No Mercy / No Malice: Quitters

As read by George Hahn. https://www.profgalloway.com/quitters/ 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?

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• 0:48Speaker 01

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• 1:19Scott Galloway?

  I'm Scott Galloway, and this is No Mercy, No Malice. Democracies are built on competing ideas. And in healthy democracies, the best ideas win. However, an increasing share of Americans have decided to stop competing. Their vision for America: not to fix the nation, but to quit it. Quitters, as read by George Hahn.

• 1:50George Hahn?

  60 years ago, Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged. The book is set in a dystopian United States on the brink of economic collapse. Exhausted by a corrupt government, the hero, John Galt, packs his things and starts a self-sufficient community in an isolated valley, hidden and separate from the US. He recruits the nation's business leaders to quit their jobs and populate his utopia. The book was a hit, especially among disaffected people who felt the US was on the wrong track. Sales spike whenever America experiences a downturn.

• 2:31George Hahn?

  In 2009, following the Great Financial Crisis, half a million copies were sold. Ayn Rand's message: "Government is rigged, America is broken, and you should quit." She eventually became a conservative icon, and Atlas shrugged the quitters' bible. Quitting used to mean being anti-government, but social media has morphed the message into something larger. There are now multiple ways to quit, and multiple gurus, communities, and schools of thought to guide you. Libertarianism is one path: an entire political party dedicated to going it alone. Or you can take more extreme measures.

• 3:13George Hahn?

  One Republican representative recently suggested a national divorce.

• 3:18Speaker 03

  Georgia Congressman Marjorie Taylor Greene made waves over the holiday weekend with this tweet calling for a national divorce. Greene is saying that a national divorce would empower individual states to form a smaller government.

• 3:30George Hahn?

  That we quit this whole "United States" thing and split the country across political lines. Some of our most influential media personalities support the idea, and an increasing share of Americans are flirting with it. Others are resigned to all-out apocalypse. Four in 10 Americans are either actively prepping for a doomsday scenario or have plans to. Among 18- to 24-year-olds, that number is 6 in 10. For tech billionaires, the quitting menu is more expansive. Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, bought a 477-acre bunker in New Zealand in preparation

• 4:12George Hahn?

  for a US apocalypse, and was given citizenship after spending 12 days in the country. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, made a pact with Thiel that they'd fly to New Zealand together when the collapse arrives. If that falls through, Sam will be fine. Quote, "I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Forces, and a big patch of land and big sur I can fly to." Unquote.

• 4:48George Hahn?

  This is what it means to quit. On the eve of the apocalypse, load up the Gulf Stream with guns and leave. When did things get so extreme? How did we go from anti-government Reaganism to apocalyptic secessionism? The movement has roots in the valley. In 2013, a former general partner of Andreessen Horowitz named Balaji Srinivasan gave a talk at Y Combinator, the nation's premier accelerator for tech startups. The talk was titled "Silicon Valley's Ultimate Exit." Srinivasan opened with a question.

• 5:29Speaker 04

  Is the USA the Microsoft of nations?

• 5:35George Hahn?

  The thesis was the US had become outdated, brittle, and slow. He offered two solutions. You can try to reform, change the system from within, or his preferred option: you can leave. In Balaji's view, this was Silicon Valley's destiny: to secede from the US and form a techno-utopian state, free from government regulation and any duty to serve the needs and interests of the rest of the country. The ultimate exit.

• 6:08Speaker 04

  What do I mean by this? What do I mean by Silicon Valley's ultimate exit? It basically means build an opt-in society, ultimately outside the US, run by technology. And this is actually where the valley is going. This is where we're going over the next 10 years. That's where mobile is going. It's not about a location-based app. It's about making location completely irrelevant.

• 6:26George Hahn?

  It was also, he divulged, the dream of many other prominent tech leaders. Balaji cited Larry Page's interest in "setting aside a part of the world" for unregulated experimentation.

• 6:39Speaker 04

  He's not saying, you know, take away the laws in the US. If you like your country, you can keep it.

• 6:44George Hahn?

  Marc Andreessen's prediction that the world would see "an explosion of countries in the years ahead."

• 6:51Speaker 04

  Since the end of the Cold War, we've just been seeing them burst up in all kinds of places. And some of the best will have lessons for all the rest.

• 6:57George Hahn?

  And of course, Elon's mission: to colonize Mars.

• 7:04George Hahn?

  Balaji predicted that when that time comes, there will be pushback from the paper belt, a term used to describe America's less technologically advanced cities, DC, New York, Boston, and so on. But he believed Silicon Valley would persevere.

• 7:21Speaker 04

  We're putting a horse head in all of their bets. All right, we are becoming stronger than all of them combined.

• 7:26George Hahn?

  Technology would be the tool that would let the elites secede from the union without having to pick up a gun. His speech was an enormous hit. And precursor to a movement among Valley elite to begin seceding from America via shitposting government, financing MAGA campaigns, catastrophizing on Fox News or Twitter.

• 7:51Speaker 05

  And if there's weaknesses at these banks, they're getting flushed out and exposed, and deposits are leaving the system very quickly, potentially creating the risk of the next cascading failure.

• 7:59George Hahn?

  And demonstrating a general disdain for our country. Several tech startups dedicated to the secessionist dream have emerged. The Sea Steading Institute, co-founded by Thiel and Milton Friedman's grandson, is building politically autonomous floating cities. Prospera bought a plot of land on Honduras's Rotten Island, where you can pay to be an e-resident. Nation 3 is working on an online-first, zero-tax nation with its own jurisdiction, court, and system of law. The list goes on. It's no coincidence the guy who feels Silicon Valley will secede is also pushing crypto.

• 8:44George Hahn?

  Last week, Balaji made headlines after he bet $1 million that Bitcoin would reach $1 million within the next 90 days. Sort of. The real wager is that the US will enter a period of hyperinflation within 90 days. His proxy for that scenario is Bitcoin breaching $1 million. Consider what that means. In his view, the price of Bitcoin is directly proportional to the likelihood that America will experience a catastrophe. Put another way, he's long doomsday via Bitcoin.

• 9:26George Hahn?

  People have capitalized on catastrophes before: political coups, short-selling, etc. But in the history of humanity, there's never been an asset class whose value is predicated on collapse. Bitcoin has risen 30% since Silicon Valley Bank's crisis threatened the banking system. The cryptocurrency has historically been marketed as "a hedge against inflation," but it's really "a hedge against catastrophe," which is to say, "a bet on catastrophe." Crypto is becoming the ultimate libertarian scheme, the world's first asset class that

• 10:10George Hahn?

  encourages you to stop investing in America and quit. Guns, bunkers, private islands, crypto, secession: connect the dots. The venture catastrophists now have a vested interest in the nation's decline. They've invested too much in doomsday not to root for it, maybe even catalyze it. Balaji has $1 million on the line, and Drayson Horowitz has $8 billion. Much of their catastrophizing is in response to elements of US society that are legitimately broken. The first block of Bitcoin ever mined is encoded with a message that reads:

• 10:54George Hahn?

  "The Times, 03, January 2009: Chancellor on Brink of Second Bailout for Banks." A reminder that Bitcoin was born in response to the failures of our banking system during the Great Financial Crisis. Post-Dodd-Frank, we still have issues. Silicon Valley Bank was mismanaged, and many banks are fragile. The government is gridlocked, parties polarized, teens depressed. There's a lot wrong with America, and we have reason to be upset about it. The question is: what do we do about it? For too many, the answer is quit. Instead of fixing the feds, start a different currency.

• 11:38George Hahn?

  Instead of healing our divides, split the nation in two. Instead of making this planet more habitable, colonize other planets, or put a headset on that takes you to a meta-better universe. But here's the thing: we're stuck here and with each other. History's greatest leaders aren't quitters, but reformers. Abraham Lincoln felt it was his duty to preserve the Union, not to accept its division and cauterize the wound. Despite the headlines and all the work to be done, our nation's arc still bends toward bringing groups together. From civil rights to gay marriage, America still strives to bring people closer

• 12:23George Hahn?

  under the auspices of a shared belief in a Union that offers liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We have lost sight of our achievements. We are responsible for more than half of the world's Nobel Science laureates and have provided more than a trillion dollars in non-military foreign aid. Inflation is high, but not as high as our developed peers, and our economy continues to grow. The US can and will be the first society in history to be a truly multicultural democracy. It comes down to this: do we invest in Mars or Michigan?

• 13:06George Hahn?

  Are our most fortunate business and elected leaders citizens or survivalists? When I was in elementary school, we performed duck-and-cover drills to prepare for a nuclear attack by the Russians.

• 13:23George Hahn?

  Duck and cover. This is an official civil defense film produced in A flash of light from the detonation of a thermonuclear device? No problem, just duck and cover and you'll be fine. Spoiler alert? No matter how many rough-cut gems you can shove up your ass and how plush your bunker, there is no escaping the fallout of our democracies failing. Because our democracies are largely capitalist and accept, if not idolize, people who aggregate the wealth of small nations. If shit gets real, I mean real. Bunkers likely become easy targets in the recalibration of society.

• 14:07George Hahn?

  The previous sentence is a pedantic way of saying the best bet, by far, is to double down on a society that already has Netflix, Nespresso, and Girl Scouts. Citizenship is not just an obligation. It's also a trade. In the case of America, the best trade? Is to invest in each other and what MLK called "our beloved community." We need reformers, not quitters.

• 14:38George Hahn?

  The 2003 M. Night Shyamalan film "The Village" is about a group of people who secede and develop an alliance with creatures who keep villagers in line by terrorizing them. Spoiler alert: The creatures are just villagers in costume. The threat is still real. But it's exaggerated in order to serve powerful people's objectives. In the US, our threats are also real. But powerful people are dressing them up to suit their own nihilism and self-interest. These anti-citizens do not see dead people - a much better film - but tear at the fabric of what is and continues to be the great experiment that is the United States.

• 15:21George Hahn?

  They should be called out for what they are: cowards.

• 15:28Scott Galloway?

  Life is so rich.

• 15:49Speaker 06

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• 16:19Speaker 07

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