Tim Wildmon: Hey, welcome back everybody to Today's Issues on American Family Radio. Thanks for listening to AFR. I'm Tim with Ed and Fred. We have last names, but we don't want to have our identity stolen, so we're not giving them to you again.
Tim Wildmon: Steve Paisley, whatever your last name is. Hey, everybody. Try that, ladies and gentlemen. Try to steal Steve Paisley's identity.
Steve Paisley: Most people can't spell my last name even if they know it.
Tim Wildmon: That's true. Yeah, you're lucky in that respect. Steve Paisley, do it all with us. Good morning, Steve.
Steve Paisley: Good morning. Hey guys, real quick, somebody was telling me during the break, did you see where the O'Charley's restaurant chain completely shut down last night?
Tim Wildmon: I just heard about it.
Speaker: Oh, no.
Tim Wildmon: There's one down here. There's one in Tupelo.
Steve Paisley: Yeah, but the whole chain shuttered last night.
Speaker: Huh?
Steve Paisley: Eight o'clock last night. Anyway, they've been open for 55 years. A longtime Tennessee restaurant is closing its doors. This is from an article I'm reading. Nashville-based O'Charley's Restaurant and Bar will close all of its remaining company-owned locations nationwide Wednesday, which would have been last night, ending the restaurant chain's 55-year run.
Steve Paisley: I don't know how many stores they had. Maybe I can find out in this article. But most people, I would guess in the South, I don't know, maybe they're all over the place.
Speaker: I had never heard of one until I got here.
Tim Wildmon: Okay, so they're Nashville-based. Anyway, I always enjoyed their food.
Speaker: Yeah, it was very similar to like a Chili's or something.
Steve Paisley: Okay, it says O'Charley's operated at 52 locations nationwide earlier this year, including eight in Middle Tennessee. So maybe they're a regional chain, but anyway, I didn't know they'd close all their stores.
Tim Wildmon: Have you guys been back to Cracker Barrel?
Speaker: I have. Yeah. I have a time or two.
Speaker: I did notice Saturday my wife and I went up into the area where there's a Cracker Barrel. We were going to go run some errands. And it was about nine o'clock on a Saturday morning, when usually they're packed. They were not packed. So I don't know whether that was because it was Labor Day weekend or if maybe some of their foot traffic has fallen off a little bit.
Speaker: I was there about two weeks ago, and it was packed.
Tim Wildmon: All right, there you go. Yeah, I think they're doing okay. You know, they went through an identity crisis, what, about a year and a half ago or so? New CEO. They tried to change some things about Cracker Barrel, and they got some backlash.
Speaker: Sure did, even from the president.
Tim Wildmon: Yeah, and from their customer base.
Speaker: Yes.
Tim Wildmon: And so they said, we're sorry. And they went back. They reverted back. And they fired their CEO who had these ideas about changing everything.
Speaker: Oh, I think she resigned, quote unquote, resigned. And I think she's got a new position where she can ruin some other brand. Maybe it was Nike. Did you see this? Nike got delisted off the S&P 500 index. I didn't realize their market share had been dropping.
Speaker: Oh, that's a big deal.
Tim Wildmon: Nike, you talk about one of the leaders in the woke movement.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And some people are saying that's why. Remember back in the day when Michael Jordan was a Nike brand representative, and his allegedly, or by the...
Speaker: No, it was on video. He did say it.
Speaker: Did he say it? He said, when asked why, I think his mom asked him to endorse a candidate that was running around his hometown, and it was a Democrat. And he said, well, I'm not going to, because Republicans buy tennis shoes too, meaning that's what he wanted to focus on. And a lot of people were writing that Nike had forgotten that.
Tim Wildmon: Well, Nike, for those who don't know, I mean, Nike has gone down. I was reading that article. The big news yesterday was that the Nike Corporation had been taken out of the top 100 S&P, right?
Speaker: Right.
Tim Wildmon: So that would be, I think that's the most profitable companies in the world. When you look at the S&P 500, I believe the number is the average of the index companies, those companies. So they're still in the top 500. They're just dropped out of the 100.
Speaker: Yeah, probably. They still sell some shoes, and they're still doing business.
Tim Wildmon: Yes, but their profitability has dropped off tremendously in the last eight to ten years, and their stocks have just been cut like more than half of what it was. A lot of this is due to, remember, they embraced Colin Kaepernick. You remember that?
Speaker: Yeah.
Tim Wildmon: The guy who started kneeling at the national anthem in the NFL, and then Nike celebrated him. And they did other things that were, well, people call them leftist ideas, woke stuff, and people just said, you know what, I can buy Under Armour or I can buy Adidas or somebody else or whatever, but I don't have to buy Nike. And so Nike lost a lot of business because of that. I don't know if they've stepped back their political aggressiveness on the left-wing politics or not, but yeah, it was big news.
Tim Wildmon: Somebody read the first paragraph of the news story about Nike dropping off the 100.
Speaker: And while someone is looking that up here, some key controversial actions that critics have included when they have lambasted Nike, obviously the Colin Kaepernick partnership.
Tim Wildmon: And they made that partnership after Colin Kaepernick, and they said he's right, he's brave.
Speaker: They also partnered with Dylan Mulvaney, the trans influencer, a biological male, to model women's sportswear.
Tim Wildmon: Yeah.
Speaker: And that was leading to widespread accusations that the core female fan base was being ignored in favor of a man claiming to be a woman. Cancellation of the Betsy Ross flag sneaker. They pulled a patriotic Fourth of July shoe after Kaepernick complained the design was offensive, and then other things like that.
Speaker: They shot themselves in the shoe.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Nike did. Unforced error.
Speaker: If you say that today, please credit me.
Tim Wildmon: What's that?
Speaker: That was my joke, shot themselves in the sneaker.
Tim Wildmon: Oh, okay. Yeah. As soon as I think about repeating it, I will. We wanted the first paragraph that you sent around. Please read the first paragraph.
Steve Paisley: This is from OutKick, and the first paragraph reads, "Republicans buy sneakers, too."
Tim Wildmon: Well, read the second paragraph, Steve.
Steve Paisley: Those famous words came from Michael Jordan, widely regarded as the greatest basketball player of all time. He's also the athlete most responsible for transforming Nike from a shoe company into a global sports empire. Jordan made the comments during the 1990s, but the line endured because it captured a basic business lesson in four words: Republicans buy shoes. Democrats buy shoes. Most companies benefit when both groups want to buy theirs.
Steve Paisley: And it continues, Nike stopped listening. After spending much of the past decade injecting left-wing politics into its brand, Nike is now set to be removed from the S&P 100, ending a run of nearly 18 years on the blue chip index. S&P Dow Jones Indices announced the move Friday. Nike will come out before trading begins.
Tim Wildmon: Read the stock drop, and then we move on here.
Speaker: I've got some here. It says, since hitting its peak of about $179 per share in 2021, Nike shares fell nearly 80% to a fresh 52-week low of about $37 this year. Translated into the market cap, that is a loss of over $200 billion.
Tim Wildmon: It's a lot of money. We could use that money. We'll see whether they rethink their left-wing political endorsement or not. I bet they will. You know, it's just a case of why do they do it? Why?
Tim Wildmon: I don't think they calculate in the boardrooms when they make these decisions of marketing and how we're going to do things. Hey, the vast majority of Americans are going to be against that, but somebody gets up and says, well, let's do it anyway. I think what happens is you get groupthink in some of these boardrooms of some of these big corporations, and it gets taken over by left-wingers. Nike is based out of Oregon, right?
Speaker: Yeah, Portland.
Tim Wildmon: So not that everybody who works for Nike is from Oregon, but at the same time, that's where they're based out of. Well, when you think of Oregon, and I know with apologies to our friends who listen in eastern Oregon who want to make sure people understand they're not like Portlanders, that's a woke...
Speaker: Eugene.
Tim Wildmon: That's a woke mecca.
Speaker: The other thing is, I used to, by the way, when I was in Colorado, my next door neighbor was Phil Knight's personal assistant for the first...
Tim Wildmon: The founder of Nike.
Speaker: The first like 20 years of the company. Remember, the other reason the companies might do this is, and I know this is specifically the way that the big LGBTQ activists work, the activists will write a company and say, if you don't do these work policies, we're going to out you and we're going to trash your name. So there's pressure from the left. The right doesn't do this.
Tim Wildmon: But with Colin Kaepernick, when Nike said, hey, that's a brave guy, we need to celebrate, and he's taken a knee at the national anthem to disrespect our flag and our country, but more than that, he was dissing our history. He was taking the sort of approach that we're stolen ground, and he was coming from that far-left, anti-American point of view that he was into at the time, Colin Kaepernick was. And he was also racially divisive. You know, white people are the problem, and I don't think he said it exactly like that, but you know, white Europeans and all that stuff.
Tim Wildmon: And that was okay. And Nike said, you know what, we're with you, brother. We're with you on this, and we're going to put you in Times Square and put our brand name on it. I think that's when they first started losing customers. I know it was for us. We said, you know what? Because we bought Nike before then, and I'm not saying that we'll never buy Nike ever again in our lives, but I'm saying when you go shopping, you've got choices. And there are comparable products to Nike today, maybe where there weren't in the 80s and 90s.
Tim Wildmon: I remember when Nike, I think it was in junior high or high school when this would have been late 70s, early 80s, and Adidas was big. I'm talking about, I played basketball. Converse kind of owned the sneaker slash tennis shoe market. A lot of the country calls them sneakers. In most of the South, they're called tennis shoes. What are they called in Canada?
Speaker: Sneakers.
Tim Wildmon: Oh, I've heard you call them runners.
Speaker: I don't know why we in the South want to have our own words for everything.
Tim Wildmon: Because they're more than tennis shoes. Although if you go back in the countryside here, deep in the heartland of redneckville, they're called tenny shoes.
Speaker: Tenny?
Tim Wildmon: Like T-I-N-N-I-E. Tennis shoes. I'm serious, you listen to people. Anyway, I digress, which is rare for me, again. Tenny shoes, sneakers, whatever. But I remember when Nike came in with the ankle-top basketball shoes that came up to your ankles and gave you ankle support, and they had the swoosh. It was big. It was a big deal.
Speaker: It's a good movie, probably available on like Netflix or one of those kind of services, about that deal. Michael Jordan's agent, I think Nike was making a push for Michael Jordan, and they had him in, and he was going to go with Converse or Reebok or one of the other ones that was there. But Nike made him an offer he couldn't refuse, basically, and Michael Jordan put Nike on the map.
Tim Wildmon: Yeah, when Michael Jordan, the Air Jordan that's still around today, that just, you're right. Michael Jordan and Nike, they both made tons of money off it.
Speaker: It was his silhouette.
Tim Wildmon: Yeah.
Speaker: It was between his and mine, and they went with his.
Tim Wildmon: That's true. They went with his. Anyway, the big news is that the Nike Corporation has dropped out of the S&P 100 after being on there forever. So they're losing, and their company's going down.
Speaker: Just one last comment. Interestingly, when the controversy first erupted with Nike going with Colin Kaepernick, one of the defenses that I heard on social media was, listen, Nike is a private company, can do whatever they want. If you don't like them, don't buy their stuff. Well, a lot of people didn't buy their stuff, and now they are...
Tim Wildmon: I know a lot of people at the time, it's hard to sustain a boycott over years. And I don't know that it ever was an official boycott by any particular organization. But just the buzz out there, when you talk to people, they're going, you know, I'm not buying Nike because they're endorsing, they're embracing Colin Kaepernick, their guy and all this. So anyway, it wasn't just that. It was other things that they had listed there too.
Tim Wildmon: I don't celebrate anybody's job loss necessarily, or market share loss, except when you do stupid stuff and you keep doing it over and over again. I think it's fair to point out why this is happening to Nike, and that's what we're doing.
Tim Wildmon: What does a kidney go for? What can you sell a kidney for nowadays? Let me look that up.
Speaker: Well, while you're doing that, our producer Adam sent me a note. Now, if you really want to go on both tours, maybe you should vote Republican because you'll have $5,000 coming from the president.
Speaker: Per person. Per person.
Tim Wildmon: That is, you're onto something right there, guys. Yeah, so you can either vote for Republicans and they win and Trump says you get five grand, or you sell a kidney.
Tim Wildmon: Go ahead, Steve. What's your news?
Steve Paisley: Well, let's talk about the next company that may be self-destructing and taking itself out of an index. Apple is really putting out some new features on its Apple Watch. One of two new things that are going to be on the Apple Watch Series 12 Ultra 4, when paired with compatible iPhones. One feature is called Live Rewind, and it provides a text snippet of the past 15 seconds of your life, any conversations you've been having. And the second is Siri Recap, which can basically give you a Siri readout of conversations you have, like if it's details you want.
Steve Paisley: Now here's the thing. Both of these features require the watch or your phone to listen to your surroundings, ambient noise. It's listening all the time. Now, it's opt-in. You have to choose it, and you can turn it off. It's not compulsory. But Live Rewind continuously records and can give you a transcript for your last 15 seconds of your life. Siri Recap can continuously listen to conversations and make summaries of the conversation.
Tim Wildmon: When would you turn that on? What's the advantage of turning that on?
Steve Paisley: If you are in a meeting with your boss and you want to have notes, maybe. I don't know. But once Siri Recap is enabled, the watch is ambient listening all the time. You can turn it off.
Tim Wildmon: So you're telling me Apple's bringing back the flip phone?
Steve Paisley: Well, no. Apple's new phone has a foldable screen. They're like the last major phone company to come out with one of these. But this is a feature of the watch, which has to be paired with the newer model Apple. So it really doesn't have a whole lot to do with a foldable screen, but it does need the new phone.
Tim Wildmon: What's the difference between a flip phone and a foldable screen? I thought I said Apple was bringing back the flip phone, and you said no, they're bringing back the foldable screen.
Steve Paisley: Well, a flip phone is basically one of those old phones you flip, and you have text, but there's no internet connection. In fact, flip phones are what a lot of parents will give their teenagers. You're able to call out and do the phone thing, but there's no internet connection. It's the old type where you have to press A three times if you want the letter C or something like that, as opposed to the screen where it's like our phones, it's just a foldable screen.
Speaker: Tim, I can't believe you don't know the answer to this. There is a significant difference in design and use case. Both fall under the broader category of foldable smartphones, but serve opposite purposes. Flip phones, commonly called the clamshell, fold vertically. That shrinks a standard smartphone-size screen in half for maximum portability and pocketability. A foldable phone folds book-style, unfolds horizontally to reveal a large tablet-sized display, essentially acting as a phone that stands into a mini tablet.
Steve Paisley: Well, I think if you ask most people and ask like a parent what a flip phone is, they'll say it's a phone made before 1990, 2004 maybe.
Speaker: Yeah, and I just read the AI answer to my question. I know you guys couldn't tell.
Speaker: It was very helpful.
Speaker: It was.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: It made me sound smarter.
Speaker: Yeah, it did.
Tim Wildmon: By the way, I looked up, can you sell a kidney? Here's what I got from AI. In the United States and most developed nations, you cannot be paid to sell your kidney. However, under the National Organ Transplant Act, it is legal to receive reimbursement for expenses incurred during a live donation. I don't know about a dead donation, but during a live donation you get your expenses paid for.
Tim Wildmon: So real quickly, the Donor Shield and Assistance Program, you familiar with this, Ed?
Ed: Oh, no. Absolutely not.
Tim Wildmon: Well, can I elaborate?
Ed: Yeah, absolutely. Please elaborate.
Tim Wildmon: Well, there are people listening right now who want to know the answer to this. I would say that I'm just repeating what I'm reading here. Through programs like Donor Shield, a legal living donor can be reimbursed up to $30,000 to cover lost wages. I guess giving a kidney puts you out of work for a few days, I'm not sure. Up to two grand a week. So you can be reimbursed up to $30,000 to cover your travel, your lodging, and your dependent care as you get your, as you sell your liver. No, not your liver, your kidney. You don't want to sell your liver. You'll need one of those. You've got two kidneys. You can sell one of those.
Speaker: You know what's going to happen now if you searched for that? The algorithms will assume you need fast cash, and you're going to start getting ads on your internet searches for some fast cash options.
Speaker: The numbers to all the hospitals in the area.
Tim Wildmon: I'm not selling my kidney though. I'm almost 70 years old. Who wants a 70-year-old kidney?
Speaker: You can bypass that whole thing by getting the new Apple Watch.
Tim Wildmon: A legal living donor can be reimbursed up to $30,000 to cover lost wages. So a little tidbit there on our show.
Speaker: Most of the time people lose kidneys in horror movies, I think. You know, they do all these stories about waking up in a bath.
Tim Wildmon: It's a good thing the show's over, ladies and gentlemen. We hope you have a great afternoon. Keep listening to AFR. We'll see you tomorrow.
Tim Wildmon: Hey, welcome back everybody to Today's Issues on American Family Radio. Thanks for listening to AFR. I'm Tim with Ed and Fred. We have last names, but we don't want to have our identity stolen, so we're not giving them to you again.
Tim Wildmon: Steve Paisley, whatever your last name is. Hey, everybody. Try that, ladies and gentlemen. Try to steal Steve Paisley's identity.
Steve Paisley: Most people can't spell my last name even if they know it.
Tim Wildmon: That's true. Yeah, you're lucky in that respect. Steve Paisley, do it all with us. Good morning, Steve.
Steve Paisley: Good morning. Hey guys, real quick, somebody was telling me during the break, did you see where the O'Charley's restaurant chain completely shut down last night?
Tim Wildmon: I just heard about it.
Speaker: Oh, no.
Tim Wildmon: There's one down here. There's one in Tupelo.
Steve Paisley: Yeah, but the whole chain shuttered last night.
Speaker: Huh?
Steve Paisley: Eight o'clock last night. Anyway, they've been open for 55 years. A longtime Tennessee restaurant is closing its doors. This is from an article I'm reading. Nashville-based O'Charley's Restaurant and Bar will close all of its remaining company-owned locations nationwide Wednesday, which would have been last night, ending the restaurant chain's 55-year run.
Steve Paisley: I don't know how many stores they had. Maybe I can find out in this article. But most people, I would guess in the South, I don't know, maybe they're all over the place.
Speaker: I had never heard of one until I got here.
Tim Wildmon: Okay, so they're Nashville-based. Anyway, I always enjoyed their food.
Speaker: Yeah, it was very similar to like a Chili's or something.
Steve Paisley: Okay, it says O'Charley's operated at 52 locations nationwide earlier this year, including eight in Middle Tennessee. So maybe they're a regional chain, but anyway, I didn't know they'd close all their stores.
Tim Wildmon: Have you guys been back to Cracker Barrel?
Speaker: I have. Yeah. I have a time or two.
Speaker: I did notice Saturday my wife and I went up into the area where there's a Cracker Barrel. We were going to go run some errands. And it was about nine o'clock on a Saturday morning, when usually they're packed. They were not packed. So I don't know whether that was because it was Labor Day weekend or if maybe some of their foot traffic has fallen off a little bit.
Speaker: I was there about two weeks ago, and it was packed.
Tim Wildmon: All right, there you go. Yeah, I think they're doing okay. You know, they went through an identity crisis, what, about a year and a half ago or so? New CEO. They tried to change some things about Cracker Barrel, and they got some backlash.
Speaker: Sure did, even from the president.
Tim Wildmon: Yeah, and from their customer base.
Speaker: Yes.
Tim Wildmon: And so they said, we're sorry. And they went back. They reverted back. And they fired their CEO who had these ideas about changing everything.
Speaker: Oh, I think she resigned, quote unquote, resigned. And I think she's got a new position where she can ruin some other brand. Maybe it was Nike. Did you see this? Nike got delisted off the S&P 500 index. I didn't realize their market share had been dropping.
Speaker: Oh, that's a big deal.
Tim Wildmon: Nike, you talk about one of the leaders in the woke movement.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And some people are saying that's why. Remember back in the day when Michael Jordan was a Nike brand representative, and his allegedly, or by the...
Speaker: No, it was on video. He did say it.
Speaker: Did he say it? He said, when asked why, I think his mom asked him to endorse a candidate that was running around his hometown, and it was a Democrat. And he said, well, I'm not going to, because Republicans buy tennis shoes too, meaning that's what he wanted to focus on. And a lot of people were writing that Nike had forgotten that.
Tim Wildmon: Well, Nike, for those who don't know, I mean, Nike has gone down. I was reading that article. The big news yesterday was that the Nike Corporation had been taken out of the top 100 S&P, right?
Speaker: Right.
Tim Wildmon: So that would be, I think that's the most profitable companies in the world. When you look at the S&P 500, I believe the number is the average of the index companies, those companies. So they're still in the top 500. They're just dropped out of the 100.
Speaker: Yeah, probably. They still sell some shoes, and they're still doing business.
Tim Wildmon: Yes, but their profitability has dropped off tremendously in the last eight to ten years, and their stocks have just been cut like more than half of what it was. A lot of this is due to, remember, they embraced Colin Kaepernick. You remember that?
Speaker: Yeah.
Tim Wildmon: The guy who started kneeling at the national anthem in the NFL, and then Nike celebrated him. And they did other things that were, well, people call them leftist ideas, woke stuff, and people just said, you know what, I can buy Under Armour or I can buy Adidas or somebody else or whatever, but I don't have to buy Nike. And so Nike lost a lot of business because of that. I don't know if they've stepped back their political aggressiveness on the left-wing politics or not, but yeah, it was big news.
Tim Wildmon: Somebody read the first paragraph of the news story about Nike dropping off the 100.
Speaker: And while someone is looking that up here, some key controversial actions that critics have included when they have lambasted Nike, obviously the Colin Kaepernick partnership.
Tim Wildmon: And they made that partnership after Colin Kaepernick, and they said he's right, he's brave.
Speaker: They also partnered with Dylan Mulvaney, the trans influencer, a biological male, to model women's sportswear.
Tim Wildmon: Yeah.
Speaker: And that was leading to widespread accusations that the core female fan base was being ignored in favor of a man claiming to be a woman. Cancellation of the Betsy Ross flag sneaker. They pulled a patriotic Fourth of July shoe after Kaepernick complained the design was offensive, and then other things like that.
Speaker: They shot themselves in the shoe.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Nike did. Unforced error.
Speaker: If you say that today, please credit me.
Tim Wildmon: What's that?
Speaker: That was my joke, shot themselves in the sneaker.
Tim Wildmon: Oh, okay. Yeah. As soon as I think about repeating it, I will. We wanted the first paragraph that you sent around. Please read the first paragraph.
Steve Paisley: This is from OutKick, and the first paragraph reads, "Republicans buy sneakers, too."
Tim Wildmon: Well, read the second paragraph, Steve.
Steve Paisley: Those famous words came from Michael Jordan, widely regarded as the greatest basketball player of all time. He's also the athlete most responsible for transforming Nike from a shoe company into a global sports empire. Jordan made the comments during the 1990s, but the line endured because it captured a basic business lesson in four words: Republicans buy shoes. Democrats buy shoes. Most companies benefit when both groups want to buy theirs.
Steve Paisley: And it continues, Nike stopped listening. After spending much of the past decade injecting left-wing politics into its brand, Nike is now set to be removed from the S&P 100, ending a run of nearly 18 years on the blue chip index. S&P Dow Jones Indices announced the move Friday. Nike will come out before trading begins.
Tim Wildmon: Read the stock drop, and then we move on here.
Speaker: I've got some here. It says, since hitting its peak of about $179 per share in 2021, Nike shares fell nearly 80% to a fresh 52-week low of about $37 this year. Translated into the market cap, that is a loss of over $200 billion.
Tim Wildmon: It's a lot of money. We could use that money. We'll see whether they rethink their left-wing political endorsement or not. I bet they will. You know, it's just a case of why do they do it? Why?
Tim Wildmon: I don't think they calculate in the boardrooms when they make these decisions of marketing and how we're going to do things. Hey, the vast majority of Americans are going to be against that, but somebody gets up and says, well, let's do it anyway. I think what happens is you get groupthink in some of these boardrooms of some of these big corporations, and it gets taken over by left-wingers. Nike is based out of Oregon, right?
Speaker: Yeah, Portland.
Tim Wildmon: So not that everybody who works for Nike is from Oregon, but at the same time, that's where they're based out of. Well, when you think of Oregon, and I know with apologies to our friends who listen in eastern Oregon who want to make sure people understand they're not like Portlanders, that's a woke...
Speaker: Eugene.
Tim Wildmon: That's a woke mecca.
Speaker: The other thing is, I used to, by the way, when I was in Colorado, my next door neighbor was Phil Knight's personal assistant for the first...
Tim Wildmon: The founder of Nike.
Speaker: The first like 20 years of the company. Remember, the other reason the companies might do this is, and I know this is specifically the way that the big LGBTQ activists work, the activists will write a company and say, if you don't do these work policies, we're going to out you and we're going to trash your name. So there's pressure from the left. The right doesn't do this.
Tim Wildmon: But with Colin Kaepernick, when Nike said, hey, that's a brave guy, we need to celebrate, and he's taken a knee at the national anthem to disrespect our flag and our country, but more than that, he was dissing our history. He was taking the sort of approach that we're stolen ground, and he was coming from that far-left, anti-American point of view that he was into at the time, Colin Kaepernick was. And he was also racially divisive. You know, white people are the problem, and I don't think he said it exactly like that, but you know, white Europeans and all that stuff.
Tim Wildmon: And that was okay. And Nike said, you know what, we're with you, brother. We're with you on this, and we're going to put you in Times Square and put our brand name on it. I think that's when they first started losing customers. I know it was for us. We said, you know what? Because we bought Nike before then, and I'm not saying that we'll never buy Nike ever again in our lives, but I'm saying when you go shopping, you've got choices. And there are comparable products to Nike today, maybe where there weren't in the 80s and 90s.
Tim Wildmon: I remember when Nike, I think it was in junior high or high school when this would have been late 70s, early 80s, and Adidas was big. I'm talking about, I played basketball. Converse kind of owned the sneaker slash tennis shoe market. A lot of the country calls them sneakers. In most of the South, they're called tennis shoes. What are they called in Canada?
Speaker: Sneakers.
Tim Wildmon: Oh, I've heard you call them runners.
Speaker: I don't know why we in the South want to have our own words for everything.
Tim Wildmon: Because they're more than tennis shoes. Although if you go back in the countryside here, deep in the heartland of redneckville, they're called tenny shoes.
Speaker: Tenny?
Tim Wildmon: Like T-I-N-N-I-E. Tennis shoes. I'm serious, you listen to people. Anyway, I digress, which is rare for me, again. Tenny shoes, sneakers, whatever. But I remember when Nike came in with the ankle-top basketball shoes that came up to your ankles and gave you ankle support, and they had the swoosh. It was big. It was a big deal.
Speaker: It's a good movie, probably available on like Netflix or one of those kind of services, about that deal. Michael Jordan's agent, I think Nike was making a push for Michael Jordan, and they had him in, and he was going to go with Converse or Reebok or one of the other ones that was there. But Nike made him an offer he couldn't refuse, basically, and Michael Jordan put Nike on the map.
Tim Wildmon: Yeah, when Michael Jordan, the Air Jordan that's still around today, that just, you're right. Michael Jordan and Nike, they both made tons of money off it.
Speaker: It was his silhouette.
Tim Wildmon: Yeah.
Speaker: It was between his and mine, and they went with his.
Tim Wildmon: That's true. They went with his. Anyway, the big news is that the Nike Corporation has dropped out of the S&P 100 after being on there forever. So they're losing, and their company's going down.
Speaker: Just one last comment. Interestingly, when the controversy first erupted with Nike going with Colin Kaepernick, one of the defenses that I heard on social media was, listen, Nike is a private company, can do whatever they want. If you don't like them, don't buy their stuff. Well, a lot of people didn't buy their stuff, and now they are...
Tim Wildmon: I know a lot of people at the time, it's hard to sustain a boycott over years. And I don't know that it ever was an official boycott by any particular organization. But just the buzz out there, when you talk to people, they're going, you know, I'm not buying Nike because they're endorsing, they're embracing Colin Kaepernick, their guy and all this. So anyway, it wasn't just that. It was other things that they had listed there too.
Tim Wildmon: I don't celebrate anybody's job loss necessarily, or market share loss, except when you do stupid stuff and you keep doing it over and over again. I think it's fair to point out why this is happening to Nike, and that's what we're doing.
Tim Wildmon: What does a kidney go for? What can you sell a kidney for nowadays? Let me look that up.
Speaker: Well, while you're doing that, our producer Adam sent me a note. Now, if you really want to go on both tours, maybe you should vote Republican because you'll have $5,000 coming from the president.
Speaker: Per person. Per person.
Tim Wildmon: That is, you're onto something right there, guys. Yeah, so you can either vote for Republicans and they win and Trump says you get five grand, or you sell a kidney.
Tim Wildmon: Go ahead, Steve. What's your news?
Steve Paisley: Well, let's talk about the next company that may be self-destructing and taking itself out of an index. Apple is really putting out some new features on its Apple Watch. One of two new things that are going to be on the Apple Watch Series 12 Ultra 4, when paired with compatible iPhones. One feature is called Live Rewind, and it provides a text snippet of the past 15 seconds of your life, any conversations you've been having. And the second is Siri Recap, which can basically give you a Siri readout of conversations you have, like if it's details you want.
Steve Paisley: Now here's the thing. Both of these features require the watch or your phone to listen to your surroundings, ambient noise. It's listening all the time. Now, it's opt-in. You have to choose it, and you can turn it off. It's not compulsory. But Live Rewind continuously records and can give you a transcript for your last 15 seconds of your life. Siri Recap can continuously listen to conversations and make summaries of the conversation.
Tim Wildmon: When would you turn that on? What's the advantage of turning that on?
Steve Paisley: If you are in a meeting with your boss and you want to have notes, maybe. I don't know. But once Siri Recap is enabled, the watch is ambient listening all the time. You can turn it off.
Tim Wildmon: So you're telling me Apple's bringing back the flip phone?
Steve Paisley: Well, no. Apple's new phone has a foldable screen. They're like the last major phone company to come out with one of these. But this is a feature of the watch, which has to be paired with the newer model Apple. So it really doesn't have a whole lot to do with a foldable screen, but it does need the new phone.
Tim Wildmon: What's the difference between a flip phone and a foldable screen? I thought I said Apple was bringing back the flip phone, and you said no, they're bringing back the foldable screen.
Steve Paisley: Well, a flip phone is basically one of those old phones you flip, and you have text, but there's no internet connection. In fact, flip phones are what a lot of parents will give their teenagers. You're able to call out and do the phone thing, but there's no internet connection. It's the old type where you have to press A three times if you want the letter C or something like that, as opposed to the screen where it's like our phones, it's just a foldable screen.
Speaker: Tim, I can't believe you don't know the answer to this. There is a significant difference in design and use case. Both fall under the broader category of foldable smartphones, but serve opposite purposes. Flip phones, commonly called the clamshell, fold vertically. That shrinks a standard smartphone-size screen in half for maximum portability and pocketability. A foldable phone folds book-style, unfolds horizontally to reveal a large tablet-sized display, essentially acting as a phone that stands into a mini tablet.
Steve Paisley: Well, I think if you ask most people and ask like a parent what a flip phone is, they'll say it's a phone made before 1990, 2004 maybe.
Speaker: Yeah, and I just read the AI answer to my question. I know you guys couldn't tell.
Speaker: It was very helpful.
Speaker: It was.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: It made me sound smarter.
Speaker: Yeah, it did.
Tim Wildmon: By the way, I looked up, can you sell a kidney? Here's what I got from AI. In the United States and most developed nations, you cannot be paid to sell your kidney. However, under the National Organ Transplant Act, it is legal to receive reimbursement for expenses incurred during a live donation. I don't know about a dead donation, but during a live donation you get your expenses paid for.
Tim Wildmon: So real quickly, the Donor Shield and Assistance Program, you familiar with this, Ed?
Ed: Oh, no. Absolutely not.
Tim Wildmon: Well, can I elaborate?
Ed: Yeah, absolutely. Please elaborate.
Tim Wildmon: Well, there are people listening right now who want to know the answer to this. I would say that I'm just repeating what I'm reading here. Through programs like Donor Shield, a legal living donor can be reimbursed up to $30,000 to cover lost wages. I guess giving a kidney puts you out of work for a few days, I'm not sure. Up to two grand a week. So you can be reimbursed up to $30,000 to cover your travel, your lodging, and your dependent care as you get your, as you sell your liver. No, not your liver, your kidney. You don't want to sell your liver. You'll need one of those. You've got two kidneys. You can sell one of those.
Speaker: You know what's going to happen now if you searched for that? The algorithms will assume you need fast cash, and you're going to start getting ads on your internet searches for some fast cash options.
Speaker: The numbers to all the hospitals in the area.
Tim Wildmon: I'm not selling my kidney though. I'm almost 70 years old. Who wants a 70-year-old kidney?
Speaker: You can bypass that whole thing by getting the new Apple Watch.
Tim Wildmon: A legal living donor can be reimbursed up to $30,000 to cover lost wages. So a little tidbit there on our show.
Speaker: Most of the time people lose kidneys in horror movies, I think. You know, they do all these stories about waking up in a bath.
Tim Wildmon: It's a good thing the show's over, ladies and gentlemen. We hope you have a great afternoon. Keep listening to AFR. We'll see you tomorrow.
Tim Wildmon, Ed, Fred, and Steve Paisley discuss Nike's announced removal from the S&P 100 after nearly 18 years, following what one article described as an 80% stock decline and over $200 billion in market cap losses since 2021. The hosts argue that partnerships with Colin Kaepernick and Dylan Mulvaney, cancellation of the Betsy Ross flag sneaker, and other politically charged decisions alienated customers and contributed to the company's financial troubles.
The panel also covers the nationwide closure of O'Charlie's restaurant chain after 55 years and notes Cracker Barrel's reversal of unpopular menu and branding changes following customer backlash and criticism.
They also examine new Apple Watch features, Live Rewind and Siri Recap, that continuously record ambient audio to generate transcripts and conversation summaries. The hosts raise privacy concerns about the opt-in but always-on listening technology.
Live
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