Heard him on Patriot Radio recently and had to look him up. No, haven't read the book but he's an interesting guy.


Amazon Link to Woke, Inc

Born in Cincinnati, went to school at Harvard (Biology), worked for GS on wall st, went to Yale law, got rich building biotech companies and finally left after he started seeing all the woke leftist employees demanding all their woke shit. Plus, he mentioned on the radio that Goldman will not take a company public unless they have the diverse board (think it happened to him).



Podcast interview with him:CSPAN podcast with Vivek Ramaswamy

Crude summary:

5 min - His background
10 min - Talked about working on wall st and their virtue signaling (Fearless Girl statue financed by State St, who was in the middle of a suit by a bunch of women for paying less. They also sued the statue artist for making copies)
14 min - How wall st started joining with Occupy WS after 2008 to try and coopt them
16 min - 3 drivers of woke - CEOs who want to virtue signal, employees who demand wokeness at the company, and Shareholders who demand wokeness -- he mentions Black Rock demands diversity crap from any company they own stock in
19 min - Some do it to just virtue signal, some authentically believe the woke crap and systematic racism. Authentic believers are the worst
27 min - Mentions BRCC to show some companies recognize the split in the country and support right wing (we know BRCC is fake though). Doesn't want to see such a split, woke baseball and right wing baseball
30 min - Doesn't believe America is racist
40 min - Stakeholder Capitalism: allows managerial class to expand who they serve to such a large extent that they can avoid responsibility for anything (kind of like CEOs who go woke, crash their share value but still give huge bonuses)
42 min - China (repeats the great line that we imported their values, not the other way around)
46 min - Corps have joined with Dems (he says gov) to do their bidding and allows the gov to say "we didn't regulate anything" This is his books main thesis
53 min - Politics and Joe Biden the uniter (calls it BS, but I think he's naive about this)
57 min - Books he likes


Also, a youtube vid interview at the Federalist Society (22 min start time):

[youtube]5xPwNcvvEq8?t=1242[/youtube]

Waiting for the paperback version.

Interesting podcast. Pretty awesome that he's a Dostoevsky fan.

Yes, meant to include that in my notes.

He also mentioned Mises and Hayek, so, though I think he's naive about how bad things are he's coming from the right place.

I have the book in my kindle library, it's going to take me a few books until I get to it though.

This is a solid post.

Bump to keep it out of the archives.

Referenced here:

Thread - Why Many Companies Go Woke - Larry Fink, BlackRock, and the 4th Branch of Gov

I wonder if SPACs (special purpose acquisition companies) will be a response to this.

TMTG and Rumble are both using SPACs.

The CEO of Rumble was smart enough to retain a majority of the voting control to himself.

Forgot to @dedreckon

Good interview, thanks OP.

God this woke shit is a fucking cancer.

The book is fantastic so far. He also explains the Indian caste system and the effects of capitalism on it. I had always assumed it was like a euro feudalistic thing. Not so.

I've heard about how the caste system is taking over in Silicon Valley, but didn't hear him talking about it. I still have to read the book (I suck, I post in books about books I hear about and haven't read yet).

I thought it was just that once the guys get in charge (Google, Twitter, MSFT now run by Indians) they just promote or favor people from their caste?

He was a few years ahead of my son in High School, he's a St. Xavier Bomber!

It’s more like the educators, religious leaders, generally philosophical types or holders of knowledge do not sully themselves with manual labor and are treated as the higher class. The workers had always supported them and were not their equal. Servant entrances even. Capitalism has simultaneously greatly improved their lives and upended this system.

Bittersweet is how I took it.

This has been a thing in tech for decades. It's not new, but its more than in the past.

Bittersweet how?

I've heard of the Brahmin class, which is high caste (and apparently Kamala's mom was high caste) treat the lowers like shit but still not sure how that translates into a tech company -- guess the coders look down on the call center dicks.

I'm probably going to India this year to help set up some training programs, will be interesting.

The author is a capitalist and loves the system that rewards hard work and innovation. So do I fwiw. Visiting India he was able to see the improvement in his ancestral home in the form of sanitary sewer, a microwave, etc. Totally becoming first world.

As I interpreted it, his family was of the higher caste but this was not a monetary issue. They just had an intellectual role that ruled out most labor. The lower caste did that. His embracing capitalism, despite his great success and earning, was inconsistent with their history and a downgrade in status.

The switch to the dollar over education and theology cheapened each while making life cleaner and more comfortable. That’s just how I understood it listening to the audiobook and multitasking, often in noisy environments. My wife says I don’t listen in the first place.

@dedreckon

In tech, the caste culture is most prominent in global consulting firms and mid to large size companies using the Theory X PMO management model. In that environment, the casts are the PMO and PMPs at the top, who are mostly untouchable regardless how much they contribute to problems. The next level is the engineers who won't voice or point out problems, and tell the PMPs what they want to hear. The PMPs will promote those engineers, no matter how bad they are, because they don't threaten the PMP's image. At the bottom is engineers who are rightly pointing out problems that would get corrected within hours to days in a Scrum or XP shop, but will likely never get corrected in the PMO/PMP shop because it detracts from the PMP's carefully crafted image.

This is where the jokes about "doing the needful" often come from. This caste system isn't race-based, but it's compatible with caste-based cultures. This is likely why Indian outsourcing was more popular and more common than eastern European or South American based outsourcing - because the Eastern European and South American cultures are more likely to tell you when you've fucked up.

When I worked with offshore help from South America, it was basically like working with Americans, from an engineering culture. The Indians are not like that - they are a lot more likely to kiss ass than point out problems. This is why the global outsourcers have so many Indians - they won't tarnish the outsourcer's image by pointing out legitimate problems.


Scrum and XP on the other hand don't have any of these issues. Scrum and XP have flatter org charts, and have mechanisms that force problems to get surfaced to leadership, and prevent middle management (such as PMPs) from suppressing the bad news. Because the problems get surfaced, they get corrected much faster. Also, because the engineers are legitimately empowered by Scrum (whereas in a PMP shop they only get empowerment handwaiving), the engineers can correct problems the moment they are identified. This keeps tech debt low, and productivity high.

Scrum and XP shops don't have the "you must get a PMP or MBA to get promoted" mentality - and because of that, do not have the caste mentality. Highly competent engineers, with or without masters degrees (or even bachelor's degrees) have upward mobility in Scrum and XP and other Theory Y shops that they will never have in a Theory X PMP/PMO shop.

Ok, I get it now. And yes I've heard of that split between brain work vs. Muscle work. You could actually make the argument that the USA is going towards that where the laptop class and the ivy league class now looks down on working class people.  I think JD Vance pointed this out in his book.

Thanks. Good stuff. My company is building data centers in India and I am helping to build their ops organization so have to deal with blue collar up to engineers and have to get them to work together.  Already seen some of these issues.

Vivek giving a nice speech on the trucker protests against the elite on our new buddy, Bill Maher's show

[tweet]www.twitter.com/RitaPanahi/status/1492427871666663426?cxt=HHwWhMCr-b7PlbYpAAAA[/tweet]

Couldn't get the tweet to link so here is 10 min of him and Marianne Williamson (weirdo love candidate for prez in 2020).

Damn. I really like the dude. Can't wait to read the book. I used to work with (not for) the three-letter agency they mentioned in the video doing anti-fraud stuff. Totally agree with Mr. Ramaswamy that the agency should be dismantled, and its "trust funds" be re-distributed should universal health be seriously pursued. Last resort thinking of course. Let me tell you something about government-administered "universal healthcare" -- a centralized body decides the rules relating to medical care. End of story. Just one example, Medicare providers are constantly hit with civil penalties and even criminal indictments if they prescribe medication for off-label use. Individual doctors regardless of their billing association should see fit to prescribe any medication without fear of legal reprisal during the course of performing their medical duties.

It's also funny how Maher all of a sudden is talking about how hospitals make money due to keeping their beds filled with COVID (can I say that in this subforum?) px. Where were you with this information that red pillers already knew when the government and their big pharma concubines were pushing their shared scheme from the start?

Yeah, I like his point of view and hadn't heard him talk about health care yet. I did finally buy the book so will be reading on my next business trip tomorrow.

Williamson was whining about health insurance and why CA doesn't have universal yet. I was glad Maher told her Insurance companies only make 11B out of the 2 T we spend on healthcare, so that was good, and they did also say the Insurance companies fuck things up and demand rationing (beds, etc). They should have brought up that CA has twice voted on universal health care -- so expensive it would equal the current CA state budget so never gets done. Hopefully these assholes pushing that realize they aren't going to save much going to universal, but they will get VA levels of care.