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May 4, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:01:20
1905 Entrepreneurial Terror - A Listener Conversation
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Time Text
Hello. Hey, how's it going?
Hey, good. How are you?
How's your cold? Oh, it's getting better, thanks.
My voice is getting back.
Okay. That's good.
That's good. Right on.
So, yeah, in regards to transitioning from a full-time employee to a full-time entrepreneur, So I just want to say up front, I'm really, really feeling a lot of anxiety right now about this call.
And I feel like I'm kind of panicking a bit.
Is that because of anxiety about the content of the call or my response or anything else?
I think it's been largely I'm feeling I've been feeling a lot of self attack about not knowing what to talk about.
I just spent the last few minutes just kind of writing trying to just identify what the fear and anxiety is or where those thoughts go and I'm kind of just getting a real run around.
Like my mind's just really buzzing, but it can't seem to find a calm place to kind of sit and just...
Anyway.
But it's not so much about you.
I guess it does definitely feel, or my fears about your responses.
It feels more like just, what am I doing?
Or what do I want to talk about?
Or what's the real problem here?
It's a great topic and I applaud you and appreciate you for bringing it up because I've been thinking about it.
It's good to have a convo about it so it's not just me talking about it.
I think it's a very deep topic.
It's not about economics, I don't think.
It's all just naturally my opinions but the shift to entrepreneurship I believe is a class conflict.
I don't mean like a Marxist necessarily class conflict, but I think that there's a lot of anxiety about moving out of salaried or employment and so on, which is a subservient position, right?
I mean, you're not in charge.
You can claw your way to the top, but you'll never be your own boss if you do that, in my opinion, because then you're just, you know, responsible to more and more people.
And now, I mean, if it's an entrepreneur, you're responsible to customers and so on, but it's not really the same as being your own boss to claw your way to the top.
And of course, the people who get to the top of large organizations aren't always the nicest people.
They don't always do it the best way.
In fact, I can't think of a time where that has occurred, though it may have.
And of course, the number of executives in any reasonably large corporation relative to the workforce as a whole is tiny.
There's one CEO, one maybe global CTO. The CXOs are very limited, so most people aren't going to make that.
And you have to wait for 20 years.
If you become your own boss as an entrepreneur, even in a small concern, you can go pretty quickly.
I went from a pretty low-ranking peon as a programmer in a big banking trading company to being relatively my own boss in a pretty small business.
So, I have some experience of that kind of transition, but it's a very deep and powerful thing to say, I don't want to fit into somebody else's structure.
I want to be my own boss.
Boy, oh boy.
Yeah. Yeah, you're right.
I got two things from what you just said there.
Two things are popping up for me, which is like, man, this is hard.
It's really hard.
To kind of move forward like this and try to, like you said, truly be my own boss and take all of these responsibilities that Well, no, no, no.
Let me sort of be clear.
Oh, sure. You know how to take responsibilities.
I mean, you're into philosophy, so you know how to think for yourself.
You know how to take responsibilities.
You can work hard when you need to.
I don't think those things are the issues.
Obviously, correct me if I'm way off, but I don't think those things are the issues that you're facing, stepping from salary to entrepreneur.
I think it's much deeper than that.
And that's good, because that means when that's solved, the energy that can be unleashed, I think, is prodigious.
No, I do think you're right about that, and this just reminds me of something that in my writing I was feeling a little foggy on, where I know, in terms of skills, it's like I don't feel any anxiety about skills.
I feel like I can learn those, and that's not an issue.
Oh yeah, you can do that, no problem.
Yeah, but it's just other stuff.
Yeah. Now, do you want me to ask questions?
Do you want me to give you a framework that I think would be useful and you can tell me if it makes sense or is there anything else there?
Maybe I'll just add one more point if it helps in any way, but it's just another thing that came up when I was just listening to you, which was I'm just experiencing a lot of anger and frustration in my current workplace because I feel as though I want to be the boss and I'm not.
Sure, sure. Yeah.
That's a very common feeling.
One way you know that you're an entrepreneur, or at least a potential entrepreneur, is you think you know better than your bosses.
Exactly, yeah. And, you know, you need to find that out one way or the other, right?
You can't sort of sit there and say, I know better than my bosses.
You need to put that to the test, right?
Yeah. And if you're right, yay.
And if you're wrong, at least you won't feel that way in your next job, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
But yeah, that was just what I wanted to add.
Well, let me ask this.
What... What skills do you think you're lacking as far as going to be an entrepreneur?
You know, the thing that pops to mind is just like budgeting.
That's something I'm not great on, but in terms of skills, I'm striking my brain here.
I mean, I really can't think of anything Communication-wise, I think I'm okay.
I think I'm good. I think I'm gonna be good.
Yeah. Nothing significant is coming up.
Right. So it's not like somebody saying to you, you know, I want you to go and give a speech in Mandarin tomorrow or I'm going to cut your leg off.
Yeah. No, I mean, but seriously, sometimes it can feel like that level of anxiety, right?
Right. Yeah, yeah.
But it's not like you're being asked the impossible.
Nobody's asking you to fake your way through an appendicitis surgery, right?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean on the cutting end, not the receiving end, right?
No one's asking you for the impossible.
You're in a sense asking yourself to do what you do in your job but to be your own boss.
So it's not...
A practical anxiety.
I mean, there's some level of risk and so on and of course, right?
But that's all relative, right?
And that's a matter of degree, right?
So there's risk staying in your current job.
There's risk leaving your job.
There's risk going to the bathroom in the morning and slipping and falling and killing yourself.
There's risk taking a car drive anywhere.
There's risk when it's lightning and you're outside.
I mean, there's risk everywhere. But this, if I understand where you're coming from, this is a different kind of anxiety.
This is more existential than it is, you know, what if, which I can check off.
Yes. I want to put words in your mouth.
I mean, that's what it was for me, but I don't want to project what it was for me onto you.
No, no, that is what it is.
Because I was, I don't know if I wrote it down, but the thought I had just before the call was that there's just something about it that has the quality of the impossible.
And it's just, like, I can't, I don't know if that speaks to what you just said.
Yeah, it's impossible.
It's abstract, it's sort of like, I don't get it, or I don't know.
Right, right. It's impossible, and I have to do it.
I mean, that's a paralyzing conundrum, if ever there was one, right?
Yeah.
Well, let me take you on a journey.
Let me sort of give you a way that I sort of worked with it and do work with this because, I mean, I talk about an entrepreneur like I used to be one, right?
Of course, it's not really the case, but, I mean, I still am one.
But with these kinds of emotions, I would strongly suggest to look at them Bigger than your history, bigger than your family, bigger even than your school, and look at the class system.
Because employees are very useful to bosses, right?
Right, yeah.
So if you stay an employee, that's very helpful to people who have a lot of economic clout and power, right?
Mm-hmm. If you become an entrepreneur, that's not as good for them, A, because you're unavailable as an employee, and B, because you're now available as a competitor, right?
So the people in charge, and I don't mean some sort of shadowy group, I just mean sort of basic economic self-interest, right?
The people in charge don't want people to become employees, sorry, don't want people to stop becoming employees and become entrepreneurs.
Because that takes them from a resource to a competitor.
It takes them from a net economic positive to a potential economic negative.
In fact, it definitely is a negative.
Because imagine if 20% of employees tomorrow Said, fuck this.
Fuck this veal fattening Ben called a cubicle.
You know? Fuck this 9 to 5 stuff.
Fuck these boring meetings.
Fuck all this shit. You know, I know what to do.
I'm just going to go do it. Now imagine 20% of employees did that tomorrow.
Well, what would happen? There'd be some anxious managers, I think.
Yeah, a lot of people would, like, let's just follow it through, right?
A lot of people would quit. And a lot of people would set up competitors.
And those people would have low costs, right?
When you're an entrepreneur, you're happy to get a fucking ham sandwich for a week's work sometimes, right?
So they would have low overhead, high work drive, high work ambition.
They would be young like you and like I was when I started, without family, without kids, without a lot of fixed expenses, right?
And they'd also have a knowledge of the industry.
They'd have a knowledge of the customers.
They'd have, you know... And the technology in doing what you do is available for people for, you know, a couple of grand maybe to start up.
Something significant.
They could work out of their home. You know, all of this kind of stuff, right?
So it's... It's not good for the bosses.
That's just one aspect. The second is, who the hell are they going to get to finish the work that 20% of people aren't doing?
Well, they're going to have to go hire people, right?
But with a pool of 20% fewer applicants, they're going to have to bid up the wages of everyone else, right?
Because there's less supply of employees, because more people want to be entrepreneurs, right?
And if people are successful, as, you know, I think young, energetic, intelligent, competent people like yourself have every reason to believe they will be, they're going to bid up the price of office space, right?
You know, the CEOs that I've known, I mean, they all have cottages and kids in private school and, you know, three jaguars and, you know, that kind of stuff, right?
Expensive, expensive lifestyles.
And someone's got to pay for that, right?
You're not going to be starting out charging those kinds of rates, right?
And I'm not saying those CEOs didn't earn it.
But there's a whole section of people who have a lot of power who really, really, really don't want people to become entrepreneurs.
So the question is, how?
If they ban you, From becoming an entrepreneur, right?
Then that's no good because then you'll be too depressed to even be an employee, right?
So how do they infect you with this kind of anxiety about what is fundamentally a merely practical problem?
You have a practical problem, right?
Which is, you know, maybe advertise a little or knock on some doors or find some customers or whatever, right?
It's just a practical problem.
How does it become an existential problem about identity and self-worth and anxiety and disastrous scenarios and this, that, and the other?
How does it go to that?
I mean, sorry, does the framework make any sense?
Because I think it's a big issue and I think it's a class issue.
Yes, the framework does.
That makes perfect sense.
And it's kind of leading me right back to my anger.
No, and it should.
It should. It damn well should.
Because this kind of infection keeps you, if you don't beat it, it keeps you a wage slave.
Right? So you should be angry.
Because if someone or something or some structure or some culture or some society or some ethic has made you paranoid, About a merely practical problem of personal economic liberation, you should be angry.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Especially if it's been inflicted on you by people who are enjoying the fruits of that economic liberation already.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. So, how do you make, how did you become afraid to be an entrepreneur, which is just a practical problem.
It's not an existential, not an identity problem, nothing like that.
Well, you know, What's coming to mind here is just, I feel as though, you know, I was convinced that I have inherent inborn flaws.
Right. That are, you know, just...
These are things that can't be overcome, so...
You should satisfy oneself with a unionized position.
Sorry, this is my mother speaking now because this is basically what she always wanted.
Anytime I told her I was freelancing or I'd quit a job, it raised her anxiety.
Yeah, it's like, do you think that's a good idea?
And without even, in a sense, the honesty of genuine and principled opposition.
Like if she said, you're an idiot.
What are you, crazy? Are you sure that's a good idea?
That's more like sowing the seeds, in a sense, rather than having an open confrontation about things.
Mm-hmm. Where you could actually, in a sense, have a conflict out in the open about the levels of risk and talk about it, as opposed to, oh, I don't know, do you think that's a good idea?
That's just like, you know, you can't, in a sense, you can't fight that, right?
It's not bullets that you can dodge, it's fog and you've got to breathe, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
It creates, yeah, it makes me think of, it's almost as though I end up creating this seed of doubt that kind of puts my judgment into question.
Right. Right.
Right. Yeah.
Okay, so your mom had anxiety when you would be freelancing.
And what else?
I'm not saying that's not important.
Maybe that's all it is. But is there anything else?
Oh, I'm trying to think now.
Because that was definitely a big one.
It always bugged me.
But... I mean...
Well I think, well you know actually the one that comes up is, I don't know at first I was like oh that's insignificant but actually I think it's like one thing I'd like to do a lot and when I was young is just play a lot of video games because it was a lot better than hanging up upstairs with my mom and And they're fun.
Yeah, exactly. And all trauma-based.
I mean, I hope not anyway, because I still enjoy the odd game.
But yeah, they're fun.
They're very engaging. They're challenging.
They're stimulating.
Oh, yeah. No, it was...
Yeah, that actually, to me, it still forms a huge part of kind of my childhood.
But I mean, another thing I remember, and certainly this goes for my mom, but my dad, you know, there was a lot more anger and confrontation, but they kind of come downstairs on sunny days.
It's like, are you sure you want to do that?
Don't you want to go out and play?
It's such a nice day outside.
Don't you want some fresh air?
Empirically, no, because this is where I am.
I used to go like every Saturday.
God, this was back in the late 70s.
Oh, my God. They had a computer lab at school.
And you would sort of be open from 10 till 2 or whatever if you wanted to come in.
Yeah. Rain or shine, you know, like I was in there.
I was just geeking it out with everybody, learning how to program, learning how these ridiculous computers with 2K of memory worked and all this kind of stuff.
And it was fascinating.
It was fascinating. I remember one time, because you always had to have a parent there, and one time a parent couldn't...
I actually did manage to drag my mom over for a couple hours so that I could...
Everybody thought we were just playing games, right?
But we were programming games, which was how everybody used to learn how to program before.
Games were a multi-million dollar sort of endeavor.
But yeah, and people say, oh, don't you want to be outside?
It's like, well, the first clue is, I'm here, which indicates that no.
If you're sitting there on the couch and somebody says, don't you want to be somewhere else?
It's like... I don't think you really understand empiricism.
If I wanted to be somewhere else, I don't think I'd be here.
Yeah, I always hated those kinds of open-ended questions because it's not a fair fight, so to speak.
You know, just, hey, come out and tell me.
Tell me I'm wasting my life staring at a screen.
Come on, tell me that I'm, you know, tell me that, you know, that it's much better outside and we'll have that conversation, but planting those little seeds, bleh, you know?
Yeah, yeah, and something that just popped into my mind is...
That's my big philosophical argument, bleh!
Highly effective. Yeah, it hits me right here.
But yeah, it's, I mean, I guess another thing that came up is just, you know, how much I did enjoy these games.
And there was a real, you know, there was very delightful and I was quite happy.
And, you know, there were genuine moments where I was like, hey, do you want to play with me?
And let's play together.
And, you know, it was always sort of a, they'd put in a few minutes and then they didn't get it and they'd leave.
And it's like, I don't know, part of me feels as though like, Because they weren't excited that, oh, it's like a bad thing.
It's not as good. Does that make sense?
Yeah, and look, I mean, I don't know.
I can't remember too many of the details about your family, and it's not too important.
I don't mean it's not too important.
It's not too important for the context of entrepreneurship.
But the one thing that I very clearly remember from my family is that people would get upset with me for the symptoms Of the problems within the family.
But they would never ask me about the causes.
So I loved an album called The Wall by Pink Floyd.
And side three, I played a lot.
I dare say, perhaps, incessantly.
Anyway, I played it a lot.
And so people would say, well, that's, you know, get some different taste.
You know, this is obsessive, blah, blah, blah.
So it would become like a negative, right?
And what people wouldn't say is, huh, I wonder why Steph finds this album of brute human pain to be so compelling.
And pain derived from a guy who doesn't have a dad and whose mother is claustrophobic and all that, right?
Nobody would say, why is this album important to you, right?
Yeah, exactly. They would just say, you know, this is not good or this is bad or this is immature or something like that, right?
And that's something that I really understood a little bit more later in life that...
That's a very dangerous thing to do, I think, with people.
You know, to just get upset with them.
So there was a reason why you were playing video games.
Let's say, I don't know, let's say you were playing them to excess.
Who knows, right? Hard to say.
But the question is important from your relationships, not the judgment.
The question, why do you think you like these video games so much?
To learn something about you.
And not with the agenda of like, so we can fix it, but just, you know, hey, help me to understand why you like these video games so much.
Like, you know, you live in this house, you play these things a couple of hours a day.
I really, really want to understand.
It's not good or bad. Like, I really want to understand why you like these so much, you know, as opposed to you shouldn't like them so much, you should be doing something else, if that makes any sense.
Yeah. And most times people don't ask that question because they know the answer.
They don't want the answer, right? Yeah.
Why am I listening to side three of the wall?
Because my family is fucked up.
So nobody can ask that question because they know the answer.
Yeah. Yeah.
So anyway, that's...
I just sort of wanted to point out that.
As opposed to, you know, someone say, oh, do you think it's a good idea for you to be freelancing?
Oh, I don't know. As opposed to, well, tell me what, you know, do you like freelancing?
Do you like salary? You know, what do you think?
What are your goals? But, you know, just curiosity, just finding out about another human being rather than just managing your own anxiety by judging them.
Oh, yeah. No, exactly.
Exactly. Like, just...
I don't know. It just really pisses me off.
There was never that shared enthusiasm.
It was almost like...
I don't know how to...
I totally... Nobody ever asked me why I was interested in computers.
Yeah. I'm interested in computers because my social and familiar life is so chaotic that I really love having an environment which is predictable and controllable.
Exactly. That's exactly how I felt about my games.
I could level up.
I could actually become more powerful.
It didn't mean you could win, but it was predictable and it wasn't random and it wasn't destructive.
Yeah, exactly.
Nobody in my environment is rational, but programming is rational.
So I just sort of wanted to put that in a framework.
So you just talked about your mom.
What about your friends when you would talk about, you know, hey, I'm freelancing and I really like it or whatever, right?
My friends, I'm trying to think.
Friends! If I have any...
Well, that's the thing.
At that time when I was freelancing, I had friends, but I don't think I would have called any of them very close connections.
I think... I'm trying to think.
I mean, I did share that with people that I was freelancing.
I was proud of that. Like, former people I went to design school with.
It's like, yeah, I just got this contract and things are going really well.
I'll check out my work. But the reactions...
I don't know.
I mean, I don't know how to put my finger on it, but there is that sense of, like, not wanting to be too enthusiastic.
Right, right, right.
I'm not shocked.
See, this is to praise the Free Domain Radio community a little bit, which I think is perfectly justified.
You can't fundamentally be any bigger or any more powerful or any more secure than the people in your environment allow or encourage you to be.
I believe that is an iron law.
Of society, of human nature.
We cannot be more confident or bigger or more powerful or more ambitious than the people in our environment allow us to be or encourage us to be.
Freedom in radio screws up that equation.
Mm-hmm. As I think, you know, other far more competent, inspiring people like Socrates or Ayn Rand or other people who've inspired people, is that here's a community where if you say you want to be an entrepreneur, you're probably going to have 10 people offering to help you and encourage you, right?
Or more. Yeah.
Right? Yeah. But that's not how society is supposed to work.
Society is supposed to work that we all keep each other down.
So that we don't compete with the bigwigs and we don't compete with the people who have real power and wealth, right?
But I think you're missing a big part of it.
So what else is there? Is your mom?
Your friends maybe a little?
What else? Boy, it doesn't sound like friendly.
What else? What else? What else, damn it?
It's a big one. It should be obvious.
I'm just kidding. Right. The bigger they are, the harder they are to see, right?
Right. Well, I just, I guess maybe I'll just start with, because it's funny when you just said, when you were talking about the free domain radio community and the fact that, and I think it's very true that, you know, as soon as you kind of say, I'm working towards this goal and, you know, I always get that sense that people are just extremely supportive and really want to help.
And when you said, when you kind of said, oh yeah, you'll have like 10 people at least just want to offer help.
It's like, oh, I got really scared right there.
Right, right. I don't know if that's part of what I'm missing, but...
Well, it's school, right?
School, and school, this isn't even a theory, right?
I mean, government schools were instituted...
To prepare people for factory work.
They were instituted to make sure that people became good robots pushing good robots, right?
I mean, that's not even, that's a complete, that's an open agenda.
This is like, John Taylor Gatto talks about this repeatedly.
This isn't even a conspiracy theory.
This is the openly stated goal of the Prussian-based, first, you know, produce soldiers and priests, and then to produce factory workers, to produce employees, to produce salaried wage slaves.
That is the intention of public school, because you're not allowed to choose anything.
You go around like a fucking can of tomato soup on a conveyor belt from place to place.
Wow, I know why I didn't get this or see it at all now because I don't even want to think about that.
And think about anybody, any goddamn person who expresses any kind of ambition in junior high school or high school.
What happens to that person? Yeah.
Well... What happens to that person?
What happens to that person?
Well, they're going to... That's it for the people in the future who may be listening who don't know.
Well, I think they're going to get attacked in a big way.
And not only by first the teachers, but then by the other students.
If they haven't been attacked already by...
I don't know.
That's really difficult to think.
That's just a slaughterhouse.
Yeah.
I mean...
It's brutal.
Everybody in high school is poised to attack anybody who breaks ranks.
Now, there are limits to that.
I mean, if you're really, really handsome or you're really good looking or you're really rich, then you can do whatever the fuck you want in high school.
And you will just pull people along like a star pulls along planets.
But if you're not blessed with those particularly shallow and ridiculous yet essential at that time blessings and you simply are relying not on the implicit argument of biological superiority or financial superiority but you're relying just on personality and rationality, you're screwed if you try to do anything big, right?
Mm-hmm.
Which is why there are all these fantasies of bigness, right, that I've talked about before, these comic books and cartoon characters and so on, all these fantasies of Lord of the Rings and Dungeons and Dragons, these larger-than-life heroes, these demigods, because you can't be any of those things.
Yeah. I mean, the entire structure doesn't allow it.
I mean, think if, I mean, this is a ridiculous example, right?
But think if Bono from U2 was running the educational system.
I mean, the guy, whatever his faults may be, and I'm sure they're legion, as all of us are, but, I mean, he's pretty passionate about big projects.
And he's pretty, like, as Peter Gabriel said, you know, he gets his teeth into your neck and he doesn't let go until you say yes.
I mean, the guy's a bulldog.
You know, hyperverbal, very passionate, very encouraging, you know, just won't stop to get things done.
Now, if he was running a high school, he was the principal, right?
The principal with the coolest bug-eyed shades that you'd ever seen, right?
He would be like, yeah, you want to do this thing?
That's great. You want to do that thing?
Yeah, let's figure out how we can do it.
Let's get the resources to enable you to do that.
Let's just make it happen.
Because, I mean, that's the kind of shit that goes down in private schools.
And private schools, particularly Montessori schools, is child directed.
Child wants to do X, they find a way to make X happen.
Not this, you know, you go into that fucking peg hole and you stay there until we give you a piece of paper and shove you out the door.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. So there's family, there's friends, there's school, there's, you know, extended family.
Did you know anyone who was an entrepreneur when you were a kid?
No. Right, of course.
Yeah. Because it's very effective, right?
Yeah. This ban on ambition is incredibly effective.
I mean, this is what blows my mind when people say anarchism can't work.
It's like, it's working everywhere.
It's working everywhere.
I didn't know a single entrepreneur.
I knew people who were nurses.
I knew people who were teachers. I knew people who worked in hardware stores.
I knew people who worked in offices.
I even knew a professor.
But I didn't know entrepreneurs.
Because either they come from a realm where entrepreneurship is encouraged, right?
I mean, like Bill Gates' dad, was he a patent lawyer or some shit like that?
That's kind of helpful to have in your corner when you're negotiating with IBM about the future of the known universe, right?
It's a pretty useful stuff to have.
So entrepreneurs either come from other entrepreneurs or they come from some environment like you and I, in which case the last place they ever want to go back to is an environment where they came from.
Because there'll be this weird resentment, there'll be this tension, there'll be this whatever, right?
Yeah. And there'll also be this memory of how much they had to not listen to the small-minded, parochial, claustrophobic, head-clamps words from those around them in order to have some sort of ambition, some sort of growth, some sort of power, some sort of self-direction.
So, that's why we don't see any of these people.
They're either not coming from where we are or they're coming from where we are and never want to come back.
Yeah. Whereas, you know, I mean, my daughter is probably never going to even imagine that you could even have a regular job.
Yeah. She's making shit that I do for a living, right?
Yeah. No, yeah, absolutely.
And that's good. Hey, if she wants to be an employee, I think that's fine.
I mean, if that's her choice, yay, good for her.
But if she wants to become an entrepreneur, yay, you can do it.
We can make it happen. Let's figure it out.
Mm-hmm. Somehow, yeah, exactly, that approach.
When she's encouraged at every turn, like anything she's interested in, I don't see how that would lead to being an employee, but I just wanted to say that.
Well, she might be, right? So maybe she wants to be a novelist or something, and she's going to need to get a job to write books at night.
I mean, there could be lots, and maybe she finds that she likes the job, or whatever, right?
Or maybe she wants to be, I don't know.
A doctor or something, and she wants to work for something.
I don't know. I mean, who knows? That's fine.
I just, you know, I want there to be an open field for her to choose from, any direction that she wants, with neither pushing nor pulling nor barring.
And so, yeah, but, you know, I mean, if she says I want to be the greatest painter since Ingres, then I'd be like, hey, okay, let's find a way to make that happen.
I mean, no doubt that she can do it if she wants to.
So I think that's...
You know, that having been said, you know, if she doesn't pick up a paintbrush, then I'm not going to assume it's going to happen.
I have to be clear about what you need to do, right?
Magic, right? Yeah.
So I really wanted to sort of place this, like, in context, right?
So we're embedded in families, and families are embedded in communities, and we're embedded in school, and school is embedded in culture, and the culture is all embedded in the government, and the government is embedded in a class structure.
And the class structure...
Wants workers and middle managers at the top of the class structure.
Masters of our universe, so to speak.
And I'm not saying that they're bad, evil guys.
I mean, it's just that they have this desire like everyone does.
I mean, you'd prefer it if you were the only person offering your good or service in a particular area.
Of course you would, because then everybody would have to come to you.
It's natural. And if you had, I don't know, I mean, you'd have to be a really damn good friend if your best friend who was 10 times better at your job than you were said, hey, I'm going to open up an office right next to yours.
You'd be like, hey, that's great.
Let me help you.
That would be tough, right?
Yeah. So given that, you know, the government exists and public school exists and the self-interest of those who are in charge of the government, right, the people who lobby, the people who have money, the people who choose the politicians who get elected and then choose whether they get elected or not, at least in terms of funding them, these people quite naturally, quite naturally...
I do not want much competitors, right?
So, as I mentioned in Adam's show the other day, the law in Florida says you have to go through like a couple of hundred thousand dollars worth of training for a couple of years to become an interior designer.
Right? There was some woman, I think, who's also mocked on The Daily Show, who wanted a 300-hour curriculum for learning how to braid hair on the beach.
And why did she want that?
Because she – it's natural, right?
So she obviously started doing this as some hippy-dippy young thing and then she got older and as you get older, your costs tend to increase.
You can't just live in a basement apartment.
You can't just live on a friend's futon.
You need your own space.
You need – If you're any kind of libertarian, hopefully you need some finances to not have your kids go to public school.
You need a car and all that sort of shit, right?
So what happens is that she started doing this hair braiding and she noticed that, hey, there's always some new drifter coming along who's willing to braid hairs for like $1.50.
Unfortunately, I need to charge $10, but I'm not eight times better or seven times better at braiding hair.
And so I need to find a way.
I can't reduce my costs because I'm not this homeless wife who's coming down to the beach to braid hair.
So how the hell am I going to be able to continue to charge $10 when someone will charge $1.50?
Who's younger than me, who's cuter than me, who's more willing to flirt than me, who's not got haggard old wrinkled sun damaged leather head like me or whatever, right?
Right. So she says, oh, well, you know, hair braiding is very, very important.
You know, you don't want to give lice.
There's a safety issue. There's a health issue.
She scares the shit out of everyone.
She goes and lobbies the government and blah, blah, blah, and all the other people who are old and want to keep their prices up because their expenses are higher than the young things who were willing to charge less.
They all thunder to the government.
It's natural, right?
If the power is there, people are going to want to use it.
And it's really tragic, of course, because, I mean, obviously it's really bad for everybody who comes after them and so on.
But what it does do is it makes hair braiding, which is a pretty ridiculous occupation, seem kind of reasonable.
Because it's like, hey, you know, 10 bucks an hour or 20 bucks, whatever.
Like 10 bucks a hair, it's like 50 bucks an hour.
Do that eight hours a day, it's like 100 grand a year.
As opposed to it should be a buck 50, so you should do it and then move on, right?
Yeah. Not a lot of people would graduate from waitering to anything else, right?
So keeping the price artificially high keeps people stuck in these ridiculous occupations that should be stepping stones, that should be transitions.
So I'm not, you know, sorry that's a long speech, but I really sort of wanted to impress upon you the degree to which these fears are driven by the economic self-interest of people who have a lot more power than you and I can ever dream of.
Right. Right.
And I'm really feeling still stricken by just this, you know, school.
School. Bringing that up, yeah.
I feel like that's definitely something I need to take a closer look at in terms of just how much I had to just hide myself and to Well, let me tell you what an entrepreneurial school would look like, just so you get a sense of how fucked up our education system really is.
And this is not my invention.
This has been done before the 19th century on the Lancashire school system.
The teachers compete with the students for better classes, right?
So you've got teachers who put out an offering which says, hey, I'll teach you calculus for, you know, 300 bucks in six weeks or whatever, right?
Mm-hmm. But then the students who've already learned calculus can turn right around and compete with the teacher and say, are you kidding me?
150 bucks in two weeks.
Easy peasy, nice and easy.
I'll show you. And of course, they can charge less because they have lower living expenses, right?
Yeah, yeah. And so, and then someone who's just a complete genius at teaching and at calculus, maybe he'll offer it to you in one week for $75, whatever, right?
But maybe one week people don't learn that much and they feel kind of ripped off.
So maybe he has to offer them a refund or maybe they just, you know, whatever.
Hey, I'll give you $75 credit to try out my course or whatever, right?
So you're making money Instructing people in competition with your teachers by offering an alternate curriculum to younger or less experienced or less knowledgeable people.
That's a school system that has been tried before that was enormously successful.
I mean can you imagine?
Standing up in your functions and relations class in high school and saying, you know what, mate?
This teacher is really, really dull.
Listen, anybody who's interested, I understand this stuff.
Trust me. I got it.
Anybody who's interested, I got something across the hall.
Get a refund from this joker.
Come across the hall with me and we're going to do it with like jelly beans and rocket ships and video games and have a party.
There's going to be a disco ball.
I got the ghost of Elvis on karaoke.
We're going to have a ball learning this stuff and I promise you will never forget it again for the rest of your life.
So let's ditch this droner.
Let's go across the hall.
Let's have some fun learning this stuff because it is important.
It is useful. And I'm dying.
My brain is attempting to eat its way out of my skull with boredom at the moment.
So I'll give it to you for half the price.
It'll take half the time to be twice as fun.
This isn't even fun at all. It'll be a hell of a lot of fun.
Who's with me, right? Imagine half the class comes with you.
Imagine! That would be a school for entrepreneurs.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
The speech you just gave there, or just like of that child, it's exactly the kind of speech that's running through my head daily at work right now.
This could be so much more fun, this could have so much more integrity, this could be so much better, and we could all want to come to work.
You know, we could all get up in the morning humming because we want to come to work.
I love coming to work.
I love coming to work.
I look forward to it. Oh, email!
Yay! I'm so excited.
But that, of course, is the complete opposite of our experience at work, at school, right?
And that translates, right?
So they're trying to create us to just be dull, resentful, brain-dead drones who can type and scratch and answer phones and fax and whatever, right?
It's retarded and it's ridiculous that we have still this educational system inherited from a complete post-medieval fascistic dictatorship in Prussia from the 18th century.
I mean, it's insane!
I mean, everybody who's a fan of the school system should not be allowed to touch any medicine newer than 200 years.
Here's your bucket of leeches, right?
I mean, that's how it should be, but that's not, you know, people don't understand that, right?
So I just, I really want to point out, you know, I've backed on the family, and I think that there's good reasons to bag on the family, but the family is itself embedded upon a larger and exploitive economic context that, in a sense, they're just mindlessly reproducing, if that makes any sense. Right.
Right. No, that definitely doesn't make sense, but I just want to say I feel like I may have, like I totally connected.
Well, no, I don't think I totally connected with the class thing.
I think that is important, but I feel like I skipped over it or something.
I'm not sure why.
You mean, sorry, you skipped over the school thing?
Sorry, no, no, when you're talking about classes.
It's huge, right? Yeah.
It's a huge topic, but it takes some of the personal burden.
Off ourselves and our immediate family, right?
Because it's like, okay, so there's this whole big thing.
Like, I had a very, very cautious history teacher.
Very cautious about everything.
He was like, ooh, you know, I would come up with some pretty wild topics for history papers.
And he'd be like, mm, you know, that's, you know, it's a bit outside the mainstream.
That's, I don't know about that.
I don't know if anyone's done that research before.
I don't, right? I just, I remember saying to him one day, I said, you know what's funny?
You keep telling me not to take any chances.
You tell me one person that you have ever taught about in history who didn't take chances.
Everyone you talk about in history.
This guy was a big fan of Martin Luther, for Christ's sake.
Martin Luther take a chance?
You love this guy. He would tell us about Socrates.
Did Socrates take chances?
Yeah. So if everyone you teach and the only reason you have a job is because other people took chances, don't you think you could maybe flex out a little bit some of these constraints?
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's the same as the philosophy professors who also worship Socrates.
The moment you start engaging with them in a Socratic debate that they start to lose, though suddenly they're not such a big fan of the Socratic method.
I want to teach Socrates, but if I have even a whiff of Socrates in this class, I'll...
Sorry, Greek ass.
Yeah. Oh my goodness.
Wow.
Yeah.
I mean, I've also made the case about free market professors, right?
Yeah. No such thing as a free lunch, except for me working three hours a week for six figures and having a sabbatical every couple of years.
Anyway. Yeah.
No, for sure. It's so much hypocrisy.
I mean, I just... But it's weird to point it out, right?
Because that is the matrix, right?
The matrix is the economic self-interest plus the hidden coercion of the state.
That is the matrix. And pulling out of it is really, really hard because it's not like you're just saying, okay, I'm going to just push through this shit and become an entrepreneur, which you could do.
It'd be stressful and harder than it needs to be if you can get this stuff.
And that sounds really condescending.
I'm still working to get this stuff, so please don't think I'm like, ah, I'm across the river and I'm yelling at you to swim, swim, dammit.
I'm still trying to get...
I mean, the enormity of cultural pressure is so large.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around it 30 years in, so I hope that doesn't sound like a...
No, no. But you are wrapped into a very powerful engine.
Of human subjugation.
It's second wave slavery.
The fact that slavery ended in an informal way doesn't mean that all those economic actors just went, oh, okay, let's let everyone be free.
No, no, no, no. It's like, okay, let's do slavery 2.0.
is pounding initiative, pounding curiosity, pounding ambition out of children through boredom and through the teacher inspiring mockery and humiliation on the part of the other kids to any kid who pounding ambition out of children through boredom and through the teacher inspiring mockery and It's building up that horizontal slave-on-slave violence that I've talked about so many times before.
It's all inculcated.
It's all there.
Because otherwise...
There are these very scarce resources called executive level positions, called starting companies, called office space, called access to lawyers.
I mean, it's very, very scarce resources.
They don't want people competing for those resources.
Because if people compete for those resources, the economy would look fundamentally different than it does now, and the economy would be in much greater flux.
The moment people have money and power, the first thing they do is they want to hold on to it.
And they do that by reducing competition.
And the way that they've understood how best to reduce competition, is to reduce human beings.
You know, this is, damn it.
See, okay. All I want to say is that, I mean, this is exactly what's going on again in my workplace, which is just to say, I mean, this has been just a phenomenon I've been experiencing in the last couple months, which is I've been just feeling a much deeper connection to myself.
So there's been a lot more, like I've been asserting myself a lot more, certainly in all areas of my job and especially in my job.
The level of...
I mean, and I know it was like a beam of light.
As soon as I started to do this, I could see exactly who people were.
And I had big handfuls of passive aggression as soon as I started.
You know, it's funny because the business itself, they're trying to grow.
They're trying to do things differently.
So they've started encouraging the critical analysis of projects.
And, you know, you've got these dinosaurs who think...
Who the hell does this piece of shit think he is?
Asking me why I made the hands on this character so big.
It's like...
Anyway. But it's just part of it.
They feel so threatened.
This isn't an opportunity for discourse or learning.
They just want things to stay as they are.
Yeah, they do. They do.
And that is not a secure manager, right?
I mean, a secure manager is the one who says, that's very interesting, tell me more, right?
Or maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong, but let's see some facts behind this.
Let's see some market research. Let's see some evidence or whatever.
Feel free to make the presentation.
Yeah. Yeah.
But of course, the weird thing is that to be afraid of the anger of people in authority is what we're trained for.
Not because that anger has any justification, but because it's implacable, because it attempts to hook into a guilt that we may have or a guilt that has been inculcated through moral judgment, and because we can't reason with it, although it claims to be rational.
And that's a terrifying set of circumstances.
And this fear... Of the arbitrary punishments and moral condemnations, quasi-moral condemnations of people in authority, that's very hard for people.
It's very hard. It's hard for you and it's hard for me.
I mean, it's hard for me as well.
But I think it's just really important to recognize that this is just how we're trained and that the training isn't any big manual that evil people in a troll vault are piecing together out of goblin blood or something.
It's just the inevitable consequences Of power.
Concentration of political and economic power is what happens.
And so I think just be aware of those fundamental barriers.
You are trained to stay in a very small enclosure and you want to take off to the wilds.
And there are lots of people who have a great fun in the wild who don't want you out there because there's less room for them.
And so they've trained you to be frightened of the wilds, and yet at the same time, philosophy is saying, wild, wild, wild, baby!
Yeah. Absolutely.
Absolutely. And of course, I think everybody knows this in many ways, which is one of the reasons why parents are so messed up about this kind of stuff, right?
Because, I mean, I would assume that your mom didn't exactly fulfill her own desires, ambitions, and potential.
Otherwise, she'd be more encouraging of yours.
So if you can get a generation to not fulfill their dreams, then their kids' dreams are going to be that much more anxiety-provoking for them in ways that they can't probably express very well.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, I totally connect with that.
I already feel like I'm almost...
I'm kind of light years away from the type of dreams my parents had.
I mean, you know, like housewife, office worker.
It's like I'm trying to...
I'm really just...
Oh, my God.
I've just got claws right now because I'm just trying to scrape some sort of new path here.
It's like crawling around in the dark, but...
Anyway, I connected with that.
Well, and the great thing that you can do through this, I think, my friend, is because you understand this issue, right, this very huge issue, this truly global issue, you can become the kind of entrepreneur who is going to encourage his employees rather than viewing them as threats, right? Mm-hmm.
And I think that is the greatest kind of entrepreneur.
That is the most powerful kind of entrepreneur in the long run.
It's the entrepreneur who welcomes challenges to authority.
The entrepreneur who encourages confrontation and competition from employees.
Yeah. Yeah.
As opposed to, hey, I broke through, so now I'm going to start crushing everyone to make sure nobody follows me, right?
Right. Right.
You're right. You're absolutely right.
I just want to say I feel kind of empowered right now.
Yay! Good.
I promise you that tomorrow you won't.
You'll be scared again because it happens to me too.
But I just keep coming back to this.
Look, I was trained for a certain kind of life and half-life, quarter-life, tenth of a life, one percent of a life.
I was trained to be you know all hands and no head right and I want to not live in that kind of limited way.
And have I been grandiose at times?
I have no doubt that I've been grandiose at times.
Have I achieved more than I ever thought I would?
Absolutely. Am I going to achieve more?
Oh yeah, baby.
Will I bump up against various things and make mistakes?
Absolutely. And will I fail to live up to my own standards at times?
Of course I will.
That's natural. But I just – I did not want that kind of limited life of, you know, the best you can hope for is being a middle manager in an unstable economy and call that security.
You know, that security bullshit, you know, worked 30 years ago, right?
When you could get a union job and expect it to last your lifetime or when you could, you know, be a teacher and expect to never get fired or you could be a middle manager and you'd either never get fired or you'd get another job again pretty quickly – I mean, you know, people who look for security in the mainstream economy these days are mental.
I mean, they just, they don't get it.
They don't get it. I mean, the greatest security, you know, just to speak from my own experience, excuse me, I mean, if I had stayed in the software field because it was more secure, well, I was in R&D and marketing.
Well, what are the two things that companies cut when they face economic hard times?
The stuff that doesn't pay off immediately, i.e.
R&D and marketing. And so I have found much more security, I believe, much more financial and job security begging for loose change in the dark corners of the internet than I would have, I believe, staying in...
A very south-facing Canadian software industry.
So as the people I know who stayed in the field, some of them had a pretty rough time of it.
So I would, you know, for me, security was achieved through risk.
And that makes sense because risk means that few people are going to do it.
And so if you can do it, there's less competition.
And so, yeah, I would recommend that You do it because I think you're going to get much more security in the long run through this.
And you can't fail.
You can't fail because even if the worst happens and you struggle and you try and you fail, when you return, if you have to return to an employee, you would have learned so much about the business world.
You would have learned so much about what makes a business work.
Your value as an employee to anybody with any brains at all is going to be multiples what it is now.
So you can't fail.
All you can do is learn hard, right?
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
I guess that's another thing.
It's just something I'm having to negotiate with myself is the right time to actually make the transition.
Yeah, I mean, nobody can tell you much about any of that sort of stuff at all.
Yeah. But, you know, there may never be a right time.
I mean, it's sort of like, you know.
Yeah, that's absolutely it.
I mean, the more I kind of look at, like, as soon as my mind starts to going, there's preparation or something of that.
I realize, you know what, I just have to start doing it.
That's when I'm going to actually know what I need to do in order to make my company more efficient or yada yada.
It's like I won't know how to do any of it until I actually just start doing it.
So anyway, I guess a certain amount of self-assurance comes from that.
It's like, oh, okay. So that's pretty easy.
I just start. Yeah, the only suggestion that I would have is You should start when you have a community, right?
You should start when you have a community.
If you do it completely alone, that's really hard.
That is really hard. But if you have a community of people, they don't even have to be in the same industry, right?
But just people who've done something like this before, or at least who are willing to be a sounding board.
There's lots of people, lots of entrepreneurs who hang around Free Domain Radio, which is great.
But I would do it to the point where you can at least have a weekly call or people you can ping and ask for advice who know what you're up to, who know what you're doing.
Because to be completely alone and doing that is really, I think that's too much ledge work for any kind of relaxed concentration.
So I think that the time to entrepreneur is when you have a community to some degree of people who are willing to help you out, who you're willing to help out so that it's not such a solitary endeavor.
Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense.
That makes a lot of sense.
Just kind of having a nice network.
And yeah, I've really felt an incentive lately to really invest in that.
So I think that's great advice.
Good. Yeah, that would be my only suggestion.
So listen, I mean, that's all I really had to say about it.
Again, we really appreciate you bringing this up because it's a very big...
It's a very big topic and it's a very hard topic for a lot of people to work with.
I struggle with it.
I continue to struggle with it.
But it is a very, very important topic because, of course, the more people that we can get free – and freedom – look, freedom doesn't mean not being an employee.
I mean, people can be employees and be quite free as long as it's a choice, as long as it's not just – If it's a choice, then it's free.
So the more people we can make less afraid of entrepreneurship, whether they become entrepreneurs or not, is not the important thing, but at least they have a choice.
Yeah. Yeah.
No, absolutely. Absolutely.
Thank you, Stefan. Feeling that empowerment.
Good, good, man. Well, listen, you'll do great.
You'll do great whatever you do. And, you know, just keep your ears peeled to the ground for a good community and, you know, hit the afterburners, man.
Absolutely. Take care, man.
Gonna do it. Thanks. Bye.
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