No Mercy / No Malice: Addiction Economy

As read by George Hahn. https://www.profgalloway.com/addiction-economy/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Scott Galloway?

  Support for the show comes from Northwest Registered Agent. Your business identity is everything that makes your business legitimate and professional. With Northwest Registered Agent, you don't just form a business, you start a complete foundation built for privacy, credibility, and growth. That includes registered agent service, a business address, operating agreement, domain, website, professional email, phone number, and built-in privacy. In other words, your home address, personal email, and phone number stay private. Don't pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for what you can get from Northwest for free. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/profgfree and start using free resources to build something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at northwestregisteredagent.com/profgfree.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com/aplewatchseries12.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies, 18 plus.

• 1:45Scott Galloway?

  I'm Scott Galloway, and this is No Mercy, No Malice. America has been described as an attention economy. That's incorrect. We're an addiction economy. Addiction economy, as read by George Hahn.

• 2:06George Hahn?

  It's the final day of Dry January. I tried it, didn't last. I'm now drinking, again, like a Pan Am pilot in the 70s. Anyway, the 22% of US adults who abstained from alcohol this month will get a personality upgrade just in time for the Super Bowl. Ostensibly, the Super Bowl is a contest between the two best football teams, but really, it's a platform for the real economy: the addiction economy. As Matthew McConaughey says in the latest ad from Uber Eats, quote, "The whole game is basically an elaborate scheme to make you buy more food," unquote. Super Bowl ads are a proxy for the addiction economy, as advertisers for the food industrial

• 2:51George Hahn?

  complex, beer and alcohol brands, online gambling, crypto, and social media platforms offer you DOPA on demand. But there's a downside to gorging, no? Not to worry. There will also be ads from the medical-pharma industrial complex for products that manage some of the damage. Pundits claim we live in an attention economy. We don't. Attention is just a metric for addiction. The addiction economy is broader, encompassing media, technology, alcohol, tobacco, gaming, pharma, and healthcare.

• 3:32George Hahn?

  The world's most valuable resource isn't data, compute, oil, or rare earth metals. It's DOPA, i.e. the fuel of the addiction economy, which runs the most valuable companies in history. Addiction has always been a component of capitalism. Nothing rivals the power of craving to manufacture demand and support irrational margins. Sugar and rum were the DOPA delivery systems and currency of the triangle trade. Later, the British East India Company was the Sinaloa cartel of the 19th century, producing and distributing a product China became addicted to: opium.

• 4:13George Hahn?

  At its peak in the last century, big tobacco acquired customers with TV ads and endorsements from doctors. But the addictive ingredient, nicotine, is how the industry extracts $86,000 to $195,000 per customer and costs those customers $1 million to $2 million in expenditures, opportunity costs, and healthcare expenses. Historically, the most valuable companies turned dopa into consumption. Over the last 100 years, 15 of the top 30 companies by cumulative compound return have been pillars of the addiction economy. The compounders cluster in tobacco,

• 4:58George Hahn?

  Altria, plus 265,528,900%. The food industrial complex, Coca-Cola, plus 12,372,265%. Pharma, Wyeth, plus 5,702,341%. And retailers, Kroger, plus 2,834,362% that sell both substances and treatments. To predict which companies will be the top compounders over the next century, consider this: Eight of the world's 10 most valuable businesses

• 5:42George Hahn?

  turned dopa into attention or make picks and shovels for these dopa merchants. Given a choice, most lab rats will pick sugar over cocaine. They'll even self-administer electric shocks for a sweet boost. Sugar stimulates our reward system 20 times faster than cigarettes. Food companies engineer processed foods not to maximize nutrition, but to hit the so-called bliss point, the exact combination of saltiness, sweetness, and other tastes that make their product delicious, but not so delicious that consumers feel sated after a small serving. In other words,

• 6:26George Hahn?

  their food is engineered for more, not nutrition.

• 6:35George Hahn?

  The industry profits at the expense of its customers' health. According to a 2022 meta-analysis, 20% of American adults are addicted to food. Consumption of processed foods raises your mortality rate by 25%. The US has a diabetes epidemic and an adult obesity rate of 40%. Compounding this public health crisis, food companies have a history of purchasing their competitors: Diet companies. In 1978, Heinz bought Weight Watchers for $72 million.

• 7:15George Hahn?

  Unilever paid $2.3 billion for Slim Fast in 2000. Nestle purchased Jenny Craig in 2006 for $600 million. In 2010, the private equity firm that owns Cinnabon and Carvel ice cream purchased Atkins Nutritionals. Most of these diet brands were later sold. These acquisitions are akin to Pablo Escobar buying the Betty Ford Center.

• 7:46George Hahn?

  McDonald's used to brag "1 billion served." Considering the history of weight loss and diabetes drugs (Desoxefedrine, Fen-Phen, Metformin, etc.), pharma might just as easily brag "billions prescribed."

• 8:03George Hahn?

  After the food industrial complex makes people sick, we hand them over to the healthcare industrial complex to treat the chronic conditions of these lifelong customers. GLP-1 drugs are the most effective weight loss drugs to date, as they make us feel fuller for longer and suppress hunger cravings by modulating DOPA levels. About 12% of US adults have now taken a GLP-1, and the average GLP-1 user spends 11% less on food and beverages. But it's early days for GLP-1s. Cost remains a barrier, and only 1/3 of employer healthcare plans cover GLP-1s for

• 8:48George Hahn?

  non-diabetic patients looking to lose weight. Anecdotally, a Bloomberg Businessweek profile of Bowling Green, Kentucky, where 4% of the residents take GLP-1s, tells us that restaurants, grocery stores, healthcare providers, gyms, and clothing retailers are all feeling the GLP-1 impact. If 60 million of the roughly 100 million US adults who are obese took the drugs, Goldman Sachs estimates GDP could grow by more than 1%. As their full impact and second-order effects play out, GLP-1s will likely transform the economy.

• 9:32George Hahn?

  Some people, smokers, used to reach for a cigarette immediately after finishing a meal. In the movies, they'd reach for a cigarette after sex. Today, most restaurants are smoke-free, but phones are ubiquitous before, during, and after every meal. We used to pick up a landline (Google it) to reach out and touch someone. Now that everyone has a cellphone, we spend 70% less time with our friends than we did a decade ago. We're addicted to our phones, and even when we're not seeking our fix, our phones are

• 10:15George Hahn?

  seeking us out, notifying us on average 46 times per day for adults and 237 times per day for teens. In college, I spent too much time smoking pot and watching Planet of the Apes, but when I decided to venture on campus, my bong and Cornelius didn't send me notifications.

• 10:42George Hahn?

  The compounders here are in your pocket. Sales of iPhones have made up roughly half of Apple's revenue since 2009. Of late, the company has rolled out screen time tracking and other anti-addiction tools. Apple's brand positioning is a bartender opening an AA chapter. Alphabet is incentivized to maximize screen time as 76% of its revenue comes from targeting eyeballs with advertising. Alphabet is a niche player in the device market, but its Android OS, 73% market share, is the perfect gateway drug as it's open source and free.

• 11:25George Hahn?

  It took us 20 years to wake up to the danger of opiates, and about the same time for the phone. But it is happening. 18 states have passed laws restricting the use of phones in school, and roughly 3/4 of schools have policies restricting their use in the classroom. Yonder, a firm that makes locking pouches for phones, has increased sales to schools by 10x since 2021 to $2.1 million. When Mark Zuckerberg released a video announcing the end of Facebook's fact-checking program, Jimmy Kimmel joked that Zuck was dressed like a molly dealer from Chechnya.

• 12:06Speaker 04

  Somehow, all the other billionaire tech boys are jealous, including the CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, who's been kissing Trump's ass like it's the Blarney Stone lately. Mark Zuckerberg showed up to debase himself at Mar-a-Lago shortly after the election. Today, he released a suspiciously Trump-friendly announcement.

• 12:26George Hahn?

  The shoe fits. The difference? MDMA makes you euphoric, while social media makes you anxious and depressed. As my NYU colleague Jonathan Haidt put it, "The unconstrained combination of phones and social media has been, quote, 'the largest uncontrolled experiment humanity has ever performed on its own children,' unquote."

• 12:54George Hahn?

  So far, the results are a mental health crisis. Eight percent of teens are addicted to alcohol or drugs. Twenty-four percent are addicted to social media. Unlike other platforms, TikTok is built around affinities, not the social graph. If chasing likes from our friends is digital heroin, TikTok's AI is fentanyl. The algorithm rapidly calibrates what triggers a user's DOPA response by feeding them hundreds of videos every hour, turning the user into a blissed-out zombie. According to a lawsuit filed by the Kentucky Attorney General, users can become addicted

• 13:36George Hahn?

  to TikTok within 35 minutes. The same lawsuit cited TikTok's own research, which stated that, quote, "compulsive usage interferes with essential personal responsibilities, including sufficient sleep, work in school, and connecting with loved ones," unquote. We are hardwired for addiction. We're also wired for conflict, as competing for scarce resources has shaped our neurological system to swiftly detect, assess, and respond to threats, even before we're aware of them.

• 14:17George Hahn?

  As technology advances, our wiring makes us more powerful and more vulnerable. We produce DOPA monsters at internet speed. We can wage war at a velocity and scale that risks extinction in the blink of an eye. Human beings evolved in small cooperative groups, where loyalty meant survival. This instinct makes us naturally favor in-groups—our people, our nation, our ethnicity—and distrust out-groups—foreigners, outsiders, the other. Genocide exploits this instinct by amplifying group identity and dehumanizing outsiders,

• 15:01George Hahn?

  making mass killing seem justified or even necessary. Violence, repeated, becomes routine. What was unthinkable on Monday becomes standard procedure by Friday.

• 15:17George Hahn?

  Removing the security details of our political adversaries, who are under real threat from foreign enemies, is simply repackaged violence. In sum, it's Tuesday in America.

• 15:34George Hahn?

  This week marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet Army. Our proudest moment, in my view, was America's role in arresting this genocide, which represents the very worst perversion of human instincts. Now the US risks becoming the font of this abomination. The president has repeatedly said that, "Immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country." The world's richest man is making Nazi gestures and told a far-right group in Germany, "It's good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism

• 16:18George Hahn?

  that dilutes everything." Our worst instincts remain static. It's our technology that's evolving. Instinct morphing into fear and demonization, coupled with propaganda, rail transport, and Zyklon B, gave rise to the largest murder site in history. What might happen if these same instincts take root in a nation with unprecedented industrial might, armed with social media and AI? We need to cauterize this hate. People and bots in the comments section will accuse me of TDS.

• 17:02George Hahn?

  Have at it. The road to fascism is littered with accusations of overreacting. So, color me overreacting. It's both the correct response and impossible to overreact. Never forget.

• 17:27Scott Galloway?

  Life is so rich.

• 17:41Speaker 05

  You're listening to a quick ad. You know what else is quick? Selling your car on Carvana. Just put in your vehicle information and we'll give you an offer. Done. No hassle, no negotiation, no guy from an online listing lowballing you. Which means, by the time I'm done explaining this, you could have basically done it.

• 18:04Speaker 05

  Still haven't started? Hey, better late than ever. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pickup fees may apply.

• 18:11Speaker 06

  Did you know that mosquitoes have killed almost half of all people who have ever lived? Today, people are fighting back. With support from the Gates Foundation, American scientists and partners around the world have developed a new generation of bed nets that can kill up to 90% of mosquitoes exposed to them, helping cut malaria rates in half. The result? A safer, healthier future for everyone. The Gates Foundation, partners of human potential. Search gatesfoundation.org/mosquito to learn more.

• 18:42Speaker 07

  Dev Experts has over 20 years of experience in fintech development with more than 800 engineers and a physical presence in 11 countries. Supporting some of the largest institutions in finance with trading platforms, order management systems, matching engines, and more. Dev Experts is here to help your financial business succeed. Learn more.