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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back to the show, professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business, author, including his most recent notes on being a man. We're going to discuss manhood in a minute. He also hosts three podcasts, feels like more, The Prof G Pod, Raging Moderates, and Pivot. That's because it is more.
Don't you have another one? Don't you have four? Anyway, it's Scott Galloway.
Yeah, I at least track something. To resist is futile. I'm like AOL in the 90s. If you stick your hand into a cereal box, you're going to pull me out. I'm everywhere. That's kind of a yucky thought.
Well, I want to start by talking about the campaign you've been working on. You emailed me the other day. You're working on an unsubscribed campaign. People have been talking about it. And just in candor, because we're all about candor here, I replied and I was like, I'm not so sure about this.
So let's just do it.
Let's hash it out. You tell me what the case is for it and then we can hash it out a little bit.
Well, I think a lot of us feel frustrated and want to do something. Action absorbs anxiety. And what I think I'm
wanted or the objective is to just signal send a signal to people that there's a weapon hiding in plain sight and that is your economic power or specifically the most radical act of activism in a capitalist society is non-participation and if you just for example unsubscribe from a paid version of chat gpt because they're raising money at 40 times revenues you're literally denting that company's valuation by ten thousand dollars by just using the free option and
And if you look at 40% of the S&P is 10 companies, and those 10 companies are highly sensitive to their growth or slowdown in their growth of their subscription revenues. And you look at where the president has walked back his plans to annex Greenland or tariffs. It's been with one... catalyst. And that is when the bond market or the stock market falls.
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Chapter 2: How can economic power serve as a form of protest?
That's not a terrible idea.
Not a terrible idea. We welcome all. But here's my question. Like, yeah, I just is the scale of it enough. And you've got, you know, not to glaze you, but you have reach. All right. People listen to Scott Galloway. But like, even still, like the scale to have an actual impact. I mean, is there a little bit of this concern? This is like a nap on an elephant's ass kind of, you know?
Right. And if there's enough gnats, the elephant goes down. So, like, I'm getting about 60 to 80,000 uniques a day to the site. I'm all over AI. It estimates that I get four to five percent conversion, meaning that for every hundred people that come to the site, four to five unsubscribe because these people are intentional. They're not being driven by any paid advertising.
They, on average, unsubscribe from two platforms. They spend about an average of $200 per platform. So that's 2,500 subscribers unsubscribing across $400. That's $100,000 a day on subscription platforms. Or excuse me, it ends up being approximately... a million dollars in unsubscribes revenue, 10 times revenues, it's 10 million bucks a day.
I think I'm gonna take a third of a billion dollars out of the market cap of these companies, Tim. Now, does that mean anything when they're trading at trillions of dollars? Not overnight, but if slowly but surely other people, as they're starting to do, start to build their own resistance movements, Over time, these individuals are going to notice. I've already heard from 20% of the CEOs.
They already noticed what's going on. If we give them tangible reason to say, look, if Sam Altman reports 8% growth month on month in subscriptions, not nine, he's not going to be able to close his $850 billion round. Microsoft missed its earning estimates by one percentage point and stock was off 10%. So the most famous kind of strike was the Montgomery bus strike.
And we remember the cinematic, what we think was kill shot of a very brave woman refusing to give up her seat. That's not what moved it here. It was a sustained drive, collective effort by Dr. Martin Luther King to have thousands of carpools over the course of a year. And then finally they did the math and said, we're losing $2 million a year, the municipal bus system.
And they decided to desegregate the buses. So My point is every day, a guy like Tim Miller, I can do the math for you. If you posted your unsubscribes, you would probably hit these guys between $3 and $20 million in market cap. And if enough Tim Millers decide to do that, these guys are going to notice.
So we picked these companies because the CEOs are assholes or because they might have influence over Trump, right? What's the motivation here? I'm just, I mean, some of them are obvious, right? Amazon, Apple, Google, but like, what was your thinking?
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of unsubscribing from major platforms?
And these are the companies that are highly sensitive to unsubscribes. And that with a small amount of economic movement here at the tail of the whip, they'll send a strong signal to the markets. And I believe ultimately the president.
In addition, those companies, a lot of them are the ones sitting around the table of the White House who I think are enabling the president and sending a false signal that. that America and the markets and our premier business leaders are on board with the president's programs.
What I call the blast zone are companies that are directly working with ICE, whether it's to house them like Hilton or provide infrastructure, AT&T. But also, Tim, I recognize that a guy with some economic security living in London, I don't want to be the arbiter of where you spend money or don't. I'm trying to give you the option to unsubscribe and recognize it's not that hard.
huge ROI here if you're trying to send a message, but you might decide that you're going to go from six streaming media platforms to two. You might say, okay, I'm going to cancel the ChatGPT subscription, but I'm going to keep Clode. I may resubscribe to Amazon Prime in March. And I want to be clear, I'm not giving up my iPhone. You know, I'm just not, but I am.
I'd like to, because I'm fucking, Tim Cook is one that pisses me off the most.
Yeah. Actually, it's funny you say that. I think he pisses me off the most too. I think there are few people who have benefited more from our embrace of civil rights, our embrace of competitive markets. And it seems to me he is totally... And then this bullshit memo to his company, I'm upset about ICE, but I'm not going to actually do anything about it.
I said something in private to Melania when I showed up to the ball at the White House. Good for you, brother. The night of the killing of Alex Preddy. I'm talking about somebody who's benefited so much from... The American system. It's spitting in our face. On a lot of levels. I'm with you. I'm looking at the Apple one now. We'll just not have to subscribe to the other stuff.
I'd like to throw my iPhone in the trash can, but then I'd get the green dot.
But an easier one is unsubscribing from Apple Music. Do you really watch Ted Lasso? Okay, Apple TV+. I don't want to be the arbiter of what people should do. I want to provide them with the insight and make it easy for them to unsubscribe where they feel like they have the least friction. They may even decide it's a value add.
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Chapter 4: How does Scott Galloway suggest we hold CEOs accountable?
That's your call. I'm just trying to educate people about the power they have for economic spend or where not to spend and how easy it is to unsubscribe and how much money you'll save.
You're not calling for the Benedict option. You're compelling to me because just as a former Republican and a capitalist, part of this is I just get queasy about these sorts of things. There have been a lot of eye roll boycotts in modern times. I think the only thing I've ever actually boycotted was the hate chicken during the height of the gay marriage stuff.
I didn't do Chick-fil-A, but even then I kind of felt bad about myself for boycotting them. But you as an avowed, almost unapologetic capitalist – You're a compelling messenger, I guess.
Well, let's be clear. Most economic protests don't work. One day economic protests are an annoyance, but they don't do anything. And unless they're sustained and they build, I don't think the president is going to reverse policies based on resist and unsubscribe. What I think could happen, and I can show the analytics.
I know people in these companies are talking about it, and it's one more point of light that says to these guys, there is an economic downside to my continued support of ICE, and maybe at some point, it is worthwhile for me economically to resist. It's going to take more than my movement. It's going to take more than protests, but it is all additive and is all cumulative.
We need to send a signal to these CEOs. There is a downside to keeping quiet and also supporting explicitly or implicitly or symbolically. What the fuck are you doing showing up for the Melania premiere? Literally, what the fuck are you doing? What are you doing paying $45 million for a documentary that is a shitty piece of film that you know is going to make no money?
Oh, it's coin operated autocracy, kleptocracy. Well, guess what? If in the 70s, 80s and 90s, we had let that shit go on. Apple wouldn't have never made it out of the crib. Amazon would have been put to sleep by Sears and JCPenney's who controlled the government. You have some obligation to look at the American values that made you a billionaire and build these great companies.
So what am I hoping to do? People don't realize they've got a weapon hiding in plain sight and every pimple on the elephant, every gnat on the elephant's ass matters. Chelsea Handler put out an Instagram reel today. It's gotten a couple hundred thousand likes. It's sent, I think about... 2,500 new people to my Unix, to my site today.
I think she alone today is going to take $1 to $3 million out of the hide of the market cap of big tech. If enough people do that, at some point, it will be a data point when they're evaluating, should I provide infrastructure for ICE? You got me. Goodbye, Apple TV+.
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Chapter 5: What is the current state of the economy under the Trump administration?
Everybody else will be back here Monday with Bill Kristol. See you all then.
Peace. We are on subscribe. So subscribe. Buck Season 5.
The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.