Tim Walz is "Petty As Hell" After Kristi Noem Firing | Pivot

Speaker 0:00 [cheering]

Kara Swisher 0:07 This is the original heated rivalry, but a hundred percent [laughing]

Speaker 0:11 [laughing]

Kara Swisher 0:11 A hundred percent less fucking.

Speaker 0:14 [laughing]

Scott Galloway 0:15 Yeah.

Speaker 0:15 [laughing]

Tim Walz 0:15 Actually-

Kara Swisher 0:16 Two hundred percent.

Speaker 0:19 [laughing]

Scott Galloway 0:19 Yeah, boner killer. Um-

Speaker 0:21 [laughing]

Scott Galloway 0:22 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.

Speaker 0:32 [laughing]

Kara Swisher 0:32 [upbeat music] I'm Kara Swisher.

Scott Galloway 0:37 And I'm Scott Galloway.

Kara Swisher 0:39 And welcome to the first Resist and Unsubscribe live event at the Pantages Theater in Minneapolis.

Scott Galloway 0:45 Yeah.

Kara Swisher 0:46 Um, wow.

Speaker 0:49 [cheering]

Kara Swisher 0:49 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.

Speaker 1:13 [laughing]

Kara Swisher 1:13 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.

Speaker 1:37 [laughing]

Kara Swisher 1:37 Um, he was very seductive on the presentation situation.

Speaker 1:40 [laughing]

Kara Swisher 1:40 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,

Kara Swisher 1:53 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.

Speaker 2:00 [cheering]

Scott Galloway 2:23 I love him.

Kara Swisher 2:24 Wow. Wow. Maybe you should tell Klobuchar you changed your mind.

Scott Galloway 2:29 Well, I [laughs] ... No, this is what happens when you don't run, I guess.

Kara Swisher 2:33 Oh, yeah.

Scott Galloway 2:33 I don't know. So...

Kara Swisher 2:35 Oh, suddenly you're popular.

Scott Galloway 2:36 Yeah.

Kara Swisher 2:37 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?

Speaker 2:52 [laughing]

Kara Swisher 2:53 Self-deportation.

Tim Walz 2:55 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-

Kara Swisher 3:04 So-

Tim Walz 3:05 So it was-

Kara Swisher 3:06 Give a, give a-

Tim Walz 3:06 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.

Scott Galloway 3:37 Right.

Tim Walz 3:37 Um, that's kind of the feeling I've had, whatever she has coming yet. Um, so-

Speaker 3:42 [cheering]

Kara Swisher 3:42 So you-

Tim Walz 3:43 With justice, but-

Kara Swisher 3:45 You-

Tim Walz 3:45 I-

Kara Swisher 3:45 You said last week that Secretary Noem should probably get used to spending more time in Minnesota-

Tim Walz 3:50 Yes

Kara Swisher 3:50 ... because we've got to get, we've got to get accountability. How are you planning on getting that?

Tim Walz 3:56 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-

Kara Swisher 4:11 Yeah.

Speaker 4:12 [laughing]

Tim Walz 4:12 I'm making my pitch to them.

Kara Swisher 4:13 I know he's having a problem with the border between names, but-

Tim Walz 4:16 Yeah

Kara Swisher 4:17 ... get it.

Tim Walz 4:17 Well, they can't, uh, that's...

Kara Swisher 4:19 [laughs]

Tim Walz 4:19 They can't, um, they can't do-- They can't fund these people, and they can't give them without putting guardrails back around, and I've been, I'm... I think Minnesotans are demanding. Before they do anything confirming someone else, we need to make sure they give us the investigations we need here, bringing those people back-

Speaker 4:40 [cheering]

Kara Swisher 4:41 Mm-hmm

Tim Walz 4:41 ... and, and holding accountability. Um, the, the both physical and moral injury that's happened to this state demands that justice be carried out. So look, whether it's, you know, whether it's county attorney with Mary Moriarty or Keith Ellison, both have talked about it, both are incredibly talented, and both of them will get justice. And, um, it's of course with, with Renee and Alex, but this, people in Minnesota know there are literally hundreds if not thousands of things that were done to Minnesotans, both physically, mentally, economically.

Speaker 5:15 [cheering]

Tim Walz 5:15 Somebody has to pay. Somebody has to pay a price, so.

Kara Swisher 5:18 Do, do you, do you imagine trials with her? I mean, she will say she's acting, she was acting at Stephen Miller's behest or-

Tim Walz 5:25 Well, it's out of my wheelhouse-

Kara Swisher 5:26 Right

Tim Walz 5:26 ... not being an attorney. But, um, we all know in history, saying you followed orders didn't get you out of anything. Just following orders didn't get you out of anything, and somebody issued those orders, and she was more than happy to, uh, to tell us she was in charge as, as she rode her horse around telling us that.

Speaker 5:46 [laughing]

Tim Walz 5:46 So, so yes, I, I think, you know, when you're an elected office and you can make mistakes or whatever, but this was not mistakes. This was a blatant violation of human constitutional rights of Minnesotans, and she-She spoke to that, and I was, I was in Congress last week too, and, uh, mine went a little better I, I think, than hers went.

Kara Swisher 6:09 [laughs] Yeah.

Tim Walz 6:09 But, but she claimed that everyone knew on this. And but I, I will say this, that yes, I think that we need to find out. There, there certainly needs to be investigations, and if those lead to indictments, trials, and imprisonment for the people who did these crimes, that, that needs to happen. But, um-

Kara Swisher 6:28 Can I get one more-

Tim Walz 6:29 But, but I would just leave with this. It all goes back to the top. This is Donald Trump's started this.

Kara Swisher 6:35 Yes.

Tim Walz 6:35 Donald Trump did this.

Kara Swisher 6:37 Yeah.

Tim Walz 6:37 So-

Kara Swisher 6:37 Let me, uh, ask one question then. Scott, Scott will have one. Is, um, y- they're trying to equate her with their ca- the right, I've noticed, is saying the fraud around these ridiculous commercials, the two hundred million dollars given to a friend of hers in some fashion, or Corleine Lewandowski's.

Tim Walz 6:53 Yeah.

Kara Swisher 6:53 Um, it wh- they're trying to equate it to what happened here, fraud that happened here. Like, if we go for fraud there, we gotta go for fraud with Kristi. Um-

Tim Walz 7:01 There's a big difference between fraud and corruption. Um, people stole from the people of Minnesota, and those people are in jail. We'll continue to do that. Uh, ironically, the amount that we know with our Feeding Our Future scandal is exactly what she spent on the Riding the Horse scandal or whatever it was.

Kara Swisher 7:17 Mm-hmm.

Tim Walz 7:17 But this goes a lot deeper, where people in government directing money towards their clients. These were criminals that stole from Minnesota, and Minnesotans caught them and put them in jail. So it was on the pretense of this, and there's folks that need to be accountable. I s- I said to all the Minnesotans, over the next ten months my job is to make sure, again, I am not going to apologize that Minnesota has incredible social service programs that lift people up, feed hungry kids, put people in. [cheering] I will, I will tell you it is my responsibility to make sure those programs are as secure as possible, and that's what we're doing. So they're not interested in any of that.

Kara Swisher 7:53 No.

Tim Walz 7:53 And this, that's just straight up-

Kara Swisher 7:54 If they were, they'd go to Louisiana, but that's another issue [laughs]

Tim Walz 7:57 Yeah, straight up corruption, um, of people taking money and, uh, you know, they, the false sense of they come here, they, you know, right-wing social media. Uh, here in Minnesota, there are folks that invited those people here. There are people here in elected office who will not condemn what happened to Alex and Rene or Liam or anyone else, and their accountability will come in November. But there still needs to be other, other avenues to make sure that justice is served.

Kara Swisher 8:26 Scott?

Scott Galloway 8:28 If a mayor calls you and says, "We have word or suspicion that ICE is about to have an equivalent preve- uh, presence to what happened in Minneapolis," what advice would you have? Specifically, what do you think you got right? And given, you know, you were in sort of uncharted territories, what did you get wrong? What would you do more of? What would you do less of if you were advising a mayor about to face this same situation?

Tim Walz 8:49 Well, just to be clear-

Scott Galloway 8:50 Or governor, excuse me

Tim Walz 8:51 ... the, what happened right and why they left was because of the people on the streets.

Kara Swisher 8:58 Yeah.

Tim Walz 8:58 It wasn't the elected officials. [cheering] They left because of that. And parent-teacher organizations that turned into food banks and, you know, soccer, uh, a-and basketball carpools that turned into protecting children and parents surrounding schools. Um, what I would tell them, and, and I don't know if you can... You can't replicate it immediately, but that old adage that all politics and all action is local, Minnesotans take that to local to your house and the house next to you and the house next to you. So my take is, make sure as elected leaders that you're watching where the organic leadership is coming from. Make sure you're not doing anything to interfere with that, and we were getting a lot of feedback, uh, from, from folks on the streets. And, and to be prepared. And make sure that, that you are ready to make these decisions that need to be made without any coordination. Like, e-everybody in this room knows and everybody in Minnesota knows, we always work with the federal government and the FBI, sex trafficking, you know, drug trafficking, things like that. They came in here and tried to make the case that we don't cooperate with them, and I'm telling you this. At the end of the day when Donald Trump and Tom Holman stand up and say, "Well, you know, Minnesota finally cooperated. That's why we're leaving," we didn't change one damn thing we were doing before.

Kara Swisher 10:18 Mm-hmm.

Tim Walz 10:18 Because our job is not immigration reform. We are not going to spend our resources going after people who are trying to follow the path towards citizenship and get here. So my, my advice to them is stay in your lane. Y- there's nothing you're going to do, like all of a sudden we would say, "Oh sure, we're gonna start giving you names," or something like that. They, I, I... The, the thought of that, these states that are saying... 'Cause when the president called me, he said, "Well, we didn't have this problem in New Orleans," or, or, you know, somewhere else. And I said-

Scott Galloway 10:51 We didn't give a shit. [cheering]

Tim Walz 10:52 We said, I said [laughs] well, I said, "You didn't shoot people in the face in those states. You didn't do things." And I said-

Kara Swisher 10:56 Right

Tim Walz 10:56 ... and he asked, "What's wrong with the people of Minnesota?" And this was on the call. I said, "Not one damn thing is wrong with the people of Minnesota." [cheering]

Kara Swisher 11:04 So, so-

Tim Walz 11:04 It's, it's being organized. It's being ready as elected officials. And I think what we learned in Minnesota, the coordination between different levels of government, because I think it was within a matter of minutes of, of Rene's murder that Mayor Frey called right away and things were starting to be put in place. But just to be very clear, uh, state and local governments were following the leads of the organic leadership on the streets and watching what did that.

Kara Swisher 11:30 Right.

Tim Walz 11:30 And that's the advice I would give.

Scott Galloway 11:32 It's incredible.

Tim Walz 11:32 So that's what I'd give.

Kara Swisher 11:33 So it, it's one of the most important parts of this, and I think most of the country got a lot of inspiration from it. Um, but Minnesota and, and, and the cooperation with the federal government w- didn't seem at that point cooperative, at least with Greg Bovino, may he whatever in pe-

Scott Galloway 11:50 [booing]

Kara Swisher 11:51 I know. It's an easy one. He'll be on Dancing with the Nazis someday.

Scott Galloway 11:55 [laughs]

Kara Swisher 11:55 Um, but, um-

Tim Walz 11:57 [laughs]

Kara Swisher 11:58 And with Kash Patel, as it turns out, if you'd given him a Surly beer, he would've been fine.

Tim Walz 12:01 Yeah.

Kara Swisher 12:04 He likes beer. He chugs it.

Tim Walz 12:08 What?

Kara Swisher 12:09 Like a, like a freshman in college.

Tim Walz 12:11 What, what-

Kara Swisher 12:11 That's how he chugs. Like a, like you're like, "Oh, you're a bad chugger, too."

Tim Walz 12:14 What adult goes into a locker room that you had nothing to do with and, and acts like it had to do with you?

Kara Swisher 12:20 What adults whose names-

Tim Walz 12:21 You know, here's my take on this for what it's worth. I was telling them backstage, they said, "Well, we gotta be afraid." I said, "I don't care. I can say whatever I want right now."

Kara Swisher 12:28 That's correct. We'll get to that. Okay.

Tim Walz 12:29 And so my thing is here's something we have to bring back. Shame has to be something. These people don't feel shame. You have to be ashamed of yourself.

Kara Swisher 12:37 I think the problem is you're dealing with people who are shameless, and I say that about the tech people. Uh, so if they don't have shame-

Tim Walz 12:43 They are

Kara Swisher 12:43 ... they, they're shameless. So Minnesota residents, y- as you just noted, and activist groups say that arrests are reportedly still happening every day, particularly in the suburbs. Uh, talk about what local authorities are doing about it, and then White House border czar Tom Homan promised Minnesota would be down to 150 ICE agents by last week. Has he, has he kept that promise?

Tim Walz 13:01 No. No, I don't believe so.

Kara Swisher 13:03 Okay.

Tim Walz 13:03 Um, and this is the other thing. It's very difficult for us to confirm that. Um, and one of the things is I, I, again, whether there is 650 here or not, the threat of them being here and the mental stress that puts on, especially our immigrant community, um, it doesn't really matter whether they're here or not. It's interfering with their life. It's causing trauma. It's doing all of the same damage. And so I-- no, I don't believe they probably have. They, they s- look, all of us here know she did not get fired because of what happened here. She got fired 'cause of those ads. And they left Minneapolis not because they did some- they thought they did something wrong. They left because it became politically damage to them. I believe if they get an opportunity again, they will do the same thing somewhere else, and that's why Minnesotans-- I tell you this. I was in Idaho last night with the Idaho Democratic Party. By the way, 1,200 people, largest it's ever been. 800 waiting to get their... Idaho. Idaho. [audience cheering] Every single, every single one of their-- They, they're outnumbered 102 to 13 in their legislature, the Democrats are, but they have candidates in every single district. But when we got, we got to town, the Minnesota flag was unfurled on buildings as a sign of resistance. [audience cheering] So...

Scott Galloway 14:28 So I talk about, uh, the Democratic Party on a more meta level. You went from almost being vice president to facing, um, impeachment articles in your home state. And a lot of people-

Tim Walz 14:39 Good luck with that. [laughs]

Scott Galloway 14:42 [laughs] And a lot of people would argue that as bad as the Republican Party is, what makes a lot of progressives angry is the Democrats don't seem to, quite frankly, have their act together.

Tim Walz 14:50 Yeah.

Scott Galloway 14:50 That, um, we, we wanna join a resistance, but quite frankly, we wanna, we wanna join a more competent, aggressive resistance.

Tim Walz 15:00 Yeah.

Scott Galloway 15:00 As someone who was on the front lines, right? You're the helm of the bobsled.

Tim Walz 15:05 Yep.

Scott Galloway 15:05 What observations and what advice would you offer to Democratic leaders around building a resistance that people are just, quite frankly, more excited to join-

Tim Walz 15:17 Yeah

Scott Galloway 15:17 ... and have a more full, more full-throated response to being a part of?

Tim Walz 15:21 No, I agree. Well, look, I've said it here, and, and I might be the wrong person to say this because I s- you know, I accept my responsibility because we would not be in this crap show if we had, uh, if we had won. But what I think the Democratic Party is, is one is we're prisoners to kind of norms, mores that are out there. We're prisoners to our institutions. And I will give you this, and I-- the tech folks drive me as crazy as they do you. The one thing they possess, and I, I will tell you I don't do this, I'm more of a rule follower, this idea of totally breaking something. Now, I would usually think if you break it, you have a better plan to go forward. Um, Democrats tend to be, you know, "We gotta listen to the system. We have to send a strongly worded letter." Um, people are sick of strongly worded letters, and I made this case, I made this case in, in '22. I said, "If we're gonna ask Minnesotans to vote for us and give us a trifecta," and this was with Melissa Hortman and Kerry Diesek in the leadership there. I said they're-- [audience cheering] Yes. And those two women knew it. The Democratic Party, Scott, I think in the past has been people want to see a direct connection to what they voted for and what they worked for to an improvement in the life and the things they asked for. And I remember after that legislative session in '23 where we did paid family and medical leave, fed our kids, you know, did, uh, child tax credit, 2040, all that whole list of things, new flag, all of those things. Um, I had a young staffer who worked on my re-election campaign on that and, and we did cannabis and everything, and he looks at me and he said, "Well, this wasn't that hard. We got all this stuff done." And I'm like, "God dang. We've been at this for 20 years." But it was a real telling moment on this is if you wanna get people excited, you wanna have them believe, then actually do something. And here's what I say. I'm not gonna give Donald Trump credit for anything, but what I have learned from what they did, if they can break every institution to try and go into people's houses or to kill people on the streets or go into wars that are illegal, then we should be able to break all the norms to give universal healthcare. [audience cheering] Break 'em all. To, to protect things that we want. Um-

Kara Swisher 17:26 So who do, who do you imagine best represents that right now in the Democratic Party?

Tim Walz 17:31 I think right at this point, and I think it's healthy, I, I think we should all agree, we need as broad as possible as we go past the, uh, abroad as possible people out there as we move to '28. I don't know if that person's out there yet, but when I started last January, I was doing town halls in West Virginia and Ohio where I was saying, by the way, "Everybody's telling you, you know, uh, the road to, you know, your--The road to totalitarianism, I said, is littered with people telling you're overreacting, and I said, "We're not overreacting." I was encouraging everybody to enter the fray and fill their lane because I find great joy every day I read Gavin Newsom's stuff, what he's doing. There's joy in hitting him at that. There's, there's JB Pritzker's out there. I see people like Gretchen Whitmer. There's, there's a lot of people out there. I don't know who's doing it, but here's what I learned. Donald Trump can suck up so much oxygen, there isn't one single person that is kinda the counterweight to that. But what we saw in Minneapolis is strength in numbers, strength in unity, and I want a bunch of folks out there.

Kara Swisher 18:30 All right. We just have, uh, two more questions for you. What does that mean for your political future?

Tim Walz 18:36 Well, I'm-- I have 10 months to continue to build, uh, what we've done in Minnesota. There's more-

Kara Swisher 18:41 All right, month 11.

Tim Walz 18:42 So yeah. Um, I think I still have a voice to go out there and, and make the case to, to get young people involved again, to get... Like in, in Idaho, that is pretty encouraging to be in there with 1,200 people in Idaho who are sick as hell of what's going on, and they were there to, you know, what can we do about it? How do we get organized? So I think for me, taking that message, getting out there, I wanna get, uh, uh, out on the road after this and do some more and to help. And, and my goal is just to make sure, and Scott, your point was there, is not only to elect a Democrat, I wanna make sure that that person we elect, we hold them accountable to passing the things we know we need to get done. How long have we fought on this healthcare thing? We all know... You know, we give them the statistics. We spend more than any other country. The days of arguing that are over. Whoever wins in '28, in early '29, better fix the healthcare system in a way for people.

Kara Swisher 19:33 So-

Tim Walz 19:33 Better strengthen middle class

Kara Swisher 19:35 ... are you-

Tim Walz 19:35 I wanna be part of that.

Kara Swisher 19:36 Are, are you interested in that? Would New Hampshire be a place you might stop? Are you interested in running? I just interviewed Gavin, and he lied that he wasn't.

Tim Walz 19:43 Uh, no, I am not, but I am interested in being a part of it and, um, in the ambassadorship to The Bahamas, if that's available.

Scott Galloway 19:51 [laughs]

Tim Walz 19:51 So...

Kara Swisher 19:51 All right. I have one last question.

Tim Walz 19:53 Herschel Walker, by the way, is the ambassador to The Bahamas, just so you...

Kara Swisher 19:58 So, so-

Tim Walz 19:58 Do not worry

Kara Swisher 19:59 ... last-- the last question is the Republicans using the scandal to-- it was partially one of the reasons you left, I think, or maybe it wasn't, you can correct me. But Republicans say the scandal proves Minnesota's social safety net is broken, and Democrats say it proves we need better oversight, not fewer programs. What has concretely changed since these stories broke and these, uh... and every state has this issue.

Tim Walz 20:22 Well, they broke five years ago-

Kara Swisher 20:24 Right, exactly

Tim Walz 20:24 ... and folks were on it.

Kara Swisher 20:25 Yeah.

Tim Walz 20:25 And I, I remind people that we told the Department of Agriculture, and they didn't do anything, but I, I'll own this. What's changed is, is we have pre-approvals. We have things in place, but again, as you see this, they are not interested in stopping the fraud. They're interesting in taking away meals from kids. They're interested in taking away Medicaid from kids, and this is why this is not a victimless crime, and it's why I'm so angry about this. Because it weakens people's trust in the institutions that are absolutely needed. What I would a-assure them is there's numerous things. I will fix this. They won't. They've got corruption, but what I can tell you, um, we're not gonna move one inch. We have the most generous social service programs, and there's a reason that we rank at the top on almost category. So my job is to clean those programs up, make them more secure, but, um, I totally reject where they're at. And, and to be lectured by people who spend a quarter billion on horses, to be lectured by the crypto bros with Don Jr. or whatevers, to, to watch the, the Trump family make money, and I remind people on this, I was the guy who authored that members of Congress shouldn't be able to trade stocks or own stocks, and-

Scott Galloway 21:31 [cheering]

Tim Walz 21:32 ... I thought it was-- I'll just leave you with this, that difference between fraud and corruption, I really thought it was a flex when The Wall Street Journal did a big breaking story when I got onto the ticket and said, "We believe in our analysis that Tim Walz is the poorest person to ever run for vice president." [laughs]

Scott Galloway 21:48 [cheering]

Tim Walz 21:48 Well, you didn't elect me to get rich. You elected me to do the job, and so I, I'm not gonna... I'll, I'll take my beating, but we're not gonna do it.

Kara Swisher 21:58 Is there any more? Last question.

Scott Galloway 22:00 [cheering] So-

Kara Swisher 22:01 Scott

Scott Galloway 22:01 ... uh, la-last question. You've had a rough year, or you've had a stressful year. What advice would you have for young people who have this incredible ascent in their professional life, which you have had, and then you face disappointment-

Tim Walz 22:15 Mm

Scott Galloway 22:15 ... and you face a tremendous amount of stress? I was-- we were talking backstage, and I said incorrectly, "I always feel like I know what to do," which is dangerous. And I remember when I saw the situation here, I remember put- trying to put myself in the shoes of a government leader. I just would've been so flat-footed. I just wouldn't have known what to do.

Tim Walz 22:32 Yeah.

Scott Galloway 22:32 I can't imagine the stress and, quite frankly, the disappointment you have likely registered personally in the last 12 months. How do you deal with that? What is your own process for managing stress and disappointment, and what advice would you have for young people who have mostly just known success-

Tim Walz 22:50 Yeah

Scott Galloway 22:50 ... and then face real stress and disappointment?

Tim Walz 22:53 Well, I think the-

Kara Swisher 22:54 And by the way, you do look good.

Scott Galloway 22:55 Yeah, you look great.

Tim Walz 22:56 [laughs] Thank you. Um-

Scott Galloway 22:58 Have you considered running for governor of California?

Tim Walz 23:00 Yeah, there you go. Um, no, look, I, I approached this job, I was 40, a schoolteacher in Mankato. I had no political experience, no money, and, and no connections. I approached it as an opportunity that if I had a skill set that could help, and it's the same way I told the vice president. I said, "You pick the person who gets you elected. If you want me to go to Omaha and get a point, I'll do that. You just tell me what to do." So I always approached it as it's public service. This isn't my-- my concern this year, and especially around making the decision to run again, um, my number one concern was we needed to hold the seat, not for me to sit in the seat, but for us to hold the seat, and now Republicans are totally screwed because they're not gonna win any elections in Minnesota. And so I-

Scott Galloway 23:41 [cheering]

Tim Walz 23:43 Here's my advice to young people, and I've told my team this. In these jobs and the decisions you have to make, or whether it's at 4:00 a.m. to--know your best friend had been killed or to watch George Floyd or, or those things. You, you elected me to make those decisions to the best of my ability, surround myself with people who could make good decisions. But I say the way you manage the stress on this is, is I know we make every decision in the best interest of Minnesotans. We try and do it as ethically and as, uh, obviously following the law as possible. That's the way you sleep at night knowing you did the best you possibly can in it. 'Cause I've asked, I don't know how some of these people sleep, and it might be what you said. They're shameless.

Kara Swisher 24:19 Mm-hmm.

Tim Walz 24:19 They don't have a, a conscience. But I would tell young people, and it's what we need, um, they've got horrible role models right now in many cases, but there are public servants out there serving. And there's numerous ways you can do this, whether it was to be on those streets, whether it was to be in those food banks, whether it was to be standing at the bus stops helping kids, whether it was to be writing letters, whether it was be donating to the Immigrant Law Center who's doing incredible work.

Speaker 24:44 [cheering]

Tim Walz 24:44 Find a way to, find a way to contribute because I think what, what Donald Trump did and what social media in a modern world has done, while we should be more connected, we feel more isolated. And I always said this as a coach, I knew this, that people-- It wasn't about the X's and O's. It was about being part of something bigger. And I know that sports gets overblown, the analogy, but Trump figured this-

Kara Swisher 25:04 You, you get a pass, but go ahead.

Tim Walz 25:06 Well, Trump, Trump figured it out. Make-- People go to those rallies because it's a place they wanna go. He even gave them a uniform and the red hats, and he made them feel like they were part of something. Um, what you saw in Minneapolis was community is still real. It is still there. There are still places you can go, places you can contribute. Find your community, contribute to it, make a difference because I think all of us know, every research does this, it's-

Kara Swisher 25:30 Yep

Tim Walz 25:30 ... it's far better to give and to help. And Minnesotans, by the way, none of this surprised the people in this room because it's all a correlation to highest voter turnout, highest volunteer rates, highest donations to charity.

Speaker 25:44 [cheering]

Tim Walz 25:44 It's what we do.

Kara Swisher 25:45 So-

Tim Walz 25:45 And happy.

Kara Swisher 25:46 Very, very last question.

Speaker 25:48 [cheering]

Kara Swisher 25:51 Are they still weird?

Speaker 25:54 [laughing]

Tim Walz 25:55 If I had to do it again, I think I would have used harsher language, but, um-

Speaker 26:01 [laughing]

Tim Walz 26:01 Don't norm-- Yes, they are. Kash Patel, look, that little dude jumping around, I, I, I don't-

Kara Swisher 26:07 But what's your new word?

Tim Walz 26:09 We have to-- And, and again, there's something about it, that belonging whatever, and, and I don't wanna say it, like, flippantly or whatever, but people wanna be part of an organization that they're proud of, that things are happening. Um, we have the capacity to do that, and one of the things that's more challenging for us, they set a small parameter, and you either conform or you're out of the cult. With us, we're proud of our broad, big tent, um, but that also means, um, we're gonna have to figure out ways to make people feel more, more a part of it. And so I think there's, there's somebody out there. Look, there's a lot of exciting people out there, which-- And again, I s- I swore this, Scott, that I would never-- Beto O'Rourke's one of my dearest friends. And after the last time Beto ran, I said, "I'm not putting another penny in Texas, damn it. It's taking money away." Now we got James Talarico. I said, "Okay, I'm putting a penny in there," [laughs] so.

Speaker 26:58 [cheering]

Kara Swisher 26:58 All right. Anyway, I want everybody to thank, uh, Governor Walz.

Host 27:01 Thank you, Governor.

Speaker 27:03 [cheering]

Kara Swisher 27:18 Yes, great. Thank you. Thank you. That was great. We really appreciate it. I liked his socks, his Minnesota socks. Did you see them?

Host 27:25 Yeah.

Kara Swisher 27:25 You wanna see mine? A little different. Says, "One hundred percent that bitch."

Speaker 27:32 [cheering]

Kara Swisher 27:34 So... I'm not running anything but my mouth tonight. Anyway, all right, well, we need, we need to take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll get to some of the latest headlines. Support for this show comes from Framer. Your website can set the tone for your brand, and it's the one touch point that every single one of your customers sees on the daily. So if you still struggle to make small changes or simple updates, you're potentially leaving opportunities on the table. That's why so many companies are turning to Framer, the website builder that turns your dot com from a formality into a tool for growth. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Miro to move faster. With real-time collaboration, a robust CMS with everything you need for great SEO and advanced analytics that include integrated A/B testing, your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your dot com from day one. Changes to your Framer site go live to the web in seconds with one click without help from engineering. So whether you wanna launch a new site, test a few landing pages, or migrate your full dot com, Framer has programs for startups, scale-ups, and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site as easy and fast as possible. Learn how you can get more out of your dot com from a Framer specialist, or get started building for free today at framer.com/pivot for thirty percent off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com/pivot for thirty percent off. framer.com/pivot. Rules and restrictions apply.

Host 29:00 Support for Pivot comes from Anthropic. Success doesn't come easy. Usually, it's filled with unexpected twists and turns that can leave you scratching your head before you come out the other side. But these detours are where the real magic lives, those aha moments that can shape your journey beyond the question at hand. And when you're in the midst of all that, you should check out Claude, the system that is designed to work as hard as you do. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's a collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Plus, Claude's research capabilities go deeper than basic web search and can have comprehensive, reliable analysis with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes. Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at claude.ai/pivot. That's claude.ai/pivot, and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. claude.ai/pivot.

Kara Swisher 30:01 Scott, we're back recording live from the Pantages Theater in Minneapolis.

Scott Galloway 30:06 Yeah! [cheering]

Kara Swisher 30:14 Let's get

Kara Swisher 30:15 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.

Scott Galloway 30:51 [laughing]

Kara Swisher 30:51 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?

Scott Galloway 31:39 Yeah, last century. Um-

Kara Swisher 31:41 Yeah. [laughs]

Scott Galloway 31:42 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-

Kara Swisher 32:49 [cheering]

Scott Galloway 32:51 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-

Kara Swisher 33:14 That's an attractive-

Scott Galloway 33:15 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."

Kara Swisher 33:33 [laughs]

Scott Galloway 33:34 "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."

Kara Swisher 33:47 [laughs]

Scott Galloway 33:48 This was the mother of all missed opportunities for shareholders.

Kara Swisher 33:52 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?

Scott Galloway 34:03 [laughs]

Kara Swisher 34:03 I like it.

Scott Galloway 34:04 I did.

Kara Swisher 34:04 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-

Scott Galloway 34:13 Yeah

Kara Swisher 34:13 ... 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?

Scott Galloway 34:23 Yeah.

Kara Swisher 34:23 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-

Scott Galloway 34:30 Hundred percent

Kara Swisher 34:30 ... 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.

Scott Galloway 34:38 Yeah.

Kara Swisher 34:38 Um, but they, but they-- but he kind of walked back saying, "I shouldn't have been so rash." Uh, he's still-

Scott Galloway 34:44 Yeah

Kara Swisher 34:44 ... suing the govern-

Scott Galloway 34:45 Yeah

Kara Swisher 34:45 ... suing the government for the behavior.

Scott Galloway 34:47 But we've talked about this. Look, what's needed is the following: there's a lack of leadership amongst... So I, I'm friends with a guy named Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, who runs the leadership course at Yale, who brings together the largest convocation of CEOs in the country, and I've been having a dialogue with Jeff, and I said, "Jeff, you're the hero we need," because the reality is you have to be empathetic to-- It's very hard to go first right now. And that is, if you go first and you say, "I'm the president's enemy," the largest customer in the world is the US government, and it also has the ability to basically neuter your company, and you do have a responsibility to employees and shareholders. So what's needed is collective action, and that is somebody has to get ten, fifty, a hundred of the Fortune five hundred CEOs to basically put out, you know, a real letter saying, "This has just gone too far," and there are certain constitutional, uh, and democratic and civil rights that have made these companies the m- best performing companies in the wor- Best performing organization in history is the m- US military. The second best performing organization in the world is the US corporation, and one of the reasons it's performed so well is basic separation of government and business, uniform systemic laws that you get to o-oblige by, you're, you're compliant to, but also you have the same treatment. And they could just put out-A fairly, a letter that says, "We're just not down with what's going on," and it needs to be fifty of them, 'cause right now what they all say, and I've heard from probably about twenty percent of the companies we're asking to, um, resist and unsubscribe from, and they all make a good point. They're like, "It's really hard to go first." So there's a lack of leadership, or there's an opening for someone to organize a group of them to push back. But the fact that effectively in the last week, I think Anthropic has become more valuable-

Kara Swisher 36:30 Yeah

Scott Galloway 36:30 ... than OpenAI.

Kara Swisher 36:31 Yeah.

Scott Galloway 36:31 You're going to see more nos. All of a sudden, a bunch of CEOs are gonna reach down and find these spherical things [laughing] and decide to speak up.

Kara Swisher 36:40 Well, um, speaking of which, uh,

Kara Swisher 36:42 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-

Scott Galloway 37:14 Yeah

Kara Swisher 37:14 ... 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-

Scott Galloway 37:39 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-

Kara Swisher 37:54 That means you're old, but go ahead.

Scott Galloway 37:56 [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-

Kara Swisher 39:42 So-

Scott Galloway 39:42 ... in every room.

Kara Swisher 39:44 So who is in Pete Hegseth's room besides Jack Daniels? [laughing] No, really, it's his friend from high school.

Scott Galloway 39:51 I don't... I, I think-

Kara Swisher 39:53 And probably grammar school, looking at him. But-

Scott Galloway 39:56 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.

Kara Swisher 40:05 So he'll get some help.

Scott Galloway 40:07 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."

Kara Swisher 40:12 Any prediction what firm that would be?

Scott Galloway 40:12 I-

Kara Swisher 40:12 It's not gonna be Jeff Bezos.

Scott Galloway 40:15 I don't know. I really don't know.

Kara Swisher 40:17 I feel like it might be Ted Sarandos or someone like that 'cause he doesn't give a fuck now.

Scott Galloway 40:22 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.

Kara Swisher 40:35 And by the way, I wrote that book. [laughing] You did not read it 'cause you don't invest in-

Scott Galloway 40:40 Oh, the AOL, the book on AOL

Kara Swisher 40:42 ... but yeah, I wrote two.

Scott Galloway 40:44 Yeah. No, I was-

Kara Swisher 40:45 It was called There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere

Scott Galloway 40:47 ... I was having a bottle of Lancers and watching, listening to Cisco when I read that. Um-

Kara Swisher 40:50 [laughs] Okay

Scott Galloway 40:52 ... and, and the English Beat.

Kara Swisher 40:53 All right, finish up. I got another story.

Scott Galloway 40:56 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.

Kara Swisher 41:20 Yeah.

Scott Galloway 41:20 There's absolutely... There's basic, there's a basic rule. Sherry Redstone, Edgar Bronfman Jr., now David Ellison, the wonderful thing about income inequality, unfortunately because of our tax structure, we create dynasties, but when we had a more sane tax structure where we taxed estates 'cause we didn't believe in dynasties, it had, we had, didn't have such out of control income inequality, 'cause here's the thing, rich, the kids of rich people are usually fucking idiots.

Kara Swisher 41:42 Yeah.

Scott Galloway 41:42 And they usually spend, they usually spend all of their dad's money 'cause they're under the impression that being rich makes them smart, and they start making really stupid decisions.

Kara Swisher 41:50 Yep. That's been my experience. Um, I always say, uh, uh, to one of them, I thi- I can't remember who it was. One of these kids, I said, "You're, you know, so you were born-"

Scott Galloway 42:00 The only, the only people paying these prices in media are the children of rich people-

Kara Swisher 42:03 No, they are

Scott Galloway 42:04 ... who think they know what they're doing.

Kara Swisher 42:05 But I mean, their idea is they were born on third base and they think they've hit a home run. Um, and they haven't, and it will be a disaster. You're right. Speaking ofUnusual

Kara Swisher 42:13 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.

Scott Galloway 42:48 He literally fits the SEC definition of insider trading and market manipulation.

Kara Swisher 42:52 Yeah.

Scott Galloway 42:52 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.

Kara Swisher 44:03 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.

Scott Galloway 44:12 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.

Kara Swisher 44:31 Yeah.

Scott Galloway 44:32 So-

Kara Swisher 44:32 And he's gonna be a trillionaire with the SpaceX-

Scott Galloway 44:34 So who cares? He doesn't care, and he just throws money and lawyers at it.

Kara Swisher 44:37 So do you think he'll win this case? 'Cause he's, he's won them all.

Scott Galloway 44:40 I don't know enough about it. What do you think?

Kara Swisher 44:42 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-

Scott Galloway 44:55 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-

Kara Swisher 45:03 Yeah

Scott Galloway 45:04 ... 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-

Kara Swisher 45:16 Yeah

Scott Galloway 45:16 ... 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.

Kara Swisher 45:28 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.

Scott Galloway 45:34 And to be fair, the company has performed better than they thought.

Kara Swisher 45:37 And he moved it into X AI, and he moved it into-- Well, you don't know how it's performed. Twitter's-

Scott Galloway 45:39 Well, Twitter, most of the metrics-

Kara Swisher 45:43 Are lower significantly.

Scott Galloway 45:44 But my understanding is advertisers have returned. That's not your understanding?

Kara Swisher 45:47 My understanding is the business sucks as it always did, and-

Scott Galloway 45:50 Fair enough

Kara Swisher 45:51 ... and, and the numbers are down, and Threads, owned by-

Scott Galloway 45:54 Huge inroads. Is now bigger-

Kara Swisher 45:56 Bigger

Scott Galloway 45:56 ... bigger than Twitter.

Kara Swisher 45:57 Than Twitter.

Scott Galloway 45:57 Yep.

Kara Swisher 45:57 But still, I mean, people do-- still there's a lot of politicians on it, which, and press, that continue to stay on it. Scott and I left a long time ago despite enormous audiences there.

Scott Galloway 46:07 I, I, I mean this sincerely. I, and I talk about this a lot. I struggle with anger and depression, and I try and go through a series of things that will be an unlock, uh, that, and I try to keep track of what causes when I go dark, and one of the things I realized about Fourth is that twenty to twenty-five, I'm very analytical, twenty to twenty-five percent of the time when I went dark was fucking something that happened on Twitter.

Kara Swisher 46:27 Yep. You used to get upset.

Scott Galloway 46:28 So I stopped using Twitter about three and a half, three years, last World Cup. My suggestion is, uh, one of the most accretive things you can do for your mental health is not be on Twitter.

Kara Swisher 46:39 Yeah, I would agree. I would agree. I have not missed it one bit. Um, I had, I, I continually have tech bros saying, "You're really missing out," and what's there, and I'm like, "Oh, someone not calling me a cunt fifty times a day. I'm, I'm good. I'm real good with that." What?

Scott Galloway 46:57 Why does that make me happy? I don't know. [laughing]

Kara Swisher 47:00 [laughing] That's a word we need to reestablish as a good word to use. They use it in Britain. You live there, right? Don't they call you that all the time?

Scott Galloway 47:06 Yeah, that's one of those words that I should never, ever say under any circumstance.

Kara Swisher 47:11 Yeah, please don't. Please don't. Don't even do, "See you next Tuesday."

Scott Galloway 47:14 Yeah.

Kara Swisher 47:14 You're not allowed to do any of them.

Scott Galloway 47:15 No, no, no.

Kara Swisher 47:15 Anyway.

Scott Galloway 47:15 You, you own-

Kara Swisher 47:16 But I, I-

Scott Galloway 47:16 You own that word. I-

Kara Swisher 47:18 I can, and I use it quite a bit.

Scott Galloway 47:20 Yeah.

Kara Swisher 47:20 Um, anyway, um, all right, next story. More than fifteen

Kara Swisher 47:24 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

Scott Galloway 48:32 [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-

Kara Swisher 49:43 It's settled

Scott Galloway 49:43 ... and move on.

Kara Swisher 49:44 But it's not settled law. They took away their licenses. This is, this is where it goes-

Scott Galloway 49:48 That-

Kara Swisher 49:48 See, this is what-- One of-

Scott Galloway 49:49 That-- But the law, in my opinion, my read of the law is there's no legal justification for taking away their licenses.

Kara Swisher 49:55 Right.

Scott Galloway 49:56 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-

Kara Swisher 50:07 I hadn't noticed that.

Scott Galloway 50:08 [laughs]

Speaker 50:08 [laughing]

Scott Galloway 50:09 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.

Speaker 50:37 [applauding]

Scott Galloway 50:38 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."

Kara Swisher 51:17 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-

Scott Galloway 51:22 Yeah

Kara Swisher 51:22 ... 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-

Scott Galloway 51:30 It, it's persecution for no, for no reason. It's-

Kara Swisher 51:32 I think it had resonance here in Minnesota. I didn't live here, but that definitely-

Tim Walz 51:36 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.

Kara Swisher 51:45 Yes. That's correct.

Speaker 51:46 [laughing]

Kara Swisher 51:46 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-

Scott Galloway 51:53 Agreed

Kara Swisher 51:54 ... 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?

Scott Galloway 52:10 Right.

Kara Swisher 52:10 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-

Scott Galloway 52:32 Agreed

Kara Swisher 52:32 ... and, and suffering also at the same time. So, uh, last one, this one

Kara Swisher 52:37 is for you, and it's our friends, uh, at the Minnesota Star Tribune, which we love.

Speaker 52:42 [cheering] [applauding]

Kara Swisher 52:44 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.

Scott Galloway 52:57 [laughs]

Kara Swisher 52:57 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.

Speaker 53:12 [cheering] [applauding]

Kara Swisher 53:14 First of all, what the fuck is going on with all of you?

Speaker 53:18 [laughing]

Kara Swisher 53:18 And Scott, will you be staying a little longer in Minneapolis?

Speaker 53:22 [laughing]

Kara Swisher 53:24 It's-

Scott Galloway 53:24 So I, I-

Kara Swisher 53:25 Go

Scott Galloway 53:25 ... I'm fascinated with OnlyFans, not for the reasons you're saying. Um-

Kara Swisher 53:28 It's exactly for the reasons you think.

Scott Galloway 53:31 [laughs]

Speaker 53:31 [laughing]

Scott Galloway 53:31 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.

Speaker 53:47 [cheering]

Scott Galloway 53:47 Uh [laughs]

Speaker 53:50 [laughing]

Scott Galloway 53:51 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-

Kara Swisher 54:35 Here he goes

Scott Galloway 54:37 I think we need to celebrate young men's horniness.

Speaker 54:41 [cheering] [applauding]

Scott Galloway 54:42 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.

Speaker 55:04 [laughing]

Scott Galloway 55:05 [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.

Speaker 55:53 [cheering] [applauding]

Scott Galloway 55:58 And let me, let me be less aspirational here. I wasn't looking at her thinking I want lower rates on auto insurance.

Speaker 56:05 [laughing]

Scott Galloway 56:06 Um, I think embracing your horniness and wanting to have sex is a wonderful thing. It encourages you to level up. It encourages you to shower. It encourages you to have a plan. It encourages you to develop a kindness practice. It encourages you to work out. It encourages you to get girl friends who can teach you how to behave around women, and when they see you're a decent dude, maybe introduce you to some of their friends. Men need to level up, and the motivation for leveling up, quite frankly, is being so horny you're willing to take risks.

Kara Swisher 56:38 Oh, well, all right.

Scott Galloway 56:39 And-

Kara Swisher 56:39 That's your next book then.

Speaker 56:40 [laughing]

Scott Galloway 56:40 And when, and when you're, quite frankly, jerking off twice a day to porn, which unfortunately through AI is getting more and more lifelike and more and more seductive, it's gonna reduce your ability to do one of the most wonderful things in the world, and that is make your own bad porn.

Speaker 57:00 [laughing]

Scott Galloway 57:01 And let me just, let me just finish with this.

Kara Swisher 57:03 All right. I'm waiting for this to end. Okay.

Speaker 57:05 [laughing]

Scott Galloway 57:07 Let, let me just finish with this. I hate the incel movement. Involuntarily celibate, like it's so-- they're-- you face so many obstacles that you've just given up and you wear it like a badge of honor. Well, guess what? Ninety-nine percent of men through ninety-nine percent of history have been involuntarily celibate. I was involuntarily celibate for the first nineteen years of my life.

Kara Swisher 57:30 Ooh.

Speaker 57:31 [laughing]

Scott Galloway 57:32 And this is what men do. They level up such that they can be voluntarily incelibate. So the fact that... Okay, work-- welcome to the fucking work week, dudes.

Speaker 57:42 [laughing]

Scott Galloway 57:43 Level up. Women are leveling up. That means you've gotta raise, you've gotta, you've gotta level up, right?

Kara Swisher 57:49 Yes, so-

Scott Galloway 57:49 Develop the attributes. I have-- I coach young men. I call it the, the rule of threes. If you work out at least three times a week, and I have data on this, if you spend at least thirty hours a week working outside of the house, and if three times a month you put yourself in the company of strangers in the agency of something bigger than you, church group, writing class, nonprofit, and you're willing to talk to people and endure rejection, express friendship, express romantic interest. Every father has an obligation to teach his son how to express romantic interest while making that woman or that man feel safe.

Kara Swisher 58:21 Yes.

Scott Galloway 58:21 That is an obligation you have, you have to-- Forty-five percent of men eighteen to twenty-two have never asked a woman out in person.

Kara Swisher 58:28 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 58:29 And there are not enough men leveling up and realizing at some point i-if you do those three things, you're in the top five percent of men, and what I tell these young men is that if you're in the top five percent of young men for long enough, you will be, uh, tru-trust me, voluntarily incelibate.

Kara Swisher 58:45 All right. Okay.

Scott Galloway 58:45 And the most, the most wonderful-

Kara Swisher 58:47 [laughs]

Scott Galloway 58:47 ... the most wonderful thing in life, the most wonderful thing in life is building a life with a partner, and guess where it starts? When dudes are really fucking horny.

Kara Swisher 58:59 All right then.

Scott Galloway 58:59 Embrace their horniness.

Speaker 59:01 [applauding]

Kara Swisher 59:01 All right, the theory of horny from Scott Galloway. Um-

Scott Galloway 59:06 It's why we put-

Kara Swisher 59:07 All right. First up

Scott Galloway 59:07 ... a man on the moon and have vaccines. It was guys who wanted to get laid.

Speaker 59:11 [laughing]

Kara Swisher 59:11 All right. In any case, you know, Minneapolis, we're gonna let you off the hook 'cause it's super cold here. But now that the weather is lovely like today, you better get out there and fuck, apparently.

Speaker 59:22 [laughing]

Kara Swisher 59:22 According-- That's according to Scott Galloway. I, of course, have never had a problem attracting people, but-

Speaker 59:29 [laughing]

Kara Swisher 59:31 It's not gonna happen for you tonight. I'm going back to his house tonight, [laughs] but I'm not, it never happened. No, I'm kidding. Wouldn't that be grotesque?

Scott Galloway 59:37 You, you always bring this up when it's live.

Kara Swisher 59:38 I don't. I have no interest in you whatsoever.

Scott Galloway 59:41 You always bring this up.

Kara Swisher 59:41 I mean, it's like you're, you're the reason I became a lesbian. Anyway-

Speaker 59:45 [laughing]

Scott Galloway 59:45 [laughs]

Kara Swisher 59:45 We'll take one more quick break, and we'll be back with Scott's update on the impact of Resist and Unsubscribe.

Speaker 59:53 [cheering]

Speaker 59:53 Support for this show comes from Harvey AI. Law is a craft forged through repetition, sharpened by judgment, perfected in the details most people never see. Practice makes perfect is Harvey's belief in relentless refinement, in turning complexity into clarity, pressure into precision, and experience into advantage. Legal work isn't just knowing the law. It's about applying it carefully, consistently, and under real stakes. Harvey is an AI platform built specifically for legal practice, helping teams analyze large volumes of documents, drafts with precision, and collaborate securely across complex matters. It doesn't replace expertise. It strengthens it, making teams faster, more exacting, more certain. Today, more than half of the AM Law 100 use Harvey as part of their workflow. Learn more at harvey.ai.

Scott Galloway 1:00:45 Support for the show comes from BMC. Before you trust AI to make your business decisions, before you can reliably scale automation across every workflow, before all your data pipelines are connected with intelligence, your business faces some complex challenges ahead, namely tackling things including orchestration as a competitive advantage, unifying your modern and legacy systems, or transforming your mainframe. Before you take them on, make sure you do one thing, BMC first. BMC is the automation engine for the AI era. Over the years, they've helped customers worldwide run and modernize their businesses by automating, managing, and optimizing complex IT environments. They've partnered with eighty percent of the Forbes Global 100. They've helped to build trust into critical workflows in virtually every category, including finance, healthcare, regulated industries, national infrastructure, and more. Their history in the category runs deep across hybrid, multi-cloud, and mainframe environments. They have a proven track record of driving productivity, reliability, and resilience, and they're here to help you revolutionize the way your enterprise runs. Before automation, before scale, before transformation, before you begin, BMC first. What can you do when you partner with BMC? Get started today. Learn more at bmc.com.

Speaker 1:01:54 [whoosh]

Kara Swisher 1:01:54 [upbeat music] Support for this show comes from DeleteMe. DeleteMe makes it easy, quick, and safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. When you sign up, the experts at DeleteMe do the heavy lifting of wiping you and your family's personal information from data broker websites. This isn't a one-time service. DeleteMe sends you regular personalized privacy reports showing what info they have found, where they found it, and what they removed. I've tried DeleteMe, I use it all the time, and I've found incredible the amount of information about me out there, a lot of it inaccurate, but all of it compiled in a way that's really disturbing. You don't have to take my word for it, though. Last year, The New York Times Wirecutter named DeleteMe their top pick for data removal services. Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for DeleteMe, now at a special discount to our listeners. Get twenty percent off your DeleteMe plan when you go to joindeleteme.com/pivot and use the promo code PIVOT at checkout. The only way to get twenty percent off is to go to joindeleteme.com/pivot and enter the code PIVOT at checkout. That's joindeleteme.com/pivot, code PIVOT.

Speaker 1:02:59 [whoosh]

Kara Swisher 1:02:59 Scott, we're back, recording live from Minneapolis. [audience cheering] And the reason we're here is that back in

Kara Swisher 1:03:09 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.

Speaker 1:03:23 [clapping]

Scott Galloway 1:03:24 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.

Speaker 1:03:33 [laughing]

Scott Galloway 1:03:33 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.

Kara Swisher 1:16:56 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.

Scott Galloway 1:18:28 Thank you, Minnesota.

Kara Swisher 1:18:30 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-

Speaker 1:19:14 They're not going anywhere.

Kara Swisher 1:19:14 [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.

Scott Galloway 1:19:37 Thank you, Minneapolis. [audience cheering] [upbeat music]