I want you to go to jail next. You need to Don Lemon this shit. That's what you need to do. Oh, that would take our subscribes way up. We need to get arrested. 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 best-selling 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 are working with ICE by unsubscribing from their products and services. He's got a website called resistantunsubscribe.com. It's full of information on which companies to unsubscribe from for maximum impact. 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 resistant 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 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. When you run a business, you want the right tools. Enter Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world, from household names to brands just getting started. With hundreds of ready-to-use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand style. So if you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.nl. Go to Shopify.nl. That's Shopify.nl. Power your business with the platform trusted by millions today. I got in the water in the very early morning before the sun had risen, and the water was pitch black. I started swimming, and I felt the water hollowing out around me, and felt like something really big was swimming below. I'm Phoebe Judge, and this is Love. A show about the surprising things that love can make us do. More than 100 episodes, available now on This Is Love. It is on. Well, Scott Galloway, thank you for coming on On. 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 has such an enormous pain in the ass? Yes. Am I on with that, Kara Swisher? You are on. I'm thrilled to be here. It's a big honor. 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 onlisters 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? 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%. Right. So it was a reaction to what had happened during COVID. But it was a reaction to the economy. Right. 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&P or the bond market die? 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. 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, I don't know, show ponies. Yeah, chew toys. And these 10 companies make up 40% of the S&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 Sheet BT. I'll go with the free version. Right, or use one that has better values, for example. 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 reach Trump, correct? I'm trying to reach the markets who will then reach the CEOs who will then reach Trump. Look, this is, let me go, I've been learning a lot about protests recently. Right, you've been studying them, right? Like what's effective and what's not. And there's studies on it. So the most, probably the most famous is the Montgomery bus strike. Sure. And what people remember was this incredibly courageous woman who refused to give up her seat. That was the cinematic part of it. Right. And it wasn't until 11 months later that they decided to get rid of segregation on municipal bus lines. The economic protests that work 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. Got it. So 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. 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? That's the correct question. So I find the research I've done is that day-long economic strikes are an annoyance, but don't move the needle. Like, don't work today. They just don't work. Like, don't go in Friday, no work Friday. It's fun. It gets virality 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 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 site up and I'll start maybe adding companies, taking companies off and updating. I'm trying to be really transparent around site 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. But you heard from CEOs. Yeah, I have heard. I've heard from CEOs, yeah. 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. You know, they're so nice and they're so charming. Right. And they agree with you, but they still are going to do business. Well, they say they're going to, I'm like, boss, agreeing with me on this phone call or via text message doesn't do anybody any good. Right. It makes me feel good. But, you know, it's never the wrong time to do the right thing. And what I try to do is these are all men who are going to be dead soon. I try to play to their sense of mortality and their emotions. 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 percent or the guy who took a stand that cost something? Like, what do you want at the end? Well, they also argue that 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? Yeah, I want credit for being a leader without actually being a leader is how I would describe Tim Cook. And let me go there. This is the Applehead for people who don't know. I think competition, open markets, especially for a guy like Tim Cook, civil rights, have played a really important role in that company success and his personal success Absolutely 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. Or whatever you want, yeah. 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. That's what I was going to ask about Jeffrey because Jeffrey does lists. He did it around Russia and Ukraine. 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? We talked about that on the show. And she asked really thoughtful questions. And I said, I struggle with this, but I think I'm going to go to a U.S. 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. So I'll get to that issue in a minute. But the idea is that tech companies' stock price drops and the CEOs then talk to Trump. But how do you decide? You've broken down corporations on the unsubscribed list to two categories, ground zero and blast zone. Talk about the distinctions. 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. 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 working with them. But quite frankly, AT&T is somewhat meaningless in terms of market cap. And let me give you an example. if you were to say to people, no economic activity, 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 a president's ear, but he is the CEO of a very big company. Kroger's trades at 0.3 times revenues. If you cancel your open AI chat GPT paid subscription and just use the free one, which as far as I can 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. 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 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. Yeah, I don't have total moral clarity around this. I'm not giving up my iPhone. Right, that's what I mean. Someone correctly asked me, 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. I did that. 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 Ellisons are there as well. And there's all sorts of wrong about the president getting involved in a socialist, cronious movement. But I want to, 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. You want to give them information. Okay, this is what they do. 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 resistantunsub.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 health care service that I signed up for in 2020 to get a prescription of Paxlid. Oh, God. 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 Blackberries that have been in a landfill for a decade. I found that out recently, yeah. And they kept charging me $60 or $70. 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. Yeah. This is an easy way to once save some money and send an out... And figure out where you're subscribed and what you need. We'll be back in a minute. 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 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. Apple music was easy. Not for my kids. So let me be clear. In terms of the family, they're all down with my movement. They kind of rolled their eyes, but fine. Dad's at it again. More of his attention-mongering. He's such a whore. That's what their body language says to me. 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, all right, smother dad and sleep tonight. And so we've gone down to two and we're about to go down to one. But I'm not asking people. 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. Which one? I hate to say it, but it's the big one. You know? Netflix. Well, there you go. Yeah. 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. But you've already done that. That's just me. Because you can go back to things, right? That's your whole point is you can. My point is this is your call. Yeah. 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 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 instant and said, these are the following companies I'm unsubscribing from. She listed about $1,000 a year in savings. Most of these companies, especially the big tech companies, trade in an average of 10 times 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 site analytics. I think Chelsea's one social media post about her unsubscribing is going to get between 5,000 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 are actually unsub. Explain what conversion is. 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. So it adds up. 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 it's not. It's fixed. 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. 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. Right. And I just want you aware of the math, and then you make your own decisions. Right, that you have an impact. Because I think most people feel useless, right? They feel like they're small. I think you're moving into that. Spotify is not on the list, but you mentioned them right here. 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 isn't on the list. I having a difficult time being the arbiter of who should be on the list and who shouldn Well it 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 resistandunsubscribe 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 toward 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. A quarter billion. 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 MSNOW or whoever, you know, going on Fox News, et cetera, et cetera. 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 side 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. I was on with Christian Amon tour last night. I'm going on a bunch of pods today. That is only sustainable for so long that I think, and I'd be curious to get your thoughts. I think the only way this sustains, Cara, is if enough people decide to do it themselves and then communicate their actions on social. Or create their own versions of resist and unsubscribe, right? 100%. 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. It's 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? Well, I'm violating one of my dictums, and that is greatness is in 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 companies should be on the list or not. I just don't have the fucking patience. Yeah, I know. 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, Cara, I'm finding that I have as much insight into this as they do at this point. Right. 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. Probably more effective, right? Right. I am coming to grips with 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're 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. Right. 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. 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 grids 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 a thing that is more powerful with less effort, right? And actually is good for your budget too, by the way. 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. 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 open AI right now and the signal you're sending, I think is an enormous ROI relative to the consumer friction there. Do you have an endgame or just do you want to start a, you know, a fire, essentially? Well, my endgame is that we don't have a mass secret police terrorizing Americans. You know, my endgame is we stop, we find it untenable 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 U.S. 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 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. 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 Brady if she was possessed by Satan, whatever. Or, or I can, I just made that up. I'm proud of that. No, that was actually a plot point on one of the Brady movies. 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. One of the things you did was go on with people who are just angry right-wingers, which I don't advise you to do. It was a mistake. I didn't know that was going to happen. Oh, really? Because that would be their move. You're killing the economy. You're talking about Pierce Morgan. 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. What policies do you object to, Professor? Well, having a mass secret police shooting mothers in the face or denying a person's first second. A secret police? You're referring to border patrol? Excuse me, sir, please stop interrupting me. I'm just trying to clarify. I let you prattle on with your traif. Let me finish and I'll let you say it. I'm just trying to understand what you're attempting to say. You're referring to Border Patrol and Secret Police? Denying a person's first second. Yeah, well, the idea was you're hurting the economy, Scott Galloway. Like, that's going to be their move. No, he called it desperate, unpatriotic, and you liberals can't get over that Trump won fairly, so you're trying to crash the economy. Right. And I hope Pierce got another $11 or $12 in AdSense 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. But, and by the way, the left does it too. Turning 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. That's a formula. And it's their most popular show. But answer it in and over. Like, is there anything wrong with tanking the economy? Like, that's their whole thing. Like, I get their stupid argument about patriot is stupid. They're just pulling all your buttons, kind of pushing the buttons of idiocy. They're not going to tank the economy. This is what we want. Sam Altman, Tim Cook, Sergey Larry, Satya, you know, Sundar Algo. You know what? And 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. Downside, we have to go see the Melania movie. 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 going to find their testicles. That's when they're going to 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 going to be an exorcism soon, that that's not going to happen. Yeah, no. But be clear, these guys, if there's enough organic movements where their shares are going to go down, not up because of their support of ICE, they will all of a sudden— It sticks with sticking with their consumers versus anything else. Let me ask you a bigger picker in that regard. There'd be no need for anyone to unsubscribe if the business community wasn't enabling all this 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 going to take a stand where it counts. Tina Brown just said, it turns out having fuck you money means you just want more fuck you money and you don't want to 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. I don't get it. I literally, 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. And it's worse because you're not seeing the unredacted, but go ahead. 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? Alleged co-conspirators. 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 going to be able to send our kids to the best schools. We're both going to 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 creates – I think wealth can do this, ideally, in a capitalist society. It gives you fewer excuses to not be a good person. It gives you more opportunities to be a good person That the whole point of money That 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 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 Gulf Streams, 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 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. What's the point of having it? That is exactly right. It's fucking gross. 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 capitalist 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? I'm using Instagram. 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 when 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 we'll never recover from is just not accurate. We were purposely under a wonderful president who's now considered a hero incarcerating Japanese families solely because of their identity, many of whom had kids fighting for us in the European theater. He signed it. He signed it. 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 has come back, 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. Plummeting, plummeting. So I'm hopeful. 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. But, you know, there are those who think you have to extricate yourself completely. 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 presidency here 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, and two, make it easy for them to unsubscribe from some of the more obvious players. Yeah. Yeah. So what if, what if this snowballs and it turns out you're the hero, we didn't know we needed. Are you prepared to come to face the anti-Trump economic resistance? Yeah, I think you're being generous. I don't, I don't think that's fair. I am being generous. I'm just teasing. 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, is recommending erectile dysfunction stocks. So I don't know if it sees me as the leader we need right now, Kara. 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 that, I'm like, it's just something. Like, you know, just don't overthink it, right? People who want to take part can only unsubscribe from a few services who don't know where to begin. What's your message? Give your final inspirational speech. 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 have symptoms of something and he was freaking out and really upset. And I said, okay. This wasn't one of my kids, right? I'm kidding. No, I'm sorry. That was last year. That was 2024. And I said, look, 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 going to 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 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 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 going to 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 and so am I. The difference between you and greatness and relevance is overcoming your fear of public failure. Yep, that's it. That's all you have to do. Scott, the hero, we didn't know we needed. Yeah, right. Scott Galloway. Erectile dysfunction sucks. And let me just say- They're not helping us. Kara, a lot of people shitpost you. I know this firsthand. You are a very loyal friend. Who was first on this bandwagon? Kara Swisher. Kara Swisher. All my good friends now, now that I've had a little bit of success and momentum, all of a sudden now they're like, I'm with you, brother. I'm like, yeah, where the fuck were you 10 days ago when no one was RSVPing to my party? 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. I appreciate that. 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, 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 have 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? 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. 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. www.resistandunsub or resistandunsubscribe or unsubscribeFebruary. Up to you. Up to you. Scott Galler, you're the best. Thank you so much. No, you are. No, you are. You are. No, you are. You are. Today's show was produced by Christian Castro-Wassell, Michelle Eloy, Megan Burney, and Caitlin Lynch. Nishat Kerwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. special thanks to Madeline LaPlante Duby our engineers are Fernando Arruda 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.
