Inside Scott Galloway's messy, money-first activism
· Business Insider
Andrew Testa for BI
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Scott Galloway never claimed to be an activist.
"I'm too lazy, selfish, socially minded," he told Business Insider on a February call about his unlikely leadership of two movements at once, both with Big Tech in the crosshairs. "I saw an opportunity for a new form of economic activism," he said, "but I'm a long way from being a Cesar Chavez or refusing to give up my bus seat."
Later in our call, he analogizes his "Resist and Unsubscribe" initiative — which urges Americans to unsubscribe from Big Tech to protest the Trump Administration's immigration crackdown — to the 1955-1956 Montgomery bus boycotts. At one point, he calls activists "more noble" than himself. Seconds later, he describes not wanting to "get on a call with a bunch of people in Birkenstocks."
I asked his cohost, Kara Swisher, the same question: Is Scott an activist? Not in a traditional sense, she texted me, or he would have formed a coalition. "I got a lot of pings from people who do organizing that this was a dumb way to do it," Swisher wrote. "It wasn't."
If you don't know Galloway's name, you've certainly seen his clips. The executive-turned-professor-turned-podcaster rakes in millions from his center-left media empire, including four podcasts, two newsletters, and six books, the latest about how young men are socially and economically disadvantaged, thanks in part to Big Tech. He's a sort of shock jock for the TikTok age — and his 400,000 followers there love it.
In recent months, his anti-Big Tech efforts have made him an even bigger lightning rod. He's been disinvited from two speaking gigs, he said, because the hosts didn't "want controversy." (He declined to share which gigs: "I'm hoping they invite me next year.") He's also heard from CEOs or chief marketing officers of 20% of the companies he's targeted, he said, who have mostly been kind. He says he's disappointed because he wishes they felt more threatened.
It's a surprising turn for the serial entrepreneur and business school professor. He's a provocateur, a testosterone-injecting multimillionaire who students call a "dick." Is this the man who can move the masses to quit Amazon Prime cold turkey?
Galloway is a businessman at heart. Even his activism is done through the market.
After federal agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Galloway launched his Resist and Unsubscribe campaign. The best way to catch President Donald Trump's attention, he reasoned, was the market. Since, he said, corporations were providing the "data, infrastructure, and logistics" to assist with Trump's immigration crackdown, it was time for Americans to vote with their dollars.
Andrew Testa for BI
He wanted to walk the walk — and that meant cutting his own subscriptions. He quickly found that he'd been paying for some duplicates: four Apple TV Plus accounts, three ChatGPT subscriptions. He had four AT&T contracts, of which "three are for Blackberrys and iPads that have been in landfills for the last decade," he told me.
The Galloway family also found some workarounds. His son found a "probably illegal" way to watch the Premier League without Paramount+. He binge-watched "Heated Rivalry" before dumping HBO Max. The hardest app to give up was Uber, which he said on his podcast was costing him $34,000 a year.
On stock ownership, Galloway is more mixed. He's hesitant to sell his Amazon shares while the stock is down, but he said he did sell down almost all of his Apple shares.
"I'm especially offended, personally, by Tim Cook," he said. Galloway said that Cook paints himself as a "soft, gentle, nice guy" while sucking up to Trump at the "Melania" premiere. ("I'm not a political person on either side," Cook recently told Good Morning America.)
He plans to move his money out of Goldman Sachs and is debating whether to choose a regional US bank or the Royal Bank of Canada.
If you're worried that you can't fully unsubscribe, he gets it.
"I don't have entire moral clarity around this," Galloway said. "I still have an iPhone, and I'm not giving it up."
As February came to a close, Galloway felt contented. Resist and Unsubscribe had hit 23 million views on social media and 2 million unique site visits, he said. An estimate on his website shows how much market capitalization the movement would wipe out if 5% of visitors canceled two subscriptions. As of this story's publication date, it calculated just over $281 million in losses.
When Galloway first started talking about the plight facing America's young men five years ago, it produced a "gag reflex," he said. People compared him to manosphere influencer Andrew Tate and accused him of misogyny.
Galloway has said that young men are more economically and socially disadvantaged than young women. He points to the stats. Young men account for only 42% of students at four-year universities, and 63% of young men are single. "If you go into a morgue and there are five people who died by suicide, four are men," he said.
His book, "Notes on Being a Man," published in November, is a how-to guide for the disenfranchised young man in your life. Of course, young people are reading for pleasure less and less. His most encouraging feedback comes from mothers, Galloway said.
The book has also received plenty of criticism. In her review in The New Yorker, Jessica Winter writes that Galloway thinks "men should still rank above women in the social hierarchy, but just not as much as before."
Galloway seemed taken aback. "I think that's a total misinterpretation of what I've written about," he said. Those on the left — which he groups The New Yorker into — seemed to think that young men don't have problems, he said. "They are the problem."
"We have decided, in the social hierarchy, young men are less deserving of empathy than women," Galloway said.
Andrew Testa for BI
Galloway also faced misogyny accusations from women online after calling himself a "'50s dad" who wasn't sure if there should be mandatory paternity leave. He said that dads are a "waste of time" in the first few months of a child's life, and that their only jobs are to keep babies from drowning and "make sure moms don't lose it." In The New York Times, Jessica Grose called it "loud and wrong."
On this subject, Galloway was more remorseful. "The comments on paternity leave were meant to be funny," he said. "They weren't. It was stupid, and so far I've paid a fairly significant reputational price."
He was less sympathetic to the Times, which he said "made a cartoon out of my comments so that they could play guardians of gotcha."
Stirring up controversy has long been part of Galloway's brand. Why not double down?
"I try to be provocative, I try to be funny, I try to say what I'm thinking," he told me. "Against paternity leave? No, that's absolutely not the message I want to communicate."
It's easy to think that Galloway hates Big Tech to the bone.
Tech is the target of both of his movements. He accuses the industry of helping to push young men down; in his book, he analogizes Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg to heroin dealers standing outside a middle school. Then, for Resist and Unsubscribe, he asks you to stop paying these companies entirely.
Indeed, on our call, Galloway spared no barbs for the tech CEOs. "I don't think there's any way feasible that he could be described as a good person," he said of Zuckerberg.
But the tech industry is full of his friends, his former coworkers, and the people who made him rich. Galloway is an entrepreneur, after all; he made (some of) his millions on the sale of the business intelligence firm, L2. He wrote a book about Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, which he called a "love letter."
Of the executives targeted by Resist and Unsubscribe, Galloway said that half are acquaintances, a quarter are "friendly" with him, and one or two are friends. "I find that they're, on the whole, good people," he said of tech executives.
That's what makes his shift to organizing so surprising. He's not raging against an industry from the outside; he could well be part of the in-crowd if he wanted to. He was a successful business executive with a vengeful spirit, then a snarky podcaster — and now a man trying to save the world.
Galloway said that humans are "net gainers" from Big Tech — but that we're also net gainers from pesticides and fossil fuels. What's Big Tech's emission? "Rage," he said.
Pesticides and fossil fuels are regulated by the government. For tech, we often rely on a benevolent CEO, Galloway said. He's not sure they exist anymore.
"If we're waiting on the better angels of Mark Zuckerberg to show up, don't hold your breath," he said.
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