No Mercy / No Malice Turns 10

As read by George Hahn. https://www.profgmedia.com/p/no-mercy-no-malice-turns-10 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:01George Hahn?

  I'm Scott Galloway and this is No Mercy, No Malice. We often say storytelling is the most valuable skill, a superpower I'd grant my boys if I could grant them anything. Every Friday for the past decade, my storytelling practice has included writing this post, No Mercy, No Malice. It's the laboratory at the center of our books, podcasts, and Prof G Media. No Mercy, No Malice turns 10, as read by George Hahn.

• 1:38George Hahn?

  10 years ago this month, I began writing No Mercy, No Malice every Friday. My firm at the time, L2, was a reincarnation of my first business, Profit, but I wanted to get it more right this time. Profit was and is a good firm, but it was trapped in a transactional service model versus a recurring revenue model. This created a more fragile revenue stream with a greater cost of sales, as there were only so many weekends I could play golf.

• 2:13George Hahn?

  We conceived L2 around an annual fee membership model, and we tracked touchpoints, how many times the client interacted with our product, which predicted renewal. Note: This strategy paid off, twice. I sold Profit for 2.8x revenue and L2 for 8x. Before I sold L2, we'd launched a series of media products to create more engagement. Winners and Losers was a video series exploring innovation in the consumer sector, and No Mercy, No Malice was meant to be a newsletter exploring, well, whatever was on my mind that week. In addition, I enjoy writing.

• 2:56George Hahn?

  I pen a book every 18 months, believing it's effectively exercise for the brain. I've convinced myself that I'm less prone to early onset dementia when I'm struggling to fix that last sentence. No Mercy, No Malice was too salty for Gartner, the acquiring company, and they said it could not be affiliated with the firm, but I could have the IP. A decade later, we have 430,000 subscribers and the newsletter is the center of the flywheel for Prof G Media. The tone and aim of No Mercy, No Malice is simple: Provide insight and be fearless.

• 3:36George Hahn?

  The oldest surviving No Mercy, No Malice post dates to November 18, 2016. It's only 288 words, roughly 20% of a typical post these days. A few things stand out. The post, Warby Snarker, was about Snap's new camera-equipped glasses known as spectacles. A decade later, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel continues to pursue his wearable white whale, despite erasing 95% of the company's market cap over the past five years. The 2016 post contains an early example of Prof G Media's visual storytelling.

• 4:16George Hahn?

  In this case, a chart comparing Nike's performance on Instagram's new-at-the-time Stories feature to its performance on Snapchat. Also, there's a prediction from L2 co-founder Maureen Mullin. It proved to be correct, highlighting a No Mercy, No Malice commitment to making bold calls that catalyze conversations. Finally, the post links to my message about the 2016 election. As I noted at the time, every CEO and founder felt compelled to say something to their troops about the political earthquake that was sending, and continues to this day to send, shockwaves through our society and the world.

• 5:01George Hahn?

  In the subsequent decade, however, most of those leaders have gone silent. I've grown louder, consistently writing about the topics I believe matter most. Hint: I believe Trump Inc. is a criminal enterprise and a stain on the American experience. Another hint: accusing me of Trump Derangement Syndrome has no effect. Whenever I'm in public, I can tell which media channel is the catalyst for someone approaching me. If someone says "the dog" or uses a similar bro opener, they likely recognize me from our videos. If the approach is more familiar, like we're old friends, they're a podcast listener.

• 5:45George Hahn?

  My favorite thing about podcasting is the friends you don't know. It's a parasocial medium. But if they want to discuss losing a parent, or the tension between making a living and being a present dad, I know they're a reader of my newsletter and/or books. The written word is a bunker buster, reaching emotions we think are safely buried. We believe storytelling is the most valuable skill, a superpower you'd grant your children if possible. The arc of evolution bends toward good storytellers, as storytelling equals the efficient transmission of survival-relevant information.

• 6:28George Hahn?

  Business runs on the same code. Entrepreneurs, aka storytellers, deploy a narrative that captures imaginations and capital to pull the future forward. Regardless of the medium, however, I believe storytelling begins with writing. Joan Didion put it best: "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see, and what it means." In other words, when we write, we're learning and teaching. In a widely cited 1977 paper, composition scholar Janet Emig concluded that "writing

• 7:10George Hahn?

  involves the fullest possible functioning of the brain, which entails the act of participation in the process of both the left and the right hemispheres." According to Emig, writing simultaneously engages three cognitive processing styles: inactive, learning by doing, the physical act of writing; iconic, scanning and depicting text with the eyes; and symbolic, restating thoughts into structured words. Translation: Writing is a full-body cognitive workout. Talent matters, but reps matter more.

• 7:55George Hahn?

  It's a practice. As Stephen King explained in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, "Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration. The rest of us just get up and go to work." My advice? Commit to a certain amount of time to write on a regular basis and have deadlines or some other form of accountability. As the Nike ads famously say, "Just do it." The first 100 newsletters were written by me late Thursday night after I came home from drinking. It pains me to say this, but some are better when I'm a bit fucked up.

• 8:36George Hahn?

  I'm less guarded, as the white space the better missives tap into is straight men who aren't in touch with their emotions. It's a big market. Writing isn't just a personal discipline, however. It confers a competitive advantage, and the best-run organizations treat it that way. Jeff Bezos said the smartest thing they ever did at Amazon was to ban PowerPoints in favor of six-page narratively structured memos. His reasoning? Decks hide flaws in logic, functioning as sales tools meant to persuade, whereas memos

• 9:16George Hahn?

  expose weak arguments, force deep thinking, and compel clarity. The US military adheres to a strict "bottom-line-up-front" writing style that puts the most important information at the top of the document. If they bury the point, it might cost lives. Reporters at the Associated Press, a journalistic institution dating to the 1846 Mexican-American War, deploy a similar inverted pyramid to communicate information in descending order of importance. AP Style is the operating system for news. The common thread?

• 9:58George Hahn?

  Good writing reduces storytelling to first principles. I'm going on Bill Maher next Friday. When the producer calls to review topics, I will write about the one that resonates most as prep. Last month, I wrote about metrics maxing, specifically how a growing obsession with health and fitness data is obscuring life's purpose and meaning. Many of the themes apply to No Mercy, No Malice. Our team tracks the visual digital media metrics, open rates, views, et cetera, but that data has zero influence on editorial decisions.

• 10:39George Hahn?

  I use No Mercy, No Malice as an incubator for new ideas and catharsis, things I'm thinking about but haven't been able to express. The good ideas usually survive our editorial meetings and become posts. The best ideas, i.e. those that resonate deeply, turn into chapters in books. We want to be fearless and spark a conversation by wading into dangerous waters: the struggles of young men, college admissions, antisemitism, tech valuations, Trump. A byproduct of my writing is criticism, a win as I believe that criticism is the receipt for actually saying something.

• 11:24George Hahn?

  Also, often, I just plain get it wrong.

• 11:31George Hahn?

  We sold L2 for eight times revenue, in part because we manufactured scarcity, saying no to potential clients, and had a good subscription model. Our competitive advantage in a crowded marketplace, however, wasn't a function of our proprietary data and analysis, but our commitment to investing in creative differentiation. As my business partner and the chief creative officer at L2, Catherine Dillon, often reminds me, "We hired our third animator before hiring our first salesperson." We also spent thousands of dollars licensing Getty Images photos, because we viewed our

• 12:15George Hahn?

  reports not as dry, white papers, but as magazines that pull our clients deeper into the story. As Catherine said in a recent presentation on design as a differentiator, "There are a lot of wonderful storytellers, Scott among them, but I think the visuals associated with No Mercy, No Malice separate it from the pack." Catherine is biased, and correct. One frequently asked question from readers: "Do you draw those charts yourself?" Answer: No. But the woman who created the visual style for No Mercy, No Malice, deployed hand-drawn

• 12:56George Hahn?

  grayscale illustrations to communicate a personal and professional tone that lets readers feel like they're inside an idea incubator. In other words, Catherine and the designer nailed it. One of the joys of podcasting is meeting your listeners in real life and discovering that most people are lovely. Newsletters, sadly, don't go on tour. On the internet, spam, bots, and bad faith actors conspire to reduce our expectations for humanity. As I've previously written, most people, including me, are lesser versions of themselves

• 13:40George Hahn?

  online. Vulnerable writing is a full-contact sport that exposes you to injury. It's also incredibly powerful. One of the most popular posts I've ever published was about putting down our dog Zoe. It's titled "Love Persevering," and doesn't fit into a newsletter about business technology and the forces shaping society. Yet it sits in the archive, sandwiched between a post about the attention economy and another about individualism and institutions. Five years on, my tribute to Zoe is a reminder that while fear permeates our culture, action,

• 14:25George Hahn?

  in this case, writing, absorbs anxiety. Also, for an economic animal ruthlessly focused on maximizing my career and financial trajectory, a post about trading my arrested adolescent's lifestyle, Soho Loft, homes in Delray Beach in London, for marriage, kids, and dogs proves that the key to happiness is investing in deep, meaningful relationships. The theme that rests at the center of No Mercy, No Malice is the only observation I'm near certain is true: Happiness is love. Full stop.

• 15:10George Hahn?

  I write a lot about the end: death. Believing that I'll go first, and that someday I'll look into my son's eyes and know our relationship is coming to an end. This has been an unlock. All the fear of shaming, worrying what other people think, and reticence to tell people I love them melts as the light at the end of the tunnel draws nearer. My boys have little interest in my work; I doubt they've ever read a post. But they will. It will transport them back to this era, the good and bad, and cement what they feel

• 15:53George Hahn?

  but may not know: how much I think about and love them, and how much I'm going to miss them. That's the real mission here, that No Mercy, No Malice will be read by my sons years from now and remind them how much they miss me. If you want to live forever, start writing. Life is so rich.