PivotTim Walz is "Petty As Hell" After Kristi Noem Firing | Pivot
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
75 min read · 15,146 words- 0:00 – 1:53
Intro
- SPSpeaker
[cheering]
- KSKara Swisher
This is the original heated rivalry, but a hundred percent [laughing]
- SPSpeaker
[laughing]
- KSKara Swisher
A hundred percent less fucking.
- SPSpeaker
[laughing]
- SGScott Galloway
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
[laughing]
- TWTim Walz
Actually-
- KSKara Swisher
Two hundred percent.
- SPSpeaker
[laughing]
- SGScott Galloway
Yeah, boner killer. Um-
- SPSpeaker
[laughing]
- SGScott Galloway
So caption this photo: Gay man in his sixties who never found love or family of his own goes to Romania to adopt eight-year-old boy.
- SPSpeaker
[laughing]
- KSKara Swisher
[upbeat music] I'm Kara Swisher.
- SGScott Galloway
And I'm Scott Galloway.
- KSKara Swisher
And welcome to the first Resist and Unsubscribe live event at the Pantages Theater in Minneapolis.
- SGScott Galloway
Yeah.
- KSKara Swisher
Um, wow.
- SPSpeaker
[cheering]
- KSKara Swisher
Whoa. Man. You know, you guys are in the lead right now. We're gonna try to... We're, we had a, a, a, a, a, a Pivot tour last year. We're doing it again this fall, and we have to kill at least two or three cities, but I think you just killed one. I'm not sure. I feel bad for Boston right now.
- SPSpeaker
[laughing]
- KSKara Swisher
Anyway, uh, uh, thank you for showing up tonight and helping us support the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota. We're recording tonight's show, and we'll run it on the Pivot podcast audio feed and on our YouTube channel. We're gonna do a lot tonight. We'll talk about some headlines, just like we do on a Pivot show, and Scott will give us an update. If you've never seen Scott present, it's an amazing thing. That's how I met him and ended up in this relationship.
- SPSpeaker
[laughing]
- KSKara Swisher
Um, he was very seductive on the presentation situation.
- SPSpeaker
[laughing]
- KSKara Swisher
Um, but he's gonna give us an update on the massive impact of Resist and Unsubscribe. People have questions, and Scott's gonna answer them, and, on how much it's made. It really has, and I'm glad he's, to be here to support it with, for him. Um, but first,
- 1:53 – 30:15
Gov. Tim Walz
- KSKara Swisher
we have a special guest we're gonna chat with tonight. We always have special guests you don't know about. Please give a round of applause to Governor Tim Walz.
- SPSpeaker
[cheering]
- SGScott Galloway
I love him.
- KSKara Swisher
Wow. Wow. Maybe you should tell Klobuchar you changed your mind.
- SGScott Galloway
Well, I [laughs] ... No, this is what happens when you don't run, I guess.
- KSKara Swisher
Oh, yeah.
- SGScott Galloway
I don't know. So...
- KSKara Swisher
Oh, suddenly you're popular.
- SGScott Galloway
Yeah.
- KSKara Swisher
Okay. All right. Um, I think we're gonna start. We're gonna ask him a bunch of questions. We've done this on all the tours that we've had, and we've had a great time and had a... We had lots of governors and various things. But first things first, what was your immediate reaction to Kristi Noem's, um, departure?
- SPSpeaker
[laughing]
- KSKara Swisher
Self-deportation.
- TWTim Walz
Well, I, I was trying to act all serious and say, "You know, I'm, I'm not a petty person," and then I checked myself and I said, "In this case, I'm petty as hell." [laughs] So-
- KSKara Swisher
So-
- TWTim Walz
So it was-
- KSKara Swisher
Give a, give a-
- TWTim Walz
And I was saying this, that I, I knew Kristi Noem as a member of Congress, and I... When they get in the orbit of Donald Trump, because we-- I think you would've considered us friends at one time. We authored some legislation around water quality and things like that, and then all of a sudden it, it, it turns into this. And, um, but I think for me, uh, what happened here in, in Minneapolis was so far beyond the pale that the sense of, uh, the sense of anger I had towards her that whatever happens isn't enough.
- SGScott Galloway
Right.
- TWTim Walz
Um, that's kind of the feeling I've had, whatever she has coming yet. Um, so-
- SPSpeaker
[cheering]
- KSKara Swisher
So you-
- TWTim Walz
With justice, but-
- KSKara Swisher
You-
- TWTim Walz
I-
- KSKara Swisher
You said last week that Secretary Noem should probably get used to spending more time in Minnesota-
- TWTim Walz
Yes
- KSKara Swisher
... because we've got to get, we've got to get accountability. How are you planning on getting that?
- TWTim Walz
Well, look, there's a... And, and I would make my pitch to, to the U.S. Congress, um, and especially with, uh, with her, I guess, replacement in Markwayne, who I know too. Um, one name. We're all getting that. Um-
- KSKara Swisher
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
[laughing]
- 30:15 – 36:42
Target Boycotts
- KSKara Swisher
to some news starting with Target. Target, um, it's one of the biggest employers here. I know. Mm. I know. I know. It's one of the biggest employers here in Minnesota. It's been getting heat for not pushing back on ICE and the Trump administration. Two Minnesota Target employees, who are U.S. citizens, were, were detained by federal agents back in January, fueling protests and boycotts. Target's new CEO gave an interview to the AP, uh, this week. He said the company is working to, quote, "Win back trust," and the employee and guest safety is their, quote, "North Star." I have never heard such fucking nonsense in my life.
- SGScott Galloway
[laughing]
- KSKara Swisher
Like, and I, I interview a lot of people, and I knew Brian Cornell, Cornell, who used to run it for a long time 'cause I covered retail, and I thought that opportunity was the-- that interview was the worst interview I've seen in a while. It said nothing. It was all talking points. It went out on no limbs. It was not brave. It wasn't genuine. Um, and people have a great emotional relationship with Target. They have over the years. I mean, there's other issues they have, but, um, I thought it was a real missed opportunity for a CEO not to have a fresh start. Um, Brian had been tarnished, uh, and rightly so, for dumping gay flags, as if that's the biggest deal in the fucking world. Um, and, and it was an opportunity it missed. Um, obviously there's secular issues happening around retail, but Target for a while was really on a, on a tear. Your thoughts?
- SGScott Galloway
Yeah, last century. Um-
- KSKara Swisher
Yeah. [laughs]
- SGScott Galloway
Like Target, Target's a great company. They carved out a great position. The last twenty years they've returned about seven percent a year. S&P's up sixteen percent, Walmart's up twenty-three. Uh, so the bottom line is Target has vastly underperformed the market, and that's what's such a shame. I look at this through a shareholder lens. That was a big opportunity, 'cause I think the biggest commercial opportunity, I've been saying this for six months, is for someone to elegantly, in a non-personal way, basically to say no and demonstrate that we have stronger fidelity to our stakeholders and the Constitution without being personally vindictive around the Trump administration. But this was a huge opportunity, and it looks like Dario Amodei is taking it in the last week when he's kind of refused to comply with certain Trump administration. He's since backpedaled a little bit, but the a-annual occurring revenue, uh, of Anthropic has gone from fourteen to nineteen billion. So the opportunity for someone to push back was enormous, and quite frankly, the CEO of Target missed an enormous opportunity, 'cause right now what this city deserves is spine, not spin. And-
- KSKara Swisher
[cheering]
- SGScott Galloway
The-- this was just such a lost opportunity, and I'm, I'm gonna name drop 'cause I'm desperate for your affirmation, but I've worked with probably one hundred and fifty of the Fortune five hundred CEOs at some point in my career, and whenever they put out a press release, I know exactly what happened here. This was a press release that was gang banged by about a dozen eight hundred dollar an hour communications consultants that were worried about-
- KSKara Swisher
That's an attractive-
- SGScott Galloway
Different interpretations. I used to write CEOs press releases in their IR, and I'm like, "No more than two people can work on this 'cause it'll get diluted into nothingness." And also what I like to remind CEOs of is when they get stressed out about saying something or potentially offending shareholders, I'm like, "Dude, you're already rich, and you're gonna be dead soon."
- KSKara Swisher
[laughs]
- SGScott Galloway
"So why wouldn't you say something?" This was such an enormous opportunity to say-- to basically stand up for employees. He would've been a national hero. So many people would've said, "You know what? I think I'm gonna shop at Target this week."
- KSKara Swisher
[laughs]
- SGScott Galloway
This was the mother of all missed opportunities for shareholders.
- KSKara Swisher
So why do y- again, besides the, um... [clapping] I, I like that s- spine not spin. You spent all day thinking that one up, didn't you?
- SGScott Galloway
[laughs]
- KSKara Swisher
I like it.
- SGScott Galloway
I did.
- KSKara Swisher
I'm gonna steal it. Um, but when you have that, when y- when, when they didn't do that, 'cause again, there are secular issues around retail we all know-
- SGScott Galloway
Yeah
- KSKara Swisher
... and we are aware of, and that e- even Walmart, which was the juggernaut, is only up twenty-three percent. But what would you-- when you, when you-- this person had worked-- has, has worked there most of his career, right?
- SGScott Galloway
Yeah.
- KSKara Swisher
He's a career person. How difficult right now is it for CEOs to do things like that? 'Cause you don't-- you keep saying-
- SGScott Galloway
Hundred percent
- KSKara Swisher
... there's gonna be more and more of them, and Dario did backpedal a little bit. Like, he said-- uh, he's called Trump a dictator, which is technically accurate.
- SGScott Galloway
Yeah.
- KSKara Swisher
Um, but they, but they-- but he kind of walked back saying, "I shouldn't have been so rash." Uh, he's still-
- SGScott Galloway
Yeah
- KSKara Swisher
... suing the govern-
- SGScott Galloway
Yeah
- 36:42 – 42:13
Anthropic Apologizes
- KSKara Swisher
let's go over Anthropic. The Pentagon has officially labeled it as a supply chain risk, but the company says it won't impact business partners as much as Pete Hegseth implies, and the ban will only apply directly to contracts with the department... I'm gonna call them Department of Defense 'cause I feel, 'cause it's like the Gulf of America. Um, Dario Amodei is also apologizing, as I said, for a memo. He basically said the White House punished Anthropic for not offering, quote, "dictator-style praise." Um, what is happening here? There's a person, as I've talked about, a guy named Emil Michael, who is a, a tech person-
- SGScott Galloway
Yeah
- KSKara Swisher
... who got, uh, who got, who had to leave Uber under very bad circumstances, including reporting by a organization I ran. Um, really a, a, a bullying toady is how I would describe him. Um, but Hegseth, let's use him, pretend he knows what's happening. Um, do you think he's, they're gonna try to go harder on Anthropic now? And what is the price? 'Cause he did pull back some. What do you think went into that from a-
- SGScott Galloway
I think they're distracted, and the only way, the only thing I'm fairly certain of is that, again, I'll go back to my consulting days. There's actually a wonderful kid, uh, Ari, he's here, who used to work with me. Um, kid, he's now three kids, lives in Minnesota. Um-
- KSKara Swisher
That means you're old, but go ahead.
- SGScott Galloway
[laughs] But I always used to say before we'd go in to talk to a board or management, "Who's in the room that's not in the room?" And that is, there's always a context or atmospherics in a room. Companies are highly politically charged places with leaders who have a disproportionate amount of influence even when they're not in the room. I'm like, "We're going in and we're talking about e-commerce or shareholder value, but who's in the room that's not in the room?" And I believe almost every decision being made by this administration is two people who are in the room but not in the room, and that is whenever you see anyone dealing with the press or congressional testimony, Roy Cohn is in the room. And if you look at Roy Cohn's... Roy Cohn was Donald Trump's mentor. Attack, attack, attack. Insult, lie, never deny, never acknowledge. Attack, attack, deny, insult. And basically, i-the one of the greatest brand erosions of the US government is there used to be a certain decorum and civility when you testified in front of Congress. We weren't that nation that broke into fisticuffs or started throwing water at each other. That's gone because Roy Cohn is in the room. The second person that is present in every room right now around every, every decision is Jeffrey Epstein. And I believe, and I've said this over and over, that there are two very, or three very smart people armed with every LLM monitoring the temperature of the proximity between Trump and Epstein's name in the news. And when it gets above a certain temperature, they then ask the LLM for what action would create the most controversy, no matter how ridiculous it is. We're taking tariffs of fifty percent on Spa- on Spain. We're gonna invade Cuba, start calling someone racist names that will push the temperature down again. I think that the, Roy Cohn and Epstein are literally-
- KSKara Swisher
So-
- SGScott Galloway
... in every room.
- KSKara Swisher
So who is in Pete Hegseth's room besides Jack Daniels? [laughing] No, really, it's his friend from high school.
- SGScott Galloway
I don't... I, I think-
- KSKara Swisher
And probably grammar school, looking at him. But-
- SGScott Galloway
Yeah, I, I, I think that Dario's gonna get let off the hook 'cause my prediction is in the next two to four weeks, other CEOs are gonna step into the void, the vacuum of leadership here.
- KSKara Swisher
So he'll get some help.
- SGScott Galloway
I think he'll get some cloud cover from other firms that'll start saying, "We're, we're not gonna run with the government."
- KSKara Swisher
Any prediction what firm that would be?
- SGScott Galloway
I-
- KSKara Swisher
It's not gonna be Jeff Bezos.
- SGScott Galloway
I don't know. I really don't know.
- KSKara Swisher
I feel like it might be Ted Sarandos or someone like that 'cause he doesn't give a fuck now.
- SGScott Galloway
Yeah, Ted, Ted is in a position to do it now. Um, I mean, in fact, well, um, we're going on a diversion here, but walking away, it's so funny, if you wrote a book called The Worst Acquisitions in History, you just might as well call it Warner Brothers.
- KSKara Swisher
And by the way, I wrote that book. [laughing] You did not read it 'cause you don't invest in-
- SGScott Galloway
Oh, the AOL, the book on AOL
- KSKara Swisher
... but yeah, I wrote two.
- SGScott Galloway
Yeah. No, I was-
- KSKara Swisher
It was called There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere
- SGScott Galloway
... I was having a bottle of Lancers and watching, listening to Cisco when I read that. Um-
- KSKara Swisher
[laughs] Okay
- SGScott Galloway
... and, and the English Beat.
- KSKara Swisher
All right, finish up. I got another story.
- SGScott Galloway
No, but, but effectively, they walked away from a hundred and twenty billion dollar deal, so they have a hundred and twenty billion dollars. Their stock's up twenty-four percent since walking away from a deal another sixty billion. So my suggestion to Ted is, "You know what? You've just saved a hundred and eighty-two billion. You know what's worth a hundred and seventy-eight? Disney, the most defensible business in all of entertainment, which is the parks." The reason I bring that up is, again, Warner Brothers is about to be the worst acquisition in history.
- 42:13 – 47:24
Elon Testifies
- KSKara Swisher
people. Some Elon Musk news. He was in a courtroom this week. Investors are suing him, claiming his 2022 tweets about pausing the Twitter deal tanked the stock price and cost them a ton of money. Elon's defense, he says he put the deal on hold because he genuinely had concerns about bots and fake accounts. If the jury doesn't buy it, he could be on the hook for close to a billion dollars in damages. He's managed to, to unctuous his way out of so many lawsuits, the PETA lawsuit, the other one where he said four twenty. Um, what do you think about this one? He really misbehaved in this case. He was forced to then buy it, of course.
- SGScott Galloway
He literally fits the SEC definition of insider trading and market manipulation.
- KSKara Swisher
Yeah.
- SGScott Galloway
If I had said-- [clapping] If I was on the, if I was on the board of a public company and said, made an announcement, tweeted that the, we had just, um, that I was buying the company for four hundred and twenty dollars a share at a sixty percent premium, and the funding was secured a-and that wasn't true, I would never be on a public board again, much less be an officer, and most likely I'd end up in jail. We have sent people to jail for much less than this, and this is the problem with this level of massive income inequality, and that is, generally speaking, the one way AI might help is AI might actually be a means of enforcing the law unilaterally, which it is not now because the reality is the top one percent are protected by the law, but they're not bound by it, and the bottom ninety-nine are bound by the law but not protected by it. And Elon Musk represents that in spades, and so what? Because most of the, most of the penalties from the law are civil penalties, and there is no penalty big enough to get Meta to stop putting out content that convinces teenage girls to, to stop cutting themselves, and there's no penalty large enough, no fine large enough for Musk to stop lying and committing the types of SEC violations that the rest of us have to play by.
- KSKara Swisher
So what's gonna happen here to him? Because he'll say he was concerned about bots. He, he had an ironclad deal with no due diligence that he agreed to.
- SGScott Galloway
At some point, the laws, the penalties have to be a percentage of your wealth or the market cap of the company because he might be fined as much as a billion dollars. If you have the average household wealth of a family in America, a hundred and twenty thousand dollars, that's the equivalent of a five hundred and fifty dollar fine.
- KSKara Swisher
Yeah.
- SGScott Galloway
So-
- KSKara Swisher
And he's gonna be a trillionaire with the SpaceX-
- SGScott Galloway
So who cares? He doesn't care, and he just throws money and lawyers at it.
- KSKara Swisher
So do you think he'll win this case? 'Cause he's, he's won them all.
- SGScott Galloway
I don't know enough about it. What do you think?
- KSKara Swisher
I think he might win it again. I think he, he always manages to squeeze out of things, and he says, "Oh, we just didn't mean to say it," and he had real concerns, and, you know, we talked about this at the time. We're like, "He's gonna have to buy it." I don't-- We don't care what he says. He-
- SGScott Galloway
Oh, the court, the, the Delaware court was not impressed with him. He did not want-- He tried to do, do everything. He realized in a manic state, ketamine, he would-- that-
- KSKara Swisher
Yeah
- SGScott Galloway
... Twitter was worth forty-four billion dollars, and then when he sobered up, he's like, "Uh-oh," and he did everything to try and get out of it, and the Delaware chancellor said, "I'm just not that impressed by you." These agreements, and to the board-
- KSKara Swisher
Yeah
- SGScott Galloway
... the board of Twitter's like, "If this-- We don't care if this guy's really fucking high. If he wants to pay us this much money, just send an agreement that they are tight," and they did that, and they wouldn't let him out of it 'cause they knew that he, they was buying a eighteen billion dollar company for forty-four billion.
- KSKara Swisher
Yeah, but he of course sailed out of that because the banks didn't foreclose on him. They did, because they wanted the next deal.
- SGScott Galloway
And to be fair, the company has performed better than they thought.
- KSKara Swisher
And he moved it into X AI, and he moved it into-- Well, you don't know how it's performed. Twitter's-
- SGScott Galloway
Well, Twitter, most of the metrics-
- KSKara Swisher
Are lower significantly.
- SGScott Galloway
But my understanding is advertisers have returned. That's not your understanding?
- KSKara Swisher
My understanding is the business sucks as it always did, and-
- SGScott Galloway
Fair enough
- KSKara Swisher
... and, and the numbers are down, and Threads, owned by-
- SGScott Galloway
Huge inroads. Is now bigger-
- KSKara Swisher
Bigger
- SGScott Galloway
... bigger than Twitter.
- 47:24 – 52:37
Kansas Invalidates IDs
- KSKara Swisher
hundred transgender people in Kansas woke up this week to find their driver's licenses are now legally invalid, all thanks to a new state law forcing them to get new IDs that reflect the gender they were assigned at birth. The law ha- also has what critics are calling a bounty provision, where anyone who encounters a trans person in a public bathroom and feels aggrieved can actually sue for damages. Courts are already pushing back with legal filing calling the law something designed to, quote, "discri-discriminate against and dehumanize transgender people," you think? Um, these anti-trans laws are popping up across the country again. Will be, uh, will pushing back on this be a winning or losing strategy for Democrats? Obviously s- the sports stuff did stick, but as we get closer to midterms, this, this particular thing seems the most dehumanizing thing and sickening thing, is trying to-- You need your license to vote. People are immediately without a l- a license, a real ID to fly and everything else. And, um, it's really, um, I think it's one of the cruelest things that I've heard to do to transgender people, uh, y- as yet, among the many cruel things people do. Uh, any thoughts about how to deal with a story like this?Be careful, Scott
- SGScott Galloway
[laughs] So, uh, uh, something David Frum said kind of summarized how I feel about the Democratic Party right now, and that is if progressives won't enforce the border, fascists will. And we stick out our chin, and we lose our fucking minds when we try to pass legislation that demands corporations have third bathrooms or when we let a trans woman... And I realize this is the wrong crowd for this, but I wanna speak as I would anywhere else. Or we decide that a trans woman can compete in a women's NCAA meet, and all progressives look around cautiously and then applaud and call it inspiring. So you're telling me ar- all medals, endorsement contracts, professional contracts, all money, college scholarships are ultimately gonna go just to people born with penises? We lost our fucking minds. And then they move in and see an opportunity to demonize a community and just, quite frankly, cover it and respond with hate. So I think where the Democratic-- And I'm torn on this. I think where the Democratic communi- co- uh, co- community needs to be thoughtful is like, "Look, we have, we have civil rights. This is a community that deserves the same dignity as every other community, but no, we're not gonna make it our front and center issue." These-- This should be settled law-
- KSKara Swisher
It's settled
- SGScott Galloway
... and move on.
- KSKara Swisher
But it's not settled law. They took away their licenses. This is, this is where it goes-
- SGScott Galloway
That-
- KSKara Swisher
See, this is what-- One of-
- SGScott Galloway
That-- But the law, in my opinion, my read of the law is there's no legal justification for taking away their licenses.
- KSKara Swisher
Right.
- SGScott Galloway
But don't make it the platform for the-- whoever's running for president. I just think these, these-- I think a lot about, uh, you know, I think a lot about masculinity, and-
- KSKara Swisher
I hadn't noticed that.
- SGScott Galloway
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
[laughing]
- SGScott Galloway
And loosely speaking, I think of it as a- acquiring skills and strength, uh, in the service and protection of others. You don't ha- You might disagree with the trans community. You might not believe in, uh, gender affirma- whatever your beliefs are. But if you think of yourself as a man, right, and you see this kind of demonization, it doesn't matter your political views, you move to protection. This is just straight victimization.
- SPSpeaker
[applauding]
- SGScott Galloway
So wh- where I land, where I land is this should be settled law. Of course, you don't take their driver's license away. That's just stupid. But don't make it, don't make it the lead and opening debate for the presidential election because this is a community that, uh, uh, this is-- I get it. This is a really tough one, but we really screwed up on this one, and there are a lot of Americans that have a different viewpoint on this. But in my view, this is something where we say, "All right, let's be reasonable. We're gonna afford this community the same rights and dignity as every other community, but it's not gonna be a part of our platform that we lead with."
- KSKara Swisher
No, I think-- I, I do think they're trying to, de- definitely trying to get us to stick our chin out. That same time-
- SGScott Galloway
Yeah
- KSKara Swisher
... this, I think it actually is very helpful when they do this bounty provision thing. It just seems fucking mean. Like, I think just like everywhere else in-
- SGScott Galloway
It, it's persecution for no, for no reason. It's-
- KSKara Swisher
I think it had resonance here in Minnesota. I didn't live here, but that definitely-
- TWTim Walz
Well, North Dakota passed a law for no, uh, uh, uh, free play law, whatever it's called, so no trans athletes in high school, and then when they were asked to find a trans athlete in any high school, they couldn't find one.
- KSKara Swisher
Yes. That's correct.
- SPSpeaker
[laughing]
- KSKara Swisher
There's six of them. Anyway, um, it'll be an interesting thing going forward, but it's astonishingly cruel, and I think it will-
- SGScott Galloway
Agreed
- KSKara Swisher
... it will hit back at them, especially these bounties. I think there's a real trend that I think you and I talked about was a lot of people have immigration issues, a lot of people have this, and there-- a lot of people who are sort of pro-Trump or voted for Trump, to me, has said, "But not this way," right?
- SGScott Galloway
Right.
- KSKara Swisher
And I think there's a great deal of political strength to be saying, "Okay, you can have that view, but do you really wanna do this to people? Do you really wanna do that?" And I think Minnesota was, was sort of the absolute place where people were like, "Are, are you fucking kidding me?" Like, that kind of thing, and I think it does have resonance, and especially when the citizens fight back in a way that is-- has a lot of dignity and grace-
- SGScott Galloway
Agreed
- 52:37 – 1:03:09
Minneapolis OnlyFans
- KSKara Swisher
is for you, and it's our friends, uh, at the Minnesota Star Tribune, which we love.
- SPSpeaker
[cheering] [applauding]
- KSKara Swisher
Um, this-- I love this thing. I wear it all the time. It's so great. Uh, Minneapolis now leads the Midwest in OnlyFans subscriptions according to new data [laughs] from OnlyGuider. I didn't even know there was, like, a data for OnlyFans.
- SGScott Galloway
[laughs]
- KSKara Swisher
But out of 167 cities, Minneapolis ranks fifth in the country per capita and sixth in the world. Minneapolis residents spent more than $14 million on OnlyFans in 2025.
- SPSpeaker
[cheering] [applauding]
- KSKara Swisher
First of all, what the fuck is going on with all of you?
- SPSpeaker
[laughing]
- KSKara Swisher
And Scott, will you be staying a little longer in Minneapolis?
- SPSpeaker
[laughing]
- KSKara Swisher
It's-
- SGScott Galloway
So I, I-
- KSKara Swisher
Go
- SGScott Galloway
... I'm fascinated with OnlyFans, not for the reasons you're saying. Um-
- KSKara Swisher
It's exactly for the reasons you think.
- SGScott Galloway
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
[laughing]
- SGScott Galloway
It's just-- It, it reflects a lot of things about our society and economics. It's-- So 84% of the creators are women. 80% of the revenue-- I'm sorry, 80% of the creators are women. 84% of the revenue comes from men.
- SPSpeaker
[cheering]
- SGScott Galloway
Uh [laughs]
- SPSpeaker
[laughing]
- SGScott Galloway
It's the highest per employee revenue company in the world right now. It's a bigger business than The New York Times. It's seven billion, and, uh, the number of registered users is greater than the population of the United States. It's effectively a transfer of-- It's basically we've monetized healthcare in the United States, we've monetized rage with social media, and now we're monetizing male loneliness. And I think it's a symptom of something much more insidious and frightening, and that is, uh, young people aren't having enough sex, and a lot of it is 'cause young men are not leveling up and taking as much-- They're taking way too much risk online, and they're not taking a risk, enough risk offline. And, uh, I offend people when I say this, uh, but I hold to it. I think we need to s-
- KSKara Swisher
Here he goes
- SGScott Galloway
I think we need to celebrate young men's horniness.
- SPSpeaker
[cheering] [applauding]
- SGScott Galloway
Um, [laughs] but we need to celebrate it offline, and what I would say is that the killers of masculinity are, uh, the indoors, a lack of exercise, blaming immigrants, blaming women, and porn, I think are killers of masculinity. And I, like, I'm very good at doing, I'm gonna bring this story back to myself.
- SPSpeaker
[laughing]
- SGScott Galloway
[sighs] When I was-- about twenty-four years ago, I was at the Raleigh Hotel at the pool. On Sundays, they have a DJ day, and there was just this scorching hot woman, and I ma- I said to myself, "Before I leave, I promise myself I was gonna speak to her." And I'm like, "I'm gonna speak to her. I'm gonna make the approach. I promise I'm gonna do it." And without the benefit of alcohol, I chickened out, 'cause I'm just not that interesting without alcohol. [laughs] And so I went to get my car, and I had the valet ticket, and I thought, "Oh, fuck," and I ran back in and I went up to her, and I showed her the valet ticket and I said, "I promised myself I was gonna say hi to you, and, uh, almost left." Anyways, uh, eighteen months later, we gave birth to a son whose middle name is Raleigh.
- SPSpeaker
[cheering] [applauding]
- SGScott Galloway
And let me, let me be less aspirational here. I wasn't looking at her thinking I want lower rates on auto insurance.
- 1:03:09 – 1:20:00
Resist and Unsubscribe
- KSKara Swisher
February, you started telling people how to resist and unsubscribe on our show. Now, uh, tell us how well it worked. Scott, let me tell you, you're in for a treat. Scott doing a pres-- He's-- He used to be a very good professor, and he's gonna show you why in a second. That's how I met him.
- SPSpeaker
[clapping]
- SGScott Galloway
All right. I've got, I've got fifty-five, uh, I've got fifty-five slides and six hundred seconds, so let's light this candle.
- SPSpeaker
[laughing]
- SGScott Galloway
Okay, so the agenda, why, why we did this, the weapon that's hiding in plain sight, what we built, what's next. Okay, so what we, uh, don't recognize is we have a weapon hiding in, in plain sight, and that is the most radical act in capitalism is non-participation. If you go all the way back to COVID, which is the most, quite frankly, crispest, biggest government action in history, it wasn't because tens of thousands of people were dying, it was because GDP crashed thirty-one percent. The only time the Trump administration responds is when the markets crash. So I started thinking, "How can we send a signal to CEOs and to the president about, uh, our objection to what's taking place here?" We wanna rewire the incentives. Right now, the incentive for all CEOs in tech is to just comply, is just to be obsequious to the president. We need to figure out a way such that when CEOs, instead of, instead of complying, instead of providing data for surveillance, whatever it might be, they think there's a down- potential downside to this. And then also just personally, I have found that, um, action absorbs anxiety. This is the first time in my life I've had t- I've had trouble disassociating from what's going on politically. And also, I think there's way too much courage behind a mic and behind a keyboard, and more of us sort of need to have our off mic and our off keyboard actions foot to some of the virtue we claim to have when we get in front of a fucking keyboard. I'm not gonna go through this. So in a capitalist society, right? Consumer spending, two-thirds. We are a consumer-driven economy, and also, uh, the wealthiest among us are controlling more and more, so if you wanna hit the wealthiest, you go after stock prices. And then effectively, again, what we saw was the greatest political response in history was when GDP crashed. Wanna rewire the incentives. I apologize, I'm being, um, redundant here. So what's the weapon hiding in plain sight? Um, economic strikes. It really is a powerful lever, and this is a brief history of economic strikes. And the one I always point to is the Montgomery Bus Strike, and there was a very cinematic moment where a courageous woman refused to give up her seat. But actually what moved the needle, it was a thirteen-month economic strike, where approximately three hundred cars a day, organized by a young reverend named Martin Luther King, gave people carpools such that they didn't have to take the bus. And essentially, the municipal system started losing a quarter of a million dollars a month, and then after thirteen months, they gave in and they desegregated the bus line. So it needs to be sustained. And essentially, our president does not seem to be moved by outrage, not as much by protests, not as much by the Supreme Court, not as much by even his own Republican Party. He seems to be moved, quite frankly, by markets, and when he has withdrawn from discussions of annexing Greenland or of crazy tariff ideas, it has been when one thing has happened. It's been when the market has crashed. So how do we send a signal to him? What I think is the soft tissue of the market right now is it's too concentrated, and that is somewhere between a third and forty percent of the stock market or the S&P is just a handful of companies. So that's the soft tissue. We go after these companies, and then we go after the soft tissue of the soft tissue, and that is, um, subscriptions. And again, these companiesmake up most of the market so when Netflix just announces that for the first time they've lost subscriptions versus gained them they lose fifty-eight billion dollars in market cap. More reason-recently T-Mobile was supposed to do add five hundred and six thousand this is from an earnings call a couple weeks ago they only added four hundred and ninety-five thousand so just an eleven thousand delta in subscriptions they lost thirty billion dollars in market cap. So the amount of power we have when we b-take when we blow the air-- when we strike the artery of these companies, the organs of our corpus and government with a blow around subscriptions it really is the most impactful thing we can do relative to the amount of consumer disruption. [cheering] Okay. So what you're gonna find when you go to Resist and Unsubscribe like me is you might even save some money. I found out that I had four AT&T contracts that, uh, for Blackberries and iPads that would have been in landfills for ten years. That's my visual. All right, so what we built. [laughing] That's what my creative team did this weekend. What did you do? [laughing] Uh, so these companies are smart, and they make it very hard to unsubscribe. So basically the site is just meant to navigate you to a link such that you can unsubscribe really easily. And what we have found is that of the people who go there, approximately five percent actually unsubscribe versus four percent at an e-commerce site. And we have driven approximately, uh, one and a half million, we're coming up actually on two million unique site visits without- [applauding] Thank you. But the most exciting thing is we haven't spent a single dollar 'cause neither Alphabet or Meta would take my money because it was quote-unquote political in nature. Yeah. Anyway, so how did we drive traffic? What's interesting is it's kind of a lesson in what works the best, and that is if you look at the number of people in the core demographic, traditional cable is really dying. This is the number of people in the twenty-five to fifty-year-old demographic that these shows on average, networks reach versus pivot. It's a little bit of patting ourselves on the back. What was really interesting, the thing that drove the most traffic was an article po-posted at NPR.org. I was not expecting that. [cheering] [applauding] We've also built a calculator where if you go on and type in who you're unsubscribing from and the size of your social media footprint, it will give you a sense for the economic impact. So I'll give you an example. If you have, uh, if you and your family or you have a decent sized social network and you unsubscribe from ChatGPT, two hundred and forty dollars. Based on the size of your social network, if it's decent, you get another three people. So four people unsubscribing, that's nine hundred and sixty dollars in lost revenue. Because this company is trading at forty times revenues, that is essentially about a thirty-eight or forty thousand dollar hit to their market cap just with you unsubscribing and then posting it on social media. Again, this is needs to be a sustained effort of small actions adding up over thirteen months. So Instagram, uh, we had huge views and ta-pickup because we had some le-celebrities talk about it and then try to-- the cloud cover, actually, I did a, I'm doing a bunch of research on protests, is media coverage. Uh, we pelted you with this before. I've been a total whore. I'm going on everything right now. [laughing] I'm not gonna... I realize videos of me on top of me speaking is like shavings of shit on a shit salad, so, uh... [laughing] It, but media coverage is important 'cause if you look at when A-ABC acquiesced and put Kimmel back on the air, it was actually when unsubscribes were going way down, but the media coverage had picked up 'cause it hurts morale internally. So what's next? So what I'm trying to do is figure out a way to sustain this movement, and I'm gonna be hiring someone full-time and recognizing that it, we had some good momentum and we don't wanna give it up after a month and try and add some innovation to it and continue to drive traffic to the site. Uh, also, where is our kind of red line, right? Like, what is your, you know, w-what was your sort of last straw moment? And for me, um, quite frankly, it was, uh, it happened here. When we had a member of the cabinet describe a nurse taking care of veterans as a domestic terrorist, I just can't... I, I want you to know, and I, I'm fairly confident of this, I don't have research, I think there are tens of millions of Americans that just feel your fucking rage right now. [applauding] Okay. So we have a lot of companies. We're gonna spend, uh, a few weeks focusing on one, specifically ChatGPT and an unsubscribe movement around ChatGPT. [applauding] Also, I think there's, um, essentially we get poor if we don't have systemic laws that affect all companies, when we start punishing some companies and rewarding others with... One of the reasons that America trades it at the highest P/E multiple, in other words, if you create a dollar at Target, the shareholders, the, the stakeholders get twenty-seven dollars, whereas retailers in Japan get much less and in Germany. And one of the reas-reasons, great research universities, incredible risk aggressiveness, deepest pools of capital, but the reason we have the deepest pools of capital is because of those things, but also rule of law, where they believe that if they invest in a company, they know what the company is gonna get to do or it be unable to or be restricted to because the laws are supposed to be applied equally. So when we have these one-off punitive efforts that result in CEOs bending a knee to the president, it not only is embarrassing, it not only denies us of our civil rights and our civil liberties, it's going to make us poorer over the long term. Okay.And we don't realize how good we've had it for so long. Okay, I'm gonna skip through this. Effectively, if you think of it, we have five million dollars for every startup in this nation. Europe has one million. We have ti- five times the amount of risk capital here, and I think it's in large part because until recently, we had a set of consistent systemic laws that applied to everybody in terms-- If, if Palantir or Anduril wanna make weapons or provide the government with information to surveil citizens, if it's legal, they're allowed to do it. But at the same time, if a company doesn't wanna work with the Department of Defense, they're allowed to do that as well. And the big myth over the last year is that the markets have performed well. If you look at the crash in the dollar, we're twenty-one out of twenty-three right now. We have underperformed every market except for New Zealand and Denmark since President Trump, uh, was inaugurated. What I would say is one of my role models around this is Heather Cox Richardson. I think it's really easy to be bereft. [audience cheering] I got about two minutes here and I'll wrap up. Uh, I think it's really easy to be resigned or bereft to the notion that we're in uniquely dark times, that this is the worst it's ever been. That just isn't true. This nation has survived plagues, civil wars, world wars, unbelievable economic disasters. We were interning families because they were Japanese in what was effectively concentration camps not that long ago, and many of those families had sons serving in the European theater. But what happened in each of those instances is that Americans were equal to the moment, and our democracy came back stronger. And effectively, that's the question now. Are we equal to this moment? And my fear is that people such as myself, that effectively I would describe my economic history as unprecedented typhoon-like winds in my sails while paying the lowest taxes in history. Never asked to serve in the military, never really asked to volunteer, incredibly low tax rates, free education, UCLA and Berkeley, unbelievable technology paid by middle class investors, DARPA. I got assisted lunch, I got Pell Grants, and I've paid, I think my average tax rate, and I talk openly about this, has been about twenty percent for the last ten years. So in sum, and I think there's a lot of you like me in this room, we have a debt. So I think about this a lot, right? I think this is our moment, and I wanna be at-- I wanna be able to answer this question. I'm gonna summarize. [audience laughing] Our objectives are to send a signal to consumers that they have a weapon hiding in plain sight and to create a series of incentives among CEOs that there's a downside to enabling this depraved behavior. The weapon hiding in plain sight is economic strikes. Most radical act in a capitalist society is non-participation. I talked a little bit about what we built, and we're gonna continue to innovate around it and continue to try and drive traffic to it. I'm gonna hire full-time resources and probably focus in on a narrower set of companies to send a stronger signal. And what I would ask each of us, and I think we've been inspired by some of the sacrifice that many of you have demonstrated, uh, what I'm asking, uh, of a lot of people, especially my generation, is do you have a debt? You know, are we equal to this moment? Thank you.
- KSKara Swisher
Whoo! [audience cheering] All right. Thank you, Scott. So, um, we-- Again, one of the things, you can go to Scott's site, Resist and Unsubscribe. Anybody can do, one of the things we wanna do, and we don't wanna, like, a lot of stuff when people ask you, you feel guilty. We don't want people to feel guilty. Decide what you can use and not use temporarily, forever, for whatever you wanna do. If you need to watch Severance, turn off Apple TV for now, and when it comes back, put it up, and then shut it down again. Like, it's okay. You don't have to feel perfect and virtue signal all the time. Just make one s-- If you leave here today, m-make one-- unsubscribe from one thing that you don't fucking need, and you don't need it all. That's all. [audience cheering] And it does build. There is a-- One of the great things about Minneapolis was there's a stone soup quality to all this. We all can contribute. There's, uh, talking to your, uh, legislators. It's talking to people at work, talking to your community, organizing community groups, things like that. And the most important thing, the absolute most important tool in your, in your entire kit besides your wallet and everything else, is to vote. Voting is the most critical and important tool in this to do. [audience cheering] Scott always surprises me with things like this, and I think it's really important. And you can ask a million questions of why it won't work, but as Scott says, what could go right? And again, for the people of Minnesota, thank you so much from the rest of us in the country.
- SGScott Galloway
Thank you, Minnesota.
- KSKara Swisher
Um, [audience cheering] when, when history is written, this will be one of the main stories of this era, and I'm telling you, it's changed everybody's... It, it has. You don't think it has? It-- The, the sacrifice has been worth it, even if it seems like an incredibly steep price to pay. Y- across the country, people are-- It has inspired people in a way that is, I think, gonna change things rather significantly. But it's not over. Just remember, there's still, these sons of bitches keep coming. Anyone who's in, in any marginalized group, like gays, they keep coming, so you gotta keep vigilant against what they're doing, and don't assume they're ever gonna go away. And so it's-
- SPSpeaker
They're not going anywhere.
- KSKara Swisher
[chuckles] Well, that's true. That too. [audience cheering] Um, so, so keep going, Minnesota. We have got your back. We really appreciate this, um, and we're so thrilled to have done this here, and we'll-- we will be back this year. And you can catch tonight's show on YouTube and in your podcast feeds. That's all the time we've got for today. Thank you, Minneapolis.
- SGScott Galloway
Thank you, Minneapolis. [audience cheering] [upbeat music]
Episode duration: 1:20:00
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