Raging Moderates: LA’s Wildfires, Trump’s Bold Agenda, and Historic Sentencing

Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov break down the politics fueling Los Angeles’ record-breaking wildfires and the fallout from budget cuts, environmental policies, and political blame games. Then, they dive into Trump’s bold—and polarizing—agenda as he prepares for a second term, from cabinet picks to eye-popping proposals like buying Greenland. Finally, they unpack Trump’s historic sentencing, its impact on his political future, and the fight over Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report. 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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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 1:02Scott Galloway?

  Welcome to Raging Moderates. I'm Scott Galloway.

• 1:04Jessica Tarlov?

  And I'm Jessica Tarlov.

• 1:06Scott Galloway?

  Jessica, so I've done my seven-day free trial of 2025 and I've decided I want my money back.

• 1:11Jessica Tarlov?

  Oh, what happened?

• 1:13Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, I'm just not enjoying 20. It's like 2025 got right to work and I just don't like the way it's approaching the world. And I think I went back to 2024 and I thought that was kind of a shitty year.

• 1:23Jessica Tarlov?

  I would undo the wildfires if I could. So if we need to go back to 2024 to wipe that off the board, absolutely. But besides, did something bad happen to you while you have been in America?

• 1:35Scott Galloway?

  Oh, no. I'm trying to be funny, Jess. My worst day is better than most people's best day. Get it? Seven-day trial is over.

• 1:43Jessica Tarlov?

  Yeah, no, I get that, but it could also have something deeply meaningful behind it, like something real happened to you.

• 1:49Scott Galloway?

  No, no. Okay, let me describe my last few days because I'd like to talk about me. So I did a speaking gig at Jefferies, the investment bank. I was in New York, which I always love. I love my place here. There are no kids here, so there's no shit everywhere. It's like a, I don't know, a Northern European architect with OCD designed it. There's just nothing anywhere and I love it. It's my kind of place of peace. Saw friends, went out, and then I had a speaking gig in Boca, and then I went out and got shitty drunk Friday night, which I hadn't done in a while. And you know what? I need to go back to this kind of semi functioning alcoholic thing. I really enjoyed myself.

• 2:26Jessica Tarlov?

  You didn't wake up completely destroyed?

• 2:29Scott Galloway?

  I did. Yeah, no, I did. I did. We're gonna, we're gonna gloss over that. But I stayed at the Faina Hotel, which I love and is colorful. And then Saturday night, I went with, I went with my friend Pablo to this new restaurant in South Beach called Sparro Italia. Super hot, super hot people everywhere, good food. Hello, Miami. Twenty-eight dollar drinks. And then Sunday, I got on a plane and I went to Houston to speak to the, I think it's called the PMCA, which is like this big events thing. There was like 5,000 people. I did well there, except I couldn't help it. I made my crack about the Catholic Church institutionalizing pedophilia, not knowing that a group of like 12-year-old boys were coming out and singing after. So that's kind of awkward. And then I got back on a plane, came here last night,

• 3:12Scott Galloway?

  took a Xanax, woke up, here I am. Pretty good weekend. Pretty good weekend.

• 3:16Jessica Tarlov?

  Okay. Yeah, it does sound like a good weekend. And last week, you went super viral from your MSNBC hit, your kleptocracy hit. And I, because you've inspired me to start reading comments, or you've inspired me to be a narcissist. So I went and looked at some

• 3:36Scott Galloway?

  It's worth it.

• 3:37Jessica Tarlov?

  I mean, I don't know. I don't feel that great about me. I saw this very nice comment that you're one of the most important voices in our society today. Scott Galloway embodies a driven, successful person who hasn't lost his humanity, nor his sense of being part of a nation with mutual responsibilities to each other. I thought that was really nice.

• 3:55Scott Galloway?

  Okay, no, that's true. I just like the attention and I like seeing myself on TV.

• 3:58Jessica Tarlov?

  So TV is not a dying medium?

• 3:59Scott Galloway?

  And I really like.

• 4:00Jessica Tarlov?

  If you feel good about it?

• 4:02Scott Galloway?

  Well, so first off, thank you. We've become a kleptocracy, full stop. And I find it just outrageous or upsetting, I would say, that we don't appear to have a lot of strong voices on the left, voicing what is obviously a move towards Russia, where when one man invests $250 million in the Trump campaign and his businesses are the same or even shittier, Tesla reported year-on-year sales declines and his net worth is up 140 million because the market, which is a neutral arbiter and is not as politically spun as everything else in our society, says, oh, this is a kleptocracy and the biggest customer in the world is going to start funneling funds towards his companies, regardless of whether they deserve them or not, and engaging in regulatory punishment and capture for

• 4:46Scott Galloway?

  him and his enemies respectively. Back to you. You also went viral.

• 4:53Scott Galloway?

  We're viruses.

• 4:54Jessica Tarlov?

  I think a lot of people feel that about us.

• 4:56Scott Galloway?

  You're Ebola, you're COVID. Today, we're going to try, we're going to talk about the politics behind LA's raging wildfires, and this is why Jessica went viral, the bold and controversial moves shaping Trump's agenda, Trump's historic sentencing. All right, let's get right into it. Firefighters are in a make or break phase of their week-long fight against the devastating Los Angeles wildfires, with many residents still under evacuation orders. The Palisades Fire has already cemented its place as the most destructive in LA's history. On top of that, the political blame game is in full swing. Trump's taking shots at California policies and Gavin Newsom, or Governor Newsom, while Karen Bass is under fire for Los Angeles Fire Department budget cuts. Critics are pointing fingers at everything

• 5:39Scott Galloway?

  from immigrant care to DEI hires and homelessness spending for the fires. Even Jess got into it with colleagues on Fox News. Let's listen to a klep.

• 5:49Jessica Tarlov?

  Greg and Jesse's points about, you know, this is because of DEI or what we need is practical solutions. There is so much bad information swirling around about the main players involved in this, like the fire chief who's been called a DEI hire. I take a resume any day. 24-year vet, paramedic, engineer, fire inspector, captain, battalion chief, fire marshal, deputy chief. I don't know. But you're proving my point. No, I'm not proving your point. Yes, you are. You're proving it because- She is qualified for that job. DEI makes everybody suspect. That is the problem. Because you told them to be that way. And you guys paraded it around. So now you put it in people's heads. No, you put it in people's heads. How? I didn't say that's a DEI. I didn't back it. You both mentioned it. Anyway.

• 6:32Scott Galloway?

  Let me get that.

• 6:33Jessica Tarlov?

  Don't you wish you had my job?

• 6:34Scott Galloway?

  DEI makes everyone suspect if they're racist. So I suspect DEI if and when I use it as a political cudgel to make a point instead of actually doing fucking anything to help these people. I mean, this fire chief, and I pause, I don't know her name.

• 6:49Jessica Tarlov?

  Karen Tyler.

• 6:50Scott Galloway?

  I read her background. The only thing her background shows is there might still be remnant racism in the fire department. She didn't get this job sooner. She's out of central fucking casting for this job. She's so incredibly qualified. And I don't know about you, I merely interrupted you and I want to come back to your clip, but we used to at least wait a few weeks before we turned this into a political rage machine. My favorite was Trump saying that it was because of this Water Reclamation Act where they were diverting water from fire safety to save a fish. And it ends up there's no such act that ever existed.

• 7:21Jessica Tarlov?

  Smeltgate. That's what we call it.

• 7:24Scott Galloway?

  But instead of trying to rally help to the city, some of those powerful people in America are, and of course Musk had to weigh in and say DEI equals die. It's just so incredibly, it's like, could they at least wait until the smoke is smoldering a bit here? Anyways, more of your thoughts, Jess.

• 7:44Jessica Tarlov?

  I generally echo those sentiments. Everybody, at least that I've spoken to and I'm sure in your orbit, knows somebody who has been affected by this. And it is- So frightening. It is so devastating. Understanding the scale of this, and it's the most expensive fire in US history. I think now they think be 52 billion. I'm sure that will continue to go up. And we're supposed to get new harsh winds coming in Tuesday and Wednesday. I don't know what happens, you know, to the future of those neighborhoods. I don't know what happens to having the Olympics there in 2028. It's completely devastating for a real crown jewel of America, which Los Angeles absolutely

• 8:25Jessica Tarlov?

  is. And I feel heartbroken for everyone there. My sister is evacuated and they're safe, which is great and didn't lose their homes, which she has several friends who did. And, you know, thinking of everyone there and searching for ways to be able to be useful and helpful. And the contrast between what you see on the ground, which is real people helping each other, like they've turned the, I think it's the Santa Anita racetrack is in this, it's this pop up aid center right now, where you can go and you can get clothes, you can get food, you can be linked up with people that you've been looking for, you know, talk to public officials, et cetera. And then this hellscape of disinformation

• 9:07Jessica Tarlov?

  that is going on online and in person. And I don't know what the solution to this is because unless we find some way to make it profitable, to spread good and decent information, people will not stop. And I remember Arianna Huffington years ago, remember when she launched Good News, I think was the name of it, right? And it was a publication, it was an optative Huff Post that was just supposed to amplify things that like make you feel good, right? That people want to see that someone was rescued or they, we love cat videos, right? Like that's what people spend all their time on their social media feeds. And she thought, you know, the clickbait, it's too much and we can't live in a cycle like this. Our mental health is suffering. You know, she was very ahead

• 9:52Jessica Tarlov?

  of the curve about needing enough sleep, something that we all know now and still don't do. And we gotta get it back because.

• 10:03Jessica Tarlov?

  We're not going to survive living like this when the people with the most powerful accounts, not only online, but you know, in real life, like the president-elect of the United States of America sees no good reason to amplify truth, joy, camaraderie, nationalism, Americana, whatever you want to call it, the lurch towards divisiveness only will be the undoing of this nation. And you see the contrast between the images of the firefighters coming from all over the country like they did after 9/11, right? I lived in downtown Manhattan, in Tribeca. We had firefighters that were from all over

• 10:46Jessica Tarlov?

  the country that were using our house as a bathroom. We opened it up and we said, you come here and you can stay. There were meals being served here. We had people from Indiana coming in. We had people from Texas coming in. Same thing in California, the Oregon firefighters coming, the Mexican planes landing, right? At this moment where Trump is saying, you know, the Gulf of Mexico is the Gulf of America, the Mexicans are showing up to help us. Even Greg Abbott, who I think is a terrible partisan in Texas, you know, sending the firefighters up there, which Gavin Newsom thanked him for. And then you contrast that with the messaging coming out of these big accounts like the Charlie Kirk's of the world, what Elon Musk is doing. I don't know if you saw this video, but he showed up at a fire command briefing

• 11:31Jessica Tarlov?

  around the Palisades fire and got completely embarrassed by the fire chief, who was basically like, what the fuck are you talking about? Right? He said, well, you know, he's repeating talking points from Twitter, or from X, I should say. And you've now heard from basically every official under the sun that, quote, "Mother Nature owned us." That's what the fire chief who was on 60 Minutes said. "It was unstoppable." The head of FEMA says, "I think they were very prepared, but you have not seen 100 mile-per-hour winds that are fueling this fire." And who could look at that video, I'm sure you've seen of the McDonald's, right? With the fire blowing by, the Santana winds is 100 miles per hour, and think... That if you had an extra hose full of water,

• 12:14Jessica Tarlov?

  when the choppers couldn't even fly for 27 hours, that you were going to be able to solve this problem. No, that doesn't mean that, I'm sure there were mistakes that were made, and I'm glad there will be audits of everything and after-action reports. And Governor Newsom has been speaking about that. But what can we do to fix this?

• 12:32Scott Galloway?

  Mm hmm. I mean, you're talking about, you're talking about an area that's a desert that is in the midst of this or in the middle of this meteorological anomaly called the Santa Ana winds, or because of, I don't know if you've ever seen, I think it's called Nazarene, which is this topographical anomaly in Portugal where these huge waves come. And then there's this gigantic shelf in the form of like a tube that creates these 100-foot waves. That's kind of what Los Angeles is in the sense that it's a desert. It's incredibly dry. We had an unbelievable drought in the winter. And you think, well, winter should be good for fires, but it's not because it creates high and low pressure systems colliding,

• 13:13Scott Galloway?

  which creates a massive vacuum of the wind coming into the low-pressure system. And then it runs through mountains and it creates this exceptionally dry, kind of voluminous, massive velocity wind that can take any ember and move it across hundreds of yards in seconds. And California actually has a very robust fire response system, one of the most robust in the nation, if not the most robust in the nation. And they had, I think, something like 12,000 people working or fighting against it. I mean, the bottom line is LA probably just shouldn't be there. And it's so populated in terms of a city deciding to string itself in this area, where there's earthquakes, where there's droughts, where there's superfires.

• 13:57Scott Galloway?

  Nine of 10 of the biggest superfires in the last 100 years, by the way, have been in the last decade. And one of the things that frustrates me a little bit about the left is that we like to think of ourselves as better than them. So we don't engage in this conspiracy theory to hit back and say, oh, it's because, it's because of Republicans inability to prepare for the obvious and ignore science around climate change. We don't go there because the reality is, you know, we really don't know. We're going to need scientists to look at what happened here before they start leveling political accusations. But they may immediately go to the politicization. I heard about- Musk and the fact that he's so dominant, it reflects our idolatry of money. This reflects how politically polarized we've been.

• 14:43Scott Galloway?

  It also, the thing that really struck me about this, and I found it really frustrating. I went to UCLA. I have a lot of friends in LA. I didn't want to bother them with constant like, how are you doing? So I was trying to get information. And the first thing when I said UCLA, you know, UCLA evacuation? Question mark. Well, the first thing that came up was this TikTok from this kid saying it's, it's the University of California of people who don't care and that the evacuation order should have been issued already. And I sort of immediately went to it. And it's some fucking sophomore with a TikTok account. And that's what comes up first in my news, my news search. And I do have a tough time trying to triangulate in on accurate information.

• 15:28Scott Galloway?

  And I've been relying on two things. I've been relying on Anderson Cooper, who I think does his level best to talk about stuff in a balanced way. CNN, no doubt, has a left leaning bias, but I do find that they do try to seek the truth without fear or favor, which at the end of the day is the media's job. I'm going to Jessica Yellen's News Not Noise. And unfortunately, because Jessica lives in Los Angeles, she had to take a couple of days off to manage probably her own evacuation and her own dog. And I want to move to the virtue signaling part of the program and what you can do. This Rabbi Stephen Leader, who I follow, said something really powerful. I think it was on threads. He said, don't ask people how you can help. He said, people are embarrassed. People don't want to come up with ideas.

• 16:13Scott Galloway?

  They're in a state of panic. They don't want to tax you. They don't want to feel like victims. He said, you should just help. Bring food, come over and take their dogs or whatever it is, or call them and say, you know, here's a picture of your bedroom. We live in Newport, come here right now. And so I went to Jessica's site and she has a subscription for a hundred bucks a month and I bought 50 of them. And I'm in a position of privilege and anyone who knows me knows I like to talk about my success, my, you know, faux masculinity through my economic success. Any fucking GoFundMe, I'm doing. How can you help? You move to action, you know? I mean, checking in on people's fine, but instead of asking if they need help, just help, don't ask.

• 16:57Scott Galloway?

  You know, just immediately reach out and start helping. I was even thinking I was in Houston, I thought, should I go to LA? And I thought, no, I'm just a liability. I can't fight fires. I don't know what the fuck I would do there. It has gotten so bad in terms of an inability to find accurate information. And our most powerful people, their willingness to immediately move to the politicization, that it's just, it's just very discouraging in, in a situation like this. I remember even in Hurricane Katrina, you know, Democrats and Republicans said, all right, let's get down there and let's see what we can do to help. And there was a blame game against Bush around this once kind of it became pretty obvious, the guy running the whole rescue operation, remember

• 17:40Scott Galloway?

  him, Brownie, was a total fucking incompetent. But it wasn't, at least they took a beat. You know, at least they, at least they took a moment. Any thoughts on how this can get better, or what we can do to make sure this isn't such a shit show the next time this comes around?

• 17:55Jessica Tarlov?

  Well, I want to say first about disasters that happened in an era, like the Bush era, which we thought was pretty bad partisan wise, at least where we turned out and thinking that these wars were an enormous mistake. And, you know, people until Bush started doing oil paintings and belly tapping Barack Obama, thought he was the devil. And now that we live in this era, we, we all have rose colored glasses about him. But I felt in the 2000s, certainly 9/11, Katrina, et cetera, that people actually cared about their fellow Americans, no matter their partisan affiliation. And I think that that has shifted for a lot of people, that this has become blood sport, not just something

• 18:40Jessica Tarlov?

  that you do, you know, every two or four years when you show up and vote, and that we have common call, more unites us than separates us. And I think for probably the average American, that that's still the case. But for the people with the loudest megaphones, that is not the case. And they are playing to our worst angels, is that how you say? Like, they're, they're playing to the worst parts of us. Right? And when that's happening from the leadership level down, it is very hard.

• 19:15Jessica Tarlov?

  To upend that kind of system. And I saw, you know, Gavin Newsom set up a new site that's has the facts on it, right?

• 19:23Scott Galloway?

  Fighting misinformation.

• 19:24Jessica Tarlov?

  Right. And he's having to, obviously, it's his rapid response team is constantly online, you know, quote tweeting things saying, no, that's not true. Go to this to see it. You know, stuff about funding cuts to the budget that weren't true, you know, doubling the size of the firefighting army, having these C-130s. I think they're the only state that's able to use them for firefighting, all of that. So using these official channels. But the problem is, is that official channels don't matter to millions of people. They think that the government is the one who predominantly lies to you. And I had this interaction with a good friend of mine on The Five, Kennedy, who was MTVVJ, is now with us at Fox. She's

• 20:07Jessica Tarlov?

  a libertarian. She has a house in-

• 20:10Scott Galloway?

  MTVVJ now on Fox. That actually fits. That checks out.

• 20:14Jessica Tarlov?

  Kennedy's great. She is lovely. You would very much enjoy her. She has a house in the Palisades. It is still standing, but uninhabitable. Obviously, this is, this has been very emotional for her. She was on air when we first showed the footage of the fact that her kids preschool had burned down. And she was talking about the tiles that the little kids make that they keep. You know, every student that comes through has a tile on this wall. And it's, you know, we, we both have kids. I can't imagine what that could feel like. But I said, I was reading an official declaration about the fire hydrants and that the hydrants were all full technically, but because of pressure issues, that's why they couldn't, there was no water up the hill. Right? That's, this was part of, one of the theories of

• 20:59Jessica Tarlov?

  how LA had failed its people. And again, let's wait for the audits of everything and see what really happened. But she said, I don't believe that. And I said, well, then I can't do anything about that. Right? So if, if I'm reading an official government document, or I'm reading the budget items from the LA firefighting budget and talking about the 17 million that apparently went missing, like, what do you do about that? And this will take a complete reboot of the way we teach young people about civics, about government, about the role that government plays in our lives. And the parties are so divided in what benefit we think-

• 21:43Jessica Tarlov?

  Public servants can play in our lives. You know, the people who are scared if they're knocking on the door and the people who think they're here to help us. And that I worry, especially in moving into an era where these kinds of events are going to be happening, unfortunately, more and more often. I feel like we, you know, it was hurricane season, but we are just, every month, right? There is just something catastrophic that's happening. And we do not occupy the same space whatsoever in how we think about this and what responsibility we think the government has in taking care of us and where, what they are driven by, that they are driven either by public service or personal vanity. And I don't know how you overcome something like that.

• 22:29Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, and this is like, I mean, the devastation of the scale of the fire is really dramatic. The fire has now burned an area, a landmass that is greater than San Francisco or Boston, just to give you a sense of scale for it. I'm merely good at economics. I think it's going to be fascinating. The, uh, some of the biggest insurance companies did the math and they canceled the insurance policies. They said, look, and to be fair, California had instituted, I believe, some price caps on, uh, the escalation of premiums. So these companies who have an obligation to their shareholders said, on a risk-adjusted basis, we just can't, we can't do business here. And so there's, I think, a California estate-sponsored or state-backed insurance program, which is a-

• 23:12Jessica Tarlov?

  It's like Woolley, I think, is the name of it or something like that.

• 23:14Scott Galloway?

  Which is essentially outsourcing, uh, kind of this risk to California taxpayers, such that you can keep prices high. I mean, there's a decent argument that insurance should be allowed to be priced to its natural level, which will decrease the prices of houses. I live in a house in Florida that's probably, you know, prone to hurricanes or maybe the sea level's rising. And I believe I should have to pay insurance rates that reflect that. And if the house of my, uh, the price of my house or the value of my house goes down, that's fine. But having, keeping my, you know, house price elevated back on, on the backs of taxpayers because insurance companies have decided to vacate, I don't think makes any sense. What will also be interesting is what happens to the economy because I did a little bit of

• 23:57Scott Galloway?

  research here and I thought, will this be the straw that breaks the camel's back and kind of escalates the flight from California to states like Texas and Nevada from people who think it's just become a bad consumer product where it's both expensive and bad. They pay some of the highest taxes in the world. It's a, you know, housing prices are crazy and because of the stress on many industries, especially in LA where production, the entertainment industry is down 40% year on year. Well, a lot of people just say, that's it, give me my check for my house that's been burnt down and we're out. What the data shows though is that most people typically don't leave after a disaster. And in California, despite all of the noise about people exiting the state, when they move, they usually move to another city in California.

• 24:42Scott Galloway?

  And you're going to see so much capital pour into Los Angeles. Housing prices, I would imagine, will escalate in the short term because of the destruction and housing stock or available housing stock. But I wonder if over the long term, you see a kind of an economic boomlet or just a boom because of all the money and building that's going to go into Los Angeles. And then to just start to get off our heels and onto our toes, is this an opportunity for Los Angeles? I was with ironically, accidentally a member of the International Olympic Committee yesterday at this talk. And he was saying, you know, we, we want to figure this out because immediately went to, well, will they be able to have the Olympics in 2028? And I would imagine they'll diversify to some other venues in San Diego or San Francisco.

• 25:27Scott Galloway?

  But I do think this kind of stuff does bring out the best in regular citizens, all those videos of people handling pets. The other thing, just to shout out to our.

• 25:38Scott Galloway?

  Fantastic Fire People and Government Services. This was a fire that made the Chicago Fire look like a barbecue. And then my, my masculine energy moment. Have you seen all these aerial vehicles dropping retardants? Jesus, what badasses in these retrofitted DC-10s swooping in 10 feet above the ground to drop flame retardants? It's something out of, I don't know, a better version. It's something out of kind of one of these World War II movies. I just find it.

• 26:15Jessica Tarlov?

  Well, you realize also how unde-i'd all of this actually is. Right? For the way the narrative is about people.

• 26:23Scott Galloway?

  Who's good? Who can help?

• 26:24Jessica Tarlov?

  Right. And it's also all of these, I guess, beta males? Is that the right term for sitting keyboard warriors saying, if I was out there, I could do this, right? Or, you know, I would have walked right up to so and so. And I don't want to let us escape, you know, some criticism. I was very disturbed by Mayor Karen Bass's tarmac interview where she couldn't even summon kind words or soothing words for the people of Los Angeles when she arrived back from Ghana. And it seems quite clear that it was a massive mistake for her to have gone on this trip. If there was.

• 27:03Scott Galloway?

  Well, she said she wouldn't leave.

• 27:04Jessica Tarlov?

  Yeah.

• 27:05Scott Galloway?

  Yeah. And she said during her campaign she was like, she's out.

• 27:07Jessica Tarlov?

  I think so too. And it'll be interesting to.

• 27:10Scott Galloway?

  Some of it's fair, some of it's unfair, but she's done.

• 27:13Jessica Tarlov?

  Some things are just too bad to survive, no matter what you did in those circumstances. And I think that Governor Newsom, we'll see again how it all shakes out. He is certainly sounding to be the competent on top of it all, one in all of this.

• 27:29Scott Galloway?

  I think he comes out of this a winner would be my, would be my guess.

• 27:32Jessica Tarlov?

  It will be interesting to see how all of this is run, especially looking ahead to the next president.

• 27:36Scott Galloway?

  Him in that jacket and those jeans.

• 27:38Jessica Tarlov?

  Being turned on and saying that he's gonna come out a winner are different things. I totally get it.

• 27:43Scott Galloway?

  I'm literally, I'm watching him and I'm like, what did he say? He's just.

• 27:49Scott Galloway?

  I see his lips moving.

• 27:50Jessica Tarlov?

  It's just the hair, right? Everything's so perfect.

• 27:53Scott Galloway?

  I'm literally like, it's so hot there. Shouldn't, shouldn't you take off your shirt?

• 27:56Jessica Tarlov?

  The winds, Scott, there are big winds there. Can I, um, link to a comment you just made and say something boring?

• 28:03Scott Galloway?

  Yes, please.

• 28:04Jessica Tarlov?

  Okay, great.

• 28:04Scott Galloway?

  Doesn't stop me.

• 28:05Jessica Tarlov?

  You said that there'll be opportunity, right? For Los Angeles out of this in terms of the rebuild. And something that I, I found really interesting, or the boring, the nerdy side of me, found really interesting was one of the things that Governor Newsom did was sign all these executive actions to cut red tape in terms of the rebuilding process. And like the enforcement of the CEQA and the California Coastal Commission, et cetera. And that stuck out to me as a pragmatic person, as like an opportunity for Democrats to take a step back and say, we obviously know that some of these regulations are so burdensome that we stand in the way of people and businesses getting back on their feet.

• 28:50Jessica Tarlov?

  And there's been a lot of hay made of the fact that Rick Caruso, the property developer who ran for mayor against Karen Bass in 2022, you know, he had all of these properties in the Palisades that were protected by private firefighters, which a lot of people didn't know was a thing that you could do, but they didn't burn down. And a lot of that has to do with when they were built and the fact that they weren't subject to these outdated regulations that kept a lot of homes and businesses in more precarious positions. And I'm hopeful that this will be a signal to the sane world to say, we can't live like this, right? Like it is not 1960 anymore. I understand we want to preserve the integrity of the place.

• 29:32Jessica Tarlov?

  We want, you know, people to maintain their views and we want things to look beautiful. And who doesn't love a Spanish villa that looks like it's original conception? Yeah, but you are gonna die.

• 29:44Scott Galloway?

  Yeah.

• 29:44Jessica Tarlov?

  If we keep it this way. And that stuck out to me as a big opportunity out of this to have a, you know, a cleaner, faster, more economical process to a rebuild and also a path forward to, to meet people where they are. Because no matter your politics, everyone is frustrated by how hard it is to get things done.

• 30:04Scott Galloway?

  I'm hopeful that a lot of good is going to come out of this. The property destruction is obviously devastating. But there was a, there was a fairly scant loss of life. And I think we might be better for this in terms of looking at things like climate safety, fire safety, housing permitting, reinvestment in Los Angeles. So I, I think we're going to see silver linings everywhere here. That's my view. We're going to be right back. Stay with us.

• 30:34Scott Galloway?

  Support for the show comes from Nutraful, the number one dermatologist recommended hair growth supplement brand used by over one and a half million people. With age comes knowledge, patience, and for some, hair loss. Didn't say it was all good things. And for those who want to do something about it, there's Nutraful. Nutraful has formulas built for men at different life stages. They have Nutraful Men for guys age 18 to 49, plus the new Nutraful Men 50 and older. That's the first product of its kind specifically for men over 50. You can now address the key root causes of thinning wherever you are in life. Grow visibly thicker, fuller hair in just three to six months. Start Nutraful today and make the hat optional. Visit nutraful.com and enter promo code PROP G for $10 off your first month's subscription and free shipping.

• 31:19Scott Galloway?

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• 31:37Scott Galloway?

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• 32:20Scott Galloway?

  Upwork also takes care of contracts, payments, and other administrative tasks, so you can spend less time managing logistics and more time focused on what's next. Visit upwork.com/profg right now and post your job for free. That's upwork.com/profg to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's U P W O R K dot com slash prof G, upwork.com slash prof G. 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

• 33:02Scott Galloway?

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• 33:44Scott Galloway?

  That's spelled V A N T A dot com slash prof G for $1,000 off. Welcome back. Let's dive into the week in politics. Biden's wrapping up his final days in office, and Trump is gearing up to take charge. He's already making waves, debating with House and Senate Republicans about how to fast-track his agenda. And in true Trump fashion, he's grabbing headlines with bold proposals: buying Greenland, reclaiming the Panama Canal, and renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. Yeah, makes total sense. His goal: outmaneuvering China and Russia in trade, shipping, and military strategy. At the same time, confirmation hearings are kicking off for Trump's cabinet picks. Pete Hegseth.

• 34:29Scott Galloway?

  For defense, Kristi Noem for Homeland Security and Marco Rubio for State and Pam Bondi as Attorney General. Jess, what do you make of Trump's push to expand US territory? Is there any chance it could happen or is this more of a distraction?

• 34:41Jessica Tarlov?

  I think it's somewhere in the middle from a distraction and it could happen. It's always interesting to see conservatives or other Republicans commenting on these kinds of things when they let it slip. Like, obviously, this isn't going to happen in the way that he is saying it, but there might be a kernel of truth in what he's talking about and we're going to try to get to that point. Like, James Langford was on Meet the Press and said, "The US is not going to invade another country. That's not who we are. The President speaks very boldly on a lot of things." We've seen this over how he's done negotiations, whether it be for real estate, etc., you know. But you do see, especially

• 35:20Jessica Tarlov?

  on the Greenland front, an interesting change in posture, I guess, moving from, obviously, he's not going to come and take over Greenland, but maybe we could have some more US troops there, which it seems like the Danish government isn't totally opposed to. So that feels like one of those kind of compromise positions, right, where Trump will get to say, "I won and it was worth sending Don Jr. out there with a film crew and some snowshoes and for the Danes to be able to continue living as they do and maintain a good relationship with us." I think there's going to be so much culture shock for the international community

• 36:02Jessica Tarlov?

  as Trump properly takes office. I mean, they've obviously had this first few months where, I mean, he essentially did become president, right, right after the election and Mar-a-Lago became the summer White House again. But it will be different, right, when he is showing up at these meetings and they're having to do, you know, their one-on-ones with him or in the groups and we'll have more of those strange photos from G7 meetings where he's kind of standing there in the corner in a huff like this. And people are thinking, "All right, we have four years to get through this, but we also need to understand that Donald Trump has fundamentally changed the way the Republican Party is going to work."

• 36:44Jessica Tarlov?

  Essentially in perpetuity, right? A normie Republican is not coming back. Even if J D Vance isn't the guy in 2028 who runs and you would assume that he is going to be since he's vice president, even if you get a kind of more standard Republican, the magification of the party is complete and there is no return and you will have to deal with the fact that there are going to be comments and people who are thinking things like Canada should become the 51st state or that we should rename the Gulf of Mexico. And these leaders are really going to have to decide how they want to deal with

• 37:24Jessica Tarlov?

  it. I mean Trudeau, he won't be around. He feels as though he's gotten past the annexation idea and wants to really focus on the implications of the tariffs for Americans. He's like, that's what I need to message on, right? That if you you put 25% tariffs on us, we're going to have retaliatory tariffs and it's going to be bad and it's going to be bad for you. And then like Claudia Scheinbaum in Mexico has taken a very offensive tone. And I like how she said, basically, you know, I'm happy to be in negotiations, but we will not be a subordinate. We are a sovereign nation and we are not interested in dealing with someone who's going to talk about, you know, renaming us in whatever fashion they so choose.

• 38:08Jessica Tarlov?

  So that's what I'm most interested in it, rather than the real implications of whether he's going to be able to pull any of this off. So I don't understand. If Canada becomes the 51st state, Democrats never lose, right? I mean, you're getting a huge influx of a bunch of liberals. I mean, even their conservatives are liberals.

• 38:25Scott Galloway?

  I think it's pretty easy what's going to happen here. Absurd fucking literally nothing. I've struggled my whole career with the difference between being right and being effective. And I was saying this on our other podcast pivot, Kara is interested in assembling a group to buy the Washington Post and she has the skills, she has the contacts, she's actually on speed dial with a bunch of people who have the money to do it.

• 38:51Jessica Tarlov?

  Yeah.

• 38:51Scott Galloway?

  But she's going about it wrong. And that is, if you want to get a deal done, you call people, you call the owner, you call the people who actually get to decide whether to do a deal and you express interest. You don't make them look stupid because no matter that, from that point on, the deal is just not going to happen. You don't go public and try and shame them into a deal. And the idea that the, the Danish are going to decide, yeah, we'll do a deal with, with Trump over Greenland because they're big and bad and scary. First off, the Panama Canal is just a dumb idea. It's about a five, it's a small business. It's a $5 billion business. It's politically stable. We would

• 39:32Scott Galloway?

  get no incremental advantage by owning it that we get now. It's better to lease the thing than to own it. It's not a big business. It's not of, it's only of strategic value if someone were stupid enough to start, to start arresting ships or not allowing them say passage, which no one has any intention of doing. Everyone has mutual interests here from the Chinese to the US to keep, keep letting people go through the Panama Canal. It has, there's no reason to do this. There's no incremental value to taking the Panama Canal back. Greenland, on the other hand, has real strategic importance. It has rare earth minerals, but we get to use all of those things right now. And the thought that we're going to bully a sovereign Northern European nation into selling us Greenland,

• 40:17Scott Galloway?

  they don't need the money. And so, and they actually have a more healthy, homogenous society. This is almost a gift to their incumbent party because it's created an enemy where there wasn't one and they can just stand up and show the middle finger. What are we going to do? Like deploy the US Navy to Greenland? This is just another example of Trump has figured out, and he's smart to do this, how to dominate the, the news and the media cycle, even if it's a ridiculous notion. So I don't think anything is going to happen here. This is just an opportunity for Claudia Scheinbaum, and I don't know who is the equivalent person in Denmark to say, you're an idiot. No, we're, we're not going to do this. And the renaming of the Gulf to

• 41:01Scott Galloway?

  The gulf of expensive eggs when circling back to the fire. A lot of his policies could play a pretty significant negative role in the rebuilding of LA specifically. Construction is a magnet for immigrants and undocumented workers. And while we like to, or the Republican administration wants to paint undocumented workers as these criminals, the, the, one of the realities for why we have allowed illegal immigration to get to a point where it is out of control, I will acknowledge that and we need to do something about it. And I actually believe that deporting criminals who are here illegally, I'm, I'm down with that.

• 41:44Scott Galloway?

  But what we don't want to acknowledge is that not only is immigration the secret sauce of the United States economic growth, but in many ways illegal immigration is because they kind of flow in as a flexible workforce where there's work and then they flow out, they, they actually absorb fewer until recently, social services and they pay their taxes. So they pay taxes, but they don't call the fire department or the police department or ask for social services or stick around for social security because they're worried about being deported. And when you have 12,000 houses that need to be rebuilt, you are going to need a massive inflow of construction workers.

• 42:25Scott Galloway?

  There is no way our domestic resources and domestic workers are going to be able to accomplish that. In addition, if he really goes through with anything resembling this level of tariffs on Mexico or China, you're going to see the cost of rebuilding these homes explode, everything from a washing machine to the garage door where either the parts or the entire thing is assembled in China or Mexico. All of a sudden, you're going to see reconstruction or rebuilding costs of 10, 30, 40%. So you're going to see a massive increase in labor if you can find people to build your home. And then the costs are gonna explode. And both of these are going to be pretty easily reverse engineered into what I feel are

• 43:10Scott Galloway?

  very short term, jingoist, kind of non-economic policies.

• 43:14Jessica Tarlov?

  Yeah, well, I mean, we were talking about this last week about, you know, humanizing the deficit for people, and this is the way to get right to that. You know, this is cost of living in your face and silly policy that's going to make it worse for the average American. And I have been keeping track of the major promises that Trump made during the campaign and where we stand on those things. And four central goals or promises that he sold the American public that he was going to get done, they're already admitting, aren't gonna happen.

• 43:54Jessica Tarlov?

  So from all of the cuts that they were gonna make, I mean, Musk is admitting now that they won't be able to do the $2 trillion in cuts, right? Like, that's something that we already knew and that Doge didn't have this kind of power. But that's one of them. J.D. Vance did his first big interview over the weekend. He was on Fox News Sunday. He gives a great interview. I gotta say, that guy, so smooth. But he is talking about prices for Americans, and he says, "We're going to stabilize prices for Americans." That wasn't what you guys promised us. You promised us that on day one, prices were going to fall. Guess that's not happening. Tom Homan, apparently, the borders czar, is privately telling GOPers that, you know, they won't be able to deport everybody, right?

• 44:39Jessica Tarlov?

  Like, that was the tough talk of the campaign. But the reality is that you have to have more modest goals and you should focus on people who are violent felons. We agree with all of that, but you still talked about a deportation force. And then ending the war in Ukraine, right? Where he said, "I'm the one with the line to Putin. I can get this done right away on day one." And the special envoy for Ukraine has said, "You know, we'll see what happens in the first 100 days." So those are four key planks, right, of the Trump Vance platform and why everybody got on board with this motley crew. Of people in the new Trump administration, from the Vivek Brahmaswamis to the Elon Musks, to the Tom Homans, the Tulsi Gabberts, Cash Patel, whoever it is.

• 45:24Jessica Tarlov?

  And I think that we are in for such an incredibly rude awakening. I saw Jamie Dimon was interviewed on CBS Sunday Morning, and he said he's cautiously pessimistic about what's to happen, though he did, I think, at one point say, we're going to have this massive recession that didn't come under Biden. But people are going to start pricing that in to what they think is going to happen going forward. I'm sure the market is going to continue to respond in that way. And if you lump on 25% tariffs, or even 10% tariffs with our top trading partners, and make it so that we can't get any decent pricing on everything from lumber to the people

• 46:04Jessica Tarlov?

  that we need to be able to make our country run, it's going to be complete chaos over the next two to four years.

• 46:11Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, I feel as if Donald Trump to date has been the luckiest person in the world. And I find that luck is perfectly asymmetric, that if you're around long enough, you have just as much good luck as bad luck. And with respect to the economy, we've had a 15-year bull market run. I think the S and P trades at a P of like 31 or 32. 50% of the total market cap globally is now represented by US stocks, which is a historic high. I just, and typically about 5% of institutional capital goes into emerging markets, or excuse me, 9%. It's about 5% now. All the flows of capital have been into the US. And I think one event, whether it's inflation starting to spike again, or a big company announcing that reducing their investment in AI, that's just not showing the return

• 46:55Scott Galloway?

  they'd hoped for, I think you could see the markets just absolutely throw up. And it just feels like it's time. Markets are cyclical, and I'm even, you know, I mean, it's impossible to time the markets, but I can, I can do math, and US stocks are just so expensive. But I think his first year, I think this guy, and nobody controls the markets. We overestimate or overcredit presidents for the markets, wins or losses, and give them too much blame for when they're not strong. But this guy's been jumping from lily pad to lily pad, and I think he's going to miss one in the next, I don't know, 12 or... 12 or 24 months. Real quick, Jess, how do you think these hearings are going to play out?

• 47:40Jessica Tarlov?

  I think some of them are going to be a total walk in the park. I think everyone knows the folks that will be welcomed in with open arms and will get some decent Democratic support. The whole foreign policy apparatus, Marco Rubio, Mike Waltz, Pam Bondi, I think there are concerns about her, especially she kind of played around with the election denialism and she's obviously a very strong partisan and team Trump from the beginning, but I imagine that she gets through. It's interesting to me that for all of this time that has elapsed from when we first started talking about these nominations, it's still the same names where I think people don't know if there are secret no votes in all

• 48:24Jessica Tarlov?

  of this. So for Pete Hegseth at defense continues to be stories that come out, not just about his personal behavior, but about his views and how he would manage these 3 million people at the Pentagon. Cash Patel has real concerns for people. RFK Jr. is interesting because everybody, even the very strong Republicans, have been pushing him about the vaccine skepticism. And he's found artful ways to dodge around how he talks about it. I'm just for vaccine safety. It's like, bro, you're on enough tape saying that you don't think we should have mandatory vaccines for kids in school and what the implications of that is going to

• 49:08Jessica Tarlov?

  be. So I think that that's still up in the air. I imagine the other health officials, like your pal, Dr. Oz, will get through, the Surgeon General, etc. So I think, and Tulsi Gabbard. And she continues to be, it's interesting, the ones that people are the most quiet about, part of me thinks have to have the biggest objections, right? And we haven't been talking a lot about the post-Assad world in Syria since it fell in 13 days. But I know that people, whether you're a traditional Republican hawk or not, are very concerned about having someone who has been on the side of Assad and Putin

• 49:50Jessica Tarlov?

  in such an important role as DNI. So I still don't know about those, but I think he's probably going to have a lot of success with the less controversial picks. You know, someone like a Kristi Noem, where you think like, well, what business does she have in having that job? No one's going to care, I think, because they, you have to pick your battles with this. And if your battle is Cash Patel, you don't have time to talk about why Kristi Noem isn't qualified. Someone like Sean Duffy getting through a transportation, which I think is fine, or Doug Burgum coming in agriculture.

• 50:22Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, just a quick reminder on vaccines. Rick Perry, who was governor of Texas, made HPV vaccination for, I believe it was for kids or was it just girls? Anyways, he made it mandatory. And now that these kids are coming of age, there's a statistically significant decline in HPV-related cancers. These things are a gift from God. I think if you were to say, if you were to give people from both sides of the aisle who actually understand science and say, what has been the greatest innovation in history? Near the top of the list would be vaccines, I think. And it's so funny, I'm so, I mean, I find the whole vaccine or anti-vax thing from RFK Jr. disqualifying.

• 51:07Scott Galloway?

  I'm going to ignore his character for a moment. The thing that's so troubling is he's so good on some issues. I don't know if you've seen him talk about our food supply or.

• 51:18Jessica Tarlov?

  Obama wanted him for EPA. He was in consideration.

• 51:22Scott Galloway?

  It's going to make for a very interesting conference. His will be the most interesting.

• 51:25Jessica Tarlov?

  They're going to be great TV, which we know is what Trump and co. likes best.

• 51:29Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, it's going to be, it's going to be really interesting. Okay, we have one more quick break. Stay with us.

• 51:37Speaker 04

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• 52:08Speaker 01

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• 52:38Scott Galloway?

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• 53:45Scott Galloway?

  Welcome back. Before we wrap, Trump has made history again, becoming the first former and soon to be sitting president sentenced after a felony conviction. In the hush money case, Trump was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records. But Judge Juan Murchán handed down a symbolic ruling, no jail time, no fines and no probation. Trump, now a convicted felon, dismissed it as a political witch hunt while prosecutors argued he's shown no remorse. At the same time, Special Counsel Jack Smith resigned from the Justice Department amid a battle over releasing his report on Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election and mishandling classified documents. Jess, what does this

• 54:27Scott Galloway?

  mean for Trump's political future and public trust in our institutions?

• 54:31Jessica Tarlov?

  Yeah, I mean, it'll be interesting to see. I mean, the battle over whether the DOJ reports that Jack Smith put together actually get released will be ongoing, I imagine. It will get to SCOTUS at some point. And it should be noted that Amy Coney Barrett and Justice Roberts joined the liberal justices to allow the sentencing to go forward on Friday in the hush money case. And you've seen the freak out online from luminaries such as Cat Turd that Amy Coney Barrett is a traitor, you know, Steve Bannon's turned on her, et cetera. They really have no tolerance whatsoever for even, you know, one, one little scribble

• 55:15Jessica Tarlov?

  outside of the lines of total Trumpism. But so Jack Smith has these two reports that have been filed. One of them is about the documents case. And because there are two co-defendants in that, and that that case could continue to go forward, for instance, if Judge Cannon's

• 55:34Jessica Tarlov?

  Ruling on dismissing it doesn't hold. She got it taken away, obviously, for Trump. And now Smith has dropped that, but it could move forward. So that report is not going to come out because you don't want to tamper with a quote unquote, ongoing investigation. But then there's the report about election interference and the DC case. And that's the one that I think Trump especially doesn't want to come out as he moves into Trump 2.0 and gets to pardoning pardoning some of the Jan sixers, et cetera. And if that does get to the Supreme Court, it'll be really interesting to see what Amy Coney Barrett and Justice Roberts do when it comes to that. It makes sense. He didn't get a sentence

• 56:18Jessica Tarlov?

  or anything really happened to him. The guy just won the election. It's not practical. I think it would have made a few uber partisans, you know, feel vindicated in some way. But basically, everyone who's been an honest broker in all of this has said that the hush money case was the weakest case in all of this. And now, most liberals, including people like Adam Schiff, have admitted that Merrick Garland has been a big disappointment in that he waited a couple of years to

• 56:46Scott Galloway?

  Terrible Attorney General. Terrible.

• 56:48Jessica Tarlov?

  Yeah. He might have been a great Supreme Court Justice if he had been able to get his hearing from Mitch McConnell. But obviously, this guy did not have what it takes to meet the moment. And that will, I think, be a big part of Biden's legacy, certainly Merrick Garland's legacy and all of this. And there will be a lot of people who don't know the the strength of the case that they had, don't know all of the details, don't know really what played out. Because this, he didn't appoint Jack Smith, you know, right away, right after January, you know, Biden comes in January 20, January 21. Hey, we need

• 57:30Jessica Tarlov?

  somebody, right, to be looking into this. And I hope For history's sake, that that report does get out into the ether and that it is at least something that people, if they so choose, can refer to and can look back at because, you know, thank God that the institutions held. Thank God that Mike Pence had the courage. And thank God that we got out of that day. And I'm not here to say it was as bad as, you know, nine 11 or Pearl Harbor or Sunny Houston even put it in the category with the Holocaust, which offended me to no end. But January 6 was obviously

• 58:09Jessica Tarlov?

  bad. And you now have JD Vance in his interview. He said that violent January sixers will not be pardoned. People who are just walking around aimlessly will get pardoned, which I think is probably where you should end up in all of this. But I think that he's going to, for people who support him, be able to effectively rewrite this as if January 6 was somewhere around a day of love or something that is really inconsequential. And history is long. And so I hope that this report will at least be part of history. So for those who care to know about what happened and how intricate the plan was and what role the president-elect played in all of it, that it'll be available. What do you make of it?

• 58:54Scott Galloway?

  I'm just excited about referring to President Trump as Fodos, felon of the United States. I think that's

• 59:00Jessica Tarlov?

  That's cute.

• 59:01Scott Galloway?

  We should, yeah, I should credit the comedian. I forget her name. It came up with that on threads. And anytime he and Steve Bannon are on Air Force One, we've got to call it Con Air. I mean, that's just, there's got to be a silver lining. There's got, we got to have some fun with this.

• 59:18Jessica Tarlov?

  I mean, so basically everyone that flies around with him, right?

• 59:20Scott Galloway?

  But to your, to your point, we are Democrats, Merrick Garland, just couldn't have fucked up any worse. And that is insurrection, election interference, mishandling of secure confidential defense documents. These are all issues that deserve legal scrutiny. Hush money to a porn star?

• 59:45Scott Galloway?

  All that did was give the Republicans a legitimate claim that Democrats had weaponized the government and the deep state and the DOJ against their political opponents. So, we didn't get our shit together, or Merrick didn't get their, didn't get a shit together for the real stuff, but managed to figure out a way to create a legitimate political concern on behalf of the right. It just couldn't, could not have handled this any more poorly. And some people would argue, well, he's not, Alvin Bragg doesn't report to him. But in terms of, and this goes back to the notion, this guy gets to jump from lily pad to lily pad. While from an ego standpoint, he doesn't

• 1:00:28Scott Galloway?

  like being called convicted felon, I believe the mishandling and the cadence in the way that these legal cases played out, played a big role in his reelection. I don't think anyone could have strategically thought of the Chestnut Checkers move of, all right, here's four cases, let's pick the one and move forward with it that looks like the deep state and the most politicized, and make that the one that goes the furthest to fastest, such that it emasculates the other three. It, it just played out so incredibly poorly, for, in my opinion, it created the ultimate miscarriage injustice and accrued or created political benefits.

• 1:01:13Jessica Tarlov?

  It also revealed a level of partisanship from our public servants here in New York that's just gross. Like, that you have Tish James and Alvin Bragg on tape saying, "We're gonna get him no matter what." That's ugly. And you don't want that no matter what the crime is, or alleged crime that's been committed, let alone for it to be this case, which was obviously the weakest of all of them. And, you know, Fonny Willis also created a big problem for us in Georgia, I do think. And that's, there are people who've been held accountable in Georgia for good reason for

• 1:01:58Jessica Tarlov?

  what went on there. And now he walks around like... You know, I have a fake conviction from the stupidest case and you'll never see or hear of the rest of it at all.

• 1:02:07Scott Galloway?

  What you got planned for the rest of the week, Jess Tarlov? What is Jessica up to?

• 1:02:10Jessica Tarlov?

  Um, I'm gonna go to work. And so

• 1:02:14Scott Galloway?

  You are at work.

• 1:02:15Jessica Tarlov?

  I'm gonna go to other work.

• 1:02:16Scott Galloway?

  What is this?

• 1:02:18Jessica Tarlov?

  More stressful work, like one on four work. This is just, this is a good hang, which I enjoy. Um, I don't think I have anything that, oh, I'm going to the Knicks game tonight with a high school friend who I had lost touch with. And she texted me and said, and we both played basketball together in high school. She said, shot in the dark. I have tickets to the Knicks. Would you like to go to with me? And I said, yes. And so we're gonna have a rekindling, I feel, and get to watch Jalen Brunson, which I'm excited about.

• 1:02:52Scott Galloway?

  So we, we need to double, we need to double click on that. You were a high school athlete. You played basketball.

• 1:02:56Jessica Tarlov?

  And I played tennis in college. Yeah, I played tennis and basketball in, but Division three, not, you know, I was not.

• 1:03:01Scott Galloway?

  Still, you're, you're a college athlete. That's very impressive.

• 1:03:04Jessica Tarlov?

  Um, or I was.

• 1:03:05Scott Galloway?

  And were you a power forward? What was your position in basketball?

• 1:03:09Jessica Tarlov?

  Yes, technically a power forward, but I would do the tip. So I was, I've been 5'11" since like seventh grade.

• 1:03:15Scott Galloway?

  You were the center?

• 1:03:16Jessica Tarlov?

  Well, for the tip.

• 1:03:17Scott Galloway?

  Okay, let me guess. That was not, that was not the most competitive league in wherever you, I, I imagine you going to some Tony prep school.

• 1:03:23Jessica Tarlov?

  We were, we were called the Ivy League.

• 1:03:25Scott Galloway?

  Sign each other.

• 1:03:26Jessica Tarlov?

  The New York City Ivy League, but, um.

• 1:03:29Scott Galloway?

  Where'd you go to high school? Let's, let's lean into your white privilege. Where did you go to, where'd you go to high school?

• 1:03:33Jessica Tarlov?

  I went to a school called Dalton.

• 1:03:35Scott Galloway?

  You look so self-conscious right now.

• 1:03:37Jessica Tarlov?

  I went to Dalton.

• 1:03:37Scott Galloway?

  You look like, you look like the four when you get in their face. You, you went to Dalton.

• 1:03:42Jessica Tarlov?

  I did. Yeah. But, um, I mean, it's for another time and I'm sure this topic will come up, but it was a very interesting journey through high school athletics. My dad, who was a lawyer, um, threatened a Title IX lawsuit against my high school because they wouldn't let the girls get the prime. Time slot, so no parents could attend, right? If your game's at four o'clock, parents work, they can't come. And it made us very much personas non grata at school, but it was an interesting lesson.

• 1:04:11Scott Galloway?

  Oh, your parents were those parents?

• 1:04:13Jessica Tarlov?

  Just my dad. My mom was like hiding in the corner. So we'd have the 7:30 game and still no one would come because no one wanted to watch the girls. There were more parents there. He really meant well, but it was an interesting lesson in standing up for yourself that my dad imparted upon us as a very young age.

• 1:04:28Scott Galloway?

  And when parents have too much time.

• 1:04:30Jessica Tarlov?

  Yes, he did have a flexible work schedule.

• 1:04:32Scott Galloway?

  And you played tennis in college? Did you get a scholarship?

• 1:04:37Jessica Tarlov?

  No, I didn't. I, my, I was lucky, my parents paid for college, but I got to play and it was great.

• 1:04:46Scott Galloway?

  You went to Dalton and played basketball, then tennis. I went to University High School, which now is, got the distinction of having more homeless kids than any LA SD school. And I got cut from the baseball team, so we have almost nothing in common.

• 1:05:03Jessica Tarlov?

  How did we end up here? I actually think about that a lot. How, how did we end up here?

• 1:05:07Scott Galloway?

  How did we end up here?

• 1:05:08Jessica Tarlov?

  Do your boys play competitive sports?

• 1:05:12Scott Galloway?

  My boys have just the right amount of athletic ability, and that is very little. And they have enough to play sports at their schools. They both play football, better known as soccer.

• 1:05:23Jessica Tarlov?

  I was gonna say, we're talking European.

• 1:05:25Scott Galloway?

  Unwashed masses here in the US. And they can play, which is a ton of fun, but there's absolutely no illusions that they're ever gonna, you know, use that on their college apps or, or play professionally. Whereas for a brief moment, I thought I might be an athlete and I tried out for a couple of teams at UCLA and got cut and ended up on the crew team. But anyways, have a great time with the Knicks, Knicks game. Actually, Jess, why don't you read us out?

• 1:05:50Jessica Tarlov?

  All right. That's all for this episode. Thank you for listening to Raging Moderates. Our producers are David Toledo and Chinanya 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 and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for hanging with us.

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