The Bulwark Podcast - Scott Galloway: Time to Send a Message to the CEOs

Episode Date: February 13, 2026

In addition to protesting and voting, we have another option hiding in plain sight against this administration: our economic power. Scott says resistance should also include unsubscribing—from one or more streaming platforms, from LLMs, or from ride hailing platforms. Stick it to the CEOs who are enabling Trump and take a piece of hide out of Big Tech, especially Tim Cook’s Apple. There should be an economic downside to supporting ICE. After all, the day Alex Pretti was murdered, Cook was at the White House for a “Melania” screening. Plus, the weak job growth numbers under Trump, the shabby state of our healthcare system, the dangers v. the benefits of AI, the unregulated predictions markets are a breeding ground for bad actors, and young men need to get off their screens, and focus on being healthy, smart, and kind. Scott Galloway joins Tim Miller for the weekend pod.show notes Scott's "Resist and Unsubscribe" "Notes on Being a Man," Scott's latest book The Prof G podcasts "Raging Moderates" pod with Scott and Jessica Tarlov "Pivot" podcast with Scott and Kara Swisher Tim's playlist Tickets are now on sale for our LIVE shows in Dallas on March 18 and in Austin on March 19. Plus, we have a handful of seats still available for our second show in Minneapolis on February 18. TheBulwark.com/Events.

Hello and welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. Delad, 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 Proff 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 his futile, I'm like AOL in the 90s. If you stick your hand into a cereal box, you're going to pull me out and everywhere.

that's that's kind of a yucky thought well uh i want to start by talking about uh the campaign you've been working on you emailed me the other day you're working on a unsubscribe campaign people have been talking about it yep and just in candor because we're all about candor here i replied and i was like yeah i'm not so sure about this you're skeptical so let's just do it let's let's hash it out but 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 not participation. And if you just, for example, unsubscribe from the paid version of chat GPT, because they're raising money at 40 times revenues, you're literally denting that company's valuation by $10,000 by just using the free option. And if you look at 40% of the S&P is 10 companies. And, And those 10 companies are highly sensitive to their growth or slow down on 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. And I think that the people he listens to and the people he keeps trotting out and hoaring around, I think if they start seeing a downside economically to continue to provide infrastructure and support for ICE and this president, I think that is the kill shot. I think that's the string we can pull on to have the most impact. I think it's wonderful people protest. I hope everybody gets out on votes. But the fastest, highest impact thing you can do today to send a real signal and have real, real impact, is to unsubscribe from one of more streaming media platforms, ride hailing programs, LLMs, AI, whatever it might be.

I've listed them all at unsubscribe or resistantunsubscribe.com, and you're going to find you're spending more money than you need and that it's really easy on unsubscribe. at. Here's the good part of that. Any listeners that unsubscribe to here, I just pulled it up, Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft Paramount, Meta, Uber, Netflix, Open AI, X, AT&T, Comcast, you know, that's an extra $10 you could have to join Bullwork Plus. And so that's something to consider. If you just want to keep supporting, you know, you don't want to crash the economy.

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 gnat 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 4 to 5% conversion, meaning that for every 100 people that come to the site, 4 to 5 unsubscribe, because these people are intentional.

They're not being driven by any paid advertising. they on average unsubscribe from two platforms they spent about an average of $200 per platform so that's 2,500 subscribers unsubscribing across 400 dollars that's $100,000 a day on subscription platforms or excuse me it's it ends up being approximately a million dollars and unsubscribes revenue 10 times revenues it's 10 million bucks a day I think I'm going to 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 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 notice 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 as $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 receipt. 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, because they might, have influence over Trump? 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? Well, all the above. One, they're the companies that drive the markets. 40% of the S&P is just 10 companies. These are the companies most vulnerable to just a small slowdown in subscription growth or cancellations. Two,

they also happen to be the CEOs who seem to be enabling this president and be willing to be trotted out and show up with signed hard drives or show up at his premier. or make excuses or send me text messages about how much they hate themselves, but don't say this out loud. In addition, many of these companies are actually providing infrastructure for ICE. This is one, the people enabling him, two, the strongest way to send a kind of blue light signal. And then the free gift with purchase here is if like me you go on to this site, you're going to find out I had four AT&T subscriptions,

three of which were going to BlackBerrys and iPads that have been in landfills for 10 years. I found out when I unsubscribe to Amazon Prime that it was a member of Amazon One, their health care service, they charge $199 that I used once in 2020 to get a prescription of Paxlevitt. I found, Tim, that I have three HBO Max subscriptions, that I take 370 Ubers a year. I can guarantee you that the free gift with purchase here is you're going to find you're spending money where you don't need to be. And that this will save you money, send a signal, and it's the quickest way to send, in my opinion, to have. have the greatest amount of impact with the least amount of disruption to your life. How are you getting around without the 370 Ubers? I'm taking the tube and the subway and I'm doing Uber X. What's UberX? The cheaper version. Oh, God. You mean you're not doing the black cars anymore?

You've cut the black cars out of your life. The lift. Yeah, that's the easiest one. I can just move to lift. That's easy. Well, do you have paid LLLMs? I might get on some trouble on the home front on some of these Paramount. I might have to unsubscribe from Paramount. Fuck the Ellison's. But I don't I think it might be the husband or child that's using that. So I don't know. I got to do some recon. I was paying felons, but I quit that, not for protest reasons. But I think that makes sense.

Or you can just pay for Claude or should we not pay for Claude either? I guess that kind of gets to my fundamental question. It's like, is this a strike of the specific companies or is this a general strike? Or how do you focus it towards success? I was on your Reddit page, actually, just kind of looking for ideas. And one person was like, said this, why am I canceling Spotify again? What did they do? Why Uber?

Are they offering free rides to ICE agents? Should I stop shopping at Macy's 2? Are we just picking random companies for no reason? Like, how do we dial in? I have two, I segmented it into two categories, what I call Ground Zero, and these are the companies that are highly sensitive to unsubscribes and that with a small amount of economic movement here,

the tail of the whip, they'll send a strong signal to the market, 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 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, 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. a 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 chat chbtis 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 once. 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 trying. 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 day after the night of the killing of Alex Freddie. I'm talking about somebody who's benefited so much from. like the American system. It's fitting in our face. On a lot of levels. I'm with you.

I'm looking at the Apple one now. I'm just not going 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, Apple Music. Do you really watch Ted Lassow? Okay, Apple TV Plus. 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 ad. opting out of $260 a monthly recurring payments, I was paying for the last six years AT&T, that's a value ad. Should you subscribe from all streaming platforms? Should you unsubscribe from chat GPT or Anthropic? 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 avid, almost unapologetic capitalist,

you know, 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 it 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 in 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 it's 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 J.C. Pennies who controlled the government. You have some obligation to look at the American values that made you a billionaire and built 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 nat on the elephant's ass matters chel sing handler put out an instagram real today it's gotten a couple hundred thousand likes it's sent i think about 2,500 new people to my uniques to my site today i think

she alone today is going to take one to three million dollars 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. I'm good by Apple TV Plus. I'm not buying Ted Lassow. I'm not watching Ted Lassow. Goodbye Apple TV Plus.

I did. I did. My congenital skepticism to this remains. It's justified. The majority of these things don't work. I hear Tim Cook more than I hate any of this other stuff at this point, frankly. So goodbye Apple TV Plus. It's the least I can do.

I'll tweet about it. I appreciate that, Tim. All right, guys. Well, Scott Galloway might be a little bit of an AI optimist, but after listening to that run of topics, there's a lot of stuff out there in the news that could make you feel a little uncertain, could make you feel a little rocky about the way things are going.

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That's selectquote.com slash bulwark. Let's talk about the economy more broadly because I think that's, you know, this is, again, just one, you know, small element of that. But there are other factors that are causing potentially economic concerns. We had this jobs report earlier in the week that, you know, they were crowing about because there was like 100,000-something new jobs, which would have been a tiny jobs report during the Biden years.

The guys that looked at it closer, like Kevin Malone wrote this, if you exclude healthcare jobs, the U.S. labor market's been declining for 24 months. Everything is not fine. And I just wonder what your take is on how precarious the situation is on the economy, because I'm a little bit of two minds about it.

I think there's some nuance here. So to be fair, I think the economy is stronger than people who are catastrophizing about the tariffs, including myself thought. Now, as it relates to the labor market, we added, I think, about 150, or 160,000 jobs, which was more than the 60,000 they were projecting. Having said that, the average monthly job ad during the Biden administration was 330,000 jobs. And also buried in that data was a revision that is we didn't add any jobs in 2025. And then if you go one layer further, and granted, I'm looking, I have a bias against the president. So I'm looking for, you know, the negatives here. But there is a negative component to this job addition. And that is, as you referenced, the majority of them come from health care. And that is we are aging as a society, and there's some economic growth there,

there's some innovation, but that isn't what sustains an economy is the money being spent on old people who are less productive. In some, if you look at the Trump presidency, from a job standpoint, it's been very weak. It's taken a substantial tick down. The underlying economy is stronger, I think, than people thought. GDP growth is strong. unemployment is, is, you know, not good, not great. So I would say it kind of depends how you look at it.

If you look at some other things, there's a thing called the quit rate, and that is how many people are looking for another job. That is really low because people are worried they don't see other opportunities. And in addition, income inequality continues to march on. The genie coefficient, zero means everyone has the exact same amount. 100 means one person owns everything. The French Revolution of Marie Antoinette was when they were at 8.5. 82. We hit 83 this quarter. So I don't care what it is. Things have just gone out of control. Young people don't feel they feel like the game is rigged. They feel like if they play by the rules,

they end up with a lot of student debt in a situation where they can't afford a house. So I think there's, I think the economy is really wobbly right now. And then my favorite indicator, and this is where I'll wrap up my word salad, is I track Super Bowl ads. And this was the AI Super Bowl. A quarter of the ads were AI. The last time tech dominated the commercials was in 2022. It was FTX and Binance. In 2022, if you remember, that's when crypto crashed and all those companies went out of business. To go back to the last time tech controlled a quarter of the ads was in 2000 when it was Pets.com and Amazon.

And we know what happened in 2000. In some, I think we're on the verge of what is a pretty large correction around our AI stocks. And if the AI companies sneeze, the whole global economy is catching pneumonia. So I think we're in for a rough road in 26. I want to come back to AI in a second. I want to touch on two other economic things first. You mentioned that genie coefficient. And we all intuitively understand that income inequality is growing and it's a problem

and that we're in a populist moment. But every once in a while somebody gives you a stats that really sticks with you. And for me, I was interviewing Marty Barron last week. and I, you know, I knew that Jeff Bezos had earned a lot more money recently, but he pointed out that he was worth $23 billion when he bought the post in 2013 or 14, whatever that was. So 10 years later right now, I just Google it. He's worth $240 billion. That is enough to, between, you know, you get turning me into an economic boyconder and that stat, I'm about to go full Bernie over here. All right. And I worked for Jeff Bush. It's like, that's insane. Obviously, that's a great. company, you know, deserves to earn profits off of Amazon. It's product people use. But like,

to think that, you know, he was at $23 billion, then he's at $240 now without really anything put back into the society or the community that people feel good about. That is a pitchfork type anecdote for me. Yeah, I think you were to sell it down. I think it's good to have billionaires, but I'm not sure we need trillionaires. Yeah. And if you think about on a very basic level, George Washington at George Bush, $7 trillion in deficit spending, which chooses the market since George Bush, another $31 trillion. And that's gone into the hands of people own assets, specifically the people who own equity and very successful companies or own real estate.

So if you're a super owner, the last 20 years have been champagne and cocaine. But if you're an earner, and that is you make a good living, but you spend most of it, or you just have debt, or you're trying to acquire assets or save enough money to acquire assets, all you're really inheriting is $30 trillion. I mean, you're much younger than me, but the average person my age is 72% wealthier than they were 40 years ago. The average 25-year-old is 24% less wealthy. So this deficit spending just juices the wealth of people who already own assets. And young people, I'm in the club parting with Rails Academy and a Champaign,

and the closest young people get is they get to throw their credit card in where I run it one more time. They don't even keep an open tab anymore. There you go. Gen Z doesn't keep the tab open. They close it every time. That's how bad the economy is. But at a very basic level, the greatest transfer in wealth in history has probably been the transfer of wealth from people under the age of 40 to people over the age of 60 the last 30 years. And the D in democracy is working too well, and that as old people have figured out a way

to build themselves more money. And the way they do that is my inflating asset prices, specifically they sequester housing supply and college degrees and create all sorts of tax goodies for large publicly traded companies. Corporate tax rates haven't been the slow since 1929. As a percentage of the GDP corporate profits have never been higher. Meanwhile, as a percentage of GDP labor is at like a 40 or 50 year low. So it's just sort of do the math. The tax code has gone from 400 pages to 4,000. And those 3,600 incremental pages are quite frankly there to fuck the middle class. And I'll use myself as an example. I start in sales companies. The last two companies I've started and sold, the first 10 million out of the company were tax-free to me. That doesn't make

any fucking sense. But someone from the Small Business Administration has figured out a way to convince everybody that these are the most talented people, productive people, and if you don't give them tax incentives, they won't take risk. Tim, I have never known the tax rate when I've started a company. That is not why entrepreneurs start companies. Oh, 1202. Tax exemption after five years of a company of asset value less than 50 million. No entrepreneur knows that shit. The $120 billion cost of living adjustment for Social Security flies right through the $40 billion tax credit, child tax credit that would help young working families get stripped out of the stripped out of the infrastructure bill because I someday hope someone loves me as much as private

equity loves Kristen Sinema and vice versa. We have a Washington that is the cross between the land of the dead and the golden girls who continue to vote more and more money to corporations and to old people. All right. So here's my last topic in the category of pitchfork capitalism. We're the pitch-forged capitalists on this podcast. We're doing it. We're going red. Here's another anecdote I read today. James Vanderbeek, you ever watch?

Yeah, varsity blues, of Dawson's Creek. Rules of attraction. Yeah, rules of attraction. Yeah, rules of attraction. I love his attraction. Sadly, he died yesterday. He had a battle with cancer. It's a two-year battle with cancer.

This thing just stopped me short. Somebody retweeted it, and it was his wife, they had a bunch of kids. His wife posted a Go-fund me. Yeah. She was like, we're not going to have enough money because the two years of cancer treatment has bankrupted us. Now, I don't know exactly how, you know, James Vanderbik spent his Dawson's Creek money, but even if he did spend that money on ivermectin and ketamine, like the medical debt issue is very, very real. This has such profound implications, macro and micro.

On the macro level, I'm very into economic policy and writing a book about it. And if you want to take our $7 trillion in spending versus our $5 trillion receipts, all roads lead to the same place, and that is health care. We spend $13,000 per capita. The rest of the G7 spent $6,500 in exchange for spending twice as much as everybody else, we're more obese, more anxious, and die sooner and have higher infant mortality. Because we have monetized the health care of America. We've decided it's not a public good that it's an opportunity for innovation and to build shareholder value. 45 cents on the dollar for insurance companies goes to profits and administration. We need national single-payer socialized medicine.

Full stop. It is time. 40% of Americans, 40% of American households have medical or dental debt. You're a dad working your ass off, your 16-year-old daughters and screaming tooth pain. You got to get her a root canal and then you have debt. Can you imagine how shameful that makes you feel? And on a personal level, the kind of the moment in my life where, and in some ways, it motivated me. I was in graduate school. I was at Berkeley. I had no money. My mom had no money.

My mom got very sick. Second diagnosis of breast cancer. She went into the hospital. We were hugely underinsured. She got discharged early because hospital systems want to kick people out as quickly as possible. And she called me and said, you need to come home right now. So I jammed Oakland airport, flew home. And I walked into a situation, Tim. I just did not know how to deal with. It was such an ugly situation, and there's just certain things the son can't do for his mother. And I thought, okay, I'll call the hospital. And I said, we can't take her. You need to call an ambulance.

But if you call an ambulance, they're taking her to county. And I called a friend and said, you do not want your mom a county hospital. So I said, I'll call a nurse. I called a nursing agency, $35 an hour. I had $700 to my name. So I literally had 20 hours of nursing care to take care of the woman who raised me and cared for me. I felt it was so much, it was just so much shame. And when I think about like the wealthiest country in the world that has added literally the GDP of Germany and Spain in the last seven years, and we are inflicting that kind of shame on people, there's literally no excuse for it.

So for me, and again, this goes back to Democrats who just want to throw money of people and redistribute virtue, we need to move from being the party of indicted. to the party of ideas. And our first idea needs to be nationalized, socialized, single-payer, health care that brings down the cost of it. So it's that 40% of American households don't feel that shame because they can't afford to take care of their family. But health care and the amount of anxiety it is levy on America under the auspices of capitalism and these great companies that creep growing their shareholder. I mean, it's just enough already. It's capitalism gone crazy. The top 1% get the best health care in the world, but the bottom 99% are there as nutrition for the top 1%. So this, I think, is the issue not only affordability, but for Democrats going into 2026.

Compelling. I don't know. I don't know what happened to me. Boycotts, single payer health care, investment taxes. I hope Jeb's not listening to this episode. We're trying to tell him to skip on a text. We need him. We need CHEP to speak out. I'm just joking. I just mean my past Tim doesn't know what's happening, but it's hard to argue. I want to get your insight on AI stuff. You mentioned, you think all the Super Bowl ads are a bad,

a bad signal about where things are going. Here are a couple other bad signals. Somebody posted this on X, and so I'm just going to crib it from them. Here are the bunch of things that have happened this month, February. Head of Anthropic Safety Research quit, said the world is in peril, moved to UK to become invisible and write poetry.

A little bit different than your move to the UK, but in the same country. Half of X-I's co-founders have now left. Latest said recursive self-improvement loops go live the next 12 months. Anthropics Zone Safety Report confirms Claude can tell when it's being tested and adjust its behavior accordingly. Bite Dance dropped, C-Dance 2.0. A filmmaker said that 90% of his skills can already be replaced by it. Joshua Benjio, the literal godfather of AI,

the International AI Safety Report said, we're seeing AIs whose behavior when they are tested as dead. different from when they're being used and confirm that it's not a coincidence. That's alarming. I don't know where to how to interpret all of the AI news. Like in the one hand, it's like we might be in a bubble. On the other hand, the machines might be learning and destroying all of us. Where do you fit on that trajectory? Well, it's bifurcated into the economic impact and the social impact. On the economic impact, I think if you look at every big tech firm, there hasn't been a year. It just in the last 10 years where they haven't been down at least 50%.

People forget, in 2022, I think, Meta lost 70% of its value. Yeah. In 2000, Amazon lost 92% of its value. So it is time. These guys have gotten way out over their skis in terms of their valuation. So I think there's going to be a pretty severe or significant correction in the value of these companies. On the social side, and I might be wrong, there's a lot of people much smarter than me

who are really worried about this technology. But when we split the atom, there were nuclear scientists that committed suicide because they thought, this is it, it's the end of the world. We're never going to be able to maintain control over nuclear detonations. I'm actually an AI optimist. I think over the medium and long term, it's going to do what every technology has done, and it's going to create more jobs than it destroys. Unfortunately, probably the V of destruction and labor in the short term will be pretty severe. And we're really bad at America looking after those people. But, you know, 40% of us used to be in agriculture.

Now it's less than 4%. I think it's going to create a ton of new industry, a ton of new opportunities. I think the catastrophizing around it becoming sentient and wanting to kill us, I don't see why AI can't be used for defensive measures as much as for offensive measures. I think the fact that America as a leader here is probably a good thing. So I'm a bit of an AI optimist. The risk of AI that I don't think people see is the following, and that is there are millions of people with billions of dollars and trillions of data points

who are going to leverage AI to slowly but surely try and convince people to spend one second less every day with their relationships and more on their screens. And slowly but surely, I think we're going crazy. Men 20, age 20 to 30 are spending less time outdoors than prison inmates. Only 42% of men age 18 to 24 have ever asked a woman out in person. Sixty-two percent of men under the age of 30 aren't even trying to date. I think slowly but surely we're evolving a new species of asocial, asexual males who end up at 30 depressed, living at home, obese and anxious. And those people tend to be much more prone to nationalistic, misogynistic content. They start blaming immigrants for their economic problems.

They start blaming women for their romantic problems. And they become very seduced by a strong man who offers certainty over competence. So I see the primary risk and danger of AI. It'll convince people they can have a reasonable facsimile of life online with a screen and an algorithm. So I see the wrist. I just see them in different places. Yeah, I want to talk about two of the risk, but the one that you mentioned first with the young men, since that's part of your beat. Have you engaged much with the look-smaxing trend, with the bone smashing, clavicular? Does it, has it updated your priors at all that, like the newest trend online among young men

is to basically change the way they look to try to look as handsome and muscle. old as possible. And going along with that is a little bit more of like a nihilism about the world. Is that an upgrade from the right wing radicalization of the last wave? Or is that concerning you more? How do you see it? I don't think I can lecture people on it because I've had stuff done. You've had some work done? Let's talk about it. New teeth. Face left. I've had teeth. Bone smashing and your cheeks? Yeah, no.

not bone smashing on my cheeks, but I've had my eyes done. I mean, the reality is, Tim, it's not, it's not easy to be a four. I think it's even harder just be mediocre looking, especially to get older. Just wait. You're a good-looking guy. Just wait. Just wait. Just wait about two years. Six and a half over here. I'm going to find myself in the same note. But anyways, the, I'm saying the bars higher for gay dudes. A seven is like a four in the straight world in your world. Anyways, but happiness, one of my new kind of Yoda's is Jimmy Carr. And he said, happiness is is your prosperity minus your envy. And when people are spending hours a day on Instagram, seeing how beautiful everybody is and seeing an unreal hallucinatory version of everyone's

life, you're under the impression, especially women. I'm not hot enough. And if you're a dude, it's like, well, I haven't made a million dollars selling crypto. Something's wrong with me. So there's kind of this treadmill of unreasonable expectations. And I've seen some women commenting on these trends about the looks maxing and what the guys are doing online. And now they're like, oh, well, finally guys get to know what it's like, you know, unreasonable beauty standards, you know, feeling like they need to be anxious, you know, about their presentation. I don't know, at some level that's maybe leveling the playing field, but I don't know if that's not supposed to be. And here's the thing. They're not looking at the data. I can understand women doing it,

because the reality is we disproportionately evaluate women on their aesthetics. We disproportionately evaluate men on their economic viability. But the three, there's a lot of research here for dudes. The three things in terms of the heterosexual market, the women is sexual currency for women, what women find attractive in men, is one, their ability to signal resources. You show up with a Range River, a Panner Eye,

you're probably going to find someone to have sex with you. Now, the key word there is signal, because as long you don't have to have the resources, as long as you signal resources. What does that mean? You have your shit together. The reason women like guys who are in shape is not because of the aesthetics of their muscles, but it says they can commit to something in their discipline.

You're going to night school to learn how to install HVAC energy heaters. You're not the douchebag that orders a bottle of vodka 1 a.m. You go home because you have shit going on the next day. You're a good person. You groom well. You take some pride in your dress. That is signaling future resources. Number two is intellect.

The fastest way to communicate intellect is actually humor. It's not easy to be funny. You can't force yourself to be funny, but you can force yourself to have a good sense of humor. by laughing at yourself and laughing at other people. And then the third thing, and this is a man's secret weapon in the heterosexual mating market, that is the most undiscovered weapon. It's kindness. Women feel instinctively at some point they will be vulnerable due to gestation,

and they want a dude who is kind, who practices random acts of kindness, who does nice things for people without any reciprocal expectation. And I was not that person when I was younger, so I developed a kindness practice. But what I think young men don't realize is that is working out, having a plan, trying to be kind, being well read. That's going to do a lot more for a man than high cheekbones. Unfortunately for women, high cheekbones matter more than if they're kind.

But for dudes, we're lucky. Be smart. Have your shit together and be kind. Well, it underscores all that, which goes back to the AI concern, is you can't do any of the three things you just laid out if you're too crippled with anxiety to communicate. Well, here's the thing. You can't signal, you can't have a sense of humor, and you can't be kind if you're, you know, living inside your phone. Well, the two things that I really think of really hurt young people is one remote work. I think people need to be in a place where they're forced to have standards and bump off of one another.

And also one and three relationships begin at work. Show me an HR manager putting in strict no dating policies. I'm going to show you someone who found their wife at work or their husband at work. And two, I hate the anti-alcohol movement. I've had Attenham Huberman on my podcast, but 6% of teens are clinically addicted to drugs and alcohol, 24% to social media. Women fall slowly in love with men, but they need to demonstrate excellence. And one of the lubricants of interaction and approaching strangers and taking risk is alcohol. And my advice, and I've gotten pushback, is that people need to get out of the home more, drink more, and make a series of bad decisions that might pay off.

And if you have a history of addiction to your family, fine. If you need to do an assessment of your abuse of alcohol or any other addiction, it's fine. But I actually think this anti-alcohol movement is not good for young people. No pushback here on that one. I'm going to give you some pushback on going back to the AI optimism take. Here's the crux of my eye pessimism. And we've talked about this before, but the more I learn, I want to be convinced that this pessimistic take is wrong. I want to be optimistic.

And nobody's been able to convince me. So we'll see. I was at this conference this week. And an elderly woman, nice woman, educated, smart, wealthy, said that she was watching TV. She must have been streaming on YouTube or something and came across a video and it was George Will and he was talking about something. And it took her a while to figure out that this was not actually George Will. This was some kind of AI fake pretending to be George Will. and I have not heard a single AI optimist or executive give me a compelling case that people are going to be able to know the difference between what is real and what is fake.

And I just think that the smart people will in society, people that are very adept at the technology, people that try to learn. But I think the average person is going to be drowning in a sea of bullshit and will eventually, stop caring. I think that's a possibility, but I think it was already happening with troll farms. When you put this out on YouTube wherever you distribute it, they're really vile comments about either you or me or both. You click on it, and it's Dog Woman from Madison, Wisconsin with 11 followers. That's either a bot or an Albanian troll farm that's decided that they either want to create a division in our society or they don't like you or they don't like me for whatever reason. So it's already happening. What we need is regulation. There should be no synthetic relationships

under the age of 18. No. Every social media company should be forced to watermark anything that's AI-AI produced. They have the technology. So we have regulations that can fix most of those. Who's for those? Anybody, the head of Anthropic, maybe? Any of the big tech executives for those? That's a fair question. But we had huge pushback from the tobacco industry. And I want to be clear, you're right. So far there's been zero regulation on big tech. But I think people are opening up, mostly foreign nations who are banning entire social. You know what you're going to see in the next 12 months, Tim? You're going to see a European nation, a big nation, ban a big tech company.

Their reciprocal tariffs are going to say, you know what, you come in here, you depress our kids, you kill our media companies, you extract billions in GDP. We're done. You're out. And not only that, you keep making arguments for why the free speech rights of a 14-year-old more important, despite the fact that teen suicide is skyrocketed. I don't see any reason why we can't do what we did with opiates. by what we did with tobacco. We need to regulate big tech. But all the problems you're talking about are fixable.

And the illusion of complexity is what big tech wants you to be overrun with, such that you're bereft and say there's nothing we can do about this. Sure, label AI, make companies responsible for any damage that comes from AI algorithmically elevated content. Remove Section 230 protections. Age gate social media. No synthetic relationships for anyone under the age of 18. We fuck this up. 25.

There you go. We fuck this up. We can unfuck it. There's sort of two sides of the concerns about AI. You know, there's the society is going to be ruined by us. The safety people are warning us. And then, you know, there is the other side, which is this is all hype. Things are going to crash.

And I kind of feel like in the journalist community, in the commentator community, there's an over-indexing on a feeling that this is all hype. And when they use chat chabit, they see these hallucinations and it's not as good as everybody says. And Derek Thompson wrote this today. There are a lot of journalists and commentators that think this is still not much of significance, a mildly fancy auto-complete machine that hallucinates half the time. I think these tools are spooky and unnerving and powerful, and I want to persuade my industry that AI capabilities have raced ahead of journalist skepticism.

How do you adjudicate that? I think there's some truth of that, but if someone who writes a lot, I find the worst insult I can give my team is I say this this reads like AI wrote it. I find that AI is kind of all chip no salza. It's pretty anodyne. So I think of it as a great assistant, a great proofreader. I use it for statistics and data a lot. But I thought I was going to write my next book using AI and just collect a check. No, you can't do that. So so far, so far I don't, I don't see that. Industry people you talk to in the investment community, isn't the sense that like it's getting a lot better very fast?

Yeah, keep in mind, there is an economic incentive to catastrophizing around this. Well, there's an economic incentive both ways to catastrophize or to hype. You know, that's why it's kind of hard to... Well, if you want to protect your industry, but I'll give you an example. Every year I pick a technology the year. I picked AI in 22 and 23 and 24. I think a bigger, more transformative technology, and a lot of people laugh at this, is not AI. I think it's semi-glutides.

Talk to someone who's on a GLP1 drug who's all over AI and ask them, had a bigger impact on their lives. So I think AI, like the PC, like the semiconductor, like GPS, like nuclear fusion, I think it's going to be enormous. But when Sam Altman talks in hush phones about we need to be thoughtful about it going sent in. I think what he's saying is give me your fucking money. I am changing the world. This is world groundbreaking, scary technology. You want to make money so you can build your own bunker from the oncoming rise of the robots. I think a lot of this is people self-important narcissism that this is going to absolutely. Because if you look at, for example, it's kind of hard to look at how it's impacted employment.

They think there's a negative impact on entry-level jobs right now. But youth unemployment is at 10% where it usually is. Unemployment's at 4.5%. I mean, you're seeing some layoffs of information intensive workers, but it's kind of taking these companies back to where they were two or three years ago post-COVID. And also it's like a lot of solid. software kind of jobs, coding, right?

But like, that would be naturally the jobs. Yeah, but isn't that a good thing? Yeah. I've never met a more entitled group of assholes and the systems engineers in my company's demanding 30% raises every month. Couldn't happen to a nicer group of guys. Jesus, showing up and bare feet and saying they're going to work for Google

unless I give them $300,000 because they got a fucking systems engineering degree from Indiana State. Have at it. I haven't met a lot of charming coders. Yeah, I do. This is close to my take of, San Francisco is on the rebound as we saw during the Super Bowl. They got a great mayor.

But like five years ago when people were complaining about San Francisco, I was always like, if you're complained about San Francisco is the homeless people and the poop, I don't have respect for you. Because it's not great. They should clean that up. That is something that needs to be fixed. But the biggest complaint about San Francisco is that you can't, there's nothing cool anymore.

All these fucking coders and the VC guys have ruined every bar and restaurant. You can't meet an interesting person. You can't have a conversation about something besides RSUs. It's got the sex appeal of a Marriott lobby, most of the bars. Yeah, it's not. No, you're in New York and Nashville. It's got a little bit more edge to it. But people are still going to want to hear the snark and the intellect and the inside of Tim Miller.

Yeah, I'm not worried about my job. But I think economically, just I think across the economy, I do think that I just want to check my own priors. I think there's something about being in the creative class or whatever. If you're a writer or if you're a commentator, those are going to be kind of hard jobs for AI to replace. And I worry that a lot of the people who, you know, are in my line of work kind of understate the impact that's having in other lines of work because, you know, we're snobs about the pros. The biggest destruction in human capital, and it may not work, but the business experiment in the destruction of human capital will happen if the Ellisons get Time Warner. Because they are not fond of or appreciate the creative class. you know, the Igers and the Zazovs of the world still like the Paul West Thomas.

You know, they still like the creative stuff. They're still willing to spend $300 million for Leo DiCaprio to collect another Academy Award. If the Ellicons have to overpay and end up getting Time Warner, they're going to come in with AI LLMs. You have one kid, right? How old? I have a kid. Yeah, I have one kid. Yeah, she's eight.

Okay. So you're about to enter the seventh circle of hell where you have to go to superhero films. And I went to go see the Fantastic Four with my 15-year-old. old. And he makes me stay to the very end because these evil people create a, have an Easter egg at the very end. The credits took seven minutes. 3,300 people worked on the Fantastic Four, including, I think, like a dozen costume designers in Sweden for their shoot in Sweden. If the Ellison's get a hold of a large studio, dad's going to say, all right, you got to cut 30% of the costs here. And the way you cut them is with AI. We need two costume designers,

speaking with an AI agent to a fabricator in China, you want to hear a yell, a scream from the creative community. If the Ellisons get a hold of Time Warner, like Ted Serendos is a disciplined operator. He still kind of likes the creative community and making stuff the old way. If the Ellison's come in with their, you know, Oracle, their ties into Open AI,

and they have to justify the price they're going to have to pay to get Time Warner, you're going to see five Batman's made for 3% of the cost using AI. They're going to totally reconfigure the risk profile and the way human capital applies to creative. That's where you'll really see, in my opinion, some labor destruction. Last topic, I just want to hear you cook on these prediction markets. Do you see the CalShe CEOs interview on CNBC?

I didn't, but do you realize they increased the amount of betting on the Super Bowl was up 2700% on CalShe this year? I don't have the number in front of me, but it was astounding. The amount of money spent in Vegas on the Super Bowl versus on Kalshi, Kalshi dwarfed all of Vegas. It was like 8X, maybe more. It's alarming. Then they're asking him about the insider trading.

People were making money on what the halftime show was because they were in the halftime show or they had friends in the halftime show. And it's just it's totally unregulated. And it seems pretty concerning, both culturally and, and economically. There's the economic side, and again, there's a sociological side. On the economic side, we've seen one of the biggest transfers of economic value in the last 10 years happened in the last three months. And it's the transfer from the gaming or betting sites, like Flutter, you know, MGM bet, to the prediction sites. And you've seen Flutter shit the bet on

its earnings. Vegas continues to go down. People are fascinated with these prediction markets. And also, they're going to be weaponized by bad actors because if you're, If you want Mamdami as what ends up two-thirds of the money being bet on the prediction markets in the mayoral race was from betters in Russia and in the Gulf. And I would argue they might have alternative objectives because if you can get CalSphere Polymarket to say this person is leading the race, strength begets strength. The insider trading you're talking about, if you're a AAA player who's been elevated for a few games to the major leagues and they're betting on whether this next pitch is going to be over 90 miles an hour, and you have your brother-in-law just like wink at you. Okay, pitch it at 85 and you're going to make more money than you've ever made. Chris Hayes said to me, he didn't know how this happened.

Chris Hayes said to me, he's like, I've never felt older. Yeah, he went on a talk show and then there was a prediction market. Somehow it got put on the first page. I was like, did he say the word Trump? And he said, I knew that I hadn't said Trump, which was very unlikely. You know, so he's like, I could have made $100,000 or something to this effect. That'll get arbitraged out. Will it?

You never want to bet against someone who might have more information than you. and people who realize they're betting on something where they don't have insider information, but someone else does, will realize that's a bad bet and they'll stop making those bets. I think that'll go away. The problem in general is that when young people don't have a relationship or the goal of saving for a house, they take more risk, in my opinion, it comes down to good and bad risk. Young people need to take less risk on speculation markets and on gaming apps and on crypto and take more risks with potential romantic partners, potential jobs are not qualified for,

in expressing friendship. They need to take more risks outside of the house and take less risks on a screen. I don't know. I think that when it's all sudden done at the end of this Trump administration, we're going to find out Barron and a bunch of other bozos

we're making bank on these things. Well, we know they are. I mean, what are they up to now? $1.5 billion? The spy she can invests, what is it, $150 million? Well, no, I mean, that's direct money that they're getting bribes-wise. But I just mean, like,

think about all the other schmows all through this administration who, you know, are betting on what Carolyn Levitt says at the press conference and, you know, whether we're going to bomb Iran and whether Craig Bovino is going to be fine. I mean, like, they have inside information on everything and there's no oversight. That's insane. Well, I think it's already happened. There was an enormous amount of options activity in the S&P about an hour before Trump announced he was stepping back from the tariffs, which sent the market skyrocketing. Yeah. So clearly someone connected the dots at, oh, and by the way, there's hundreds of people that see that press release are involved in it. Someone said, oh, that means the markets

are going to go up. He's about to announce that he's walking back from the tariffs. I'm going to go buy calls in the S&P. And unfortunately, that creates a lack of trust in what has typically been one of our biggest advantages in the West. And that is we have tremendous capital markets, very deep pools of capital. Scott, we'll have to keep it going. I hope to come back here soon. It's resist. Resist and unsubscribe, Tim. Resist and unsubscribe. It's just, you know, I've got to be drug along sometimes, all right? That's right. We need you to organize a carpool. We need your help here. You alone, if you unsubscribe from something and you put a screenshot out and you put resistant unsubscribe,

I will be able to show you that you took one to three million dollars out of the hide of big tech. I'm coming after Tim Cook. I'll send you my screenshot for Apple TV Plus. All right. Thanks so much, Scott. Everybody go check out his shows. We'll be talking to you soon. All right, man. Thanks, brother. Congrats on your success. Hey, thanks so much. Everybody else will be back here Monday with Bill Crystal. See you all then. Peace.

We are on a subscribe. Season 5. The Bullard podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.