Pod Insights On with Kara Swisher Scott Galloway: How to Hit Trump Where it Hurts (Unsubscribe) About this episode Scott Galloway is spearheading a consumer-led protest movement with a simple goal: to get people to cancel their subscriptions to tech companies that have disproportionate influence over the U. S. economy. The New York University marketing professor and Kara’s “Pivot” co-host says targeting the companies that dominate the stock market — and by extension many of the CEOs who’ve cozied up to President Trump — is an easy way to pressure an administration that doesn’t respond to citizen outrage or media criticism.
Kara and Scott talk about his goals for the Resist and Unsubscribe campaign, how he came up with a list of companies worth targeting, and the outsized impact unsubscribing can have on a tech company’s market capitalization. They also talk about the potential to extend the Resist and Unsubscribe boycott beyond February.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Kara Swisher? I want you to go to jail next. You need to Don Lemon this shit. That's what you need to do.
0:04 Speaker 01 Oh, that would take our subscribes way up. We need to get arrested.
0:19 Kara Swisher? Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. My guest today is Scott Galloway. You know who Scott is. He's the professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business, the founder of multiple firms, including L2, Red Envelope, and Profit, and a bestselling author many times over, and of course, my co-host on Pivot, and my longtime work husband. Scott has recently started a movement, which he began talking about on Pivot, called Resist and Unsubscribe. The idea is to pressure CEOs who are either kowtowing to Trump or working with ICE by unsubscribing from their products and services. He's got a website called resistandunsubscribe.com. It's full of information on which companies to unsubscribe from for maximum impact,
1:03 Kara Swisher? and it's really started to gain traction. The original plan was to get people to unsubscribe for the month of February, but as you'll hear, it might be getting extended. I talk to Scott all the time, but I wanted to bring him on the podcast because this Resist and Unsubscribe idea is really important. When I initially heard it, I thought, oh, okay, it's an interesting idea. Now I actually think it's a great idea because working with a lot of people to impact companies has more impact than you think. And of course, it hits Trump where he hurts, which is in the wallet, his big, fat, corrupt wallet. And it's important to send a message to companies, a lot of tech companies, that you don't like what they're doing, and you have choices. And it gives you just a tiny bit more power. You should absolutely protest. You should absolutely
1:45 Kara Swisher? write to your congresspeople. You should absolutely show up at hearings, and you should absolutely vote. But this is another way to show your displeasure by denying them your business. It's really important. So stick around.
2:04 Kara Swisher? Support for this show comes from The Guardian and their new show, Stateside, where journalists Kai Wright and Carter Sherman use the entire independent reporting resources of The Guardian to slow down the news and wrestle with the questions we all have about what is actually happening in the world. Join Kai and Carter three times a week as they utilize all the reporting resources The Guardian has across news, international coverage, climate, culture, wellness, and more. And The Guardian's not owned by a billionaire, they fearlessly report the facts without interference. Go to theguardian.com/stateside to learn more and listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube. That's theguardian.com/stateside.
2:48 Kara Swisher? Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow, none of them ever talk to each other. That's where Odoo comes in. An all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all in one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try it today for free at Odoo.com/kara. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash Kara.
3:31 Speaker 02 Support for the show comes from Engine. Running a small business means every dollar has to work hard, but if your team is still booking travel the old way, it's costing you more than you think. Engine is the fastest-growing travel and spend platform in the country, built specifically for businesses like yours. Book a trip in as little as two and a half minutes, earn up to 10% back on hotels. And in 2025, Engine customers save more than $300 million on travel with zero booking fees, no contracts, and no BS. More than 1,000 businesses join Engine every month. Join them and get $500 when your business signs up and starts traveling at engine.com/box.
4:17 Kara Swisher? Well, Scott Galloway, thank you for coming on On.
4:20 Speaker 01 I just have one question. Am I on with Kara Swisher right now? Am I on with the inimitable tech journalist, live forever, piss off all the tech bros in the world, has literally given up billions of dollars in personal wealth because she is such an enormous pain in the ass?
4:38 Kara Swisher? Yes, like, that's me.
4:39 Speaker 01 Am I on with that Kara Swisher?
4:41 Kara Swisher? You are on.
4:42 Speaker 01 I'm thrilled to be here. It's a big honor.
4:44 Kara Swisher? Okay. Well, here's the thing. We have like beefs with the tech bros and beefs with tech companies and stuff like that. But one thing you've started lately is this resist and unsubscribe. And a lot of On listeners may not know about it. So we want to get them to know about it. I want you to explain what resist and unsubscribe and how does it work? And how'd you come up with it? You started talking about it on Pivot, really. But how did you decide to go full bore into a resistance movement?
5:10 Speaker 01 Well, I say this a lot. I've struggled my entire career with the difference between being right and being effective. And I think protests and a lot of podcasters and journalists talking about the injustice and the slow burn to fascism, that's all meaningful. But I think they're missing a profound weapon. And that is the greatest government action in history was six years ago, when on a dime, the government decided to inject trillions of dollars into the economy, new laws passed, new guidelines. And it wasn't because tens of thousands of people were dying. It was because GDP crashed 31%.
5:48 Kara Swisher? Right. So it was a reaction to what had happened during COVID.
5:50 Speaker 01 But it was a reaction to the economy.
5:52 Kara Swisher? Right.
5:52 Speaker 01 And then if you look at most recently, when does the president actually check back on plans to annex Greenland or on tariffs? When the S and P or the bond market died. And then I thought, well, okay, if that's the goal, what's the string that you can pull on? What's the soft tissue? And it's the following. T-Mobile was supposed to sign up 992,000 new subscribers. They announced 962. And their stock was off. $12 billion in the after hours. So if we can slow the rates of growth of subscriptions to big tech, you are going to see a massive hit to their market capitalization.
6:34 Speaker 01 And then the individuals who will notice this, the CEOs, they are the ones that have the president's ear that he's constantly prostrating or using as his kind of
6:44 Kara Swisher? Chew toy.
6:45 Speaker 01 I don't know, show ponies, yeah, chew toys.
6:47 Kara Swisher? Yeah.
6:48 Speaker 01 And these 10 companies make up 40% of the S and P. So while I applaud, and I think protest is really important, journalism is really important, the courts. What I think we're missing, and the objective is to educate people that the weapon hiding in plain sight is just to decide, maybe I only need two streaming media platforms, not six. Maybe I don't need the paid version of Chat GPT. I'll go with the free version.
7:14 Kara Swisher? Right, or use one that has better values, for example. Which is, that's not a new thing, the idea of boycotts, right? I remember, I mean, I go way back to Anita Bryant and orange juice and gay bars and things like that, which was super effective. Obviously, the Kimmel one, even though Disney says that wasn't the reason, was effective in terms of everything. So you're trying to reach the CEOs who reached Trump, correct?
7:37 Speaker 01 I'm trying to reach the markets who will then reach the CEOs who will then reach Trump. Look, this is, I'll, I'll, let me go. I've been learning a lot about protests recently.
7:48 Kara Swisher? Right, you've been studying them, right? Like what's effective and what's not?
7:51 Speaker 01 And there's studies on it. So the most, probably the most famous is the Montgomery bus strike.
7:56 Kara Swisher? Sure.
7:57 Speaker 01 And what people remember was this incredibly courageous woman who refused to give up her seat. That was the cinematic part of it.
8:02 Kara Swisher? Right.
8:03 Speaker 01 And it wasn't until 11 months later that they decided to get rid of segregation on municipal bus lines. The economic protests that worked are sustained, building, and they're economic. Fast forward to 2025, Kimmel and Disney. The unsubscribes at Disney were actually plummeting when they decided to put Kimmel back on the air. But traditional media began picking up the story and shaming them.
8:30 Kara Swisher? Got it, right.
8:31 Speaker 01 So it's, it's a function of, it needs to be a sustained build. It does need to be economic. And it's also about media highlighting it to the employees internally. And the risk of economic damage.
8:44 Kara Swisher? So why then for only one month? I mean, you were saying the Montgomery Bus thing was a year, and it took a while before it sinks in. Why a month versus like February?
8:53 Speaker 01 That's a great question. So I find the research I've done is that day-long economic strikes are an annoyance, but don't move the needle.
9:01 Kara Swisher? Like, don't work today.
9:02 Speaker 01 They just don't work. Like, don't go in Friday, no work Friday. It's fun, it gets reality online, it doesn't do anything. You might be right. And what I might do is, if the momentum keeps building, I might leave the side up past February. Because what I'm seeing online now is, I was talking about this last night, I got very little momentum out of the gates. Very few people, and you and a handful of other people said this is important. But now that it's got some momentum, and I've been on every, every channel, a cable news program in the world, all of a sudden, people are finding their backbone and saying this is a good idea. If it keeps building momentum, I'll keep the side up,
9:43 Speaker 01 and I'll start maybe adding companies, taking companies off, and updating. I'm trying to be really transparent around side analytics, what works, what doesn't. I mean, so far, I use AI to evaluate my progress. So far, its summary has been, product management teams at big tech are talking about this, but it's not yet a conversation in the boardroom. You still have some wood to chop here.
10:06 Kara Swisher? But you've heard from CEOs.
10:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, I have heard.
10:08 Kara Swisher? I've heard from CEOs, yeah.
10:10 Speaker 01 And they all say the same thing. Scott, really respect what you're doing here. I trust you understand, as a former board member and shareholder, how difficult it is to go first, but we just wanted to reach out and tell you that I agree with a lot of, you know, they're so nice and they're so charming.
10:24 Kara Swisher? Right, and they agree with you, but they still are gonna do business.
10:27 Speaker 01 Well, they say they're gonna, I'm like, boss, agreeing with me on this phone call or via text message doesn't do anybody any good.
10:33 Kara Swisher? Right.
10:33 Speaker 01 It makes me feel good. But, you know, it's never, it's never the wrong time to do the right thing. And what I try to do is, these are all men who are gonna be dead soon. I try to play to their sense of mortality and their emotions. I mean, I had this conversation with the head of a very large streaming network on Saturday morning. I'm like, boss, we're on the back nine. We're going to be dead soon. Time is going fast. When the kids are around you and you know that you're going to look into their eyes for the last time, do you want to be the guy that got shareholder value up 10, 20%? Or the guy who took a stand that cost something? Like, what, what do you want at the end?
11:09 Kara Swisher? Well, they also argue that they, they, they're there for shareholders. You see the prostrations that Tim Cook makes for Trump, for example, someone unlikely to do so, and then behind the scenes to his employees says, "I'm all for immigration," right?
11:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, I want credit for being a leader without actually being a leader, is how I would describe Tim Cook. And let me, let me go there.
11:29 Kara Swisher? This is the apple head for people who don't know.
11:31 Speaker 01 I think competition, open markets, especially for a guy like Tim Cook, civil rights, have played a really important role in that company's success and his personal success.
11:42 Kara Swisher? Absolutely.
11:43 Speaker 01 And for him not to nod back to those things and be willing to take a stand, I find gross. And what I do empathize with is none of them, it's very difficult for any of them to make the first move, because a good autocrat rewards his allies with insider trading information and sweetheart deals and avoidance of Chinese tariffs.
12:02 Kara Swisher? Or whatever you want, yeah.
12:04 Speaker 01 And punishes severely the person who moves first. So actually, a really key player in this, I believe, and why I had him on my podcast yesterday, is a guy like Jeffrey Sonnenfeld.
12:14 Kara Swisher? That's what I was going to ask about Jeffrey, because Jeffrey does lists. He did it around Russia and Ukraine.
12:18 Speaker 01 So for those of you who don't know, Jeffrey is a professor of leadership at Yale, and he literally gets the CEO of AT&T and Anthropic in the same room. He gets all of them. They said, "Jeff, what needs to happen here is that 10, 50, 100 of the Fortune 500 need to collectively say something, such that the president can't punish any one of them. He'd have to go after all of them." But just to circle back, let me go to the micro here. Chelsea Handler called me and said, "Are you..." Taking your money out of Goldman and putting it in a Canadian bank account and going from dollars to Canadian dollars?
12:55 Kara Swisher? We talked about that on the show.
12:56 Speaker 01 And she asked really thoughtful questions and I said, I struggle with this, but I think I'm going to go to a US regional bank and keep my money in dollars because I don't want to hurt America. I want to send a message to Americans about the weapons they have and I want big tech to feel this pain that there's some economic downside, not just upside to supporting ICE.
13:12 Kara Swisher? So I'll get to that issue in a minute, but the idea is the tech company's stock price drops and the CEOs then talk to Trump. But how do you decide, you've broken down corporations on the unsubscribe list to two categories, ground zero and blast zone. Talk about the distinctions.
13:28 Speaker 01 So ground zero is companies that if you can take their subscription growth from, you know, 8% month on month to 7.5%, Sam Altman isn't going to get his round done at $850 billion.
13:41 Kara Swisher? Right.
13:41 Speaker 01 It's the tail of the whip. It's the, you know, it's the ignition, the small spark that ignites, you know, a nuclear detonation. Those companies are so sensitive to subscription growth and they have such massive market capitalizations that when Microsoft's cloud growth is 37% versus 38, it loses 10% of its value and then the entire NASDAQ 100 declines 1.5% in one day. So ground zero is where there might be a small spark might create a massive detonation. The blast zone is companies like AT&T that are openly working with ICE. Quite frankly, it's an important philosophical signal to say, I don't want to work with companies directly, work with them. But quite frankly, AT&T is somewhat meaningless in
14:26 Speaker 01 terms of market cap. And let me give you an example. If you were to say to people, no economic activities, stop buying groceries, just plant a garden and don't shop. Kroger's is a public company. I don't think the CEO quite frankly has the president's ear, but he is the CEO of a very big company. Kroger's trades at point three times revenues. If you cancel your OpenAI ChatGPT page subscription and just use the free one, which as far as I can tell is pretty much the same, and I'm all over AI right now. They lose $240 in a company that's being valued at 40 times revenues or $10,000.
15:03 Kara Swisher? Right, so you're making it easy for people to do that. And these are things that they can do and send a message at the same time. Were there ones that you considered and then left off? Because everybody has some hair on them, right? That's the issue is there's not a company that doesn't have some link to the government, that doesn't have some, something that they, some deal they did with the Defense Department or whatever. Companies can't stay totally clean in that regard, which I think is the problem with some of it, is there's no, maybe Patagonia, I guess. Like, there's very few like that.
15:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, I don't have total moral clarity around this. I'm still, I'm not giving up my iPhone.
15:38 Kara Swisher? Right, that's what I mean.
15:39 Speaker 01 Someone correctly asked me, my, one of my co-hosts for another podcast I do said, are you selling your Apple stock? I'm like, oh, fuck. And I've started selling down my Apple stock.
15:48 Kara Swisher? I did that.
15:48 Speaker 01 I'm not sure, I'll give you another one. I'm not sure if Netflix should be on the list because I think of them as being politically neutral, doing their best just to be good actors. I really like the CEOs there, but I'm like, okay, it's a $300 billion market cap company. The CEO decides to get on a plane and go meet with the president, hat in hand, because the Ellison's are there as well. And there's all sorts of wrong about the president getting involved in a socialist, cronyist movement. But I, I wanna, I struggle with who's on the list and who isn't. I struggle with how far I should go. I struggle with one thing I'm trying not to do. I don't want to be the arbiter of what people should unsubscribe or subscribe to.
16:30 Kara Swisher? You want to give them information. Okay, this is what they do.
16:33 Speaker 01 If you're rattled, as I was, by the Secretary of Homeland Security calling an ICU nurse serving veterans a domestic terrorist and you want to do something, what I'm saying is, You're going to be shocked if you go to resistinunsub.com, how much money you are spending on these platforms that you didn't even know. And the examples I use are the following. When I unsubscribed from Amazon Prime, I found out that I was still a member of Amazon One, their healthcare service that I signed up for in 2020 to get a prescription of Paxil. When I unsubscribed from AT&T to go to Noble Mobile, I found out I didn't have one, I had four AT&T accounts. And three of them were for iPads and BlackBerrys that have been in a landfill for a decade.
17:17 Kara Swisher? I found that out recently.
17:19 Speaker 01 And they kept charging me 60 or 70 bucks. And they know damn well, there's never been a ping from that, but they continue to auto renew. I have, no joke, spent $4,000 to $6,000 on automatically renewing subscription. I found out that, and this is a story of privilege, I'm taking 370 Ubers a year. And because Uber has consolidated the market, they have increased the prices 7% to 10% a year. The price of Ubers, or Uber Lux, which is what I take, has doubled in the last six years. So it's similar to Dry January, where you might decide to come out of it and recalibrate your alcohol intake, up or down, mostly down.
17:56 Kara Swisher? Yeah.
17:56 Speaker 01 This is an easy way to, one, save some money and send an out.
18:00 Kara Swisher? And figure out where you're subscribed and what you need.
18:05 Kara Swisher? We'll be back in a minute.
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21:38 Kara Swisher? So talk about how it's affected you personally. You got rid of Uber One, Netflix, correct? Amazon Prime? And are your kids bugging you to restart the, an Xbox subscription? Because I've got to have a discussion with Louis tonight about Apple Music, which I want to get off. I've gotten off almost all the Apple things, except for my storage, which I have to figure something out.
21:57 Speaker 01 Apple Music was easy.
21:59 Kara Swisher? Not for my kids.
22:00 Speaker 01 So let me be clear, in terms of the family, I, they're all down with my movement. They kind of rolled their eyes, but fine, dad's at it again. More of his like, attention mongering, he's such a whore. That's the kind of, that's what I, that's what their body language says to me.
22:13 Kara Swisher? Yeah.
22:14 Speaker 01 And they're like, fine, we'll go along with it. But when I told them we were going from six to zero streaming media platforms, I'm not exaggerating, they looked at each other like, alright, smother dad and sleep tonight. And so we've gone down to two, and we're about to go down to one.
22:28 Kara Swisher? Yeah.
22:29 Speaker 01 But I'm not asking people some, I'm not willing to move to Ted Kaczynski's old shed in the forest and have a ham radio. I'm keeping my iPhone, I'm going to have one streaming media platform.
22:40 Kara Swisher? Which one?
22:41 Speaker 01 I hate to say it, but it's the big one, you know?
22:44 Kara Swisher? Netflix.
22:45 Speaker 01 Well, there you go.
22:46 Kara Swisher? Yeah.
22:47 Speaker 01 So, we all voted on it as a family, and everyone had, I would have kept HBO Max just because I like watching hot men who play hockey fuck each other, but that's just me.
22:56 Kara Swisher? But you've already done that.
22:57 Speaker 01 That's just me.
22:58 Kara Swisher? Because you can go back to things, right? That's your whole point, is you can.
23:00 Speaker 01 My, my point is, this is your call.
23:02 Kara Swisher? Yeah.
23:03 Speaker 01 I'm an economically secure guy living in London, I'm not the arbiter. What I'm trying to give you is information on you. You have zombies outside that are really upsetting you? Well, guess what? I got a fucking cannon that you, is in your house that you didn't even know you had. And I'll go back where I was headed with Chelsea Handler. Chelsea went on Instent and said, these are the following companies I'm unsubscribing from. She listed about a thousand bucks a year in savings.
23:31 Kara Swisher? Yeah.
23:31 Speaker 01 Most of these companies, especially the big tech companies, traded an average of 10x revenue. So Chelsea unsubscribing cost them $10,000. But I went on AI on both platforms and I said, okay, she'll probably have a quarter of a million to half a million likes. The number of views is in the millions. And I went on my side analytics. I think Chelsea's one social media post about her unsubscribing is going to get between five and 7,000 new unique visits to the resistant unsub site today. The AI says you're getting about a 4% to 5% conversion to people who actually unsub.
24:04 Kara Swisher? Mm-hmm.
24:05 Speaker 01 So.
24:05 Kara Swisher? Explain what conversion is.
24:06 Speaker 01 How many people come to the site and either buy your products or actually unsubscribe from a platform? And the average number of platforms people are unsubscribing from is two to three. So anyways, 5% of 7,000 is 350, times two is 700, times an average annual subscription, that's $140,000, times 10, that's $1.4 million.
24:33 Kara Swisher? So it adds up.
24:34 Speaker 01 My point is, if you woke up and said, I am pissed off and I want to do something, A, personally, you can probably take a $10,000 bite out of the market cap of these companies. And two, if you have anything resembling a platform, you can take millions of dollars. And wars are fought one battle at a time. They're fought one soldier at a time. We like the idea of a cinematic detonation where overnight.
24:59 Kara Swisher? Yeah.
24:59 Speaker 01 It's not.
25:00 Kara Swisher? It's fixed.
25:00 Speaker 01 It's, you know, death by a thousand cuts? Well, okay, if you have 10,000 cuts, you have an impact. I'm speaking to the entire senior class at a high school in Michigan who want me to argue why they should all collectively unsubscribe from Spotify.
25:13 Kara Swisher? Mm-hmm.
25:14 Speaker 01 And I can say to them, I'll work them through the math and say, if the entire senior class at this school in Michigan unsubscribes from Spotify, it's going to cost them about $700,000 in market cap.
25:25 Kara Swisher? Right.
25:26 Speaker 01 And I just want you aware of the math and then you make your own decisions.
25:30 Kara Swisher? Right, that you have an impact. Because I think most people feel useless, right? They feel like they're
25:36 Speaker 01 Helpless.
25:36 Kara Swisher? Small. I think you're moving into that. Spotify is not on the list, but you mentioned them right here.
25:43 Speaker 01 A lot of people are doing Spotify because it's easy to unsubscribe from because there's so many substitutes around music. And I want to be clear, I'm not sure why Spotify is not on the list. I'm having a difficult time being the arbiter of who should be on the list and who shouldn't.
25:55 Kara Swisher? Well, it's your list and then people can make a decision or you could have an area where people could suggest. By last week, more than half a million had visited resist and unsubscribe.com and the campaign has generated over 18 million views across social platforms. So how do you continue to build and sustain that energy? Is it a first step towards mobilizing a mass of people towards prolonged economic strike or street protests? How do you look at that? Because you're talking about taking, you want to take a quarter million out of the market cap of these companies.
26:24 Speaker 01 Quarter billion.
26:25 Kara Swisher? Quarter billion, excuse me, and that's a lot. Talk about how you sustain that energy. One of the things is media talking to me, talking to MSNBC or whoever, you know, going on Fox News, et cetera, et cetera.
26:37 Speaker 01 Well, so the answer is, I don't know. And so right now we're tracking to hit these companies with a notional decrease in their market cap of a quarter of a billion dollars, which across all of them, isn't a lot. This is what I've done. I started personally with a bunch of social videos and I put the site up. Okay, you know, kind of a tree falling in the forest. I then went on traditional media. I was everywhere. All of a sudden it got some momentum. Monday and Tuesday, the site visits started to decline. We lost some energy. And then yesterday, some fairly, I won't call it famous, but people who have big footprints went on to their social and started talking about it. And it feels like the momentum is increasing again. I can't be on CNN or Fox every day or NPR was on with Christian Amanpour last night.
27:21 Speaker 01 I'm going on a bunch of pods today. That is only sustainable for so long. I think, and I'd be curious to get your thoughts, I think the only way this sustains, Kara, is if enough people decide to do it themselves and then communicate their actions on social.
27:36 Kara Swisher? Or create their own versions of resist and unsubscribe, right?
27:39 Speaker 01 Hundred percent.
27:39 Kara Swisher? And one of the things I told you, you're doing it by yourself, you know, and of course you got, I had a lot of sort of. The activist community is like, why doesn't he do it in a group? And I'm like, because he hates long phone calls with lots of people. I don't know what else to say. You moved on your own, right? But you need others to join at some point, correct?
27:57 Speaker 01 Well, I'm violating one of my dictums, and that is greatness isn't the agency of others. You only win great wars with allies. I have a personal feeling here, and that is at my age, I don't want to get on the phone with a bunch of people in Birkenstocks arguing over which company should be on the list or not. I just don't have the fucking patience.
28:14 Kara Swisher? Yeah.
28:14 Speaker 01 So this is, I did hear, I went on the resistance.com podcast. I spoke to the good people yesterday at Indivisible. And to be blunt here, I'm finding that I have as much insight into this as they do at this point.
28:28 Kara Swisher? Right.
28:28 Speaker 01 And that's not to say I don't want to partner with them. I spoke to a kid today who said, I think I can get a thousand young creators to talk about what they're unsubscribing from.
28:36 Kara Swisher? Probably more effective, right?
28:37 Speaker 01 Right. I am coming to the grips of the fact that is, you know, as infinitely likable and sweet as I come across, I'm going to have to find other allies in this fight, which makes my skin crawl. But anyways, you asked me how this sustains. I need to do a better job of finding coordinated, organized allies. And two, more than anything, I've planted the seeds here. We definitely going to take, it looks like now a quarter of a billion dollars out of their market cap. I want to educate Americans as to the power of their economic strength.
29:13 Kara Swisher? Right.
29:14 Speaker 01 But if this is going to sustain, it's got to go, for lack of a better term, it's got to get some virality on social.
29:20 Kara Swisher? Yeah, right, exactly. I mean, the theory behind, it's like the ice bucket challenge, right? Everybody suddenly has to do it. The theory behind resistance grabs that you want the most impact with the least amount of sacrifice. One of the issues is people don't recognize their wallet has, just as much as making a sign, has a different kind of impact, but has an impact, right? Correct? Is that this is something that's easy to do, and you're not trying to make it easy for people to protest, but it's, it's a thing that is more powerful with less effort, right? And actually is good for your budget, too, by the way.
29:52 Speaker 01 I'm trying to figure out the way you can have the biggest impact with the least amount of effort. To give up your Saturday and go protest and make signs, that's a real effort and more power to those people, and they're incredibly inspiring. If you decide not to go into work because you're pissed off, that's a real risk. If you decide to go without groceries, that's a huge risk. Canceling ChatGPT and going to the free one relative to the impact you're having on OpenAI right now and the signal you're sending, I think is an enormous ROI relative to the consumer friction there.
30:21 Kara Swisher? Do you have an endgame or just you want to start a, you know, a fire essentially?
30:27 Speaker 01 Well, my endgame is that we don't have a mass secret police terrorizing Americans. You know, my, my endgame is we stop, we find it untenable or that the different quote unquote co-equal branches of government that have effectively become the Duma decide that you are not allowed to take undocumented workers or even some US citizens and send them to what is the definition of a concentration camp and that is a black side outside of the overview of the laws and regulations of a, of a nation. I find what's going on here, you know, what's my endgame? My endgame long-term is to have the president check back as he has with other market movements on some of what I think are really, really frightening policies.
31:12 Speaker 01 But in the short run, my objective is very simple. I want tens of millions of Americans to think, what can I do? I can protest, I can vote, I can turn on my ring light and be outraged, I can go on and call Pam Bondi, you know, Jan, Jan Brady if she was possessed by Satan, whatever. Or, or I can, I just made that up, I'm proud of that.
31:34 Kara Swisher? You know, that was actually a plot point on one of the Brady movies.
31:37 Speaker 01 Or, or if I want to take just $10,000 out of the market cap of OpenAI in about 20 seconds, I can cancel my paid subscription and use the free one.
31:48 Kara Swisher? One of the things you did was go on people with people who are just angry right-wingers, which I don't advise you to do, but one of the things-
31:56 Speaker 01 It was a mistake, I didn't know that was going to happen.
31:58 Kara Swisher? Oh, really? Because that would be their move, you're killing the economy.
32:01 Speaker 01 You're talking about Pierce Morgan, typically brings me on and I have a sane, thoughtful debate with like that guy, Kevin O'Leary. And by the way, it was very civil and I thought his audience benefited from it. He invited me on and quite frankly, he ambushed me with one of these young MAGA people I'd never heard of before. I don't think I handled it especially well, but I think both of us look worse for it.
32:24 Speaker 02 What policies do you object to, professor?
32:28 Speaker 01 Well, having a mass secret police shooting mothers in the face or denying a person's first second.
32:34 Speaker 03 A secret police? You're referring to border patrol.
32:35 Speaker 01 Excuse me, sir, please stop interrupting me. I let you.
32:36 Speaker 03 I'm just trying to clarify.
32:37 Speaker 01 I let you prattle. I let you prattle on with your trafe. Let me finish and I'll let you finish.
32:41 Speaker 03 I know, I'm just trying to understand what you're attempting to say. You're referring to border patrol and secret police?
32:45 Speaker 01 Denying a person's first second.
32:46 Kara Swisher? Yeah, well, the idea was you're hurting the economy, Scott Galloway. Like, that's their gonna be their move.
32:50 Speaker 01 No, he called it desperate, unpatriotic, and you liberals can't get over that Trump won fairly soon trying to crash the economy.
32:59 Kara Swisher? Right.
32:59 Speaker 01 And I hope Pierce got another 11 or 12 dollars in ad cents for being such a fucking rage-baiting whore. Hi, Pierce. But his audience does not benefit from people just interrupting each other and getting into a food fight, which, by the way, the algorithms absolutely love. I'll give you that. And by the way, the left does it, too. Turn into Abby Phillips for her new show called "I Feel Stupider," where they bring on a right-wing guy who says something so vile, so false, and then they have a bunch of C-League academics with, you know, blue hair go fucking crazy.
33:36 Kara Swisher? That's a formula.
33:37 Speaker 01 And it's their most popular show.
33:39 Kara Swisher? But what, answer that, answer it in a, like, is there anything wrong with tanking the economy? Like, that's their whole thing. Like, I get their stupid argument about patriotism, stupid, they're just pulling all your buttons, kind of pushing the buttons of idiocy.
33:51 Speaker 01 They're not gonna tank the economy. This is what we want. Sam Altman, Tim Cook, Sergey Larry, Satya, you know, Sooner I'll Go. You know what? This whole.
34:02 Kara Swisher? I'm sick of this.
34:03 Speaker 01 This whole ignoring ICE is starting to cost us money. It was making us money. We were left out of this tariff nonsense. We might get government-backed financing for our chips and infrastructure. We get all sorts of goodies. We might, in fact, get huge government contracts. It's good for shareholder value. They have to be taught.
34:23 Kara Swisher? Downside, we have to go see the Melania movie. Go ahead.
34:26 Speaker 01 At some point, when they start calling each other and go, you know, people are pissed off. Have you seen all these unsubscribe movements? That's when they're gonna find their testicles. That's when they're gonna say, you know, collectively, we need to put out a statement saying what's going on here is directly contrary to the great American values that built companies like Amazon, Apple, Meta, Google. I doubt Zuckerberg will do it, because I'm convinced he is the Dark Lord. I do think that. Unless there's gonna be an exorcism soon, and that's not gonna happen.
34:57 Kara Swisher? Yeah, no.
34:58 Speaker 01 But be clear, these guys, if there's enough organic movements where their shares are gonna go down, not up, because of their support of ICE.
35:08 Kara Swisher? Right. Or if it sticks with them, it sticks with sticking with their consumers versus anything else. Let me, let me ask you a bigger, bigger question in that regard. There'd be no need for anyone to unsubscribe if the business community wasn't enabling all this, and in such a really ridiculous way. I can't count how many times one of us or a guest on the podcast has said some version of, what's the point of having this money if you're not gonna take a stand where it counts? And Tina Brown just said, it turns out having fuck you money means you just want more fuck you money, and you don't wanna do anything with it. What's the point? So, when you watch these business leaders bend the knee, how do you feel about that? Many people are surprised. That's one thing I get from a lot of people.
35:48 Speaker 01 I don't get it. I literally, I'm, just as I saw, I just had no concept of the depths of the depravity as revealed in the Epstein files. I knew it was bad. I didn't know it was this bad.
36:00 Kara Swisher? And it's worse, because you're not seeing the unredacted, but go ahead.
36:03 Speaker 01 I didn't know, I didn't know that the DOJ had been contacted by survivors and had no interest in even speaking to them. I mean, it's like, okay, let me get this, and then you release their names, but you redact the co-conspirators?
36:17 Kara Swisher? Alleged co-conspirators.
36:18 Speaker 01 So, that was shocking to me. Going to your question, and I'll do some virtue signaling for both of us. We both make really good money. We're both gonna be able to send our kids to the best schools. We're both gonna have really thoughtful, good-looking people taking care of us and wheeling us around when we're older. So, I'd like to think it, it creates, I think wealth can do this, ideal anticolonous society. It gives you fewer excuses to not be a good person, and gives you more opportunities to be a good person. That's the whole point of money. That's the whole point of wealth is that, and I look at everything now through the lens of masculinity, you want to provide, you want to develop skills and strengths such that you can protect others.
37:02 Speaker 01 And what could afford less protection right now? If we don't have the most powerful men in America deciding that I need to protect, when a mother of two is shot in the face three times, when an ICU nurse who is taking care of veterans is shot 10 times, and in about 15 seconds, his First, Second, Fourth, and 10th Amendment rights are violated, those are the very principles that gave us the Gulfstreams, gave us civil liberties, gave us unbelievable companies, gave us access to power, and it would be short sighted and just a total lack of gratitude and recognition
37:46 Speaker 01 of the people, whether at Normandy Beach, or people who were protesting the civil rights. All of these people paid such huge sacrifices to give me my fucking Gulfstream and the fact that I can live with another man, or the fact that I could immigrate here from India without being worried about my family being rounded up.
38:03 Kara Swisher? It's, what's the point of having it? That is exactly right.
38:08 Speaker 01 It's fucking gross.
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40:51 Kara Swisher? Let me read a quote for you. Audre Lorde, the writer, activist, and feminist famously said, "The master's tool will never dismantle the master's house." On the other hand, we've heard the saying that's attributed to Lenin, probably incorrectly, "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." Who's right there? We're trying to use technology to organize this movement. And I think that's fine. Personally, why not use their rope to hang them?
41:15 Speaker 01 I'm using Instagram.
41:16 Kara Swisher? Mm hmm.
41:17 Speaker 01 And people have called me out for it. And I said, look, I have a home in Florida. And the electricity we get is from a coal-fired plant. I'm hugely against coal, but I still turn on my lights. I want to be clear that one of the downsides of a concentration of power is that they extort or exact greater rents. And one of the greater rents they exact is that you don't have much choice. I understand what people say. I can't give up search right now. I get it. So I personally am quite optimistic that if you look back, we like to always think that we're sub. As humans, we think we're subject to something totally unique. When the reality is, you don't have to go very far back in history to find times that were the same or worse. If you look at America, the notion that this is this dark time
42:01 Speaker 01 we'll never recover from is just not accurate. We were purposely, under a wonderful president, who is now considered a hero, incarcerating Japanese families solely because of their identity, many of whom had kids fighting for us in the European theater.
42:16 Kara Swisher? He signed it. He signed it.
42:18 Speaker 01 Yeah. So the notion somehow that we haven't been in very dark places. But what has typically happened is we get it right over the medium and long term, almost better than anybody else. We make a lot of big mistakes in the short term. But our democracy has rebounded and shown real tensile strength. And his comeback, I would argue, even stronger. And that's what I'm hoping this is. I see a lot of movement. I see a lot of. Look at the popularity of the president. It is plummeting right now.
42:47 Kara Swisher? Plummeting, plummeting.
42:48 Speaker 01 So I'm hopeful.
42:50 Kara Swisher? Yeah. So you already brought this up, but let me get some final clarity. I've asked you this on Pivot, if you had divested from one of these companies. You said, I think I'm going to have to. I'm going to have to walk the walk here. It's a big step. It's like another step, right? As you said, nobody can extricate themselves perfectly from the capitalist system to be completely pure. So people shouldn't. I don't think they should dwell on that. I think you should do your best. That's my feeling. And but, you know, there are those who think you have to extricate yourself completely.
43:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, look, like I said, I'm not giving up my iPhone. But as someone who is asking other people to do this, as someone who is. You know, the catalyst for this little movement, I have an obligation to lead by example and be a little bit more out front than other people. So I am selling down my Apple stock. I'm going Goldman Sachs manages my money. I really like David Solomon. I really like Jamie Dimon. I'm disappointed that those types of leaders who do have the president's ear have not been more vocal. So I'm going to transfer my money out of Goldman and my assets to a regional bank. You know, everybody has to make up their own mind about how aggressive they want to be. All I'm trying to do is, one, raise awareness of the power of this.
44:00 Speaker 01 And two, make it easy for them to unsubscribe from some of the more obvious players.
44:05 Kara Swisher? Yeah. So what if, what if the snowballs and it turns out you're the hero? We didn't know we needed. Are you prepared to come to face of the anti-Trump economic resistance?
44:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think you're being generous. I don't, I don't think that's.
44:16 Kara Swisher? I am being generous.
44:17 Speaker 01 I think the last, I don't know if, I think Amazon has recognized or profiled me. And when I go to their site is serving as recommending erectile dysfunction socks. So I don't know if it sees me as the leader we need right now, Kara.
44:32 Kara Swisher? So last question, what do you tell people who feel hopeless or overwhelmed? Because that's one of the things. And when people ask me, and I'm like, it's just something like you, you know, it just don't overthink it. Right? People who want to take part but only unsubscribe from a few services who don't know where to begin. What's your message? Give your final inspirational speech.
44:52 Speaker 01 Well, this isn't inspirational. I coach a lot of young men. I had a young man call me a few weeks ago and say, I had sex and I, I'm, I have symptoms of something. And he was freaking out and really upset. And I said, okay.
45:07 Kara Swisher? This wasn't one of my kids, right? I'm kidding.
45:11 Speaker 01 No, I'm sorry. That was, that was last year. That was 2024. And I said, look, that the lesson I wish I had learned earlier in life is that action absorbs anxiety. I want you right now to go online. I want you to set up an appointment and you're gonna go in and find out if and what is going on with you. And we did it online together, and the next day he called me, "Good news," you know, but he immediately felt better. Action absorbs anxiety. And if you're as upset as I am about what is going on, and for the first time in my life, I have had trouble disassociating from what's going on. It has created anxiety and anger, and it takes me away from my family, it takes me away from my health, it takes me away from my mental wellness, then what I would
45:55 Speaker 01 tell you is it feels really good to do something. Paint a sign and go to a protest, call your congressperson, speak to friends, start thinking about organizing and getting people registered to vote. Give a little bit of money to a candidate who you think is showing courage around this. It feels really good to do things with other people. It makes you feel American. It makes you feel strong. And like I said, how do you want to be remembered? As the person barking at the moon and angry, or the person who actually fucking did something? And the other thing that I'm trying to do personally is, the reason I have had such a wonderful life, I have the economic security I have, the friends I have, that I get to hang out with someone much higher character, much hotter than me, is I have never been
46:40 Speaker 01 afraid of public failure. The difference between you and action and greatness and relevance is your fear of public failure. That's why people don't start businesses. That's why people don't reach out and express romantic interest to people hotter than them. That's why people don't write op-eds that are potentially dangerous to them professionally. And what I can tell you is the risk of public failure is a curb that's two inches fucking tall. It doesn't matter. We're all gonna be dead soon. If you want to start a website, if you want to tell your group that you are unsubscribing and this is why, say I threw this party and no one showed up, and it was laughable, and there's that angry professor, and what a stupid movement, it didn't work. You know what? They're gonna be dead soon,
47:23 Speaker 01 and so am I. The difference between you and greatness and relevance is overcoming your fear of public failure.
47:28 Kara Swisher? Yep, that's it. That's all you have to do. Scott, the hero we didn't know we needed.
47:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, right.
47:34 Kara Swisher? Scott Galloway.
47:35 Speaker 01 Erectile dysfunction socks. And let me just say.
47:39 Kara Swisher? They're not helping.
47:40 Speaker 01 Kara, a lot of people, a lot of people shitpost you. I know this firsthand. You are a very loyal friend. Who was first on this bandwagon?
47:47 Kara Swisher? Kara Swisher.
47:48 Speaker 01 Kara Swisher. All my good friends now, now that I've had a little bit of success and momentum, they're all of a sudden now they're like, I'm with you, brother. And I'm like, yeah, where the fuck were you 10 days ago? When no one was RSVPing to my party?
48:00 Kara Swisher? Yeah, I like all your schemes, Scott. Any scheme you want to do, I'm there for it. I'm there for all your schemes. It's a good scheme.
48:05 Speaker 01 I appreciate that.
48:06 Kara Swisher? At first I was like, huh? Only because you were insulting protesters. And I'm like, don't insult that too. It's like a two. It's a, you know, like when you do whatever.
48:14 Speaker 01 It's additive.
48:15 Kara Swisher? Like, it's a thing you can do. And I think people feel good about it. And actually, it is effective. It is. I have, myself, I unsubscribed at least several thousand dollars. It's really something a year. It's really crazy. And again, it was like, I didn't have as many streaming services as you, but. And it's good to have discussions. One of the things I will say, like, you talk to your kids with my kids about it. Like, you know, what are you willing to give up for? And let me just say the last thing. And I think Scott agrees with this. It doesn't have to be forever. It's for now, right?
48:46 Speaker 01 Go back. Subscribe. It's really easy to sign up. They make it really easy to sign back up. You'll even get a better deal. If you cancel from AT&T, they'll try and tempt you back with a better deal.
48:56 Kara Swisher? And if they do something good, reward them by signing up again. Say, I really appreciated that. And do it on the other side. So, Scott, thank you so much. Again, resist and unsubscribe. What's the site? Say the site's name so people.
49:08 Speaker 01 www.resistandunsub or resist and unsubscribe or unsubscribe February. Up to you.
49:15 Kara Swisher? Up to you. Scott Galloway, you're the best. Thank you so much.
49:18 Speaker 01 No, you are.
49:19 Kara Swisher? No, you are.
49:20 Speaker 01 You are. You are.
49:28 Kara Swisher? Today's show was produced by Christian Castor-Wissel, Michelle Aloy, Megan Burney, and Kaitlin Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Madeleine Leplant-Duby. Our engineers are Fernando Aruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, resist and unsubscribe is going to grow exponentially. If not, it will anyway. Get on board. Use your wallet to make a statement. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.
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