No Mercy / No Malice: Shoulders of Giants

As read by George Hahn. https://www.profgmedia.com/p/shoulders-of-giants 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.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Hogging seats on a crowded train, not saying "excuse me," watching videos on your phone with no headphones in. Sometimes it feels like we don't know how to act anymore. What we have been seeing increasingly is people breaking rules. Why should I play by the rules if nobody else is going to do that for me? This week on Explain It To Me: How to Mind Your Manners. New episodes Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:31George Hahn?

  I'm Scott Galloway and this is No Mercy, No Malice. At a certain point in life, you have an obligation to reverse engineer the parts of your success that weren't your fault. The breadcrumbs for me all lead back to the same places: the generosity of California taxpayers and the vision of the Regents of the University of California. "Shoulders of Giants", as read by George Hahn.

• 1:06George Hahn?

  I took my son to see The Odyssey last night. We enjoyed it, but this isn't a review. The film is the shared creation of one of this era's best directors, Christopher Nolan, his crew, and uber-talented cast. Their success, however, owes a debt to Homer, one of history's greatest storytellers, who in turn owes a debt to an even older oral tradition practiced by storytellers whose names are lost. Sir Isaac Newton put it best when he wrote, "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

• 1:47George Hahn?

  The same logic holds regarding my own success. Last week, Governor Gavin Newsom appointed me to the University of California Board of Regents. This is the only board I have ever wanted to serve on. Let me be clear, I am not a humble person. However, as you get older, unless you are an asshole cosplaying an innovator, i.e. big tech bro, you recognize success is not an individual sport. And mine reverse engineers to things that aren't my fault. Parents in their 20s left family and everything they knew to crawl across the Atlantic to pursue a better life. A mother who raised me on her own on a secretary salary,

• 2:30George Hahn?

  irrationally passionate about my well-being. The unearned advantage of being born straight, white, and male during the largest economic expansion in history. And taxpayers who invested in the unremarkable. In other words, standing on the shoulders of giants.

• 2:54George Hahn?

  Americans love a self-made success story. The operative word, however, is "story."

• 3:02George Hahn?

  In his book Born on Third Base, Chuck Collins analyzed the economic backgrounds of the people on the Forbes 400 list. He concluded that while media accounts labeled 70% of the wealthiest Americans self-made, in reality, only about 1/3 came from a poor, working-class, or middle-class family with no significant family capital. 2/3 of the people on the list stood on the shoulders of a giant named generational wealth.

• 3:37George Hahn?

  In an interview with The Economist last week, Elon Musk claimed that zero people had died as a result of his decision to eviscerate foreign aid while running Doge. In fact, a conservative estimate puts the death toll after one year at more than 750,000 people, 2/3 of them children. The ugly cruelty of the world's wealthiest man slashing aid to its most vulnerable people marks the worst attribute of this age: misplaced self-credit that immolates empathy. Musk, who came to the US on a student visa, is the poster boy

• 4:20George Hahn?

  for tech bros who shitpost public spending, unless they're the beneficiary. Musk is the welfare queen Reagan complained about. Tesla was built with $2.5 billion of US government support. NASA is SpaceX's number one customer, accounting for 20% of the company's revenue.

• 4:48George Hahn?

  Venture capitalist and SPAC enthusiast Shyamath Polihapetia recently told CNBC he'd gladly give away 95% of his money to taxes, but he believes starting a company would be more helpful to society as government policies are a joke. The punchline? Government investments in scientific research led directly to the internet technologies Polihapetia leveraged to create a company and build his fortune and created a hysteria for SPACs. Remember those? Marc Andreessen, who coded Mosaic, the first consumer-friendly graphical web

• 5:32George Hahn?

  browser while attending the publicly-funded University of Illinois and working at the federally-funded National Center for Supercomputing Applications, has said he's pro gridlock because when the government does things, it usually doesn't end well. Evidently, government actions that benefit him are the exceptions. Peter Thiel reaps the benefits of America's free markets, rule of law, and democracy, but in a 2009 essay argued that the expansion of the welfare state and extension of the franchise to women had rendered the notion

• 6:15George Hahn?

  of capitalist democracy into an oxymoron. The dishonesty regarding the giant shoulders these jerks stand on is obnoxious and extends beyond Silicon Valley.

• 6:32George Hahn?

  Born in Georgia during Jim Crow, Justice Clarence Thomas benefited from the Voting Rights Act, but in a decision that gutted the law and helped to disenfranchise millions of Black Americans, he called that line of jurisprudence "a disastrous misadventure." By many accounts, Senator Lindsey Graham was gay, but during three decades in Congress, he consistently voted against LGBTQ rights. Then there's Ayn Rand, the fairy godmother for those selling the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" myth. Despite railing against what she believed was the welfare state's immoral redistribution of wealth, Rand received

• 7:14George Hahn?

  $11,000 in Social Security benefits over the last eight years of her life. These people aren't success stories. They're cautionary tales about how success distorts reality and erodes empathy.

• 7:31George Hahn?

  Psychologists have researched wealth's distortion field. In one study, Berkeley professors Paul Piff and Dasher Keltner primed participants to feel either upper or lower class by having them compare themselves to people with more or less money, education, and status, then left them alone with a jar of candy ostensibly meant for children. Participants primed to feel upper class took two times more candy than those primed to feel lower class. In two other studies, they observed that drivers of luxury cars were more likely to cut off

• 8:13George Hahn?

  other motorists and pedestrians. In 2012, Piff and Keltner wrote in The New York Times, "Wealth gives rise to a 'me-first' mentality, and the ideology of unbridled self-interest serves as its lofty justification."

• 8:32George Hahn?

  Inside wealth's distortion field and operating with reduced empathy, incumbents weaponize the tax code to favor capital versus labor, corporations versus people, and old versus young.

• 8:50George Hahn?

  I believe when you reach a certain point in your life, you have an obligation to reverse-engineer the parts of your success that weren't your fault. For me, those roads run through public education, specifically Los Angeles Public Schools and the University of California system. In Garrison Keillor's fictional town of Lake Wobegon, all the children are above average. In reality, most children are unremarkable. I was unremarkable. Lost four out of four student council elections at uni high, got cut from the baseball and basketball teams, didn't attend my prom as four girls declined my invitation,

• 9:34George Hahn?

  graduated with a 3.2 GPA and 1130 SAT, was rejected by UCLA, then admitted on appeal. California's public schools gave me a good education, free lunch, and daily lessons in resilience. At UCLA, I benefited from an admission policy designed to give unremarkable kids remarkable opportunities. When I applied, the acceptance rate was 76%. Today, it's 9%. It's gotten nearly eight times more difficult to become a Bruin. In college, I was put on academic probation four times,

• 10:19George Hahn?

  made subject to dismissal twice, became president of the Interfraternity Council (weak flex, but an early leadership signal), and graduated with a 2.27 GPA. I also made lifelong friends and rode crew, where I learned that human limits are far beyond what people think. None of that would have been possible if I hadn't received Pell Grants, i.e. educational investments I didn't have to repay. I was eligible not because of merit (see unremarkable) but because my mom couldn't afford to send me to college. Family income isn't a proxy for inequality.

• 11:04George Hahn?

  It is inequality. Americans support class-based preferences by 2 to 1. And they work. Without looking at race, UCLA and Berkeley consistently admit the highest percentage of students receiving federal Pell Grants. Unfortunately, the Pell Grant program faces a $104 billion to $132 billion shortfall over the next decade, significantly less than the $152 billion allocated to fund the American Masked Police Mass Deportation Campaign.

• 11:46George Hahn?

  Meanwhile, Pell Grant awards haven't kept pace with the average cost of attending a public four-year college.

• 11:57George Hahn?

  One way to reinvest in the unremarkable? A Marshall Plan to increase enrollment at four-year public colleges by 40% and junior colleges and trade schools by 80% over the next 10 years. This would be funded by taxing endowments above $1 billion of universities not expanding freshman seats at 1.5x population growth. Any institution with tens of billions on its balance sheet that isn't increasing admissions is not a public good, but a hedge fund offering classes. We should also tax K through 12 private schools

• 12:42George Hahn?

  and reinvest the proceeds in public schools. We are barreling toward a caste system, sequestering kids by income, which cuts at a key ingredient in capitalism: empathy. These investments aren't charity, but infrastructure for upward mobility. And while students don't repay Pell Grants directly, one study estimated that recipients earn more money and therefore repay the initial grant via additional taxes within 10 years. But perhaps the best reason to fall back in love with the unremarkable is that doing so reboots the American dream,

• 13:27George Hahn?

  or what Alexis de Tocqueville called "the charm of anticipated success."

• 13:35George Hahn?

  UCLA and Berkeley were transformative for so many of us. I've given approximately $20 million to the University of California, and I still owe, as I didn't climb, but was lifted. My success isn't proof I deserved it. It's proof Americans were willing to invest in young people before we'd done anything to earn it. I am not self-made, but American-made. My job now, as a citizen, alumnus, donor, and regent, is to build ladders for future generations of unremarkable kids.

• 14:19George Hahn?

  I'm walking the back nine now, and it's wonderful. My mom, America, California taxpayers, and the regions of UC have all been next to me the whole time. You can't see them, but they've been there. Always.

• 14:40George Hahn?

  Life is so rich.