The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - No Mercy / No Malice: Quitters

Episode Date: March 25, 2023

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

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cards, savings accounts, mortgage rates, and more. NerdWallet, finance smarter. NerdWallet Compare Incorporated. NMLS 1617539. 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. Sixty 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 U.S. 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 U.S. was on the wrong track. Sales spike whenever America experiences a downturn.

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 quitter's 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. One Republican representative recently suggested a national divorce. Georgia Congresswoman 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. 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 ten Americans are either actively prepping for a doomsday scenario or have plans to. Among 18 to 24-year-olds, that number is six in ten. 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 for a U.S. 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. 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. Is the USA the Microsoft of nations? The thesis was the U.S. 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 U.S. and form a techno-utopian state, free from government regulation and any duty to serve the needs and interests of the rest of the Silicon Valley's ultimate exit? It basically means build an opt-in society, ultimately outside the U.S., 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. It was also, he divulged, the dream of many other prominent tech leaders.

Balaji cited Larry Page's interest in, quote, setting aside a part of the world, unquote, for unregulated experimentation. He's not saying, you know, take away the laws in the U.S. If you like your country, you can keep it. Marc Andreessen's prediction that the world would see, quote, an explosion of countries in the years ahead, unquote. Since the end of the Cold War, we've just been seeing them, you know, burst up in all kinds of places. And some of the best will have unquote. Since the end of the Cold War, we've just been seeing them, you know, burst up in all kinds of places. And some of the best will have lessons for all the rest.

And of course, Elon's mission to colonize Mars. 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, D.C., New York, Boston, and so on. But he believed Silicon Valley would persevere. We're putting a horse head in all of their beds.

We are becoming stronger than all of them combined. Technology would be the tool that would let the elite secede from the union without having to pick up a gun. The 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. 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. And demonstrating a general disdain for our country. Several tech startups dedicated to the secessionist dream have emerged. The Seasteading Institute, co-founded by Thiel and Milton Friedman's grandson, is building politically autonomous floating cities. Prospera bought a plot of land on Honduras' Roten 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. 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 U.S. 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. 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 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 a million dollars on the line. Andreessen Horowitz has eight billion dollars. Much of their catastrophizing is in response to elements of U.S. society that are legitimately broken. The first block of Bitcoin ever mined is encoded with a message that reads, 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 Fed, start a different currency. 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 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 U.S. 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? 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. He knew just what to do. He ducked. 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.

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.

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 U.S., 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. They should be called out for what they are. Cowards. Life is so rich. Hey, it's Scott Galloway. And on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions. What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello, I'm Esther Perel, psychotherapist and host of the podcast, Where Should We Begin, which delves into the multiple layers of relationships, mostly romantic. But in this special series, I focus on our relationships with our colleagues, business partners, and managers. Listen in as I talk to co-workers facing their own challenges with one another and get the real work done. Tune into Housework, a special series from Where Should We Begin, sponsored by Klaviyo.