harlem to do, then the boss shows up the managing director the guy at the top of the food chain Goldman Sachs was of slim fit suit and tailored shirts but they do not wear rolex they were visibly cheap rubber wrist digital watches as a show of false humility and shows up not only with this watch but lets take pictures to get out of here, we walked into a bar nearby and started drinking so k asked one of the older associates and i said we want to call it a social day we shouldve called it that rather than calling a service day, his response stuck with me have you heard of the golden rule, of course i had if you treat others like you want to be treated and he said no the golden rule is this he who has the gold makes the rules and that stuck with me i called the goldman room and i learned something valuable that summer after all it is the golden rule i saw on display ten years later when Goldman Sachs took place from the mountain tops that they would not take Company Public in the United States, if the board was insufficiently diverse they do not mean ideologically them recreational and gender diversity. The abuse of market power to exercise power in the marketplace of ideas is a question that i felt needed to i be decided in our democracy at large that was the greatest form of corporate overreach of all. Thats a big part of why he wrote the book. Another story from the beginning of the book which is so similar is about a fearless girl, the statute put in front of thepu wall street. It was supposed to be an icon, she makes a difference is what is is the base of the statute she spoke to stare down the wall street bull male power that that stood for. Is it turns out it was commissioned by state street Global Advisors as you know an active management firm. It turns out the sage stance not just for she but this particular of the fund that was a diversity index a well afflicted stock that embodied the Progressive Social values and they tried to feed in the process. It was even better than that. They built the statue around the time they were facing a lawsuit from the female employees at the firm who alleged they did not get paid enough as much as their male counterparts. As their counterparts, them did exactly what you would expect them to do. They built a statue for the women. You cant make this up. The creator of the statue created a few more copies because she was a feminist and proud of what she created. At the states could sue her for creating unauthorized reprod states suitor for creating an authorized reproductions of the statute that commission. So it comes full circle. Select the magic trick i tell about in the book. You pretend you can about something other than provident power. A good magic trick isnt about making the money disappear. You have to bring the money back. Its a joke i tell in the book but you might remember this shortly after we met you introduce me to a professor at Harvard Law School are taken an interest in some of these issues and he stops will he invited me to his class to give an early draft of the book or least a chapter of the book as a workshop that we worked out with his Corporate Law class. One of the things, that happened to be the chapter that contained the fearless girl story and itha was a girl and a class who i still remember raised her hand and said i hear the story you told but fearless girl still inspired me and nobody can take that away, even state street cant take that away. That is something that took me deeper into my exploration of the early draft and god knows an early draft looks nothing like the final book as is able to go deeper in the subsequent for five months. Their something to be said for really exploring the way in which may be wokeness can stand on its own two feet when it isnt intermingle with capitalism. Capitalism. It is the merger with capitalism, which actually paints both the progressive values that they are asked to be stewards of as well as taking corporate purpose in its own right as well, so that is what the heart of the book is about more so than criticizing one end of the spectrum or another. Ones perspective might have different motivations and state street. Exactly. And it embodies this merit between the Progressive Left and big business in this country if an arranged marriage i think of it more like mutual prostitution where each side gets something out of the transaction. The artist got money out of it, straight the same thing is happening writ large in the post2008 era. Effectively if you are a big bank it is a tough pill to swallow. What i think you effectively had happen is a generation of big banks with woke millennials together they had woke capitalism and that is what allowed them to put wall street up for adoption. Everyone else started replicating it. Silicon valley has a version of it where they effectively censor or moderate content the movement doesnt want to see online. The new Democratic Party looks the other way when it comes to leaving the monopoly power. Whether or not it is a good thing or a bad thing is working masterfully for both sides to shine some sunlight on that reality so the consumers into the citizens can at least make their own judgments about whether its a good thing or bad thing but step one is seeing the phenomena itself that is part of what i try to do in the book. The examples that we talk about when the companies were deeply cynical, they were sort of using a Progressive Agenda to further their own goals which were not political at all. What about the stakeholder capitalism more generally. Can a ceo and race stakeholder capitalism, does it make sense should the shareholders have other goals so as ceo im going to pursue those whether its combating climate change, diversity. Im going to take this as an opportunity worth unpacking in the discussion. A few different kinds. It is a problem, the phenomenon that it decides he only lives once and is going to use his position to advance his social good, even if that means using some of his shareholder resources as part of his platform to do it. The shareholders are the victims and for the people that dont like this kind of behavior, he may be distributing by the resources if they make a multimillion dollar donation to the high school or to the temple where he worships i think most people would agree that is something that is a breach of the fiduciary duty being a custodian of those resources. If it is written to a different temple, why should that be treated any differently, is that something we should come back to . The second is actually different. It might be the perpetrator where you have a shareholder that says you executives, ceos, you work for us. And we demand that you actually advance these particular social values, or else you are breaching your duty to us, the shareholders. In its capacity as a shareholder where they say they have sustainability accounting standards that says if a company doesnt meet its standards they will divest from that company. I think you have a problem of the woke executive where its not as an investor but the investors that have their money and the ceo and manager that is the executor all over again. You have a number of investors that say you [inaudible] both of those are different from the third phenomenon which is the consumers themselves. They demand that those they buy their products from and body the values that match their own values as consumers. I think you could argue that is capitalism working. Its cultural commentary that it is a cultural malaise where we are cultured and hungry for a cause and for reasons of purpose, but we have resorted to the superficial means like mixing morality to satisfy the hunger that demands a more substantial fit. You can cut the three types, the executive, the directors or the consumers. You touched on this as well, those that pursue it in authentically i think Goldman Sachs and state street fall into that category. Thats the majority of cases ill lay out in the book about the decided minority of cases that have corporations and executives in the board and investors sometimes who believe in the values that there ultimately is anticorporate platform push, and here is a place that i change my mind in the course of writing the book. I begin taking aim at the capitalism. I was convinced of the bigger threat was the authentic kind where you have somebody that is using their corporate platform as a way of sidestepping the debate and using force, Economic Force nonetheless to settle the questions that ought to be settled to free speech and open debate in a political democracy in the Public Square where everyones voice and vote is weighted equally by the number they control in the markets and that is the biggest threat of all into the realization in the course of writing the book and evolution in my own perspective. Not only is it the consumers but the employees. When you were ceo of what happened in the aftermath of the black lives matter movement. It was nearly identical so in the wake of George Floyds death, add to this point we can say it was a murder, there were protests, there was a National Reckoning on the use of police force but also a demand that companies somehow play a role in rectifying that problem. I certainly take issue with the blanket claim of systemic racism without defining more specifically what that means on the content of the demand that was being made but i had a more principled issue. I didnt think corporations should be using it to substitute for the free speech and open debate that ought to be taking place in the democracy. A lot of employees didnt feel the same way. We came to work at a place that did more than just pursue the prophet. Medicines for the patients that needed them. In the eyes of the employees it also meant that there was a new expectation the business play a role. That was something that led to a deep level of reflection wondering not only whether i was going to make the right return but some of my investors felt the same way and it made me question if i was misguided and being a slave of some intellectual slave of some philosophy that id learned in places like economics and harvard and whether i was in the wrong in failing to think about the unique challenges of modernity where the government was failing and maybe they did need to step up and address the issues. On the other side of it i would say with a stronger conviction in my own position is why it was important for the sake of democracy and capitalism to separate each from the other, but it was on the other side including taking it through a journey with greater and more Solid Foundation on the other side. You eventually stepped down and with these continuous pressures coming down the border, how do you think you would have responded . One of the places that ended is when i realized that actually the philosophy of taking me full circle are the sort of ceos that have a different worldview and are comfortable using the Corporate Power to force their views on to others. I didnt do that during my time as ceo of a company, however, id begun speaking out and regularly appearing even on Cable Television and other media expressing my own views on the very topic of capitalism and the spread of critical theory in academia and the spread of ideas sparked by political theory and corporate sector in others and i had to take a step back and in some ways practiced what i preach, walk the walk and recognize while i did my best to avoid using the corporate platform the nature of the topic were such that that was impossible to do perfectly so to protect a company from my own perspective and my own ability to speak freely with the stewardship role as a citizen the best thing to do was to separate my role as ceo. I had been a ceo for years and if i had to also run it through the lens of deciding what impact it was going to have on being extrapolated to be the business of boys on these issues so separating myself i stepped down as the ceo of which im a member elevated as an ordinary citizen and i hope that everybody would find a bit of what i had to say worthwhile. The cynical kind of woke capitalism for the shareholder value in the era with the Strange Alliance on the Progressive Left and corporations with shareholder value may be was in fact pursuant. Its possible and i explore that in the book. Symptomatic of a deeper cultural malaise in the country, the hunger for the cause and moral vacuum with more substantial merger of progressive values and consumerism, but it may be right if you take that as a given may be they are doing the right thing. Theres also the school of thought certain sectors could be true this is a market efficiency and a great opportunity that is frustrated with nike signaling its virtue and alignment with black lives matter when there is an alternative opportunity to create an alternative version to the left wing version. With the prophet in a way that has different kind of hunger for a cause i dont think that is good for us as a people or as a country used to be places that brought people together irrespective of whether they were black or white or democrat or republican. Once we lose that in a divided policy like ours we lose the possibility. If we lose those that would bring us together across the divisions, we may be closer to a trajectory towards the civil war then when we are on achieving solidarity in our own life and once we have two economies, that may be the beginning of the end of the american experiment as we know it where we grew up idealizing acknowledging the individualism and the American Dream that we could pursue in the economy against a backdrop of solidarity that abounds us together as citizens. If that policy now invades the sphere of the economy that brings people together and talking about it in the book the spread of capitalism and social structure in india, capitalism had the ability to bring people together across otherwise politically or culturally divided categories. Once we lose that it is a source of further division. It may be where we are naturally heading absent a cultural intervention and i hope the book serves as one of those where i offered a different vision of where we go forward. I want to explore that a little bit because you mentioned without going into a lot of it, certainly the case the legacy of slavery and africanamericans today on average experience worse economic outcomes and difficulty in life than other racial or ethnic groups. It took to what extent this responsibility and if not the corporations, what other institutions do you think should be stepping up and what should they be doing . The modern systemic racism, one of them is actually a claim of descriptive clarity. The action on the basis of the prejudice lien it had in the prior and weve made it a steady progress over the decades to reduce the problems that racism represents and i think racism is a problem in america decades ago. Or where we were in the jim crow era or the era of the 1860s was a pretty preposterous claim. Systemic racism is a sloppy way of actually defining what the problem itself is. I understand what racism is. I dont believe this has been flushed out to even be defined as a phenomena. A different problem with it, the same force that gives the verbiage of systemic racism exists as a solution that demands fighting racism with more racism and i personally am at the john Roberts School of thought were the best way to end is to stop discriminating on the basis of race and take it from me were the best articulate proponents the direct quote from the book is the only to pass discrimination is present discrimination, the remedy is the future discrimination. I disagree and i think that is a big part of my view without the dogma of the systemic racism effectively is combing gold in the solutions that demand further racial lysing solutions that are likely to be counterproductive in every direction including in the direction of actually serving poorly the black community and around the communities that i think are close to have been helped by this dogma. But there are things i reject as the ideas that bring a prism of race to evaluate the struggles equally or more powerfully through the lens in the theory of intersection intellectual underpinnings which a black woman will always be disempowered relative to a person who might live 10 miles down the street from me here in ohio that might be going through the opioid epidemic, rustbelt version of White America that involves a load of poor people that may be having struggles of their own but may not be black or a woman and i reject the idea that opera winfrey and her struggle as a black woman ought to have more of the concerns than somebody that might be a poor white man. I think that 90 of what we could agree on is the people that are more economically disempowered access to a feared education and access to capital and to participate in the equal participants in the economy, that is a universal message for the left to embrace that lifts everyone up from the disempowerment that everyone shares in the same way. Part of the issue obfuscates what could empower everyone but instead of obsessing over the characteristics like race, gender, orientation which is what the movement is focused on today. The narrative is sloppy and lazy and ought to define what we need for the inequities we do need to address that affect people that has nothing to do with race. You might be rethinking affirmative action. I want to give my nuance position. Affirmative action is a disservice to the people its supposed to help in part for the simple reason when you look at a black pilot once they have a quota system based on those of color that have to get rid of the test for with a previously used, theres no way that any human being can be faulted for having a moment or instinct of questioning whether they would have passed the same tests in order to create this new system and i think that fosters a new brand of judgment that no pilot deserves and that is something that is unjust not only to those excluded is so that might be one but the injustice that cant be distinguished that creates a new wave of racism on its own reinforcing the idea that they could not excel but for the elite intervention. This idea that has gained popularity the to the discipline of math and of the idea of two plus two equals four because of the inequitable outcomes in the achievement is it to solve a racist idea and one of the things we risk doing when its reached an alltime low we are throwing kerosene on it and that is part of it. As it pertains to harvard, theres something to be said in a liberal Arts University to create the conditions for students to have an opportunity with every strike and banner. I as a kid that came up as a firstgeneration kid would never have interacted with. It was a totally different culture just as my kids from the inner city that grew up in a different circumstance than i did and i think i benefited from all of those things. There is five times as many that could have been qualified as though the ability to use an idea of composing a diverse class on the basis of diversity experience is what i would say for the diversity experience is for the diversity of the experiences and the best way for the thought. The idea of using race or gender as a proxy commits the very transgression that racism was committing in the first place and i think we should reject it in the corporate sphere as it pertains to the liberal arts universities at the end of the day we would be better off there and elsewhere with the product of affirmative action and begin an earnest process and diversity of thought and we would end up with classes or corporate workforces that dont look that different that was a much more vibrant process. Lets change topics a little bit. You talk about the woke capitalism and on the managerial class who do you mean and how do they benefit . The entrepreneurs, the founders, the investors, the employees that follow for the three legs of the stool. It is hired management, people paid by the shareholders to run the company that then created bureaucratic layers between those other stakeholders. The problem is this, the more people you are accountable to, the less accountable you are to any given one of them and then you are accountable to no one. The managerial class and powers itself by increasing the number of not only shareholders but stakeholders to whom they are accountable and one of the things that allows them to create power is an infinite set of people that can claim they are serving somebody elses interest when they could never communicate with one another. Its one of the failures that you discuss in the economic class or law schools to be a steward for the person that is the ultimate owner but this is the principal agent problem at large when you ultimately say not only are they responsible for the shareholders but also people that are not shareholders at all that might be socalled stakeholders and this is one thing progressives miss like systemic racism, stakeholders is poorly defined. Anyone could be a stakeholder and the political implications once the corporations become vectors they become vehicles to advance any values and no one has managed to make themselves a quiet stakeholder more effectively than the party of china and now flexing its muscle as a stakeholder to do some Dangerous Things even in the future of the free world as we know it. How does china take advantage of it . By turning on the head of the philosophy of the Democratic Capitalism in the 1990s and 1980s where we began in my opinion on the misguided premise that we could use capitalism as a victor to spread out our own political values like democracy. We thought we could use our money to get them to be more like us and instead, china has turned that on its head and have used their economic muscle to get us to be more like them. They thought that would spread democracy but instead they loaded up the horses that are undermining american interests in the global state and i will tell you what, i mean. When you meet the demands of the stakeholder capitalism, part of the demand is the companies criticize injustice even micro aggressions like systemic racism or misogyny or bigotry yet as they continue to do business in china they said they could not shoot a film in the state of georgia if georgia and the equivalent of an antiabortion statute like a heartbeat will. They didnt say a peep as they filmed mulan last year with over 1 million in concentration camps subject to forced sterilization, communist indoctrination. One of the human rights abuses with of the third reich of germany as he doesnt say a thing in fact at the end if you look at the credits they quietly thanked the local authorities including some of those that are responsible for committing the human rights atrocities. So it isnt just about hypocrisy. Its about the standing of the United States by creating a false moral equivalence between what i think of as chinese nihilism and i think that erodes the greatest asset of all it is our moral standing on the global stage and once we lost that, i think we lost our status as a great power in what i think is the defining cold war of the next century. We need leaders. Do we need to change our cultural mindset . Who is supposed to change their behavior . The biggest solutions are in the culture and that is where im the most focused on the Legal Solutions in the book policy solutions that could make a difference. Some of it is the on even work for us right now a lot of people are afraid of expressing their beliefs on their own time is the number of people over the course of the last couple of years for what they said at home or on social media is staggering and that is a good list of examples in the book and i think that is the policy that is not applied. For the race and gender and Sexual Orientation and origin altogether we apply evenhandedly in a way that reflects the discrimination that we see in the workplace today on the basis of the political speech so add political speech or belief in the category right there for National Religion and you cant be fired for being black, jewish, white, whatever or not spoken liberal for that matter. Those are the kind of solutions where i spend it at a time. Among other things it immunizes private companies, Internet Companies in particular for removing content that is otherwise constitutionally protected and its one of the statutes that says otherwise in the text of the statute itself. Even if you dont get the special protection from the states or you do get the special federal protection bound by the same constraints in the federal government itself including the First Amendment of the constitution of the United States and that is one of the arguments i make they are working hand in glove to censor hate speech information and my basic principle if it is a state action in disguise then the constitution still applies. You cant have it both ways. We have to apply policies in an evenhanded way. The backdrop that we do not need to those policies in the first place or the protected classes at a civil rights statutes, everybody else seems to think they are necessary but we need to modernize them in ways that actually request the unintended consequences of the political discrimination that theyve created today. What i think we really need in this country is a cultural cure and revival of the shared identity is. Hard work, the kind of things that use to fill the void, those have disappeared and what we need to do is not to cancel the woke miss and return or the capitalism but the irrelevance by building the shared identity of what it means to be an american in 2021 that makes the other philosophies look irrelevant by comparison. The impact beginning to move the ball forward where we may not be celebrating our diversity as much or lets define this together as one people. Whats harder in some ways is much more grassroots sort of phenomenon. There may be some, but i agree its hard. By definition theres unintended consequences of the policy i propose in the book and ones i didnt consider. But at the end of the day its a surface level. We need the revival of the shared american identity. Its one of the most important things to talk about. Weve lost a sense of the pursuit of excellence as an end in itself and personally when americans rally around the cry to make America Great again, i dont think they were rallying behind a donald trump, i think they were rallying behind the unapologetic pursuit of excellence and we live in a moment where there is a new antiexcellence culture of this victimhood and heights from victory that one of the defining ideals is the shared pursuit of excellence i see a lot of it in minority communities who may be blaming Second Generation rather than me who have a practice towards their excellence with the mediocrity and i was worried about that culture of mediocrity affecting the public life and i wanted that pursuit of excellence as a shared american idea that can bring us together and lift up the people along with it. That isnt something i touch on in the book but its an undercurrent. If i write a sequel, that is what it would be about but its the cultural revival that im talking about here. Youve had an amazing career and have written a bestselling book. Im curious what does the future hold . I started thinking about that. To be able to speak in an uninhibited way at least the beginning to what it could be and one of the things i quickly started learning as i started thinking about what it could entail is that you become a presenter of your own plans end of the things you say have to become the means to an end of achieving what you want to go after next and i found a way for me that was most liberating for the defined end for the time being. Thats new for me. Its something ive been blessed with what thats given me. At the end of the day i wanted to take a year at least. I hope people benefit from it and probably this Time Next Year i will have to figure out what plan comes after that. It wasnt something that appealed to me this year in the context of writing this book. With a pull string of numbers or sort of understanding of how the focus group reacts to it. I wanted to finish that process and see it through. Looking at the possibility for myself is it is not something that you should do for any reason other than a thinking about it as a service and if i ever did go into politics it wouldnt be for a long time it would be with a predefined stint i was going to get off after i served and did my part. A big part of the change we need to see is in our culture and lawmaking cant fix that. Do i think they are rare drivers of change in culture, sure. Ronald reagan did it but i think that there are a lot of ways a lot of which come outside of politics to see where we could have the most impact personally,. Did you see any moving out in the direction . Not to that immediately come to mind i will be honest with you. You explicitly endorsed the shareholder capitalism and he is explicit in moving the direction you are advocating. I still rooted for his success. He said he wanted to unify the country. I took him at his word and was rooting for him to succeed because that had been something that was probably what the country they need now more than anything else. Im not sure how committed he was or is to that idea. Look at the struggle with driving back the nation in the country and the single thing he could have done when taking office was to give credit to the administration. Forget about whether you think it was deserved or whether you like the guy or not if your goal was to bring the country together to end the pandemic where you have a lot of lipservice the greatest way to build trust around that and solidarity would have been to give credit to the predecessor or someone to your cells. Im worried that even the president that made at the the platformunified in the couns already fallen short of the occasion to do the opposite of that. Is there anybody that icn bodying that idea. Its going to be somebody im thinking of right now may not even be in the front pages of the newspapers. Im sure that that person or those people exist i just hope they step up and do what the country needs. I love your book and i think it is a very readable important issue. I dont think anybody would have trouble if you look at your own intellectual development, it was very influential. Is there anything that you recommend . Somebody that writes about the psychological need created by capitalism itself, one of the books i wanted recommended was a story that i quoted in the book but i think that it is one of the books that captures the Human Experience in a way that only literature can. Theres a story that didnt come from the bible titled the grand inquisitor where christ comes back to earth in the middle of the spanish inquisition and the grand inquisitor he has him arrested and puts him in a prison cell and of the dialogue of the chapter is what the grand inquisitor says to christ in that prison cell. We the church dont need you anymore. Being here is an impediment to the church and then he sentenced christ to death. In the book what i talk a little bit about is that parallel diversity with true diversity of thought all the while keeping up the diversity. There are so many different layers that i take away from what is written. A couple more books that are not bad either our senegal theories which i discussed in the book that talk about the postpartum philosophy that i gathered from the social media commentary but i quoted them in my book and i think there is a book that came out recently that doesnt focus on the corporate but focuses on academia. The parasitic mind fits that description as well. I dont know a lot of the ideas that they had developed in the spheres of public life but i applied them to my analysis and went in a different direction altogether so that is a few things that stuck with me off the top of my head. Vivek ramaswamy thank you very much and congratulations on your book. Thank you. I appreciate that. Journalist and American EnterpriseInstitute Senior fellow matthew kahn and that he talked about his new book the right which looks at the history of the american political right since the early 20th century. Heres a look. One of the big things of my book is its relationship between conservatism and populism. And the irony that oftentimes the only way conservatives get into power is through populist politics. Which conservatives like buckley and meyer might mention often ambivalent and kind of conflicted about. But this is clearly evident in the reagan election. Populism being one of the driving forces of reagans rise. Reagan able to synthesize vitalism with the supplyside agenda, with the interest of the religious right, with the tax cutting, defense buildup, all the various factions of the american right as well. With his departure from the scene, this argument begins a new. And i always thought it was interesting, 1988 gop primary was in many ways a missed opportunity. Because you had a moment where the Republican Party couldve been forced to choose between jack kemp, your old boss, and buchanan. Pat doesnt run for president in 1988. He waits until 1992 because he recognizes, smartly, that reagans successor is probably going to be george h. W. Bush, who is not a a reaganite. Who is an establishment republican. So then we get the fight between establishment republicanism representative by bush and buchanan in 1992, representing the populist wing, representing the resurgence of the old right and its attitudes towards war and its attitudes towards immigration, and then really beginning in two cannons 96 campaign picking up the tradition as well, becoming more protectionist. So that debate has had, but we can and successful. In 2000 of course course he leaves the Republican Party and he runs for president on the reform ticket where one of his rivals is a businessman named donald trump. And i think buchanan is a first recognize the irony that 16 years later trump would ascend to the presidency on many of the ideas that he was lambasting buchanan about just in the 2000 cycle. So at the moment i do think the argument has been settled in favor of the forces of populism, and the conservative governing class that came to power with Ronald Reagan lasted through the first george bush, was kind of moved up to capitol hill during the republican revolution, Newt Gingrich and then came back down pennsylvania avenue with george w. Bush. That conservative governing class which you listed for a about 30 years has been displaced. Watch the full program anytime online at booktv. Org. Just search Matthew Continetti or the title of his book the right. Tonight cnn anchor the New York Times bestselling author Anderson Cooper chronicles the rise and fall of a legendary american dynasty, his mothers family, that vanderbilt. He is joined by katherine howe, a New York Times bestselling author of historical fiction and an academic who brings her teeth Research Skills and narrative flair to the story of an extraordinary family. And now without a further ado i would like to welcome our guests to the virtual stage