The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
Kai Ryssdal on Why the Economy Isn’t as Strong as It Looks
19 Feb 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Episode 384. 384,000 kilometers is the average distance from Earth to the moon. In 1984, the Terminator premiered. What's the difference between the Terminator and my dad? The Terminator came back. Hold me.
Go, go, go!
Welcome to the 384th episode of The Prof G-Pod. What's happening? I am enjoying ski week. Actually, that's not true. I fucking hate skiing. Let me just come out of the closet as someone who has, you know, tolerated skiing. I didn't start skiing until I was a senior in high school. I went on a trip. I remember it cost $53, which was a lot of money for me and my mom at the time.
And skiing, I've just never been good at. I hate the cold. I hate the equipment. I'm absent-minded. Everything about skiing is just, like, not my vibe. And I'm at this point in my life all about injury prevention, but I'm in a beautiful mountain town. I love the culture, basically ski for a little bit, then start drinking.
And I decided very early I wanted to give my kids the gift I didn't have, and that is get them on skis from when they're like, you know, yay, hi. And then they'll be beautiful skiers the rest of their lives. So I've done that. I'm out. I've had it. So here I am inside my room. ordering fondue and speaking to you. Resist and unsubscribe. A quick update. I think we're on to something here, folks.
And I've been trying to figure out what drives traffic, trying to figure out attribution, because I think it's fascinating what new media, traditional media, print, podcast drives the most traffic to resist and unsubscribe, which now has an aggregate 1.1 million unique visits. If you were to try and inspire 1.1 million unique visits to a website,
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Chapter 2: What are the contradictions in today's economy?
You would need $4 million in paid ads. We have spent zero on paid ads, which is interesting. I would. I would have used Alphabet and Meta because they're monopolies. And if you want to get something out there, you unfortunately have to use Instagram. You have to use these platforms. They would not let us buy paid ads, which I find kind of interesting. because they say it's political.
But anyways, even without that 1.1 million. Now, what drives the most traffic and what is the net end or attribution? And I like to think of myself as someone who's very analytical and holds their feet to the flame. So far, it looks as, I mean, this is across CNN, you know, MS Now, Fortune, Forbes. I've been everywhere, right?
Yeah.
And it looks as if, as of today, the two things that drove, or the three things that drove the most unique visits, and you don't know if it drives awareness, and there's different types of outcomes, awareness, actual unsubscribes, unsubscribing without going to the website. But in terms of driving actual traffic to the site, number one, it looks like an article and an interview in NPR.
And it drove what looks to be 27,000 unique visits to resistant unsubscribed. So let's do the math here. 27,000. Most good e-commerce sites do 2% to 4% conversion. I'm going to go with five because this is purposeful. Someone decides on their own, no paid ad, no clicking on anything to come to this site. And then I'm assuming that they unsubscribe from two platforms.
When I see screenshots, it's usually they post one to five. So I'm going to assume an average of two.
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Chapter 3: How does the current labor market affect job security?
Average of $240 lost the first year, so I'm going to round up to $500 of the 5% who convert to unsubscribing. So what does that mean? With 24,000 times 5%, that is, I believe, 1,200, right? 1,200 people unsubscribing. What does that mean? 1,200 people unsubscribing times 500, that is $600,000. These companies trade at an average multiple of 10 times revenues.
That is $6 million in lost market cap occurrences. Now, $6 million in lost market cap across big tech. These companies are worth trillions of dollars. No big deal. One article likely costs big tech $6 million in market cap. And let's go to what movements are about and what economic strikes are successful. The most successful are the most successful. I don't know.
Famous is the Montgomery bus strike. Now, the cinematic moment that everybody talks about is a courageous woman refusing to give up her bus seat. But that's not what moved the needle. What moved the needle was a young reverend named Martin Luther King organized a years-long carpooling effort such that
Non-whites or people who didn't want to be part of a segregated bus system could avoid taking the bus. There's a tremendous amount of organization. And slowly but surely, the municipal bus system recognized they were losing a quarter of a million dollars a month in bus fares from a large segment of the population that was no longer active. taking the bus.
And once it got to about two, two and a half million dollars, they decided to acquiesce and they desegregated the municipal transportation infrastructure in Montgomery, Alabama. And that's where we are, folks. This movement, as of today, and I can show the math, has cost big tech about a quarter of a billion dollars in market capitalization. Is that enough to get them to change course?
No, but this is what we want to do. One, we want to send a signal to
to consumers, that they have a weapon hiding in plain sight, and we want to change the incentives and show these big tech CEOs who are showing up for premieres, prostrating themselves to the president, sending me text messages saying they hate themselves, yet they fucking blow this guy, hoping that if they can just stay out of his way and acquiesce to him. Well, guess what, folks?
Acquiescence, appeasement, appeasement is not a strategy. It's basically when people are around you on your deathbed, they're going to be, what did you do in the war, dad? Well, I did fucking nothing but grab my ankles and get fucked by some obese clown who was a fascist. Is that what you want to be? Is that too much? Is that too much?
Anyways, bottom line, you can show up with a moped at one of those stops and give people a ride to work. You can make a small... If you go to resist and unsubscribe right now and you unsubscribe from ChatGPT, you are taking $10,000.
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Chapter 4: What impact do tariffs have on consumer prices?
out of their market capitalization. That's you showing up on a moped. If you're Chelsea Handler and you post about your resistant unsubscribe movement and give specific examples, and you have 110,000 likes and likely inspire millions of views and thousands of people, you're probably costing big tech six or $800,000. She drove up to the carpool stop with a minivan.
We are driving up with a bus, maybe even a tractor trailer. But if we do this long enough, if enough of us... Don't give into this bullshit that it's too big, that we're just gnats on an elephant. Guess what? Enough gnats can take down an elephant. And we are harassing this fucking fascist elephant right now. I have already heard from these companies, 20% of the CEOs, they are noticing.
So this is the question you want to pose to yourself when this is over, right? Was I part of the resistance or did I do nothing? If you don't believe in this, fine. I get it. Do what you want. This is obviously your decision, but you have the agency to absolutely do something. We have survived civil wars, plagues. incredibly racist moments in our history.
We interned the Japanese, we fought world wars against fascism, and every time Americans rose to the moment. If you're like me and you think I have benefited so much from this country, if you were to summarize my benefit being born in 1964, a white heterosexual male, it's basically the following.
unprecedented prosperity, and the lowest taxes paid in history with the most amount of freedoms and rights. That is what I have taken. I have a debt. So two questions. Do you have a debt? Second question. Dad, what did you do in the war? Go to resistandunsubscribe.com and take action. Join us.
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Chapter 5: Is the fear of AI replacing jobs justified?
Resist and unsubscribe. All right, moving on. In today's episode, we speak with the inimitable Kai Risdahl, senior editor and host of Marketplace. I feel as if I grew up with Kai. I thought he was one of the more thoughtful, reasoned voices about business. And we were pleasantly surprised.
Kai's podcast with us, the first time he was on a few months ago, is one of the most viewed and listened to podcasts we've ever had. So here's to the famous superstar and driving tons of ZipRecruiter ads, Kai Risdahl. Kyle, where does this podcast find you?
I am in a shed attached to my garage at home in Southern California.
Where in Southern California?
La Cunada, just sort of north of Glendale.
Yeah, yeah. I went to UCLA, so I spent a lot of time out there. So let's bust right into it, or let's draw the camera way back. I'm curious to get your overall sense or big picture view of the economy. It feels very split screen in that we have The stock market at record highs, according to Pam Bondi, it's $50,000.
$50,000, yeah, right.
Yeah, and we do have solid GDP growth, much of it fueled by the AI boom and a disproportionate consumer spending from the wealthiest Americans. But on the other side, we're seeing what appears to be a slowing job market. affordability concerns and consumer sentiment near historic lows and a lot of catastrophizing about how AI could potentially destroy the labor market.
How do you make sense of this? When you do your program and someone says, summarize the American economy, what is your best shot at it right now?
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Chapter 6: How is income inequality affecting the economy?
And that's definitely not sustainable. AI will be the future. It's just not there yet. And I think as we look at what's going to happen to certainly white-collar jobs, that is something that people in white-collar jobs ought to be thinking about, not for tomorrow, but for some short number of years from now when these things are really actually workable. It's a little bit like
It's a little bit like crypto, right? Crypto will be the future of money. It is not the future of money right now. It's not actual money right now. AI will be a future of this economy, but it's not yet. It's not right now at scale.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that companies across retail and consumer goods are raising prices again this year, many by high single digits, citing tariffs, higher labor costs, and rising health insurance expenses. In terms of affordability, which obviously reduces the prosperity of Americans, do you think it's going to get worse, get better? What do you see as signals out there?
Yeah, I think it actually is going to get worse. And let's think about why for a second. What's happening here is the knock-on effect, the lagging effect of tariffs. For a long time, since Trump's tariff palooza back in April, companies, by and large, bit the bullet. And they absorbed a lot of the cost.
Let's just say here, parenthetically, that there have been studies from the Fed and from Gita Gopinath at the IMF, something between 94 and 96 percent of tariff costs are passed through directly to American businesses and American consumers. Businesses have been taking that hit for the past, whatever April is, eight, nine months ago, right? Now they're getting fed up with it.
It's squeezing them. They can't do it anymore. And more importantly, consumers, even though, as you rightly pointed out, consumers are really cranking consumer sentiments in the toilet, we're still spending money. We're still paying whatever the companies are demanding. So we are going to see those prices tick up by sort of high-ish single digits. That will have a knock-on effect on inflation.
I don't know that I buy the Fed's theory here. This is Powell and Austin Goolsbee, among others, who say it's going to be a one-time pass-through, right? Tariffs are going to hit the economy one time and then stay. I don't know that I see that. But look, Goolsbee's a trained economist. I'm not.
But definitely now we're seeing companies saying, you know what, consumers, you got to pay a little bit more now. And that's what's going to start happening.
And I read somewhere that, so if you look at the GINA coefficient on income inequality, zero meaning everybody has the exact same amount, 100 meaning one person has everything. That the French Revolution and let them eat cake happened in France was at about 81 in terms of income inequality.
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Chapter 7: What role do prediction markets play in economic forecasting?
And there's some reports saying that the U.S. right now is at 83. Do you feel it's sort of progressive catastrophism that there's a revolution coming because of income inequality hitting these levels or that as America, we're sort of down with levels of this type of inequality?
Well, look, I think sadly, as history demonstrates, you go back to the Gilded Age, we are down with it. There have been corrections, of course, passed in history of when that's happened, but not without a little bit of societal stress. And look, we're definitely there. I mean— Forget the trillionaire or the almost trillionaires, right?
But so much of the wealth in this country is now going to capital as opposed to labor. And that's just upside down from the thing that made this economy great in the 40s and 50s and 60s. Look, there were bad things about this economy back then, too. I get that. But if you want solid middle class jobs where everybody can grow and be reasonably happy and successful, this ain't it. This ain't it.
How do you think that manifests in terms of, is it we constantly ping from one extreme to the other, that people decide to pick up pitchforks and lanterns? Like, what do you think, how does it play out in terms of, you know, if we've reached some sort of tipping point? I don't know.
I don't know. I don't think it's pitchforks. The premise behind your question is where does the leadership come from, right? How does this change happen? And the answer is, that we're not seeing leadership now on virtually every level of governance and the body politic in this society, right?
We have Republicans who are going along with whatever the president decides to do because they are afraid, right? And their cowardice is becoming manifest. And we have Democrats who can't decide what they're for. And the internal schisms in the Democratic Party prevent them from leading. So I don't know where the leadership, where the motivation, where the rallying cry comes from
to say this cannot stand. And just empirically, it just can't. A society can't work when everybody doesn't have what the top nth percent has.
I'm curious, just when we talk about trying to predict where the economy's headed, we're increasingly in the media, and I consider myself media adjacent, looking at this, what appears to be the most accurate or least flawed predictor, and that is the prediction markets. And I find myself consistently quoting data from Kalshi and PolyMarket.
And I'm just curious what your take is on these prediction markets.
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Chapter 8: How can consumers influence corporate behavior?
I mean, what is that? How is that a valid statistical sample of anything? Let me give you an example really close to sort of my professional line of work. So in the days slash week before Trump named Kevin Warsh to head the Federal Reserve, a guy by the name of Rick Reeder, who you may know, I'm sure you know of him, he does fixed income investment.
He's the head of fixed income at BlackRock, the huge money management firm. Um, he'd been a dark horse all along. And then somehow for some reason, his odds on, on Cal sheet popped up to like 62 or something percent and, and out of nowhere. And I will say, by the way, the only reason I found out about this is because I'm on a thread of emails where, with about 50 or 60 of my fraternity brothers.
Rick Reeder was a fraternity brother of mine 45 years ago. He was a year ahead of me. We didn't really know each other, whatever. But anyway, so that's how I found out about it. And I go looking at it. And then I started looking for news. And there is no news about why Rick Reeder is somehow going to be the chairman of the Fed.
And then sure as hell, Trump says, oh, no, it's going to be one of the two Kevins, Kevin Warsh. So I don't know that, yes, wisdom of the crowds and all that, and people are putting actual money on the line. But you have to take it with a really big grain of salt.
And when you think of these prediction markets, do you think that they're going to play a role in... I mean, do you think they're going to sort of become the primary data streams for traders? And my mind sort of starts spinning in terms of how this might impact hedge funds, alternative investments.
Because you will be able to lay trades... with real money on virtually everything, right? Not just, you know, what color jacket is Kamala Harris going to wear to debate, just to pick an old historical example, but also, right, what policy issues are going to be decided, where the Supreme Court might come down, all of those big, you know, significant policy moves.
And then those calcium markets and polymarket and all the rest of them are going to be followed by people actually making those decisions. And you're like, what are we doing? We'll be right back after a quick break.
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