Raging Moderates: Trump’s Short-Lived Trade War

Trump’s at it again—chaos, confusion, and a whole lot of head-scratching. This week, Scott and Jessica dig into the latest mess: a gutted federal government, Trump blaming DEI for a deadly plane crash, and new attacks on schools, trans kids, and immigrants. Plus, just as inflation was easing up, he launched a short-lived trade war with tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China. And what does Ken Martin’s win as DNC chair mean for the future of the Democratic Party? Follow Jessica Tarlov, @JessicaTarlov. Follow Prof G, @profgalloway. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 1:00Speaker 02

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• 1:28Scott Galloway?

  Welcome to Raging Moderates. I'm Scott Galloway.

• 1:31Jessica Tarlov?

  And I'm Jessica Tarlov.

• 1:32Scott Galloway?

  So first off, just because we're capitalists here and there's not anything important going on in the world, it's important to run a commercials we start here. But effectively a little insight into the podcast world. The RSS feed where people subscribe is what advertisers look at. And right now we're at 42,000. And once you get to 50,000, for some reason, the advertising industrial complex has decided then they can start advertising with us. And keep in mind, we still have ads, but there are those shitty rotational ads that have a stranger reading them. And if you want Jess Tarlov to tell you why Athletic Greens gives her that radiant look or why I am so much better now that I have Zbiotics, which

• 2:14Scott Galloway?

  Helps me go out and drink recklessly and the next day I don't feel as shitty. Both ads that we will do. If you'd rather hear host readovers, please hit the subscribe button on our, both on YouTube and on our dedicated Raging Moderates feed. We would really appreciate it. Please do it now. We will tell you when we hit 50,000, but let's try to get there this week. Oh my God, that was so commercial. Jess?

• 2:41Jessica Tarlov?

  It was a good one though.

• 2:42Scott Galloway?

  Pretty good?

• 2:43Jessica Tarlov?

  Yeah, I liked it.

• 2:44Scott Galloway?

  All right. Let's move on to banter. How are you?

• 2:46Jessica Tarlov?

  I'm pretty depressed.

• 2:48Scott Galloway?

  Are you?

• 2:49Jessica Tarlov?

  Well, I think maybe democracy is ending. I was, last week you were so over your skis, or I thought so and I was like, hey, it's okay. Let's figure out what to work with the other side on. And this weekend I was just melting down the whole time. And then Luka Doncic got traded to the Lakers in the middle of the night. I don't, do you care about the NBA at all?

• 3:10Scott Galloway?

  I hundred percent don't care. I don't even know who Luka Doncic, is that a?

• 3:13Jessica Tarlov?

  That's not true.

• 3:14Scott Galloway?

  Is that a Serbian tennis player? Who is, I have no idea who that is, seriously.

• 3:17Jessica Tarlov?

  He is Slovenian, isn't he? He's a basketball player who was on the Dallas Mavericks. He's probably going to be an MVP, five-time All-Star. He's amazing. Anyway, there was a tweet Saturday night saying Luka Doncic to the Lakers for Anthony Davis, which is just an absurd trade. And I thought that the reporter had been hacked because it was so ludicrous. Woke up Sunday morning and it's true and the trade deadline for everyone is February 6th. Anyway.

• 3:42Scott Galloway?

  Just so you know.

• 3:43Jessica Tarlov?

  That was crazy, but you don't care.

• 3:45Scott Galloway?

  And a decent number of female viewers on YouTube right now have decided you are in fact the perfect woman. That you not only bring a lot of intelligence and you're obviously very attractive, but you understand the latest in basketball trades. You literally are.

• 3:59Jessica Tarlov?

  I couldn't do, I'm bad with like salary caps and stuff, but.

• 4:01Scott Galloway?

  I have no idea who that is and I don't, unless it's Cole Palmer, I don't care.

• 4:05Jessica Tarlov?

  Well, he was on the Mavericks, which your pal Mark Cuban used to own. So I've contextualized it. I've made it a little personal for you. No, don't care. Anyway, what did you do?

• 4:14Scott Galloway?

  Uh, what did I do this weekend? Really? My favorite weekend. I did absolutely nothing. My boy was home. My seven-year-old comes home on the weekends from boarding school and my 14-year-old. On the weekends, he turns into, he's kind of difficult. I think, I don't know what it is about the dynamic, but the weekends he's tough. And

• 4:32Jessica Tarlov?

  Is it because his older brother is home?

• 4:33Scott Galloway?

  I think that might have something to do with it. And then we went to a one year old's birthday party, snoozarama.

• 4:40Jessica Tarlov?

  That's my wheelhouse.

• 4:41Scott Galloway?

  I keep telling

• 4:42Jessica Tarlov?

  It's where I live.

• 4:43Scott Galloway?

  Yeah. Yeah. I'm out of that. I'm out of that stage. But they're nice people and I knew they'd have a bar. So it was fun. And then, what did I do? Did I have any fun Saturday night? I, you know, really boring weekend. Didn't even watch any Premier League games. I'm headed to, after this, I'm bombing to the airport and I'm headed to Orlando.

• 5:02Jessica Tarlov?

  For the real fun.

• 5:03Scott Galloway?

  Of all places.

• 5:04Jessica Tarlov?

  I assume speaking gig and not Disney World, or maybe a speaking gig at Disney World?

• 5:08Scott Galloway?

  Yes. Again, see above. Like, you're not, it's smart. You, I am doing a speaking gig at Disney World, which, and that's a first for me. Yeah, I'm doing a speaking gig.

• 5:19Jessica Tarlov?

  I love Disney. I went

• 5:21Scott Galloway?

  I can so see that. And you should keep that to yourself. But anyways, go ahead.

• 5:25Jessica Tarlov?

  If we get our new 8,000 subscribers, it will be because I am the Luka Doncic ex Disney World gal. I think Disney is so fun and I can't wait to take Cleo, who's three. I've heard like four is really the sweet spot, but there's a lot that she could still do. It's the happiest place on earth.

• 5:41Scott Galloway?

  I think it's the seventh ring of hell for most of us. You have to take your kids there. And 364 days a year, I under contribute to this whole parenting thing. And then one day a year, I take, or used to, because now they're a little too old. Now they go to Universal. Universal is for teenagers, but Disney is for kids. I would take my two boys and six of their friends to Disney for the weekend.

• 6:07Jessica Tarlov?

  Whoa.

• 6:07Scott Galloway?

  And that, as far as I'm concerned.

• 6:09Jessica Tarlov?

  Alone?

• 6:09Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, just me.

• 6:10Jessica Tarlov?

  Or you have another parent that helps?

• 6:11Scott Galloway?

  I might be able to rope another guy into the seventh ring of hell, just so we can complain to each other. But that, as far as I'm concerned, that compensates for my negligent parenting the rest of the year. I think that I, I'm, I can totally see That you enjoy it. I don't understand it, but I can totally see it.

• 6:31Jessica Tarlov?

  I think that's most of the male female dynamic, frankly.

• 6:34Scott Galloway?

  It's so awful.

• 6:35Jessica Tarlov?

  I can see it, but I don't understand it and I still want to hang with it. Right? You're like.

• 6:39Scott Galloway?

  I, I will say this, when I was at, was it Walt Disney or was it Disneyland or Walt Disney World? They have that princess thing where you sign up your little girl and she goes in and they make her up and they put wings on her and a little princess fairy thing.

• 6:54Jessica Tarlov?

  I think it's at both, but world does it.

• 6:57Scott Galloway?

  And then they have that little area where she's introduced and they have lights and smoke and she comes out. I sat there for 15 minutes while my kids were going on Space Mountain or something and watched the most beautiful little girls come out and you, they come out like they're floating. And I thought, oh my God, Disney, like, it made me want to buy Disney stock as emotional as I am. It was these little girls, you could tell they were thinking about this all year and they picked out their outfit and they do such an amazing job. It really is, it really is incredible. But just to bring us back to reality, one of the, I had one of those moments that made me feel very depressed about income inequality and I'm on the right side of that trade.

• 7:42Scott Galloway?

  So this is a story of privilege, but I took the kids and the ride Avatar, it was a three hour wait. So you could pass out the movie Avatar on an iPad and people could watch it before they actually got on the ride. And you just saw so many families in line, holding their kids asleep. And I thought, this is borderline abusive to create something that parents have to go to and the majority of people can't. And I did one of those VIP tours where you pay thousands of dollars and you roll by the entire line and then the person at the front of the line, operating the ride, gives you a hand signal in case you want to go twice.

• 8:27Scott Galloway?

  And I remember thinking at some point, the people in the line, it goes planet of the apes and they kill us all. Because this is so out of control, the disparity between the life that 99.9% of Americans have to have to lead. And the rest of us who've gotten, you know, really lucky. Anyways, I, it was one of those moments. I thought, this is weird. This is uncomfortable. Anyways, that's my Disney story. Okay, Jess, in today's episode, we're discussing chaos reigning across the federal government. Chaos is the right word. Trump launching a trade war with tariffs and Democrats elect a new chair to lead their party. That's kind of a snooze. The first two.

• 9:09Jessica Tarlov?

  We can jazz it up. It'd be fun.

• 9:11Scott Galloway?

  It's gonna be hard to make that sexy. All right, let's get into it. Trump, the Trump administration threw the government into total chaos with the surprise spending freeze. They cut off funding for things, including school lunches, college, financial aid and medical research. Then just as quickly as it appeared, the freeze was blocked by a federal judge, only for the White House to insist they weren't actually backing down, leaving everyone even more confused. But that was just sort of the first inning here. Trump has been on a signing spree, rolling out executive orders targeting schools, trans kids and immigrants, even tried to blame a deadly plane crash on DEI. And on top of that, his administration sent a mass email offering millions of federal employees a chance to resign now and still get paid through September. Workers were stunned, legal experts

• 9:54Scott Galloway?

  are flummoxed, and no one's really sure if this is even legal. Jess, I mean this sincerely. Where should we start?

• 10:03Jessica Tarlov?

  I spent a lot of time prepping for this conversation and dealing with that question explicitly. Like, what do I think is the most egregious example of the overreach that's going on of the constitutional crisis that I believe we are at the beginnings of having, you know, an unelected. bureaucrat with access to all of our most sensitive information and turning on and off government contracts, you know, plane crashes where 67 people lost their lives that the president and his cabinet seem woefully unprepared to deal with or to even be able to express the right sentiments to the public and I assume to the grieving families as well.

• 10:48Jessica Tarlov?

  I don't know. It's almost feels like you should just go in chronological order of catastrophe. But I do think, because we're recording this on Monday, and God knows what tomorrow will look like, that what Doge is doing with, you know, purging the FBI, the DOJ, and then shutting down the USAID site. It's now, you can still access it off the Secretary of State site, of state.gov. But I think we should probably start there because it's so representative of the fact that we don't have three co-equal branches of the government

• 11:30Jessica Tarlov?

  anymore. What Elon Musk is doing is completely unprecedented, and it seems like he has unfettered access to anything that he wants, plus the five or six 19 to 24-year-olds that are running Doge with him. I saw this tweet that I thought was so funny. So the private information of every American is now in the hands of six guys not old enough to rent a car. Well, you're not laughing, so you didn't think it was that funny. But it's crazy what's going on.

• 11:59Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, it feels like the high sparrow and his acolytes. I don't know if you watch Game of Thrones, but...

• 12:03Jessica Tarlov?

  We already talked about this, and I don't, and I told you that, and I have two daughters.

• 12:07Scott Galloway?

  And you need to start. It's just start. Just trust me on this. Look, this is just taking it in order, trying to, my mom used to say, how do you need an elephant, one bite at a time. Let's just start. With the erosion, if you were to start with, we have 750 military bases in 80 countries. China has one in Djibouti in Africa. And I think when terrorists try and transmit funds, or they have a choice, a government has a choice between partnering with a US company, or a Chinese company, or another Western company, they generally choose us. And first off, this notion that somehow America has been taken advantage of, as someone who has

• 12:50Scott Galloway?

  been roaming the earth, working with the biggest global companies in the world, I've done deals with world leaders on behalf of companies, not on behalf of the US government. The notion that we are somehow getting taken advantage of around the world is just so asinine. We flex our muscles every minute of every day around the world in terms of our trade agreements. Do you think these, these 80 countries that host our military just decided to do it because they, they like us? I mean, that's some of it. But that goodwill, that power, we exercise and benefit from every day. So just starting there, the notion that this is somehow a recalibration to get back to some symmetry of equity, that's just not, that's just not true. And starting with the economic argument, not the moral

• 13:35Scott Galloway?

  argument, in Canada, you know, first off, they don't even know what he wants. They're claiming it's because of the flow of fentanyl across the border. There really isn't a lot of fentanyl coming in from Canada. You could maybe-

• 13:50Jessica Tarlov?

  It's like 43 pounds.

• 13:51Scott Galloway?

  You could make that, maybe make that argument for Mexico, maybe even for China, because some of it's being manufactured there. But Canada isn't like dumping fentanyl from Vancouver. That's just not, that's just not happening. And Canada can't even figure out what it is he wants. And keep in mind, this is a nation that, in the Iran hostage crisis, the Canadian ambassador residence hosted or hid hostages. They risked their lives in the embassy there to help get Americans out. They followed us into Afghanistan, no questions asked. They followed us into Iraq, no questions asked. We have Major League

• 14:32Scott Galloway?

  Baseball. You just mentioned the NBA. We have American sports teams in Canadian cities.

• 14:38Jessica Tarlov?

  Hockey.

• 14:39Scott Galloway?

  And we've decided to declare economic war on Canada?

• 14:44Scott Galloway?

  It's just, it just doesn't, it's not only reckless, it's, it's stupid. And that's just on the economic side. We can go further into, you know, the different, you know, the other mendacious things they're working on, but this tariff, this tariff is just, it's, I always go to the economics. I'm like, okay, how can I figure out a way to take Brexit and expand it and supersize it where we make our nation less productive, but increase costs for everyone in the United States? I know, let's take Brexit, let's make it 10 times worse or bigger, and then let's figure out a way to be really mendacious

• 15:24Scott Galloway?

  and mean to people in the United States and in special interest groups and across the world. Your thoughts?

• 15:32Jessica Tarlov?

  Well, I think a critical component of the way Trump sees the world is enmeshed in your statement about being really mean. And I think that they uphold this notion that having friends doesn't actually really matter. Everything is for sale, everything is a bargaining chip, an exchange. We're all associates more than we're actually friends or colleagues. And Justin Trudeau has said as much that he had been trying to speak to Trump since the inauguration, hasn't been able to. And he even went down to Mar-a-Lago, right, and kissed the ring and said, you know, I want to find ways to work together.

• 16:13Jessica Tarlov?

  So Trump doesn't care about friends at all. He doesn't believe in allies, certainly in the way that we've conceived of them. I don't think that he thought about or really cares about the second order effect of this, which was the same as we were talking about last week with Colombia and Panama, Mexico, that maybe everyone actually gets together behind our backs and we end up really isolated and alone from all of this. And for some of them, not necessarily Mexico, but.

• 16:46Jessica Tarlov?

  Like a Columbia, for instance, that they turn to China, who are their second biggest trading partners in reaction to us changing the way that we do business, to put it politely. But you see these Republicans melting down and freaking out about what's going to happen to their constituents. Chuck Grassley is on X begging for certain exemptions. And the Canadians are being very specific about how they are executing these tariffs. They are targeting products that come out of right-leaning states that have Republicans in charge and majority of voters who voted to elect Donald Trump. So things like orange juice, bourbon,

• 17:27Jessica Tarlov?

  whiskey. And they want to be specific about it. And they understand that the country is really split along these lines. I shouldn't say they're split on what they think of tariffs because a large majority of people know that tariffs are just a tax on the consumer. But so you have Republicans that are concerned about this. Ron Johnson was on Fox this morning talking about how it's a tax. Mitch McConnell was on 60 Minutes yesterday talking about how this is a tax. You have him asking for these exemptions from it. And you really have got to wonder, besides the fact that Donald Trump just likes tariffs, and maybe it's that simple, the man talks about McKinley more than anyone, probably even members of McKinley's family talks about him, that he just has this fascination with it. But when

• 18:12Jessica Tarlov?

  you have the business community who has been of such value to him and huge boosters of his campaign and his presidency, the people who benefited the most from the tax breaks that he put into effect in 2017, coming out and saying, you're going to wreck my business, right? People that run Walmart, Lowe's, Home Depot, et cetera. I wonder if he is going to have to find some way to backtrack. And I know that he would argue this is just the opening salvo. But the opening salvo was supposed to be a few percentage points, right? Not going for 25%. And I know that the market didn't open as far down as it did on Deep Seek Day last week. I was curious why you thought that that was, that it wasn't as

• 18:57Jessica Tarlov?

  much of a hit as I would have expected, at least opening.

• 19:01Scott Galloway?

  Well, so as we stand here right now, the Dow's off 100 and or about 200 points, which you're right, isn't huge. I think the market, what the market is saying, and what a lot of Republicans, when they have absolutely no response for what is the strategy here, say, oh, this is like you said, an opening salvo and people, what the market is saying is that he's done this, he'll get some sort of, you know, pinky promises, Mark Cuban said, he'll declare victory and say, oh, we got this, they're stopping the shipments of fentanyl and people will nod, do nothing, and he'll declare victory and then take these down or eliminate them. That's what they're saying right now. The problem with this is that when you threaten people, you know, they remember it. And I can just, he's creating an enormous

• 19:44Scott Galloway?

  opening for Russia and China to establish military bases, goodwill, cooperation between their intelligence services, less likely to cooperate with ours, less likely to call us and say, hey, we have information saying there's a terrorist organization in a cell and a bunch of these individuals have gotten on planes and are headed to New York. We have a lot of nations that will call, will cooperate with our intelligence personnel. I think part of the problem is I think Americans have cold comfort that, one, they don't realize how many people are out there and organizations that would like to come, kill us and take our shit away. And that this, our government security apparatus has been so effective,

• 20:24Scott Galloway?

  and we are so strong at getting the best, better end of trade agreements and the prosperity we recognize, which I acknowledge has been crammed into, you know, just proportionately to two people's pockets. I think people take for granted just how strong our security and government apparatus is overseas, and how much that is aided by the ultimate cloud cover of goodwill towards us, that despite being arrogant, indulgent, loud, obnoxious, that people generally believe around the world, especially in the West, that we're the good guys, that they can count on us. And so to, to kind of stick up the middle

• 21:04Scott Galloway?

  finger, create chaos, do real economic harm, without even a clear signal as to what it is you want in return, but just to do this because you can, even if in fact, he does retract these things, I was on the board. Of a large specialty retailer and I talked to the person runs the company over the weekend. I said, what do you think he's doing? And he said, well, we've stocked up because we knew this was coming. So we stocked up, we got a bunch of stuff in like six months where the stuff before this took effect because we knew it was coming. And we're banking that when he realizes when all of a sudden the price of everything goes up for American consumers, he's going to pretend that it was a victory and that he negotiated some deal and back away.

• 21:48Scott Galloway?

  And even if that comes off with as little damage as we think, that is, that is like radiation that 20 or 30 years ago results in, you know, from now results in leukemia. And the other thing that the only kind of analysis I did hear that I think uncovered something that maybe the media isn't talking that much about is that this has this tariff thing has Elon Musk's fingerprints all over it. What do I mean by that? If you look at Tesla, to their credit versus other automobile companies, the majority of automobile companies, that car they're producing goes across the Mexican and Canadian border back and forth several times. Because there's different parts manufacturers with different advantages or skillsets across, you know, the trade agreements in Mexico and Canada.

• 22:33Scott Galloway?

  Tesla, to its credit, has built a company that has kind of a deeper manufacturing base. What do I mean by that? The majority of the car is assembled domestically. And you think, well, what about China? They're going to have to pay tariffs when China imposes reciprocal tariffs. Actually, the majority of cars sold in China from Tesla are produced in China. Now, some of the Chinese manufactured Teslas that are sold in Europe faces seven and a half percent tariff, which by the way, he's suing them for. But of all the companies in the automobile industry that will be least impacted by these tariffs, it's Tesla. So again, even, I mean, we talked about cutting off, he has access to the payments for veteran affairs, all these different things that people are worried about.

• 23:17Scott Galloway?

  Even where they don't see his fingerprints, his fingerprints are there. I believe that he, he had a large, a lot of influence in how these tariffs were implemented such that it has.

• 23:30Scott Galloway?

  It has seriously diminished the economic power of his automobile rivals. And again, it's okay, the richest man in the world now has more access to the federal government payment system, can decide to turn off or on veterans benefits. I mean, just this crazy shit. And what do you know, he's the richest man in the world and it all goes to the same place. And that is, and I was talking with care about this on pivot, you know, and we'll get to this, the, the, all of the, the, the websites that are disappearing around family planning and choice and HIV and vaccines. I see this as the far right and Trump have said, it's not a war on gay people or a war on women, it's a war on the poor.

• 24:15Scott Galloway?

  Because I think the deal they've struck is they've said, you know, poor people always have a back door to family planning, to vaccines, whatever it is they need, they'll be fine, they'll figure it out. This really feels like a war on the poor. And the flip side of that is that the richest man in the world is now basically much more powerful than any elected representative, any governor, any senator, any congressperson. I still think Trump's more powerful because he can fire Musk. But we now have an unelected person and what do you know, he happens to be the wealthiest person in the world. This is full idolatry of money. This is full capture by money of DC. And it is, I think it's going to come at a huge cost to the long-term goodwill.

• 24:58Scott Galloway?

  And it's so strange, and I'll stop my word salad here, for the first time in my life, and it feels really odd, I'm rooting for the Germans and the Canadians. When the German public turns out, 100,000 of them to say, by the way, when your fucking idiot shows up and tells a far-right group here, they should be proud of their culture. The majority of Germans do not believe, believe that nor endorse that message. When Canada boos, when the national anthem is sung at a sporting event in, I don't know if it was Toronto or Montreal, I gotta be honest, I'm with them and it feels really, really unusual.

• 25:36Jessica Tarlov?

  I think it was Toronto, it was a Raptors game, right?

• 25:39Scott Galloway?

  Was it?

• 25:40Jessica Tarlov?

  I think so. Just to your point about how quickly this can be reversed, while you were word salad-ing, which I actually got a lot of sense out of, and I have something to respond to that. There was an announcement that Claudia Scheinbaum, the president of Mexico, has negotiated a one-month delay on the tariffs. So this all fits nicely, though, into the manufactured chaos of everything. And that they want us, at every single moment, to be looking in a thousand different directions and to be outraged about all of these different things so that you can't see the forest through the trees. I think that's what that phrase is. And it feels as if the takeover of the government

• 26:21Jessica Tarlov?

  by an unelected, unconfirmed, almost trillionaire, right? Or will be, certainly by the end of this, is absolutely the forest through the trees of this. And Musk has such a personal touch on all of the very aggressive and very underhanded tactics that are being used in the management of Trump's second term, that I think it's almost indisputable that he is this co-president, which I know pissed off Trump when people were saying things like that. And yes, of course, Trump is the most powerful man in the world because he's actually in control of our military. But the influence that Musk has had is so far-reaching. I mean, he's the henchman that is going out there and bullying all of the senators who might not vote

• 27:06Jessica Tarlov?

  for the nominees that they want for cabinet. And the newest one, Todd Young, from Indiana, is, you know, probably not interested in Tulsi Gabbard's brand of national security. That last week during her confirmation hearings, she just couldn't get there to call Edward Snowden a traitor. And you had Democrats and Republicans alike basically begging her just to say the guy is a traitor.

• 27:31Speaker 05

  Can't we do better than somebody who doesn't believe in 702? Can't we believe that somebody who can't answer whether Snowden was a traitor five times today? Who made excuses for Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine? The first time that I'm aware of any American official has done that?

• 27:56Speaker 05

  I'm questioning her judgment. That's the issue that's at stake here.

• 28:00Jessica Tarlov?

  And that's something that I think is pretty fundamental to someone who's going to be heading up 18 intelligence agencies. So now Todd Young is being bullied. There was a big Politico piece about what happened in the back rooms to get Tom Tillis to vote for Pete Hegseth. And by extension, what happened with Joni Ernst before that, two people who didn't seem like they were going to. And if they had added on to Murkowski and Collins and Mitch McConnell, that Hegseth wouldn't have been confirmed. And I don't know what can be done about this. And this brings me back to where I started of feeling really depressed or just despondent about the whole thing. And you, I'm an optimistic person. I've been accused of being a Pollyanna

• 28:44Jessica Tarlov?

  once or twice in my life. But it seems like that there are really few bright spots, especially because there has been no delivery of lower prices, or the crime rate hasn't fallen, or that they're deporting the bad guys. And I understand that there's a difference between how you're going to be holding some of the world's worst terrorists and how you're going to be holding migrants that either have deportation orders or who have done something terrible, like murdered an American, or who are pedophiles, people that none of us want in here. But everything just is blazing red un-American to me at this point. And I think that the answer, or at least this is what my husband has been telling me, is that my definition

• 29:28Jessica Tarlov?

  of America isn't applicable anymore. That whether we like it or not, we have undergone a revolution. That's what happened at the ballot box on November 5th in 2024. And that's not to say that this was the shellacking that a lot of people have made it seem, but it put a person back in office that so many millions of people think can take absolutely any action that he and those around him want in pursuit of whatever their stated goal of the day is. And I don't know how we come back from that. There is so much evidence that this has nothing to do with efficiency. This is a coup.

• 30:11Jessica Tarlov?

  That's what's happening. Bill Maher used to say it's a slow moving coup. This is now a fast moving coup. This is day 15 of it when this goes live, a day 14 when we're recording it. It's pretty fucking fast that this is happening and they are banking on our inability to do anything about it. And I have friends who are saying, well, what about the lawsuits? And there are a bunch of lawsuits that have been filed and they were able to unfreeze the freeze. But they will be able to break things so fast that a lawsuit will not get to them. And we essentially, if you needed Mike Pence on January 6th, you need thousands of Mike Pence's now to be able to do this.

• 30:51Jessica Tarlov?

  And it seems like the good people of the DOJ and the FBI and all of these agencies feel up to the job. And they are dug in. There are all these amazing Reddit threads where folks who work in the bureaucracy are saying, you know, I was thinking about the buyout and now I'm showing up to work and I'm going to make sure that we support and defend the Constitution. But at a moment where the Democratic Party is pretty weak and we're really struggling with a message and getting it together and having a unified theme in all of this, that we don't stand much of a chance to be able to stop what's already begun.

• 31:26Scott Galloway?

  Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that the symbol of America isn't really an eagle. It's a pendulum and that, you know, it's never at the bottom. And if you're looking for a moment of optimism, I believe that the majority of Americans will come to realize, whether it's through an inability to rebuild their house for less than 40% more, the fact that prices are going to go up, the fact that we're going to start to meet people who are, who were really treated unfairly, or just the fact they're going to go, you know, I'm no longer as proud to be an American as I used to be. I think people, I think there's a decent chance they have really overreached here. And some of the damage that's going to come out of this is going to frighten people who even thought they were,

• 32:08Scott Galloway?

  you know, I think a lot of people probably didn't sign up for, for this. And while it might feel good and like, yeah, take that libtards. And I mean, I just find it so telling that the, some of the agencies charged with rounding up, if you will, undocumented workers, where are they going? They're going to work sites, schools and places and churches.

• 32:33Scott Galloway?

  And it strikes me, okay, if you found a group of people and said, where can we find them? We can find them, but we're only 40% of Americans work. 145 million people have a job out of 350, 350 million. These people are working, they're going to church and their kids are going to school. Doesn't that kind of make them ground zero for what America is supposed to be? And then to go macro, and I am not a believer in open borders. I absolutely think 250,000 people coming across the border in December of 2023 got us into this fucking mess. And I think Biden did a terrible job. But at the same time, what we have to acknowledge is how, okay, how did we get here? We got here because America's, if America's secret sauce is immigration,

• 33:18Scott Galloway?

  the most profitable part of that sauce is illegal immigration. And we have known about it. 17% of people on a construction site are undocumented workers. There are all these videos now everywhere of all these work sites that are empty. They come in, it's the most flexible, profitable workforce in history. It's not Stanford graduates. It's not, it's not immigrants from India running NASDAQ companies. It's, it's illegal undocumented workers coming in, taking care of grandma, picking our crops, providing services for quote unquote below market. I renovated a house. There's not a single American who will work outside. They just won't do it. You can't find them. They're still in plumbing and electric.

• 34:02Scott Galloway?

  Any other job, building a house is like, I can't find domestic workers. And they're very profitable. They, they don't tax social services. They don't stick around for social security, despite the fact they pay social security taxes. So they've been demonized. This feels eerily reminiscent of the 110,000 Japanese who made the mistake of their parents being born in Japan. They did nothing else and they were rounded up and put in camps. That was a stain on the American experience. And it feels like we're getting eerily close to some sort of kibuki version of that. Or some sort of karaoke version. I don't know what the term is, a bad, bad impromptu version of that. But this is. I gotta think if I'm looking for a piece of optimism,

• 34:45Scott Galloway?

  it's like, oh, my gosh, I can't imagine that moderates who decide elections are looking at this. I think for about three or four days, they thought, right on. Okay, went too far, but I'm enjoying it. It tickles my sensors. Those fucking Democrats. I love this. I think this is way further than people had anticipated. You want to talk about an impact, try and build a house right now. Wait till you go to the grocery store. I don't think you're going to see prices pivot as quickly as people think because per this CEO I spoke to, they were expecting this, so they stocked up. But when the guy who said the war in Ukraine would be over in 24 hours and I'm happy your prices come down right away. When prices start ticking up, I had,

• 35:30Scott Galloway?

  we were very critical of the Democrats' response and I had a Democratic senator call me and said, well, what would you do? I'm like, I'd totally focus on prices. I'd have on the DNC website, the price of six foodstuffs and I'd track it every day. I don't think people realize what's, what's coming.

• 35:44Jessica Tarlov?

  I totally agree with you and I see, I watched all the Sunday shows and you see the Democrats have clearly gotten that memo, but it's still so clunky in the delivery, right? You got a question about X. And then so before I get into that, do you know how much eggs cost today, Marge? Like, what? It's not flowing cohesively at this point, but yes, it's obviously going to be about the prices. So go back. That was just an egg aside.

• 36:14Scott Galloway?

  And then this nonsense about politicizing a tragedy. The wildfires were politicized by both ends. Democrats immediately said it was climate change. Republicans said it was DEI. They were both wrong in my view. I mean, we'll find out, but that immediately went to politics. On the, on the airline disaster, the Democrats, I think handled that correctly. And basically the Republicans said it was DEI. And of course, no one has been able to establish a link with DEI. And if you look at the FAA. Yeah, I'm about to get on a plane for Orlando in about two hours. I can get there for about 400 bucks. And it is safer to get on a plane to skirt along the surface of the atmosphere at eight tenths of

• 36:58Scott Galloway?

  speed of sound for, you know, whatever it is, 7,000 miles. Or I'm sorry, no, 4,000 miles, 7,000 kilometers than it is to go, well, literally walk up my stairs. You take a greater risk when you walk upstairs than when you get on a plane. The FAA, granted, this is a tragedy. I don't, and anyone want to diminish the tragedy of the families who have lost loved ones. But we should pray for companies and organizations that do as well as the government run FAA. It is amazing. And if DEI had anything to do with the culture at the Federal Aviation Administration, then we should incorporate DEI into any or every organization because they do an amazing job.

• 37:40Scott Galloway?

  And it's such bullshit because the standards have not been lowered. All they did was broaden the aperture to try and find candidates from different backgrounds. And when you attack DEI, be clear, I understand the notion. I have proposed and advocated before it was cool to disassemble the DEI apparatus and campuses because I think that problem has mostly been solved. It has not been solved in corporations. And be clear, as it relates to the government, if you want to get rid of DEI, that's really going to impact veterans. There are a lot of veterans who have lost a limb, suffer from PTSD. And because of DEI, they have a fighting chance of being employed after they return from service. So just be careful what you're asking for.

• 38:24Scott Galloway?

  And these, the politicization of that was so ugly and so strange and such a disservice and to all government employees. It just feels as if where, where is this going to? I mean, where is this, where is this, where is this headed? I don't, I'm, I'm like you having trouble. I do think you're going to get a check back. What you just said about Claudia Schombach says to me, his advisors have already said, okay, we may have overreached here.

• 38:54Jessica Tarlov?

  This isn't going to work out for us, which is what they had to do with unfreezing the freeze. Right before it even got to court, apparently there was. A difference of opinion from Trump's camp versus the OMB and the Doge folks, even though the head of OMB isn't even confirmed at this point. I tend to agree with you about DEI. I think that it's an easy scapegoat for people that don't want to do real thinking about how to reform agencies, make things more efficient, and also be more inclusive, which is one of our strengths as a country. But going back to what I was saying about maybe my vision of America doesn't compute with how people see America these days.

• 39:38Jessica Tarlov?

  And we don't have the same set of shared values. But what I noticed during the aftermath of the plane crash, and this was going on, I was on the five every day last week because the Democrat that I shared the seat with was out. So I had the continuity of day after day after day after day on it. And seeing how the story was shifting from my Republican counterparts and how they were trying to move around the facts that were coming out. Things like the same DEI policy that was implemented under Obama, Trump kept it and even sent out new recruiting materials in 2019,

• 40:21Jessica Tarlov?

  looking for people with all the characteristics that they sit up there and decry and try to blame this for. Or even watching Trump shapeshift on the first day of the crisis, where he comes out, you know, hot about DEI. Then he hears that the pilots were white. So he was like, mm, what do I do now? So then he says DEI actually just means incompetence. And then there's the natural correlation or extension, I should say, which is that you think that people of color or women or people who are part of the LGBTQ plus community are incompetent. But that was a safe place that people that support him and this war against DEI could hide, where they said, well, we're just talking about incompetency.

• 41:04Jessica Tarlov?

  And of course, no one wants an air traffic controller that's incompetent. The real problem is recruitment. And Pete Buttigieg had requested this, made a big stink about it in 2023, saying, we need more FAA controllers. And if you have on the night of the crash, which we did, one controller that is talking to both the helicopter and the plane. It's a recipe for disaster and we'll see what the NTSB finds in all of this. I think that they have been incredibly professional and the right balance also of, you know, we want to get to the bottom of this and also so emotional when it comes to dealing with the families who are obviously grieving all these young figure skaters that had these

• 41:47Jessica Tarlov?

  hugely bright futures ahead of them that were on that plane. But we are in this dangerous place where the talking points like DEI are cover for all sorts of deeply racist and bigoted and anti-American sets of values and they are, they have been able to very effectively hide behind them. And I was thinking a lot about the impact that Javier Malay has had on this administration. So the president of Argentina, who came in in 2023, big reformer, and he's essentially the model for what Musk and Trump are doing right now.

• 42:31Jessica Tarlov?

  So fire tens of thousands of bureaucrats.

• 42:33Scott Galloway?

  Shut down entire departments.

• 42:35Jessica Tarlov?

  Shut down entire departments, halt infrastructure projects, slash energy and transportation subsidies. I mean, it's really crazy actually to look at how aligned they are with what he has done. And Argentina has, there are obviously still a lot of problems there, but they have had some very positive results, which no one has been able to deny. And then Malay shows up in Davos last week and gives this speech that most regarded as incredibly bigoted and attacked, you know, many members of the Argentinian community. And you see the applause or the inability, I guess, to separate the good parts of this from the bad parts of this.

• 43:19Jessica Tarlov?

  And it's like you have to be. A mean kid in order to be effective. And I just don't understand that. There were all of these very effective leaders, and I'm not a math of Ronald Reagan gal, but I understand how many people feel passionately about him and his legacy. And he didn't feel the need to talk like that. And I know that the policies had a lot of negative implications for people. But even the way that we have made it okay to be so crass and so nasty and cutting. And so obviously telegraph the fact that you don't think that the people that you govern

• 44:01Jessica Tarlov?

  are equals to you, that our humanity is not equal. That being on display from the most important pulpit in the world. Things spells a really dangerous future for all of us.

• 44:17Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, Argentina is not America. And to use it as a role model is just plain stupid. In Argentina, 55% of registered workers are work for the government. In Argentina, they have an inflation rate of like 170%. And it's declined, I think, to 118%. So that's type of shock therapy. It's easy to understand why that was receptive. It's just not, that just isn't the case in, in the United States. And this general notion of people, I think it all reverse engineers back to income inequality, where people feel really frustrated when they see all this prosperity that they're not sharing it, so they get angry.

• 44:56Scott Galloway?

  And then oddly, you know, this guy positions himself as an outsider, shitpost government. And if you think, I had one of those moments where for the most part, we need to look at government regularly, but for the most part, I find that generally speaking, government workers do an outstanding job. The most impressive organization in the world is the US government wing, and that's our Department of Defense and our Armed Services. They are the most impressive organization in history in terms of what they've been able to accomplish on a lot of different levels. I mean, and if you want to talk about why we have deficits and why taxes, I mean, why we have, you know, like what I would call a reckless fiscal policy, something they

• 45:38Scott Galloway?

  also passed under the cover of dark while I was trying to figure out, respond to this ridiculousness.

• 45:44Scott Galloway?

  They passed a tax cut. And that is, anyone making under $300,000 is about to see their taxes go up, or they're proposing a tax cut. And people making over $300,000 are about to get a tax cut. Is that what moderates wanted? Anyways, this is, this is the strategy, and it's unfortunately really effective, is flooding the zone with weirdness and depravity. And because there's an absence of journalists, and because we don't know which, where to react first, we're literally like in MASH, a MASH unit, where all of a sudden, 600 soldiers get brought in on stretchers with, with an absence of limbs. We do not know where to start.

• 46:29Scott Galloway?

  Anyways, on that, on that optimistic moment, we're going to take a break. Please stay with us. Support for the show comes from Bilt. Most of us work hard to earn our keep, but usually there's no one around to hand you a cookie when you successfully pay your monthly housing bill. No one except Bilt, that is. Bilt has expanded from their original renter rewards program, and they have a lot more going on for members now. For example, members can earn points on mortgage payments, too. Every housing payment gets you points that get you a lot more than baked goods, such as flights with top travel partners, including United and Hyatt, Lyft rides, Amazon.com purchases, and much, much more. Here's another benefit of Bilt membership. You also get access to what they call a neighborhood concierge.

• 47:11Scott Galloway?

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• 47:37Scott Galloway?

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• 48:44Scott Galloway?

  Support for the show comes from Vanta. As AI adoption grows, so does your company's security risks and requirements. New frameworks, audits, and vendors keep piling on, but your team isn't getting any bigger. Most compliance tools promise automation, but you're really stuck doing all the work by hand, chasing screenshots, validating controls, and playing catch-up when audit season comes around again. Vanta works differently. The Regentic Trust platform is built to scale with you, not slow you down. With over 1,400 automated tests across 400-plus integrations, Vanta collects evidence and monitors your controls year-round, cutting your audit prep by 82%. Plus, you can access the Vanta agent everywhere you work, whether your team is in Vanta every day or living in tools including Claude or Cursor. Want proof?

• 49:29Scott Galloway?

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• 49:51Scott Galloway?

  So, welcome back. I want to talk about a couple of things and get your response to each of them. So, a couple of the things we haven't been talking about, the US government has decided, or basically Trump has decided, to eliminate and take down sites. According to reporting from Wired and the New York Times, more than 8,000 pages across government sites have been taken down since Friday. This follows Trump's orders to take down all outward-facing media sites, social media accounts that include or promote gender ideology. Topics of pages taken down include vaccines, veterans affairs, hate crimes, and scientific research. Specifically, 3,000 pages were taken down from the CDC, 3,000 pages from

• 50:32Scott Galloway?

  the Census Bureau, 1,000 pages from the Office of Justice Programs, 200 pages from Head Start, a program for low-income children, and 180 pages from the Department of Justice. And this goes to a theme that I'm big on, and that is, I believe that the way Trump is implementing a misogynist, anti-gay ideology is to say to communities, "If you're rich, you've got nothing to worry about. If your nephew's gay, or transgender, or your daughter needs to terminate a pregnancy, don't worry." That this is continuing a war on the poor. Because like, one of the things they took down, I was reading about, was this HIV transmission calculator, where you went in and talked about the type of sex you practiced, your

• 51:15Scott Galloway?

  sexual orientation, very straightforward questions, and it said, "Okay, you're at high risk or low risk, but there's options available." Or, "What type of options or programs are available for a pregnant woman who contracts an STD?" And I think about, "Okay, my son doesn't need that website. My son has education, two parents at home, money to figure things out, or my daughter would need it." This is an attack on poor people, under the auspices of implementing a far-right, white, Christian nationalist ideology with a wink and a nod saying, "Okay, but my daughters and my sons, if I'm rich, we need an out. We need a back

• 51:59Scott Galloway?

  door here." Your thoughts, Jess?

• 52:02Jessica Tarlov?

  I totally agree. I always thought that we lost a bit of ground on the Dobbs decision because we didn't message about it being an economic issue enough. And we just seemed like people that were screaming about access to reproductive healthcare without talking about the brass tacks of who's actually in need of this. Because there will be options for people who have financial flexibility, even if they are in an emergency crisis, let alone have the time to go across state lines or go abroad to get the care that they need. So I think looking through the prism of the economy is the way to do it. And it's also the only way, it was shown in the election, that voters respond to anything. It has to be about their bottom line.

• 52:46Jessica Tarlov?

  And people are doing less and less for other people and more and more for themselves. I'm very concerned about all of these data sets that are being taken down from the CDC site, the NIH site, the USAID site, because they are the key for people who work in the public sector in general, especially the healthcare industry, to be able to take care of people the world over. And there are some prominent folks who have worked in these agencies that are sounding the alarm. They're all over social media. They're talking to whatever reporters that they can, including this guy, Atul Gawande, who was the former

• 53:31Jessica Tarlov?

  head of global health at USAID, talking about how this is all just a gift to our enemies and competitors. It's not a pause. And I thought that was really important that he called it out, that they are telling you that this is a pause, that everything will be restored, it'll be, you know, just less the things that we shouldn't be doing and the things that are actually appropriate. But he said it's the destruction of the agency. And I thought this was really powerful. We're on the verge of ending HIV, TB, and malaria, funding the treatment of 20 million people with HIV worldwide, including 6.5 million orphans. Who else is going to be taking care of those orphans, especially in countries where there isn't infrastructure? To take care of them, whereas a society, they don't care. That's how they ended up in

• 54:16Jessica Tarlov?

  this position. Someone just dropped them off on a doorstep and they had a chance of actually living somewhere and being taken care of because of this. And, you know, we have bird flu coming. There's Ebola in Uganda again. Price of eggs, going back to it, I finally could get some. Whole Foods had been out for several days. I was able to stock up though, but at an increased price point, of course. It's really disturbing. Are people up to the task? You talk about the journalists. Two of the most major pieces of journalism on this have come from Wired, and you already cited one of them. I'm concerned about the

• 54:59Jessica Tarlov?

  actual bodies to do the journalism, but then also the depth of understanding to be able to do the job well. Because when you're dealing with Elon Musk and these kids that are running Doge with him, that are coming out of Silicon Valley, or these institutions where they have been steeped in technology and understanding things that are way above my head, that you need people to be reporting on them that actually understand what's going on. And I don't know if those voices are getting the right level of amplification. And I mean that literally in terms of on social media, is the guy who's running the algorithm, keeping those voices out of the discourse? I would say yes. And if you look at what happened

• 55:39Jessica Tarlov?

  in the election, you can see that coming to the fore. But are we doing enough as private citizens to be amplifying these voices as well? Because there's a lot of, you know, people screaming from the rooftops, you know, saying democracy dies in darkness. But what are the practical things that we can be doing to be able to tell this story in a way that's penetrating the average American that needs to know this going into the next set of elections? But even to be able to prepare themselves for whatever is to come next over the course of the next two years, which is the next time that we're gonna get the opportunity to say something at the ballot box?

• 56:18Scott Galloway?

  It's a perfect storm of bad things. One, social media has gutted journalism. The number of journalists over the last 20 or 30 years has down somewhere between 20 and 30%. And they're arguably the largest cop.

• 56:29Scott Galloway?

  Or the most powerful cop that doesn't carry a badge to report on this stuff. And they're just overwhelmed. And in addition, the quote unquote information that is replacing these journalists, traffics in rage and makes you hate the government and hate each other, which has kind of led to this. And then you couple that with the idolatry of the dollar, where we let one person who happens to be the richest person in the world, make these sorts of decisions. You end up with an uneducated populace that believes in conspiracy theory is enraged. And the wealthy or the wealthiest man in the world will start making these unilateral decisions with a lack of checks and balances, not only from a Congress that's worried about him turning his sights and his money and his algorithms on them and primaring them. But because people are just so in awe of money.

• 57:12Scott Galloway?

  You reference what I think is just a national disgrace. But again, so many disgraces, we can't focus on these things. And that is the foreign aid freeze. The US Congress froze foreign aid, a decision that will go down in my view in history as one of the most short sighted, destructive and frankly, un-American failures of leadership. To be clear, foreign aid is a rounding error in the federal budget. It's about $70 billion or $200 per citizen. In exchange for that, what do we have? Sudan, war ravaged countries on the edge of starvation. Until last week, US funds supported 634 soup kitchens feeding 800,000 people.

• 57:53Scott Galloway?

  After the freeze, 434 of those kitchens were shut down overnight. In Thailand and Myanmar, patients with tuberculosis and life threatening conditions are being carried away on makeshift stretchers, told to leave US funded hospital within a week because they have no more supply of medicine and they have nowhere else to go. In Africa, famine riddled Sudan is worsening. 6 million people are on the brink of starvation, 4.5 million. Displaced people, they were on the verge of eradicating diseases, including malaria and malnutrition. Some of those clinics are shutting down. Global health, the US-funded HIV/AIDS programs in South Africa and Haiti have stalled, putting hundreds of thousands

• 58:34Scott Galloway?

  of lives at risk. And be clear, folks, even if you want to make the moral argument, well, that's a tragedy, but I want that $200 focused on American kids. Okay, that's an argument. Don't agree with it, but that's an argument. But the geopolitical fallout here is going to come back to haunt us. China and Russia are stepping into this void while the US pulls back. Beijing is deepening its ties in Africa and Latin America. AIDS isn't just about generosity, it's about influence. And Washington's retreat is just going to leave this gigantic vacuum that our adversaries are happy to fill with a fucking fraction of their investment. Putin will come up with that 70 billion if he can grab some of that

• 59:15Scott Galloway?

  goodwill. So for a 200, the majority of Americans, and I think Republicans and Americans, we sat them down and said, this is the good we're doing around the world, around HIV, malaria, starvation, displaced refugees. This is what we are doing for pregnant women with AIDS, with kids, with vaccines. This is what happens if we withdraw. Are you willing to give us $200 right now, here and now, for the year? I think the majority of Americans would say, absolutely. The moral, this aid freeze isn't just a moral failure, it's a strategic disaster, weakening our allies, funding humanitarian crises, and abandoning

• 59:55Scott Galloway?

  global leadership. It's going to cost us a lot more than 200 bucks per citizen. This is just what, this is the definition of a lack of strategy and taking goodwill built over decades and investments by previous Americans and taxpayers, and just trashing it in the worst way. This is just so, just so dumb.

• 1:00:16Jessica Tarlov?

  Well, it also is exposing I think a mistake that a lot of us made, certainly I made, in talking about, "Oh, it'll be fine. Marco Rubio is great, right? So I'm really happy with the foreign policy apparatus that he's put into place." Marco Rubio is rubber stamping this. And he hired this guy, Darren Beatty or Beatty. He was fired from Duke for attending a conference with white nationalists, and he was too extreme for a junior role as a speechwriter in Trump's first administration, when there were adults around. He said that NATO is a bigger threat than the Chinese Communist Party, whites in the US are treated better than Uighurs, and he told Tim Scott and another and a bunch of other black people that they need to bend the knee on January 6, and that

• 1:01:01Jessica Tarlov?

  other black people should, quote unquote, "learn their place." So that's how he was spending his day. And this is who Marco Rubio has on his team. So if Scott Bessin, you know, almost a year ago, is talking about how tariffs are rarely used and shouldn't be discharged, and we have this fight with Canada and maybe impending with Mexico in a month, whenever they get their stuff together, you have this guy being a support system for Marco Rubio, are there going to be any adults left in the room?

• 1:01:32Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, I don't, like, this is, this is, and, you know, at some point, we're gonna have to do a show on what can be done here. But I've said, you know, around Democrats, this is not a time to come together. This is a time to come to the rescue and focus on the economic impact. I do think Democrats are starting to hit back. I loved the, some of the Senate confirmation hearings. I think Senator Michael Bennett is an absolute hero. By the way, who I supported for president?

• 1:02:02Jessica Tarlov?

  My dad, too. You guys were the only two.

• 1:02:04Scott Galloway?

  Really? The two of us?

• 1:02:04Jessica Tarlov?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:05Scott Galloway?

  I think there was a third somewhere in there.

• 1:02:06Jessica Tarlov?

  Really?

• 1:02:07Scott Galloway?

  But I-

• 1:02:08Jessica Tarlov?

  Probably James Bennett, his brother. What a cool sibling tandem, by the way.

• 1:02:12Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, they're very, but it really, and I know Senator Bennett, he's a really decent man, public school superintendent, senator, was in private equity, understands capitalism. Anyways, I, I thought Senators Sanders and Warren were very effective. So I, it is good to see Democrats hitting back. But it, this does feel like we're in uncharted territory. Anyways, we're gonna take one more quick break. Stay with us.

• 1:02:43Speaker 00

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• 1:03:14Speaker 01

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• 1:03:43Scott Galloway?

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• 1:04:51Scott Galloway?

  Welcome back. Before we wrap, Ken Martin's election as Chair of the Democratic National Committee marks the beginning of a huge challenge. After spending 14 years leading Minnesota's DFL, he's no stranger to political battles, but now he's stepping into a role with a lot more weight. His victory was a decisive one, but it's only the first hurdle. Martin's job now is to unite a divided party and rebuild momentum after disappointing losses in 2024, all while preparing for a tough battle against the Trump-led GOP in 2028. Just with contenders, including Ben Wikler, who had a lot of big-name support, what do you think gave Ken the edge in securing the win? And how do you think he'll use this momentum to unite the DNC moving forward?

• 1:05:29Jessica Tarlov?

  I think it was a lot having to do with his personal touch. So there are 488 voting members of the Democratic National Committee for this. He called every single one of them and spent up to two hours on the phone with them. So he didn't just, you know, hit, you know, line one, can I count on your vote? Line two, can I count on your vote? He said, talk to me. What's been going on here? And a lot of that has to do with the fact that he's been so enmeshed in the organization. He's been a vice chair since 2017, I think it is. So he seemed like he was really the people's pick in all of that. And I think that that's a very good direction for us to be going in. It sucks for leadership

• 1:06:12Jessica Tarlov?

  like Schumer and Pelosi and Jeffries. Also, big donors Soros and Reid Hoffman were backing Ben Wikler, who is much more of the media darling in all of this. And also, I don't want to minimize how effective he's been in Wisconsin. And that is certainly a model for all of us. But it seems like Ken Martin had that personal touch that folks liked. And I loved this quote, you know, they were talking about... How some have called him a knife fighter and a Democrat said he's like Stalin and I say that as a compliment and I would love to have some Stalin energy on our side in terms of being ruthless over the course of the next two to four years, figuring out what

• 1:06:56Jessica Tarlov?

  our message is and he talked a lot about getting back to our working class roots, which is definitely the direction that we have to be going in and I'm hopeful that he can get the job done. It was quite the contrast though. So he won by a decisive victory, but there are all of these clips floating around of what was also going on at the DNC, you know, stuff about pronouns, starting with a land acknowledgement. Jamie Harrison gave an interview, he's the outgoing chair of the DNC where he said that we should have stuck with Biden, which I think would have led to, you know, over 400 electoral votes for Trump if Biden had stayed on the top of the ticket. And so there's this contrast between

• 1:07:40Jessica Tarlov?

  being positive and hopeful about what the future holds for the party and also thinking that there are still a lot of headwinds coming fast and furious towards us and that you almost can't have anyone around a position of power who would say something like Biden should have stayed on top of the ticket, looking at the results of the election and where the electorate is now. And most importantly, 7 million people who voted for Biden in 2020 sat at home. That is our target. We have to be laser focused in on those people.

• 1:08:14Scott Galloway?

  I think we've done a really bad job, we being Democrats, of building our bench.

• 1:08:18Jessica Tarlov?

  Oh, really?

• 1:08:19Scott Galloway?

  I'm trying to think.

• 1:08:20Jessica Tarlov?

  The bench is bad? I usually hear the messaging is bad, but I feel like there are all these up and coming stars.

• 1:08:26Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, but my, my view is that we've decided to opt for 90 year olds who engage in insider trading and won't leave. That the top of the pyramid is so stacked with right, but ineffective players that we're not advancing some of our younger voices fast enough. I just think there, I think if you're a young, ambitious and talented, you want to get to America and you want to be a Republican right now because I think the Democrats have decided that it's a, it's a seniors facility. And I just think we need to absolutely elevate. I mean, for God's sakes, Amy Klobuchar, I think she's 60 or 62. She looks like a teenager compared to

• 1:09:08Scott Galloway?

  the rest of, or Hakeem Jeffries looks like he's 15. We need to get some of these younger, more forceful people. I'm not a huge fan of AOC's policies. I, I love that she said, I'm not going to the inauguration. He's a rapist. I mean, where are those voices? I mean, we needed to identify a cadre of 30 or 40, really, I mean, Secretary Buttigieg, I like how he came out and immediately tweeted, you know, zero crashes on my watch, boss. And that's an unfair statement and he should make it. But I don't think, I think we have, I don't know, I think we're like a corporation. I, I think a lot of these people need to be put on an ice floe, Jess.

• 1:09:46Jessica Tarlov?

  I think that that's fair. I agree with you. I, not necessarily for an age cutoff, but just for people coming to their senses and realizing that even if they can still physically walk and talk, that there are people who need to be nurtured and to have the opportunity and that we do have a dearth of people waiting to have their opportunity. I wanted to shout out though, there are a few people, you already said AOC. I think Chris Murphy on the Senate side has been great over the course of the last week and a lot of it he's doing through his own social media. I don't think Instagram Live is going to save us per se from the hostile takeover of the government by Elon Musk and co. But I liked seeing.

• 1:10:29Jessica Tarlov?

  What he had to say about it and that it was the rapid response. People don't care that much if you are absolutely right about every detail. And the details are moving so quickly that within a couple of hours, part of what you said is unfortunately going to have been inaccurate. But they want to see the passion. They want to see the fight and they want to see that you care and that you're using all of the tools in your arsenal to make sure that the American public knows that there are still people there fighting for them. Agree with you about Michael Bennett. I thought one of the most powerful moments during the RFK Junior confirmation hearing, and God, I hope that he doesn't get through, but I am so afraid of everyone being pushed into line by these bullying tactics, was Maggie Hassan from New Hampshire.

• 1:11:14Jessica Tarlov?

  I don't know if you saw this, but she was basically in tears talking to RFK Junior about her son, 36 years old, cerebral palsy.

• 1:11:22Speaker 06

  Now, some of you are new to this committee and new to the Senate, so you may not know that I am the proud mother of a 36-year-old young man with severe cerebral palsy. And a day does not go by when I don't think about what did I do when I was pregnant with him that might have caused the hydrocephalus that has so impacted his life. So, please do not suggest that anybody in this body of either political party doesn't want to know what the cause of autism is.

• 1:11:56Jessica Tarlov?

  I'm sure you had this as well with your partner, where you just think, oh, I know it's the third trimester, I can have a glass of wine, but should I? Or I really would love to have some cold cuts. Or is having this sushi going to be OK? Or God forbid, I fell in the subway or walking down the street, whatever it is. And what are the implications for this little person that I already love more than I thought I could love anything in this world? And it just, it brought me to tears watching her talk about that and having to do that in a confirmation hearing for someone who is going to run our healthcare system and can't say that vaccines don't cause autism.

• 1:12:37Scott Galloway?

  Every time I saw, I thought, this is the greatest threat to democracy of an individual who, you know, shares.

• 1:12:45Scott Galloway?

  Shares company with Bashar al-Assad and can't call Edward Snowden a traitor is gonna just destroy the morale of people who put themselves in harm's way every day and wonder, is this person really gonna have my back? And then I think, oh, no, she's not the worst. He's the worst. That we're gonna have kids who are gonna lose limbs and have hands and feet amputated, which is what happened if measles, we have another measles outbreak, who's selling onesies to babies that says, you know, vaxxed and pro, I mean, unvaxxed and what is it? What were those onesies?

• 1:13:17Jessica Tarlov?

  I don't know, but they were 26 bucks.

• 1:13:19Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, and I just, it's, it's just very odd, really.

• 1:13:25Jessica Tarlov?

  It's dystopian.

• 1:13:26Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, it is.

• 1:13:27Jessica Tarlov?

  You just don't think that it's really happening.

• 1:13:29Scott Galloway?

  It feels very strange.

• 1:13:29Jessica Tarlov?

  You're watching Cash Patel and them holding up a picture saying, you know, did you post this meme of chainsawing Democrats? And this can't possibly be happening. And he's gonna soar through.

• 1:13:40Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, he's coming across almost as like semi-legitimate. And Senator Rubio has always been a political animal. He wakes up every morning and looks in the mirror and says, hello, Mr. President. He would do anything to increase the likelihood. And by, quite frankly, and I'm circling back the very beginning here around our immigration policy, they got very serious about immigration about 20 years ago, and they had something called the Gang of Five, and they included this very young senator named Marco Rubio. And he blew up the whole thing because his pollsters decided that in Iowa, they don't want anything resembling a path to citizenship for Dreamers. So Marco Rubio will always do what he believes is the most politically expedient thing, full stop. I mean, he really

• 1:14:24Scott Galloway?

  is the opposite of a leader. And my favorite statement about Marco Rubio is, who would have thought that peoples with last, with the last names Cruz and Rubio would hate Mexican people so much? He really hasn't been, anyways. And what's strange is, I can see how he flew in 99 to zero, because we have, we have just changed, entirely changed the benchmark. But what you said about, is it Senator Hassan? That was really powerful. Actually, I think that's probably a, a good place to end it. I don't have anything upbeat. What are you doing, what are you doing this week, Jess? Let's get back to you. Talk about something upbeat. Anything going on with your kids?

• 1:15:08Jessica Tarlov?

  No, I know you're really desperate.

• 1:15:09Scott Galloway?

  I am desperate.

• 1:15:10Jessica Tarlov?

  Well, Scott, since you asked, no, pickups, drop-offs. My, well, that part, I'm jealous of that part. My daughter went to her first tennis class.

• 1:15:20Scott Galloway?

  Really?

• 1:15:20Jessica Tarlov?

  Where they don't really use rackets, but they, you know, meet the ball and the racket. It was very cute. It's all just about the videos and the pictures, right?

• 1:15:28Scott Galloway?

  Very good. Trust me on this, you cannot take enough pictures when your kids are young. I, every day, I send a photo of me and my, one of my boys, when I was with them, when I was a kid. I send it to them, I text it to them at school. And it is, you can't take enough photos.

• 1:15:45Jessica Tarlov?

  And they love it.

• 1:15:46Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, they do.

• 1:15:47Jessica Tarlov?

  Like, well, we love ourselves, no matter how old we are. Narcissists from birth.

• 1:15:52Scott Galloway?

  There you go. All right, that's it for this episode. Thank you for listening to Raging Moderates. Our producers are David Toledo and Chinanyi Onike. Our technical director is Drew Burrows. You can find Raging Moderates on its own feed every Tuesday. That's right, Raging Moderates on its own feed. Please follow us wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:16:09Jessica Tarlov?

  See you later.

• 1:16:11Scott Galloway?

  Thanks, Jess.