Resist and Unsubscribe with Gov. Tim Walz

25:31And Minnesotans, by the way, none of this surprised the people in this room because it's all a correlation to highest voter turnout, highest volunteer rates, highest donations to charity. It's what we do.

25:44Kara Swisher:And happy. Very, very last question.

25:50Kara Swisher:Are they still weird? If I had to do it again, I think I would have used harsher language. but don't norm. Yes, they are. Kash Patel, that little dude jumping around. What's your new word? We have to. And again, there's something about it, that belonging, whatever. And I don't want to say it like flippantly or whatever, but people want to be part of an organization that they're proud of, that things are happening. We have the capacity to do that. And one of the things that's more challenging for us. They set a small parameter and you either conform or you're out of the cult with us. We're proud of our broad, big tent.

26:31Um, but that also means, um, we're going to have to figure out ways to make people feel more, more a part of it. And so I think there's, there's somebody out there. Look, there's a lot of exciting people out there, which, and again, I, I swore this Scott that I would never beta or works, one of my dearest friends. And after the last time beta ran, I said, I'm not putting another penny in Texas. damn it, it's taken money away. Now we got James Tellarico. I said, okay, I'm putting a penny in there.

26:57Kara Swisher:Anyway, I want everybody to thank Governor Walden. Thank you, Governor.

27:17Kara Swisher:Yes, great. Thank you. Thank you. That was great. We really appreciate it. I liked his socks, his Minnesota socks. Did you see them? You want to see mine? A little different. It says, 100 % that bitch.

27:32Kara Swisher:I'm not running anything but my mouth tonight. Anyway, all right. We need to take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll get to some of the latest headlines.

27:44Hey, marketers, listen up. Before this, there was this. Our voice. It's how we shared knowledge, built communities. Well, guess what? Voice is back. That's why Spotify Advertising has published a new report, The Sound On Era, because audio moves culture forward. And if your brand wants to be heard, you need a Sound On strategy. Go to ads.spotify.com to download The Sound On Era and turn up the volume on your business. Hi, I'm Brene Brown. And I'm Adam Grant. And we're here to invite you to the Curiosity Shop. A podcast that's a place for listening, wondering, thinking, feeling, and questioning.

28:25It's going to be fun. We rarely agree. But we almost never disagree, and we're always learning. That's true. You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app to automatically receive new episodes every Thursday. For the last 10 years, everything in American politics has basically revolved around one man. And as a political journalist who came of age during Donald Trump's rise in 2016, I've had a front row seat. I am officially running for president of the United States. It's going to be only America first. America first. Thousands of supporters of President Trump stormed the U.S.

29:09Capitol building. But is it possible to talk about politics without talking about Donald Trump? That's the question I'm going to ask in our new show from Vox. The idea of like a post-Trump or not exactly Trump-focused show can exist because he's not really driving any agenda items. It really does feel like so reactive. You know, I think this Iran thing is also going to cause a big split in the GOP. So far it doesn't among like people who say they're MAGA voters are still with Trump. But like for the first time, you see on a major issue open opposition from the start of this war. I'm Estet Herndon.

29:41And welcome to America Actually.

29:49Kara Swisher:Scott, we're back recording live from the Pantages Theater in Minneapolis. Yeah!

30:00Kara Swisher:Let's get to some news starting with Target. Target. It's one of the biggest employers here. I know. I know. I know. It's one of the biggest employers here in Minnesota. It's been getting heat for not pushing back on ICE in the Trump administration. Two Minnesota Target employees who are U.S. citizens were detained by federal agents back in January, fueling protests and boycotts. Target's new CEO gave an interview to the AP this week. He said the company is working to, quote, win back trust, and the employee and guest safety is their, quote, North Star. I have never heard such fucking nonsense in my life.

30:38Kara Swisher:Like, and I interview a lot of people. And I knew Brian Cornell, who used to run it for a long time because I covered retail. and I thought that opportunity was that interview was the worst interview I've seen in a while it said nothing it was all talking points it went out on no limbs it wasn't brave it wasn't genuine and people have a great emotional relationship with Target they have over the years I mean there's other issues they have but I thought it was a real missed opportunity for a CEO not to have a fresh start Brian had been tarnished and rightly so for dumping gay flags as if that's the biggest deal in the fucking world.

31:15Kara Swisher:And it was an opportunity missed. Obviously, there's secular issues happening around retail, but Target for a while was really on a tear. Your thoughts? Yeah, last century. Target's a great company. They carved out a great position. The last 20 years, they've returned about 7 % a year. S &P's up 16%. Walmart's up 23%. So the bottom line is Target has vastly underperformed the market. And that's what's such a shame. I look at this through a shareholder lens. That was a big opportunity because I think the biggest commercial opportunity, I've been saying this for six months, is for someone to elegantly, in a non-personal way, basically to say no and demonstrate that we have stronger fidelity to our stakeholders and the constitution without being personally vindictive around the Trump administration.

32:05This is a huge opportunity. And it looks like Dario Amode is taking it in the last week when he kind of refused to comply with certain Trump administration, he's since backpedaled a little bit. But the annual occurring revenue of Anthropic has gone from$14 to$19 billion. So the opportunity for someone to push back was enormous. And quite frankly, the CEO of Target missed an enormous opportunity. Because right now, what the city deserves is spine, not spin. and this was just such a lost opportunity. And I'm going to name drop because I'm desperate for your affirmation, but I've worked with probably 150 of the Fortune 500 CEOs at some point in my career.

32:50And whenever they put out a press release, I know exactly what happened here. This was a press release that was gangbanged by about a dozen$800 an hour communications consultants that were worried about -

33:00Kara Swisher:That's an attractive. Different interpretations. I used to write CEOs press releases in their IR and I'm like no more than two people can work on this because it'll get diluted into nothingness and also what I like to remind CEOs of is when they get stressed out about saying something or potentially offending shareholders I'm like dude you're already rich and you're going to be dead soon so why wouldn't you say something this was such an enormous opportunity to say to basically stand up for employees he would have been a national hero, so many people would have said, you know what, I think I'm going to shop at Target this week.

33:34This was the mother of all missed opportunities for shareholders. So why do you, again, besides the, I like that spine, not spin.

33:46Kara Swisher:You spent all day thinking that one up. I like it. I did. I'm going to steal it. But when you have that, when they didn't do that, Because, again, there are secular issues around retail, we all know, and we are aware of. And even Walmart, which was the juggernaut, is only up 23%. But what would you—this person has worked there most of his career, right? He's a career person. How difficult right now is it for CEOs to do things like that? Because you keep saying there's going to be more and more of them. And Dario did backpedal a little bit. Like he said, he's called Trump a dictator, which is technically accurate.

34:24Kara Swisher:But he kind of walked back saying, I shouldn't have been so rash. He's still suing the government for the behavior. But we've talked about this. Look, what's needed is the following. There's a lack of leadership amongst. So I'm friends with a guy named Jeffrey Sollenfeld, who runs the leadership course at Yale, who brings together the largest convocation of CEOs in the country. And I've been having a dialogue with Jeff. And I said, Jeff, you're the hero we need. Because the reality is you have to be empathetic to. It's very hard to go first right now. And that is, if you go first and you say, I'm the president's enemy, the largest customer in the world is the U.S.

34:59government. And it also has the ability to basically neuter your company. And you do have a responsibility to employees and shareholders. So what's needed is collective action. And that is somebody has to get 10, 50, 100 of the Fortune 500 CEOs to basically put out a real letter saying, this has just gone too far. And there are certain constitutional and democratic and civil rights that have made these companies the best performing companies. The best performing organization in history is the U.S. military. The second best performing organization in the world is U.S. corporation. And one of the reasons it's performed so well is basic separation of government and business, uniform systemic laws that you get to oblige by, you're compliant to, but also you have the same treatment.

35:44and they could just put out a fairly, a letter that says, we're just not down with what's going on and it needs to be 50 of them because right now what they all say, and I've heard from probably about 20 % of the companies we're asking to resist and unsubscribe from, and they all make a big point. They're like, it's really hard to go first. So there's a lack of leadership or there's an opening for someone to organize a group of them to push back. But the fact that effectively in the last week, I think Anthropic has become more valuable than open AI. You're going to see more no's. All of a sudden, a bunch of CEOs are going to reach down and find these spherical things and decide to speak up.

36:25Kara Swisher:Well, speaking of which, let's go over Anthropic. The Pentagon has officially labeled it as a supply chain risk. But the company says it won't impact business partners as much as Pete Hegseth implies. And the ban will only apply directly to contracts with the department. Department—I'm going to call them Department of Defense because I feel because it's like the Gulf of America. Dario Amodi is also apologizing, as I said, for a memo. He basically said the White House punished Anthropoc for not offering, quote, dictator-style praise. What is happening here? There's a person, as I've talked about, a guy named Emil Michael, who is a tech person who got—who had to leave Uber under very bad circumstances, including reporting by an organization I ran.

37:07Kara Swisher:Really, a bullying toady is how I would describe him. But Hegg said, let's use him, pretend he knows what's happening. Do you think they're going to try to go harder on Anthropic now? And what is the price? Because he did pull back some. What do you think went into that? I think they're distracted. And the only thing I'm fairly certain of is that, again, I'll go back to my consulting days. There's actually a wonderful kid, Ari, who's here, who used to work with me. Kid, he's now three kids, lives in Minnesota. That means you're old, but go ahead. But I always used to say before we'd go in to talk to a board or management, who's in the room that's not in the room?

37:49And that is there's always a context or atmospherics in a room. Companies are highly politically charged places with leaders who have a disproportionate amount of influence even when they're not in the room. I'm like, we're going in and we're talking about e-commerce or shareholder value, but who's in the room that's not in the room? And I believe almost every decision being made by this administration is two people who are in the room but not in the room. And that is whenever you see anyone dealing with the press or congressional testimony, Roy Cohn is in the room. And if you look at Roy Cohn's, Roy Cohn was Donald Trump's mentor.

38:23attack, attack, attack, insult, lie, deny, never acknowledge, attack, attack, deny, insult. And basically, one of the greatest brand erosions of the U.S. government is there used to be a certain decorum and civility when you testified in front of Congress. We weren't that nation that broke into fisticuffs or started throwing water at each other. That's gone because Roy Cohn is in the room. The second person that is present in every room right now around every decision is Jeffrey Epstein. And I believe, and I've said this over and over, that there are three very smart people armed with every LLM monitoring the temperature of the proximity between Trump and Epstein's name in the news.

39:03And when it goes above a certain temperature, they then ask the LLM for what action would create the most controversy, no matter how ridiculous it is, we're taking tariffs of 50 % on Spain, we're going to invade Cuba, start calling someone racist names that will push the temperature down again. I think that Roy Cohn and Epstein are literally in every room.

39:26Kara Swisher:So who is in Pete Hegsest's room besides Jack Daniels? No, really, it's his friend from high school. I don't, I think... And probably grammar school, looking at him. Yeah, I think that Dario's going to get let off the hook because my prediction is in the next two to four weeks, other CEOs are going to step into the void, the vacuum of leadership here. So he'll get some help. I think he'll get some cloud cover from other firms. It'll start saying, we're not going to run with the government. Any prediction of what firm that would be? It's not going to be Jeff Bezos. I don't know. I really don't know.

40:00Kara Swisher:I feel like it might be Ted Sarandos, someone like that, because he doesn't give a fuck now. Yeah, Ted is in a position to do it now. I mean, in fact, we're going on a diversion here, but walking away, it's so funny. If you wrote a book called The Worst Acquisitions in History, you just might as well call it Warner Brothers. And by the way, I wrote that book. You did not read it because you don't invest in Marble. Oh, the book on AOL. Yeah, I wrote two. Yeah. It was called There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere? I was having a bottle of Lancers and listening to Cisco when I read that. Okay. And the English beat.

40:37All right, finish up. I got another story. But effectively, they walked away from a$120 billion deal, so they have$120 billion. Their stock's up 24 % since walking away from a deal, and they're the$60 billion. in. So my suggestion to Ted is, you know what, you've just saved$182 billion. You know what's worth$178? Disney, which has the most defensible business in all of entertainment, which is the parks. The reason I bring that up is, again, Warner Brothers is about to be the worst acquisition in history. There's a basic rule. Sherry Redstone, Edgar Bronfman Jr., now David Ellison. The wonderful thing about income inequality, unfortunately, because of our tax structure, we create dynasties.

41:14But when we had a more sane tax structure where we taxed estates because we didn't believe in dynasties, we didn't have such out-of-control income inequality. Because here's the thing, the kids of rich people are usually fucking idiots. And they usually spend all of their dad's money because they're under the impression that being rich makes them smart. And they start making really stupid decisions.

41:35Kara Swisher:Yeah, that's been my experience. I always say to one of them, I can't remember who it was, One of these kids, I said, you know, it's that you were born. The only people paying these prices in media are their children of rich people. But I mean, their idea is they were born on third base and they think they've hit a home run. And they haven't. And it will be a disaster. You're right. Speaking of unusual people, some Elon Musk news. He was in a courtroom this week. Investors are suing him, claiming his 2022 tweets about pausing the Twitter deal tanked the stock price and cost them a ton of money.

42:07Kara Swisher:Elon's defense, he says he put the deal on hold because he genuinely had concerns about bots and fake accounts. If the jury doesn't buy it, he could be on the hook for close to a billion dollars in damages. He's managed to unctuous his way out of so many lawsuits, the Peto lawsuit, the other one where he said 420. What do you think about this one? He really misbehaved in this case. He was forced to then buy it, of course. He literally fits the SEC definition of insider trading and market manipulation. Yeah. If I had said, if I was on the board of a public company and said, made an announcement, tweeted that we had just, that I was buying the company for$420 a share at a 60 % premium and the funding was secured, and that wasn't true, I would never be on a public board again, much less be an officer.

42:59And most likely I'd end up in jail. We have sent people to jail for much less than this. And this is the problem with this level of massive income inequality. And that is, generally speaking, the one way AI might help is AI might actually be a means of enforcing the law unilaterally, which it is not now. Because the reality is the top 1 % are protected by the law, but they're not bound by it. And the bottom 99 are bound by the law, but not protected by it. And Elon Musk represents that in spades. And so what? Because most of the penalties from the law are civil penalties. And there is no penalty big enough to get Metta to stop putting out content that convinces teenage girls to stop cutting themselves.

43:38And there's no penalty large enough, no fine large enough for Musk to stop lying and committing the types of SEC violations that the rest of us have to play by.

43:48Kara Swisher:So what's going to happen here to him? Because he'll say he was concerned about bots. He had an ironclad deal with no due diligence that he agreed to. At some point, the laws, the penalties have to be a percentage of your wealth or the market cap of the company. Because he might be fined as much as a billion dollars. If you have the average household wealth of a family in America,$120 ,000, that's the equivalent of a$550 fine. Yeah. He's going to be a trillionaire with the space. So who cares? He doesn't care. And he just throws money and lawyers at it. So do you think he'll win this case? Because he's won them all.

44:24I don't know enough about it. What do you think?

44:26Kara Swisher:I think he might win it again. I think he always manages to squeeze out of things. And he says, oh, he just didn't mean to say it. And he had real concerns. And, you know, we talked about this at the time. We're like, he's going to have to buy it. We don't care what he says. Oh, the court, the Delaware court was not impressed with him. He did not want, he tried to do everything. He realized in a manic state, ketamine, that Twitter was worth $44 billion. And then when he sobered up, he's like, uh-oh. And he did everything to try and get out of it. And the Delaware chancellor said, I'm just not that impressed by you.

44:58These agreements into the board, the board of Twitter's like, if this, we don't care if this guy's really fucking high. If he wants to pay us this much money, just send an agreement that they are tight. And they did that and they wouldn't let him out of it because they knew that he, they was buying a$18 billion company for 44 billion.

45:13Kara Swisher:Yeah. But he of course sailed out of that because the banks didn't foreclose on him. They did because they wanted the next deal. And to be fair, the company has performed better than they thought. And he moved it into, you don't know how it's performed. Well, Twitter, most of the metrics are lower, significantly. But my understanding is advertisers have returned. That's not your understanding. My understanding is the business sucks as it always did. Fair enough. And the numbers are down in threads owned by. Huge inroads. It's now bigger. Bigger. Bigger than Twitter. But still, I mean, people do, still there's a lot of politicians on it, and press that continue to stay on it.

45:47Kara Swisher:Scott and I left a long time ago despite enormous audiences there. I mean this sincerely. I mean, I talk about this a lot. I struggle with anger and depression, and I try and go through a series of things that will be an unlock. And I try to keep track of what causes when I go dark. And one of the things I realized about 4th is that 20 to 25, very analytical, 20 to 25 percent of the time when I went dark, it was fucking something that happened on Twitter. Yeah, you used to get upset. So I stopped using Twitter about three and a half, three years ago, last World Cup. My suggestion is one of the most accretive things you can do for your mental health is not be on Twitter.

46:23Kara Swisher:Yeah, I would agree. I would agree. I have not missed it one bit. I continually have tech bros saying, you're really missing out and what's there. And I'm like, oh, someone not calling me a cunt 50 times a day. I'm good. I'm real good with that. What? Why does that make me happy? I don't know. That's a word we need to reestablish as a good word to use. They use it in Britain. You live there, right? Don't they call you that all the time? Yeah, that's one of those words that I should never, ever say under any circumstance. Please don't. Don't even do see you next Tuesday. You're not allowed to do anything.

46:59Kara Swisher:Anyway. You own that word. I can, and I use it quite a bit. Anyway. All right. Next story. More than 1 ,500 transgender people in Kansas woke up this week to find their driver's licenses are now legally invalid, all thanks to a new state law forcing them to get new ideas that reflect the gender they were assigned at birth. The law also has what critics are calling a bounty provision where anyone who encounters a trans person in a public bathroom feels aggrieved can actually sue for damages. Courts are already pushing back with legal filing calling the law something designed to, quote, discriminate against and dehumanize transgender people, you think?

47:36Kara Swisher:these anti-trans laws are popping up across the country again. Will pushing back on this be a winning or losing strategy for Democrats? Obviously, the sports stuff did stick. But as we get closer to midterms, this particular thing seems the most dehumanizing thing and sickening thing. You need your license to vote. People are immediately without a license, a real idea to fly and everything else. And it's really, I think it's one of the cruelest things that I've heard to do to transgender people as yet among the many cruel things people do. Any thoughts about how to deal with a story like this?

48:15Kara Swisher:Be careful, Scott.

48:19So something David Frum said, kind of summarized how I feel about the Democratic Party right now, and that is if progressives won't enforce the border, fascists will. And we stick out our chin and we lose our fucking minds when we try to pass legislation that demands corporations have third bathrooms. or when we let a trans woman, and I realize this is the wrong crowd for this, but I want to speak as I would anywhere else, or we decide that a trans woman can compete in a woman's NCAA meet and all progressives look around cautiously and then applaud and call it inspiring. So you're telling me all medals, endorsement contracts, professional contracts, all money, college scholarships are ultimately going to go just to people born with penises?

48:57We lost our fucking minds. And then they move in and see an opportunity to demonize the community and just quite frankly cover it and respond with hate. So I think with a democratic, and I'm torn on this, I think with a democratic community needs to be thoughtful. It's like, look, we have civil rights. This is a community that deserves the same dignity as every other community. But no, we're not gonna make it our front and center issue. This should be settled law and move on.

49:28Kara Swisher:But it's not settled law. They took away their licenses. This is where it goes. But the law, in my opinion, my read of the law is there's no legal justification for taking away their licenses. But don't make it the platform for whoever's running for president. I just think these, I think a lot about, you know, I think a lot about masculinity. I hadn't noticed that. And loosely speaking, I think of it as acquiring skills and strength in the service and protection of others. You might disagree with the trans community. You might not believe in gender affirmation, whatever your beliefs are. But if you think of yourself as a man, right, and you see this kind of demonization, it doesn't matter your political views.

50:16You move to protection. This is just straight victimization.

50:23So where I land is this should be settled law. Of course you don't take their driver's license away. That's just stupid. But don't make it don't make it the lead and opening debate for the presidential election, because this is a community that this is I get it. This is a really tough one, but we really screwed up on this one. And there are a lot of Americans that have a different viewpoint on this. But in my view, this is something where we say, all right, let's be reasonable. We're going to afford this community the same rights and dignity as every other community. But it's not going to be a part of our platform that we lead with.

51:00Kara Swisher:I do think they're trying to—definitely trying to get us to stick our chin out. At the same time, I think it actually is very helpful when they do this bounty provision thing. It just seems fucking mean. Like, I think just like everywhere else— It's persecution for no reason. I think it had resonance here in Minnesota. I didn't live here, but that definitely— North Dakota passed a free play law, whatever it's called, so no trans athletes in high school. And then when they were asked to find a trans athlete in any high school, they couldn't find one. Yes, that's correct. There's six of them. Anyway, it'll be an interesting thing going forward, but it's astonishingly cruel.

51:36Kara Swisher:And I think it will hit back at them, especially these bounties. I think there's a real trend that I think you and I talked about was a lot of people have immigration issues. A lot of people have this. And a lot of people who are sort of pro-Trump or voted for Trump, to me, has said, but not this way. Right. And I think there's a great deal of political strength to be saying, OK, you can have that view. But do you really want to do this to people? Do you really want to do that? And I think Minnesota was sort of the absolute place where people were like, are you fucking kidding me? Like that kind of thing.

52:09Kara Swisher:And I think it does have resonance, especially when the citizens fight back in a way that has a lot of dignity and grace. and suffering also at the same time. So last one. This one is for you, and it's our friends at the Minnesota Star Tribune, which we love. Minneapolis now leads the Midwest in OnlyFans subscriptions, according to new data from OnlyGuider. I didn't even know there was like a data for OnlyFans, but out of 167 cities, Minneapolis ranks fifth in the country per capita and sixth in the world. Minneapolis residents spent more than 14 million dollars on OnlyFans in 2025. First of all, what the fuck is going on with all of you?

52:58Kara Swisher:And Scott, will you be staying a little longer in Minneapolis?

53:04So I'm fascinated with OnlyFans, not for the reasons you think.

53:08Kara Swisher:It's exactly for the reasons you think. It reflects a lot of things about our society and economics. So 84 % of the creators are women, 80 % of the revenue, I'm sorry, 80 % of the creators are women, 84 % of the revenue comes from men.

53:31It's the highest per employee revenue company in the world right now. It's a bigger business than the New York Times at 7 billion. and the number of registered users is greater than the population of the United States. It's effectively a transfer of, it's basically we've monetized healthcare in the United States, we've monetized rage with social media, and now we're monetizing male loneliness. And I think it's a symptom of something much more insidious and frightening, and that is young people aren't having enough sex. And a lot of it is because young men are not leveling up and taking as much, they're taking way too much risk online, and they're not taking enough risk offline.

54:10And I offend people when I say this, but I hold to it. I think we need to celebrate young men's horniness.

54:23But we need to celebrate it offline. And what I would say is that the killers of masculinity are the indoors, a lack of exercise, blaming immigrants, blaming women, and porn, I think are killers of masculinity. And I'm very good at doing, I'm going to bring this story back to myself. When I was about 24 years ago, I was at the Raleigh Hotel at the pool. On Sundays, they have a DJ day. And there was just this scorching hot woman. And I said to myself, before I leave, I promised myself I was going to speak to her. I'm like, I'm going to speak to her. I'm going to make the approach. I promise I'm going to do it.

55:07And without the benefit of alcohol, I chickened out because I'm just not that interesting without alcohol. And so I went to get my car and I had the valet ticket and I thought, oh fuck. And I ran back in and I went up to her and I showed her the valet ticket. And I said, I promised myself I was going to say hi to you. And on was left. Anyways, 18 months later, we gave birth to a son whose middle name is Raleigh.

55:38And let me be less aspirational here. I wasn't looking at or thinking I want lower rates on auto insurance. I think embracing your horniness and wanting to have sex is a wonderful thing. It encourages you to level up. It encourages you to shower. It encourages you to have a plan. It encourages you to develop a kindness practice. It encourages you to work out. It encourages you to get girl friends who can teach you how to behave around women. And when they see you're a decent dude, maybe introduce you to some of their friends. Men need to level up. And the motivation for leveling up, quite frankly, is being so horny you're willing to take risks.

56:18Kara Swisher:Oh, well, all right. What's your next book then? And when you're, quite frankly, jerking off twice a day to porn, which unfortunately through AI is getting more and more lifelike and more and more seductive, it's going to reduce your ability to do one of the most wonderful things in the world, and that is make your own bad porn. And let me just finish with this. I'm waiting for this to end. Let me just finish with this. I hate the incel movement Involuntarily celibate Like it's so You face so many obstacles That you've just given up And you wear like a badge of honor Well guess what 99 % of men through 99 % of history Have been involuntarily celibate I was involuntarily celibate For the first 19 years of my life And this is what men do They level up Such that they can be voluntarily incelibate so the fact that okay work welcome to the fucking work week dudes level up women are leveling up that means you've got to raise you've got to you've got to level up right develop the attributes i have i coach young men i call it the rule of threes if you work out at least three times a week and i have data on this you spend at least 30 hours a week working outside of the house and at three times a month you put yourself in the company of strangers in the agency of something bigger than you, church group, writing class, nonprofit, whatever it is, and you're willing to talk to people and endure rejection, express friendship, express romantic interest.

57:55Every father has an obligation to teach his son how to express romantic interest while making that woman or that man feel safe. That is an obligation you have to—45 % of men, 18 to 22, have never asked a woman out in person. And there are not enough men leveling up and realizing at some point, if you do those three things, you're in the top 5 % of men. And what I tell these young men is that if you're in the top 5 % of young men for long enough, you will be, trust me, voluntarily incelibate. And the most wonderful thing in life is building a life with a partner. And guess where it starts? When dudes are really fucking horny.

58:40Embrace their horniness.

58:42Kara Swisher:All right. The theory of horny from Scott Galloway. It's why we put a man on the moon and have vaccines. It was guys who wanted to get laid. In any case, you know, Minneapolis, we're going to let you off the hook because it's super cold here. But now that the weather is lovely like today, you better get out there and fuck. Apparently, according that's according to Scott Galloway. I, of course, have never had a problem attracting people. but it's not going to happen for you tonight. I'm going back to his house tonight, but I'm never happy. No, I'm kidding. Wouldn't that be great, Jess? You always bring this up when it's live.

59:19I don't. I have no interest in you whatsoever.

59:22Kara Swisher:I mean, it's like you're the reason I became a lesbian. Anyway, we'll take one more quick break and we'll be back with Scott's update on the impact of resist and unsubscribe.

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1:01:40Kara Swisher:Scott, we're back, recording live from Minneapolis.

1:01:46Kara Swisher:and the reason we're here is that back in february you started telling people how to resist and unsubscribe on our show now uh tell us how well it worked scott let me tell you you're in for a treat scott doing a press he's he used to be a very good professor and he's going to show you why in a second that's how i met him okay so the agenda why why we did this the weapon that's hiding in plain sight, what we build, what's next? Okay, so what we don't recognize is we have a weapon hiding in plain sight, and that is the most radical act in capitalism is non-participation. If you go all the way back to COVID, which is the most, quite frankly, crispest, biggest government action in history, it wasn't because tens of thousands of people were dying.

1:02:28It was because GDP crashed 31%. The only time the Trump administration responds is when the markets crash. So I started thinking, how can we send a signal to CEOs and to the president about our objection to what's taking place here? We want to rewire the incentives. Right now, the incentive for all CEOs in tech is to just comply, is just to be obsequious to the president. We need to figure out a way such that when CEOs, instead of complying, instead of providing data for surveillance, whatever it might be, they think there's a potential downside to this. And then also just personally I have found that action absorbs anxiety This is the first time in my life i've had i've had trouble disassociating from what's going on politically And also I think there's way too much courage behind a mic and behind a keyboard And more of us sort of need to have our off mic and our off Keyboard actions foot to some of the virtue we claim to have when we get in front of a fucking keyboard So in a capitalist society Right consumer spending Two-thirds, we are a consumer-driven economy, and also the wealthiest among us are controlling more and more.

1:03:36So if you want to hit the wealthiest, you go after stock prices. And then effectively, again, what we saw was the greatest political response in history was when GDP crashed. I want to rewire the incentives. I apologize for being redundant here. So it's the weapon hiding in plain sight. Economic strikes. It really is a powerful lever. And this is a brief history of economic strikes. And the one I always point to is the Montgomery bus strike. And there was a very cinematic moment where a courageous woman refused to give up her seat. But actually what moved the needle, it was a 13-month economic strike where approximately 300 cars a day organized by a young reverend named Martin Luther King gave people carpools such that they didn't have to take the bus.

1:04:23And essentially, the municipal system started losing a quarter of a million dollars a month. And then after 13 months, they gave in and they desegregated the bus line. So it needs to be sustained. And essentially, our president does not seem to be moved by outrage, not as much by protest, not as much by the Supreme Court, not as much by even his own Republican Party. He seems to be moved, quite frankly, by markets. And when he is withdrawn from discussions of annex in Greenland or of crazy, terrified ideas, it has been when one thing has happened. It's been when the market has crashed. So how do we send a signal to them?

1:04:58What I think is the soft tissue of the market right now is it's too concentrated. And that is somewhere between a third and 40 % of the stock market of the S &P. It's just a handful of companies. So that's the soft tissue. We go after these companies and then we go after the soft tissue of the soft tissue. And that is subscriptions. And again, these companies make up most of the market. it. So when Netflix just announces that for the first time they've lost subscriptions versus gained them, they lose$58 billion in market cap. More recently, T-Mobile was supposed to do add 506 ,000. This is from an earnings call a couple of weeks ago.

1:05:37They only added 495 ,000. So just an 11 ,000 dealt in subscriptions, they lost$30 billion in market cap. So the amount of power we have, when we strike the artery of these companies, the organs of our corpus and government, with a blow around subscriptions, it really is the most impactful thing we can do relative to the amount of consumer disruption. Okay, so what you're going to find when you go to resist and unsubscribe like me is you might even save some money. I found out that I had four AT &T contracts that for BlackBerrys and iPads that would have been in landfills for 10 years. So these companies are smart and they make it very hard to unsubscribe.

1:06:23So basically the site is just meant to navigate you to a link such that you can unsubscribe really easily. And what we have found is that of the people who go there, approximately 5 % actually unsubscribe versus 4 % in an e-commerce site. And we have driven approximately 1.5 million, we're coming up actually on 2 million unique side visits without. Thank you. But the most exciting thing is we haven't spent a single dollar because neither Alphabet or Meta would take my money because it was quote unquote political in nature. Yeah. Anyway, so how did we drive traffic? The thing that drove the most traffic was an article posted at npr.org.

1:07:04I was not expecting that.

1:07:11I've also built a calculator where if you go on and type in who you're unsubscribing from and the size of your social media footprint, it will give you a sense for the economic impact. So I'll give you an example. If you and your family or you have a decent-sized social network and you unsubscribe from ChatGPT,$240, based on the size of your social network, if it's decent, you get another three people. So four people unsubscribing, that's$960 in lost revenue. Because this company is trading at 40 times revenues, that is essentially about a$38 ,000 or$40 ,000 hit to their market cap, just with you unsubscribing and then posting it on social media.

1:07:53Again, this needs to be a sustained effort of small actions adding up over 13 months. so instagram uh we had huge views and pick up because we had some celebrities talk about it and then tried to the cloud cover actually i did about doing a bunch of research on protests is media coverage uh we pelted you with this before i've been a total whore i'm going on everything right now it but media coverage is important because if you look at when abc acquiesced and put kimmel back on the air it was actually when unsubscribes were going way down but the media coverage had picked up because it hurts morale internally.

1:08:35So what's next? So what I'm trying to do is figure out a way to sustain this movement. And I'm going to be hiring someone full time and recognizing that we had some good momentum and we don't want to give it up after a month and try and add some innovation to it and continue to drive traffic to the site. Also, where is our kind of red line, right? Like, what is your, you know, what was your sort of last straw moment? And for me, quite frankly, it was, it happened here. When we had a member of the cabinet describe a nurse taking care of veterans as a domestic terrorist, I just can't, I want you to know, and I'm fairly confident of this, I don't have research.

1:09:24I think there are tens of millions of Americans that just feel your fucking rage right now.

1:09:37Okay.

1:09:43So we have a lot of companies. We're going to spend a few weeks focusing on one, specifically ChatGPT and an unsubscribed movement around ChatGPT.

1:09:55Also, I think there's essentially we get poorer if we don't have systemic laws that affect all companies when we start punishing some companies and rewarding others. One of the reasons that America trades into the highest P multiple, in other words, if you create a dollar at Target, the shareholders, the stakeholders get$27, whereas retailers in Japan get much less, and in Germany. And one of the reasons, great research universities, incredible risk aggressiveness, deepest pools of capital. But the reason we have the deepest pools of capital is because of those things, but also rule of law, where they believe that if they invest in a company, they know what the company is going to get to do or be enabled to or be restricted to because the laws are supposed to be applied equally.

1:10:36So when we have these one-off punitive efforts that result in CEOs bending a knee to the president, it not only is embarrassing, it not only denies us of our civil rights and our civil liberties, it's going to make us poor over the long term. and we don't realize how good we've had it for so long. Effectively, if you think of it, we have$5 million for every startup in this nation. Europe has 1 million. We have five times the amount of risk capital here and I think it's in large part because until recently, we had a set of consistent systemic laws that applied to everybody in terms. If Palantir or Andoril want to make weapons or provide the government with information to surveil citizens, If it's legal, they're allowed to do it.

1:11:21But at the same time, if a company doesn't want to work with the Department of Defense, they're allowed to do that as well. And the big myth over the last year is that the markets have performed well. If you look at the crash in the dollar, we're 21 out of 23 right now. We have underperformed every market except for New Zealand and Denmark since President Trump was inaugurated. What I would say is one of my role models around this is Heather Cox Richardson. in. I think it's really easy to be bereft.

1:11:53I got about two minutes here and I'll wrap up. I think it's really easy to be resigned or bereft to the notion that we're in uniquely dark times, that this is the worst it's ever been. That just isn't true. This nation has survived plagues, civil wars, world wars, unbelievable economic disasters. We were interning families because as they were Japanese in what was effectively concentration camps, not that long ago. And many of those families had sons serving in the European theater. But what happened in each of those instances is that Americans were equal to the moment and our democracy came back stronger.

1:12:29And effectively, that's the question now. Are we equal to this moment? And my fear is that people such as myself, that effectively I would describe my economic history, as unprecedented typhoon-like winds in my sails, while paying the lowest taxes in history. Never asked to serve in the military, never really asked to volunteer, incredibly low tax rates, free education, UCLA and Berkeley, unbelievable technology paid by middle-class investors, DARPA. I got assisted lunch, I got Pell Grants, and I've paid, I think my average tax rate, and I talk openly about this, has been about 20 % for the last 10 years.

1:13:14So in sum, and I think there's a lot of you like me in this room, we have a debt. Our objectives are to send a signal to consumers that they have a weapon hiding in plain sight, and to create a series of incentives among CEOs that there's a downside to enabling this depraved behavior. The weapon hiding in plain sight is economic strikes. Most radical act in a capitalist society is non-participation. I talked a little bit about what we built and we're going to continue to innovate around it and continue to try and drive traffic to it. I'm going to hire full-time resources and probably focus in on a narrower set of companies to send a stronger signal.

1:13:52And what I would ask each of us, and I think we've been inspired by some of the sacrifice that many of you have demonstrated, what I'm asking of a lot of people, especially my generation, is do you have a debt? You know, are we equal to this moment? Thank you.

1:14:17Kara Swisher:All right. Thank you, Scott. So, again, one of the things, you can go to Scott's site, Resistant Unsubscribe. unsubscribe from one thing that you don't fucking need and you don't need at all that's all and it does build there is a one of the great things about minneapolis was there's a stone soup quality to all this we all can contribute there's talking to your legislators it's talking to people at work talking to your community organizing community groups things like that and the most important thing the absolute most important tool in your in your entire kit beside your wallet and everything else is to vote.

1:14:57Kara Swisher:Voting is the most critical and important tool in this to do. Scott always surprises me with things like this, and I think it's really important. And you can ask a million questions of why it won't work, but as Scott says, what could go right? And so that's how you should think about it. People of Minnesota, thank you so much from the rest of us in the country. Thank you, Minnesota.

1:15:27Kara Swisher:When history is written, this will be one of the main stories of this era. And I'm telling you, it's changed everybody's, it has. You don't think it has. The sacrifice has been worth it, even if it seems like an incredibly steep price to pay. Across the country, people, it has inspired people in a way that is, I think, going to change things. rather significantly. But it's not over. Just remember, there's still these sons of bitches keep coming. Anyone who's in any marginalized group like you, they keep coming. So you got to keep vigilant against what they're doing and don't assume they're ever going to go away.

1:16:05Kara Swisher:And so it's that true. That too. So keep going, Minnesota. We have got your back. We really appreciate this. and we're so thrilled to have done this here. We will be back this year. And you can catch tonight's show on YouTube and in your podcast feeds. That's all the time we've got for today. Thank you, Minneapolis. Thank you, Minneapolis.

1:16:41Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for$15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three-month plan equivalent to$15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra.

1:17:09Kara Swisher:Default terms at mintmobile.com.