Resist and Unsubscribe: Scott Galloway’s Plan to Hit Big Tech Where It Hurts | Pivot

What you want is the most impact with the least amount of sacrifice. Make it easy, and also maximum impact.

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Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher.

And I'm Scott Galloway.

Before we do anything, I'd like to point out that as of this episode drops, it's been forty-two days since the deadline passed for the DOJ to release all the Epstein files. Though we do have an update, DOJ officials said in a court filing this week that they expect to release the files, quote, "in the near term," but they did not provide a specific date. Pam Bondi, get on it. Scott, after Sunday's bonus episode about the violence in Minnesota, we've gotten a mountain of responses to our discussion of the economic strike that you suggested. I know you're working on something, and we'll talk about that in a minute, but first, here's what some of our listeners had to say.

I'm seeing online some suggestions of people stop paying their income tax by updating their W-2.

I and many of my colleagues are watching with sadness, a lot of anxiety [chuckles] and anger at the escalating violence, and I keep wondering what, if anything, people outside the US like me can do that's actually useful.

Reportedly, Vanguard, BlackRock, and Fidelity hold half of the shares in two companies, GEO Group and CoreCivic, which run nearly ninety percent of ICE detention facilities. If investors divested from these collaborators and others, could that put a stop to ICE's worst abuses?

And given a lot of you have been writing in, wondering what you can do personally, we asked financial educator Vivian Tu, host of Networth and Chill, uh, to give some tips on how to make an impact. Let's hear what she had to say.

Hey, Scott and Kara. Heard you guys were talking about an economic blackout. I've got a couple personal finance tips. For our friends with a lot of financial discipline, you could consider changing your W-4 withholding for your taxes. You'll pay fewer taxes throughout the year and then pay them all in one lump sum come tax time. You're not going to get to pay fewer taxes overall, but why let the government hold your money and do stuff with it for longer than they need to? Make sure you are taking advantage of time value of money. Up next, everybody talks about shopping local versus corporate, but another thing you can do is pay in cash. These local businesses oftentimes might even give you a small discount for doing so because then they have to give less up as well. Wink, wink. And last but not least, for the economic blackout, money that you aren't spending on buying stuff, make sure you're putting towards a really smart, strategic cause, things like paying down your debt so you aren't so heavily tied to financial institutions, but also causes that you care about that might support things like immigration or human rights. The main takeaway is this: economic boycotts do not work if a small population stops spending cold turkey for one to two days. What we're actually going to need is a critical mass of people to scale back their consumerism over weeks and months, and even if they can only do it to seventy or eighty percent of their ability, that is going to have a bigger impact.