The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
Will the U.S. Go to War With Iran? — with Karim Sadjadpour
26 Feb 2026
Chapter 1: What are the current U.S.-Iran tensions and their implications?
When things get hard, how do you talk to yourself? I'm Robyn Arson, VP of Fitness Programming and Head Instructor at Peloton. And this week on my new podcast, Project Swagger, I'm sharing my strategies for how to build better self-talk. It's time to work on befriending yourself. Follow Project Swagger wherever you get your podcasts.
Episode 385. 385 is the area code covering Salt Lake City, Utah. In 1985, The Breakfast Club premiered. What do a pregnant teen and the fetus have in common? They're both thinking, shit, my mom's going to kill me.
Chapter 2: How does President Trump's strategy compare to past approaches?
Go, go, go!
Welcome to the 385th episode of the Prop G Pod. What's happening? It's almost the end of February, which means we've completed or nearly completed a month of resist and unsubscribe. The idea was over the course of a month to try and put a dent in big tech subscription growth and send a signal to the markets and to the president.
believing that the only time the president checks back from irrational and sometimes depraved policies is when the bond market or the stock market declines. So we pulled together a list at resist and unsubscribe of what we call ground zero. That is companies, big tech companies mostly, that are very sensitive to subscription growth or lack thereof.
And then what we call blast zone, and that is companies directly enabling ICE. And the belief was that this was the stream we could pull
Chapter 3: What military actions are being considered against Iran?
where 40% of the S&P is just 10 companies, and these companies are highly sensitive to any sort of check back in growth. The two objectives were one, signal, and two, incentives. Signal, trying to educate the American public that they have this weapon hiding in plain sight, and that weapon is the most radical act in a capitalist society, and that is non-participation.
The second was incentives, and that is have big tech executives ranging from Tim Cook to Jeff Bezos to Sam Altman check back and realize that it's just not a one-way street, that if they enable, if they are sycophants, if they quite frankly just continue to ignore the depravity in the anti-capitalist activities of this administration, that it'll be good for their shareholders.
And to send a strong signal that results in an incentive where they think twice before showing up at premieres or talking about supporting the president publicly when they're texting people, including myself, on how much they hate themselves, well, we hate you too. That's not helping a lot. And also to recognize overpaying for documentaries or providing data
that directly violate our rights to privacy and constitutional rights, that there is a dual incentive, and that is it not only is good for shareholders to kiss up to the president, but it could also be bad for shareholders. Let's review.
Chapter 4: Could a military strike lead to regime change in Iran?
Signal. We had over 22 million views of our social media posts. We were everywhere. By the end of February, we'll have approximately 2 million unique visits to the site. To give you a sense of how difficult that is, if you were to launch an e-commerce site or a content site and try and drive 2 million unique visits,
and you ask for a budget to try and inspire 2 million visits to a site that no one had heard of before, it would cost you somewhere between $4.5 and $8 million. And that's sort of the first tactical learning, and that is we have a very strong social footprint that we've been working on for the better part of a decade and a half here. at PropG Media.
Whether it was videos we did at L2, whether it was me doing a follower strategy after night feedings with my first son 15 years ago to build a Twitter following, we have consistently invested in social media. And while I think it's ripping at the fabric of our society, there's just no getting around it.
Chapter 5: What are the potential risks of military action against Iran?
Social media is now the means of driving traffic and influence across almost everything. And if I look at the different media vehicles, the traditional media did in fact play a role. And I have a lot of contacts there. And if you're sick of seeing my face, I get it. I have been everywhere from CNN to NPR to MSNOW to, you know, name your media outlet. I've probably been on it.
What we found is the traditional media creates a halo, but what has really moved the needle was some surprising things. An article posted to their website, NPR.org, an NPR article, really moved the needle.
Chapter 6: How do Iran's internal dynamics affect its stability?
A virality of celebrities posting. When Chelsea Handler posted a video, a reel of the things she was unsubscribing for, it got over 120,000 likes and probably between one and two million views. And we spiked visits to the site by about six or 7,000. And if you do the math, and that is, conversion to actual unsubs, number of unsubs, revenue that has been lost by big tech times the multiple.
She alone probably took a million to $2 million out of the market cap. So traditional media, not as effective. Podcasts, very effective. But the virality of individuals posting on their own social media is probably number one. We got some mentions from elected representatives, Representative AOC and Kinzinger both mentioned it.
Chapter 7: What role does the Iranian public play in the regime's future?
Some senators mentioned it. Did that drive traffic? We didn't see a blip. In some, it looks as if New media continues, especially social media, continues to draft off of and suck oxygen from traditional media. What do we do moving forward? We are faced with some options to partner with other resistance efforts, to keep going, maintain the current strategy, to zero in on one or more companies.
We seriously considered zeroing in on one or maybe two companies. The problem is one of the things we like about this movement is that we're not being arbiters of what you should or should not subscribe to when you resubscribe. This was meant to be a one-month effort.
Chapter 8: What are the prospects for U.S.-Iran relations moving forward?
And so we are not going to actively promote the site, but we are going to leave it up, and we're also going to highlight some other great efforts, such as... First off, QuitGPT. The team behind QuitGPT argues that historically the most effective boycotts have two things in common. They're narrow and they're easy.
If you're a one-action kind of person, we encourage you to cancel ChatGPT from OpenAI. ChatGPT is Trump's biggest tech donor and a facilitator of ICE. Enough said. Also, there's good substitutes, the free version, trading at a 40 times multiple of revenue. Just one cancel, one unsubscribe from the paid version of ChatGPT. likely hits this firm's enterprise value of around $10,000.
Second, the impact calculator. It takes our high-level thesis and drills down into specifics, showing the estimated financial impact of our individual consumer decisions. If you want to know the exact impact your action has on a company, it's worth exploring. And then just as we wrap up here, the final objective was a more personal one, and that is...
I have a tremendous amount of anxiety around what I see is happening in our country. I think many of the things that I have benefited so much from, competition, rule of law, civil rights, a general respect or a camaraderie among citizens, a respect for immigrants, I think those things are directly under attack.
And when I reverse engineer all of my success to the things that aren't my fault, a lot of those things are in fact under attack now. And I'm sick of just barking from the cheap seats on podcasts or getting angry or being profane or speaking to you and expressing my indignance. My actions behind a keyboard, if you will, need to foot to my actions in the real world.
And also, I find that action absorbs anxiety, and it felt really good to do something with other people. And I'm going to continue to do those things. We're going to have an event in Minneapolis in nine or 10 days, highlighting the brave work of the good men and women in Minneapolis. And one of the reasons I'm moving back to the U.S. is I want to play a role in 26 and in 28.
So what I would ask of all of you is the following. If, like me, you have benefited a great deal from some of the wonderful attributes of what makes our America American, of what makes our America America, then I would ask, what are you actually doing outside of your keyboard? Are you planning to register people to vote? Are you raising money for candidates?
Are you yourself making signs and going to protests? What exactly are you doing? And ask yourself, finally, do you have a debt? If you're of my generation, have you enjoyed unprecedented prosperity with the lowest taxes in history and an all-volunteer army where you've never been drafted, never really asked to commit? In sum, I have a debt, and I recognize that.
And I would ask all of you to ask yourself, do you have a debt? Are you standing on the shoulders of other Americans from past generations that have sacrificed such that we could have such extraordinary prosperity and such extraordinary freedoms? America has faced darker times before, civil wars, world wars, civil rights battles, plagues, but Americans have always equaled to the moment.
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