No Mercy / No Malice: Shoulders of Giants

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**George Hahn** (1:13)
Introducing Meta Glasses. You have questions, they've got answers.
Hey Meta, what's the capital of Peru?

**SPEAKER_1** (1:21)
Lima. How do you say, where's the restroom in Spanish?

**George Hahn** (1:25)
Donde esta el baño?

**SPEAKER_1** (1:27)
Hey Meta, is a hot dog a sandwich? Technically no. Spiritually, yes.

**Scott Galloway** (1:33)
Hey Meta, what should I do with my life?

**SPEAKER_1** (1:35)
That's one of life's biggest questions.

**Scott Galloway** (1:38)
What do you think?

**George Hahn** (1:39)
Ask anything with the new Meta Glasses.

**Scott Galloway** (1:44)
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.

**George Hahn** (2:19)
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.
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, 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.
Americans love a self-made success story. The operative word, however, is story. 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 one-third came from a poor, working-class or middle-class family with no significant family capital. Two-thirds of the people on the list stood on the shoulders of a giant named generational wealth.
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, two-thirds 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 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 dollars of US government support. NASA is SpaceX's number one customer, accounting for 20% of the company's revenue.